"Who's your favorite zomenby?" Rellek clapped happily.
Dao looked up from his files and gave them a death stare. "Not even a week ago you bit off my ear."
"Not the point. My point is, you don't even know any other zombie who's an enby. I've got to b...
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“Dao! Come here, quickly!”
Until yesterday, the undead population of India had been going about their undead lives just like any other day. But twenty-four hours later, the roads were eerily quiet in South Kolkata's undead localities of Baghajatin. The news this evening had reported that suspicious drone activity was noticed in the sky by the undead military in the wee hours of the afternoon. They had been gunned down and destroyed in the fear of being some sort of Chinese coup. But the shards of busted metal bore traces of the tricolor and the mortal government had gone live and declared war on the undead community. It couldn’t be swept under the rug anymore.
For the last few weeks now, Daomir had been following the Undead Hour and Amrita News Bangla closely. There’d been something going on in the mortal world this year. They called it a pandemic. But the perks of being around since the Pala Empire of the Middle Ages included having the right connections in both the worlds. Dao, too, had his sources. They said that he should stock up on supplies.
Although the undead had been through some crisis or the other since the beginning of time and found a solution to each of them because they had all the time in the world, human crises were always interesting. It was fun to watch them scurrying like little mice for shelter trying to run away from the big, bad cat. But it was also because the undead were affected by these crises. Sometimes the disgruntled humans came after them. Most of the time, the undead governments of each country had to initiate a census procedure after each of these episodes in their regions. No wonder the top undead news agencies were covering the global pandemic of humans.
But something was amiss. Even Pom, who was Dao’s roommate and whose response to everything was a bored voice saying something along the lines of “I don’t care”, was alarmed enough to go shopping with Dao for supplies when things were still normal. She did keep asking Dao to hurry up so she could go back home and play the new video game she picked up in the name of “supplies”, but that was a story for another day.
Dao had dutifully stored up blood bags and blood-flavored soda in their refrigerator and even bought a carton of those funny-smelling, blood-flavored Vitamin C juice boxes just because they would last longer than blood bags without a fridge connection. Nobody could tell when there’d be an outage of electricity when the humans attacked.
Oh, Daomir was sure the undead world was going to be attacked by the humans. It’d been the same thing every time a crisis hit that demographic.
For the period when they would have no way to store wet food without electricity, he had got cans of dried blood cakes. Dao was particularly happy about the bottles of sunscreen he got at a heavily discounted price for when they would have to go out scavenging for food in the broad daylight after exhausting their stock. Dao was ready.
Now that the Undead President of India had declared a state of emergency across the undead provinces of the country, it was like being in a home invasion where your extended family had gone rogue. You didn’t know whether it’d be ethical to kill that murder-plotting mamu you would meet at the common balcony, so it was just better to just stay in your mum’s side of the house, bolt the doors and board up the glass windows.
