THEY ARE COMING COCO ST. GEORGE
Y
ou knew it all along. Ever since your first neighbors showed the early symptoms of contagion, you’ve been waiting for this day. And it’s finally here. You go through the house, making sure all windows and doors are securely locked. You are so used to doing this, the task is completed in a few minutes. You also make a quick check of the pantry. How’s your food supply? Cans, bags, bottles… they seem enough for a few weeks more if you use them sparingly. You pause to remember how you got most of this food. That was an epic battle! Apparently, the bodega down the street had been stocked shortly before the outbreak, because you found everything you could ask for. You grin. Oh, simpler times! All you needed to fend off your enemies back then was a baseball bat to crack open their skulls. They walked so slowly you didn’t even need to run from them. You could calmly walk to them, wielding your baseball bat, mentally calculating the height you’d need to swing it at to hit their skulls, and— wham! Yes, in the first few days and weeks you kept a tally, remember? How many? You can’t remember. You stopped counting at more than 300. What was the point? Everybody expected somehow, some scientist, some pharmaceutical company would come up with a cure, a vaccine of sorts, that would stop the ever-growing contagion and save the human race from extinction. And sure, they did produce a vaccine. In fact, some months after the first detected outbreak, several vaccines from different companies and countries were vying for the market. What was at stake was huge, of course: the very future of humankind. But also, substantial business, as the goal was to vaccinate the entire human population.
THEY ARE COMING
But along with the solution came the people who compounded the problem. Citing obscure and unverifiable sources, they claimed the whole outbreak was a hoax schemed by Big Pharma in order to reap huge profits and, at the same time, to control the population through some mysterious and diminutive chip allegedly embedded in the vaccine. How that chip was supposed to work was something they never talked about, much less explained. But hundreds of thousands of people, millions even, refused to get vaccinated. They were, of course, the first to get infected. The first to spread the virus as they bit other unvaccinated people. The first to become living dead. As was to be expected, the virus mutated, and the new strains proved immune to the first vaccines. New vaccines came about, and new strains appeared in a war of attrition whose outcome was clear from the beginning. You hear a noise outside, on the street, and dare to take a peek through the shutters of a window on the ground floor. A herd. Yes, it was inevitable. The successive mutations of the virus have made them a tad smarter. Not smart-smart, just enough to walk faster— some even can run now —and to realize they are better off in big numbers. How good you have become at calculating their numbers! How many are there? You look at the width and length of the parade and somehow your brain comes up with a number: 120. They are fast walkers; it would be impossible to take down all of them. You’d need an automatic gun for that. And ammunition. Lots of ammo. No, it’s better to lay low and wait for the herd to walk past your house. You decide to go upstairs and try to take a nap. Falling asleep with a herd marching in front of your doors proves to be harder than you thought. With your PHOTOS: COCO ST. GEORGE
