Carlo looked at the small black pin on his chest, stark and bright on his faded orange jacket. He shrugged. “I keep forgetting to remove it.”

Erika only looked at him for a while before her 9-nine year old son, Jasper, clamored for her attention. Carlo looked outside the car window where the streets were being swept clean by the typhoon rain.

He didn’t feel like accompanying Erika and Jasper to the mall and its crowd. But his sister-in-law had asked for his help, saying that she needed someone to watch over Jasper while she ran her errands. Carlo had acceded to her request, feeling that he had been neglecting his nephew for some time. And besides, he liked Jasper.

After separating from Erika, Carlo brought Jasper to Powerbooks. He didn’t want to but he wasn’t sure where to take a 9-year-old boy.

Sarah and Carlo never had a chance to become parents. But likewise, going to Powerbooks brought too many painful memories. They both loved books and they respected each other’s silences as they individually prowled the shelves. There would be times when they would hang out for the whole day at Powerbooks.

At the entrance, Jasper immediately ran towards the colorful children’s section. Carlo hesitated and then took a step inside. It felt strange to be inside a bookstore without Sarah. But then, it felt strange to open even a book. All of their books had piled up gathering dust at their small one-bedroom apartment.

As he wandered through the various shelves and book bins that proclaimed a sale, he looked at all the books with their white pages full of text he didn’t recognize and the different covers he couldn’t bother to care for.

But then the side entrance that led outside the mall flew open in a storm burst of rain and wind and all the book pages on the shelves and bins started to flap and thrash. As the shouts of dismay echoed through the store, he saw people raising the books they were reading in alarm.

He picked up one book and opened it to see all the pages had Sarah’s face printed on it over and over again. He dropped the book and picked up another with the same result. He turned around to see all the flapping pages had Sarah’s face on them.

He fell to his knees and started laughing uncontrollably. He didn’t know when the laughter started to become howling tears.

Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was a crazy bastard but he did some good.

For example, Martial Law? He had his reasons for it, the primary one being to kill all monsters. Big-assed, flying, digging, crawling, teeth and claws, bloodthirsty monsters. They were coming out of the woodwork and it took all Marcos and the government to put them down without panicking the public in the ‘70s.

Of course this took a toll on Marcos’ New Society with accusations of corruption and killings. Marcos couldn’t reveal we were actually fighting a war of shadows at that time and this would later cost him when the military took the side of civil society in Edsa ’86.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Take for example Jabidah Massacre. Remember that? Where more than a hundred Moro soldiers and officers were recruited and trained to invade Sabah? And when the operation was aborted, it was said the soldiers were summarily executed by the military?

Well, there’s an even more interesting story behind that one.

Reports started to surface in 1965 of four monsters appearing on the islands off Tawi-tawi, near Sabah. They killed all the islanders and turned the place into a ‘desolate wilderness.’

Reports indicated they were the four monsters of legend: the many-limbed Kurita, the man-shaped Tarabusaw, the gigantic bird-like Pah, and the seven-headed bird that was not named.

In order to save the remaining inhabitants, Marcos had ordered a special unit of Muslim soldiers be drawn up for a special mission.

Their first task was to try to retrieve the people there and bring them to safety. Marcos’ strategy in using the Muslim soldiers was that they would be able to talk to the people there.

Their other task was to kill the monsters.

One thing you could say about Marcos’ claims of being the Filipino Audie Murphy of World War 2, he had the balls to back it up. With only a handful of his own PSG, he led the Jabidah commando unit into action against the monsters.

What happened? Of more than 200 Muslim soldiers who had landed on the islands, only twenty were left when they finally managed to kill all the monsters. Marcos was severely wounded—that damned kidney problem—and he was never truly the same afterwards.

But that was the start of it all, when the government’s official war of shadows started and the declaration of Martial Law.

So yeah: Marcos was a bastard but he eventually did some good.

“Goddammit,” Anton said as he reached for his carbine.

He peered through the window to see if there were any lurkers and then unlocked the gun hatch in the center of the  back door.

“You assholes! Get off my garden!” he cried, aiming the rifle at them.

The two ignored his imprecations even as the sound of their chewing came clear to him.

“Hey! Get off… hey! Those are my tomatoes you’re standing on!”

One of the feeders looked at him and Anton felt the gorge rise up his throat. The feeder’s eyes were clear, his skintone was healthy– the feeder was alive, not dead.

That meant the corpse they were feasting on was the zombie.

“Leave us alone!” growled the feeder, a young man in his 20s though his eyes seemed to be older than that. The feeder maliciously flipped a bird at him and then ducked his head down again.

Anton cursed and aimed the carbine at them. He would have rather the feeders were zombies rather than people. As it was, if he killed them now, he’d have to shoot them again in the heads to make sure they didn’t get back up as zombies.

Bullets were worth their weight in gold nowadays.

His first burst hit the feeder nearer to the house and sent him tumbling into the carrots. The feeder mewled as he tried to rise but fell back on his knees, his spine broken.

The second feeder cried in alarm, “Fuck off–!”, but Anton had fired a second burst and hit the feeder in the face.

Safe now, he thought as he opened the door. He still kept the carbine ready as he walked towards the bodies.

“Who’s the fucker now, buddy?” he said as he prodded the second faceless feeder with a toe-capped steel boot. Dead in the head, as they used to say.

He checked over the zombie and saw that it was definitely down for the count after the chewing it had undergone.

Strange days indeed, he thought. Whatever was turning dead people into zombies had also killed almost all of the animals. There was no livestock left, there was no game to hunt or fish. The world was a dying place and that meant there was only a few things left to eat.

One was plants, fruits and vegetables, like what he was eking out in his garden. The rest… well.

He saw the other feeder was still alive and his eyes were pleading with him. Bloody pieces of the zombies were still hanging from his mouth.

“Yeah, buddy. You too,” he said. He raised the carbine and blew the feeder’s brain out.

Dr. Alan Saldano took a step forward, clutching the scalpel. He jumped when one of the glass doors slid open, the laser light blinking as it sensed his approach.

He was the only one left of the research team. In fact, he didn’t know if anyone was left alive on this level of the lab.

“Hello?!” he cried. “Security, can you hear me?!” The lab-wide intercom remained silent.

Things had changed so suddenly. An hour ago, the team had been celebrating after getting word from the corporate higher-ups that the next phase of their project had been approved. This despite the problems they had encountered with the experiment. And now everyone was dead.

The last door in the corridor led to the creches. He hadn’t wanted to pass this way except the elevators were located in this area. From his spot, he could see the words stenciled on the glass door: NURSERY.

He crept forward, trying to look everywhere that his neck started to hurt. They had been working so hard on their project, trying to beat other corporations in developing the first human clone. And they had managed to do it, birthing a healthy baby boy.

But the first subject– dubbed Adam, such a fucking corny joke– had been… other. Though he seemed like a normal baby, Adam acted like a wild animal, biting and scratching at the nurses that tended him. Then he started to develop teeth and his eyes began to flood with blood-red veins. And when he moved, he moved fast– so fucking fast.

As he neared the darkened nursery, the glass door slid open–  and he could hear the cries of the other babies in their creches.

He remembered his Filipino grandmother’s fairy tales, about the legend of the tyanak that haunted the woods of her childhood. And then he saw red eyes peering at him from their creches.

Manuel averted his eyes even as the smell of burning flesh overwhelmed him. At least the bodies this time weren’t human, he thought, though the limbs on the bonfire seemed human enough.

He carried his groceries to the small apartment he was renting on the avenida. As he was unlocking the gated door to his unit, a Humvee bearing a troop of American soldiers carrying high-powered rifles swept by with their siren red lights streaking the darkened street.

So far, the military sent by the United Nations had been successful in liberating Manila from the invading alien forces. But there were still pockets of resistance throughout the city. As he walked up his apartment, he thought he could hear muted gunfire in a distance.

He put down his groceries of instant noodles and plastic bottles of Coke and turned on the apartment’s dingy yellow lights. He scratched the recurring rash on his arms, face and body.

Most Filipinos had welcomed the UN army even as they started hunting the aliens down in the streets. Disgust had powered the mobs, attacking those suspected humans who had helped the aliens called the makapilis– as well as any alien they could catch.

The aliens looked human enough, if disembodied sentient limbs that moved on their own could be considered human. The carriers were two arms connected together jumping forward like ape limbs. The mounts were two legs walking around on their lower torso.  There was also the brains with the floating heads. And then there were…

Suddenly, he felt something on his face and he ran towards the bathroom. Looking at the mirror, he was aghast: a piece of reddened skin on his face was peeling off though he felt no pain. Slowly, he started pulling it off and he felt the skin begin to come off in one whole piece.

To his horror, he felt himself– his being, his consciousness– being peeled away together with the skin. And underneath, he saw alien eyes watching from underneath.

Of the two men walking at the side of the road, only the younger man looked up.

Dressed in torn jeans, military boots, and a ragged Dead Kennedys t-shirt, the man smiled though his dead white eyes still looked at the world hungrily. “Gladly. Always good to see a helping hand.”

His companion – a gaunt man in black that neither dust nor the sun seemed to touch – was intent on walking himself into the ground. But a touch on the elbow from the young man quickly turned him towards the direction of the pickup.

“So where y’all headed?” asked the driver, his lined face watching the road for potholes. Despite his watchful eye, the potholes seemed to sneak up on their vehicle despite his tight grip on the steering.

The young man looked at the man in black riding at the back of the truck and said, “The town of Revelation Rock.  I hear it’s at the end of this road. Is that right?”

“True enough,” the old man muttered. “I’m guessing you’re with the group that showed up in town. What’s your name, son?”

“I’ve been known as The Prince that will Come– but you can call me Dragon,” he said, studying the multitude of new and old cuts on his forearms. “Your friend?”

He looked back and said mockingly, “I don’t know his name so I called him George. Met him at him at a place called Armageddon in Montana.”

“Hah!” said the old man. He swung the steering wheel past a boulder and pumped the brake several times. As the pickup slowed to a halt, he declared, “Well, we’re here. End of the line.”

The road before them had petered out before a stand of trees. As the three got down, Dragon asked, “What about you, old man. What’s your name?”

The old man grinned and said, “Nothing so special. You can find all kinds of characters here but me, you can call Daniel.”

“Well, Daniel,” said Dragon, “What say you lead us to these characters?”

Daniel nodded and waved them to follow him. At first glance there seemed to be no evidence of the town with the dry summer foliage surrounding them. But soon they could see ramshackle wooden buildings emerging from the undergrowth.

“The first one showed up a week ago, a dead woman who called herself Legion,” Daniel rambled. “Always noisy when she was around, lots of moaning and groaning of dead people though I don’t know where the sound comes from.”

He skirted a shimmering black puddle on the ground, but Dragon stopped before it. Hello, he thought as he looked down.

The thoughts that invaded his brain almost overwhelmed him like a swarm of maddened bees. But he fought back and soon found himself staring down into a darkness that stretched forever.

Nice to see you too, o Blackness of the Abyss.

There was a shrill desperate laughter that echoed at the back of Dragon’s mind.

Is everyone here? He asked. At the negative that he felt, he said, Ah, so the Sun God is late again?

He took a step back as the old man shouted back at him: “Are you coming?”

Dragon nodded and continued walking.

“The second and third came in fighting like cats and dogs,” Daniel said. “One was this big galoot always dripping wet wherever he went. Leviathan, he called hisself. But I thought him familiar as a Dutch mariner I once sailed with. Goes around with a cane with an albatross head for a handle. ”

“Who was he with?” Dragon asked, peering behind them to check if the man in black was still following.

“A beautiful woman,” he replied, laughing at himself. “She gave out a list of name like The Mother Beast, The Bearer of a Thousand Young, the Queen of Babylon, and so on and so forth. She thinks herself quite a bit, too.”

The three stood before an abandoned old structure, half of its roof collapsed in. Incongruously, wild flowers grew in profusion around the building. A sign that said ‘Diner’ advertised what the building had been before, but the sign had been broken in two. Dragon could not see what the diner’s name was.

“Well, we’re here,” Daniel said. “Go on in. I expect your friends are waiting for you.”

“No rush,” Dragon smiled. “We’re expecting one more. Besides, the year 2012 won’t be around for two more years, and we’ve got some time to play out whose turn it is, yeah?

He grimaced. “Though I hope we’re not playing ‘old maid’ again.” And the two went inside the building.

(First published in allmusicjunkies here.)

Tom grinned despite himself as he slowed down his rented Honda Civic around the rotunda. You’d think that after being in the country for almost six months and doing NGO work for the World Bank, he’d have an easier time judging Filipino faces.

He studied the person in the distance. Truth be told, the figure was too masculine to be a woman – the shoulders too broad, the Adam’s apple too prominent in the throat, and the features too strong despite the Chinese cast to the face.

It didn’t help that the sun dress he/she wore hung too loose on a thin frame. But there was something to be said about the long black hair that hung straight down to the waist, or the graceful way he/she took the pedestrian crossing.

Could be, couldn’t be, could be, couldn’t… Tom shook his head, unable to decide, once and for all, whether the figure was a woman or a man.
Suddenly, he saw a jeepney dart from a darkened side street in a screech of wheels and clip the androgynous figure crossing the road. All doubts in Tom’s mind about gender were resolved by the resulting high-pitched squawk.

“Ayyy! My leg, my shapely leg! Ayyy!” he cried, writhing on the road.
Tom pulled the handbrake and jumped out of the car. “Are you all right?” he said as he ran towards the figure.

He looked up. “That damned son of a cockbag! I’m going to turn that bastard into a chicken so I can cook him into pinikpikan! Oh… Pierce Brosnan is alive and well in the Philippines!”

Tom couldn’t respond for a moment, struck by the small face looking up with his wide brown eyes. “Er,” he said, catching his breath. “I don’t know about that. Do you need to go to the hospital?”

The person uttered an earthy chuckle and said, “I’ll go with you anywhere, bebe. But no, I’ll be fine.”

“Here, let me help you,” Tom said as he tried to stand up. He demurely let himself be held by the hand, which was soft to the touch.

“You’re such a gentleman,” he said abashed. “And it’s nice of you to stop and help. Nobody here in the city would have done the same.”

Tom grinned. “Yes, well, call me old-fashioned. I don’t believe that chivalry or even compassion should be dead just because it’s the age of Facebook and Twitter.”

He nodded and replied, “I’m a provincial myself so …”

“Hey fag!” a voice interrupted them. “You’re so ugly, why don’t you just die?”

Both of looked down the street to see flashing red hazard lights slowly backing up to them. Tom recognized the vehicle as it stopped as the erring jeepney.

As three men clambered down from the vehicle, Tom stepped forward and warned, “Ease off, boys. We don’t want any trouble. If you leave now, we won’t report this to the police.”

A growl erupted from one of the men. “Go home, Joe. Mind your own business.”

“I’m not a damned Yank,” Tom barked. Suddenly he saw a glint of a blade in one of the tough’s hands and a tire iron in another. Alarmed, he muttered, “Now we’re really in it.”

The figure behind Tom stepped forward. “Hoy! So you think you own the road here?!”

“No,” another man crooned, his white teeth smiling at them. “But when we see faggots like you on the road, we usually run them over.”
“You seriously don’t want to mess with me,” he said with answering smile. Tom looked at him in surprise.

Just then, the man who answered released a loud burp, and then another one. His two companions looked at him in puzzlement as the man started coughing and pounding on his chest with a fist. Then he exhaled a chicken feather.

“See? I told you,” the Englishman’s companion laughed as several more feathers flew out of the man’s mouth.

He/she suddenly jumped forward, his limbs stretching inhumanly long. The man with a knife slashed at him but he ducked and backhanded the tough off his feet.

The other tough with a tire iron tried to get behind him but Tom tackled him with all his 6’6’ lanky frame could manage. “I’ll take that,” he said as he relieved the man of the tire iron.

His opponent shouldered him off and started running. He shouted, “Cock-lover!’

It was dark and the man was already far down the street. Tom threw the tire iron without hesitation and it tangled the tough’s feet, tripping him.

“Nice throw,” the now-gravelly voice said. Tom looked hesitantly at him. “Thanks… I think.”

Tom looked at the other men. The remaining tough still standing was bent over, still coughing and burping chicken feathers while the third was out on his back.

A slim arm slipped around his and said, “So, do you want to buy a lady a drink?”

He turned to see deep brown eyes looking back at him with interest.

(First published in allmusicjunkies here.)

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

I can now officially announce that this is my first Christmas in space.

I’ve already tried to fix things inside the Aureus to make it appear more festive. Unfortunately, I don’t have too much in terms of colored paper and my Christmas lights consist of the on-board monitor’s flashing LEDs.

The Company’s budget cuts also mean I can’t make my usual orbital-distance call back to Earth to my family and my parents. Fucking cheapskates. I can see the whole planet below my observation port but I can’t greet them ‘Merry Christmas.’ The absurdity of my life.

I miss Jennifer and Taji. Taji would be – what? 10? 11 years old today? The last time I saw her before I went into shuttle training was when she was five. Jenn told me the last time we talked that our daughter only knows me as Daddy-in-the-sky. And when our little girl prays, Jenn said, Taji mixes me up with God.

I ended laughing and crying the whole day after that.

So here’s to everyone down below: Merry Christmas, and I hope you people are spending time with your loved ones.

Day 485, December 25, Christmas Day.
From the Log of Engineer Thomas Indra-de Leon, The Aureus Orbital

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

I checked out my previous entry last Christmas so I thought I’d make it a tradition here in Chez Aureus to keep a yearly Christmas update. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

This year the Company gave us a holiday bonus. They also gave us the option of spending the bonus on the really expensive orbital-Earth long distance call, which I gladly took. What choice do I have?

If it weren’t the fact that the Company pays us well for this orbital duty and that jobs are so hard to come by back on Earth, I would have found a better way to support my family.

Anyway, I managed to talk to Jenn, Taji, and my parents. My mom and dad aren’t technically spending Christmas since my mom’s Indian. However, she doesn’t really have a choice since my dad is a Christmas-freak who starts putting up Christmas decorations by September. He says it’s a tradition in his home country and that Filipinos really love Christmas.

Maybe that’s why I have a hard time being alone during Christmas day. When I was younger, my parents and my siblings always spent Christmas Eve with the traditional feast, and exchanging gifts once midnight struck.

When I got married, I brought that tradition into my family. It’s a good thing though: Jenn is a non-practicing Muslim and we’ve promised to respect each other’s cultures, she’s given me leeway on this thing.

It’s hard to break childhood traditions so… Merry Christmas, everyone. Whatever denomination you belong to, I hope you’re having a better year than I am.

Day 850, December 25, Christmas Day.
From the Log of Engineer Thomas Indra-de Leon, The Aureus Orbital

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

Calling Major Tom, where are you now?

I’ve been so busy these past couple of weeks, I’ve almost forgotten it’s Christmas.

Here’s the low-down: the orbital electronic payload I’ve been laying out in space for the past two years is almost finished. A couple of more months and I’ll be home again.

Unfortunately, the Company has just told me that some of the cargo I’ve just dropped over the Asian hemisphere has stopped working. No amount of software hacking is getting the data flowing.

So here’s the trick question: the Company said I have the option of going back and checking each malfunctioning satellite, which means an additional year up in space. They also said that they’d give me extra space duty hazard pay for it, plus the usual incentives, blah-blah-blah.

If I refuse that option, I can go home – but unspoken is the fact that they’ll never give me another job again as long as I long. Alas, the Company has a memory of an elephant and holds a grudge like a Japanese horror movie.

As they say, the data must flow, dammit.

So here’s a Merry Christmas to one and all, and give us poor stiffs working over the holidays a pint of good cheer, wherever you may be.

(First published in allmusicjunkies here.)

The body on the bed didn’t respond and she laughed softly. She rose from the bed, the sheet sliding off to reveal her naked form. She glided on the room’s soft rug to the window where she had a view of the towers of Hong Kong all lit up in the distance.

Bored with the view, she headed towards the bathroom and passed the mirror. Her reflection moved past, her body shifting from that of a black hag to a curvaceous woman of Asian descent. She stepped on the cold bathroom tiles.

As she did her ablutions, she felt bloated, satiated like a snake that had swallowed its prey whole. She wished she had not eaten so much, but the man on the bed had more than fulfilled her. Of course, there was no mark on him: when she fed, she did not touch her victims.

A beautiful woman, fair-skinned, blonde and model-thin in a tight-fitting aquamarine dress and stiletto shoes, coalesced from the shadows behind the bathroom door and looked around disdainfully. Her reflection in the mirror changed like snapshots: from a short, fat old woman back to the image that stood before her, switching back and forth incessantly.

“So, are you done?” the other woman said, her luscious mouth in a pout.

“Very much so,” she said with a satisfied smirk.

“Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” the woman said and seeped back into the dark of the shadows.

“Sister,” she said mockingly. “Don’t be a stranger!” Then she laughed as the shadows thinned and became mundane again.

It was tempting fate, her being here in the hotel room. Her kind had always hunted alone, their victims killed sparingly so that no one would suspect their existence. Fortunately, the woman who roamed these hunting grounds – including the hotel – was her sister, one of ten among their mother’s brood.

If it weren’t for that tenuous kinship, they would have already settled the matter with the black blood spilled from their veins.

She walked out of the bathroom fully clothed and refreshed. She always cleaned herself after feeding. As she walked towards the bed, she thought of what she was, her kind that stalked the night and fed on only men. She had heard all the names that they had accumulated over centuries: succubus, the Old Hag, bangungot, – they meant the same thing.

She had once wondered why she had to feed through sex, gaining nourishment through the orgasmic act as she lay on top of her sleeping victims, though not touching them. She didn’t understand why it was all interconnected – the targeting of males, the sleeping victims – but it felt like she always needed to undergo a complicated ritual in order to feed.

She looked down at the body on the bed. Take this one: most of her kind had changed their diet since the last century, feeding on Asian males instead of Caucasians. It was the rice that they consumed, that made every meal tastier than usual. She licked her lips at the memory of the taste.

“Ah well…” she whispered. Time to go indeed. She slipped into the shadows… and halfway across the world to where a young housewife was sleeping on a bed in a small house in the suburbs of New York.

The alarm woke her up and she groaned, covering her head. She didn’t know why she felt so tired after sleeping. She had gone to bed early after dinner, in fact. And her dreams were so strange…

She resigned herself to getting up. She needed to cook breakfast for her husband and the kids before they left the house for work and school. At least one thing nice about her dreams was that she always felt like she had eaten the best meal she ever had.

(First published in allmusicjunkies here.)

It’s hard to think of before, when the end of the world came and the infection spread. People screaming and dying, being chased by these zombies, cars exploding, governments collapsing – it all sounds like one hell of a bad B-movie.

Personally, I didn’t give a shit then. I was in a world of my own smoking my grass and just cruising through life, you know? But then I got bitten by this half-assed zombie while trying to score and next thing I know, I was becoming a zombie myself. One moment I was alive, the next I was dead and mad-on against the next guy.

But here’s the funny: I wasn’t really “dead”, more like “brain-dead”. They called ‘em “zombies” on account of some kid screaming at TV reporters in the early days and it spread.

But the docs said it was more like the upper functions of the infected’s brains had shut down even though all the body functions were running on full tilt. Me, I thought they shoulda been called ‘Deadheads’ on account of their brains shutting down. But the Grateful Dead people would probably’ve sued my ass off.

The other funny thing? Hell, I do grass, man. But the reason this whole shitload of trouble came up is because of some coke from South America that really fucked us up. I don’t touch that cocaine stuff but I still got infected.

Blame it on the Colombians and the US government. The US was testing some kinda new herbicide that was going to shrivel up the coca leaves in South America. The damn thing didn’t take – and the side effects were even worse. Somehow, the cocaine that was taken from those sprayed fields upped the hit a thousand times stronger and turned their users into raving maniacs.

The scary shit about it was that it easily spread. The docs called a “convergence of vectors”: some dude with the swine flu or the common cold got the infection, it got swished around, and out came a nasty piece of infection that hit those who got attacked a 100% chance of becoming just like their attackers via “fluid transmission”.

So Colombia went down like Oscar dela Hoya, followed by the rest of South America, and the infection started to head northward. Thanks to international flights, the infection also began popping up all over the world, including the Philippines.

Huh, I still remember the first report of infected at the NAIA, it was some seaman named Luisito Delgado. The immigration officers didn’t know what hit them. By then, it was all over the place. Can you imagine it?

And you know what was really bad about the infection? Sure, your brain may’ve been turned off but you were still aware of what your body was doing.

The docs don’t like that idea. They say the infected were “thankfully, fully unconscious of their actions” and that “it was a blank phase in their memory”. Bullshit. We knew what we were doing but we were all in a purple haze and feeling too good to be bothered by what was happening around us.

And in the end, that was really mattered – especially when they found the cure for the infection. That was the kicker, man. That they managed to save the world from the zombie apocalypse and changed back all of those who were infected – except for those who were really dead, of course.

But you know what? I wish they’d left the world burning.

I looked up the statistics and 20% of the world’s population got killed, either by zombies or in the fighting in the wake of the spread of the infection. But another 10% died AFTER the antidote had been given out.

Like I said before, we were aware of what we were doing when we were zombies. So when they cured us, we could still remember being monsters. Do you know how much it takes to be able to live with that for the rest of your life?

That’s why most of those who survived being a zombie ended up killing themselves to take away the taste of blood and flesh of people in their mouths. Some things you just can’t live with.

(from Literatunes, November 2, 2009 at www.allmusicjunkies.com)