Deadline

We took a tour of the government zombie holding facility on Alcatraz today.

A lot of people don’t like having it there, even though it’s been scientifically proven that Romero was wrong about at least one thing: Zombies can’t survive without oxygen. Since they’re too uncoordinated to swim, and they don’t know how to operate boats, if there were ever an outbreak, it would be naturally confined. That doesn’t maer. “Not in my backyard” comes out loud and clear where the dead are concerned.

I looked through the safety glass into the pens, into the dozens of eyes that looked just like mine, and I searched them as hard as I could for a sign of something, anything that would tell me they were still human. There was nothing there. Only darkness.

If I pray for anything tonight, it will be that when Shaun eventually does something insane and gets himself bitten, I’ll be there to shoot him. Because I couldn’t live with myself knowing I’d allowed him to amplify. No one deserves to end up like that. No one.

—From Postcards from the Wall, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 24, 2034