Let’s talk about the zombie apocalypse

I thought it had been 12 or 13 years since I had last seen Augustine, who now goes by Gus, but he reminded me that we had run into each other at some point during our time in University of Georgia undergraduate school. That is not the first time a high school friend has had to remind me that we saw each other on the Athens campus. In fact, it’s becoming a weird and slightly worrisome trend of amnesia in my life.

Regardless, it still stands that it had been awhile since I had seen or even really talked to Gus— probably around nine or 10 years. Since then, he has met and married his wife, Sarah, and they moved to Santa Ana, Calif., where they are starting their fifth year, and while neither wants to stay forever, at the moment, it is allowing Gus to pursue his doctorate in the department of molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of California Irvine. Without getting too technical, the major focus of his lab is to genetically engineer mosquitoes so that they do not transmit dengue fever or malaria.

Sarah, on the other hand, is a psychologist in a maximum security prison about four hours from their apartment in Santa Ana, Calif., meaning she has to spend most of the week away from home, renting a room in a house near the prison and working four 10-hour days to make for a three-day weekend. I got to meet her for about an hour over dinner, before she had to drive out to her site, thus leaving Gus and I for three days to catch up on all that’s happened since we last saw one another— whenever that was exactly.

When I found out that Gus and Sarah lived in Santa Ana, I immediately thought about those winds with the same namesake that apparently make people go crazy but Gus told me that they were not that close, that you would have to drive out to the range to feel them. Something else I was curious about that did turn out to be close to their house, though, was In-and-Out Burger. There was all this fuss surrounding the fast food franchise and I had been hearing about it for years— one of those exclusive West Coast things that us Easterners would never know about, unless we made the trek to find out. Then when I was in Texas, one opened up close to where I was visiting and apparently people waited in line for hours to get in and there was crying and hysteria and I figured it must be amazing to garner that kind of attention, though I also knew somewhere in the back of my mind that people can be insane and totally blow things like that out of proportion.

“It’s a freakin’ burger,” Gus said, when we talked about it later. “It’s not going to change your life.”

He, too, had heard the hype before he tried it and said he was a little disappointed after his virgin visit. That said, he admitted that he has since become a fan and that he even craves it on occasion. And there are some good things to note about the business model, he added: they never use frozen meat; everything is fresh, including the hand-cut fries that come from potatoes chopped that day; it’s family-owned and operated; they have relations with particular ranches, which is why they have not spread much farther than the borders of California, because the meat has to travel from the ranch to any of the chain restaurants in a single day.

In the end, I went for the vegetarian option and just tried a bite of Gus’s. And it was good. I give it that. Then we moved on, driving across town to photograph some old World War II-era hangars that apparently used to house submarine-hunting aircraft. Across the street was a Costco and Gus wanted to pick up a bottle of his favorite whiskey and so as we were walking inside the store, he said: “I’m like sort of obsessed with the zombie apocalypse.”

“Do you like The Bloggess?” I asked. “Do you follow her, how she’s always sort of making fun of it but almost not making fun of it, like you get the feeling she half-believes it?”

“I don’t. Well, yeah. That’s kind of how I—”

“You really think there’s going to be a zombie apocalypse?” I asked.

“No. Well. I dunno,” he said. “It’s scary how close we already are. Like the rabies virus, when you think about it. Think about what it does to a raccoon. Another raccoon has bitten it. It infects the brain and changes the brain chemistry such that this animal is incredibly pissed off and it just wants to bite whatever it’s around. And it downgrades the pain sensors so you can beat the crap out of this thing with a tire iron all day long, break its legs, and it’s still going.”

“And then if we had rabies, we’d be doing the same thing?”

“Pretty much. Yeah. I don’t exactly know how it affects us, whether it’s the rage-frothy-mouth stuff or just straight up death,” he said. “It’s a little scary to me how little it seems you would have to change for the rabies virus to end up being—”

And then he cut himself off, ending with: “I think it’s just a fun culture, a fun thing to think about.”

Later, his scientist friend, Will came over for dinner and afterwards, while we were sitting on the back porch and they were teaching me to pack tobacco into a pipe and smoke it, I said: “So, let’s talk about the zombie apocalypse.”

“I’m so unprepared,” Will said. “I’m so jealous of Gus’s new acquire.”

“I just bought a new gun,” Gus said. “A 22 that looks like an M-16. But it’s a little 22 rifle. And it’s not for the zombies.”

Some friends of theirs have guns, he said, and they drove up to some national land, where you can legally shoot against a hill.

“And I’ve shot guns before,” he said. “But we had a bunch of different types of guns and I thought, ‘Wow. This is fun. I never ever ever ever want to use this on a person but—’ ”

“Zombies aren’t people,” Will said.

“Zombies aren’t people,” Gus agreed. “And it’s a decent rifle against the zombie because if you get it in the head at all, it doesn’t exit. It just bounces around, so it takes care of the brain and they’re down. Not that I’ve thought about that much.”

But the next day, after we had gone kayaking in the setting sun of Newport Bay, Gus commented on how many crabs he had seen on the banks of the estuary, and how big they were, and how actually, they would come in very handy as a food source, in the event of a, you know, apocalypse. Not that he was thinking about it.