The man whimpered pathetically as he stumbled down the dark street. Not a living soul was in sight. Bodies lay scattered across the bloody pavement. Across the street, hanging from the windows of the overhead buildings, stuck in their cars crashed in random places. Everywhere there was death. The man tripped over a dismembered limb, the pavement hit his head hard. Blood poured into his eyes as he crawled across the ground. He heard a moan behind him, and the man’s bowels loosened at the sound; he knew his death was coming. His limbs could not move fast enough, and within seconds his killer was on top of him, tearing flesh from his body in chunks. The man screamed, then his head fell limp to the ground. The last thing the man ever saw was a poster floating through the air.
CHILDREN OF DEMENTIA PLAYING TONIGHT 9:OO PM AT THE DEATH BALL. COME SEE THE MASSACRE AS THE FIVE PIECE BAND PLAYS LIVE.
NONE WILL SURVIVE!!!

I looked over to my left and saw Mack Malice taking a shot before singing the next lines of the song. The crowd was loving us. We were only half way through the set list and already the crowd was out of control. The song ended in a low scream from Mack and a short drum solo. I looked to the rest of my band members. Elof was adjusting the tuning on his giant bass, Alvar was flirting with some of the girls closest to the stage, and Dagmar was chugging water as fast as he could. I laughed to myself. We had come a long way from playing in the garage every weekend but we were still the same kids who dreamed of being on stage. I looked out into the crowd. The “ballroom” we were playing in was a fairly large circular auditorium with several doors along the far wall. The ceiling was taller than the eye could see in the dark. Smoke filled the room from our pyrotechnics, and the stage lights danced eerily across it. A girl in the front row caught my attention by throwing articles of her clothing at me, and I turned just in time to see security drag her off. Damn security always ruining the fun.
“Hey Mathias, some crowd tonight huh?” It was Mack the singer.

“Yeah they are pretty intense but security is a little too strict on ‘em. We will have to talk to them about that.” I had to yell to be heard above the crowd but when I was done Mack nodded and walked up to the security guard. When Mack walked back to his microphone he winked at me. I looked back at the guard and saw him walking towards the door. Well, I thought to myself, this could get interesting.

It was time to start our next song. Break time was over; I picked up my guitar and looked into the audience. There was a commotion at the very back door, probably just a couple drunk fans I thought. I started my intro solo letting the music fill my mind and distract me from the ominous number of people watching me. I heard thousands of people screaming the words of the song, words I had heard so many times before. I fell into the groove of the song, and my mind started running on the frets of the guitar. I didn’t notice when the crowd stopped screaming in joy and started screaming in horror. I didn’t notice when the first ten people by the door started attacking and eating the closest people to them, I didn’t notice when those first victims got up of the ground with pieces of their flesh missing and began to attack the people next to them. Luckily Dagmar had noticed. He stopped drumming as soon as he realized what he was watching, and the sudden loss of sound made me snap out of my self induced trance. We all looked at Dagmar, and he was pointing to the crowd. I snapped my head around and looked to where he was pointing. I saw people running as fast as they could away from the door, and then I saw a creature of my imagination, a zombie.

I acted purely on instinct, reacting solely on the primal side of my mentality. In the front of the stage we had an assortment of weapons we use for decoration. I ran forward and grabbed two kitanas. I looked to my left and saw everyone but Dagmar doing the same. Dagmar was jumping off the front of the stage and running as fast as he could to the zombies. They had already made it half way through the crowd, killing everyone that was not fast enough to escape. Dagmar reached the first zombie and started hitting it with his fists. He grabbed its wrist and broke its arm. Bone jutted out from the elbow and he used it to stab the zombie in the temple. With its own broken arm impaling the zombies’ brain it fell limp to the ground and Dagmar moved onto the next zombie. His gruesome defeat of the zombie inspired me to finally jump off of the stage and follow the rest of my band. Alvar had not grabbed a weapon from the stage instead he used his guitar to smash the skulls of every zombie that got within his fatal reach. Elof had picked up a battle axe; he resembled a dwarf from the fantasy movies as he swung it in wide arks completely separating head from shoulders. Mack had found a chainsaw, why there was a chainsaw on stage I have no idea but he used it proficiently, using it to clear us all a path to where Dagmar stood surrounded by at least twenty bodies, still using nothing but his fists. After about twenty minutes of hacking and sawing our way through the zombie hordes we got a break. The zombies had almost all been killed. Only about twelve remained in the auditorium. I stopped moving and tried to catch some of my breath, across the entire floor lay the mangled bodies of our victims and the zombies’ victims. I made the mistake of looking too far and finding the girl that had earlier been so friendly with me. Her body lay under a man with only one arm and it appeared as if her stomach was missing some pieces. Blood covered her face, her eyes lay open staring at me; I wondered what the last thing she saw was.
Mack walked over to me the chainsaw now quiet in his hands. “Well maybe telling security to take the night off wasn’t such a good idea was it Mathias?” I looked up at his ragged face. His left was black and the whole right side of his face was stained with blood.

“No,” I grunted back at him, “we shouldn’t have and next time I will know better.” I managed to smile at him and chuckle; he smiled back and went to go check on the rest of the band. I laid my head on my hands and tried to think of what we were going to do. It had been half an hour since we had cleared the room of the undead, and now we lay scattered around tending to our thoughts. Logically we should go somewhere with weapons and trained professionals, but everyone in this godforsaken city would be headed to the police station, so our other best option would be to go to the dock get on a boat and go to the island. But the dock was across town at least an hour away by car, and the chances of all the roads being clear were very unlikely. So I just sat there stuck on what to do next. Everyone else seemed to be at the same place as me because no one broke the still silence that had plagued the room after the zombies had died. Suddenly a thunderous crash broke through the room. I turned to see what new horror was coming at us, and from behind the stage another horde of zombies came charging at us. It appeared as if the armies of hell were being thrown at us. Hundreds of undead came pouring off the stage.

An endless sea of disfigured, cannibalistic, brain dead, creatures came running towards us. Mack started up his chainsaw, the rest of us picked back up our weapons, and we charged forward. Bodies fell to the ground in pieces, and the floor was soon slick with fresh blood. There was a variety of zombies in the horde. There was police officers to hungry to use their guns, there was men in suits, gangsters, women obviously of a less honorable career area, and women who looked like stereotypical mothers. There were even children who ran faster than any of the big ones. The exact details of the massacre that followed elude my mind for I have tried to suppress them for so many years, but I will say that when the battle was over I had killed 427 zombies.

I leaned against the wall, dropping my swords to the ground. Every breath that I took pained me. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, and my body felt like it was going to fall into pieces like the zombies I had just killed. Dagmar was the only one who wasn’t obviously dying of exhaustion; I guess being a drummer has its perks. I slid down the wall and closed my eyes. I let my mind wander again; I tried to imagine what I would be doing right now I assumed all had gone how it was supposed to. I woke up in a bed; soft white sheets were pulled up to my neck. I sat up in my bed and noticed a newspaper lying on my lap. The headline read:
SWEDISH DEATH METAL BAND STOPS THE APOCOLYPSE SINGLE HANDEDLY.