MicroHorror

“Zombies?”

“Yeah, come look.”

Brett followed his co-worker down their cubicle aisle, past the break room, and over to the plate glass windows which surrounded DigiOne. It was 4:55 p.m., and the setting sun cast long shadows across the snow-crusted company grounds. A moaning, groaning, mob of shambling bodies filled the parking lot, disregarding even the “reserved” parking spaces.

“Holy crap, Jenkins. Those are zombies, all right.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Brett pressed his nose to the window, his exhale fogging the glass. He watched as one of the zombies turned about in a slow circle, hands in the air, as if he were doing the Hokey Pokey. Another zombie walked round and round a red SUV, trying each door handle as he went. No luck–she was locked up tight.

“I don’t know,” said Brett. “The boss has PTO today, right?”

A continual wave of moaning seemed to leak through the glass, the sound of a thousand confused bodies looking for brains to munch.

“They look cold out there,” said Jenkins, fidgeting. “They’re all in bare feet.”

“They’re undead, Jenkins,” said Brett. “They feel no pain whatsoever.”

Jenkins was an idiot. Cold? Unbelievable. Would his co-worker feel sympathy right up until the point when probing fingers stabbed into his earholes, trying to rupture his skull membrane? Probably. Jenkins was the kind of guy whose e-mails contained that stupid “notebook” visual for a background. How retarded was that? You felt complicit to his idiocy when replying, because your own e-mail then contained the same stupid notebook background.

Brett didn’t put up with that nonsense. He would start a new message whenever Jenkins e-mailed him, one free of any background settings. Then Brett would copy the complete original text, and paste ’er right into the new one. Bingo, no stupid notebook background.

“Well, we should probably call security…” said Jenkins, trailing off. His face was pale, sweating, and his voice had taken on a wavering tone.

“I think somebody already did, look.” Brett motioned over to his right, where a circle of zombies surrounded a navy blue lump in the snow. A gold badge twinkled serenely in the light of the setting sun. DigiOne security guards carried handcuffs and flashlights, what a joke. How was a guy supposed to escort a terminated employee from the premises (or disperse a mob of zombies, for that matter) without a firearm?

Ridiculous.

Brett considered the feeding crowd, mildly surprised. He wouldn’t have guessed the guard’s brains sufficient to feed one zombie, actually, let alone a dozen.

The rest of the undead milled about the parking lot, hungrily. They were waiting for the end of the work day, obviously, when three hundred unsuspecting DigiOne employees would venture out to their cars.

Jenkins looked at his watch nervously, then back out to the parking lot.

“Gosh, Brett, I really have to go… I’m supposed to meet my wife at Gabberts to pick out new drapes.”

Brett looked at him, annoyed. Jenkins would go out to his car like a fool, then have his brains eaten by a roving pack of zombies. Who would be forced to handle his accounts after that happened? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

“Fine, go.” Brett snorted, then turned and walked away from the plate glass window. He poked his head into the break room as he passed, and said casually:

“Watch out tonight, guys, zombies are pretty thick.”

Three men from Finance grumbled, looking at their watches. Fine. If they wanted to be fodder for the undead, so be it. Everyone in the company was stupid, Brett decided.

He made his way through his cubicle aisle, and sat down in his chair with a sigh. January was such a depressing month.