Gokris Tempouin

Tomorrow’s Dream


“Fucking zombies.” I grumble the words to myself for maybe the hundredth time today.
All the media, all the warnings, you’d think we could have handled ourselves better. Seems people will always manage to fall apart in a crisis, and the bigger the group, the worse they are. Lucky I live in a small town, the name doesn’t matter anymore, most of the population are housed in rural areas surrounding the main cluster of businesses and actual paved roads.

I scan the room and glance over the faces of my ‘lucky’ compatriots;

Eddy, the mechanic was in the middle of rebuilding an engine or something. Still wearing his coveralls soaked in oil, a large wrench sits at his feet in a small pool of blood. Obviously an improvised weapon and the reason he’s still here.

Tara was babysitting, she’s in really bad shape since the dead busted in and got the kid she was watching. Through tears and choking on her own breath she told us how she just ran and ran. We try to explain there was no helping the child, but I can’t imagine what she’s feeling now.

Sidhar was a student, just walking home from classes when he heard screams from down the street. He seems like a good guy because apparently he tried to fight off a couple of them and save some guy who got bitten. As you can imagine that didn’t turn out well, still not sure how he got away though.

Lilly the kid, that was a little joke I made when we met, tried to cheer her up. I don’t think she actually knows who Billy the kid was though, still she smiled shyly. I don’t know much about kids, but I assume she’s about nine or ten? Definitely at that ‘defiant’ and ‘tough’ age though, maybe it’s because of the situation or maybe she’s just like that.

And me, Jakob. I’m just an office worker, data entry, coffee making and bad jokes are my specialty. I wasn’t at work though, I was actually on a date, first one in…a while. We were dining al fresco, I’m not sure I could have gotten away otherwise. For the curious yes, I mean just I.

So maybe you’re wondering what I’m doing writing this during a zombie siege? Well, so are the others. For one, it helps me manage my anxiety to write things down, or type as the case may be. I also have to believe that even though it looks bad, there is still a future for us and this planet. If not, I guess it won’t matter either way. But if you’re reading this, then there must really be a future, and you should know what’s happening here.
The zombies are a lot like the movies would tell us, they have no fear, feel no pain, and absolutely can not be reasoned with. No shred of humanity survives whatever happened to them. They are as slow as you would expect, or hope, as well. The five of us had to run past a large group to get to the safe-house we are now in. As long as you keep alert, outmaneuvering them isn’t too difficult, but is made much easier if you can create a distraction. The transmission of this disease also follow the familiar rules: if you’re bitten, you are dead. 
There are a couple differences you should remember though.

First, destroying the brain is a fallacy. This does not seem to stop the animated body either. If decapitated, the body somehow still takes information from it’s severed head and both parts keep ‘living’. If you destroy the head, or eyes, or remove it and simply take it away; the body will act instinctively, swinging wildly and staggering around in every direction. The only way we’ve found to actually stop one is to entirely destroy the body, or at least enough as to make it immobile. For all intents and purposes, the saying of “You can’t kill something that’s already dead.” applies totally.

Second, and make sure you understand this one, they do NOT look like zombies! No rotting flesh look that has become so familiar, or even the slightly gaunt face with dead eyes. They act and appear as a normal human pretending to be a zombie, with the sole exception of any injuries they took from the one who infected them. This might have been one of the turning points, if they looked like zombies, at least people might have been scared enough to run when they appeared. But they don’t raise their arms, they don’t moan “Braaaains!”, and they don’t seem to be a living corpse.
The change is a little different too. One guy I traveled with for a week or so, went to bed in good humor. That night I awoke to the sound of metallic items banging across the floor. Simon was his name, he had stumbled into a table on his way to tear into my sleeping form. Another lucky break, funny how I never seemed to have any during my normal life. I’ve seen one guy get bitten and turn even before the ghoul was finished gnawing on his arm. Another one had come down with a strange fever and fought it for days until he finally converted in front of our eyes mid-sentence.
That brings me to the final difference, the ‘Y’ chromosome. Yes, for whatever reason this seems to be intrinsic to the effects of this virus. Which means that every single zombie out there is male, women seem to be entirely immune. The effect of this is predictable, female-only communities have risen up in various areas around the country, probably all over the world. They reject any men, or in some cases violently attack them upon approach. I guess you can’t blame them, considering the conditions.
So maybe I’m speaking to a new world which has never seen a man aside from the walking dead. Maybe there is no world left and only the slowly degrading HDD on this laptop has heard my words. I can only hope there is a world more like the one we had before. It’s only been two months since the outbreak started, yet they have been longer than the last ten years of my life. This is not a world for the living.
If you know a world where this evil is not present. If you live with humans who have compassion, who know good and not only evil, among healthy men and women, count your blessings. Understand the happy, peaceful world you live in has not always been, and may not always be. I can only hope that world may yet exist somewhere and sometime, tomorrow holds all our dreams. I just hope it’s your reality.

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