Damage & Decay

Chapter 24

Part Two: Zombie Cards (Collect the Whole Set!)

"Everyone carries around his own monsters."

- Richard Pryor

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"I first saw the Lost Girl five years ago," Armin said. "Dot Pixis told me his story, of course, but I didn't make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the wild girl I saw in the Ruins. It's hard to believe they're the same person. Did Dot tell you about the search for the cottage?"

Eren nodded.

"There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or--more likely--they ran into trouble and died out there. It's odd. . . . People talk about First Night as if it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it."

"What do you mean?"

"We let fear rule us and guide us, that's never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that 'we have nothing to fear but fear itself.' That was never truer than during First Night. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take actions they would have never taken if they'd given it a minute's more cool thought."

"Like what?"

"Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports form Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombie crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical contact." Armin shook his head. "It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped."

"That's another thing they didn't tell us at school."

"They wouldn't," said Armin. "Trust me, though, fear is the code we live by here in town, and in the other towns scattered along this mountain range. I suspect that if there are other towns still surviving elsewhere in the country or the world, then fear is what they live by too."

"Not everyone's afraid, though. . . ."

"No. You're right. . . . There are some people who don't let fear rule their actions, and I suspect it'll be your generation that turns things around. Most of the people my age or older are lost in fear, and they'll never find their way back. But you and your friends, especially those young enough to not remember First Night . . . You're the ones who will choose whether to live in fear or not."

"Last week, when you said that people in town didn't trust anything out in the Ruins, that they think everything's diseased . . ."

Armin nodded. "You're on the right track. We--our town--could reclaim most of central California. Not Lost Angeles, of course; that's lost for good. But we could retake hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland. We could reclaim whole towns. Like the town where Harold Simmons lived. Don't you think three or four hundred armed people could retake that town?"

"We wouldn't need anywhere near that many. Fifty people in carpet coats, with rifles, axes, and swords could do it. It isn't a big town."

"Right. And there are a dozen towns within a day's walk from here. Hundreds just a few days away, with farmable land were could we grow more food than we could eat. No one would go hungry."