by James D Dean

The end of the world has come.  Zombies are walking the earth.  Law and order have collapsed, and now it’s kill or be killed.  You and your little band of survivors have escaped to your safe zone.  You have food and water, weapons and supplies.  You’re set up pretty well to ride out the storm for a while.  You and your family and friends are in a perfect situation for continued survival.

One day as you are on your perimeter sweep, you hear voices.  A man, a woman, and two young kids.  They’re coming close to your compound, and soon you will be discovered.  Your secluded safe zone is about to be discovered.  You hear the stress in their voices as they talk about food and shelter for their kids.  You want to help, but you don’t know who they are.

Is it a trap?  Have people found you and these people are just a lure?

Are any of them infected?

Will they rob you blind in the middle of the night?

When you fall asleep, will they shoot you to make sure their kids benefit from all your hard work.

It all boils down to one simple idea.  Trust.  Today in the here and now, trust is something we take for granted.  We trust that when the cable guy shows up, you’ll be watching ESPN within an hour.  You trust that your mechanic will fix that strange noise in your engine.  You trust that your grocer isn’t screwing you out of a couple ounces of meat at the deli.

But what happens when the world shits the bed?  When law and order goes the way of the dinosaurs, it’s just you and the few people you have around you.  You trust that they will not kill you in your sleep.  You trust that they have your best interests at heart, because they also trust that you also have their best interests at heart.  Trust in the ZA is literally a matter of life and death.

So what do you do?  If the world is ever to have a chance to survive and rebuild, people will need to come together and share in the workload to rebuild…if such thing is even possible.  They will need to put faith in people they barely know to return to some semblance of what the world used to be.  People will have to work together to survive.

Those are high ideas, and would be great if things like that could happen.  But the reality of things is when you are looking at the survival of your family versus the survival of another, it is human nature to take care of your own first.  Even if that means you allow a family to keep walking by without offering any help whatsoever.

So again, what do you do?  There is no easy answer.  Trusting this family could mean bringing vital resources and skills into the group that could prolong your life and possible survivability.   It could also mean that everything you have worked and fought for could be gone, and the lives of everyone you know and care about could be gone in the blink of an eye.

Trust, or don’t.  I wish I could give a definitive answer, but I can’t.  Being honest with myself, I don’t know what I would do.

Check out This Dying World: Abandon All Hope or begin with book one.

Jay Wilburn

Jay Wilburn has a Masters Degree in Education that goes mostly unused since he quit teaching to write about zombies. Jay writes horror because he tends to find the light by facing down the darkness. His is doing well following a life saving kidney transplant. Jay is the author of Maidens of Zombie Kingdom a young adult fantasy trilogy, Lake Scatter Wood Tales adventure books for elementary and middle school readers, Vampire Christ a trilogy of political and religious satire, and The Dead Song Legend. He cowrote The Enemy Held Near, Yard Full of Bones, and The Hidden Truth with Armand Rosamilia. You can also find Jay's work in Best Horror of the Year volume 5. He is a staff writer with Dark Moon Digest, LitReactor, and the Still Water Bay series with Crystal Lake Publishing.

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