Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [13]
“Let me guess. The people who told you this shit are the same ones who talk about the Midwest Wall and the government operatives who are coming to save us all just any old day now?”
I blinked at his harsh, sarcastic tone. These guys deserved his censure, don’t get me wrong, but Dave had become pretty cynical since the outbreak. He’d gone from happy-go-lucky gamer to a hardened fighter.
He no longer believed anything anyone said about a place that was still safe or that anyone was eventually coming to fix this plague. And he didn’t just dismiss pumped-up assholes like the ones sitting across from us now. Even if I mentioned the possibility of such stuff, he cut me off with a wave of his hand and a brusque change of subject.
But I have to tell you, even though I’d seen the same things he’d seen, been through the same shit he’d been through… I still held on to the slender reed of hope he’d managed to kill in himself.
I mean, it was possible They (whoever They were) had built a wall to separate the West from the East, a way to protect half the population from the outbreak, and if They had made the virus, or whatever it was that had started this nightmare, that They could fix it someday.
Right?
“Or maybe the ones who told you about ‘different’ zombies were the same ones who go on and on about cures and scientists?” Dave continued with a humorless laugh.
“I heard there really are some scientists working on the cure,” the medium build of the three guys said, though he sounded less certain than he had when they all sat down. “Maybe even in protected labs right here in the West.”
Dave let his fork hit his plate with a clatter. “Pipe dreams, boys. You should know better by now. What we can trust are the things we can see. Weapons, the camps, a vehicle that still has half a tank of fuel. That shit is real. Everything else…” He waved his hand in the air. “Illusion. Like Santa and the Tooth Fairy.”
The men shifted uncomfortably and Dave returned his attention to my plate.
“Done?” he asked.
I ate the last few bites and nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’m beat. Let’s find a tent and call it good.” He grabbed my plate and my hand, gave the now silent and sullen men a quick nod, and we took off toward the exit.
As he set our dishes into an overflowing tray, I gave him a side look. “You know, there may still be some good in the world. I wish you wouldn’t give up on that idea entirely.”
He didn’t answer as we entered the tent city area of the camp. A few hundred tents, scavenged and traded by survivors, were set up in long rows that repeated and repeated out in front of us. There were everything from small child-sized ones with Dora the Explorer’s tattered, stained face on the outside, to orange ones a family probably once took out into the mountains for a weekend, to military-grade outfits that slept ten or twelve people.
Dave paused as he scanned a sign-up sheet by the sleeping area for a tent that had two cots available. Once he had found one and had marked it as taken, he began steering me in that direction.
I figured he wasn’t going to respond to what I’d said, but as we ducked into the tent he’d signed us up for (a four-man sleeper), he turned toward me.
“Look, it’s not that I have no hope. I believe there’s plenty of ‘good’ right here. And we’re doing okay, right? The infected are a lot less active toward us now, and we’ve got a pretty fucking good system for killing them. We’re together and that’s what matters to me.”
He hesitated and here came the but.
“But I have no illusions that all that bullshit about a future without these monsters is going to happen. They wiped out the entire West in about two weeks, Sarah. There’s no way they could be stopped. Not by a wall or a scientist toiling in some borderline cartoon lab. I just can’t waste too much energy praying and looking for it.”
I stared at him, uncertain how to respond when he laid out a future for us that held nothing but faint reassurance that we’d survive, but never get back to any kind of normal life.
Luckily,