5th November 2019
"If you won't kill me now, I'll kill you later"
Lee
Let's picture ourselves, you and I, as an 11 year old girl, left in the care of a babysitter in an ordinary weekday after mum and dad have left for work.
Our name is Clementine but let's use a singular approach, i.
So i am watching the television and here comes an update that's on every channel..."A viral epidermic leads to a Zombie apocalypse, stay indoors until advised that it is safe to move around"
The babysitter had left for some errand eight hours ago.
Mum had bought me a Walkie Talkie I could use to reach her through, she doesn't pick her phone up even after several attempts at dialling her number, dads line doesn't go through, neither does my babysitters.
Not panicked but puzzled, I start locking doors and drawing curtains then notice a black muscular man walking stealthily into the compound, scary thoughts start springing up
"what if he is here to rob the house, what if he rapes me?"
Mum said I should not talk to strangers or even open doors to them.
"Please help" , the stranger knocks for the umpteenth time as his voice becomes more of a plea.
As scared as I am, something in my heart tells me his cry for help is genuine and a convinction pushes me into intuitive courage and I open the door.
" Thank you, are your parents home?"
"No, what's going on?"
"You don't know?, For weeks now zombies have infested every corner of our county, it takes one bite to turn a person into one of them and there's no cure"
"I saw in the TV an upda..." the lights go out..."What do we do"
"Get a torch, let's wait for your parents then in the morning we can leave to find safer refuge in another town, am Lee"
"Clementine"
"Ok, I'll call you Clem"
I smile at him and he smiles back, I feel safer with this stranger around, where are my parents though, I grab my Walkie talkie to call them again before we hear a groan outside the window.
Lee signals for total stillness and silence, we slowly tiptoe in the dim light towards the window to peep outside.
What I see, sends ice cold chills throughout me, my scream being timely stopped by Lee's grab on my mouth.
Our windows were see through only from the inside, we stood centimetres away from a zombies face, all that separated us was a brittle glass pane.
The zombie had pus and blood oozing out of his mouth, ears, nostrils and eye sockets, his lower jaw was missing and pieces of his torn facial flesh hanging awkwardly above his nose and upper mandible totally exposing his teeth and cheekbones. He was literally, a walking corpse with an extremely repulsive nauseating stench that strongly permeated through the glass window, the zombie was quite slow in motion and turned away in a limp exposing his leaking brains from a skull crack on the left side of his head as he freakingly walked away.
Lee walked backwards pulling him with me, that's when I realised my shoes were soaked in my own piss, I was scared to death.
Well, Lee and I hid in the house till dusk, we spent the night talking in whispers, Lee wasn't scared of Zombies, he taught me how to use a gun and to always aim for the head as that was the only way to actually put these walking corpses down.
My parents never showed up that night and even a year later, all I had was Lee who provided for me and protected me, he was my best friend, my big brother and father and put me at the centre of every decision he made from the day we met.
Lee was the only reason I was still alive, a year later.
It had been a year of hell, I had witnessed deaths of more people than I could recall, I had seen friends commit suicides and bite victims turn into zombies, I had shot countless zombies in the head, Lee and I had been survivors by stealing food from stores and houses, we always carried a bag of bullets and guns.
We had met other people, some victimised by bites and dying, some alive and surviving like us, most of us paranoid of each other and fearful of the ever lurking danger of zombies who were literally tireless and blood thirsty for human flesh.
We had formed a village and fortified it with sharpened pieces of timber, we erected a wire fence around the fort, and had several look out points where the sharpest snipers amongst us rotated in shifts of watchkeeping and shooting zombies from a far away distance.
This is the safest I had ever felt in such a long time that I had forgotten what a normal life felt like, I was a twelve year old child with a demeanor thirty years my senior.
We had a community of humans, we practiced food crop farming and poultry, we survived on it, Lee and other few men were our community leaders tasked with solving internal fights over food rations, protecting the community from external attacks from other human camps and zombies.
On one night, an army of zombies seemed to come from every corner and after over ten hours of shooting at them we ran out of long distance ammunition.
So many zombies lay dead outside the fort, but more Zombies were coming and stepping on the dead corpses that hide piled up, the zombies eventually crawled over the fort and wire fence and headed towards the house.
We all clustered in a room waiting for the worst.
Windows were cracking open and so were the doors, we had been cornered by death, staring at it cruel glaring face.
The odds were unbearablely stiff with our backs to the wall, a suicide with a bullet to the head or a bite that would have us biting each other and turning into zombie corpses, that was all the options on the table.
I was contemplating my fate, Lee held my hand tighter and whispered "we will survive this", he didn't seem to believe his own statement.
"How?, When there's no way out of".."twaaa" a deafening gunshot silenced me.
We were twenty three in the room, and now twenty two after one of the community leaders shot himself in the head.
In a span of forty seconds, ten others shot themselves in the head, Lee kept begging us to calm down and think harder and maybe a solution would come up.
The door that separated us from the Zombies outside was not strong enough to protect us, the Zombies kept pushing on the door and their weight was cracking the door open.
The door fell off and all I could hear was zombie groans, human screams and suicidal gunshots.
Zombies rushed into the room in their typical slow limp.
Lee pulled out a sword and started slashing the Zombies, we began shooting at the Zombies before an idea came up to seal the door entrance with furniture and a cupboard.
We killed all the Zombies in the room and put our weight against the furniture to counter the push from the Zombies pushing from outside.
Lee gutted out the zombie corpses we had killed, he reached in for their intestines, innards, and brains then smeared himself with the pungent smelling foul porridge like decaying matter of zombie wastes, we were all puking.
He then called me and smeared the disgusting matter all over my face and clothes, some minutes later we were all smeared with Zombie pus, blood and innards.
We looked like zombies, smelled like Zombies and were walking like zombies, so when the zombies finally threw the weight blocking the door off and walked in, they couldn't tell us from themselves.
With slow awkward zombie like limps we walked amongst the Zombies and out of the room and house and eventually the compound and fort, this took courage, thoroughness in mimicry and over three hours to accomplish.
I stayed as close to Lee as I could, it was very hard to differentiate humans from zombies and by the time I reached the edge of the compound I could only recognize Lee.
Lee and I walked away further, I was very tired and so was he, for a man of his strength he seemed unusually tired. I held him at the waist helping him walk.
We approached a cleared patch deep in the forest we had walked into before he collapsed and puked blood.
"Clem, I won't make it" he said with tears in his eyes.
My eyes were full of tears "You will Lee, you are the strongest person I've ever met, you can't die, am nothing without you" I replied.
He pointed to his hip, he had been bitten by a zombie when he was slashing them back in the room.
He gave me his gun, " If you stay here, ill turn into a Zombie and bite you, you must leave me to die"
"There must be another way"
"Yes there is, you are stronger than you know, I've taught you everything I know, you will survive and maybe meet your parents if they are still alive, I don't have much time before I die and turn..."
"But Lee, all roads lead to death..."
"I don't want to turn, you need to show me that you are strong enough, if you don't kill me now I'll kill you later when I turn..."
"But Lee...I love you..."
"i love you too, now shoot me in the head and leave" he said his last words then placed my finger on the trigger and put the gun between his eyes.
I looked into his open squinted tired eyes, blue veins laced his weak eyelids, he had no fight left inside him.
Now in the beginning of the story I said we picture ourselves, as Clem.
So here we are, with a gun pointed to the face of a dying man begging for us to shorten his pain by pulling the trigger.
Look at it in your real life, you are no longer Clem, you are you and in your hand is a gun pointed at the face of your bestfriend, not Lee.
Would you kill your bestfriend to save him from a worse fate?
I won't reveal what Clem did, I put Lee's life in your hands, what you choose to do with your best friend is whatever fate you choose for Lee, it's upto you.
Clems decision was the final moment on the final episode of season one of The Walking Dead video game as adopted by Telltale Games from the actual The Walking Dead series.
At the time I was watching this record on my Microsoft 560XL windows phone, I had two other series in my phone.
There was no radio, no TV, no furniture, no bed, no lights, no food, no job, no income, no girlfriend, there was absolutely nothing, I was living in a room rent free in my friends inherited house.
All i had was a good phone, a mattress on the floor and a friend.
I was totally depressed, I was a couch potato, spending weeks in the room smoking weed and watching a series after another, on my phone.
I was hopeless, my friend was working for his friend so he carried me along to his friends errands as an apprentice.
This was not a typical case, i was a personal assistant to someone's personal assistant.
My friends friend had a WiFi server with a network through Mombasa county, my friend and I were the installers and maintainance crew.
To be truthful, my friend was the router network and server programmer and I was the rooftop guy adjusting antenna poles towards desired direction.
I doubt if I contributed much, I think I was more of company than colleague.
I was a psychological wreck and a financial deadweight, I was not earning from my performance, I was earning because I was a friend to my friends friend.
I was not actually earning though, it was my friend who was earning, I was just a recipient of a cut he would give me from his earning.
We didn't have much to live for, but we survived, I guess we had just enough to live by.
We would have one meal a day sometimes, we were both depressed, addicted to marijuana and broke, on one night we slept hungry but the pangs of hunger overwhelmed my friend and he came to my room and woke me up at 2 am.
"I can't take it, we have some maize flour, am making porridge, do you want some?" He asked.
I said yes, I was hungry too after all the smoking that day.
Half of the way through the cooking, the stove ran out of paraffin.
The flour and water had not mixed into a solution yet, the flour had raw pebbles all over and the water was not close to boiling.
We looked at the porridge, looked at each other, looked at the porridge again, looked at each other and burst out laughing.
We were laughing outside, but crying inside and somewhere along the laughter we were crying outside and laughing inside.
We didn't know if we were laughing or crying, we were doing both at the same time, it was so painful that we laughed and at the same time so humorous that we cried.
"Will you drink it?" I asked.
He said yes then poured out a mug of raw flour and water for himself and another one for me.
He took a sip, I took a sip, we looked at our cups then at each other and burst into another painful laughter laced with comical tears.
We finished our delicacy and went back to sleep.
They say nothing teaches you more than a broken heart, a hungry stomach and an empty pocket.
Well, those three were my daily portion as I sunk further into self pity.
I thought my friend was doing better than I was but it seemed he thought I was doing better than he was.
At some point I realized that maybe we were both doing as bad as each other, it was so bad that we didn't realise how bad it was, we were too high most of the time.
We had a drum of drinking water half filled with small worm looking maggots, the bottom of the jar was covered in green algae, we drank the upper half of the water, afterall, the upper half looked clean and logic had it that infections were probably only located at the bottom with the maggots.
Miraculously, we never got sick.
My friend and I had a similar destructive logic, we committed the same sins and prayed the same prayers, we abused the same drugs and slept with the same women, we lived by the same do's and don'ts, if we died we would probably go to the same heaven or the same hell and by the same judgement.
On another occasion, my friend and I found ourselves installing WiFi in a mosque.
This specific mosque had no outer way to the top where the antenna was to be placed, the interior staircase rose to the top mid centre where the Sheikh would conduct prayers from, this was the room with the voice amplifier for "Mwadhini".
Now my friend and I were at home smoking and too high for our own good when we were contacted to install a package in the mosque.
So here we were, high as a moon and Spiderman climbing the mosques exterior walls without a ladder.
We were on the last floor before the pinnacle, my friend being almost as twice as tall as myself leaped into the air clinging to the edge with his finger tips before pulling himself upwards.
He leaned down and reached his hand out and I handed the antenna to him from below, it was my turn to ascend to his heights.
He extended his hand and grabbed my stretched arm, he pulled me up with all his might holding my entire weight by arm in his hands.
I hang mid air with an around forty metre possible fall below me, I told him to swing me then let go.
"You might die bro, what are you talking about, what will I tell your grandmother?"
"I can't die bro, I will swing my weight to the left and grab the edge with my left hand, your arm is more like a string suspending a pendulum"
"Its impossible Vic, i can't let you go"
"Well you can't hold my weight any longer, swing me now"
We would have had a longer conversation but this was as long as he could hold my weight, I was staring straight at the face of a man who had never been in a worse dillema, trust a high friend and swing him mid air from a potential death or continue holding his weight till his strength gave out, he chose to trust me and I swung and clinged on the edge with my left hand before pulling myself up.
I've never seen more concern in a man's eyes.
We've had many unforgettable moments, I've had a few unforgettable friends like him.
I had a friend who was murdered, I had friends who eventually faded away as life separated our paths, I have friends I loan money too and friends I borrow money from, I have friends that I know are my friends, I have friends who I am not sure whether we are really friends, I have been a friend to people who didn't really value me for my friendship, I have terribly wronged some of my friends and they have totally forgiven and forgotten my foolishness.
In the end, I've learned, my true friends are:
Have shared in my pride and falls
Have shared in my sorrow and joys.
Have corrected my wrongs and embraced my growth.
It's not a long list of qualifications and actually in summary, true friendships conjure spiritual, emotional, and mental connections that can be evidenced through telepathy.
With my true friends, we can speak in silence and understand each other without having to exchange a word, and it's been my honour and privilege to meet these few incredible once in a lifetime souls.
Our friendships may be on and off, maybe more off than on but at least we know we have this common bond, there's so few of us who can lean on each other when both of us are not so strong but we still have each others backs if anything goes wrong.
Friends are God's way of taking care of us.
Finally after years of adult life, I flashback to my lower primary school English compositions and see how much my description of friendship has changed.
Maybe now am ready to write the famous childhood composition.
My bestfriend (40 marks)
........................................................................................................................
In the end, life presents you with situations that might have you pointing a gun to your bestfriends temple and your friends fate just like Lees fate may end up in your hands.
You see, most times the gun in your hands is not a literal gun but a metaphorical one and the line between saving a friend from fate and tapping him over the edge of a cliff may be as thin as being there for them or not being there.
They say a dog is a mans bestfriend and it is true, in all honesty you will learn more from a dog than from Victor Mafusa.
So there you have it folks, be the person your dog thinks you are.
Victor Mafusa
