Yes, dear readers, you are going to find out a horrible, awful secret that I have been bearing the last few weeks. I would hide this from the world if I could, but a few other key people know about this already, and so it would come out someday. Someday when I'm running for president it would get spilled to the vile news-media and my deepest, darkest secret would be revealed to the world. And I would have to hide in shame. Flee the country. Change my name, my life, my citizenship. And so I decided it would be better to face up to it now, get it over with, bear my shame to the world.
What is this horrible secret?
Brace yourself.
I will confess.
I have officially become concerned about the security and safety of our country from zombies.
Think I've lost it? Perhaps I have. But it is true, nonetheless...to my everlasting shame.
Allow me to explain.
It all starts with a book. Well, two books. The first book is called
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. This is a practical manual on how to protect yourself in time of zombie attack. A friend of ours got his hand on this and started telling us how to protect ourselves from the zombies. This of course generated all sorts of discussions among the boys of the best ways to kill a zombie, can zombies climb stairs, how fast can a zombie travel, etc.
Us girls shook our heads, laughed, mocked, and basically put up with it.
Perhaps the greatest illustration I can provide of the crazy obsession of these boys is to tell you of my husband's reaction to the fact that we woke up one morning and realized that our garage door had been open all night and anyone could have walked into the house very easily. Did he say something like, "We're lucky we didn't get ____ (fill in the blank: robbed, murdered in our sleep, etc)." No, no he did not. His immediate reaction was, "We're lucky the zombies didn't try and come in. There would have been no stopping them!" Seriously obsessed.
Then the next book appeared:
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War also by Max Brooks (why this man's obsession with Zombie's, I have no idea).
Chris read this book incredibly fast, raved about it, and informed me that I absolutely needed to read this book. He assured me that I would really enjoy it, and it didn't read like a creepy zombie book but more like an oral history book.
After months of his commenting about how I should read this book, I finally caved. It's good for a wife to make her husband happy, right? And it was a little thing. With all the books I read, I might as well read this one book he was dying to share with me. And so one night, I began reading.
I will admit, I was immediately intrigued. The man writes this whole history of a Zombie war (humans against zombies - humans who have been infected by some type of disease which basically makes them undead) from the perspective of a reporter who is doing interviews with people. Which means that he has to tell all these different stories and connect all of these different sections of this make-believe war from a whole slew of different voices. While there are parts of the book that gave me chills to even consider what that would be like to live during, for the most part it was not a scary book. It was just intriguing. He lays out years worth of war through these interviews, provides commentary on politics, ethics, and other such difficult subjects while at the same time giving flashes of emotional, real life, humanity in his work. It's well written enough that I could almost believe this war had actually occured.
There was a night, however, when I knew things had gone too far. I had turned off my light and lay in bed listening to the breathing of my husband and wrestling of the dogs. And as I glanced at our window in our bedroom, I couldn't help but start thinking:
You know, we have a problem. American windows have no burglar bars. They are just screen and then glass. If a zombie attacks, there's no way we could stop it from getting through the windows. And the rest of the house is just as bad. The front door really wouldn't stop anything that determined to get in and our book is a glass sliding door. A zombie could totally break in. And it was at that point that I knew I had gone to the dark side. My self-respect shattered, memories of teasing the crazy boys for the zombie obsession haunting me, I groaned as I realized that I had been sucked into this crazy, zombie-obsessed world. And there was no turning back.
And so there you have it, dear reader. My confession of shame. I have gone to the dark side and am now obsessed with whether or not I could escape and protect my family in time of zombie attack.
