We All Fall Down

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

We All Fall Down

By Plot Roach

I consider the measure of civilization of a place and its people by the amount and quality of painkillers available to the common man. Hot water is nice, essential for a good tea or a luxurious bath. Soap, also good for said bath as well as keeping things like infection and germs at bay. But a good painkiller is an optimum tool to keep in your pack when facing the end of the world.

Everyplace I go, I kick in the windows of abandoned shops, homes and drug stores to fill up on wonderful little things like Ibuprofen, Naproxen Sodium, Acetaminophen and their cousins. I stock up on antidepressants and antibiotics as well, they come in handy on the road. Sometimes for trade with other Breathers, sometimes for myself when things get a bit too hairy.

There’s two kinds of people left on the face of the planet: Breathers (the uninfected, run of the mill human) and Shamblers (semi undead humans who crave flesh like a diabetic loves chocolates). Of the two, I have found the Breathers to be more dangerous, simply because I know a Shambler only wants to eat my flesh. The last scraps of humanity, fighting for survival, will do anything to anyone who gets in their way. In fact I nearly got killed once over a package of rancid beef jerky. And I can tell you that it wasn’t my worst day by far while walking the road.

I keep a few weapons handy, not nearly so much for the Shamblers as for the humans that get out of hand and the occasional feral dog that wants to take a bite out of my ass. Guns are too loud, and there’s always some jerk ready to fight me for it and then try to use it on me. I’ve carried baseball bats and golf clubs, which I found were too awkward when trying to lug around the wilderness. A crossbow might work, if I could aim worth a crap. And I was always afraid I would cut off my own leg by mistake while trying to wield a machete or other long blade. So my weapon of choice is a good old Craftsman wrench about the size of my forearm. It's lightweight enough, has a pronged end and a blunt end and doesn’t need to be reloaded or sharpened. And with a world filled with sporting goods stores and pawn shops filled to the brim with guns and ammunition, who the hell would want to mug me of a wrench?

When people dropped liked flies and then began to writhe like worms, was when I came into my own so to speak. When I’m around, Shamblers tend to drop to the ground. Like those pygmy goats that faint when they get too stressed. One minute they’re headed in my general direction, moaning and slavering for human flesh. Then they get within ten feet of me and their eyes roll back into their heads (kind of hard to tell unless you’re up close since the white of their eyes looks a lot like the white cataracts death brings to a corpse) and then they flop down like a pile of wet laundry.

It’s not permanent, though. It takes a good sized Shambler about two hours to recover and take back to its feet. I know this because I’ve gone back to look for the downed corpses and found none. And since no Shambler eats it own, and animals will not feed off the corpse, it only stands to reason that the corpse moved on in its own time and on its own feet, or knees, or stubs…

I tried for a while to kill everyone of them that I brought down, but in the end I spent more time killing the things than trying to keep myself alive. So it was a choice of letting them be or dying myself. I made my choice and I live with it.

I used to have this effect on other things back when the world was “normal” and the dead didn’t walk about trying to munch on the living. I could stop a Ouija Board just by walking into a room. It was kind of a buzz kill at Halloween parties. And it didn’t matter whose company I shared, if they suffered from epilepsy or multiple personality disorder, I flipped the switch on them within ten minutes. It’s not something I can control, or trust me, I would have turned it off long ago. And it earned me the nickname EMP (as in electro magnetic pulse).

Nicknames mean a lot when traveling the road, they often say more about you than your real name ever did. I once met a man so in love with his truck that he called himself Ford, only to have to abandon it when the car broke beyond a simple fix and he traded it for a Ram. Others come by the name of Doc, Bullets, Hunter and Cook. I am EMP and probably will be until the last human expires on this little planet of ours.

My skill for downing the dead, even temporarily, comes in handy for raiding small places of food and supplies. As far as I can tell the dead have no use for stale Twinkies, penicillin and gasoline. So I go in, take what I want as the Shamblers take a rest, and trade it to people I pass along the way.

I’ve tried bonding with people, and becoming one of the pack. But it always ends up the same. Either someone I care about goes and gets themselves eaten before I can take care of all the Shamblers in the area, or else people look to me as a freak worth caging and exploiting for their own profit.

I have never been, and I will never be just a normal human being. That’s not to say that I don’t socialize whenever I can. For to live in this world, or what’s left of it, like a hermit would make me no better than a Shambler myself. And hell, even they travel in packs on occasion.

Last week I bumped into a man, named Speed, who decided to travel a bit with me as I headed to the next city to pillage what I could. He was about five years my junior and aching like hell to prove himself in this new world. He was lean and wiry. And I could tell from the color of ink in his tattoos that he had spent a fair amount of time in prison before the collapse of modern civilization. We spent a few hot and heavy nights together. Like I said, I distrust humans -but I still have my urges. And he was all whispers in the dark of “ooo baby, I’ll be with you forever. You’ll be my girl and I’ll watch over you.” followed by the inevitable: “But why do I need to wear a condom?”

And why is it, even at the end of the world, surrounded by zombies and bloodthirsty marauders, that a man will try and do anything to get out of wearing a condom? I explained that I didn’t want to die of gonorrhea in a world ruled by zombies. And that until I could reach a ’civilized’ place, I didn’t want to get pregnant either.

So he started in on this long story about how the next city has all the good perks, like hot water, soap and self sustained farming. And I tell him that unless they have a fully trained, thoroughly stocked anesthesiologist, there will be no love without the rubber glove. Under no circumstances am I having a baby without an epidural. Rule number one in my book, civilization equals painkillers and plenty of them.

So the next day we head off on a side trip, raiding one of the smaller shops in search of food and condoms. And like clockwork, the Shamblers make an appearance. To his credit, he puffed himself up and strode forward with his weapon in hand to be a “man” and protect me. When I told him what I could do, his didn’t believe me. So I showed him. I walked forward to the first group and mumbled a little nursery rhyme, “Ring around the Rosie”. By the time I get to “We all fall down”, the Shamblers have all hit the dirt and I can proceed as usual. I know it’s a little ironic, what with the rhyme being based on another plague that nearly wiped out mankind, but it’s got a good sense of timing between when the dead are walking toward me and when they’re busy eating dirt. When I called Speed to my side, he looked like I’d kicked his puppy or something. He made the excuse that we should split up to cover more ground, so I wasn’t surprised when he disappeared the first chance he got. I should have known with a name like Speed that he wasn’t one for staying around.

So I gathered what I could for supplies, knowing that I can trade what I don’t want in the next town. I felt a little down about my predicament and self prescribed a few pills and a stiff drink. Like I said: I have never been, and I will never be just a normal human being. Eventually the Shamblers will fall apart and meet their final death. The Breathers meet their end in the jaws of the Shamblers and at the ends of each other’s weapons. If I don’t overdose myself one night in a drunken stupor, get killed by my “fellow man” or get chewed up by a wild animal, I might be the only human on the planet left to die of old age. In any case, the rhyme is closer to the truth than anything else. Eventually, we will “all fall down.”