Zombification

“The game does not want to be played,” I told them. We sat at spaced intervals on the huge couch in my living room. The girl and the Creep feverishly pounded the game controllers. Each hurled vulgarities at the screen before us. It did not reply, just kept flashing away while my companions desperately tried to stop from getting themselves “Killed” by the shape shifting zombies that made up the evil antagonists of the game.

I have no idea where the girl came from, or, what her name was. The Creep was my best friend, roommate, and arch nemesis in the multiverse that was gaming. Whenever I came home from the club on a Saturday night alone, he would creep (hence the nickname) out of his bedroom and demand the controller to the video game. Upon receiving it, he would launch into a tirade of abuses on the state of my complete incompetence as a Lothario, and absolute cowardice as it applies to video games. I would inevitably snatch the gauntlet he threw down, and we would find ourselves locked in mortal cyber-combat, most of the time until the sun rose the next day.
This night we had a damsel in distress to enliven a game we had, quite frankly, begun to find boring. It brought a new dynamic to our crusade against the dastardly undead adversaries. Neither of us could remember meeting her, or why she showed up at our front door that night. She stood on the porch dressed as if she had come from the club, or some club, in a tight short denim skirt, delightfully low cut strapped blouse, and four inch pumps. Being red blooded American idiots where it came to miniskirts and cleavage, we could not find a good reason to argue when she pushed her way into the house. It seemed as if she knew us and we figured one of us might get lucky. She walked to the couch, slipped off her pumps, folded her legs under her, took up the controller and began shooting zombies.

Under normal circumstances we would have been in heaven, but what happened was anything but the Great Reward. The girl proved to be anything but a damsel in distress. We discovered that she was quite vicious in her method, and deadly in her execution. After a while, the game began to consume us in ways it had never before. Our level of intensity grew with each push of the button and the bloodshed on the screen far surpassed any which the Creep and I had seen. The girl complained that the game moved too slowly, and the Creep started screaming that his controller was faulty. The screen began to distort and we could not distinguish between the game characters and ourselves. The girl shouted at me to fix it and the only thing I could think to say, was the nonsense about the game not wanting to be played.
In self-defense, I rebooted the game. When the screen characters reappeared there seemed to be a luminance that was not, or so I thought, possible from the ten year old television I sat before. The colors were much more distinct, and the sound felt as if it came from the room instead of the speakers in the box. The action resumed and rose to an even more intense level than before. The zombies swarmed at us and died slower. We found ourselves nearly surrounded before retreating. A huge snarl filled the room and the biggest monster on the screen suddenly thrust its head at us and it came right out of the screen and began drooling on the coffee table. We all fired at once. The head exploded before us into pieces of putrid flesh which showered the room with the largest chunk landing on the coffee table in front of us. It lay there throbbing and smelling of spoiled food. We stopped and gawked at the rotten goop, helpless and frozen in our fear.

The girl dropped her controller…reached down…picked the repulsive heap up…and began eating it!

The creep and I instantly turned away and began blowing chunks of our own. We looked back and found her crawling around the room scooping up the other pieces and devouring them as fast as she could. We both backed away over the back of the couch until we were standing. Instead of running we just stared at her while she finished her dreadful meal and turned to us. Her face had taken that look that we were used to seeing on the screen in the game. Her eyes had strange slant to them with pupils as white as snow and what should have been the whites of her eyes were road mapped in deep crimson. Bloody slobber dribbled from her mouth, and large sores began to appear on her face. She stood and came at us with a halting gait. Reaching the couch she flung it out of the way as if it weighed nothing.

I instantly bolted for the door and, as I looked back, she took ahold of the Creep and bit a huge hole in his skull. I left the apartment and never went back. I went to my mother’s house and stayed for a week. There were no reports on the news. The police never came by. It confused me greatly. I ultimately went back to see what happened. I met the Creep, looking normal, at the mail box and he asked me where I had been. He acted as if nothing had happened. He did tell me that the girl had slipped something in our drinks, but that it was just some acid. He said that the two of them had partied until the drug wore off, and had been hanging out ever since.

I told him what I saw, or thought I saw, and he laughed it off as the dope playing games on me. He told me to come upstairs and it would be all right. In the apartment, the girl sat at the kitchen table checking her e-mail on the laptop. She apologized for the thing with the acid in the drink and promised it wouldn’t happen again. I told them that the zombie game had to go and they agreed. We ordered a pizza and sat back to play a more subdued game with warriors and wizards and real damsels in distress.

After a while a knock on the door told us that the pizza had arrived. She got up to go and get it. I delved into the game and paid little attention to the transaction at the door. I called back to ask for a soda and heard a ghastly grunt like reply. I turned to the Creep only to find his eyes were a weird glowing white, and drool was coming down his chin. The girl came around the couch with a meat cleaver in her hand. As it descended into the hand I had laid on the coffee table, she laughed a horrible croaking cackle and said, “Welcome home!”