• D. Marlow
    10/30/08

    The Frontera Theory

    It was the beginning of March, and all was dead quiet. But it hadn't always been that way, obviously. Yet, one couldn't help but wonder what truly brought forth the catastrophe striking us all.

    February, I think it was. Back then, all you had to look forward to was getting shelter, and drinking something warm. But such was not the case. I was sitting next to Tom at the lunch table. Since 10:00, for no apparent reason, the power surged. Lights were completely dim, and not even the lowest-profile electric pencil sharpener could make the simplest utterance. Word spread by mouth from the people with iPods, that electricity was now considered a dead technology. I found their words to be completely unbiased, without any extra evidence to prove so. Yet, I couldn't rule out their ramblings completely, for even a technology like an iPod can contain a radio, which therein lied our remaining connection with outside society. No doubt a person or 2 had already tried calling the police, seeing whether it was the county's idea of a sick joke. If it was, nobody was laughing.

    “Mike! How’s the game coming along?” Tom was speaking to me about the video game we were developing for RPG Maker 2003. It’d been 3 weeks so far, and I was still figuring the program out. I feared it wouldn’t be too great a game, since newbie games usually don’t have that great a shelf life. “Slowly,” I answered honestly. “Great. We all know that. I mean, what else is new??” ‘What else?!’ What else-what?!! What was Tom expecting that it only takes a day to make a new character, or something? Granted, it can happen, just not that often, and when it does, the character may come out 1-dimensional or looking like absolute crap. I tried popping out a character in a day once. He was scrapped faster than Mac Salad. “Nothing else is new, Tom. There’s no rush, and no hurry. Now get off my back, I’m trying to eat!” Tom stared at me. He raised his arms and said in a deadpan voice, “Woah, man. Take it easy!” Vick came over with his arms, also awkwardly raised. Tom said hi to him, but there was no reaction from Vick. His eyes were glazed over like doughnuts, and his mouth was drooling like a water fountain. “Hey, did you get enough sleep last night?” I tugged at his shirt, in a joking fashion. “Hey, you touchin’ mah Spanish Rice, cabrone?” His hand shot like a bullet for my arm.

    “WHAT’S GOING ON. MY WIFE IS IN DANGER FROM THIS FRIGGIN’ EPIDEMIC,” said our principal, as he saw Vick tugging at my arm. Principal Sescowintz Javier III, was loud and obnoxious, much like Tom when he saw Napoleon Dynamite. “Principal Sescowintz, HELP MEH GOSHDARNIT!!!” Yeah, that command was certainly informative. Why didn’t I just say, “Hey, wassup? No problemz here, dawg!!” Such wasn’t the case. Vick literally had me frightened to an inexorable extent. “HELP, SESCOWINTZ, YA PIECE’O-CRAP!! VICK’S GOING TO KILL ME!!!” I was struggling to get Vick’s hand off of me. I was scared to find out which of my hands was stronger. It all had an incredibly pinching sensation. Like he could’ve tore my skin off at any moment. “Vick, I know I was the one to start this by tugging your shirt, and all… but… get your hands OFF of me!” Words were useless with Vick. He was no longer one of us. He was one of THEM. I’d seen all the horror movies, including crappy B&W ones like Night of The Living Dead from 1960’s. It had a stupid ending, and I didn’t intend for such a thing to happen here. Vick was now reaching for my neck with his mouth, and I knew where THAT was heading. With the last of my arm strength, I punched his face in with my free hand. He reeled backwards, and afterward, my arms were burning from exhaustion. After we get out of this school, I thought, I really have to work out more. Principal Sescowintz was just standing there in awe, catatonic. How useless, I thought. Now he was just expendable, and in no way going to be of any help to us.

    “What the heck was that thing?” Tom said. I sat up from the table I just barely got my rump down on. “First off, that was VICK. What, were you living under a ROCK? Man!! I think the glazed eyes should've COMPLETELY given it away! You people are idiots!” The school looked down at the floor, ashamed of themselves and their educational background. “Vick had turned into a ZOMBIE. And zombies EAT PEOPLE. Common sense vanishes in a situation like this, and everybody who’s anybody turns into a bunch of fat, dumb horror-tards!! HASN’T ANYBODY SEEN A ZOMBIE MOVIE??! YEAH, you,” I said, pointing to AJ, in the far left corner of the room. He had his hand up, and he would be hard to hear, so I wouldn’t be as annoyed from the other chatterboxes. “SHUT UP, I CAN’T HEAR HIM. Yeah, AJ, what have you seen?”

    “Well, I haven’t seen any movies, but I’ve been to La Frontera. They have the best Mexican food in the universe.” I stared at him blankly. “AJ, ARE YOU A WALKING ADVERTISEMENT, OR WHAT?!! NOW TALK TO ME ABOUT MONA VIE, AND SEE WHAT I SAY!!”

    “Okay, so Mona Vie’s this company, right? And—

    “THAT WAS A RHETORICAL STATEMENT! I DID NOT WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING ABOUT MONA VIE!!” AJ, who had his hand up the entire time I chewed him out, finally lowered it. “Yes, people. You are all a bunch of ill-educated sadsacks who’ve never seen a single zombie movie. HOW LIKELY IS THAT??! WHO TEACHES THIS SCHOOL?!! I BLAME YOU, SESCOWINTZ!” Tom tugged at my shoulder. “Please, Mike. Stop addressing the entire school like this. You’re embarrassing yourself.” I stared at him as incredulously as everybody else was staring at me. “Are you kidding me? This IS a joke, right? I don’t think I’m embarrassing myself. On the contrary, I think everybody’s embarrassing THEMSELVES!! Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t think of all these guys as nothing more than a mess of skin and hair!!” Maddie stepped forward from the lunch crowd. “Because we’re human,” she said epically. “People, you should be just a little more like Maddie, here!”

    “I am a BANANA!!” Maddie burst out. I then thought better of my statement. “Strike that. You should think like the former ideal she mentioned, but not her, or you’d be a nutjob. No offense, Maddie.”

    “None taken!”

    After the initial conversation with the deadbeats, I still had the official duty of putting Vick out of his misery by screwing a sharpened pencil into his brain. Blood squirted. I pulled the pencil out, now dripping with red. I thrust it into his eyeball, the goo collapsing like torrents of gelatin under the massive undertaking of the lead-lined cylinder. He fell in a heap to the floor, his muscles giving way to spasms of inert energy. A surrounding crowd cheered, obviously desensitized by violence. Sickening. ‘They’re us, and we’re them,’ I remembered from the 1990 remake of Night of The Living Dead. Now I just had to figure out why this happened… why VICK happened. My first clue was probably what he was eating. I queried where his tray was and was pointed in that direction. It wasn’t so much a tray, as it was restaurant food from a doggie bag. AJ stopped by me and pointed out that it was from La Frontera. As much as I knew that he had that place on his mind just a little more often than necessary, he had a point when he said earlier that the food was Mexican. Just from looking at it, it seemed to exude the feeling of being in the country itself… like you were really there… except I wasn’t. I was at a High School, with a bunch of lamebrains who’d never seen a horror movie in their lives… I wasn’t at some exotic place. I wasn’t even out of school, let alone out of the city. What I needed was a job. Tom snapped me out of my stupor. “Mike, I think Vick’s lost like gallon of blood so far. I think he needs medical assistance.” I smacked his face. “Get a HOLD of yourself, man!! Vick’s the undead! We need to BURN HIS BODY TO THE GROUND, MAN!!!” Tom stood there for a moment, contemplating. “Oh, yeah,” He finally said. He walked off.

    Running out of leads (though the only lead I had was La Frontera’s food), I requested to listen to somebody’s iPod, and see if I could get a radio broadcast. Meanwhile, Principal Sescowintz managed to find a generator, bless his ruddy heart. Soon, the light returned, and the schedule was back on track, if only losing a few class periods. There went my high-horse, I thought. Until more zombies broke into my third period. I ordered that others retrieve any conceivably sharp objects they could find, and stab the hell out of the zombies. Because UnHell was a dish best served cold. Later on, I ascertained as to what was causing the zombies. It was so obvious that it was silly. La Frontera had to be destroyed. La Frontera was a zombie front. La Frontera was the cause of the zombies. La Frontera was why we were all locked in after every period was already over. As I heard from the earpiece of the iPod, La Frontera was frequently used in military experiments. Well, it would seem the military had gone too far. La Frontera had finally received a piece of meteorite from demos’ surface. And what became of it?? Anybody who ate La Frontera’s food was zombified.

    I sat back in the attendance office’s comfy armchair, waiting for the two lovers at the counter to shut up. Waiting for the receptionist to quit eating so much. Waiting for the fateful day that The Price Is Right would come back on the airwaves. A person could dream, couldn’t he? After they were gone, I reported the situation to the receptionist. She took it with stride. I felt that she didn’t really understand anything, being that she was probably in her office all day eating crap like Cheetos and Doritos. But as long as she spread the word, I was reassured. For me, faith in humanity was dwindling.

    When I made it to the front doors to see what the hubbub was about, I saw the outside. I didn’t like it. We were surrounded by La Frontera zombies. I finally had to take the situation into my own hands. Snatching AJ, I questioned him as to La Frontera’s whereabouts. He laid out a fine map, that he did. But I couldn’t trust him to not slow me down. I told him ‘thank you,’ and went over to Tom. “Tom, this is the ultimate chance to redeem yourself as a character, and not be tethered by horror-movie stereotypes!! Are you in, or not!?” Tom stood up, almost defiantly. “I’M IN!!!” Yes, I couldn’t very-well expect him to come up with some other sort of line, being that we were usually some basic, bland individuals saying trite old sayings that fogies from ‘the war’ came up with. Jazz-age terms, the works. We could understand why people were bored out of their minds when they so much as looked at us.

    We grabbed some torches made up of ripped books and broken planks. Somehow, it was all tied together. An idiot who lit cigarettes in school gladly gave me his lighter. I told him not to do drugs, though I wasn’t some kind of pusher. If he wanted to do a drug, that wasn’t my problem, was it?

    Outside was packed, and freezing as hell, again. We quickly pushed our way down the front lines. Tom had a car, which, for whatever reason, wasn’t tipped over like 85% of the ones in the parking lot. We quickly climbed in, checking if there wasn’t some zombie in the backseat, or anything. La Frontera was about 2 miles down the road, and down the road were zombies here and there. HOW MANY PEOPLE ATE AT LA FRONTERA WAS BEYOND ME. Yet, people were zombies, so there had to be a good reason and all. Because if it’s Mexican food, it must be great.

    Maybe 5 minutes later of speeding down an empty road, we came to a stop. Tom slammed his car door, boldly proclaiming, “This is it.” I stared at the finely crafted sign hanging above the door. I suddenly, with a quick burst of energy, kicked the door open. People dropped their sandwiches, burgers, forks, spoons, plates, the works. I know for a fact I heard one or two dishes crashing. Taking advantage of the preemptive ambush, I burst in. “This restaurant is dangerous! Everybody currently eating here will somehow turn into a zombie!!” Of course, I knew this course of action would never get through to anybody. As I’d thought, everybody thought it to be a joke. A few chuckled nervously, and a few laughed raucously. Idiots! Nobody would dare take the word of an 18-year older, let alone hear from somebody their own age! They needed evidence, I thought. I came out the front doors, where Tom was waiting next to his car. “Tom,” I said. “I need you to go kill a zombie. Here’s a pen. Take it, it’s sharp. Don’t poke yourself.” Tom, or course, gladly accepted my course of action. Minutes later, I heard the sound of flesh being poked through the skin, and a corpse hitting the ground. What horrified me was that there was a scream intermixed in that chaos. I found where Tom had wandered off to to kill the zombie. I found Tom standing up, and the zombie on the ground struggling to get back up. The pen was lodged in Tom’s ribcage. “Hold on, Tom,” I said. I knew that I was only offering encouraging words to what was going to follow up as pain. “This won’t hurt a bit.” Lies. True to what I thought, Tom was experiencing severe discomfort when I started pulling the pen out. It was jammed well… maybe the zombie was an expert, or something? Hah! As if. I finally settled on telling Tom, “Hey, what’s that??” while pointing behind his back. He actually looked around, as I pulled out the pen, full force. “EAT INK, YA DEAD SON OF A MOTHER!!” I screamed, as I rammed the pen into the zombie’s skull. The zombie was dead. In the time it took for us to kill it, a small circle of zombies had encroached us. “Tom,” I said. I know, I said ‘Tom’ a lot. “It’s probably as good a time as any to perform that karate you were taught.”

    “I’m hurt really bad,” Tom grunted with a cough. “It’s just a flesh wound,” I shot back. “You’ve dealt with worse, the first time you rode a bicycle. These things are SLOW! You could practically walk right by them! Just take your time!!”

    “Alright.” And sure, he managed to ward off every zombie that surrounded us, but at a great cost of blood loss. We had to find a hospital soon. “Tom, you’re bleeding!”

    “I know that, IDIOT, what were you thinking?? GOSH!!” At times like this, I wish that mother was around, so I could say goodbye. Because it sure felt like we were all going to say goodbye, forever. “You’ll make it, through… Tom. You just have to conserve yourself. Stay in the car.”

    “That sounds good. Take the body into La Frontera, and I’ll watch myself.”

    “Good luck.” I took my torch, and kicked the front door open again. People were now used to it, only now, since I took the torch, did people get up in a panic. The body may have been another key factor. I found the nearest curtain and set it on fire. I had less than anticipated the sprinkler system going off. I went back out the front door in disgrace, just noticing that Tom’s torch had suddenly now been sitting in his lap. I walked over hurriedly, almost in a panic. “Tom, what are you DOING?!!” Tom smiled. “Mike, these past few years with you have been great. But I’m not going to make it. I’m too weak to go on, and I’ve lost too much blood. I moved the torch up here. You know what will happen when I do that.”

    Indeed, I fully knew the concept of what he was to do. And I didn’t like it one bit. “Do you really have to do this??” I pleaded. “Yes, Mike. The zombies will never stop if something isn’t done. You always took the situation into your own hands, but now it’s my turn. I will be the savior. Goodbye, Mike.” And like that, Tom was gone. There, he’d hit the gas, and there he’d drove through the doors of La Frontera. Only one or two people made it out of the restaurant alive. The rest were consumed by the explosion that was issued from Tom’s car. It was like I’d predicted. La Frontera had finally burned down, into a mere shell of its former self. With a heavy heart, I picked myself up, and sought shelter.

    Later on that night, I was somehow able to get a ride back to my house. The roads had been cleared, and school was back in regular session. About 3 quarters of the school had been eaten by the zombies. I decided to check up on everything first, before returning home. At least the parents lived, I guess. Yeah, very few people were walking around the hallways anymore. The place was almost deserted and all the windows were boarded up with cheaply-made wood from Canada. I checked up on the Principal, to see if his rules were still in effect.

    I headed into his office. Of course, none of the receptionists were around, they must’ve been dead, I suppose. Something was peculiar about the attendance office as I walked in. The walls were spectacularly clean, except for one particular body of a woman. It was the receptionist. She was lining the wall she was at with blood. I gagged a little. For when I found principal Sescowintz, he was sitting in his chair. And not just sitting, but he was also eating dinner.

    His dinner was a lump of flesh. “Not you too… !” I said otiosely.

    Life continued as usual, and most idiots had forgotten that dreaded night. A month later, and still no sign of the zombies… a sizably lesser amount of people now roamed the streets, I noticed. But I wasn’t trusting. I couldn’t take the chance that the zombies could be gone forever. I couldn’t shake the feeling off of me. The feeling I felt as Tom drove through La Frontera’s doors, and the resulting fulmination. As long as La Frontera existed, I would do what I’d have to in order to stop the inevitable judgment day that was soon to hound us all. I, Michael Farris, will do what is necessary into the coming age.