Growing up in the twenty-first century was hard enough already. I got lucky enough to be born into the beginning of the recession that started in 2008, and never really ended at all. Just kept—spiraling down to whatever shithole we were all headed for.
We had enough problems on our plates, oh yes. It started with the Arab Spring, back in the early 2010's. Then the Occupy movements. Protests turning violent, like Kiev. We all knew it was bad. But it was always far away, you know? It was—just something you saw on the news, or read online somewhere.
And as if poverty, famine, economic collapse and disease weren't problems enough, along came the Third World War.
We didn't get a lot of coverage from the media for very long. At first, some live footage. Flames and carnage and death, and statistics. Those news stations loved their statistics. Three-hundred and twenty-seven deaths here. Seventeen fighters shot down there. Such and such a city annexed somewhere else. Separations. Declarations of independence. Unconditional surrender. But after a while, statistics were all they could give us. Videos stopped coming out. Photos stopped. All we got were the numbers. Sometimes, we were lucky enough to get names and places.
We all saw that coming though. Like it was in the back of our minds the whole god-damn time. We saw the War coming. And this time, no place was safe. Not even Canada. We had lumber. We had copper, aluminum. We had the oil sands. So when the War broke out, and got so bad that militaries became desperate...they didn't care about us.
Course, we all saw that coming too, didn't we. Too big a country, too many resources, too few of us putting up a fight.
But we—we never saw this one coming.
People always loved to read the comics, or watch the movies, or television series. Read the books. Make games. Zombies. People were god damn obsessed with zombies.
Like it was in the back of our minds the whole time. Like we knew.
Nobody knows how it started. The media—such as it was—tried to keep a tight lid on it. Never told us about the corpses that started just getting back up. But every so often, someone would post live footage of these—things--that began to just ravage entire cities. Militaries were already stretched thin, so it was up to reserves. Then, well, like I said: spiraling down to whatever shithole we were headed for.
Didn't take very long for us to figure out how well we were really doing. Which side was winning. The internet crashed. Most TV channels went dead. FM radio, most of the AM went dead. Then power. Then, right on time, one of the coldest winters we'd ever seen.
Heard tell from the locals, the ones who weren't piling sandbags around their homes and raiding the malls and grocery stores for supplies, that the safest place was in the ocean.
What choice did I have?
