Jesus.
You never take the time to really appreciate the world you live in until it’s all gone, the tranquility obliterated by a horde of flesh-eating zombies. Ain’t that always the way? One minute, you’re lying back and having a cool glass of lemonade; the next, you’re running for your life from your grandmother – who died, like, at least three years ago. Then you realize that you had it pretty damn good before. Sure, there was war, poverty, evil, pain, senseless destruction, sickness, cruelty, and sadness throughout the world. Sure there were warlords and evil billionaire megalomaniacs and psychotic rapists. But you know what there weren’t? Zombies. Fuckin’ zombies trying to eat your brains. That is one thing I could live without.
It was a real loss of innocence for the world, when the zombies started to rise that is. Looking back, we were a pretty naïve world. Didn’t automatically think to incinerate every single corpse once the sweet release of death took it so that the corpse would not come back to life as a mindless, shuffling zombie drone. It’s crazy to think how foolish we were. We actually had morgues – where we would take fresh corpses and just leave them lying around for days at a time. Days! God…we didn’t even take into consideration the possibility of zombification. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20. Especially zombie apocalypse hindsight.
We really should have seen it coming. The warnings have been there for years. At my Uncle Ralph’s funeral, I could have sworn I saw him flinch in the casket. Why didn’t I tell anyone? I ask myself sometimes when I’m hunched in the back of a closet with a rifle pointed at the door in case a zombie were to burst in. I know why. I was stupid, I was scared, and I was a kid. But that’s no excuse. Jesus…we only buried them six feet in the ground? We deserved the zombie invasion for that kind of carelessness.
When it first started happening, people tried their best to ignore it or pretend like the problem would just solve itself. Medical science couldn’t explain it, so tried ignoring it. Eventually the medical community was forced to swallow its pride and let out a collective “Whoops…didn’t see this coming.” Regular people just sort of avoided cemeteries and morgues and tried to go about their daily life, hoping to God that they would be able to make it to work without being bitten by one of the zombies roaming the city streets. Even God couldn’t answer everyone’s prayers.
A lot of people just called in sick for the next few weeks, hoping the whole fiasco would blow over. Even me. Hell, I figured the government would be able to take care of this with ease, no question. I mean, they handled the whole drug problem pretty well, right? Zombies should be a cakewalk! Wow. I’ve never been more wrong in my life. The government scrambled to deal with the situation, but it spread too far too fast and caught everyone with their thumbs up the collective ass. No one knew what to do because no one could believe it. Even the news tried avoiding the big “zombie scare,” as they called it. Jeez. Imagine being in the midst of a zombie invasion and seeing “Hanson Reunion Tour a Moderate Success” as the headline of the morning paper. Zombie stories were lucky to make the Lifestyles section…or even the obituaries, at first. The newspapers mostly stopped printing the obituaries after a while, as they were getting way out of hand and would have cost far too much ink to turn a profit.
Neighbors, friends, family, and strangers would disappear without notice and people would close their eyes and whistle and go on about their daily life as though nothing was different. Pretending a zombie isn’t there doesn’t make a zombie go away. Words to live by.
By the time humanity as a whole had decided it was time to face the problem head-on, the problem had gotten way out of hand. Zombies were everywhere and destroying everything, albeit really slowly. The living dead aren’t the quickest, you see. I guess dying does something irreversible to your motor reflexes. At that point, no one could care less as to what caused the zombification of millions of corpses or how to explain their existence. It simply didn’t matter. They were there eating brains. Freakin’ brains. They ate them. That’s what mattered.
We didn’t know how to deal with it. How would we? It was, after all, our first war with zombies. We made some poor decisions here and their, both as a group and individually. For instance, the government probably shouldn’t have armed every citizen, regardless of age and criminal, emotional, or psychotic history. And I, individually, probably shouldn’t have strapped an axe to my dogs back before sending him out into the streets. But that’s a whole other story.
You never take the time to really appreciate the world you live in until it’s all gone, the tranquility obliterated by a horde of flesh-eating zombies. Ain’t that always the way? One minute, you’re lying back and having a cool glass of lemonade; the next, you’re running for your life from your grandmother – who died, like, at least three years ago. Then you realize that you had it pretty damn good before. Sure, there was war, poverty, evil, pain, senseless destruction, sickness, cruelty, and sadness throughout the world. Sure there were warlords and evil billionaire megalomaniacs and psychotic rapists. But you know what there weren’t? Zombies. Fuckin’ zombies trying to eat your brains. That is one thing I could live without.
It was a real loss of innocence for the world, when the zombies started to rise that is. Looking back, we were a pretty naïve world. Didn’t automatically think to incinerate every single corpse once the sweet release of death took it so that the corpse would not come back to life as a mindless, shuffling zombie drone. It’s crazy to think how foolish we were. We actually had morgues – where we would take fresh corpses and just leave them lying around for days at a time. Days! God…we didn’t even take into consideration the possibility of zombification. Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20. Especially zombie apocalypse hindsight.
We really should have seen it coming. The warnings have been there for years. At my Uncle Ralph’s funeral, I could have sworn I saw him flinch in the casket. Why didn’t I tell anyone? I ask myself sometimes when I’m hunched in the back of a closet with a rifle pointed at the door in case a zombie were to burst in. I know why. I was stupid, I was scared, and I was a kid. But that’s no excuse. Jesus…we only buried them six feet in the ground? We deserved the zombie invasion for that kind of carelessness.
When it first started happening, people tried their best to ignore it or pretend like the problem would just solve itself. Medical science couldn’t explain it, so tried ignoring it. Eventually the medical community was forced to swallow its pride and let out a collective “Whoops…didn’t see this coming.” Regular people just sort of avoided cemeteries and morgues and tried to go about their daily life, hoping to God that they would be able to make it to work without being bitten by one of the zombies roaming the city streets. Even God couldn’t answer everyone’s prayers.
A lot of people just called in sick for the next few weeks, hoping the whole fiasco would blow over. Even me. Hell, I figured the government would be able to take care of this with ease, no question. I mean, they handled the whole drug problem pretty well, right? Zombies should be a cakewalk! Wow. I’ve never been more wrong in my life. The government scrambled to deal with the situation, but it spread too far too fast and caught everyone with their thumbs up the collective ass. No one knew what to do because no one could believe it. Even the news tried avoiding the big “zombie scare,” as they called it. Jeez. Imagine being in the midst of a zombie invasion and seeing “Hanson Reunion Tour a Moderate Success” as the headline of the morning paper. Zombie stories were lucky to make the Lifestyles section…or even the obituaries, at first. The newspapers mostly stopped printing the obituaries after a while, as they were getting way out of hand and would have cost far too much ink to turn a profit.
Neighbors, friends, family, and strangers would disappear without notice and people would close their eyes and whistle and go on about their daily life as though nothing was different. Pretending a zombie isn’t there doesn’t make a zombie go away. Words to live by.
By the time humanity as a whole had decided it was time to face the problem head-on, the problem had gotten way out of hand. Zombies were everywhere and destroying everything, albeit really slowly. The living dead aren’t the quickest, you see. I guess dying does something irreversible to your motor reflexes. At that point, no one could care less as to what caused the zombification of millions of corpses or how to explain their existence. It simply didn’t matter. They were there eating brains. Freakin’ brains. They ate them. That’s what mattered.
We didn’t know how to deal with it. How would we? It was, after all, our first war with zombies. We made some poor decisions here and their, both as a group and individually. For instance, the government probably shouldn’t have armed every citizen, regardless of age and criminal, emotional, or psychotic history. And I, individually, probably shouldn’t have strapped an axe to my dogs back before sending him out into the streets. But that’s a whole other story.
People stopped going to their jobs and the whole “system” more or less collapsed onto itself. Then the anarchy kicked in. Here’s a good thing to remember: if zombies are taking over the streets and are pretty much omnipresent, DO NOT LET YOUR SOCIETY FALL INTO ANARCHY. Jesus H. Christ. It wouldn’t have been that hard to stick together and say, “Ya know what? Fuck you, zombies! We’re gonna work as a group and you’re gonna wish you’d stayed dead!” But no. Everyone locked themselves up in their homes or tried abandoning civilization for some tranquil, un-zombified piece of land up north. That made it easy for the zombies and the anarchists alike. There were no grand armies standing up against the zombies, so they picked off civilians individually, just the way they liked it. And the anarchists? Well, with no one showing up in jewelry stores and banks (not that paper money had a great deal of use in the post-zombie invasion society, but anarchists weren’t particularly fond of trying to have things explained to them) and groceries, they finally had their day. The only things that stood in their way were the zombies, and they were damn good at avoiding the zombies.
The first few weeks were hell. And I say that pretty literally: the dead were all around and looked particularly demon-like. Dante would’ve freaked out if he had managed to survive another thousand years to see this. Flame covered the country as the demons went about killing and maiming and eating everything in their way.
The first few weeks were hell. And I say that pretty literally: the dead were all around and looked particularly demon-like. Dante would’ve freaked out if he had managed to survive another thousand years to see this. Flame covered the country as the demons went about killing and maiming and eating everything in their way.
Now, the whole zombification thing works exponentially. Let’s say there’s one zombie. He bites one person. Now there’re two zombies. They each bite one person. Now there’re four zombies. And so on and so on. It happened so fast. Sure, we were able to take out a few here and there. They were slow. God, were they ever slow. But there were so many. Too many. And we only had so many bullets.
When the last television station went off the air (Telemundo), we knew it was over. We had lost. If they’ve given up on television, humanity might as well give itself up too. We did give up, in a way. We didn’t try to band together like we should have. The President flew around in Air Force One contemplating dropping nukes across the nation to kill people who were already dead. No one would have blamed him. Hell, most would’ve been happy with that. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to go out with the whimper of zombification. And a nuclear blast is a mighty fine blaze of glory to go out in. Plus, we had literally thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons in storage that had been lying around since the Cold War days, just collecting dust. Our tax dollars were spent making those bombs and, dammit, I hate to see something I’ve spent money on go to waste.
After a while, people started trying to make their way to army bases. A few had been taken over by the zombies, many of whom had starved because they couldn’t figure out a way to get to the brain of soldiers with helmets on. Stupid fucking zombies. Yet they beat us. They beat us. A few bases made it though. They locked themselves in, too. Just like Joe Nobody in the suburbs, they reacted hastily and fearfully. They enacted martial law and a few proclaimed their independence. Hmph. No one had a whole lot of faith in the powers that be, I guess. Not that I would either. But with not even the armed forces to worry about, the zombies owned everything that wasn’t walled in. And they even had a few walled in properties to boot. Without any system or plans – hell, with just a universal craving for brains! – the zombies had managed to wipe out our entire civilization. Pretty impressive really.
When we were first realizing what it was we were up against, the real fright started settling in. Everyone found out pretty quickly that if you were bitten by a zombie, you were going to be enlisting in the army of the undead sooner or later, whether you liked it or not. It was a lot like the movies when you think about it.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
When the last television station went off the air (Telemundo), we knew it was over. We had lost. If they’ve given up on television, humanity might as well give itself up too. We did give up, in a way. We didn’t try to band together like we should have. The President flew around in Air Force One contemplating dropping nukes across the nation to kill people who were already dead. No one would have blamed him. Hell, most would’ve been happy with that. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to go out with the whimper of zombification. And a nuclear blast is a mighty fine blaze of glory to go out in. Plus, we had literally thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons in storage that had been lying around since the Cold War days, just collecting dust. Our tax dollars were spent making those bombs and, dammit, I hate to see something I’ve spent money on go to waste.
After a while, people started trying to make their way to army bases. A few had been taken over by the zombies, many of whom had starved because they couldn’t figure out a way to get to the brain of soldiers with helmets on. Stupid fucking zombies. Yet they beat us. They beat us. A few bases made it though. They locked themselves in, too. Just like Joe Nobody in the suburbs, they reacted hastily and fearfully. They enacted martial law and a few proclaimed their independence. Hmph. No one had a whole lot of faith in the powers that be, I guess. Not that I would either. But with not even the armed forces to worry about, the zombies owned everything that wasn’t walled in. And they even had a few walled in properties to boot. Without any system or plans – hell, with just a universal craving for brains! – the zombies had managed to wipe out our entire civilization. Pretty impressive really.
When we were first realizing what it was we were up against, the real fright started settling in. Everyone found out pretty quickly that if you were bitten by a zombie, you were going to be enlisting in the army of the undead sooner or later, whether you liked it or not. It was a lot like the movies when you think about it.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
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