Winner of "Shirt of the Year" in the 2011 T-List Awards!

First I didn’t know what was worse: being eaten alive by ravenous brain dead cannibals, or being partially eaten and infected with this virus or whatever, slowly dying only to rise and stalk my friends and family. I had no idea how much worse it could be. I’m fully conscious, aware of every moment, but trapped in a body completely taken over by a primal drive to consume living flesh while my mind screams in agony, feeling every deterioration as my body rots away.

And the horrors I saw before I died have completely left me, replaced by the infinite terrors I have witnessed firsthand as my possessed body has run down victim after victim. Their horrified screams and the splashing of their blood still echo in my mind. I can still TASTE it. I’d throw up if my brain stem had any control over my digestive tract. I’ve had to watch paralyzed, like a helpless observer in a movie watching the monster through security monitors but unable to warn the stalked prey. I can see through my own eyes, but I can’t blink. I can’t look away. I fight desperately to hold my weathered, bony hands down at my side but I can only watch them rise up to strike and grab and claw.

I try to scream or cry out, even to bellow in the darkness so as to give away my position before my shell of a body can sneak up on them. Once I was able to manage a barely audible “Mrh?” but it only lured a concerned citizen closer. I wept as my body devoured them, their screams turning to cries for help, then cries for mercy, then soft gurgling, then silence.

I’m a prisoner. I’m forced to endure mental tortures no human psyche can withstand without fracturing and splintering. I see endless mutilations, death, and dismemberment. I feel my own body as it absorbs gunshots, stab wounds, even fire. I pray that someday someone is able to fight back, to win, to destroy my neural cortex and with it any danger my body might pose to the world. I simultaneously fear that it won’t be enough to set me free; that the only thing worse than being stuck in a rotting cannibal’s body would be to be stuck in a dead shell, only the ground or sky to look at, for as long as it takes me to be buried or burned or rotted away.

But the worst part of all of this, the worst part of the blind terror in their eyes and the emotionless milky clouding in mine, the worst part of their screams and my reflexive groans, the worst part of the taste of human flesh and muscle and bone and offal, is that deep down…

I’m starting to like it.

Wear this shirt: While staggering and stumbling clumsily into your local Subway, Quizno’s, or Penn Station. And for god’s sake sober up.

Don’t wear this shirt: If you just like turtles.

This shirt tells the world: “As much as I love daydreaming about running through downtown like a madman with a shotgun, you can safely bet that I’ll be the first to die in any real apocalypse.”

We call this color: Brrrroooooooowwwwwnnnnssssss

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