《23 Pangbourne Place》The Thirteenth – Chapter 25 – Unending horror

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If you can forgive me right now, I'll talk a little bit about how our world and all of us got to where we are today. Not the specific how, because only God really knows what's happened to the world in the last half-century. And based on anything I've ever heard, he still isn't taking interviews. Except of course, by the kooks.

Now if you're anything like I was when I was in school you really didn't give a damn about history and are more interested in your SAT marks, being popular or trying to get laid.

In my case that meant trying to get into the kind of crowd they didn't initiate about God and was more interested with the other guy. And getting laid and, well that worked out okay for some not so well for others. But that's another story.

Now Frank was pretty upset about the coming election, because he knew based on the polls that it was pretty likely that for next city Council were to have a re-animated mayor. In fact across the country those guys are popping up and making themselves be heard. His world was officially going bye-bye.

In fact to be honest they started popping about sixty years ago, with increasing numbers every year since then. Go check the census if you don’t believe me.

They even say that the dead are going to make up half the population by 2050. What does that mean? More and more services devoted to supporting the re-animated lifestyles. An expansion of a blood supply needed to support the growing population of vampires. More and more wolf parks that allow the freedom of werewolves to roam on full moons. Whole new industries to ensure a rancid food supply for ghouls. And let's not talk about the shortage of brain matter to service the growing needs of the urban zombie population.

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Now there's little disagreement between pundits, philosophers, priests and madmen about what the exact cause of this whole thing is. But the fact is. where once the monster is confined themselves to fantasy, under your bed, in your closets, graveyards and hidden castles in Transylvania sixty or so years ago, they started coming out of the woodwork.

Once the big war was over, before when people died, mostly, like before, they stayed dead, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they came back as zombies, sometimes ghouls, occasionally even a vampire. People freaked, thought the things were contagious. Some still do.

Now as I said before I'm not really against people living there afterlives. Anything that comes up is usually due to my job. After all Vaclav is probably one of the most interesting people I've ever talked to. The man is fascinating to a fault. Now he has dreadful taste in women, But nobody's perfect. And Teresa, who could ask for a better admin assistant. Although to be perfectly fair I wish she hadn’t started talking with Toni so much.

A guy has got a have some secrets he can keep to the workplace, eh?

So yeah, they used to be monsters, used to be the undead. But since the turn of the century demographics have shifted to a tipping point. There’s a growing rift in the population. We hear about the culture of death, protests and marches.

You remember the Million Dead march don’t you? Roger and Frank are part of a declining demographic who might someday be playing for the other team, so to speak. If they are unlucky, I guess, from their point of view.

Me, I just don’t know. I’ve never wanted to be a part of it. But more and more I have no choice. The dead surround us, and we are all going to have to deal with it. And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, if the numbers are any indication.

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But that, I can, for the most part, deal with.

My bigger problems were much closer to home. And I did not want to think about them.

So I got myself drawn into the whole live-dead debate and the time flew by. The beers helped.

We have to make room. That’s what it’s all about. Accepting that death surrounds us, works around us and might even replace us all some day. You can’t escape it, but you can take advantage of it. And that’s what this is all about, really. Taking advantage. Death’s no more contagious than it’s ever been, not really.

And that’s what the human race has always been good at doing. Adapting to the unthinkable. Make it familiar, normalize it and carry on. Why? Because it’s a better choice than the alternative.

War. Atrocity. Unending horror.

There were places in the world where such a thing was still commonplace. We here in the so-called civilized world have to be better than that. Don’t we?

--

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