That time I wrote zombie fiction: Chapter 1

By and large everyone else has become a zombie. It's pase, I know, and I kept telling them that as they were knocking at my door and asking to eat my brain. "Just one little piece. I won't eat it all," says my neighbor, who hasn't even bothered to give back the lawn mower that he borrowed two months ago before getting turned into a zombie. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets you a shovel in the head, so I waited until he stuck his head through the window and then I bashed my shovel into the side of his head, which pretty much left the majority of his brain all over the kitchen floor, which, to my credit, I didn't even think about eating. 

I'd like to begin at the beginning, way back when everything was fine, and Ron, that's my neighbor, was just a slightly overweight guy who would invite you over to his house to jump in the pool or play a game of ping pong while being jumped on by his oversized golden retriever with him saying, "oh, we've been teaching him not to do that," which, no you haven't Ron or your dog wouldn't be jumping all over me right now that big, affectionate piece of shit when all I'm trying to do is enjoy a delicious and cheap hot dog at the pool. This is precisely the sort of behavior that is probably going to earn Ron's dog a shovel to the head if I ever see him sniffing around doing zombie type things. 

I'm going to get back to that story in a bit, but can I just say that one of the most annoying and underrated things about the zombieapocalypse taking place is that it's damn near impossible to have an intelligent converstaion. Like, I'd have liked to have invited Ron in and maybe shot the breeze with him for a bit over a cold one about the state of the Lakers, or the decline of Western Literature or something, but all everyone is interested in is taking a slight portion of your brain, which is how we wound up in this situation in the first place. The one thing you can't do with a zombie is say something like,

"hey, let's reason about this for a while, what if I just start you off with a small portion of my leg, and we talk about some issues of food supply over the long term. Have you read the Bible? You know, the part about Joseph storing up all the food for the lean years? How would you say this compares to Cormac McCarthy's The Road in terms of your expectatioins?"

This is precisely the sort of tack you can't take with a zombie because they'll just try and eat your brain, and you'll wind up spending the afternoon cleaning them up off the kitchen floor witth a sponge and a heavy heart because you didn't really mind Ron all that much, on his best days he was a pretty decent guy who knew how to throw a party. 

I was also just starting to get involved in online dating and had made some inroads, had a couple of good nights out with some women who seemed like they were just about crazy enough to go out with me again. And then you start logging in to profiles and sending messages, and you're just waiting around to see if they are going to respond and as if relationships aren't hard enough, there's a possibilty that they've been turned into mindless zombies or are just cowering in fear and not checking their internet dating profile but instead focusing on news outlets and random blog posts, fearing for their life or maybe they just didn't have a good time. How the hell is a guy supposed to know? 

Outside, Ron's dog is nosing around in my flowers, which I'm just going to let go because they're pansies, and I didn't like their shade of purple anyway as it wound up clashing with the brick. I also can't tell if his dog, Rudy, is a zombie apocalypse dog ravenous for brains or whether he's just a normal and annoying dog who will jump up on you even if you ask him to stop. These are the sort of connundrums that you'll probably already aware of if you're at all a fan of the genre. I wasn't a connoisseur, but I sort of knew what to expect in terms of little zombie children coming at your or your wife or something, which I didn't have, so I guess I'm missing a critical part of the zombie apocalypse experience, which is the mental anguish you experience over closed loved ones turning into zombies or living in fear of zombies. 

The main thing, if I hadn't made it totally clear is that the zombieapocalypse is a mix of fear and horror and boredom. There is really nothing good on television. The only channels still running things are just showing repeats of movies that I've already seen, and I don't suppose we'll be seeing new episodes of our favorite shows anymore, and I suppose one of the strange things that you wouldn't think you'd find yourself worrying about is what happens to that awful boy king on Game of Thrones? Does anyone kill him, does everyone? That's the sort of thing that I'm thinking about right now as I'm watching Rudy kind of scoot around the back yard doing dog like things. Maybe I'll go throw him a stick. 

 I knew as soon as I stepped into the yard that I'd made an error in judgement. Rudy had always been kind of terrible at fetch. He was one of those sorts of dogs who gets the ball in his mouth and then won't give it back, and even though he deeply wants to continue playing catch, he's entirley unwilling to give back the ball, which will help faciliate his joy. I'm just saying that it probably wasn't going to work anyway. It also wasn't going to work because once I got outside and saw a bit of Rudy's hind leg protruding at a forty five degree angle I knew that he'd become a zombie apocalypse version of Rudy who would probably even be worst at catch. 

I gave him a chance though, because I'm a decent type of person. Who knows? Maybe zombie apocalypse dogs are different than humans and really keep their good senses about them, so I tossed a stick towards him and said, "Go fetch the stick Rudy." And I should confess that Rudy, ever dutiful, started to lurch across the yard to get at the stick while I snuck up behind him and clipped him over the back of the head with my shovel a time or twenty. 

The sun overhead was bright and surreal. Nature didn't seem to care one wit that everyone had all turned into zombies. It was the sort of thing that you'd take time to reflect on, maybe help put things in perspective, "the earth keeps on spinning, eh bud," I said to Rudy, who wasn't really Rudy anymore, but a rude sort of collection of parts that had once been Rudy. I kind of missed him jumping all over me already. 

I'd been asking myself for the past two decades almost on a daily basis, "What does it mean? What does it mean? Why are we here? What am I supposed to be doing?" And I saw now, in the strangeness of this new world that I'd found my calling. I was supposed to go around shoveling things that looked or acted like zombies in the head. Who'd have thought this is where I'd end up? 

 I carried the shovel back into the house and thought about getting drunk. I wasn't a drinker before the ZA, but I think it might be something I take up. None of the zombies are that into alcohol, and I think about how I could make a joke to them about how they lurch around despite not being drunk. What would a drunk zombie look like? Probably sad. I bet zombies are the saddest drunks ever. I bet they just sit around and talk about the good old days before they became zombies and how they wished that they'd done more with their pre-zombie lives. I bet zombies are existential fucks if you give them enough whiskey. 

I'm out of booze and am going to have to go over to Ron's if I want a refill. Honestly, some other folks have probably got a little bit tucked away somewhere, but I kind of feel like I need to stretch my legs. Otherwise, I'll just sit around and stare at the paisley pattern on my couch and wonder why I chose it. I don't know how to sew or do anything useful, so I guess I'll just have to live with it forever now because you can bet the zombies tore the shit out of all the IKEA stores in the vicinity if they remembered anything about being alive. Maybe to a zombie an IKEA is still a place of horror. 

I probably shouldn't be walking over to Ron's house what with all the flesh eating zombies about. But there is this sort of tacit assumption that I'm making here that being a zombie is a bad sort of thing. Maybe they are walking around delighted inside. Who the hell knows? Wouldn't it be nice to be on the winning team for once? What's so great about being human? 

Just then, off in the distance I see someone running, and I can tell that it's not a zombie by the way that it doesn't lurch but sprints, and I realize that I am rooting for the form, which is a middle aged woman to get away from the three zombies who are clumsily lurching after. Perhaps the great thing about being a human is the ability to root for other humans. Do zombies cheer for each other? 

And then I'm out in the yard with my shovel swinging it around and smashing various zombies in the chest, sending them reeling back while this horrified woman screams and screams and screams as if the world was ending. "We're going to be all right," I tell her, grabbing her arm while the zombies recollect their bearings and kind of amble around trying to figure out just why someone is beating the shit out of them. 

Bernice isn't really my type, but this is the sort of luck I've always had with the ladies. She told me straight away that I wasn't her type either and not to get any ideas about the world being over because until she had found out that there were literally no other options left she wouldn't even consider it. I could have pointed out that I'd saved her life out in the yard, but Bernice is busy trying to fashion one of my couch legs into some sort of club spear. 

"Where do we go next?" I ask her. 

"I've always wanted to see Montana?" she says. "Maybe we should start walking towards Montana?" 

I realize right then that Bernice is already insane and that I'm trapped in the ZA with a person who is just plain nuts because imagine a zombie Grizzly Bear. Just imagine him, Bernice! No club spear is going to save you from that kind of wrath. 

While Bernice is fashioning a club spear we have a conversation about where we're both from.

"I lived upstate for a while, working as a department store manager. After a few years of banging my head against that glass ceiling I started staying at home to take care of the kids."

Here we go. Here is where the ZA gets real. This lady has kids. But I'm guessing her kids are teenagers or something, the sort of kids you want to crack over the head with a shovel anyway. 

"How much food do you have?" she asks. "What's your inventory like?"

I could already tell that I'd hate being a part of the ZA because people were going to be running around saying words like inventory and stock until you were as tired of talking about them as the weather. I could forgive Bernice because she said she'd worked in a department store, so maybe talking about inventory was normal for her.

"Shit, they're here," she says.

"Who is here?" I ask her, anxiously heading for the window.

"My children," she says.

There are two lanky figures out in the yard now, standing a few feet from the window, looking inside in that sort of dazed, but I could really go for some human flesh kind of way that zombies always are. Plot wise, it seemed like the same thing kept happening, and I was reluctant to go out into the yard again.

 The real crux of the ZA is present in what I saw next. This woman's two sons, who she'd birthed and raised up, spent countless numbers of hours tending and loving, were pounding on the glass and trying to come inside to eat both of us, and we had to decide what to do. I suppose if I had to do it over again I'd have stepped back out into the yard and shoveled them around a bit. I guess that's what I was supposed to do. I kind of briefly forgot my raison de etre for existence and panicked. "Shit! Shit! Shit!" I said, turning back towards Bernice to see what she was doing. 

Bernice had taken my moment of indecision to sneak around to the door and lock herself out. I watched her approach her two sons, walking slowly towards them with her arms raised, like it was straight out of a movie. You know what they always tell you in these kind of scenarios is that you just have to realize that your loved one is gone that you're doing them some kind of favor by putting them out of their misery. But I can tell you, from up close. It is all just very sad, which I suppose is one of the main things the ZA has in common with our normal everday life. It is just terrifically sad. I guess the difference is that in our real life we are just disconnected, or riding around in a car listening to a sad song when it suddenly occurs to us that kids are fucking starving in Africa all the time or addicted to crank, and here we are, driving to work misting up to some stupid song, and after the ZA, the deaths are right on your front door. I don't know if life has fundamentally changed. I'm not one of those types who thinks individuals or our species are capable of making any sort of rapid change. I think we do things slowly and poorly. 

She died quickly. 

Have you ever read Hamlet? If you haven't you're missing out. It's one of the great stories in the history of man honor, murder, existentialism. So much existentialism. At the end of the day everyone eventually has to decide what type of person that they're going to be. Was I going to be the type of person who watched Bernice get torn limb from limb without trying to save her? 

As it turns out, I was. I was just like Hamlet, which is why it's such a great play. Because we all eventually wind up in a Hamlet type situation, trying to decide if it's better to act or to just sit around eating potato chips while your dad is killed and ends up marrying your uncle or your neighbor is eaten or not. To be or not to be, right? It's funny because I was just saying that maybe I was born to shovel things in the head and now I'm saying that I'm not, but such is life, right? One minute you're a king and the next you're a fool.