Of course, like with any zombie movie, now that I know they are here, they are everywhere. Those of us who have been anticipating the zombie apocalypse got one detail wrong — it’s not brains zombies must have, but rather what some lovely chemicals do to brains.
Simply take the word “brains!” and substitute “drugs!”
The incident at Walmart is only part of the natural progression of a zombie culture. I fully expect more sightings.
Think about how hard we fight already to keep out of the clutches of the zombies who will tear us apart to feed the need. We lock doors and barricade windows and stay out of their dark places.
It’s also a full time and often futile fight to keep kids safe from infection. Every day, I send my teens out into a dangerous world simply teeming with zombies who seem to want them to become zombies, too. And it is a more subtle — and insidious — process than we have been led to believe to become a zombie. Kids would run screaming from an approaching zombie who was trying to feast on them but the spread of this infection actually starts with a sip of this or a puff of that.
It’s not only kiddos who get bit who become zombies. Children sometimes watch in horror as the insatiable need (brains!) takes over and a parent’s humanity simply dissolves.
The peer pressure to relax into the zombie state is screamed from TV and is an option of any visit to a doctor’s office where sweet oblivion is sold as the antidote to human suffering.
It’s tragic. And scary as hell.
And poor zombies! Once bit, it’s not like they can do much. Eventually all zombies lose all sense of self. Maybe at first it’s just self-control but over time the job will go and the house and the loved ones and all connection to anyone or anything other than the gnawing, bottomless need. As scary as they are up close, that zombie was once somebody’s sweet-cheeked baby.
No matter how innocent and even fun it may have started out, the party was crashed by a nightmare.
Population control of zombies is a whole lot of work and most “law” enforcement is really “zombie control.” Unlike in the movies, police can’t just use a firearm “double-tap” as a standard for zombie control. The have to use informants and probable cause and search warrants and handcuffs and muscle and dogs and judges and boat-loads of cash and barbed wire and…
But the zombies just keep coming.
Now that I see, I see them everywhere.
I see them shuffling slowly on sidewalks and slipping in and out of liquor stores and pawn shops and check advance stores. I see them standing in line after line swaying back and forth while they wait for prescriptions. I see their ugly mugs in the newspaper next to a story about a grandmother bludgeoned to death or AIDS babies or gang wars. I see them on the nightly news being shoved into a cop car while their children cry and cry.
A nice young policeman recently showed me pictures of a new breed of zombies on his phone. There is a drug worse than meth that is not only instantly addictive (brains!) but also has a bonus of causing tissue to crack and then turn green at the injection site before eventually falling off to leave bones exposed. Sometimes the bones dissolve as well. Some lose limbs but keep on (brains!) dragging that rotting carcass back and forth to the dealer or to collect supplies to cook up the next batch. This zombie is mostly in Russia right now but the young policeman knows it’s just a matter of time before they make their way here.
To an area Walmart, no doubt.
