More Zombie story! Piping hot for you lovers!
From Mark Soloff's Stagger Through the Sunshine:
Chapter 1: Grocery Day
I wake slowly today. It’s that nagging kind of lethargy that takes hold when you know that the day ahead has nothing to offer you. If you could flash forward 24 hours you would. But since you can’t, you roll around for twenty minutes before finally deciding that your brain is awake even if your body isn’t. Nowadays, I get this feeling more often than not.
Beams of sunset diffuse through the western wall of my tent. It’s chilly this evening. Autumn is coming early this year. No birds chirp, I hear only the sonorous hum of the city’s inhabitants below.
I roll out of “bed” and root through my belongings until I find my mouthwash. My mouth is a sewer this evening. Lips are dry and cracked too. There’s probably less humidity in the air now. Ha. Four weeks ago, I would have prayed for dryness like this. Well, I wouldn’t have prayed. I take a measured pull of Listerine and give my self a good minute of swishing – thirty seconds more than you’re supposed to, but I don’t have the luxury of modern dentistry anymore. I swallow.
The air is thick with moans. It’s as if the atmosphere has been replaced with a wall of invisble suffering. The cries sing to me, always the same words: there is no hope. I know this with the core of my being, but somehow I continue to unzip my sleeping bag every evening and get up to face another night of life. This life is all I have and I’ve worked too hard to give it up now. It sounds dramatic. Sorry, but it is dramatic. So fuck you.
I step out of my tent and into the air. I sleep in a tent on the roof of the Integrity Financial building downtown. I’m not homeless. This is my home. And at this stage in the game, it’s a pretty fucking good one. I do some shoulder rolls and runner’s stretches. I have no idea how to keep myself in shape without the aid of exercise machines, so I try to stretch at least. Keeps me loose and nimble. Ha. My right foot is killing me. I have a fungal infection of some sort under the first three nails, it could be worse. I’ll have to find some anti-fungal cream.
I grab a nearly spent jug of distilled water and water my plants. Ironic that in this fucking swamp of a city I’m short on water. The glass, as they say, is half empty. My pride and joy is this little greenhouse. Well, it’s my pride at least. I made it from scratch and, with careful rationing, have been able to sustain myself to a certain degree from its yield. I’m not a farmer, I was a percussionist if you can believe it, so the fact that I’ve managed to grow anything at all astounds me. The “greenhouse” is comprised of five neon-colored plastic kiddie pools that I’ve filled with dirt and fertilizer. Initially I had the idea to use a kiddie pool to bale the water off of the roof, but after that was done it dawned on me that it would make a nice little planter. The pools are covered by a triangular canopy of office-grade fluorescent light covers that I’ve propped up against each other. It’s like a plastic teepee, or church roof. I hoped to diffuse the sun’s rays through the light covers so my tomato vines wouldn’t burn, but in actuality I have no idea if the canopy does anything useful at all. Like I said, I’m not a farmer. Finding dry intact fertilizer and soil in this city was a fucking miracle. Big deal, you think. Well it took me three nights to sort through, collect, and haul up enough bags of dry soil from Pet and Plant to fill the pools, so show some appreciation. Lugging eight ten-pound bags up forty flights is no picnic, but it’s done now - so whatever. I’ve successfully grown tomatoes and now I’m working on potatoes and strawberries. I don’t think the strawberries are going to make it: they’re probably summer fruits. I view my greenhouse as a sort of sickly daughter. Every change in whether becomes a dire situation. Well, not as dire as it used to be… Still, I’d say that preservation of my crop is the second biggest anxiety of my life right now. I don’t live solely on my “crops.” I also supplement my diet (and by supplement, I mean 97% of what I eat everyday is) by eating a daily multivitamin and giant economy-sized cans of peanut butter. It’s not the most nutritious diet in the world, but, all things considered, it could be worse.
The sun has set. A dull red haze blankets the city’s westernmost skyscrapers. My breakfast today is a protein bar from the case that I foraged (looted) from the body of a customer in the Indian restaurant on 5th Avenue. My second course is more peanut butter. It’s a chewy and dry first meal of the day, but steak and eggs is kind of out of the question. I lug my telescope over to the edge of the rooftop. I scan the scene surrounding Integrity’s ground floor. The water has drained significantly in the last three nights. Unfortunately, that means that I have to go down to the streets tonight. It’s a dizzying view straight down.
Greeting me this evening are thousands of human bodies choking the roadways. They throb against my building like a carpet of living flesh. It’s terrifying and overwhelming to see. I have trouble processing this sight every time I see it. The streets look like a combination of a riot, a rally, and an exodus. I scan the crowd closer with my telescope. I see a man’s yellowed fingernail scrape at the concrete wall of Integrity Financial. It peels back from his browned, decomposing hand, which he uses to smacks again against the wall with relentless fervor. Oh god does that get under my skin. Despite his wound, he continues to claw at the building’s wall. And why not? He can’t feel it. They’re all numb. Numb and relentless. Fucking monsters. I refuse to call them by that other name. I refuse to use that ridiculous word for what these things are. That cheapens what’s going on here. They are monsters. They were men and women and children with jobs and friends and favorite restaurants and now they’re corpses. They were friends, and lovers. We were making plans for the future. Now there is nothing. I have nothing. A life of terror and pity. I’m not crazy. At least I don’t think I’m crazy. My name is Renee Zinzer and I’m the only living person in the fucking world.
