30 Day Image Prompt Contest - CLOSED

Vacationing In Zombie Land

The loud alternative music coming out of the stereo was drowned out by the buzz of hundreds if not thousands of flies as the car came to a stop on the side of the interstate. The smell of decay was heavy in the car, but most of the passengers had stopped caring a while ago. They were already only the zombified remains of their former selves. The frightened human in the back seat that they had adopted as their pet and travel guide however had a pinched expression on their face and they looked greener than the plague itself. Nobody understood why they hadn’t eaten the reporter yet, nor why they weren’t scrambling around like the rest of the undead. There had been reports of others like them, though it had been a long time since they actually saw any news broadcasted live since the control towers were taken out and most of the media was eaten. 

“Up ahead is your destination, Disney World, Cinderella’s castle,” the reporter choked out between short breaths through their nose. They were doing their best not to breath in too deeply. 

“I wan go pirates carribn ride,” one of the zombie boys complained, wishing he had more control over his grey tongue.

“We would have gone there, but it was already crowded. Apparently none of the normal zombies care for the castle.”

“P-p-pink!” grunted another one of the boy zombies who sounded disgusted at the thought. 

“Quen!” guttered one of the girls, her long jagged fingernails painted with muck and what remained of her dark purple nail polish. 

The other zombie girl merely rolled her red goopy eyes and grunted as one fell out of its socket and hit the floor of the car. She picked it up carefully, wiped it on her boyfriend’s sleeve and then gently put it back in. 

They arrived at the castle long after the sun had gone down. They hadn’t been able to get the car through the wreckage and rubble strewn around the gate. It looked like someone had been trying to build a barrier, but wound up locking themselves in with something infected. Everything that they had seen about the park staggering, crawling or otherwise, had been turned into zombies. They had found that it stressed out the other zombies to see them moving almost like humans, but they hadn’t been bit again. Someone had hypothesized that it had something to do with their smell, and that the other zombies saw better close up anyway. 

The castle was deserted as they had thought. Apparently zombies were repelled by the color as much as their own smell. Nevertheless, they had been smart enough to go in slowly, their guide covered in as much muck as they could possibly cover them in, in order to make them smell like one of their own kind. The journalist had already been good at the shambling like a zombie bit before they met up. The zombies split apart, shambling off to check out their new pad, the girls immediately locating the biggest suites in the whole palace. The boys didn’t much care as they were entranced by the large screens on the walls of the dusty lobby. They were turned on to some satellite station watching what was supposedly live coverage of the zombie apocalypse. At the time of broadcasting, there had still been a group of people still alive. They had panned in on the destruction even as they talked about restoring order to the ravaged lands. The reporter tried to look surprised when they heard that there was a group of scientists still counted among the living, who were very near a scientific breakthrough that might cure the zombie disease or at least vaccinate people from getting it. There was no way to get that much vaccine supplied to whoever else was still breathing normally, nor any way to test how the zombies would react to being jabbed with needles and turned back into  their former selves, if that was indeed an option.  What they needed was something similar to the gases  that had been bottled in rockets nearly a year ago and dropped on an unsuspecting globe from still nameless entities, though it was clear that it must have been someone acting on their own whim to destroy anything and everything.