Right Now
It started on a Monday, just after lunch. I’d taken the week off work because I had some writing deadlines to meet before I left for the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City that coming weekend.
My wife was home too. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t be. She was a college professor at a local university, and though she was feeling a bit under the weather that day and had to cancel her classes, she was diligently grading papers on our home computer. Our two kids, nine and six year old girls, were at school a few miles away, near the entrance to our subdivision.
I usually wrote my rough drafts out long hand, which meant I was bent over my desk, scribbling on a yellow legal pad. My iPad was next to me, though, and I used that to check my email periodically throughout the day. The first indication I had that something was wrong was a rapid-fire series of notification chimes on my iPad. Curious, I opened it, and saw Facebook updates from several of the groups I belong to. Some included links to news stories out of Boston and Philadelphia.
The stories were confusing and contradictory. They mentioned rioting, and people tearing each other apart. The local police departments were scrambling to deal with the situation, but so far, they weren’t having much luck.
Homemade videos started popping up on Facebook, including footage from iPhones and video cameras. I watched a few of those, my mouth hanging open, and then I went to my wife’s study, where I found her watching videos from a mutual friend of ours in Boston. A man covered in blood, part of his face missing, was pawing drunkenly at her front door. He spotted her filming him from the upstairs window and began groping the air, moaning frantically. I could hear our friend breathing in the background, panic-stricken. The choppy, bouncing video and off-camera panting reminded me of something out of The Blair Witch Project, but the growing dread in my gut was very real.
“What do you think is happening?” my wife asked. “Is this real?”
But we both knew the answer to that.
This shit was very real.
Still, we’d never talked about what came next. I wrote this stuff, but it’d never been more than playtime for me. My wife hated reading about zombies. What that amounted to was that we didn’t have a zombie contingency plan. Natural disasters, which in San Antonio meant flash floods or possibly forest fires, sure, those we had covered. But not zombies.
“What about the kids?” my wife said.
It was the only point that really mattered, and it stopped me. I was a cop. I was in decent shape...except for my high blood pressure, which I controlled with medication. I knew tactics. I knew how to handle guns, how to fight if I had to. But doing the zombie apocalypse with kids. Well, that was a different matter.
“It’s just now 2 o’clock,” I said. “They get out at 2:45. Let’s you and I figure out a plan right now. We’ll go get them as soon as school lets out, bring them back here, and we’ll make ready on whatever you and I decide to do.”
That sounded reasonable to me. The part of my brain that had been trained to deal with critical situations liked that idea.
But my wife was looking at me like I’d just grown an extra head.
“Make ready?” she said. “Are you serious? Joe, we’re dealing with zombies here. Zombies! What in the hell are we going to do?”