We Live in Water by Walter Jess

Author:Walter, Jess [Walter, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780062099204
Amazon: 0061926620
Goodreads: 15818259
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: 2013-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

2

EVERYONE HAS an opinion about when it all went to hell: this war, that epidemic, the ten billion people threshold, the twelve, this environmental disaster, the repeated economic collapses, suicide pacts, anti-procreation laws, nuclear accidents, terrorist dirty bombs, polar thaws, rolling famines—blah blah blah, it’s getting to where you can’t watch the sim-tweets without someone saying this is the end of the world or that—genetic piracy, food factory contaminations, the Wasatch uprising, Saudi death squads, the Arizona border war. Animal extinctions. Ozone tumors. And, of course, the so-called zombie drug.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe. That maybe it’s no different now than it ever was. Maybe it’s ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you’re alive for a while, and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn’t it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet?

Yes, we’ve ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we’re always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we’re getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we’ve got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely—the statistics say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning—a person.

But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.

All I’d asked was that it be better managed.

But four days after the Starbucks-Financial incident, Apocalyptics began protesting Starbucks-Financial headquarters and the company announced the complete suspension of its zombie retraining program, which got the Hypo-ETE activists and support groups going again about the 60 percent zombie unemployment rate. Then, worst of all, some vigilantes came to Seattle from the country and killed a nineteen-year-old zombie girl with an antique hunting rifle, shot her outside a club and left her body outside a Starbucks-Financial.

All because I’d wanted better service.

The dead zombie girl was all over the news-tweets. I couldn’t stop staring at her photo. Her ashen-white skin glistened in the blue light. Of course it wasn’t Marci; it looked nothing like her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my old girlfriend. I sat that night in our apartment on Queen Anne Hill, staring at the results from my full body scan, the doors and windows double-locked, low music playing, and I wondered if things might have been different.

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