Free Don’t Eat Cat by Jess Walter Page B

for the door, Brando now bounding over the counter and toward me like a hungry wolf, knocking over displays of coffee cups and food-finance brochures as he ran straight into the arms of two Starbucks Financial security guys who quickly Tasered him tothe ground and, eventually, into submission.
    I stood on the sidewalk with the gathered crowd as the security guys loaded the hog-tied, muzzled Brando into the back of a Halliburton priva-police car, the poor kid still making that awful yowling noise, which shivered up my neck.
    “What happened?” a young man asked.
    “Zombie attack,” a woman said.
    I muttered, “You’re not supposed to call them that.”
    It was the first documented attack in months, and the sim-tweets went crazy, as they always do when the subject is hypo-ETE. The tweet was up for hours, twice as long as any election news; only the Florida evacuation tweet was up longer that week. Most of the noise came from Apocalyptics ranting about Revelations, law-and-ordertypes calling for another crackdown on Replexen, and, on the other side, hypo-ETE activists calling for mercy, for understanding, and for more government funding for programs aimed at those kids born into Replexen addiction, family support groups accusing the “irate customer” of being an agitator (thankfully, I wasn’t named). Starbucks Financial stock dropped a couple of points after that (I managedto short the whole coffee/finance sector for my Indonesian clients), and the company announced it would “revisit its hypo-ETE retraining program.” But honestly, it just seemed like the whole thing would fade. The manager would get a good payout, I’d get a free latte, the zombies would get retrained (“Brando. Do not eat cat”), and the world would go on. Or so I thought.
2
    Everyone has an opinion about when it all went to hell: this war, that epidemic, the ten-billion-people threshold, the twelve-, this environmental disaster, the repeated economic collapses, suicide pacts, anti-procreation laws, nuclear accidents, terrorist dirty bombs, polar thaws, rolling famines, blah blah blah. It’s getting to where you can’t watch the sim-tweets without someone saying this is the end of the world, or that —genetic piracy, food factory contaminations, the Wasatch uprising, Saudi death squads, the Arizona border war. Animal extinctions. Ozone tumors. And, of course, the so-called zombie drug.
    But here’s what I’ve come to believe. That’s maybe it’s no different now than it ever was. Maybe it’s always the end of the world. Maybe you’re alivefor a while and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.
    Sure, the world seems crazy now . But wouldn’t it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed firstborn sons, crucifiedpriests, fed people to lions, burned them at the stake, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, tortured them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet?
    Yes, we’ve ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we’re always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah,we’re getting cancer at an alarming rate, and suicides are at an all-time high, and sure, we’ve got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely —the statistics say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning—a person.
    But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.
    All I’d asked was that it be better managed.
    But four days after the Starbucks Financial incident, Apocalyptics began