The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

Chapter 2 - Okie

Grandma Clio showed me her first chapter this morning.

“Look, darling,” she said. “At some point history will judge us, and its judgement can be cruel and arbitrary: just look at Richard III. So I'm writing a little piece. Because they should know that we survivors got through it the best way we could, though it was sometimes messy.”

She's not wrong. There’s always going to be self-righteousness from some people, and it’s never too early to get your side down. So here’s mine.

The thing you have to realise is, my mother never understood me. Never never never never. She always cared about stupid stuff like whether I was making friends with the “right kind of people”, whether I was pulling in good grades, whether I looked like a pretty little princess she could show off to her friends, whether I spoke nicely and dressed properly and didn't curse, and didn't “make a scene” in public. She's obsessed with the “right kind” of everything, not that she's the right kind of anything at all.

Well. I shouldn't talk about her that way. Not now she's dead. Sort of. Kind of dead.

So it's not like I took much notice of her screaming, you know? She was always screaming about something. Yelling at my dad that he should get a better job, or accusing Granny of not “supporting her enough”. (Support her in what? Beats me. What did she even need support for? It's not like anything anyone tries to do is ever good enough for her.) Sometimes when she was on her own she'd just shout at herself, for something to do. So when I got home early from school and heard her shrieking in the kitchen, I didn't bother about fixing myself a snack, I just went up to my bedroom, turned the music up as loud as it would go, locked the door so she couldn't come in, and tried to ignore whatever had made her smash everything up this time.

Turns out my 'teenage rebellion' strategy saved my life.

I just need you to know: it's not like I'm a dumbass, OK? Let the records show that: Okie was not a moron. I do know the drill, we've done our evacuation schedules in school, I know how to check for signs of infection. I understand how and why quarantine is maintained and what it means for us. I've heard all the “do not become complacent. Look left. Look right. A zombie could be next to you right now!” speeches and unlike some of those idiot jocks I do actually listen rather than laughing with my bros during the information sessions. Disaffected teenage rebellion is only fun if you still have enough functioning brain to enjoy it, after all.

But I'd been away for a few days. Mom was on one of her health kicks, eating nothing but green food and drinking some 'health drink' dad had gotten hold of for her. I'd told the parentals there was a school camping trip, so I could stay at Megan's and then at Amber's for a few days. Till their parents started to ask questions about how long it was going to take to fumigate my house from those giant carnivorous cockroach-lizards. I just needed a vacation, you know?

So I must have missed the bit where my mom – never, let's be honest, the sharpest tool in the potting shed – stopped understanding traffic signals, started eating raw hamburger meat (I found pounds of the stuff in the kitchen later, already gone rotten), started to scream more than usual and then could only communicate by growling.

What I don't understand is how my dad missed it. But then, he never could stand up to her for shit.

So here's my childhood trauma, the story I'm sure I'll be recounting on some therapist's couch fifteen years from now, explaining why I still can't make myself look at a cocktail wiener or a Pomeranian dog or something.

Our neighbourhood in Queens had been totally clean of infection for three months. We were all doing the weekly blood tests, there were the regular sweeps of the area. The homeless population was gone and none of us asked too many questions about what had happened to them. International flights had resumed, provided you were willing to do your 72-hours in quarantine at your destination and on return and to bear the risk that some over-zealous foreign border guard might shoot you if you seemed not to be able to read, oh say, Cyrillic script. To be honest, tourists weren't really heading for Japan anymore. But anyway, civilization was back. Or some version of it. Civilization Lite: without many of the features and with occasional interruptions in service.