prompt: wage, title: the never-ending siege in misc. flash fiction

They’ve lived up there, in those hills, behind their high walls, behind their reinforcements, for as long as anyone can remember. The armed patrols at their periphery, the armored truck deliveries of perishable supplies and newer more deadly weapons and distractions from their dire situation, operating like clockwork in their efficiency and regularity. They’re under siege by monsters, by the contagion of beings they can’t even consider human anymore, but this place is their fortress, their Alamo, their Masada. They will be safe from the touch of the unclean shambling hoard by any means necessary, the power of their Council will protect them, they will live their lives as they have always known them, if it takes burning everything else down around them. They will survive, their culture will maintain, they will outlast, they will prosper if it means the end of the entire world. It is, in their estimation, their holy war and holy right to maintain this way of life.

The problem is that this is not a zombie movie. The problem is that we are the zombies. At least from their point of view. Their fortress is a gated community, their council is the home-owner’s association, their militia an underpaid staff of security guards and any person without the correct amount of savings, without the right ethnicity or religion, without the right attitude for length of grass on their front lawn, we may as well be the contagious walking death. Impure threats to the kind of reality they believe their birthright. If you get within 50 yards, you’re shot on sight, go for the head, it’s Castle Doctrine, and the judge who lives next door will mark them innocent.

They’re afraid of us, so afraid that contact might make them like us wretches down here on the ground. Carriers of that worst disease of all, not being rich. They don’t believe we’ll eat their brains or their flesh, they worry about something far worse, our eating into their largess. They hear us down here, moaning in pain, asking for some slightly-larger crumb of the generational profits we make for them, and this may as well be the scariest movie they have ever seen, “The Night of the Living Wage” in blood-curdling black-and-white tones, no shades in-between for the us-and-them give-and-take of permanent privilege. Oh God, these awful beasts, we terrible needful things, if we go to the doctors, they may only be able to buy two yachts this Christmas. For them, no vampire or Freddy Krueger could ever top that level of ghoulishness.

So they wait up there, cordoned off, armed guards at the gates, terrified of the blood-suckers down at the foot of their Mount Olympus, every moment focused on keeping out the riff-raff, unable to enjoy the fruits of their inheritance, the jewels of their avarice, because there are so many monsters just outside the walls. They have no idea how much the monsters pity that sad ever-frightened life, their metaphoric sort of walking death.