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Diary of the Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Dead

Tim, Zack's younger brother, mentions that a mob of people gathered on Main Street dressed as zombies. "That should be illegal. If you show up in public acting like a zombie, I should be allowed to shoot you in the head. Simple as that."

No one disagrees. Zombies are the greatest threat to national security. People don't dress as members of al Queda and expect not to get detained and probed by the NSA. The same rules should apply to the reanimated dead.

"You can't be too sure," says Zack. "All of this could be designed to make us complacent for when the real zombies come, so we leave them alone until it is too late. I think you could at least get away with bashing one of their heads in with a bat." He mimes doing so, almost tipping his plate of pad thai, then apologizes to the invisible zombie protester he bludgeoned.

"What were they protesting?" Melanie asks.

Tim shrugs. "Who knows? I think they just wanted to dress up as zombies. They even had the police there, blocking off roads so they could shamble. Can you believe that? Police protecting these zombies. At least they were slow zombies."

Contrary to popular belief, I think that slow zombies are a lot creepier. The idea of being surrounded by something I should be able to outrun and definitely outthink is humiliatingly terrifying. Dying at the hands of a werewolf is at least manly and quick.

We move on, Tim espousing a theory I independently came up with, that zombies should get progressively stupider through the generations, since stupid people are generally bitten (the clever ones hide out somewhere until the zombie apocalypse blows over) and only especially idiotic zombies neglect to devour as much of their victims as possible. Eventually, the successive generations of zombies should be uncoordinated enough that they will just twitch on the ground until wild dogs and vultures tear them to shreds. My personal feeling is that wildlife and newly starved pets will play a decisive role in extinguishing the zombie menace, unless zombie flesh proves toxic.

A week after this conversation, Melanie and I visit Melissa. We'd been stuck in traffic for over an hour as several exits on a major road were inexplicably closed by an accident. Even the side roads we'd taken were crowded. In driving to Melissa's apartment, we'd passed several emergency vehicles going in the opposite direction. The songs of night animals were drowned out by sirens. When this went on for a few

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