The Undead Situation Read Free Page B

wasn’t reading, I was building my strength. If I let my body deteriorate, I’d definitely regret that. Every day I’d do as many exercises as I could remember, then I’d make up a couple.
     
    * * *
     
    Neighbors have books , I realized one afternoon, upon finishing my fifth Guns & Ammo collage. Boredom often invoked irrational actions, and seeking literature in insecure rooms fell into the “irrational” category. But since my level of boredom was high, I ventured into the unlocked apartments, hauling out as many books as I could.
    I avoided Apartment 8 and Rick’s place. No need to see him again. The thumping was relentless.
    My book stock refreshed, I set to work. Even the kids’ books were appealing. Who knew Nancy Drew had it in her to solve so many mysteries? I had a good thirty or so of those, courtesy of a little girl’s room in 7, and read every one of them twice.
    In time, desperation for entertainment even forced me to read through a mind-numbing trilogy called Twilight. Apparently there was a fourth one, but I was not interested in trekking down to Barnes & Noble for it.
     
    * * *
     
    How did I get Pickle?
    Let’s start with this: the average lifespan of a ferret is about seven years. For personal reasons, two years prior to Judgment Day, I decided I needed to get a pet. Seven years seemed reasonable, seeing that it wasn’t too long, but long enough to gain some life experience.
    So, on March 9 th, I found myself in a pet store looking at albino ferrets. Much to my chagrin, they were fresh out of normal ferrets, but hey, I’m not racist. I appreciate all breeds.
    After I brought the tiny girl home, we found ourselves quick companions. She wasn’t afraid of me, appeared to love me despite my strange habits and unusual personality. She was the perfect woman. She didn’t ask questions. Or speak. Or take up space. Like I said, the perfect woman.
     
    * * *
     
    Sometimes I wondered how other people were handling the end of the world. I doubted most people took things the way I did. (Over the years, I decided my apathy about the whole thing probably meant I was an anomaly, and I came to terms with that.)
    Early in the crisis, my undead neighbors had left their televisions on maximum volume. My sound-proofed walls could barely buffer the nonstop noise, since it was coming from below and both sides of me. If it wasn’t for the power outages, I would’ve gone crazy. Francis would call, wanting to discuss the latest on the undead situation. He told me the experts were debating constantly over whether the undead were human, or if they retained memories or some of their personality when they turned.
    “I reckon they don’t, Cyrus.”
    “I don’t think so either. People need to stop fantasizing and get real.”
    “Dead is dead.”
    I scoffed at some of the earlier attempts to quarantine the living dead to study them, find a cure, and make things okay. There was no cure. This was it. The end. Didn’t anyone understand that? The walking dead were walking dead, and they didn’t have an ounce of anything human in them anymore.
    Every zombie out there was probably a loved one at some point. People who didn’t want to put a bullet in their loved one’s head were the instigators of the problem, in my opinion. If everyone saw things for what they were, there wouldn’t be a problem.
    I imagined the survivors of the initial outbreak hovelling in offices, homes. They were alone, and it must have been driving them mad. What I enjoyed as solitude, they probably thought was mind numbing horror.
    They had no food, no water, and no weapons. Most likely, they were slowly dying, fearing an animated corpse would consuming them soon.
    The differences between them and me were astronomical. I was alive because I wasn’t like other people. If I were, I’d be one of those men who wished he weren’t alone during his last leg of existence.
    If I were one of those men, I’d be dead.
     
    * * *
     
    I mused over my lack