Zombies and other dangers

There are four of us in here: me, Dan, Tyler and Tyler's girl. We are the only four we know of who are not zombies, but then again, we would have no way of knowing. It's a big world, after all--billions of people--so it seems unlikely that they would all be zombies but us. Maybe there are groups of four everywhere, barricading themselves in houses, as we have done.

The house we are in does not belong to anyone else. Before we decided on it, we checked it thoroughly for zombies and other dangers. We decided it would do, and so we boarded up the doors. Because the zombies do not stop. They can smell us, from miles away. We can smell them too, but only if we're in a few yards of them. We cannot smell ourselves, perhaps because we have become used to how we smell after all these years, and this makes us wonder if the zombies have any idea of the effect their pungent, rotting flesh has on the four of us. And do they have an exceptional sense of smell? Or--to an impartial observer, perhaps--would the smell of the dead pale in comparison to the stink of the living, and all the filth we carry with us?

It does not matter, because the zombies can smell, but they are not very smart. They cannot get into the house, even though they know we are in here. The only thing they can think of is flesh, we suppose, and once they get a whiff of it, they basically just walk in a straight line very slowly in the direction of the nearest flesh-bearing creature. This can make for a frightening picture, to be sure, when they are chasing you through the woods and you are dodging trees and plants and jumping over creeks from rock to rock and whatnot and they just keep marching forward, over and through every obstacle, as if they were not even there, but once you are safely behind a house, the best they can do is walk into the walls. The only thing we have to fear is that millions of them will be pushing at each other and they will somehow build up enough force to move the house, but this seems unlikely.

We are all very tired of Tyler and Tyler's girl, who do not seem to be taking the whole zombie thing seriously. They are always sneaking off and doing the things that a young man will do with his girl behind closed doors, with no regard for Dan and I, who have no girls of our own. We can hear them through the walls. Dan and I complained about it one day, and Tyler just laughed ironically and said that it was not his fault that we could not find girls of our own and reminded us that we could not find girls of our own even when all the girls we knew were not undead, which was not fair to me, because I did have a girl before all this happened, but we split up and went off with our own separate groups of friends, out of consideration of them, because I did not want to make Dan or Tyler feel awkward if they were in a house with us with no girls of their own and my girl felt the same way about her friends. Although in fairness, it was also because we didn't know each other so well then, and living together--especially under circumstances like these, with the constant fear of zombie attacks such that we could not leave the house--seemed like a big step forward in our relationship that neither of us were quite ready for, although I do miss her now, and not just because I am jealous of Tyler hanging around with his girl all the time when he gets tired of our companionship, but because I have some real feelings of tenderness for her. It is true, however, that Dan had no girl when the whole zombie thing started and had few (if any) girls even before that, so he was stung by Tyler's comment and didn't say much for the rest of the day.

We also suspect that Tyler and his girl are not taking the zombie threat seriously because of the things they say when they are fooling around together and doing the kinds of things a young man will do with his girl behind closed doors that Dan and I can hear through the walls. They play games with each other where one (usually Tyler) will say something like "here I come" and the other (usually Tyler's girl) will say "oh yeah, nibble me, eat me" and the first (Tyler) will say something like "your flesh, I need your flesh" and it's all very disgusting and rather inappropriate considering, I think, what with the zombies stumbling around outside, wanting nothing more than to get inside and actually eat our flesh, and I have spoken to Tyler in private about this zombie game of his (because I do not want to embarrass him in front of Dan or his girl, even though there are no secrets between the four of us, I am sure, even if we like to pretend there are) and how I think it is inappropriate considering and he just laughs it off and repeats his coarse and inaccurate remark about my jealousy regarding his girl and I remember my own girl and become too wistful to pursue the point any further. I believe Dan has confronted him in private as well, because I will sometimes see the two of them go off together and Tyler will come back smirking like he always smirks after he has an opportunity to remind us that he has a girl here and the two of us do not and Dan comes back sad and quiet.

We have noticed that a couple of the more intelligent zombies who saw us enter the house and--more importantly--saw how we entered the house have been toying around with the doorknob, intuiting that their entrance into this house is somehow limited by their inability to manipulate this strange device that sticks out of this one part of the wall like a tumor (with which they are extremely familiar, since almost all of them are covered in tumors or sores). They mostly slap at it with their palms while the dumber zombies behind them just keep pushing forward, and so we are not very worried about this or about the zombies at all, to be honest, because they are very far from figuring out the door as things stand right now, and any progress they might make in figuring it out it hampered by the crowd of zombies pushing forward dumbly. That and we have boarded up the door, so even if they figure out the knob, they have a ways to go before they get all the way inside.

One thing that does worry us slightly is the windows, which we have not boarded up, mainly because we boarded up the front door and the back door and then found out that we had run out of boards. The fear is not that they break through the glass and bust in, but that one day one of them accidentally plows through it and then tumbles through the frame and--without really understanding why--suddenly finds itself inside the house and--hey--here's that flesh it was smelling before and then maybe the four of us could band together to take out that one, but maybe more of them force their way--quite accidentally, of course--through the same broken window and now we have a whole mess on our hands and it seems like it would be all over.

Every night, Tyler and his girl play the same games. Tyler practically weeps over his girl's flesh, and as he does whatever it is exactly he does over it, she climaxes just at the mere idea of her flesh being whatevered by Tyler. It is disgusting, and Dan and I can do nothing but sit in the dark and get angrier and angrier.

Because the windows are not boarded up, we can see them outside, which is perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the whole experience. Because they're not something you like to look at, as ugly as they are. Just walking forward, right into the glass, their eyes completely dead dead dead. It is difficult to describe. We are used to seeing living beings with something etched on their faces--emotion or desire or something--but these zombies have and are nothing more than base, dumb instinct and all they can do is walk forward. They never blink and if you get to staring at them for long enough, pressed right up against the glass because of all the hundreds of zombies behind them pushing them forwards, it's enough to pity them, because you begin to mistake the blankness of their faces for desperation, and you want to help them. By You I mean I, of course. It is at these times that I have to turn away and remind myself of Tyler and his girl and what they do at night when they are in the other room while Dan and I sit here and stew and then I remember what these things are and everything is OK again.

Last night, we were engaged in some casual conversation regarding the zombies outside, and Tyler mentioned quite seriously that he hoped that one of these days they would just get in so this whole nightmare would just end once and for all, because it was really getting on his nerves and he was getting quite serious, if he was being honest. He was not smiling as he said any of this, and his girl nodded with her eyes closed. It annoyed me and Dan too, I think, because it was clear that out of the four of us, it was the two of them who were having the best time, since they had each other and I, while Dan and I had no girls of our own, which was especially tough on me, because I was used to having a girl too, and especially tough on Dan, because it reminded him keenly of the fact that he had never really had a girl of his own, for very long, anyway, before she became bored of him and left him, or he became afraid of her and left her.

After Tyler said his thing about wanting to let the zombies in, Dan said that he wondered what these zombies meant, what they represented, as it were. He posited that they represented human's animal instinct run amok under the constraints of civilization, which I thought was interesting, so I posited that perhaps instead they represented some kind of repression of a more primitive and perhaps "immoral" (as we understand it, anyway) part of our psyches, which wasn't so much an original idea as it was a refinement of Dan's original suggestion, and then Dan answered back that perhaps they represented the "other" in our culture--the things about ourselves that we feel repulsed by, that we try to repress through socialization, and then Tyler's girl burst into tears quite unexpectedly and started wailing "Stop it! Stop it! They're real! They're real!" And she ran out of the room, sobbing. Tyler was very stern with us, and he said that we were not taking the zombies very seriously, and that we were upsetting his girl. And Dan said that what about the game he played with his girl in the other room at night, that the two of us could hear, where he (usually) played the zombie and his girl (usually) was the zombie's prey, and Tyler responded that Dan just did not understand because he did not have much luck with girls, now did he. Dan swore and Tyler was stern again and said that he hoped the zombies would break through this door and just end it right now because he wouldn't take another second, and that maybe he would tear the boards out of the wall and open the door and let the zombies have at us, so it would all be over, once and for all. And I responded that that sounded like the kind of thing a zombie would say and Tyler began screaming: "What if I am, huh? So what if I am! So what if I am!"

None of it made any sense, but still, we were all silent for a very long time, because it was the kind of nonsense that digs in someplace in the back of the brain, and draws attention to the fact that there is something very wrong someplace, like you have forgotten to turn off the stove, and if you do not do something quickly there will be a lot of trouble for you.