“I think we missed the point of all
those zombie movies,” Rotten said, as Highland pulled in behind the Jeep. “We always saw the zombies as the bad
guys. We always made our plans around
the undead being the biggest problem, but we never talked about the real bad
guys and those are always the people in charge, if you can call them
people. They are worse than any zombie,
vampire, or monster ever conceived because they are real, have power, and don’t
give a damn about us. In every movie
there is someone creating the problem and someone else solving the problem, and
we are just cannon fodder in the mix of all the monsters. It’s always the same. The zombies are just as much as a victim as
we are, the only difference is that we know it.”
“It’s really real,” Moonshine spoke the words that we were
all feeling. It was really real, all of
it, the zombies, the military, the unseen rulers deciding our fate, the threats
on our person and sanity, all of it, was really real. Just like the movies, although unlike the movies in that there
was no button to make it stop, fast-forward or rewind. It was real and the odds of us making it out
alive were slim and each gunshot from the orchard punctuated the fact that
there was little hope for us.
Sully rested his hands on the book
he had retrieved. “I’ve been thinking
about what you said, Reginald, concerning there being a level of people, or
perhaps not even people, making the decisions for us. At first that was so incredibly ludicrous to me I couldn’t even
hold the thought in my head, but now I fear it makes more sense than anything
else. I can’t imagine it was
politicians, presidents, or kings and queens who made the decision to unleash a
zombie apocalypse. I hate that word.”
He shook his head. “Because there
would be no benefit for them, nothing to gain when the entire population is
dead or won’t obey the rules. So it had
to come from a higher place, a place far above what we think is the top.” He opened the book in front of him to a
marked page.
The zombie apocalypse is a horrible
thing, it’s brutal, it’s messy, it’s exhausting and it is totally terrifying,
but now that we had seen it and experienced it, the pre-zombie world was dull,
dead, and just as frightening, although a lot neater.
