The beauty of a zombie apocalypse is that roving gangs of man-eaters can stand in for anything you want: capitalism, conformity, prejudice, the perils of purchasing discount taco meat. But, as the last few years have proven – especially for those of us who are sick, elderly, or with otherwise compromised immune systems – sometimes a rampant outbreak of viral death and destruction doesn’t have to be a metaphor at all.
My wife and I have a Super Bowl tradition: we go to the store. Not a shopping spree, but a supply run. This year, we made a long overdue trip to Costco because America’s favorite brain-injuring sports holiday is one of the few times the store is guaranteed to be empty enough for us to feel safe. Most of the time, we’re stuck relying on the increasingly unreliable Instacart for groceries, the paid-for kindness of strangers who can’t buy a half-decent bell pepper even if my life – or at least my not getting food poisoning – depends on it.
An empty warehouse store is both a blessing and kind of creepy. Given the usual clamor – the customers crowded so close that carts are banging into shoes and shins, the parking lot packed for a quarter-mile in every direction – a quiet and empty Costco feels wrong. Like something’s missing. Distressed displays and half-empty shelves, entire aisles picked clean by Super Bowl parties, only added to the after-the-apocalypse vibes – but it’s an end of the world that, increasingly, the rest of the world doesn’t live in anymore.
We got what we needed, and no one tried to bite us – or cough on us – but that is, perhaps, the most insidious part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like HBO’s The Last of Us, this ongoing Armageddon seems, on the surface, almost manageable. There’s community and food and medicine. There’s lots of sightseeing and long walks through nature. There’s safety, as long as you don’t leave the four walls of your quarantine zone, as long as you’re unbearably careful when you do.
But under the surface, things are still very much a disaster, even as the government and countless others want to pretend everything’s under control. There’s only nominal support against the infection. No one’s masked, and even fewer want to be; preventative treatments are becoming outdated by the day and not always being replaced. Anyone with long COVID is basically staring down a medical plan built entirely out of hope.
The increasingly few uninfected, meanwhile – the immunocompromised, the ones most fucked if we get bit – are given some, but nowhere near all, of the things needed to survive. We have access to doctors and food, yes, but at an increased cost, an outsized risk. States are limiting telehealth opportunities, while medical offices are demanding in-person visits while simultaneously dropping COVID protocols. There are no more “senior hours” at grocery stores, no more weekly blocks where it’s even marginally safer for the at-risk to go out in the world, making the search for a non-withered bell pepper as potentially perilous as stalking through a ruined Boston in pursuit of a car battery. Loneliness and isolation are knee-capping our mental health.
And like The Last of Us’s mushroom-faced cordyceps, all of it, everything out there beyond the QZ, is connected – doctors and presidents and even neighbors. Every proclamation and every picayune habit cascading into the next.
Watching wearily from my digital balcony, I’ve witnessed one person in a group give up on wearing masks, on being safe, and then another, and another, until the last hold-out finally gets tired of solitude and gives in, gets COVID. I’ve watched them decides it’s actually not so bad, after all, and go on with their life, shuffling from bar to office, to home and back – all the while becoming an actual threat to someone like me.
For Monica and me, it’s hard not to feel like Joel and Ellie,* the two of us alone against an improbably hostile world. Seeking out fellow survivors and hoping they’re the kind that’ll make us dinner and play Top 40 hits instead of trying to hunt us down.
*I am, naturally, the Ellie in this situation. Despite mine and Pedro Pascal’s shared inability to grow a full beard, I’m the smart-mouthed punk who needs protecting here.
Of course, like most zombie metaphors, this one isn’t exactly perfect. In this scenario, the infected aren’t shambling husks, aren’t malevolent corpses trying to eat our brains (with obvious exceptions, I mean). No, they, like all zombies, are victims, too.
In fact, they’re not even really zombies, except to me and mine. Instead, they’re simply regular people with the luck to be stuck in another kind of disaster movie entirely.
While I wake up every day in a real-life The Last of Us, everyone else is living the last few minutes of Independence Day, partying down like it’s the end of an alien invasion. Gathering together, smiling and smoking cigars, looking out over the wreckage. Sure, the aliens might attack again, but that sequel’s twenty years down the line. As distant as the edge of the galaxy.
I’m trying not to single anyone out for thinking all that, for wanting to live a post-pandemic life – because I do, too. Truth be told, I’m jealous. I would love for nothing more than this pandemic being actually and truly over. I would love to return to the slightly-less virally-apocalyptic Before times.
But I don’t get to do that.
What I get is bummed out, watching everyone going on trips and hanging out at coffee shops, buying bell peppers on their own. Not because of the cascading danger they’re creating, not because I think they’re all disease-spewing homunculi out to kill me, but because their return to “normal” is a painful reminder that my “normal” is gone forever. Every story about the sorry state of commercial aviation, every complaint about crowded busses, every restaurant review and concert and unmasked photo op, every shot of a cheering Super Bowl crowd, is another reminder that I’m fighting this battle alone.
And the fucked up part is that I feel bad about saying that. My life has been shattered, the larger public cannot be bothered to, even slightly, care – to give a single, cold shit about the millions of us who remain at-risk – and I feel bad about bringing it up. Because I’ve been brainwashed and gaslit into thinking my life isn’t important. Because I know, in my heart, that I can’t blame everyone trying to move on, trying to carve out a semblance of normalcy amidst all the wreckage.
Because I know I can’t blame everyone.
The beating heart of every apocalypse movie and TV show is the notion that – despite our differences, despite our history – humanity is, inherently, good. That when the chips are down, we’re all in this together. We’ll overcome our worst instincts and join to fix the world. We’ll fight through zombie hordes to deliver a cure. We’ll sacrifice ourselves to bring down an alien spaceship, for no other reason than because it’s the right thing to do. Because it will help someone else.
But there’s a reason that’s all fiction.
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