On the drive home from seeing Zombieland, my girl blurted out, “We should try to go home.”
I said, “That’s where we’re going. Because that’s where the beer is.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said, “I meant if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, we should go home.”
“Sure we should. After all, a townhouse a block away from a main street in a major urban center will be the last place that zombies wander around.”
“I mean my home. My childhood home. Out in central Mass.”
“Okay. Sure. How exactly do you anticipate we get there?”
“How do you think? We drive?”
“Sure we drive. After all, it’s only a few miles down the Mass Pike. You know, the Mass Pike that turns into a rage-provoking fucking parking lot every Christmas Eve. And Christmas Eve is, you know, scheduled. So I’m sure it’ll be four lanes of easy travel during a sudden zombie attack.”
“So we take Route 20.”
“The road doesn’t matter. We’d never make it.”
“We could.”
“No, we fucking couldn’t. Number one: who’s behind the wheel during our flight from armageddon? Me? Because I drive a roadster. With a ragtop. To a zombie, my car’s the world’s biggest microwave fucking burrito. We’d be yanked out and turned into street sushi before we got to the end of the block.”
“We could take my car.”
“Not with you driving, we couldn’t. I’ve seen you slam the brakes on so hard I damn near herniated a disc when a squirrel crossed in front of your car. 100 yards in front of your car. You’d plow us into a tree the first time a zombie had the temerity to disregard the Don’t Walk signal… meaning once again: dead before the first stop sign.”
“Fine. You can drive my car.”
“What difference is that gonna make? First of all, you’re a terrible passenger. You think I don’t see you claw at the door handle in a panic when another car gets within ten feet of me while I’m driving? The minute a zombie leaps at the hood, you’re gonna start shrieking like I pulled a Southern Trespass on you, and after ten minutes of that, I’m plowing the car into an abutment on general principles.
“Second: we’d probably never even make it to the fucking car. Our garage door can’t keep mice out; do you really think it’ll hold back the zombie hoards? Let me take this opportunity to remind you that you won’t let me buy a gun.”
“That’s because you drink whiskey.”
“Good point. And when do I drink whiskey? When I’ve had a bad day at my office job, or a rotten commute, or when my brother calls me on the Goddamned telephone. So what do you think I’m gonna be doing when zombies are clawing at the front door? Eat a protein tablet, flare my nostrils and growl, ‘Let’s roll’? No! I’m gonna be fetal in a corner, wrapped around a quart of Jack Daniels, whimpering, ‘Well, at least I won’t be a vegetarian…’ while I drool bile on my Voodoo Joe’s Zombie Fetus Army t-shirt, hoping to go Full Rumsfeld.”
“What’s ‘Full Rumsfeld’?”
“That’s when I welcome the zombies as liberators. As a strategy, it has to work eventually.”
We rode silently for a minute, then she said, “What if we just holed up? Locked the doors. Maybe we could ride it out.”
“Won’t work. We don’t have enough food in the house to last a week, and we don’t have enough booze to last until midnight. We’d have to leave the house in pretty Goddamned short order. And there is no way that we could even make it to the convenience store down the block without running into a zombie.”
“How do you know?”
“Remember when we visited my parents’ condo in Florida? That town was a fucking zombie apocalypse simulator. We tried to walk down the sidewalk, and retirees were waving their canes at us and shrieking that we should slow down. Walk into a McDonalds and six of them were bumping up into us, moaning to the counter kids that their hot tea was too, you know, hot. Try to drive, and you have to slam on the brakes at every crosswalk while ten of them shuffle to Applebee’s for the early bird special. You couldn’t go ten feet in that town without running into a shambling, decrepit moaner… and they didn’t even want to eat your face.”
“Not necessarily. Remember that old dude who leered at me and rattled his bottle of Viagra?”
“Okay, one of them wanted to eat your face… assuming that you’re using the word ‘face’ as a euphemism.”
“I still think we could hold out – ”
“Jesus Christ, even if we could hold out, why would we want to? In a zombie apocalypse, society breaks down. People stop going to work. That includes the people at the electric company, the cable company, and our Internet service provider. I give it a week and a half after the first ‘weird cannibalism’ story on the news before the lights go out. And with no cable TV or Internet, I probably wouldn’t wait for the zombies to get me.”
“You would honestly think about killing yourself without cable or the Internet?”
“Are you kidding? I honestly think about killing myself when my Googlephone only gets 2G Internet. I’d rather loop a belt over the shower curtain rod than stick rabbit ears on the tube to pull TV signals out the the air like some kind of Goddamned savage.”
“I can’t believe you don’t think you couldn’t live without cable.”
“Don’t pretend you’re above all that shit. I’ve seen you when you don’t have access to the Internet. Demerol junkies get less anxious and singleminded. If you didn’t have your RSS feeds, you’d be carving on yourself with the bread knife just to feel something.”
She paused for a few seconds, then said, “Are we really that addicted to technology?”
“Damn straight we are. And I’m proud of it. The Internet is the greatest thing ever invented. And I refuse to live in a world where I can’t have it. My ancestors didn’t crawl out of the primordial ooze, build tools, tame fire, and bend the very building blocks of matter itself to their will just so someday I’d have to masturbate using my fucking imagination.
“And again: You’ve seen the Romero flicks. You’ve read The Walking Dead. You know as well as I do that being in Boston would be a death sentence in a zombie apocalypse, because there’s people here. And when they go zombie? We’re fucked. You know the only place you can go if you want to be not fucked? Fly-over country. Rural, flatland, small-town Middle America. Where the nearest neighbor’s three miles away, a night out pretty much by nature includes a stop at Wal-Mart, and surfing the Internet starts with that old clanging modem sound like HAL 9000 getting deep-throated. Places where every car is a truck, every truck has a gun rack, and every incest joke gets met with a loud and indignant, ‘Too soon!'”
“It wouldn’t be that bad.”
“If small town living wasn’t that bad, Bruce Springsteen would still be busking the carousel at Asbury Park for nickels. For a couple of city people from the East Coast, moving there to prepare for the zombie apocalypse would be a moot point, because it already is the fucking zombie apocalypse. The living already envy the dead.
“So I vote no. There is no point in trying to shoot our way out of that kind of situation. If we start hearing howling and clawing at the door, I vote we open a bottle of whiskey, settle in and relax and wait for the end. It’s just easier for everybody.”
I turned the car into the garage, shut off the engine and pressed the button to close the garage door. As we got out of the car, my girl said, “Isn’t that the same speech you gave to your brother on XBox live when he wanted to play that zombie game with you?”
“Yeah. I suck at Left 4 Dead.”
“Right. When the zombie apocalypse comes, why don’t you let me take point?”
“Probably a good idea.”
[tags]Zombieland, zombie apocalypse, dark humor, satire[/tags]
The best thing about this post is that Damonowskivich and I had a similar conversation over breakfast a few weks ago. Yours, of course, is always much more comical. Glad to see we’re not the only ones.
That’s why we live in the country. We have supplies, an SUV, a generator, and enough ammunition to kill the entire town if necessary.
When the outbreak is finally contained, I’ll visit your gnawed corpses to pay my respects and boost your Xbox and any other valuables. And when I say pay my respects, I mean I won’t actually step ON your remains. Because that might make me drop my new Xbox.