Outnumbered

When the end of the world came around, it wasn’t like it was any big surprise.

At least, not to Calvin. Some people seemed to have been caught off guard by it, considering the abandoned cars with their doors hanging open all over downtown, but he’d seen this coming a long way off. Even if a spur-of-the-moment, unforeseeable, catastrophic, Hollywood-sized apocalypse hadn’t hit, the earth was clearly past its good days. Hurricanes and forest fires left shells of cities in their wake, diseases mutated and spread faster than scientists could cure them, and if that wasn’t killing the human race fast enough for you, you could always pick up an assault weapon and go to a school or a concert and help the extinction along yourself.

But there had been a spur-of-the-moment, unforeseeable, catastrophic, Hollywood-sized apocalypse, starting three days ago. In a way, it felt like God was letting earth off the hook, just a little. Once He saw just how fucked the earth was from every angle, He said, “Oh, all right. You’re all too guilty to enjoy yourselves, but not guilty enough to fix anything you started. Let’s just end it already.” And then, because He knew how much we liked them in our movies, He sent the world one last parting gift: zombies.

The first news reports were tinged with natural incredulity. Was it just a hoax; a controversial new set of advertisements being paid for by Big Cremation? Was Russia trying to distract journalists from their human rights violations by pretending they had a zombie pandemic? But 72 hours and thousands of gruesome, livestreamed attacks later, even the loudest skeptics had shut up and bunkered down if they had access to a bunker, which only the smug doomsday preppers and the one-percenters did.

That wasn’t Calvin’s situation at all, so here he was, wandering the deserted streets of his hometown, a Podunk he’d never managed to move out of. He didn’t pass another soul as he walked. Everyone else had packed up their families and driven west, just abandoning their cars when they ran out of gas. However many thousands of uninfected humans were left on Earth, they were fighting until the very last to save themselves and the ones they cared about.

Calvin didn’t have anything to save, which made his situation easier. He’d never been good at keeping girlfriends and hadn’t tried for a couple of years now. He barely texted his dad since he’d moved to Atlanta with his second wife—he was more than likely dead already, so calling and hashing out their issues now seemed superfluous. At 30, Calvin had had a slew of unfulfilling jobs with different offices that never really took full advantage of the Film, Video, and Photographic Arts degree he was still substantially in debt for. He’d made a reasonable number of friends at each of these jobs, and then lost touch with all of them when he’d moved onto the next one. Now it was the end of all, and he had no life to really panic about losing, so he thought he might as well await its disappointing conclusion in an equally disappointing spot.

He’d buried his mom just under a year ago, and it was only after the funeral that Calvin realized he’d never really known her. His mom had grown up watching protests against racial and gender inequality on tv—too young to join a traveling caravan of war-hating, free-loving hippies, but not too young to imbibe their spirit—and when the ’80’s rolled around and most of the country was willing to overlook the many remaining injustices inside their borders in exchange for a narrower, sun-shinier, Reaganite view of America, Calvin’s mom got to work. She’d volunteered at environmental conservation agencies all through college; she’d fundraised for AIDS research before most of the country was willing to admit a disease killing mainly gay men was a problem. She was the one knocking on your door during election season to remind you to vote; she was the woman you saw outside the supermarket asking if you had a few moments to talk about the bees. She’d headed all the church fundraisers she could get her hands on in Calvin’s youth, and been very active during the PTA uproar over the nutritional value of school lunches.

Calvin hadn’t cared about any of that while it’d been happening. He could remember plenty of occasions from his childhood where his mom had been trying to tell him about her day and he’d cut her off, usually more interested in the video game on the screen in front of him. Listening to strangers praise his mom at her funeral for her care and kindness towards the world hadn’t helped ease his grief the way they’d intended it to. He’d felt a new guilt alongside his already overwhelming heartache for his missed opportunity to get to know this apparent saint of a woman in any other capacity than a dinner-cooking, homework-correcting, money-lending “mom.” That regret had never gone away.

The graveyard wasn’t that far of a walk from Calvin’s downtown apartment. He passed looted grocery stores and gas stations, past his old elementary school with newly smashed windows and one creepy, headless Barbie aesthetically abandoned on the playground. He passed whole sections of town that were now charred and crumbling, like someone had forgotten to turn their oven off when they’d fled, and a housefire had gobbled up all that it could before last night’s rain had put it out. He passed his family’s church, which he personally hadn’t stepped foot in for about eight years, and started up the muddy road that led to Peaceful Pastures Cemetery. It wasn’t raining now, but the sky was still overcast, not a hint of sunshine peeking through despite the fact that it was noon. He wondered if other people found the apocalypse-appropriate weather comforting, or just him. His mother had loved rainy weather that had lasted the whole day through. She’d pop popcorn or let him have his favorite cereal for dinner, and they’d curl up in front of the tv and watch something with a happy ending.

He entered through the open gates of the cemetery and passed all the familiar landmarks. Sometimes he thought he should visit his mom’s grave more; sometimes he knew he was here too often for it to be healthy for him. He stooped down and scooped some withering roses from a nearby grave, walked the 15 feet further to his mother’s tombstone, and sat, cross-legged, setting the flowers down in front of him. His butt was instantly wet and freezing from the dew of the grass. He didn’t care. He waited.

An hour passed, at least. He found himself shivering, but didn’t get up or try to switch his position. In the distance, he heard thunder rumbling. It was going to rain again soon.

It wasn’t much longer before he noticed a different rumbling coming from under the ground. This was less a sound and more a shifting Calvin felt in the seat of his pants. He scooted back a bit, then shakily got to his feet, for the first time feeling anxiety squeezing its way through his stomach.

A hand shot out of the earth.

Calvin watched in paralyzed awe as a movie scene came to life in front of him. The fingers curled into the earth around it and pulled. Seconds later another hand burst from the ground, and soon after that a head and torso appeared, dirt spraying in all directions as it fought its way out of the earth. Calvin was so mesmerized by the one emerging figure in front of him that he completely missed the dozens of graves opening all around him in just the same way, zombies surfacing to surround him on all sides.

What once had been Calvin’s mom got unsteadily to her feet, and he got his first look at her in almost a year. He grimaced. He hadn’t really questioned what his mom would look like after she’d been underground, but the answer wasn’t particularly pleasant. Her eyes were gone, replaced with open indents of off-white skull. The remaining skin around her face was a sickly, bloated black and greenish-yellow, but the bottom left quadrant of her face was just bone. Calvin could see a worm hanging out behind his mom’s teeth.

And yet none of that compared to the smell. Calvin had never much cared for his science classes, especially the ones where you’d had to cut up dead things—he’d once gotten sick just from walking past a classroom where students were dissecting pig fetuses with the door open. Now his mom was the pig fetus. The smell of rotting meat steeped in juices that were not supposed to be on the outside of the body was everywhere. Breathing through his mouth didn’t help; this was a smell you could taste.

Of course he threw up. He turned to the side, bent over, and puked all over the roses he’d stolen from the other grave. For a while, it seemed possible he was never going to stop. Any time he sucked in a breath between heaves, there was that smell again. But eventually his stomach had nothing left to purge, and as he was gasping in the rotten air that slowly—slowly—his body was accepting as the new normal, he became aware of a presence looming over his shoulder.

He turned, straightening up as much as he could. His mom was there, much closer than she’d been before, her eyeless, expressionless face turned towards him.

“Hey Mom.” He panted, swallowing down a last bit of bile. “You know, I had a lot of dreams about what it would be like, seeing you again. I gotta say, this is so much worse than those. Even the nightmares. Even when it was basically like this, with you getting to see what a failure I was as the world crashed and burned around us.” He spit to the side and felt a bit more in control. “Well, if you’re going to eat me, now’s as good a time as any. The only person I cared about making peace with was you, and it doesn’t look like there’s much of you left in there to make peace with.”

His zombie mom cocked her head at him.

“Dragging this out doesn’t help either of us.” Calvin felt his heart beating faster, though he tried to suppress it. He thought that had been a pretty decent last line to leave existence on. He was a little annoyed his mom hadn’t taken the cue and eaten him already. “It’s not like I can go back in time and un-make my decision to come here. It’s not like anybody can go back and decide to do anything that would prevent this. The whole world got screwed up, and we couldn’t fix any of it. We tried. Or, at least…some of us tried.”

As much as he attempted to ignore it, all Calvin could hear was his heartbeat pounding in his chest. He’d come here willingly, with nothing to lose. He didn’t get to be a baby about dying now. He swallowed. “I tried, Mom. For a little bit, I tried to be like you, tried to be somebody who would make you proud. But there’s too much. You get one person to donate to saving the Great Barrier Reef, the next day there’s the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the world has ever seen. I got tired, more tired than I’d ever known I could be. I had to be able to get up in the morning without falling apart. So, I quit caring. I quit trying.” He licked his lips. “I think everybody quit trying. And I’m sorry, I know you would have never quit trying, I know you would have found a way to save the world and done it with a smile, but I didn’t and it’s too late now. So go ahead and eat me; eat the whole world. We’re not good for anything else.”

Calvin’s mom stood in front of him in the black dress she’d been buried in, which—unlike the rest of her—was remarkably intact. A subtle hissing seemed to be escaping from the side of her mouth with no skin, a low, throaty sound that sent a chill through Calvin’s blood. He tried to steady himself by taking a deep breath, caught more of the stench his shallow breaths had just allowed him to get used to, and doubled over again, gagging, at just the same time that his mom lunged in his direction.

Well, this is it, he thought before his mom soared past him. He turned his head and saw her slam into a rotting mass of flesh he hadn’t noticed creeping up behind him. His mom took this other zombie to the ground, and together they landed, swinging decaying, uncoordinated limbs at each other, snapping their teeth and hissing snake-like half-words all the while. It was at this point that Calvin noticed the quiet graveyard around him was crawling with the undead, and that the closest ones all seemed to be looking his way. Without giving himself permission to do so, he sank to his knees beside the vomit-covered roses, shivering uncontrollably.

Calvin’s mom bit into the other zombie’s remaining neck flesh, ripping it out with her teeth and causing her prey to let out an unsettling gurgle of a scream. She backed off, a chunk of skin still caught between her teeth, and the other zombie scrambled away on all fours. The rest of the zombies—the ones who were watching Calvin with what eyes they had left—didn’t advance for the moment.

Calvin barely felt the touch on his shoulder. “I don’t think I want it to end.” He said, his teeth chattering. “It’s too late to save it, but I don’t want it to end.”

His mom sat down next to him, her face unable to form any expression, and yet the act alone was joltingly familiar to Calvin. When he’d been inconsolable in elementary school—when his poor goalie skills had lost his team the game or he’d been yelled at in front of his whole class for talking to Thomas when Thomas had started it—his mother had sat at the edge of his bed and let him cry his heart out into a pillow, and hadn’t said a word until he’d sat up again, sniffling and accepting the tissues she’d had waiting for him. “Now then,” she’d said, “that wasn’t very much fun, was it? But tomorrow can always be better.”

“There is no tomorrow, Mom.” He said, a surprising edge in his voice for the only tofu burger in a room full of hungry vegans. “It’s Armageddon. Basically, the whole world’s dead already.”

His mother reached out and booped his nose. He turned and wiped his face on his shirt sleeve, trying to make it look like he was insulted as a 30-year-old man by the childish booping. Really, he was afraid she’d left some death gunk on his nose.

“So what if I am still alive?” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Stop a zombie apocalypse all by myself? Fight a hopeless battle?”

She put her hand on top of his.

Calvin had sometimes found his mom annoyingly optimistic during her life. When an org she’d volunteered at went bankrupt, when the candidate she’d campaigned for didn’t win, when her tests had come back positive in the worst kind of way, she’d always said there was going to be a better tomorrow. The doctors had had their work cut out for them at the end trying to convince her there wasn’t going to be any tomorrow at all. Though it appeared she’d found a way to have the last laugh there as well.

She was still his mom. She might not look like it anymore, and she might not smell like it, but she’d protected him. She was comforting him the best that she could. She still believed in him, without him ever having to give her a reason to. She was a zombie in the middle of the uprising of an army of undead, and she still seemed to think the world could be saved, or at least that it was worth it to try.

He smiled at his mom in spite of himself, and the constant hissing sound she was making sounded more like humming for a moment. “Well, all right. We can try, I suppose.” He looked around the graveyard. “But, uh…I’ll follow your lead at first. You seem like you know more about this brave new world than I do.”

They stood up together, and with his mom’s protection Calvin was allowed to join the line of zombies marching west—toward what, Calvin had absolutely no idea. But his mom continued to hum beside him, something that sounded vaguely like one of her favorite songs from Broadway’s golden age, and honestly? Calvin felt more alive in that moment than he had in a long time.

As they left the graveyard, it started to rain.