Trafford… on this dark lonely night. Oh what a devastating and breathtaking night. Trafford… the town that could rip the life right out of you. Trafford… the home of the annual zombie convention. Allow me to digress for a short while. It started off with a slam dunk contest with Jared’s brother Air Jordan who tomahawked it home… boomshakalaka. We left the basketball bonanza and moved on to our next adventure for the night, Rachel. We picked up a young lady from the illustrious University of Pittsburgh. And now, our company was four. It consisted of our driver Jared, our quick gun Denny, as I said Rachel, and of course me, Seamus. Our night continued on semi-normally as we picked up a gentleman by the name of Mark from Duquesne University. For a short while we terrorized this place of education and I’m sure that the University was glad to see us go. We transported Mark to a different location and there were invited to some sort of social gathering known locally as “bowling”. And although we promised to attend said event, we neglected to grace the inviters with our presence as we deemed that we had far more interesting things to do, which you may or may not soon agree with. We begin our first real adventure with an apparent felony and a chase. A black man (Jared) began sprinting towards an obviously stolen vehicle (you may ask how I knew it was stolen and to that I reply….. isn’t it obvious) and well, this injustice cannot go unpunished so without hesitation, an Irishman (me) sprints after him in hot pursuit. Upon the realization that I was better looking than Jared, I allowed him to get away.
Anyways, we four brave souls entered the doomed car where we unknowingly awaited the craziest night of our lives. We sped away without a plan nor a care in the world. Lacking a definite plan and foreseeing no final destination, we just started driving based solely on the direction chosen at random by our guide riding “shotty”, Rachel. Along our travels, we happened upon an orange and white striped sign in the shape of a tripod with what appeared to be a small blinking light on top and therefore… we took it. Our next step in the plan is based solely on an assumption. We assumed that the porch of the random house that we pulled up to had misplaced their blinking sign and we returned it accordingly. I mean heck, it was theirs. Moving on. Our journey continued with yet more useless driving.
In retrospect we had way too much time on our hands. We discovered the plethora of orange cones that PennDOT had misplaced all over the greater city of Pittsburgh and because we live in a democratic nation, we took a vote and the consensus was that these orange pieces of nylon polymer were placed along the road solely for our amusement and therefore we took many of them. And in all fairness we gave them at least a fifteen second warning before taking any of them by yelling “CONES!!” and none of them made any effort at escape. We decided to use our judgement dispersing these apparent gifts from the gods and we ended up placing one in front of an ATM machine, one made its way out of the sunroof of a car traveling at high speeds and quite nearly cleared the railing that would have allowed it to escape off the bridge and into the river, and a third cone made it’s way back to the dorm room of Tomas the Honduran.
We drove on. We had been driving in the city for a while so Jared decided to start driving down some sweet back roads. Now, the account you will soon hear may not be scary while you read this under the sun’s warm gaze or while in the relative safety of your own bed, but I assure you, my heart was beating nearly out of my chest as more and more adrenaline coursed through my veins on this thrill ride at the amusement park of horror. The ride began with us driving down a narrow road with no houses in sight. Suddenly, we see a road sign that reads “Deaf Child Area”… still no houses. A mile or two down the road we come across a sort of driveway heading back from the road to an eerie looking dirty white building, which looked as if it hadn’t been inhabited for a number of years. The sign near the road appeared to read “Lenny’s Auto Wrecking Service”, but upon second glance, the sign stated in bold prose “Leprechaun’s Auto Wrecking Service”. We all thought this comical until we all looked back at the narrow dark road to see a leprechaun standing calmly in front of our fast moving car. We screeched to a sudden stop just in front of his outstretched arm; and he slowly made his way towards the driver side door. Quite obviously we sped away without waiting for this apparent apparition to invite us in for some Guinness. More absurdity ensued after we crept across a one lane bridge, traversed a smaller wooden bridge, turned onto a dirt road, and happened upon a large open field. One of our company jumped out of our car for reasons unbeknownst to the others and sprinted off into the darkness of the woods. A few minutes later, this same individual jumped back into the car and when asked why he was gone so long, he replied only with silence and to this day refuses to tell anyone of the horrors that occurred only a short distance from the safety of the locked doors of the car. We continued on the dirt road up over a small hill and as insane as this may sound…… we found ourselves IN IRELAND!
A minute or two later, back in Pittsburgh of course, we find that the dirt road meets with a major highway and to our immense satisfaction we soon found a road sign telling us where we were. Our Pittsburghians discussed our whereabouts and said that we should be en route to the center of the city, but we soon learned that the laws of time and topography did not apply to us on this fateful night. As we passed through some smaller towns our guides seemed more and more hopeful about our progress and became more certain of our final destination. Almost insignificantly at the time a van pulled out in front of us and it soon became clear that they were heading in the same direction. At first this was normal as we thought we were heading into the city, but then to the surprise of those of us literate enough to read the road signs and to the even greater surprise (to the point of utter confusion) of our two guides we pulled into the doomed town of Trafford, PA. By all matters of science we should not have ended up here. I don’t claim to be an expert in cryptozoology, but I do however trust the judgement of our native guides. They claimed that ending up in Trafford, also known as Trashford by others or called Trapford by stil more, was a physical impossiblity. We quickly surmised from context clues that the van we had been following was quite obviously heading to the Annual Zombie Convention or AZC in Trafford.(1, see Addendum)
Our female companion informed us that she knew some of the twisted history of Trafford. She told us some dark tales of how numerous people after stumbling upon the town just as we had done found themselves unable to escape the mind made manacles imposed by the aura of this place. She also assured us that the stories were regarded as being steeped in falsehood and that her Aunt even used to live just up the street , so to familiarize ourselves with the town, we drove towards the house of the only person we knew ever lived there. Everything seemed to be in perfect order at the residence as we drove by at just past one in the morning. We slowly rolled through the town feeling better and putting the horror stories out of our minds. We all sight a Laundromat with the name, and I kid you not, “NIGROS’ in huge lit up letters on the building. Jokingly, we suggested getting out of the car to take pictures with the sign (especially having Jared take a picture because….. well…) and instantly Rachel commands, “No, don’t get out of the car.” Jared hearing the intensity in her tone subtly moves his hand to the automatic locks. We leave the town expecting never to see this trashy place again. We travel on in silence for a short while until the memory of the town began to fade from our minds. As we drove further away we realized that the signs pointing towards Pittsburgh, much like before, started to tell how many miles we were away from our destination of Trafford. WHY?!? All we wanted was to get home. Seven minutes later we inexplicably found ourselves just outside of where Rachel’s Aunt used to live. And instead of a house which we had all just seen a few minutes before, there was an empty grass lot with no signs that a house had ever existed there. Then…… we screamed. Not really.
And no night of shenanigans is complete without the harassing of the local Wal-Mart Supercenter. As we entered the store, we quickly learned that cameras are not allowed in the toy section as an employee unpleasantly informed us. I think the large toys taken off of the top shelves by Jared and the hatchet we left in the middle of the toy section floor efficiently informed her of how we felt about her efforts as a Wal-Mart employee to obey the rules. We both started and ended our adventure at Wal-Mart with the carts in the ginormous and very empty parking lot. Jared and I experienced both the joys and pains of bobsledding (especially on pavement traveling at high speeds towards a very solid guard rail); and we also tried to answer the commonly held question of, what would happen if two carts were held by two people through the back window at a distance of roughly six inches from the car while the car travels at speeds in excess of 35 miles per hour at which time the carts are released in the direction of a guard rail with a large hill located behind it and Eat ‘n Park at the bottom? And trust me, the answer was phenomenal.
Addendum
1.) The Annual Zombie Convention (AZC) – the AZC is a place where zombies can feel comfortable going to talk about the current issues relating to zombiehood. These matters range from current food shortages in the middle-eastern countries to helping teenage zombies overcome peer pressure. Turnout is usually high and most zombie communities are well represented under this current system. This meeting in particular was to decide a course of action based on the complaints posed against the zombies’ active constitution. Unfortunately as everyone knows, zombies do not get along and having difficulty calmly discussing differences so as a general rule they end up killing each other, the surrounding citizens, and then themselves in violent bus accidents.(2, see Addendum)
2.) Sidenote: beware of freak bus accidents. I’ll tell you what.... lesson learned…..
