King of Zombie Heath

Day 37 - N-n-n-n-n-nineteen. Up shit creek.

Death and desertion have whittled a community of two thousand down to nineteen, plus a few khaki stragglers. Less than one percent. Now that I'm actually thinking about it, I'm stunned. It's hard to take in. Doc was right, I was living in a bubble. I'm surprised we made it this far. We have Bling, Hulk and Big Bro to thank for that. I'm... touched... I guess is the word. Especially since there's been no running water for several days and they've been melting snow to keep us from turning into desiccated Angel Duster MRE's. They had no reason to, we're well past job descriptions and legal responsibilities, and yet they took care of us. Humbling. Had roles been reversed, and I the one with the keys to the cupboards, I'm pretty sure they'd have all starved by now. I could almost forgive Bling for stabbing my ass with that spike. Almost. But not quite.

We had a meeting yesterday, motivated perhaps by our dwindling resources, namely water and electricity. All eighteen of us met in the Ward Six lounge, plus the three Lancashires. Soldier X is still carrying out his lonely penance on the roof and no one trusts Mordsley, so we left him admiring his reflection in the walls of his plexi-glass showroom. My Bad's not sure what to do with him. When I suggested she just tape over all the ventilation holes to his room - cos one more murder couldn't make her feel any worse - the look she gave me would have curdled milk.

Essentially, now that the army'd vanished, My Bad and Biswas had decided to structure our little community, work out some survival plan, and the most efficient use of the stuff and person-power at our disposal. It was also a chance to get to know our new family, and get a free (but obligatory Just In Case) Valium hit.

Hulk, Big Bro and Bling sat at the front facing everybody. Our gentle giant, Nimby, stood peering out of the window into the snow, still looking for the fox. Dick, and our overgrown, overweight, frightened child, Tubbs, sat in the front row. All ears.

Biswas is here with his family, his Bollywood trophy wife Sangeeta and her half-size carbon copy, Mini-Meena, their twelve-year-old daughter. Sangeeta is a hottie, especially in her figure-hugging turquoise sari and gold jewellery; dark, gleaming hair cascading down to her waist, brown Cleopatra-painted eyes smouldering with desire (or perhaps that was my imagination wandering) and a blood-red bindi teardrop stamped perfectly in the middle of her forehead, a third-eye she must use when she looks at Biswas because, unless he was an obscenely rich movie producer before he got his Ph.D, and I doubt that given his taste in jackets, I have no idea what she could possibly see in him.

Loitering in the corner by the wastepaper basket was Juanita, a short, pear-shaped cleaning lady from Bolivia - a Chola Matryoshka doll, minus the bowler hat - who could be anything from a weather-worn twenty to a well-oiled sixty. I'm sure I've seen her spreading dirty water around the ward with a dead llama on the end of a stick; the black pony-tail, the dark, indigenous, slightly slanted eyes and skin the colour (and textrure) of sandpaper is all vaguely familiar. I nearly had a go at her for not cleaning up La Page before he started to hum, but I bit my tongue. She has one of those generic faces and a sneaky habit of blending into the background, so I can't be sure if it's just the one of her that did the spreading or whether Walt imported a six-pack from the Andes. I sat watching her, half expecting her to burst open at the waist, a series of progressively smaller Juanitas popping out one by one, but she just stood by the wall like a living statue and said almost nothing for the duration of the meeting; her English appearing to be limited to four words: yessir, nosir, yesmam and nomam.

The unusual circumstances seem to have bonded two people I've never clapped eyes on before. Tracy Tonkin, My Bad's wide-eyed, twenty-something barbie-type flat-mate, sat in an armchair clutching a hot-shot yuppie executive-type in his early forties (Arthur Martindale or Nightingale or something like that) so tightly her knuckles were white. God knows where he came from, but the Rolex says he's loaded, the ring says he's married (possibly recently separated) and something about the way his hair tufts across his crown like perfect rows of Eucalyptus trees say he's a narcissist that's had problems with low self-esteem. He was posed on the arm of Tracy's chair wearing a crumpled but expensive suit and a practiced, composed expression that tried to tell you he was in control. His eyes though, to whoever cared to look, and to wear out a threadbare cliché, were like windows to his soul; sunken and bloodshot with a distant gaze that said he'd either been on a bender the night before, or seen things he wished he hadn't. I suspect both. Lost, is the word that comes to mind. A master of one universe woken to find himself a nobody in another. A one-time Superman banished to a world of Kryptonite. They appeared rather uneasy. I'm guessing they prefer seeing us loonies through reinforced glass to in-the-flesh.