Even in the Post-Apocalypse, it would be ironic and a bit tragic for a community of survivors to live through a zombie attack, only to be overrun by a tribe of cannibals.
Fortunately, such a situation is extremely rare. I make sure of that.
Well. I make as sure as I can be. Which is never 100%. Nobody’s perfect, and things don’t always go according to plan. But one does one’s best.
I like this particular community a lot. They seem very nice. And they do live in an actual abandoned and (now) fortified shopping mall. I find that rather charming.
Frankly, I find the whole human race significantly more charming now that there are a whole lot fewer humans running around. Misanthropy? That’s for me!
Mallville isn’t so bad, though. At least, not from a distance.
As a sidenote, I have a bit of headcanon that this is a case of Life imitating George Romero, which delights me to no end. I suppose what I’m watching could be seen as a symptom of something more sinister. It’s possible that George Romero had an uncanny and perhaps suspicious level of insight into how a real zombie uprising would play out. I mean, nobody knows how all this happened; we sure couldn’t figure it out before the Incident, and we double sure don’t have the technology to analyze it now.
(And that’s assuming that technology even could figure it out; this might be some kind of supernatural phenomenon. And if it’s the latter, then all bets are off. Mr. Romero, are you out there somewhere? And did your angry ghost do this as a punishment for some of the shakier remakes of your later films? Because if so, that is even more enchanting, if you ask me. (Not that people ask me about things in general. They didn’t before, and they don’t really do so now. Plus ça change, and all that.)
If I were really analyzing this in depth, which I am, life in the Mall is a little bit less like Cinema, and a little more like one of those old-school zombie-survival video games, back in the days when our understanding of the cosmos seemed to make some kind of, and in the midst of what claimed to be rational order, we somehow chose to immerse ourselves in impossible horrors for fun.
(Hm. Even after all this time, I need to remind myself that that distinctions between lost technologies are a luxury, and some people, especially the younger ones, only grow irritated if you reference that stuff. I’ll leave it all in, partly because we’ve gone back to the days when rewinding a cassette made it much too easy to overwrite things you intended to keep. (In a minimal-electricity, zero-Internet world, analogue still sometimes makes you miss some of the conveniences of digital.)
(Besides: If I’m listening to this for myself, in order to keep myself company in the Wasteland, I use this moment as a reminder to modernize my speech and leave out inconvenient details from Before. And if I’m not the one playing this back, then ask whoever’s doing it for you to explain what I’m talking about. If they can use a tape recorder, then they probably know the rest of my references, plus it almost certainly means that I am dead, and I don’t care if you are offended. I mean, I care even less than I would have when I was alive, which would, itself, been a vanishingly small amount by any reckoning.
Shopping malls tend to be resource-management challenges. They foster a significant sense of community, different from taking over part of a ghost town. The stores of a mall were designed to give the impression of a slightly idealized version of what we used to think of as “daily life”. You can’t get much more indoors and artificial than a candle shop whose wares use an exotic blend of chemicals to emulate fragrances which are otherwise impossible to capture at all. But they do capture those fragrances, and soon after, you, as well. Between the atmosphere of the wax and the carefully-chosen colors and decor, they work hard to make you feel a little bit like you are in a crisp wintry Wonderland, or pastoral country in early spring, or perhaps celebrating some seasonal holiday.
Thus it is that the person assigned to live in that niche has a very practical job: that of providing a much-needed light source…but in a wistful environment, one which reminds some of days which are very long past. It’s good to assign that place so either someone very pragmatic, who will get right down to business on trying to figure out how the hell candles are actually made and if we can make some…or to someone very dreamy, who will carefully store a small, clever little horde of nonessential flamelets and, as ‘evening’ rolls around, will touch flame to some particular precious candle and telling stories by its glow. In a world where Madness and suicide run rampant, the dreamer is every bit as useful an investment as the pragmatist. Not everyone realizes that.
(I am lucky. Like most successful entrepreneurs, I am able to live out some of my dearest wishes with very little compromise. But I am alone in my field. As I am alone everywhere, really.)
The whole thing is a series of non-trivial choices. Do give your sporting good stores to the former coaches and the jocks, that they might (hopefully) increase the general athletic health of your tribe? Or do you give those sprawling places to your Warriors, to train and run amok and (if possible) adapt old tools and articles of gameplay into usable weapons? (Have you considered that the lowly bat is the go-to weapon of zombie apocalypses everywhere?) …and no, your athletes and your warriors are not necessarily the same people. Both occupations involve strong spirits, and strong bodies, if possible. But the instincts which make a coldly calculating tactician, in this particularly cruel version of reality, are actually best found among your geniuses and your psychotics. Assuming there is any difference between the two, or ever was to begin with.
This particular tribe has been lucky of late. A small group of academics were led to believe there’d be safehaven, and even value for their knowledge, if they fled to this place. They did so, and found both these things to be quite true. There was a certain rejoicing. A bit later on, a crazy but ultimately too-small biker gang heard there were easy pickings at this mall, and they could make a killing. The pickings were not easy, and they were killed. But the tribe was able to make much use of their gear.
It’s amazing how much weight people will put into a short, handwritten note in a mostly-illiterate culture.
The Mall’s survival is not just luck, of course. It never is, with the worthwhile ones. More than a few tribes had good fortune, but not the ability to purvey that into long-term survival. You wouldn’t believe how many Supermarket employees turned out to be good at “eating stuff that was in the supermarket when everything went to hell”…and not a whole lot more. The big supply of food led to an early rush of followers, and an early rush of followers led to better defenses than those enjoyed by smaller or less obviously-useful outposts.
But very few among them displayed the leadership, the kind of strategic thinking which would enable them to survive more than the first or second wave of hungry challengers. (And the challengers did come, and they were so hungry)
(To be fair, this isn’t a reflection on supermarket employees in general. The primary survival indicator for most people, post-Incident, seems to have been an early understanding that the world had changed in fundamental ways, and nobody was coming to save you, and wherever and whoever you were, you needed to start work on saving yourself ASAP pronto right now. In almost every case, this meant leaving wherever you were, and getting somewhere significantly more defensible. Supermarkets are, by design, big giant boxes, simple squares or rectangles. You have perhaps two concrete walls, then big windows and doors on one side, huge loading bays in the other. Malls are intended to distribute a very large crowd, disperse it, set it to wandering through endless halls of consumery goodness. Supermarkets are meant to herd people in and out rapidly, buying as they go.
Zombies could do a direct frontal and a direct rearward assault, and catch the inhabitants like, well, like supermarket employees in a big trap with two entrances and no way out except through the howling, stomach-growling undead.)
Malls, obviously do have lots of ways in, and lots of windows, but they also have lots of defensible space, and lots of stuff inside for creating makeshift barricades, traps, outposts. What you make of it really depends on you. That’s another reason I like malls, they tend to attract people who recognize the need to take a couple of risks. That’s a very American spirit, I think. Not that there’s an America, or any other countries, these days. Still.
Malls can be defended, once you do something about all those windows and those big glass doors. But they can’t feed you initially. You are going to have to forage and scavenge and maybe, if you are particularly resourceful, get way the hell out to somewhere you can acquire seeds or seedlings, and maybe start growing something your descendents can get their teeth around.
Malls are also relatively suburban. The very dense population centers, like cities, relied a whole lot on specialization of labor. You need to move a lot of provisions in and a lot of garbage out to keep most of your people healthy. And when that stops, let’s just say that situations… deteriorate. In every possible sense of the word.
(As an aside, you know what else did really well, as a “This is my new-world fortress” culture? Old school bowling alleys. No, really, the big ones, the sprawling aircraft hangar types that were built in the 1950s, when credit was loose and Fred Flintstone was a role model. You can laugh at those joints if you like, but the regulars who would show up three times a week to bowl a few frames, or get beered up at the bar with a couple other regulars, they formed close-knit communities faster than just about anybody.
Given that the bowling alleys which survived up to the Incident were a motley medley of very different people, from the older white guys who had been coming there since they were knee-high, to the tough young Latino kids who liked the pool tables, to the roller derby girls who came in for the slightly ironic aesthetic and stayed because nobody looked at them funny. It’s almost enough to renew your faith in humanity.
Assuming you were the kind of person who had faith in humanity begin with, which I certainly did not.)
(I don’t know everything, I just get around. You know what I wonder about a lot? Basements. Some of them were already bug-out bunkers. A lot of them just stored a ton of food. I could see people making entire lives hiding out in basements, coming out at careful intervals for necessary supplies, slowly improving their living conditions over time. Then again, I can also imagine that literally every single basement in a hundred mile radius has been completely wiped out by persistent zombie hordes just scratching away at back doors until eventually they caved in. It could go either way. I will tell you this, I am not about to go scrounging through any parts of suburbia to try to figure out which way it went.
I don’t want to die now, when almost everyone else has done me the courtesy of dying in my stead.
Ahhh.There is a reasonable amount of activity at the Mall now. It’s almost a parody of what it was like when civilization was up and running. They’re lively, and a little pissed. Maybe sad, I’d say. They lost some good people in that zombie attack. You always do, when the Living Dead come in force. They’ve also acquired a few new recruits, former independants who took shelter within the roomy confines of what used to be a center of Mercantile Delight.
A few of that latter group are warriors, but most are just very green. I think the mall could stand off another serious attack, but they would take heavy losses. Not insurmountable ones, though. At least, that’s my estimate. A little more sadness, a little more practicality, and perhaps one or two steps less-close to re-establishing the systems of the Old World, should they be so inclined.
They’re a little jumpy. That’s probably a virtue; if the Zombie Apocalypse isn’t a series of jump-scares, then media lied to me all my life. (I mean, it did. It deserved its gruesome death. But that’s not the point.)
It doesn’t help let someone keeps hitting their outside walls with strange explosive devices. (Well, they’re not all that explosive. Model rockets. But not everyone knows what those are, and they’re particularly hard to identify when they’ve crushed themselves against your walls.) No damage done, but the Mallists sure are on the alert.
Good.
Restarting Society is hard. It’s going to be really difficult to get back to where we were. And that’s even if somebody, somewhere, figures out where the zombies come from and what they mean and how to stop them or, at least, how to survive their longterm existence.
But that person won’t be me. I have no idea. The Dead just started coming at us, as if the Universe had begun getting its cues from fiction as opposed to physics.
Maybe fiction’s not as fictional as we thought.
Maybe something like this has happened before. There are a lot of lost cultures out there, a lot of mysteries, a lot of things that were strange and unexplained even back when we had functional orbital surveillance and the ability to house and feed people whose whole job was figuring out the physical world.
(They died as they lived: going “Wait, what the HELL is that?!?“)
Cataclysms happen, and if the human race survives, it gets reshaped.
I never really cared for things the way they used to be. People are not kind. People are not nice. I suppose I have a bone to pick with the (thankfully-vanished-please-do-not-return) former world, where folks pretended to be civilized but were pretty much prepared to skin you and roast you if you didn’t fit in.
And I plan to be literal about that bone pickin’.
The local cannibal tribe doesn’t have a name. Or more specifically, it does, but that name changes every time they change leaders, and they change leaders not infrequently. Their rule is simple. The leader provides protein for the tribe. If they don’t get the flesh of others, then it’s the Provider’s head on the block.
That’s also literal.
If I were civilized, I’d be disgusted. Or maybe I’m just civilized enough to know:
There are far, far worse systems.
The current leader joins me behind my makeshift hunter’s blind, as I peer at the mall through my binoculars. This leader’s name is Sweetbread. That is because he is ambitious, and I am not the only professional whose services he employees; he also works with, of all things, a baker. That baker is part of the tribe, and probably has to be given the difficulty of carting a heavy makeshift oven from place to place, and the challenge of finding ingredients. I am a freelancer myself, working for a couple of the wealthier anthropophages.
The last leader of the tribe thought that I ought to be a member, willingly or otherwise. She imprisoned me when I refused to work for her. The coals under their vast grill were being heated for me soon after, but there was grumbling in the tribe. Sweetbread broke the law when he rose up against her, because technically she was offering meat, but Sweetbread created eloquent and spontaneous new law. “Don’t kill the food that brings better food”.
(You would think that they then consumed the former leader, but she also showed extraordinary legal finesse in advocating willingly, thus setting a heartwarming precedent for longterm survival). “If your meat is best, then you are the Provider.” Now they both train the best and the brightest yong of the Tribe, so that there will be Providers in the future.)
I remember that moment fondly. I was unchained, and I led them in a glorious march towards a certain supermarket of my acquaintance. The tribe agreed that this was excellent sustenance; there was even a little fat, a rare thing these days. (Woe betide those who are too fond of baked goods with a long shelf life, and not fond enough of martial training.)
Now Sweetbread’s Clan has grown, and my services are in high demand. My payment awaits me back in the camp. I will accept their compensation, as well as their lodging, and spend a comfortable few days.
They will not conquer the Mall, but there will be a dozen fresh corpses between Sundown and daylight. And they will be perfectly ripened, just muscular enough, just well-fed enough, just content enough that there will be a minimal amount of bitter adrenaline, despite their sudden and violent deaths. They will be delicious. Because I am the finest farmer of the most prized bacon in this whole godforsaken Post-Apocalyptic world.
I am so respected that the tribe doesn’t even take offense anymore that I will not join them in their feast. It’s rude of me, I know; still, old habits die hard. I like certain individuals, and I admire certain groups of people, sometimes. But in general, I hate Humanity. Even when it’s cooked just the way I like it.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
I put on a convention for Villains every February.
I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!
