planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we’re always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we’re getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we’ve got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely —the statistics say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning—a person.
But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.
All I’d asked was that it be better managed.
But four days after the Starbucks-Financial incident, Apocalyptics began protesting Starbucks-Financial headquarters and the company announced the complete suspension of its zombie retraining program, which got the Hypo-ETE activists and support groups going again about the 60 percent zombie unemployment rate. Then, worst of all, some vigilantes came to Seattle from the country and killed a nineteen-year-old zombie girl with an antique hunting rifle, shot her outside a club and left her body outside a Starbucks-Financial.
All because I’d wanted better service.
The dead zombie girl was all over the news-tweets. I couldn’t stop staring at her photo. Her ashen-white skin glistened in the blue light. Of course it wasn’t Marci; it looked nothing like her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my old girlfriend. I sat that night in our apartment on Queen Anne Hill, staring at the results from my full body scan, the doors and windows double-locked, low music playing, and I wondered if things might have been different.
3
MARCI HAD a cousin who went zombie a few years back, before it was called that. It was the usual thing: Stephanie came from a poor family, got low scores on her sixth-grade E-RADs—we’re talking food-service low, back-labor low. Imagine being a twelve-year-old girl and being told that all you can ever aspire to is greeter at a Walmart-Schwab. Stephanie had childhood diabetes, and since her parents’ application for gene therapy had been rejected, her own chances of getting a childbirth license were nil. So she started snorting Replexen. This was right after kids in clubs discovered that grinding up the weight-loss/metabolism-boosting pill could give them an ungodly buzz, slow time, allow them to dance and screw all night, and although it was already connected to the symptoms of Hypo-ETE—milky eyes, pale skin, increased hunger, slow-witted aggressiveness—it didn’t stop them. For some, that only seemed to make the high better.
One day, Marci and I were watching sim-tweets of the Northeast Portland Riots—during the debate over anti-harassment laws and the whole Don’t-Call-Them-Zombies campaign.
“Poor Stephanie,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Marci said. “Maybe she knew what she was doing.”
Afterward, people at work would ask me, Did you suspect? Of course, after someone leaves, you find all sorts of clues, look back on conversations that suddenly have great significance, but honestly, that’s the first thing I remember, Marci saying about her zombie cousin, Maybe she knew what she was doing.
Of course, I had known for some time that Marci wasn’t happy. Our last couple of years had been tough on her, tough on both of us. Most of our friends had moved out of the city. Our apartment had lost most of its value. That fall, our procreation application had been red-flagged—Marci’s gene scan had uncovered some recessive issue. I told her I didn’t care if we had a kid. But it became part of the class stuff between us: I was from money, Marci wasn’t; I’d aced my E-RADs and Gen-Tests; she’d been borderline in both. None of that had mattered when we’d started seeing each other. And it still didn’t for me. But when the procreation board said she couldn’t have a kid? I guess it was too much for her.
But
But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.
All I’d asked was that it be better managed.
But four days after the Starbucks-Financial incident, Apocalyptics began protesting Starbucks-Financial headquarters and the company announced the complete suspension of its zombie retraining program, which got the Hypo-ETE activists and support groups going again about the 60 percent zombie unemployment rate. Then, worst of all, some vigilantes came to Seattle from the country and killed a nineteen-year-old zombie girl with an antique hunting rifle, shot her outside a club and left her body outside a Starbucks-Financial.
All because I’d wanted better service.
The dead zombie girl was all over the news-tweets. I couldn’t stop staring at her photo. Her ashen-white skin glistened in the blue light. Of course it wasn’t Marci; it looked nothing like her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my old girlfriend. I sat that night in our apartment on Queen Anne Hill, staring at the results from my full body scan, the doors and windows double-locked, low music playing, and I wondered if things might have been different.
3
MARCI HAD a cousin who went zombie a few years back, before it was called that. It was the usual thing: Stephanie came from a poor family, got low scores on her sixth-grade E-RADs—we’re talking food-service low, back-labor low. Imagine being a twelve-year-old girl and being told that all you can ever aspire to is greeter at a Walmart-Schwab. Stephanie had childhood diabetes, and since her parents’ application for gene therapy had been rejected, her own chances of getting a childbirth license were nil. So she started snorting Replexen. This was right after kids in clubs discovered that grinding up the weight-loss/metabolism-boosting pill could give them an ungodly buzz, slow time, allow them to dance and screw all night, and although it was already connected to the symptoms of Hypo-ETE—milky eyes, pale skin, increased hunger, slow-witted aggressiveness—it didn’t stop them. For some, that only seemed to make the high better.
One day, Marci and I were watching sim-tweets of the Northeast Portland Riots—during the debate over anti-harassment laws and the whole Don’t-Call-Them-Zombies campaign.
“Poor Stephanie,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Marci said. “Maybe she knew what she was doing.”
Afterward, people at work would ask me, Did you suspect? Of course, after someone leaves, you find all sorts of clues, look back on conversations that suddenly have great significance, but honestly, that’s the first thing I remember, Marci saying about her zombie cousin, Maybe she knew what she was doing.
Of course, I had known for some time that Marci wasn’t happy. Our last couple of years had been tough on her, tough on both of us. Most of our friends had moved out of the city. Our apartment had lost most of its value. That fall, our procreation application had been red-flagged—Marci’s gene scan had uncovered some recessive issue. I told her I didn’t care if we had a kid. But it became part of the class stuff between us: I was from money, Marci wasn’t; I’d aced my E-RADs and Gen-Tests; she’d been borderline in both. None of that had mattered when we’d started seeing each other. And it still didn’t for me. But when the procreation board said she couldn’t have a kid? I guess it was too much for her.
But
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