When the world was alive, I would sometimes pretend that I was the only person in the world. I’ve never been really good with other people. Zoic and I get along because she wasn’t either. Pretending that no one else was around lifted a pressure I could never really explain.

Zoic’s been working on this Music of the Apocalypse list and it’s got me thinking. I used to take walks and listen to music and pretend like I was the only one listening to that song, like it made me feel special or something. I would get a bit upset when I found that other people liked what I did as much as I did, like it was some violation of the world I had created where I was the sole appreciator. I’ve listened to some of the songs that Zoic picked out, and looked through a few of my own (we’ve got quite an iPod collection these days). I realized the other day, as I listened to some Peter Gabriel that I might, for once, be the only person listening to it at that moment. I didn’t like that either.

Zoic and I got a bit restless and decided to go for a ride. We went North East to some of the ritzier car dealerships, and that’s when I saw it. I’ve never really been a huge car person. I know a fair deal, I’ve watched some top gear, played racing games, but I’m not always up to speed. But this, this is my favorite car. The one I always wanted to own. The blue one, with the curves just right. I don’t believe a more beautiful car has ever been made. Of course, I’m talking about the AC Cobra. Also manufactured under the Shelby name. To be honest, I don’t know if it was a kit or an original, and I wouldn’t know what to look for, and I really don’t care one way or the other.

It was behind a large glass window with several other older cars that I completely ignored. Zoic looks around a bit more. She’s a much bigger fan of cars. Almost everyone in the building had died suddenly and without a fight. And they were still there, just as they were before. One of them was behind the wheel of the cobra. Not a bad place to die, if you ask me. I politely escorted him from the seat to the floor and sat in his seat. It was somehow completely different from what I had imagined, but perfect in every way. The panelling was beautiful, the wheel was perfect in my hands. The seat was mostly comfortable, but comfort is not my concern. The pedals were the perfect weight under my feet. Manual transmission. I always told myself I would learn. I didn’t imagine it would have to be right now. To think of destroying such a car’s transmission.

Across the way, I heard Zoic fire up an engine. It was in some old red convertible. I couldn’t be bothered to look at it closely, but I was inspired to revive the beast beneath me. I looked to the ignition, but there was no key. I opened the door and checked the body on the floor, but he had no key.

I found a door leading to a back office. I probably should have asked Zoic to accompany me, but I was determined, and when I get determined, I get short sighted. It worked out well anyway. Everyone in the building had frozen in their tracks long ago. It’s odd how the whole building was hit that way, but it seems to be the case when this happens. Either they all react the same way, or the other just wander off. They’ll feed on each other before touching these guys. Probably something in that.

I found a key rack. There’s always one, right? I looked through all of the keys. No cobra. I really didn’t want to hot wire this car. It deserved better. On my way out, I kicked something metal. I looked down. They were nondescript keys. I picked them up and went back to the car, hoping. I sat down. I put the key in. It fit. I turned the key. It turned. But the engine didn’t. It tried really hard, but it was no good. Zoic had moved to another car already, but she noticed my disappointment and came over.

“We’ll find another one,” she said.

“Yeah,”

“You wanna go?”

“Yeah.”

I can tell that this farming stuff really irritates Zoic. She’s not sedentary. It’s a big commitment. At the same time, she has changed a bit. I’ve seen her grow more comfortable with this world, and with its inhabitants, one of which being me. She’s been feeding wild animals in the back yard, and my usual crude humour hasn’t been getting on her nerves as much. I’m not really sure what to make of it. Maybe it’s all in my head.

We’ve organized the farm the way it makes the most sense to us, which is not really all that organized. It’s not such a big deal when you’re going to eat all of it. No need to keep track for sales, etc. Our lines aren’t very straight and our holes are not a uniform depth. We did our best to fertilize, but it would have taken a lot of effort, and it would have been dangerous, to bring back all of the fertilizer in the hardware store. We’ll see what happens. We’ll learn, and eventually we’ll take Phoenix back to its agricultural roots.

So, today we dug holes. Not much more to it than that. Preparing to plant. I think we got this. No. We got this.

It had been long overdue for a us to take a trip to a local hardware store. The amount of things we needed made the dangerous trip worthwhile.

We grabbed a truck from a neighbor’s house. One of the big ones. One of the ones that says “I make up for my penis in the size of my vehicle and cowboy hat.” There was always that rift in Arizona: the people who embraced the southwestern style and dressed like they worked at rawhide everyday, and the people who wouldn’t be caught dead in cowboy boots. I was one of the latter, but being that there was very little chance of being caught dead by another living human being, I thought I’d try something new. Luckily for Zoic and myself, the owner of this massive vehicle had kept a supply of white hats in the back seat. The hardware store was not far. We checked the list of things we needed and decided we’d both have to go in. Ammo was good, blades were sharp, blunt objects were blunt. Cowboy hats were secured.

It was dark inside. And quiet. The smell of rotting flesh was present, but not as strong as expected. We kicked on our flashlights.

Walking almost back to back, we made our way through the building. Zoic stopped me.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?” I asked.

Then I stopped.

A low moaning. Not one. Several. They seemed to be coming from all around us. We whipped our flashlights around, but none were in sight yet. The sound got louder. Then a single dark silhouette blocked some of the light coming from the entrance. Then another. I counted five by the door, the rest were hard to count with the flashlight alone. “Fuck.” Zoic whispered.

“We’ll be okay,” I responded. Then I handed Zoic my flask. She took a large swig and made a pained face.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.

“We can run, or we can fight.”

“Of course.”

“We need the seeds and the supplies.”

“And we need to live.”

“We should play with that toy of yours.”

“Well, alright.”

We shot our way out of the door and pulled the truck back a ways. I found a tire iron in the bed. Zoic set up a makeshift flamethrower she put together over the last couple of days in the parking lot and got a few test blasts off.

“I’m not sure I’ve worked all of the kinks out yet,” she commented. I could not have cared less.

I searched through the truck’s supply of CD’s. It was mostly pop country garbage, but there was a Johnny Cash’s greatest hits. I put this in the player, and cranked the stereo as high as it could go. Taking the tire iron to a nearby post, I began to make the loudest noise I possibly could. It barely competed with the music, but it helped.

There were already a number of infected following us from inside the hardware store, but with this noisy addition, they began to file out in great numbers. There was an amazing number of them; a group of survivors must have holed up and slowly succumbed. It took them around 15 seconds to catch up to us, and Zoic was ready, setting them on fire immediately. We did this for around 30 seconds before the situation caught up with us. We had turned a mostly harmless mob of infected into a faster flaming mob of infected, with no discernible flight plan.

We hopped into the bed of the truck as it was the only high ground available. If they got close, we shot them, but otherwise, we let them burn out. We had only lit half of the mob on fire to start with, but in their random, anguished flailing they had managed to set the other half on fire, accordingly.

It took half of an hour for the last one to fall, and we headed into the hardware store once more. Zoic kept her flamethrower handy for lighting and torching as necessary. I emptied the entire seed rack into a wheelbarrow from aisle 7, and also a propane torch, a nail gun, and a number of other necessary items. We only found one more infected inside, but he was missing both legs, so he was not making good time. I place a boot firmly on his skull and brought his crawling to an abrupt end.

We grabbed several trees from the outdoor supply also. Might speed things along.

On the way out, we found a leg.

Placing everything in the bed of the truck, we headed home triumphant.

Most of today was spent burning things. Setting fires has lost a little bit of it’s fun now that: a. one is usually burning the dead, b. burning the living dead, or c. burning houses or cars that contain either or both.

I used to be something of a firebug in high school…not like arson or anything, just burning lots of junk in the desert. For most of my life, fire hasn’t been of much use in Arizona. You’re hardly ever going to set a fire to keep warm, but now it’s one of the most clean (for you) and pleasurable ways of killing infected.

Today we were looking for supplies in storage around some of the fields near the highways. It’s nice to walk on highways because you can see anything that’s interested in eating you far before it gets close enough to bite you. Some of the fields are still okay, but most of the ones we went through had some dead bodies lying around. It was really miserable to walk through them. I’m probably going to have to design a new hierarchy of what is truly miserable according to the new standards. We avoided corn fields like a plague. There could be a house full of ammo, and guns, and food, and a television, but if it was in the middle of a corn field, zombies could have the whole place for all I care. Corn fields are I-hope-I-don’t-die-in-a-fucking-cornfield-after-all-of-this-surviving-the-apocalypse-shit miserable. The sheds weren’t that bad. I went through them and Rok guarded outside just in case.

There was a really scary moment though when a body fell through the ceiling of one of the shacks. Apparently it had a little attic on top; someone offed themselves up there and the rotting floorboards fell through. I thought it was the other kind of dead body and fired once into it on the way down, but I heard two shots. Rok had shot the body through the window too. The guy was completely motionless; usually zombies either twitch a bit or have full on crazy spasms when they’re still, you know, working, but this guy was completely still. I turned him over with my foot. He’d been dead for a long while. One could classify this as why-can’t-I-be-checking-out-attractive-guys-instead-of-staring-at-this-decomposing-face-like-a-normal-twenty-year-old…miserable. There were some fresh wounds now, Rok got the head, I got the chest. Damn. I didn’t tell him that though when he was leaning through the glass.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

I looked up at the hole in the ceiling; it looked promising, so I went up to see if there was anything of use. I thought maybe guns or something heavy, but I found cans of gasoline, long matches, lighter fluid, kindle, pretty much everything flammable. I put them in boxes and brought them down to Rok.

When I moved all the stuff away from the back though I found a flamethrower curled up in the corner in good condition. It’s beautiful and perfect, and it only has one or two little problems keeping it from working. Rok said it might be a waste of time to fix it and thinks it’s a lazy weapon, but he’ll change his mind when I get it working. We took all our new stuff back to our place. I’ve been thinking of all the different uses we have for it. Burning dead bodies, of course, setting fire to zombies and letting them burn to ashes, making a big fire for a distraction or to scare them away from us, and cooking food or maybe making hot drinks like tea. Since we have the extra materials, we can probably spare some coffee or tea or something. That could be nice and normal.

The school was empty when the infection hit. That was good news. Otherwise, we’d be clearing out undead children, which is horrible. Even when they’re trying to eat your face off, you want to help them find their mommy. There were one or two serious threats. We dealt with them quickly. I’m not sure if they were groundskeepers, or if they wandered on the lot, but there were only a handful. Fortunately for us, the area is walled off, and we only need to patch a few spots. We did some test digging. It’s gonna take a while, for sure. We’ll need to get to the hardware store soon for all of the necessary pieces. We’ve considered burning the infected on the field. It might be too much work, and I’m not sure that would help the terroir of the produce. And we’d know what we were eating. There is something to be said for being economical and survival-minded, but we have to make sure we don’t go crazy, also. I think that’s almost more important. What difference does it make if I survive if I’m too crazy to rebuild things. Zoic is useful for keeping me in check that way, because I’m not sure what I would do if left by myself for too long. I know what I was doing before, and I’m probably better off now.

The school was haunting in the way that it had basically not been touched. The kids were on break, the teachers were home with their families, the place was recently cleaned. No one tried to hole up there either, which seems odd. I guess I would hate being stuck in an elementary school, too. That’s why we don’t spend much time inside. There wasn’t much to salvage. The cafeteria had some good cooking stuff, and big cans of food. Also, some stuff that had gone off, which we put in our new composter. And by composter, I mean pile in the corner. The groundskeeper’s shed had some good stuff for farming, and the classroom next to the greenhouse had some seeds, but we’d need more. As for the greenhouse itself, it was small and not much use except for educational purposes. It was mostly overgrown by now, and not with edible stuff, but we were able to get some fresh tomatoes, which was nice. Hadn’t had those in a while. Tomorrow, we start the hard work, I think. I guess it’s all hard. We’re planning on painting a mural on the walls, and pretty much everywhere else.

We are now close to a school. We picked out the place a while ago when we were doing some searching for solar panels. Google Earth hasn’t updated in a while, but the last update has the information we need. The school had been given a grant to start some green initiatives. While recycling doesn’t help us much now, there are solar panels on nearly every building. It makes it a good place to set up in the event that the power ever turns off, which seems inevitable. There’s also a greenhouse and a field. Let me explain. While the field is currently rocky and barren (some grass), it has the potential to be much more. With a little effort, Zoic and I can return to this country’s frontier farming roots. Neither one of us knows anything about farming, but we figure it won’t take us that long to learn, and we need to think about what to do when the food runs out anyhow. So it’s a project that will take some time. We’ll give you those updates as they happen.

So, you might be thinking, what goes into making a house safe. I’m guessing you’ve got some skills of your own by now, if you’re surviving, but you might also want to know our secrets.

Securing a house usually starts first thing in the morning. We moved all of our stuff over and got to work. The first thing, obviously, is picking a house that has the right kind of support. Brick. Arizona is known for its stick, styrofoam, and stucco construction, but those houses are immediately out of the question. You need something with the built in ramming resistance. Next up, you need metal bars. Zoic and I took apart a number of fences in our day. Then you bolt the fence pieces around all of the windows. It’s that kind of neighborhood. There are window bars in stores, but we haven’t really come across any yet. Bolting the bars on the windows is an all-day process. You have to secure every window, and some houses have really big ones. The walking dead don’t really grip things. That’s not true in all cases, but for the most part, you don’t have to worry about them pulling on your bolts. They just push on them. Once the bolting process is done, the first thought you have is, “well now that that’s done, I think we can consider ourselves safe enough for the night” and then you head to sleep. It doesn’t work though. There’s one more thing that is critically important. Cutting holes. No matter how cozy and warm, or completely exhausted you feel, you won’t let yourself fall asleep knowing that you might be eaten in the night.

You might be thinking to yourself, why would I cut a hole after I’ve just patched all of those up? They’re different holes. They go up and out of the house. The day the infected figure out how to climb on top of houses, we’ll be in trouble, but it hasn’t been a problem yet, and we usually cover them. So we find the most likely room for us to be cornered in and we saw a hole in the ceiling. It’s usually the middle of the night at this point. Having that hole cut, we place a ladder underneath that will remain there at all times. Ah, it is now time for bed. Having set our heads down for another minute, it becomes urgently important to cut another hole. Yes. What happens if the first hole is no good? What happens if instead of getting cornered there, that’s where they come from. What if we can’t get out. Now it’s important to cut another hole and set up another ladder. Now, every time I got to take a piss, I have to stand just to the left of the toilet, because there’s a giant ladder in the bathroom.

At this point, we’ve made the coffee and the commitment. The next step is hiding weapons everywhere that we might need them. This includes guns and blades and blunt objects and flammables, which are probably the most important.

Furniture goes up against the doors as full anxiety sets in.

Work lights go up on the roof in case we need to make a late night escape.

Maps are drawn.

Plans are made.

Food stockpiles are checked.

And then, it appears that there is nothing left to do, at least not in the dark. Blankets are laid in the center-most room of the house, and shifts are assigned until the final preparations can be made.

Then, we wake up in the early afternoon. The shifts didn’t work. The bolts held. The escape holes were unused. The weapons were exactly where we left them. Outside, in the bright afternoon sun, at most, one infected walks aimlessly through the neighborhood. He and his companions do not know where we are or what we are doing. Zoic shoots him in the head just to be safe, as we park cars in each direction down the street, and one in the alleyway. Traps are set in the yard. We’ve considered digging trenches, but it’s never made it that far.

The refrigerator is stocked with a month’s worth of food.

Then it finally starts to feel safe. Then the “I’m too cool to let the apocalypse bring me down” attitude comes back. Then we feast, and then we sleep for sixteen hours.