theme word "playing" title "apocalypse then" in misc. flash fiction

When the zombies finally arrived, it turned out the movies got a few things right and a lot more wrong. Yes, zombies are the animated dead and yes, they crave the flesh of the living but beyond that, as with most things Hollywood, all the nuance is missing.

First off, zombie don’t have enhanced senses, if anything their perceptions are dulled, what with the rotting organs. They can’t smell the living like a shark smells blood in the water, they’re not hounds, they’re just dead things that happen to still be moving around.

Most importantly, you rarely saw on film what zombies do when they’re not feasting. Which all makes sense, horror movies are about horror but when zombies aren’t eating, they fall into old memories and reenact shallow repetitions of their lives. Teenage zombies dimly rubbing thumbs against anything shaped like a cellphone. Zombie police listlessly beating at human-shaped clods of earth. Zombie business people groaning “buy” at each other eight hours a day.

Every morning, Tricia wakes up in her spacious reclaimed apartment and puts on her torn soiled passing-for-zombie clothes, applies a little make-up to mimic decay and gore then goes out into the city to live her life. The still-human still live their lives and have for years. It was terrifying at first, the fear of getting caught until you realize how little the zombies really understand but the more still-humans she met, the more she got used to it. There were too many zombies to fight back without losing but if the humans made minimal effort to blend in, they didn’t bother them and so they went on living their lives. Tricia is one of six thousand still-humans in Los Angeles surrounded by ten million walking dead. Well, in Santa Monica, they’re more the jogging dead, to be fair.

And they get by. Solar farms outside of town still power things. There’s greenhouses everywhere to supplement old canned goods and rations. The people get together for parties, for churches, for support groups and everything. It is a strange life, but people are anything if not adaptable to any new normal that happens comes along to. You paint up your face, you put on the rags everyone else wears, you groan what they grown now and again to not raise suspicion and… you live your secret life on the inside and at the end of the day with your like-minded people.

Tricia paints frescos all throughout the Los Angeles subway, only slightly more abandoned by the dead than it was by the living. She lives and breathes and plays in the glory abandoned by those reduced to repetitive motion all around her. Her life is complicated and strange, but her paintings are still glorious. She is still glorious.

She learned the thing so many lived by long before the zombies came along: sometimes to get by in the world, the only course of action is blending in by playing dead and then living your life anyway.