I spent a few hours yesterday and looking over the commentary about the zombie ideas I put forward and I’ve realized that is blog is going to be a very valuable resource for me. All the comments I received really got me thinking about things I hadn’t considered about this kind of story and I have come up with an idea that is a little different form what my original post stipulated. I like the fact that I can have one small idea and it grows and grows into something much larger and better with a little inspiration from the ideas of those who are commenting.

I developed a character sheet and a rough plot progression for this story, which will be in three parts. I think it might take me a few days to complete the entire first section, but I actually tried to take my characters and setting and plot and write a few pages of a first draft. It’s far from complete, but I thought that I should post it to generate some interest. I will follow the main character, as yet unnamed, through the winter and into the spring. I have a god sub plot with the monkeys and his interactions with the animals and want to go into detail about how he secures the zoo and his methods for zombie eradication. I’m excited about it but I don’t want to rush it out before I’ve fully conceptualized the entire thing. I don’t have a working title for the entire story yet, but this section will be called “The Fall” because it takes place during the Autumn season.

I also plan to include these guys as characters that interact with our main character.

So here is what I have so far,

THE FALL

Today I learned that the smell isn’t rot; They shit themselves. Of course I’ve seen many of those fucking Stinkers up close and personal in the past six months but never, until today, did I realize that the black-purple smears coating their bodies aren’t blood or rot or just day-to-day grime of being a mindless scavenger. They are literally covered in their own shit. I was passing the Polar Bear enclosure earlier today and saw a big great fat naked one do the deed all down his legs, take what he could into his hands and smear the rest back into his hair, beard and mouth.

I don’t know how I feel about that. Would I rather it be someone’s rotten old guts coating their twisted bodies? Am I really relieved to know that I’ve been surrounded by a mobile human cesspool on a daily basis? I don’t know. The big fat one I saw do it reminded me of something I once saw at a Slayer concert, so maybe not much has really changed.

Fucking Stinkers.

But then again, the Toronto Zoo has always carried an outright foul odour in the air and considering some of the things I’ve done in my illustrious career in the materials collection department, that’s what you call a unionized garbage man, this is a step up. I’ve crawled through a transport container full of maggots and month-old garbage to find a cache of recyclables in the heat of July. I’m the man who had to work the rest of the day in sour-dairy smelling boots saturated with garbage juice after the bags I was carrying leaked down the back of my coveralls and soaked my socks. I have literally spend hours of my life arm-deep in other people’s refuse so that I can find the other end of the bad that fell down into the bottom of the bin because the crew the day before didn’t put in properly. All that never really bothered me, but the smell that comes from these Stinkers, these walking shit paintings…God. It’s just indescribable.

Ironically, the one thing I wasn’t required to handle was human or animal feces because of the potential for communicable disease. Perhaps that was a good lesson because I can guarantee that whatever the fuck happened to turn the metaphorically mindless shit-eating crowd at the zoo into a literally mindless shit-eating crowd is probably pretty fucking communicable, at least to other people. The animals here don’t seem to care and frankly, have been much more well-adjusted than I am.