PUB CRAWL

Jim Robb

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     Verbatim transcript of witness statement from Jeremy Smith in the matter of the suspicious death at Finnegan's Pub on the evening of 8 October 2016

     Sometime after the fifth bar, or maybe it was the sixth, I knew something wasn't right.

     Me and my buddies have been on every Zombie Pub Crawl since the first one -- well, except for Jeff; he couldn't enter the first one because everybody gets ID'd. We never came close to finishing that first one, but even back then we all made it past the sixth bar. So I knew something was going on when I saw Paul wasn't with us any more -- like, no way he would have dropped out that early -- so we all started to look for him.

     The Crawl is on the second Saturday in October, close enough to the 31st to be a Hallowe'en thing, but early enough so there's no ice and snow on the ground. Ice and snow aren't good on a pub crawl; it's hard enough to walk as it is, close to the end. This year it was the 8th, which is the earliest it can be, but even so it was pretty dark out by that time. Besides, I couldn't remember what Paul's costume looked like, and every zombie costume looks pretty much the same anyway after the fifth or sixth bar. So I had to look real close at everyone to see whether it was Paul, and that's maybe why I noticed this guy.

     His clothes were all torn up and dirty and covered with what looked like blood stains, and his face was pretty messed up, and he had the zombie walk down real good. But what really got me was that he was carrying part of an arm, with Paul's fancy Rolex on it.

     We don't get too many zombies out this way. Like, I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a real zombie out here before, not ever. At the time I didn't even know for sure if there was such a thing as a real zombie. Still, me and my buddies decided that maybe, just maybe, this guy was the real deal. The thing was, we didn't know how we could find out for sure. Then Jeff remembered that in the movies you always see zombies eating, but you never see them drinking.

     So when we got to the next bar we crowded around him and pushed him in. We got our beers, plus one for zombie guy, and when we all drank up, sure enough, he didn't. So the guys grabbed him, and Jeff held his mouth open while I poured the beer down his throat.

     He shook us off, but he kept on shaking. Then he fell on the floor, shaking and screeching, with smoke coming out his mouth and nose and, well, like everywhere else, and after a minute he just sort of burned up from the inside out. It wasn't pretty, but we weren't too shook up about it after what he did to Paul.

     Besides, it served him right. You shouldn't go on a pub crawl if you can't handle your beer.

     End of witness statement

END