We're all starting to get a little stir crazy, now. We've been peeking out every window, we've even gone up on the roof at night and looked around. There is nothing but nothing out there. Is it still technically a zombie apocalypse if there are no more zombies? I know this is exactly what the hero does wrong in every zombie movie I've ever seen, but the urge to go and see what's out there is overwhelming. There are a few of us who want to move on, or at least go out on a real scouting mission, maybe go out a few miles and see if we can find some survivors. Or food.
The 1800 pound elephant in the room around here has always been food. We do our little foraging runs and we're doing okay, but the thing we never talk about is that sooner or later, there will be nothing to forage. Whether we're talking about our neighborhood or the world in general, there is a finite amount of stored non-perishable food out there. Even non-perishable is a misnomer--everything spoils eventually (except honey, as I recall--it last thousands of years. I have no idea why). This means that for the continued survival of our group or our race in general, we will eventaully face the same decision our cave-dwelling ancestors faced--hunt or farm.
I'm not even sure hunting is an option. We don't really see animals around here, except birds (I presume the zombies eat animals as well as people). If we were to kill an animal, I can't say with 100% certainty that it doesn't become an animal zombie of some kind. Can you eat a zombie, an animal zombie, I mean? Or does the affliction make it deadly to us the minute it "Dies?" This is all assuming that there are animals left out there. 4 billion flesh-eating zombies can put a good dent in the food chain, I imagine. Except fish. I bet there are still fish. Can there be zombie fish?
For that matter, I'm not sure what kind of an option farming is, either. I had a garden; I can grow carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers and such, but how do you grow rice? What about wheat? If you grow wheat, how do you turn it into grain? Then what? Does anybody know how to build a good stone oven so we can bake like one loaf of bread with the wheat we spent 6 months growing? We were a society dependent upon the idea that other people and machines would do the work for us. Nobody knows how to do anything here. We're security guards, computer geeks, cashiers, salespeople--none of us have skills that apply to the world the way it is now. The fact that we're still alive is nothing short of a miracle. Of course, maybe we're alive because of who we are. When this thing hit, we had no delusions about fighting the zombies or saving our distant relatives downstate or joining the police citizen militias to help keep order--we just grabbed who and what we could and hid. Again, just like our anient ancestors--when the going gets tough, take to the trees and wait for the right opportunity to take over.
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