Prologue

Zombie plague. I know, to say it out loud would have sounded like some complete and total  bullshit a year ago. Well, I’ve learned to cope with a lot of things over the past several months that, in a past life, would have sounded like absolute crap. Fantasy, sci-fi, unbelievable stuff. Utterly fucking ridiculous. Christ, how that’s all changed now.

                So, maybe someday, when this nightmare is just a topic for some new society’s history lesson, these memoirs - or whatever it’s called when a regular guy like me tries to make sense of something that defies all acceptable logic – maybe someday the words on these pages will mean something to someone. Maybe these words will make sense. God knows, nothing makes sense to me anymore.

                I’m not even sure I have the right to document a birthday party, much less the end of the fucking world as we know it. I’m a failed writer. I say “failed” more tongue-in-cheek than anything else; I was never a failure at writing. What I failed miserably at was getting my stuff published. I wonder what all those twenty-three year old editors in New York City – the kids fresh out of Brown and Colgate and UCLA who probably never even read my manuscripts before sending the “thanks but no thanks” letters – I wonder what they’re up to now. If you’re still out there, good luck, guys. I hope that diploma and the incessant urge to say “no” is keeping you safe.

                Did I digress? Yeah, I did. I get to. It’s my story, and I’m going to tell it the way I want to. If that means weaving down a few unnecessary pathways in the process of getting to the climax, bear with me and hang in there. Unlike most of the stuff I’ve written, the ending of this piece isn’t so predictable.

                Here’s a little background, just for the sake of keeping the story real. As of today – and I’m not even sure what day it is, but I know it’s summer because it’s been pretty warm and sunny and everything is green – as of today, I’m 42 years old. Married, too. And a dad. I have a great wife (Amanda, or Mandy to me) and an awesome daughter (Rachel). They’re buried in the neighbor’s yard, in six different graves. I’ll explain how two people went into six holes in the ground later on. For now, it’s only important to know that they’re dead and I haven’t decided to change my Facebook status to single just yet. I live in a suburb of Chicago, a little north and a little west of the city proper. It’s a nice neighborhood, or at least it used to be before what a lot of the survivors call The Apocalypse. As for me, I don’t call it anything. It was the first shitty, horrible, terrifying day in a year’s worth of shitty, horrible, terrifying days. I drive a Volvo, or at least I did until it ran out of fuel about a mile from home and I nearly got torn apart half a dozen times making my way back to my house. The house – there’s a story. It used to be a really pretty two-story on a street with lots of trees and several other really pretty two-stories. It was quiet here, and safe; the kids from the block could ride their bikes without having to worry about getting run down by traffic. I worked at a newspaper, running the advertising sales department. In all, I was a pretty boring guy. Of course, back then, when everything was A-OK and all was right with the world, it wasn’t all that boring. I worried about bills, I worried about ad revenues and I worried about whether or not the newspaper business would survive the recession. Yeah, as I write this I’m thinking that maybe it was boring. But it was a pretty good life, and the things I worried about back then are so fucking pale in comparison to the shit I worry about now. These days, worries are pretty easy to come by.

                Fortunately for me, the Boy Scouts of America taught me some basic survival skills. I learned a few more from the Internet before it went down. I’ve made it a year with what I know; add a whole lot of luck into the batter, bake at three hundred fifty degrees and you get a pretty good cake. I’d say that God got me through a lot of the shit I’ve endured, but I’m not too sure He’s paying any attention to me anymore. If he’s smart, he’s moved on to another project. This one’s totally fucked.

Until a year ago, I’d only fired a gun a few times on a practice range. The only living things that had ever died by my hand were a few squirrels I’d shot with a bow when I was a kid, and some salt water fish that I’d martyred while trying to get the mix of water and chemicals just right in my new aquarium. Yeah, those were the days. As of right now, I’ve killed seventeen humans, forty six dogs, thirty three cats and a leopard. And then there’s my kill count of undead. I stopped counting at two hundred and something. How many is far less important than the simple fact that I had to kill any.

I’m hopeful that, down the road, someone will figure out why the dead didn’t stay that way. So far, no one has a shred of insight into what causes re-animation. From the things I hear, mostly snippets of information passed on like a round of the Telephone Game from traveler to traveler, the scientists are clueless, the government is clueless, and that means that we’re all clueless. What I know is this:  dead no longer means dead.

I watched a lot of zombie movies before Shitty Day Number One. In movies, there’s always some chemical spill, or some disease, or some remotely explainable cause for the dead to rise. Not so in the real world. It just happened. In the movies, zombies are newly-dead ass-kicking ninjas that run the hundred yard dash in gold medal time. In the real world, they’re not all that. The Real World Zombie is just dead, with all the trappings of death – a wretched smell, moldy, dry flesh and a lot of shit missing, shit like arms and jaws and, yeah, dicks. They shuffle around, they rot on their feet and they fall down a lot. I guess muscle control is kind of hard to maintain when all your tendons are snapping off the bone like dry rubber bands. I realize that sounds pretty simple to deal with, from a logical perspective – just let them rot into nothing, then go on with your life. Problem solved. But the reality is that the whole rotting process seems to slow down for the zombie crowd. It takes a good six months for a corpse to decompose enough to lose its mobility, and even then it keeps clawing and snapping its jaws until maybe the lower jaw drops off or the finger bones break away from its hands.

Another thing the movies got wrong is that whole “kill the brain, kill the corpse” thing. I fell for that one and it nearly cost me an arm. The brain’s already dead, and putting a bullet into it just wastes a bullet. Zombies are like human-sized puppets; basically, whatever’s manipulating them isn’t inside their skulls. I’m pretty sure they can’t see – the eyes are the first to go in a rotting corpse and I’ve been upwind of groups of them, in full sight, and they just kept shambling around in circles. Smell, now that’s another thing. They can smell just about everything, and they’re attracted to scents that the living find comforting – cooking food, a cake baking (there’s a story about that) or, for some reason, the pleasant, earthy aromas of spring and fall. A zombie’s hearing is also pretty tight, at least for the first few months. The newly dead can hear like fucking dogs.

Being really goddamned quiet is a survival skill I’ve had to learn and learn really goddamned good.

A good zombie flick has plenty of scenes where a herd of zombies chows down on human limbs. That’s another fallacy. They don’t eat. Don’t get me wrong here – they will tear you apart. But you don’t have to worry about being a zombie’s Happy Meal. They bite, I think, because it’s a primordial response to their environment. But being bitten isn’t a living death sentence. We all used to think that a bite meant you were done for; I had a neighbor friend whose wife cut him up with a chain saw while he slept because she was afraid he’d turn. She regretted the shit out of that decision, so much that, a month later, she cranked up that chain saw one more time and used it for a pillow. No, a bite is just a bite – you have to worry about infection the same as you’d worry about getting tetanus from a rusty barbed wire fence, because a mouthful of rotting teeth tend to be a haven for all sorts of nasty bacteria  – however, you don’t have to be concerned about turning into a walking corpse.  

So, enough with the preamble. If you’re reading this, you already know all this shit. The long and the short of it is this:  I wrote it all down. I kept a journal, and as it happened, I wrote it all down. And then, when the lights went out and the Internet went down and there was nothing left to do but ponder and wonder and lament, I wrote it down all over again. I gave it a little bit of flavor, maybe, but it’s all there and it’s all true. It all happened.

And here’s this:  when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. When you think it’s over, it’s not. And when you think you can’t take any fucking more, God finds a way to give you more strength so He can heave another fistful of flaming shit in your direction. It’s great, isn’t it? The will to survive. It’s in all of us, some more than others, I suppose.