When the news broke on TV I didn’t hear it immediately. I was too busy with my sandwich. Making sandwiches is an art too often understated. I love them with avocado and pickles and onion. Mushrooms give them that umami thing that’s oh so delicious.
But that’s the story of how I never got to finish my sandwich.
So I was about to finally declare it ready to eat – two slices of bread toasted brown, peanut butter on one side and avocado on the other, two slices of tomato, a fried mushroom, tempeh and mayonnaise – when my neighbour stormed in through the door.
I have to lock it, I thought to myself, while she started blabbering about End of the world, mortal disease, world riots.
Haven’t you heard? she asked.
No. I haven’t. I was trying to eat a sandwich.
She looked around for a remote control and cranked up the TV volume to a deafening level. The red stripe at the bottom of the talking head was rushing with headlines very similar to the words my neighbour had blurted seconds before. I let go of the sandwich and tuned in, watching the bobbly head of the journalist.
High-volatile chemical spill. Patient zero. Signs of infection. Stay at home. Don’t attempt contact. Military shoot on sight.
Not the head nor the red stripe ever spelled the word zombie.
*
I know what you’re thinking, I would be thinking the same, oh, here’s another zombie story.
I’ll have you know that I am a writer and like every writer I’m fed up with zombie stories. The day I was preparing the sandwich I didn’t get to eat, the day of the outbreak, Day 0, or The Day Humanity Ended – that day I was actually finishing writing a story.
It was a tale inspired by Death of a Salesman. It had the normal family living the dream and then losing everything, it had romance, hate, alcoholism; it had the underdog rising and the villain falling, the critique of modern society and the call for a lost pastoral life.
I always had a literary tooth, and for as much as I’d loved the old zombie movies or the early comics of dead people rising and walking, I didn’t like zombies. Not anymore. They were overexposed, and had lost their original, apotropaic meaning.
They weren’t a symbol of corrupt humanity anymore. They weren’t a scream against consumerism anymore. Quite the opposite; consumerism embraced zombies and made them another cash machine. One aimed at eating up your brain.
I’m digressing here.
Jade turned off the TV. She was shaking and her face was pale. She wasn’t beautiful, but neither was I, in case you’re wondering. We were both overweight, single, and on my end, sweaty when under distress. So yes, you could have seen the t-shirts colouring in a darker shade near my armpit right now, while Jade lit up a cigarette.
Those things kill you, I said.
She didn’t reply, but grinned in a way that suggested It’s the fucking apocalypse, I’m gonna die anyway.
And just like that, I kept looking at the cigarette smoke expanding in my house, like the disease that scared the journalist in the TV. And at my sandwich.
I wasn’t hungry anymore.
*
In the movies, TV shows, comics – after the outbreak the main character is always stopped while he’s doing something. He usually has to run to save his girlfriend, wife, child; then, a zombie rushes through the window or door and he’s forced out of his comfort zone, on the street, doomed to aimlessly wander around in search of an outpost where to defend himself. Where to defend humanity.
Lucky ones survive the outbreak even if they’re unconscious in a hospital – overrun by brain-eating zombies – and wake up exactly at the convenient time to run out.
In real life, the majority of us did as told by the media. We stayed in our houses. Locked the doors. Didn’t go out or try to reach faraway places. Too afraid to look outside, behind the closed blinds. The silence was unnatural – no cars, no planes, no trains. No voices outside the window.
Some did actually leave to go back to their hometown, or whatever. But it wasn’t like you’d expect. It was an ordinary exodus, and the head in the TV was proud of the citizens.
Me and Jade would knock on each other’s door every day, share our cans of beans or cook our frozen pizza in the microwave. Everything kept working as expected for the first days. The Internet was ablaze with weirdos proclaiming the end of the world. On blogs and social networks, the only shares that went viral were about survival techniques and zombie-killing tutorials.
Like we didn’t know by now. Aim at the head. Don’t get bitten. The usual.
For days, the only thing one could see in the media was zombies. All over the place. But not a single one in real life. The thing that made all of this real was the silence. Unsettling. All signs of civilisation, the random high-pitched scream of an ambulance, the voices of drunk people strutting – they all disappeared.
The feeling that something was off was only reinforced when, after a week or so, the silence started to be oddly broken by high-pitched pops, like someone opening a champagne bottle. Those were gunshots.
Again, because in the movies they don’t like to use the real sound for gunshots – it is a dull sound, one which resembles the small petards kids would fire during national holidays – so, because the normal sound of a gunshot is deemed boring, they have to add echoes and that zing! sound, so that eventually it is completely different from a real gunshot. That’s why, unless you live in a bad neighbourhood, you wouldn’t normally recognise it if you heard it.
But that eventually became the only sound you would hear outside the windows. And still I didn’t have the courage to open the blinds and look at what was happening. I imagined a rain of pops! outside, and sometimes many people walking together, and whispering voices. But nothing more. Not even the soothing, familiar low growl of a brain-eating rising dead, made so familiar by media.
The reports of power cuts started appearing on social media first.
People in the city centres were forced out of their houses to raid supermarkets. There were now hundreds of YouTube videos of people sneaking in grocery stores, supermarkets, explaining what to grab, why to grab it, and jumping scared at the smallest sound.
The headlines were, How To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse in Five Easy Steps, or Groceries At The End Of The World.
Things like that. Click and bait.
Other videos suggested to raid drugstores as well, because if that thing was to continue for long, drugs would have been valuable.
The Ten Medicines You Need To Loot Right Now.
As I’ve said earlier on, I was overweight, only if ever so slightly, and so was Jade, but not one of us had any health issue or needed meds. We had a good stock of canned and frozen food. My family died in a car accident ten years before, so I had no one to worry about anymore. And Jade’s family – well, they didn’t talk much she said, and the only one that she cared about was her mother, who, at the time of the outbreak, was on holiday on some cruise ship.
She promptly called ten minutes into the outbreak to tell her daughter that the ship was safe and sound, that water was probably the best defence against those infected ones, as she called them. And the ship was stocked with food to last for an entire month, which was probably much more than the authorities needed to settle the situation down.
It wasn’t.
The power cuts were real and not just some Internet murmur. Facing a very strong lack of personnel, the power company had to automate most of the tasks, and had to ration the supply zone by zone. That’s what they said. What it meant to us was that we had to consume all of our frozen food in one go or it would have been lost.
Jade came over the first night the power was cut in our area, scheduled for twelve hours. She brought four pizzas, two boxes of chicken nuggets, frozen peas, a lasagna that her mother left two months before when she visited, and a bottle of super-chilled vodka. My offering that night was ice cream, two frozen steaks, and ice. For the vodka.
We lit old, dusty scented candles and cooked all the food, using all the electricity possibly available. It looked like a feast from times past or a reunion of old lovers, when you light up candles because electrical light is too strong for your heart to be seen under. We honoured the banquet and drank chilled vodka like we were Russian nobility. The pops outside the windows weren’t bothering us anymore.
We opened old books and read passages from there, making voices and noises like you would do if you were reading to a kid.
And it was a fun night. It was the first time Jade slept on my sofa. We didn’t feel like making love. We just wanted not to be alone.
*
The morning after I tried to run the electric shaver, but the power was still off. I checked my mobile phone, which showed an ominous No Signal. I didn’t have any radio in the house. I didn’t dare to open the blinds.
The power returned two days later.
We immediately resorted to checking the Internet and TV, craving for information. Power cuts would have been more frequent and longer than expected. The military would have rationed food in areas where food production was impossible. The TV would have broadcasted 24-hour non-stop information on How To Kill A Zombie – that was the first time they used that word – and How To Farm In Small Areas, such as balconies or terraces for people living in the city, and gardens for people living in houses.
The Internet became the place to go for self-medication, home-brewing, and everything needed to survive. Survivalists all over the world felt – finally – like gods, and no one looked at them with contempt anymore.
*
I want to make clear that, having been locked up for more than one month now, I didn’t see a single zombie around. All I’ve seen was some shaky video uploaded on the net or broadcasted on TV, possibly shot with a crappy cell phone, of a bunch of drunk guys patrolling random streets and running towards something that – in the dark and with bad light – could resemble a zombie. Or someone walking with a limp. There was no official video coming from the authorities, and all the military videos just showed green berets giving out food in the street or shooting their petard-sounding guns into darkness.
So of course there were plenty of conspiracy theories with titles like Why No One Actually Saw A Zombie, or Ten Reasons Why The Zombie Apocalypse Is Not Real, and things like Why Your Government Doesn’t Want You To Know The Ugly Truth About Zombies.
For Jade, it was a worldwide conspiracy to finally enslave the 99% in favour of the 1%. She said, World War Three actually happened overnight, with no one knowing, and zombies were just an excuse to keep population under control – after all, it’s easier to believe in something external, an evil Deus Ex Machina which reduces humanity to bits, than to believe that actually we humans are what brings destruction and despair.
The lack of proper zombie evidence made people braver. I could now hear normal talk outside the windows, not just pops. People started uploading pictures and videos of themselves walking in abandoned sites, highways; running in places which would be normally forbidden, at all times of day and night. Groups of kids would go into famous stadiums to play football like their idols from a life past, unstopped.
The bravest or craziest people didn’t believe that the end of the world was really the end, didn’t believe that they could be stopped from doing what they planned to, especially by zombies. Or maybe they just didn’t believe that you should stop yourself from doing the things you love – after all, you knew you were gonna die even before the “Zombie Outbreak”, so why should you be changing anything?
I didn’t really care about those theories. My regret, at that point, was that I didn’t eat my sandwich or finish my rather literary story.
*
One other thing that zombies do in popular culture, which I can neither confirm nor deny, is move in an almost painfully slow strut. Apart from a few exceptions, zombies always move very very slowly, and apparently they tend to group in hordes. This peculiar trait always fascinated me – if they move that slowly, and usually walk around with their distinctive growl, how come people always get bitten out of the blue? Do all the people in zombie stories have low IQ, or bad hearing?
I can understand the fear with fast zombies, but as I’ve said, I had no clue if the real zombies were fast or slow, if they could get killed with a shot in the head, and if a bite actually gave you fever and transformed you.
All my zombie-knowledge was the same as yours, and I never got to test it in real life.
So for me, so far, the only thing that zombie stories got right was that people in those stories are jumpy as hell and skinny as a french fry. Jumpy I was, and so would you have been.
And also - the Zombie Apocalypse Diet should be a thing; canned beans, tons of rice, and stale jerkies. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I brought my t-shirt up, to see my abs, which I never saw in my life. I smiled at the sight of the six little bumps on my belly, a smile with crooked, faint-yellow teeth.
Yes, I have been out of toothpaste for a while now.
I burst out laughing. I looked like a model in one of those male magazines, black and white, ripped, with sexy unshaven beard.
All Around You The World Is Going To Pieces, But You Can Still Rock A Six Pack.
*
The thing I missed the most in the two months after the outbreak is my sandwich. Seriously. It might seem naive, or downright stupid, but that’s the truth. I was really looking forward to eating it.
It sat on the kitchen counter for two full days. The avocado blackened immediately, while the tomato dried. When I threw it out, the bread had little white spots of mold in the places which weren’t charred.
If I knew I would never have tasted another sandwich again, I would have eaten it all - wet, moldy and good.
*
So after two months, power cuts were the norm, and we only got juice at random hours, with many days in between. I kept my phone attached to the wall, so that it would have charged up a bit when power came. Not that I received any calls, but it was easier to charge the phone to check the news than my laptop, which was now dead. A lamp was always on, so I saw if electricity was back when it lit up. I did the same with an old cassette stereo - which I kept until now because it looked cool - with the play button always pressed, so if I were sleeping I would wake up. The song that played at all times during the short juice hours was “The End of the World” by the Cure.
I didn’t get out of my house for two months.
The house was messy and smelled like an open sewer. We still managed to flush our toilets, thank god, but both me and Jade were almost out of food. We were very good at rationing it, but eventually we ate everything, and our last resort was dry food for dogs, left over in Jade’s apartment by a previous tenant. I guess we needed to go out and look for supplies.
Our first run after the apocalypse.
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