Libertarian Nightmare

Jackson sat on the floor of the old 7-11 and munched on a bag of potato chips.

Convenience stores had become his favorite place to camp out, because there was a good supply of food and while the remains of a supermarket would definitely have had even more goodies, the food there was more likely to be perishable. Besides, here he had access to the old magazines that had once been for sale in the store. That may have seemed like a silly reason for choosing to his hideout, but the fact was that Jackson had reached a point where looking at pictures of women either half or completely naked was necessary to keep himself sane.

Jackson had one other way of keeping himself sane and that was the journal which he now opened and began to scrawl into with his ballpoint pen:

I have lost track of the days. It has been at least a month since I heard about the first zombie attack. As far as I can tell, there are no regular humans, besides me, left within the city limits of Boston. Perhaps, the world. This is not how I wanted my life to be. When I came to Boston to study writing at Emerson college, I had dreams that I would be a best-selling author, living in a nice little apartment by Copley Square while I cranked out my novels n my laptop. I remember my one fear was that I would not be able to meet deadlines because I didn't have the discipline to keep writing every day. Now, I have an almost urgent need to write something with ballpoint and notebook paper, if necessary, but it does me no good. As far as I know every publisher in America has had his brains eaten by those zombies.

,
He sighed and put down the pen. The truth was that writing anything down now made no sense. He shrugged, put the notebook away, and picked up a copy of Playboy magazine. For one perverse moment, he wondered where the beautiful girl gracing its pages was now. Then, he decided that it was better not to think about that.

"Help me!"

The voice made Jackson look up from his magazine. It sounded too human to be real, and for a moment he wondered if he had imagined it.

"Help me!"

It was definitely a woman's voice. Grabbing his shotgun, he ran out into the street.

A girl who looked to be in her twenties was being attacked by two zombies. One had been a tall black man when alive while the other looked like she had been a geriatric woman. "Over here!" Jackson called to the girl.

The girl saw him and began running in his direction. The zombies followed her, but Jackson had his gun ready. He took aim and fired first at the tall black zombie . Luckily, he got a clear shot into the zombie's head, so that it stumbled over lifeless. But the old lady zombie kept coming towards him. He fired another shot, but this one merely went into the zombie's neck causing flesh to go flying into the streets. Jackson waited until the girl was safely at his side, then he started firing indiscriminately at the zombie. The bullets tore at the zombie, but she turned around and stumbled away. Jackson didn't see much point in following her.

As he turned to the girl, he reminded himself to be careful. The girl looked okay, but if one of the zombies had bit her, she would be dangerous. Besides, now that he thought about it, this whole situation was a little bit supicious. Where had this girl come from? He pointed his gun at her. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

She looked at him uncomfortably. "Crystal Davis. I was a student at Harvard, but now I'm just looking for food. Can you please not point that thing at me?"

Jackson couldn't imagine a zombie or even a person that was about to turn into a zombie saying that many words at a given moment, so he put his gun down. Then the girl, Crystal, surprised him by rushing towards him and giving him a bear hug. He couldn't help feeling good about that. Back before the apocalypse, he had not been the sort of guy that girls wanted to hug. "Hey," he said with a smile. "You said you wanted food? There's some in the store."

He led her inside and showed her the chips, sandwiches, candy bars and soda. "This isn't exactly what I was hungry for," she said sadly.

"Well, I hope you weren't expecting pate fois gras," said Jackson sarcastically.

"Of course not," said Crystal. "It's just that I have very special dietary needs--"

"Oh for Heaven's sake!" Crystal was starting to sound like a spoiled princess.

"It's okay," said Crystal. "I'll eat. But I should also bring some food to my friends."

"You have friends?" Jackson had imagined that she was all by herself.

"Oh Yes. I should explain. I was at Harvard when the zombies first started. A group of us students got together with a professor and hid out in Harvard Yard. We were able to maintain a halfway decent quality of life until our food started running low. That's the problem with the zombies. They can eat us, but we can't eat them."

Jackson raised an eyebrow at that last comment. "To be honest," he said, "I never thought about trying to eat a dead zombie. It might not be a bad idea if things ever got really dire."

"Gross!" said Crystal.

"You're right. God knows what kind of viruses they carry."

"I was actually a vegetarian before the zombies came," said Crystal, "I could never eat zombie flesh. Anyway, we decided to venture down here in the hope of finding more food." She paused. "Are you alone?" Jackson nodded. "Well, then you could come with me to my friends. We'll be happy to have you with us."

It seemed like a better idea then staying there by himself for eternity, so Jackson agreed, but as he grabbed his shotgun, Crystal said, "Is that necessary? I hate guns."

"Well, would you rather walk through the streets unarmed with all those things out there?" She didn't answer so they walked into the streets with Jackson's gun at the ready.

There didn't seem to be that many zombies about, so they relaxed and began to talk a little. "What were you doing before the zombies?" asked Crystal.

"I went to Emerson college," said Jackson. "Not as good as Harvard," he said with a laugh.

"That's okay," said Crystal. "I had lots of friends at Emerson. What were you, a Communications major?" (Emerson is a Communications college.)

"Creative Writing." He paused. "Believe it or not, I wanted to be a Horror writer."

"Wow! Were you going to write zombie stories?"

"Maybe. You know, I was actually working on a paper about the differences between zombies and vampires."

"Really?" Crystal looked at him a little uncomfortably.

"Yeah. Well, you may not believe this, but someone once did an academic study of the two and found something very interesting. Zombie stories flourish during Republican administrations and Vampire stories are more popular when there's a Democrat in power."

"You can't be serious--"

"Nope. Think about it. The original Night of the Living Dead came out when Nixon was president. The Frank Langella version of Dracula came out when Jimmy Carter was president. Then, during the Reagan/Bush Senior years, George Romero made two sequals to Night of the Living Dead. Then after Clinton was elected, vampires came back first with the Francis Coppola version of Dracula, then with Anne Rice plus Buffy the Vampire Slayer,. Then when the younger Bush got elected there were more zombie movies like 28 Days and I am Legend. And after Obama got elected, the vampires came back with Twilight."

"Why on Earth would that be?" asked Crystal.

"Well, some people say it's because zombies are sort of conservative and vampires are sort of liberal, so that's what everyone's afraid of. When there's a Republican in office everyone's afraid that the people will turn into a bunch of mindless drones following the leader blindly. When there's a Democrat in power, everyone's afraid that some creepy foreigners will start having deviant sex and turning us into vampires."

"So, Anne Rice was really writing about Bill Clinton's thing with Monica Lewinsky?"

Jackson had to admit that it sounded kind of silly when you put it that way.

The place she led him to turned out to be an old office building near the Park Street T-stop, where Crystal explained that her friends had set up a home base. As they entered the building, Jackson was relieved to see several normal people, most of them college age, but there was one older man in the center of the room. He had a gray beard and piercing eyes. "Greetings," said the man. "I am Professor William Bremerton, Ph.D. in Political Science. Until recently, I taught at Harvard. We are all very happy to find another human. The truth is that we were getting hungry."

Jackson scratched his head. "I'm not sure I follow that. Surely there are abandoned stores in Cambridge where you could get food.

“Yes, well, unfortunately, we need to eat other things.” He sighed. “This all started with the corporations. They kept that lobby on Washington, so that the politicians deregulated to the point where all this happened.”

Jackson tried not to roll his eyes because the truth was that he had never liked big government. At Emerson, he had been a member of the college’s Libertarian club. Still, judging by the nods and affirmations which circulated through the room, these Harvard students all agreed with the Professor, so he decided to pretend he was on their side politically.

“It’s almost nightfall,” called out a girl. “I’m starved.”

Then, Jackson gasped because her teeth had become pointy. As he slowly looked around the room, he saw that so had everyone else’s including the professor’s.”

“Very good,” said the professor. “Hold still, Jackson. It’s dinnertime.”

Author's Note: In case you're wondering, that academic study alluded to by Jackson about the politics of vampires and zombies is a real study published in a real academic journal.