Day 1: I Can Change

"I Can Change" - LCD Soundsystem

I didn’t know how it started.  No one ever does.  I had my suspicions.  A lifetime of horror movies and X-Files had bred in me a healthy sense of cynicism and mistrust.  A cover-up behind every corner.  I always suspected the zombie apocalypse sprung from any number of diseases that seem to pop up every year, only to disappear just as soon as they showed up.  SARS.  Swine flu.  Avian flu.  And so on.  Every time I heard about a new disease, only to never hear of it again after a few months, I always suspected a massive government cover-up.  “It’s zombies,” I always thought.  I knew it was zombies.  I was usually laughed at, of course. 

But this time, there was no cover-up.  There couldn’t be.  It spread too fast.  I wanted to go to everyone who doubted me and say, “I told you so.”  But they had probably already turned and were currently coming for me at their slow, shuffling pace. 

I had lived by myself for years.  I could tell the story of how I got to this point, but that’s a boring story, perhaps better lost.  Suffice it to say my days were mostly spent at home playing video games.  I used to be reasonably thin, but those days had long since abandoned me.  I joined a gym, but I never went.  I bought running shoes that were used twice.  My relatively thin, 6 foot frame had filled out to 250 pounds before I even knew what hit me.  I always had good intentions to go out and exercise, but those good intentions usually lost out to McDonald’s and Black Ops.    

But then the zombies came, and left me with no choice.

I lived in a pretty populated city just outside of Cincinnati.  I had no car, because I didn’t really need one.  My job (a desk job, naturally) was easy to get to via public transit.  Which, as it turns out, saved me during the first wave.  Everyone knows that trying to get out the city via car during  a zombie outbreak is death.  The roads are jammed, and the people trapped in cars are easy pickins for the undead.

It’s also common knowledge that heading north is the smart bet.  As it gets colder, zombies freeze, thus making it easier to kill and/or outrun them.  A zombie is slow on its best days.  If it gets cold enough, they’ll freeze completely.  When I figured out what was going on, I ran outside my apartment and started watching the roads.  Within a few hours, I-75 North was jammed with cars.  I can only assume each one was packed with people saying, “Canada or bust.” 

Not me, though.  I figured it was cold enough where I was.  I could even venture a little further south and still have cold enough winters to freeze zombies.  I didn’t need to go to Canada.  All I needed was a place away from civilization (simple math says that fewer people equals fewer zombies, so somewhere in the country was ideal).  Luckily for me, I knew a perfect place.  It was about a two hour drive south.  I wasn’t sure how long that would take me on foot, but I would just have to find out. 

This would also help me to avoid traveling among large groups of people.  I knew that, in many cases, humans are a larger threat than zombies.  By traveling south, I would be going against the majority of people.  I would be like a salmon.  A fat salmon.  A fat salmon trying to outpace the undead.  I figured there was a chance of running into hordes of zombies coming in my direction, but I decided that was preferable than having them follow me.  If I could dodge the oncoming waves of zombies coming at me, I could just slip in behind them and avoid most of them.  I’ll admit that it wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was a plan, which is all that mattered to me at that moment.  I needed to make quick decisions, and I needed to stick with those decisions.  The zombies would be here soon, and I didn’t want to be trapped in an apartment. 

In The Battery, Ben likens himself and Mickey as sharks.  “If we stop moving, we die.”  A lot of other movies seemed to be on his side.  Night of the Living Dead – the film that birthed the modern zombie – showed us this.  As did the opening scene of 28 Weeks Later.  I could go on and on.  And, while I believed I would be able to survive in the right house, my cramped apartment was not that house.  If I didn’t get out before the zombies began descending on me, I wouldn’t be leaving alive.

So I grabbed my backpack and filled it with any supplies I thought I might need.  Canned food.  Water.  Rope.  Travels With Charley.  And so on.  I tied a sleeping bag (good to 40-below-0) on the bottom.  I grabbed a crowbar and my Louisville Slugger on the way out the door (the crowbar slid easily into my backpack, allowing me a hold a weapon at all times and still have another hand free, as well as giving me easy access to a secondary weapon).  Finally – and perhaps most importantly – I grabbed my iPod and headphones.  If I were going to survive this, I would need my music to keep me motivated and sane.

I opened the door and took one long, last look around.  I was leaving my life behind.  And I didn’t really think I minded that much. 

I turned out the door and laughed.  “Looks like I’m finally going to start exercising.”  And all it took was the end of the world to motivate me.

"Faithful Heights" - Night Beds

If you have any songs for me to add to my playlist, please let me know in the comments.  My goal is to find as many songs as possible that I can run to, but give off a kind of creepy vibe to them.  But, really, any running song will do.