Still, the common people, the average every day schmoes, weren’t completely blameless. When the local grocery store runs out of food and families start missing meals, neighbors start shooting each other over a can of soup. Then neighbors’ families and friends get involved, and suddenly, there are millions of little Hatfield and McCoy style wars raging in every town and city in the world. The reality that the undead were beating down our door was bad enough, but we made it even worse when we did our part to add to their number. News footage of Miami and Seattle were looking like Baghdad after the American invasion drove home the sense that we weren’t in this together. We were on our own.
America alone produces enough food to feed the entire world. With a little rationing and logistics, every man, woman, and child, would have enough food to last over a year — I saw the reports. Hell, I reviewed plans that the Secretary of Agriculture had written up to make sure not one fat-ass beer-drinking American missed a meal. Even if that meal wasn’t going to be a thick cut of prime rib or a greasy hamburger, it was still a meal. He was a good guy. The cabinet was an embarrassment, but the Secretary of Agriculture really stood apart from the rest of us. The only problem was, by the time we got past the petty arguments about whether it was a legal use of imminent domain to turn an abandoned skyscraper into a hydroponic tomato farm… we no longer had the manpower or infrastructure available to execute.
That was another issue. When we did actually move on something, the labor required to do what needed to be done simply wasn’t available. It’s hard to blame the contractors and the government workers. What would you do? Your family is boarding up their home and stockpiling ammunition, and your boss calls you and asks you to drive to work through a zombie-infested neighborhood so you can fork-lift generators onto a flat bed. Hell, the flat beds didn’t even have drivers.
When it finally became clear that the only way we were going to get anything done was to use the military, half the military had already deserted. Again, what would you do? Your orders are to “hurry up and wait” at some military depot in BFE, and the only thing coming through the news is how your hometown is being ravaged by the undead. Unlike a contractor, you’re a soldier with an M16 and access to a military Humvee. Hell, in your mind, it’s your duty as an American to get off your ass, get home, and start popping walking corpses. This duty becomes especially clear when you’re ordered to set up camp around some well-connected rich banker’s mansion, while the poor community down the road burns to ashes. Our soldiers are good people for the most part. My guess is that none of them wanted to abandon their post, but when we misused them—when we showed them our priorities were monuments and rich people, instead of red, white, and blue mom and pop Jane and John Smith—it became their responsibility to desert… and they deserted in droves.
The military we had left would have been more valuable if it had been decommissioned, drained of its fuel and resources, and redistributed to cities and neighborhoods near military bases. What are you gonna do with a fully fueled and armed to the tooth B-52 Stratofortress? Carpet bomb New Jersey? It sounds absurd, but honestly, it was discussed. When Russia bombed Saint Petersburg, its own city, people in government started asking if maybe that’s something we should do. By then, New York City was a walking graveyard, so why not? Then when India—not their greatest enemy, Pakistan, but India –nuked their own city of Bangalore, a city of just under nine million people… those conversations stopped. The walking dead were the enemy and there were people fighting for survival in every corner of the country. Wiping a city off the map wouldn’t accomplish anything except to reduce the chances of survival from slim to none for anyone still living in that city.
That’s right around the time the president was assassinated. The Secret Service is really good about being present without being seen. For months, those guys watched the situation across the country deteriorate, while simultaneously having a front-row seat to the buffoons in charge fucking up one thing after another. Those guys are loyal, but they’re also human. I don’t know if it was one guy, or if a bunch of them had the same idea, but the day Air Force One was loaded up to whisk the president off to some secret bunker, someone had enough of the injustice and hypocrisy. I once heard the president’s chief of security talking about some dark things he saw in Afghanistan. He said, “Sometimes there aren’t any solutions. Sometimes things get so fucked up, there aren’t any answers and all you have are bullets.” Some Secret Service Agent must have felt the same way.
I guess that’s where we are now. The world’s been at war with walking dead for about a year, and we’ve lost.
We lost for a lot of reasons, but maybe more than anything, we lost because we’re human. The undead, they don’t think, feel, or worry about their next meal, or how they are going to stay warm. Humans do, however, and cold hard objective facts say that that’s a weakness. If you saw your husband, wife, child, or parent get sick, die, and then reanimate to what (to you) looks like life, what would you do? Is your first instinct to bash their brains in? Because if it is, congratulations. You’re a soulless monster, but you may just be alive. If not, if your first instinct is relief and joy at what you perceive to be a recovery, then I have some bad news for you. You’re dead too, and now there are two more zombies in this world instead of one.
When my son Ruben was bitten, I knew exactly what it was. I knew there was no hope and I knew what would happen when he died. Knowing that and accepting that are two different things, however. Even after he bit my wife, Melissa, it took a week of them locked in the bedroom clawing, scratching, and moaning before I got the nerve to put them down.
So am I human or am I a monster? I don’t know. I’ve watched my neighborhood devolve from a nice upper class gated community into a boarded-up ghost town. I try to stay connected to whatever government is still functioning, but my generator is almost out of gas and my supposedly secure government wireless signal is growing more and more unreliable. I killed my own family. I’m afraid to leave my house. The dead are wandering about outside, and I think some of them know I’m in here. I’ve done very little to help with this apocalypse, and a lot more to contribute to it. I think that makes me a bad human being.
Consider this letter as my resignation. The best person to replace me is Dr. Henry Damico — Assistant Manager to the Director of Health and Human Services in District Nine. He’s done a lot of good through all of this and he’s a smart man. If he had had my job, things wouldn’t be so hopeless.