Post 335: Dayna Ingram (guest blogger)

Pariah by Bob Fingerman. ISBN: 9780765326270.

There's a moment very early in this book when a certain character is resting peacefully on the window ledge of an apartment building, inconveniently surrounded by zombies. He chats with his wife, he smokes a cigarette. Oh shit he falls out the window! He becomes a victim first of gravity, then of hungry zombie hordes. This guy right here is totally me if I ever find myself in the midst of a Zombocalypse.

I am the poor sucker who will be killed not by zombies but by my own stupidity, or susceptibility to gravity, which is more or less the same thing. I am the idiot who will avoid being bitten for days, maybe even weeks, and then I'll forget to lock up the garage, or I'll scrape my knee on a rusty nail, or I'll run out into the middle of the street trying to save a stray dog. I'll bust the heads of a writhing, unquenchable mass of gooey, drippy dead dudes, only to trip and fall down a well on my way back to safety. I'll shoot my own undead mother in the noggin' and then step on a live wire that's been downed in a shallow puddle on the sidewalk and go to my grave regretting only that I forgot it had rained or that I forgot how electrocution works.

You read me right. In the event of a Zombie Apocalypse, I would not hesitate to shoot the reanimated corpse of my own dear mother. I guess I'm pretty proud of this inner knowledge. Whatever idiotic things I may do in the quest to not be eaten by my former friends, neighbors and countrymen, I will never die due to a misplaced sense of compassion/empathy/sympathy for my zombified loved ones. Because, as the old adage goes, there's no
OH-SHIT-MY-WIFE'S-A-ZOMBIE-I-CAN'T-POSSIBLY-SHOOT-HER-IN-THE-FACE in SURVIVAL.

Remember that, loved ones. If the Zombocalypse comes, maybe don't beep me.

Dayna Ingram is a writer and student living in the Bay Area. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Antioch College in 2008, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She works at Half Price Books, where she buys more books than she can reasonably hope to read in a lifetime.  She is also the author of Sleep Like This.

Dayna's review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: guest blogger did not disclose where she got the book from. Also, I am not a good candidate for saving your or my own ass during the Zombocalypse either. I'm both slow and callous.