What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Zombier Read Online Free Page A

job, but it takes guts.
    I had a colleague who shot himself.
    Only that he pulled a bit on the left and failed to blow up his head. We found him in his mother’s room, wearing a flowered robe with his skull half ripped and one liquefied eye pouring down his cheek as if he wanted to cry; an abstract painting of clotted blood on the half of his face, while he did back and forth from wall to wall and seemed at peace with the world.
    We caught him and brought him to the containment structure.
    Now we keep them on the University campus. It’s been a couple of years since the classes were suspended, nobody wants to study anymore, no one has projects for the future. The most required jobs are those that allow the remaining population to have at least basic services. Food and energy. But in large cities some courses are still open and not just those of medicine. Somewhere there are still people who wants to study literature, although probably in eighty years there will be no one left to read books.
    We will leave an abandoned planet full of useless things, as long as nature doesn’t claim them, deleting their traces forever. Who knows what will happen after us and which will become the new dominant species on the planet. The disease has also affected the primates, all those animals that are somehow related to us. There will not be a new evolution, not even in a million years. The human race has come to an end.
    And in the meantime we are getting older and we look with concern to a future in which we’ll be weaker and weaker and we will just have to let ourselves die. There’s nothing we can do. The time is a straight line that goes in one direction, towards an inevitable chasm.
    I can’t go on anymore. Writing all of this it just seems to me like a futile exercise.
    To whom will I leave my words? No one will preserve them; these will be just painted pages, senseless, food for the mountain goats.
    It’s been a few months since I left the city, I could not go on living every day on the edge of insanity, although after so long it has become almost like a habit.
    What was the point on staying to patrol the streets? To collect those wandering and apathetic bodies? The citizens aren’t afraid anymore, they perceive them as an inevitable part of their lives and so you see things like two girls, among the new ones, those born soon after, those who came to the world when the world was already upset, walking on the street, chatting with each other, laughing. You are doing your duty, with your black uniform, the cross-shaped pin and your nametag. A dead man comes out from the corner, staggering, all gray, he has a short-sleeved shirt and you can clearly see the signs of the cuts on his forearms and the clotted blood that poured out. Another one that couldn’t take it anymore, you think, while the girls stop. They stare at him, make a comment in disgust and then burst out laughing again, passing over, as if everything were perfectly normal. And a knot squeezes your stomach, the ice freezes your veins. Is this the world we have become?
    That day I realized it was really over, that my mind wasn’t going to accept it anymore.
    I took off my uniform, I put on some comfortable clothes, and I calmly wrote my resignation letter. I packed my bags and supplies and I got in the car.
    I love the peace and quiet of the mountains. I love the solitude. Many might think that in such a situation one wants to stay as much as possible in the company of the living, to give comfort to each another, help each other to forget our ungrateful destiny. No, thanks, I’ve seen enough of people; to me they are nothing more than dead still able to talk and eat. And I do not want them anymore.
    I’d like that the last image I have of this land will already be what comes next: the solitude, the silence, the wild nature. It gives me a sense of peace; it gives me a glimmer of hope, because I know that even without us, life will still go on. This rock is still alive