Eram quod es, eris quod sum. “I was what you are, you will be what I am.”

The thing about zombies is that they are as eternal as the waves pounding the strand, the sun beating down on your back as you walk through yet another deserted street, the paranoia that has become ingrained in anyone who’s managed to blunder along though yesterday and somehow made it to today and wants to make it to tomorrow. It only takes one to start the cycle all over again, only takes one to undo all we’ve created and the War starts all fucking over again.

Eram quod es, eris quod sum… the new litany of faith, a depressing meditation that springs unbidden to mind whenever the day-to-day machinations of survival have ceased and you are wedged in a tree, dancing on the edge of sleep like Eurynome on the edge of chaos, rosary beads clicking faintly in your hands and the Hail Mary slowly unraveling at “now and in the hour of our deaths,” because death is just below you, waiting with outstretched hands, as if they’d love to rescue you from your dangerous perch…

Life has become nasty, brutish, and short. Dinner is a squirrel, which you have bludgeoned with a rock, peeled with another rock whose edges you have sharpened carefully, and roasted over the small fire you built on the roof of an abandoned shop. You’re using rock tools, you’re seriously thinking of going naked, you scratch at flea bites, you’re eating squirrels…you’re a throwback. And to think you once hoped of going to law school, you modern-day Neandertal.

You eat frantically, spitting out the bones like spent magazines dripping from an ack-ack gun, twitching at every noise, even though you know you’re safe. You might as well be the first monkey that stepped from the dura mater that was the forest where you learned to walk and began stumbling into the savanna. Only now you run from the walking dead instead of lions and hippopotami.

Eram quod es, eris quod sum.

Battle is the one place where you don’t really think about anything. Fight-or-flight takes over, and everything just happens. It’s Zen, as Zen as anything can be these days. The only thing going through your mind—point and click, like it’s some fucking video game from when you were a kid. Point and click. Point and click.

Afterwards they lie on the ground, not spread-eagled like the dead laid on “Law and Order” but like stacks of cordwood, grey and rotting after a summer’s worth of rain and no protection. It is not true faith but mere force of habit that makes you press your saint’s medallions and scapular to your lips, force of habit that makes you mumble a swift prayer of thanks. Tonight you say your rosary and wonder, not for the first time, whether you really ought to do this. It’s a sin to think things like this, Dear God please don’t let this count against you, but…it seems more and more like you’re praying to an unhearing God.

Man is dead, is God dead too, with no one to worship Him?

Eram quod es…

You know it’s a sin to do this. But it’ll happen sooner or later, this you know as well as you know that the sun will rise tomorrow with or without you, and you might as well let Zack finish you off before typhoid or malnutrition or friendly fire.

It stands there, slowly raising its arms, that moan, that damned moan eking though its throat, and you know that what you are about to do cannot be undone. A sign of the Cross, a quick beg for forgiveness from all the angels and the saints, from you and your undead brothers and sisters, from the birds, from God, and off you go, proffering your hand as you do with a dog you’ve just met.

Eram quod es, eris quod sum.