A (More or Less) Perfect Representation of Modern Suburbia

No, I haven't seen your scissors, dad.

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This is it, the first encounter.
        You walk up what used to be a street connecting you to everyone. There's the top half of crazy old man Stevenson sloppily devouring his dog out on the front lawn where you lost your ball when you were nine. He had these cheap plastic fence posts where if you were to even put on half the weight of your nine year old self, it would snap and crumble beneath you almost immediately. You figure if he had just invested more of his paycheck into getting some decent fencing to either keep his dog in, or the kids out, you wouldn't have had to spend most of that summer mowing his lawn. Now, he doesn't complain much, just sitting there gnawing on Fido.
        The way people talked about zombies is never the way they really are, like black and white science fiction serials from the 40s before we landed on the moon. They're not as scary as they would have you believe.
        There's also your friendly neighbor, Mrs. Hannigan, who every thanksgiving would come over with yams baked in a marshmallow later. She normally minded her own business save for holidays when she had nobody else because Mr. Hannigan died but a few years earlier. We didn't talk about it because we knew she was aware, but we also appreciated the awful tasting yams. Mrs. Hannigan was the first to go. I could faintly hear her moaning and banging into the walls of her house from the other side of the street. The dead never sleep.
        Wakes were never a good idea.
        The very concept of wakes never existed until later colonial times in America. Back then there was a minor influx of a disease that put you in a comatose-like state of sleep paralysis in which you had all the symptoms of a dead person, and because of their primitive medicine, everyone immediately concluded they were dead. People thought a new plague was starting, and so they started making funeral arrangements for those that were still alive, funeral planning had never been such a booming business. One day, some colonial-type individual's wife had died after a long fever, but he had felt so sad that instead of telling anyone, he merely left the body there, without a single word to anyone. About three days later, while butter churning or candle waxing, or with burning or other miscellaneous historical s**t, he had heard coughing and wheezing coming from his house and upon further investigation, had discovered that his wife had woken up. Lo and behold, when he bestowed this knowledge to the masses of his village, they had soon realized what a horrible mistake they had made. Immediately digging up all the corpses they had buried in the past couple of months, they discovered the bodies cocked over, screaming, and finger nail claw marks on the top of most coffins.
        Thus the tradition of a wake was born, held usually three days after the death of a loved one, they allow them a window of opportunity to have that person "awoken". Now, (because of more advanced medicine), it doesn't have so much to do with waiting for the person to wake up as it does with a little extra closure.
        People come and cry. There's the smell of formaldehyde floating about a cramped building where relatives who you've never met pinch your cheeks and tell you baby stories about yourself while you tolerate it and slip away another piece of hard candy they have on a table at the entrance. It's funny how we consider family, "family", considering we only ever see them when another one of them kicks.
        Back to my main point, Patient Zero woke at a wake, and everyone was ecstatic until he started feeding on his nephew's fingers.
        When the priest came over to bless him, Uncle Fred just latched onto him like a mosquito and sucked him dry until the priest didn't think this whole cannibalism thing was such a bad idea.
        Don't knock it til' you try it. It was then that he infected everyone with the love of christ, and they flocked to spread the message.
        I shouldn't really call it cannibalism considering Patient Zero had become something not all too human.
        From chaplain to grieving aunt, from grieving aunt to little susie, and little susie to all her compadres in the second grade, no-one was safe. No-one except for the good, honest, hard working, rednecks indigenous to the native southwest. Word around the proverbial campfire is that they're trying to patch up America again with what little knowledge they have of the original foundation. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this whole zombie business will blow over in a few weeks, but don't be surprised 30 years down the road when George Washington Carver and Samuel Adams envisioned a better future for the American peoples.
        I live in a zombie-free hostel at my mutual friend's house, we all have specific jobs. Three people are sent out every day to search and possibly rescue people we once knew. Today is my turn to go out into neighboring neighborhoods and see what these empty houses might have for us.
        Bug Spray,
        Ramen,
        Soap. Everything is of value in the not-to-distant future of YOUR suburban comfort. With a trailer full of valuable items withdrawn from the homes of my once dearly beloved paisanos, I'm driving back to the hostel with my treasures, waiting to find out what happened with the search. Only vague thoughts and ideas of what they might have found today. Who they might have found today.
        What the hell ever happened to my good friend Eva.

 

Author's Note

Ignore Hitler