Quisling
Quislings: Humans who convince themselves they are zombies
–Max Brooks
“Dude, did you hear about the zombie plague?” My roommate rushes into the room where I’m cleaning my father’s Berretta 9mm pistol.
“Isn’t it wicked? The world’s ending,” he cries out, excited. He runs towards the barricaded door and stops, confused.
“Why the hell did you block the door? We need to save gorgeous chicks and repopulate the world.”
“Mike,” I sigh, testing the trigger and reassembling the barrel. “These zombies are neither a video game enemy nor an action movie special effect. This is the end of the world, and we must hide until the army manages to get things under control or we die. There are no women in distress–by now they’re all dead.”
Mike stares at me with a bewildered look and turns towards the door.
“We have to open this door, man. How else can we make a dangerous and uninformed attempt to reach some place we consider safe?”
I sigh again and explain our situation once more.
“Mike, the world went to hell. We can’t play hero if we want to survive. For better or worse, we have at least a week’s worth of food and water here as well as a house easy to defend, if we keep silent.”
Mike blinks, confused.
“You’re crazy,” he mumbles, turning towards the door. He starts pulling at the boards and moving away the furniture I had stacked there.
“Mike, don’t do it,” I say, lifting my gun.
“Dude, we need to get a school bus and tune it up with barbed wire and spikes and shit. We need to find survivors and hide in a mall until the one of us that got bitten but hid it all along transforms. We have to go outside, man!”
“Mike, I will shoot you if you don’t stop,” I say as calmly as I can. “It’s the end of the world and I know you’re stressed, everybody is, just step away from the door and we can talk.”
My roommate turns around with a crazy look on his face and growls angrily.
“You don’t get it. We cannot go through the end of the world without any large-breasted women or black men in our party,” he says, twitching nervously. “You’re crazy!” he finally yells before charging me head-on.
At the last minute I sidestep and Mike runs into the wall. I rush over, cursing Max Brooks, George Romero and all the other freaks that filled up blogs with comments like “The only bad thing about a zombie apocalypse will be that I have to hide my excitement.”
Mike finally opens his eyes and looks at me with a confused look.
“Did they bite me?” he moans in a harsh breath.
“Nothing bit you–” I start explaining but Mike’s eyes roll strangely and he starts groaning. Before I know what he’s doing, my roommate lunges at my neck and bites me. I shoot him twice and crawl away, swearing.
“You can’t escape the Z war,” he groans before collapsing. Somehow I don’t doubt it. There is no virus spreading faster than a good marketing campaign that encountered a bunch of overly excited teens. All you need is something called “The Zombie March” and a presenter that decides to try and pass it as a real undead attack. People wanted it to happen so bad they started shooting before reading the fine print or figuring out if those undead were just kids covered in makeup. From there it all went down the drain; I guess you could call it Stockholm syndrome or something like that. The bottom line: chaos and a bunch of people playing cops and robbers, or zombies and survivors in this case.
I collapse as the blood loss makes me dizzy. The last thought that crosses my mind before darkness engulfs me is that I should have sided with the zombies on this one.
