“It’s long,” I groan.
“No, I mean, it’s diverse!”
She’s right, and I can’t believe I didn’t notice before. The line is full of all different kinds of people: all different skin tones, all different body types.
I smile at Imani and her happiness just beams into me. I feel like I could levitate from it.
There’s a whole wide world, waiting out there, and for today it’s almost like there’s a whole wide world here, too.
We’ve passed a million or so people, it feels like, and at least half of them are cosplaying. Some of them are dressed like characters from Human Wasteland, but there are plenty of other horror movie characters, and zombies galore; I’ve counted at least three zombie Spider-Men.
It’s going to be the perfect day. First and foremost: I have always loved zombies. If there’s a zombie movie, I’ve probably seen it, and if they make a new one, I’m going to see it.
It all started with the first zombie movie I ever saw. It was on TV late at night on Halloween, and my mom definitely didn’t know I was watching it. Mom hates scary things. I think it’s kind of linked to how she’s a kindergarten teacher, like everything is optimism and respect and fairness and love with her, which is nice, but you know. There’s more out there, right? Good and bad. We can’t stay in kindergarten forever. Generally speaking. I guess my mom found a way.
But it’s so stinking cute when her students see her, like if we’re in a restaurant or a store, their eyes go wide like they’ve seen a celebrity, and they’ll run up calling “Mrs. Blue! Mrs. Blue!” with these high little voices, and she’ll lean down to hug them, and I don’t know why but sometimes it makes me want to cry.
My dad likes scary movies okay, he likes mystery more than horror, but they overlap a bunch so we can sit and watch those together. Dad is the director of our public library, so he’s definitely more cool and up on trends and stuff than my mom. Last week he even brought home an old library DVD of the first zombie movie I ever saw, the one I watched on TV all those years ago.
Fight the Dead. Changed. My. Life. It’s about a zombie outbreak happening and a group of people holing up in a gas station trying to survive the night. Even though it was in black-and-white, it was terrifying! And thrilling! And I felt like it was telling me something deep and true when I saw it, even though zombies aren’t real, because of how that group of people acted once they were in the gas station.
My favorite was the scared girl, who everyone kept discounting and who just kept surviving, impossibly, until the very end.
Weirdly, I really like the idea of them: zombies—these horrible, terrifying, inexorable things, animated corpses that want to devour you. Seriously scary, primal stuff.
But more than that, I like that zombies are clean. Not physically, because ew. But, like . . . emotionally.
They only want to eat you. They don’t want to hurt you, or torture you. Pain is just a by-product of how they want your meat. They’re not sadistic. They’re just hungry.
Zombies are basically human sharks.
If the sharks were also dead. And if a shark bit you and you then were destined to become a shark.
Okay, so not really like sharks.
“Have you heard from Siggy?” I ask as we get in line.
“She’s still got plenty of time.” Imani glances at her phone again.
I love her, but our other beffie, Signe Larsen, has absolutely no sense of time. She doesn’t get how long it takes to get somewhere, how long she needs to get ready, how long she needs to do anything, hell, how long she needs to watch a minute go by.
But the thing is, when Siggy finally arrives anywhere, she’s so cute and funny and so apologetic it’s hard to stay mad at her.
Hard, but not impossible.
Imani slides her phone back into her tunic pocket. “Siggy’s going to be late but not late-late. She loves the show as much as we do.”
We’re all mega fans of Human Wasteland. It’s the best show on television, and I am completely obsessed with it. It’s why ZombieCon! even exists.
Me and my three, well, two, best friends have watched literally every episode of it together, live when they air. It’s our thing. We write and read fanfic, we tweet at the show writers and actors and costume designers and just about everyone involved with the show. And of course the other fans, which is so much fun because you get this feeling in your heart, as you watch with countless other fans, this expanding, growing, glowy feeling. This feeling that there’s so much more out there, there’s a whole world of people, and they’re so into the same thing you are, and that makes you feel . . . loved, somehow. Like you belong. A really buzzy, shared, beautiful feeling.
Have you ever discovered something that made you feel . . . understood? Somehow called to something in you, and made you long to be a part of it, even if that was absurd and impossible, but even so it just . . . resonated with you, somehow?
That’s how Human Wasteland made me feel the first time I watched it, and every time after.
Part of why I love it so much is because it doesn’t try to pretend that bad things don’t happen. And yet it also highlights hope, love, and a community of chosen kinship as ideals. This big found-family of survivors who have their differences and yet in the end have to get along. The show asks big questions about what kind of world we want, and what kind of people the survivors have to be, how they’ve had to change over the course of the zombie apocalypse.
Like my favorite character, Clay Clarke, the army ranger’s surrogate son. Clay is played by Hunter Sterling, an actor only a year older than me.
Which I know, because I looked it up. Like I said, I’m a mega-fan.
I have a full-size poster of Hunter as Clay hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Which is how I know exactly what pose I’ll strike when we have our group photo op with him at the end of the day. I took a bunch of selfies with the poster, trying different poses, expressions, and outfits. By the end of it, I was just being funny, because I was holding different props, and cracking myself up.
Which, let’s face it, was infinitely more fun than studying for the SAT. Which is what I was supposed to be doing at the time.
My favorite selfie, which is now my lock screen, was the one where I put on my dress from the junior prom (what a disaster that was—do not ask). I held on to a bunch of silk flowers I swiped from the dining room table, holding up my other hand like a beauty queen waving, with her dirty and intense date glowering behind her.
I amuse myself. But if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?
We’re still not moving, but it’s only going to be a few more minutes before the convention center doors open officially.
I text Siggy again, then crane my neck around, looking for her white-blonde head.