2020 is the United States’ First Zombie Apocalypse

The zombies of television and film are a caricature of ambling disease, mindless murder, the thirst to eat brains and consume flesh. Zombies are a plague in human form, and they represent our fear that disease will come walking in the door and demand or force our death. What else could we call 2020 in the United States than our first zombie apocalypse?

This zombie apocalypse came about due to the unholy, yet wholly predictable, merger of two existing medical phenomena: a virus and a parasite.

The virus has ruined the year of the 60% of Americans who don’t own stocks. COVID-19 is a highly-transmittable airborne pathogen that causes respiratory ailments and a host of internal maladies. It spreads rapidly, uncontrollably via the vapor in one’s breath. For somewhere between four and ten days, a carrier may express no symptoms, leading to uncontained propagation among the unknowing. COVID-19 was first identified in November of 2019, in Wuhan, China, and found its way around the world within months due to its rapid spread among unknowing carriers.

The parasite, on the other hand, has been in widespread transmission and replication in the United States since the 1950s. It has many names, and has long been damaging to the country and its people, yet still our leaders have not identified it with the intent to relieve Americans of its effects. The parasite most commonly afflicting Americans today was itself born of the matrimony of similar parasites which have infected Americans, and many Europeans, for many hundreds of years. But since the 1950’s in the US these parasites have begun to cohabitate, to share DNA, and eventually to merge into a singular, pernicious worm that today we find devouring the prefrontal cortexes of countless Americans. The brain worm targets the part of the brain which is responsible for higher, reflective, critical thinking. In its modern form, the parasite disables the part of the brain which overcomes individualism to enable pro-social behavior. Much as the COVID-19 carrier can remain asymptomatic for days, it was not until the last few years that those whose brains the parasite had occupied began to manifest their most pronounced symptoms – defiance, antisocial behavior, rejection of social norms and critical thinking. And by that point, it was too late – the virus had arrived to join the infectious party.

Leaders worldwide responded to the virulent airborne plague by taking the advice of scientists. They instituted bans on public gatherings, paid their nation’s residents to stay home, implemented requirements for masks and widespread testing and contact tracing, and shut down or mandated the modified service of many businesses to contain the spread. The formula was a resounding success where it was adopted dutifully by a populace uninfected with the brain worm and still capable of social cooperation.

American politicians as a class have carried, shed and propagated the parasite for generations, as evidenced by their antisocial predilection to kill. Always innovative in how they commit murder, they decided to take none of the steps proven effective internationally to contain the spread of the virus. The parasite-riddled political class issued a one-time payment of $1200 to every taxpayer – just enough to claim they cared about those who would soon become sick with COVID-19, or lose wages and businesses from the ensuing shutdown. This lack of support for three hundred and sixty million people, most of whom were a paycheck away from bankruptcy, created havok. Thus the 2020 US zombie apocalypse began.

States and cities took further action than the US government to try and mirror successful national strategies seen around the globe. But these statewide and citywide lockdowns were unsuccessful, because the parasite knows no political bounds. Carriers of the brain worm and its many progenitors fell all over themselves to demand individual satisfaction during a moment that called for collective restraint. They refused social distancing, demanded their continued live entertainment, marched and rallied to oppose business closures, rejected masks as ineffective and mask requirements as tyrannical, attended parties defiantly, and so contracted and spread the virus in droves.

A great wave of anxiety washed over the Americans who did not carry the brain worm, in the absence of any clear direction from their leaders. With no indication of how to proceed, they stormed the grocery stores to buy many months’ supply of toilet paper, and redoubled their subscriptions to delivery and entertainment streaming services, reverting to a base sort of navel gazing in the hopes they could ride out the apocalypse with app-supplied sustenance, video on demand, and without wallowing in their own feces.

And it was here, in the malaise of righteous selfishness on one hand and anxious self-protection on another that the parasite fused with the virus, and the zombies emerged. They had spent decades living in a world of self-aggrandized isolation thanks to their inability to empathize with or take action on behalf of others. They had never considered the need to protect others through personal sacrifice. They had for decades refused vaccines, had chuckled at reduced consumption to mitigate climate change, had decried public health measures as a conspiracy against their personal choice. Their worm-addled brains convinced them that any action taken to advance the collective toward a secure future was an infringement on the right of the individual to choose for themselves that a secure collective future wasn’t worth it. The parasite kept them mobile at the time their community most needed to be still, to contain their ability to spread the disease. They became the ambling death.

Today our parasite-riddled, viral-loaded fellow countrymen are weaponized for social destruction, all-too-eager to spread the plague but just as eager to eat up the minds of anyone in proximity. Their primary means of spreading their murderous infection is not to bite, but to blather, unleashing the parasite. It is through this blather that the worms and the virus go forth and multiply. The zombies have long-attended church services and fraternal organizations where the pastors and leaders would administer brain worms on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. They have for years engaged in online discussions which fed only their brain worms’ appetite for individualist conspiracy and anti-social togetherness. They have for their entire lives watched brain worm-sponsored television and listened to brain worm radio which during the pandemic spoke not of the virus in serious terms, but made no such mentions, or which instead focused on the imaginary, tyrannical response to the virus in fire and brimstone tirades. They took to filming themselves entering public places in defiance of polite requests to contain their respiration, screaming spurious reasonings as to why safety measures were violations of their fundamental human rights. They took to the streets to shout slurs and mock those whose prefrontal cortexes remained intact. And because they ambled about, carelessly collecting these ailments, the virus flowed through their veins, lived on their breath, came out of their mouths with every spittle-flecked scream of “tyranny” and “plandemic.”

The zombies began to kill. They went to spring break, in obstinate dismissal of travel warnings, and returned to end the lives of their grandparents. They went to weddings, motocycle rallies, and Halloween parties whose ultimate result was thousands and thousands of their family members choking to death. They insisted on co-mingling, sweating, rubbing elbows without precaution, yet their brain worms had kept them from caring what would happen, what others had tried to warn them would happen. They insisted on life as usual, only to each day end life as many thousands knew it. 250,000 people are dead, and many more will die, of the blathering and ambling of the zombie horde. Some would lay dying in intensive care units, with only a ventilator keeping them away from a mobile morgue, and they would request in their last moments that the television be changed to something which reassured them that the pandemic was a hoax perpetrated to keep them from watching football with their family at Thanksgiving.

It must be said, the dead were not themselves all carriers of the parasite. In fact, as one becomes more vulnerable to the virus the parasite loses some of its ability to isolate and atomize. Individuals who depend upon their community to survive – such as those who are elderly or who have a weakened immune response – are resistant to the parasite’s siren song of individualism because their survival has often been dependent upon others. But this is not to guarantee that the victims of this zombie apocalypse were all free of the parasite, or had not themselves become zombies prior to their death. It was as likely that they contracted the virus while resisting the parasite, as it was the parasite had led them into the smothering chokehold of the virus. This is where the zombies have become most dangerous: even those who take precautions are unable to ensure their safety, because the zombies still roam the streets, and the halls of power. The virus may come knocking at your door with your next package, or meal, or on the lips of a loved one, or an old friend stopping by. The parasite may already live in your house, or within you.