When the horde approached, I didn’t bother running.
For one thing, I hate physical activity.
For another, who was I kidding? After years of media teasing, the zombie apocalypse had finally arrived, and that meant I was dead.
I’m 385 lbs. of sedentary blubber. I get winded going up the stairs to my porch. I wasn’t going to be one of the intrepid survivors who must adjust to a hardened world of hellish horrors. I was a big, fat man, and I was going to be a big, fat zombie. That was my fate. I didn’t like it. But I had accepted it.
So I didn’t run. I just stood there in the middle of the Best Buy parking lot and watched them surge forth: a mighty mass of mangled flesh and teeth, with lifeless eyes and reaching arms.
The moment before they reached me, I felt the first surge of fear. Survival instinct, I supposed. Should I have made some effort to run? No. How embarrassing would it have been to die of a heart attack running from the horde? For once in your life, I chastised myself, have a little dignity. If you’re going to die in the zombie apocalypse, then die properly, from a zombie bite. Several zombie bites, more likely. Several dozen.
But the horde didn’t devour me. They passed around me like I was no more tantalizing to their undead palates than a parking meter.
That was three days ago. Since then, I’ve watched the city fall into the expected chaos. Desperate people trying, mostly failing, to survive as the ravenous corpse army grew larger and hungrier.
But I don’t seem to have anything to worry about. Not from the zombies, anyway. They continue to shamble on by without so much as glancing at me. I have no idea why. At first, I thought maybe they don’t like fat people. But that notion was quickly dispatched when I witnessed them gnawing on my next-door neighbor and her kids, all of whom had been victims of the obesity epidemic long before they were victims of the zombie epidemic.
I have the most common blood type, O positive. I have brown hair, hazel eyes, and an unremarkable medical history, except for the sort of cholesterol numbers that make doctors sigh. I have no rare genetic mutations that I’m aware of. There is no experimental vaccine coursing through my veins. My IQ is probably only slightly north of average. I don’t know why the undead don’t like me, but they definitely don’t. They shamble around me like I’m an obstacle, in search of someone worth eating.
It kind of hurts my feelings, to be perfectly honest. I know that must sound silly. But it’s true. All my life, people have overlooked everything about me other than my weight. And as zombies, they’re not even interested in that.
I haven’t seen another human being in twelve hours. Part of me is beginning to wonder if I’m the last person with a pulse in the whole damn city, if everyone else has just been eaten or turned.
But in the plus column, I can just walk into any gas station, stroll on by the old lady with no legs dragging herself along the floor over trails of dried blood that she’d spilled when she was a little gushier, grab a couple of Snickers off the shelf, and saunter out without a care in the world.
Still, that wouldn’t last. Eventually all the best foods would be gone or spoiled. Then it would be a diet of canned goods for me, until those all spoiled as well. Arby’s and Domino’s were already closed. Hard to run a food chain when you’re at the bottom of the food chain.
Maybe eventually the zombies will get hungry enough to try me out. Maybe one of them will eventually get desperate and give me a tentative nibble, decide I’m not so bad after all, then go in for a real bite.
I doubt it though. They don’t look at me like I’m food they don’t want. They look at me like I’m just something in the way. Story of my life.
I hate to admit it, but a few hours ago, I actually tried to force-feed myself to one of them. I held my arm right up to his grotesque mouth, trying to entice him into taking a bite, but he just shuffled away. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed almost annoyed.
The thought occurred to me that maybe I’m already a zombie, and I just don’t know it. But I went into my house, looked in the bathroom mirror, and as far as I can tell I’m the same boring man I’ve always been. My flesh looks ruddy and lively. My ticker seems to be ticking. My lungs continue to suck air. As far as I can tell, I’m still in the land of the living. Well, the small island of the living, anyway.
Is this how I spend the rest of my life? The only human left in a world of uninterested zombies? Waiting for the basic amenities of life to become inaccessible and finally keeling over of thirst or starvation or dysentery from trusting a can of beans that’s four months out of date. What a dignified end to our species. The last human being on earth, shitting his own guts out because desperation forced him to ignore the expiration date.
Why don’t they want me? All my life, I wanted to be special in some way, and this is what fate chooses for me? To watch the whole ship sink, only to find out that my fat ass can float? It’s not fair. Everyone else is dead or undead, and I’m left here living this pointless life with no one to talk to and no one to care about, in a world with no services, no electricity, no internet, no streaming, no drive-thrus, no hospitals, no functioning sewage system, and eventually, no toilet paper.
I know civilization is supposed to be about art and philosophy and civic duty and children laughing or whatever, but the more I wandered through its wreckage, the more I realized that our civilization was mostly about conveniences. And goddamn I miss them. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My aunts and uncles are dead. My brother and his wife and their kids, my nieces and nephews, are dead. But I’ll be goddamned if I don’t miss my air conditioner more than any of them.
Maybe that’s why the zombies don’t want me. I’m just a rotten person. The whole human race is kaput, and I’m mourning for Wal-Mart and Taco Bell and my refrigerator. I’m mourning for annoying ads before YouTube videos and customer service representatives and shitty hold music. I’m mourning for mobile games and twitter and traffic jams. I’m mourning for all the stupid annoying garbage we creature comforts that I took for granted.
And that’s your epitaph, humanity. I may not be the last person on earth yet, but unless there’s others like me, I probably will be soon enough. Sorry I’m not more eloquent and soulful. I’m sorry that the true gravity of this situation probably eludes me. But I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want this.
I just wanted them to finish me off quickly. To get it over with. But now I’m stuck here, in the hollowed-out shell of the world, watching the dead stumble by through my living room window, feeling nothing but jealous.
They get to have a purpose. They get to wander the lands, looking for survivors, hoping their next kill is just around the corner. And even when there are no kills left, they’ll keep trudging along, too stupid to know the buffet is closed.
All that’s left now is that one sad little booger-fleck of congealed gravy that no one wants. And that booger-fleck is me. Sitting under the heat lamp, growing less appetizing by the second.
God, why don’t they want me?
TJ Kirk is the author of the sci-fi novel, Sexbot Uprising. His work tends toward satire, horror, absurdism, and the grotesque comedy of human failure.
Published 8/7/26