A Child of Pop Culture

She was different when the apocalypse happened, not so much in appearance, but in demeanor. Change was bound to happen one way or another as she got older, but the end of the world tended to bring changes in the extremes.

Appearance-wise she remained pretty much the same. After arriving at Eastpointe she had the stylist at the plaza cut her hair just above her shoulders so, when tucked behind the spandex hood on the visor, it would fit easier. She also declined more purple highlights, but her hair was still beautiful on its own; soft brown which rested flat and flowed straight from her scalp in a single wave.

Having relocated from the north Florida coast to Rhode Island, her tan was long gone and replaced with a pale porcelain hue, though admittedly this could also have been caused by seldom venturing outside her home and experiencing even the slightest warmth of direct sunlight. Or, perhaps, her body—so accustomed to constant summertime—had not adjusted to the long, harsh Rhode Island winters. She had never even seen real snow before then.

Other than that, her appearance had not changed much in five years. She remained short and petite and very cute.

She had always been a child of pop culture—MTV, showy clothes, and dreams of marrying James Spader. She had been popular throughout school and usually always had a say on what her friends could like and dislike. Even she would admit she was nothing more than a teen brat. She could remember a guy named Bobby Ware who stole the teacher’s edition of their Geometry book and gave it to her. She promptly used the book to cheat her way through Geometry throughout the semester, never even bothering to thank the guy because she knew he just wanted attention from her.

And that’s pretty much how her life worked. She could get anything she wanted, she was never teased or ridiculed, and she never had to thank anyone for anything. Underneath it all, however, she knew she wasn’t a very interesting person.

Therein lay the problem: What were the chances any interesting people had survived? Before acquiring the necessary skills, it was by luck and looks alone that she had managed to make it to Eastpointe. It certainly wasn’t because of her personality.

She had been the two hundred and seventh survivor to drive through the gate. Once she settled down she would have tried meeting other people there in the hopes they were a cool sort, but her enthusiasm had been dashed by that prick Leon Wolfe. With light brown hair past his ears and obnoxiously good-looking, he was the same type of jerk she probably would have dated—and have her heart broken by—had the world not changed and her youth not been wasted.

She was just starting to accept that by living within the walls of Eastpointe she would have to do just that—live—despite all the horrors she had already been through. It seemed everyone else there was living, moving on, that sort of thing. So why couldn’t she?

It started in the cafeteria.

Eastpointe didn’t have much going on then. A couple hundred more survivors would roll through in the weeks after her, but until they found people with the necessary talents they had to forsake things like running water and electricity. However, they still had a cafeteria in the hotel and they were still able to serve what food hadn’t gone rotten.

Working the lunch line that day was Leon Wolfe, a kid from Maine who was also one of a handful of people trained as a Black Beret along the way. Like Gordon Levi, Leon’s trainer also met his demise before finding the solace of Eastpointe’s high walls. Courtney always felt there should have been some sort of unspoken comradery between the seven Black Berets who made it to Eastpointe and maybe an even larger understanding between kids who were popular, but Leon Wolfe—the arrogant jerk that he was—mixed a glass of vinegar in with all the glasses of water and it was Courtney who got it.

She had been very, very thirsty and didn’t question or suspect anything. She didn’t even have time to smell the noxious aroma; she just tilted back the glass and took two full chugs.

It hit her hard.

She went to her knees, spitting and vomiting while Leon and several others were laughing their heads off. She had been strong on her own when she drove the humvee all the way from Georgia and at the same time managed to avoid getting eaten. She knew how to fight. She felt strong now. However, after a week at Eastpointe she was growing accustomed to the relative safety of the place and its relaxed atmosphere. There had only been a couple of actual soldiers there, but they weren’t in charge and they weren’t like the other soldiers she had met. No one there was on a power trip. There were no lustful eyes constantly watching her. For all intents and purposes, everyone there was normal. Unfortunately, she didn’t know that some of them were also going to be dickheads.

Seeing them laughing at her was too unexpected—too much to deal with. In her anger, she just sat there in the middle of the cafeteria and bawled her eyes out, creating quite a scene. She wondered if there were new rules here that she didn’t understand. She wondered why these people had done this to her. She wondered what she did to deserve this.

Then she remembered the kids—the little boys and girls with her in the back of the deuce-and-a-half—and how they met their ends. Even at Eastpointe, the very young or very old were very much a minority, as were out-of-shape types. She remembered why she survived initially—not because she was strong, but because she was pretty. She remembered all the others who deserved to be alive but weren’t.

She remembered Bobby Ware and the stolen teacher’s edition Geometry book. She remembered her mom and dad. She remembered Gordon.

And she missed them all.

With more people arriving at Eastpointe and with the various skills they brought with them, they were able to get the power plant working and the water running. They were strengthening the walls and renovating the houses.

But she had nothing to offer. She had no talents.

She chose a small newly constructed home to live in by herself. When it came time to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, she was allowed to go to the abandoned Eastpointe Plaza and take anything she wanted. It had all the amenities of the malls in Florida and she found this shopping spree surprisingly comforting.

She was able to find most of the things she owned before the apocalypse. She got a television—though she accepted there would never be any new shows to watch, a VCR and videotapes of her favorite movies—mostly Disney flicks, (she loved the gargoyles in Hunchback of Notre Dame), a stereo and her favorite CDs, her favorite sappy romance novels, and all the clothes she liked right down to the rainbow-colored socks with individual toes. She even got posters of her favorite bands—whose members were all probably wandering around as dead people with guitars still strapped to their backs—to decorate the walls in her new home.

And so she existed.

Tucked away in her house with all the conveniences she wanted, she lived in her newly created world. With no interesting people left, she felt it was best to read her books and watch her movies and listen to her music.

From within her own walls, the only reminder that all was not truly well in the world was the iron bars welded into the window frames. Every window in her house had them. Bigger windows like the two in the living room were given a vertical, prison-style treatment. Smaller windows like the ones in the bedroom were given a quick yet reliable crisscrossing metal grating. All were welded in place to suit a very simple purpose, which certainly wasn’t for aesthetic viewing pleasure. They would be her last defense if the undead ever breached Eastpointe’s walls.

In a world ruled by the dead, the living were again forced to live.

Courtney, however, simply existed.

Nestled in the triangle of Potter Cove, Snug Harbor, and the same great Atlantic Ocean Courtney saw in Florida, Eastpointe was a private community of small vacation homes for rich folks and fishermen. Just like one of the graffiti messages on the interstate proclaimed, there was a wall around all of it and it stretched as far as her eyes could see. A pre-apocalypse sign posted in front of the guard shack at the main gate read: Welcome to Eastpointe - Golf - Swimming - Recreation for the family.

There had been a rear entrance at one time, but was now bricked up and barricaded. The wall was high and solid concrete. It probably served the purpose of keeping the eyes of poor people—or, to be politically correct, ‘non-members’—from peering inside.

Eastpointe, even from the beginning, had everything a small town needed to be self-sufficient. As more and more people came, more and more of those luxuries became available. Getting the community’s small hydroelectric power plant up and running came first. Then came the pumps at the water treatment facility and getting clean, running water constantly flowing. The only thing they had to do without was telephones—which, as they all discovered—none of them actually needed.

Taking from a stockpile of chemicals large enough to last for a decade, they were able to get the indoor swimming pool at the hotel up and running. Swimming had always been something Courtney enjoyed, so it was about this time that she wanted to leave her house to go there.

She had been avoiding everyone for so long that she knew they would be questioning her sanity, so she created a facade of maintaining that she was still a child of pop culture. Any time she left her house she made sure to look her best. She showered and waxed and shaved, plucked her eyebrows, and applied makeup and mascara. She wore cool clothes and a sexy two-piece bathing suit to go swimming in. She kept to herself.

The facade worked.

She was certain everyone saw her as she wanted to be seen: a snobby chick who—despite the circumstances—still looked down on everyone around her and enjoyed being left alone.

However, the community’s in-house supplies, which were taken mostly from the Eastpointe Shopping Plaza, would not last forever. Pre-packaged food, light bulbs, toiletries, and other items of significant importance were dwindling.

Though still maintaining her right-as-rain attitude, she at last found a way to contribute. In doing so, everyone at Eastpointe—including that self-righteous bastard Leon Wolfe—soon found it evident that she was indeed trained by Gordon Levi.

Courtney, along with the six other Black Berets—including Leon, much to her chagrin—a couple of soldiers and some other gutsy people, ventured outside the walls of Eastpointe and began an operation to loot and pillage the neighboring towns. It wasn’t like anyone in those towns were going to complain. After all, they were all dead, and for all Courtney knew, anyone who was alive in the world was alive inside the walls of Eastpointe.

Courtney found it surprising that the group never really had trouble locating what they needed. While a lot of the places they went to had already been ransacked and things like appliances and guns removed, the looters left behind everything that was significant for long-term survival.

The Black Berets brought back supplies by the truckload, including the most important ones, the items a town would need to stay entirely self-sufficient forever: farm animals.

Left untouched due to the strict human-only diet of the undead, cows and pigs and sheep and chickens and even horses were herded all the way back to Eastpointe. Over the span of several months, the acres upon acres of golf course was turned into a thriving farm community and irrigation ditches were dug from the river by the power plant. Large gardens were planted and harvested, always being certain enough vegetables were gathered to last everyone through the entire winter season. The livestock gave birth to new livestock and there was always an endless supply of meat as long as the Eastpointe citizens didn’t get too greedy.

With over five hundred people in Eastpointe and the resulting melting pot of backgrounds, the inevitable power vacuum started to develop. Soldiers preferred a military style of authority, politicians wanted the common electoral system, and a Scientologist just wanted to ‘clear’ everybody. From what Courtney understood with her limited knowledge of the happenings outside her home, the matter was settled by an older man named Ervin Wright, who had been a member of the International Order of Odd Fellows. He introduced the Odd Fellow system of government and everyone eventually agreed it to be best suited to the purposes of Eastpointe.

With this system, every individual issue concerning the welfare of Eastpointe was assigned to an elected committee. Respectively, a committee was elected to address concerns of the power plant, water treatment and irrigation, land management, security, and so on. Every issue, regardless of its importance in hierarchy, was given a committee. Members of committees were elected to varying lengths of terms so some would expire before others, yet the rest of the members in rotation would still be knowledgeable of current affairs. To assure all of the committees were functioning properly, a Superintendent was elected for a six-month term. This Super-intendent would also see to creating more committees as other concerns arose and when his term expired he would not be eligible to run for Superintendent again until he served terms in three different committees. This guaranteed no one person would ever amass too much political power within Eastpointe.

Voting was held once a month in the conference hall at the hotel and all votes were taken with a simple showing of hands. Courtney only attended the ones she was requested to, and usually when she was it meant one of the committees needed something that was outside the safe walls of Eastpointe. They knew what she was capable of. With her training and her attitude they never saw nor treated her as just a girl.

She liked the respect.

And, when requested, Courtney and the rest would oblige them.

The undead were everywhere outside the walls of Eastpointe and it seemed more and more were migrating to Rhode Island to be where the food was. It was always tough—and it was always scary—every time her group had to venture into some dead town to retrieve something.

There were losses sometimes.

Sometimes a member of their group would get bitten by a zombie and—more often than not—that person would request sleeping pills to end their pain. After they had passed, someone else had to put a bullet in their head to prevent them from rising again.

Courtney never did it. She always left the room when talk of euthanasia began.

Everyone figured the zombies would rot away within a year, but as more time passed, everyone noticed that they appeared pretty much the same. During winter, the snow would cover them up and bury them, and then in the summer they would be seen wandering outside the walls again. Very rarely did they see one who had decayed enough to render itself immobile.

The years passed and the committees stopped finding reasons to send her outside. By then the town had become fully self-sufficient and the Plaza restocked with enough supplies to last almost indefinitely. There had not been another survivor to enter the gates of Eastpointe in quite some time, even though they had spray-painted directions to the community on nearly every billboard in a fifty-mile radius.

And all the while, Courtney existed. She maintained her facade. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she slept, but she always did so alone. She had dreams about Gordon at first—that he showed up at her front door, decaying and hungry. After his memory faded however, she began having the dreams about the corridor and what waited for her at the end of it.

She thought that maybe the nightmares would go away if she weren’t alone, which was when she sought out Leon Wolfe.

She heard rumors from listening to other girls at the swimming pool that he had slept with nearly every available female at Eastpointe. While she didn’t know if it was true or not, she did know he was easy enough on the eyes and her hatred for him would make it easy to forget him afterwards. And—if it was true he was the town slut—she would have no trouble seducing him.

She would regret her actions later, of course, but at the time she was so starved for some kind of release that she looked beyond her anger at him and focused instead on what he could do for her.

Yet she didn’t get the release she was hoping for. Even in someone else’s bed, with someone else sleeping beside her, the corridor still haunted her. Now she was embarrassed again, knowing he thought she simply couldn’t resist him and simply had to come over for a joy ride.

She thought the worst would be behind her, especially more than five years after the first corpse decided to rise again. Furthermore, she thought that her story would have ended upon arriving at Eastpointe, and—like in her sappy romance novels and favorite Disney flicks, ‘lived happily ever after’ would be displayed in fancy letters.

But at Eastpointe, her story had not ended.

It had only begun.