So you’ve been bitten. Happens to the best of us. Inevitable, some would say. A simple slip-up, a careless moment, a faltering step, is sometimes all it takes.

But there is comfort in failure. There is peace in hopelessness. And there’s so much to do in the Zombie Apocalypse when you’ve been bitten.

You can go to the library. Do you remember the library? Of course you don’t. Silly me. It’s still there though, millennia worth of accumulated knowledge, collected and curated and leatherbound and neatly stacked upon shelves so tall you’d swear they reached the sky.

That’s Mr. Lancaster over there, Head Librarian. Keeper of the Word, we used to call him. He still is, you know. Perpetually now, as it were. Well, as perpetual as rotting tissue and sinew and bone can be I suppose.

Or you could go to the Amusement Park. The rides and fairs are all rusty and ramshackle and overgrown now of course. And even if they weren’t, there’d be no electricity to power them. But you can still climb the rickety rails of the rollercoaster, or sit on your favorite animal on the merry-go-round (the lion), and consider the overwhelming silence of a world without humanity.

I still buy my tickets at the booth by the entrance. Old habits die hard I guess. I never knew his name, the young lad who used to work there. I just call him Billy now.

There you go, Billy. Keep the change.

But my go-to has always been the Zoo. There aren’t many animals left, mind you. First thing I did when it all went down was to free them. Open the gates, let them roam the harsh concrete jungle with the hungry dead. A few stuck around though. Old habits. Domesticated. Indoctrinated.

Your mother loved the Herpetarium the most. She’d spend hours in there, staring at the geckos and snakes and the funny little salamanders that you couldn’t really see unless you knew exactly where they were.

Her favorite was the axolotl. They can regenerate entire limbs, you know. No scarring or anything. Just a brand new limb. Just brand new life.

I tended to the axolotls for as long as I could, but it turns out even miracle reptiles have to face mortality.

I still visit her sometimes. Oftentimes. Every day.

And I think she’d know. Know the difference between a hungry cry and a death rattle. Know what to do, know how to nurture and care for a baby, care for you, in a grim world so utterly hellbent on murdering us one-by-one.

And, in the end, who could have known? Who could have known those wee little baby chompers of yours were sharp enough to penetrate skin?

So I’ve been bitten.

Happens to the best of us. Inevitable, some would say. But it’s like your mother whispered to me just before she passed on.

There’s so much to do in the Zombie Apocalypse when you’ve been bitten.

The Zoo it is then.