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08:05 am - Dream: The Annoying Dead

We were looking at houses. This one seemed just about right - good size, nice yard, nearby shopping - and we were starting to talk price when C looked out the window. "Is that... a zombie?" She pointed: a shambling form had emerged onto the street from a yard on the other side, draped in torn clothes, twitching and grunting in an all-too-familiar way.



The realtor made a horrified face. "Oh... no! Certainly not. This is a nice neighborhood. There's no..." but just then, one of the neighbors came down the street in their car, striking the lurching form in the side and scattering it into pieces all over the place. The realtor put her face in her hands. "The city will have that cleaned up in no time, I promise," she tried hopefully. C shook her head and I nodded in agreement. "We're going to keep looking."



Call us livists if you want to, but you know it's true: once a neighborhood starts getting one or two of the Dead, it's just a matter of time before the whole place is overrun. Humanity - living humanity, I mean - had been forced into a perpetual, irritated nomadic existence, always having to sell at a loss and buying somewhere else every time the Dead ruined another nice place.



The last place we'd lived, it had gotten so that you couldn't even go out to your car to leave for work without mussing up your clothes and stumbling down your own driveway, groaning and spitting, pretending to be one of them so that they wouldn't rise from where they were all lying around - on your porch, in your flowerbed, draped over the hood of the car, in the gutter - and make a sudden lunge for your throat.



Sure, you could shoot them in the head. But their putrescent remains were like a beacon for more of their kind. And there were sometimes unfortunate social side-effects of that solution. Once, at a Mardi Gras street party, two hideous, reeking figures had shambled out of the dark at me. "Are you alive?" I asked, repeatedly, but all they could do was mumble and shake. When one reached for me, I drew and put a pair of .45s into each of their heads. All the fresh red blood had been a tremendous shock and the crowd began to scream. They weren't Dead, they were just too drunk to make any sense. Manslaughter. That had been a pretty bad time, but at least there was a valuable lesson demonstrated: don't get so incapacitated in public that people can't distinguish you from a walking corpse.



Anyway, as C and I got back in our car, I looked around and saw, yeah, the Dead were already here: in the dark shade of that tree, underneath that SUV, tucked in among those bushes. They were craftier, here, hiding themselves more effectively. You might not see them until you were right next to them and then they'd be right on top of you. Were we losing this war? Were they going to keep getting better and better at blending in until we could no longer spot them? I tried not to think about. We'd keep looking. We'd keep looking until we'd found a place where the Dead could never go. That's all we wanted.



Really, I think, that's all anyone wants anymore.



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For consideration: sub-conscious metaphors for the economy