Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays

Please Add Me to Your Zombie Survival Network

Gwen asked if I’d kill her. I had to think about it. The two of us sat in a theatre in downtown Toronto, paper programs in our laps. Black walls, black curtains, black metal legs supporting grey plastic chairs, all lit by the white glow of the house lights. The kind that bring out the red in your cheeks. Blood vision.

“I could do it,” I said. “Emotionally, I think I could.”

I took silent inventory. With me, I had a messenger bag containing a notebook and a bottle of red wine. The pockets of my jeans were empty, save for my old leather wallet. My keys, a ticket stub, a small black cellphone, and a handful of unused tissues cluttered the various compartments of my theatre-school-grade corduroy blazer. I was unarmed. “But I don’t think I have anything that would really help me with the dirty work.”

“You can kill a zombie with your hands,” she said. “You do karate.”

I pictured the hypothetical scenario. A raspy moan, Gwen’s eyes covered in the instant cataracts of undeath, mouth gaping with angry eyebrows. She’d go for my exposed flesh first, probably—my face and neck. I’d guard myself, either through the automatic reflex of a karate high block or by cartoonishly palming her head to keep her at bay, the Bugs Bunny to her flesh-eating chicken hawk. Honestly considering my abilities and the implements at hand, I couldn’t imagine any way to remove Gwen’s head or destroy her brain.

“I don’t know. Is karate even enough?” I said. “I’d have to run.”

Gwen raised an eyebrow. People crowded near the edge of the stage, looking up at the risers, squinting and doing basic math, trying to find a place to squeeze their party in with the rest of us spectators.

“Let’s say you had something,” she said. “Let’s say you had a bat or a shovel. Let’s say you could definitely do it.”

I asked where she was headed with this. Judging by the densely packed seating, we didn’t have a ton of time for zombie talk before the curtain’s rising.

“Okay,” she said. “If I attack you first, having not bitten anyone to spread the zombie virus, and you karate me back to death right here, will anyone believe you did it to save the world? Or will they all think you’re a murderer?”

Everyone in the theatre sat, shifting, murmuring, and turning off their phones. The collective noun is audience, crowd. But I was thinking about hordes.

“I’m just saying, the smart thing to do is let the situation get a little out of hand,” said Gwen. “Not too out of hand. Not 28 Days Later out of hand. Just enough that tomorrow’s headlines contain the word ‘infected’ instead of ‘murder.’”

The lights began to dim. For a moment, a couple hundred bodies sat in utter darkness.

“This is probably a good time to tell you I’m coming down with a fever,” Gwen whispered. “Remember, let it get a little out of hand.”

“What if you bite me?”

“I don’t care, I’m already dead.”

*

We talk about zombies to talk about each other. In pubs, at parties, in theatre audiences waiting for plays to start, we imagine the undead uprising in present tense. In a hypothetical survival scenario, your interests, obsessions, and special skills take on heavy significance. The summer job you had landscaping could make you the chainsaw-wielding splatterpunk who saves her friends in a cloud of gas fumes and blood. Time served on your high school baseball team might elevate you to the José Bautista of blunt-force head removal. Practical firearms experience accrued on a hunting trip with your uncle can cast you as Annie Oakley in St. John’s Revelation.

As an old millennial, of the cohort who started surfing the web around age nine, I learned to write personality profiles for my digital self before learning the cardinal directions in school. Chat rooms, pop culture forums, and instant messenger programs like ICQ required me to socialize without a body. Like other people my age, I built digital avatars out of song lyrics and self-portraits. Screen name, age, country, favourite movie, favourite song, inspirational quote, uploaded image—disclosure of this data is an essential first step in communication for people who came of age during the rise of Internet society, who spend most of our social lives in collectively imagined non-corporeal spaces. That’s why zombies are such an appealing conversation topic. A zombie apocalypse discussion is profile building for the meatspace. Agreeing to a set scenario with high stakes and an internal logic established by film, TV, video games, and past conversations, we define ourselves in opposition to the undead. We laugh, we drink, and together we agree that in a world consumed by viral walking death, the people we know and love will survive by virtue of our describable utility.

Because zombies are non-human, non-living, and unable to list their hobbies in order of practicality, the shambling corpses are barely part of the conversations they inspire. Generally, actual zombie talk begins and ends with taxonomy. If we’re really going to discuss a survival plan, we need to know what kind of monsters we’re running from. Are we dealing with classic slow zombies or a newfangled strain of rage zombies that can run? Do their bites quickly transform living victims into card-carrying members of Club Zed or are we imagining a situation in which infection only means resurrection after a less supernatural death? These questions, along with the origin of the zombification vector—biomedical research gone wrong, trendy anti-aging cream applied too liberally, a novel coronavirus—help define the survival logic of the discussion. Everything else is about being alive together and staying that way.

Your zombie apocalypse profile is constantly changing with your interests, attitudes, and values. Physically active hobbies usually take up the first bits of conversation. The knee-jerk reaction is that a zombie apocalypse privileges those who can pulverize a skull. But close-contact melee with zombies is a losing battle. It’s like beating back the rising tide with a crowbar.

It only takes a few minutes to realize that survival is about creatively co-operating to make the best of the worst possible situation. Identifying friends and acquaintances with first-aid training leads to recollected adventures in babysitting. Finding shelter and foraging for food evoke shared memories of hiking, camping, and hunting. At one point, someone inevitably suggests commandeering a boat and waiting out the apocalypse on the water. This person will share stories of sailing, powerboating, or working at a marina over teenage summers. The conversation will progress, trust will emerge, and those of us with chronic medical conditions will ask if the survival party minds stopping at a pharmacy to loot EpiPens, inhalers, or insulin.

I am a lifelong martial artist, which usually puts me on guard duty. I graduated university with a performance-heavy theatre degree, which is generally thought to be useless unless you count the fact that it’s probably the reason we’re talking about zombies in the first place. I have asthma and a chronic back injury. My favourite band is the White Stripes. My favourite film is The Blair Witch Project. My inspirational quote is a haiku by Kobayashi Issa: “O snail/ Climb Mount Fuji,/ But slowly, slowly!” Please add me to your zombie survival network.