Rory

I didn’t use a calendar anymore, but it had been a month I think, maybe two. The electricity went out after a week, so it was hard to tell what day it was.

At times the days dragged on, other times it moved in a blur.

Before all of this, I was so careful with my schedule so I never had to much time on my hand, since that was when I got antsy even when high off my ass. I was always doing something – usually it was working out, or going for jogs, or holding down a part time job to keep busy. Fuck, I even did a stint at college to follow my ex girlfriend around.

But I was always busy. I always blocked out time to get high and stuck to not going outside of it.

Without that discipline, time flowed differently. When I started to feel manic, I found ways to keep busy and now I was basically a house husband, and I was pretty okay with that.

I stayed exclusively at home and kept things tidy for us and our fur babies, since - as so many zombie films showed us - shit got dirty and nasty fast when society collapsed.

But not here!

I kept things super organized. Clean. Ready for use with everything in it’s own place. My apartment was like a tightly run ship and it made me feel more secure.

Francis meanwhile would go on nightly journeys out into the world to bring back supplies, mainly food, water, and weed, but also necessary cat food and also, one on occasion, a surprise cat! We named him Rick because we were watching The Walking Dead after Francis was able to find a solar panel and battery, so now we had a working laptop – not a working fridge, but you know what, we were doing okay without it.

Right now, it was storing cat food and shit, since that stuff stank and we were pretty sure that zombies were attracted to smells. Francis did some weird shit to figure out how they ticked, but from what I gathered, sound was the biggest draw for them, and then it was sight, and finally smell.

Francis had fully moved in with me, using his apartment to – I don’t know – stock up guns and shit. I didn’t go in there cuz I was responsible for watching out fur babies at all times, which I took very seriously, but I knew that Francis was slowly building up a gun stash and shit since I held open the door to the stairwell while he brought whatever he brought up from his latest run.

And boy did he bring back a lot of guns.

He brought back some fun shit for us as well – nice clothes, shoes, a whole cat castle – and now that we had electricity cuz of the solar stuff he set up, he was bringing back DVD’s that we were building shelves in the hallway between our apartment for. I mean, there was probably a better use for the space, but we had a lot more fun with this, and I think that was really important, given the circumstances.

So yeah.

I mean, not a bad life.

Kinda sucked for the people outside, but maybe it was blowing over or something, cuz there seemed to be a lot less wandering about.

I set down the brush I was using to comb out Rick and went over to the sliding glass door, peeking out to look down and take in the street below.

Before it had been packed with just a constant, unending amount of people shuffling along, but now there was much less, like only a couple dozen visible at any time.

So...improvement, right?

I looked to where Francis had the railing of my -our – balcony covered in the heads of zombies, and I pulled away and closed the curtain. He kept pretty tight lipped about the results of his research so I wasn’t really sure what was happening to all the zombies that had been wandering the street, but I knew he had to be learning something because he spent a lot of time poking around the heads he kept out there.

But I wasn’t one to pry, not when I was high, so I just didn’t think about it.

Things got bad when I thought to hard on things.

So I just stayed high and focused on whatever task I was assigned – and right now I needed to brush out the cats, use the quiet push vacuum to clean up, and then get dinner ready for when Francis came home.