Emergency Supplies
Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about a proper apocalypse.
Not the one we’re heading for, I mean. Not the slow burn, rickety elevator climb toward destruction. Not the expiration dates that keep ticking closer. I want a real disaster, a full-fledged Armageddon, something fast and loud and heavy.
On the bus and in the shower, I let my mind wander over all the ways we could go out. All the stories I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, all the options that involve explosions and fight sequences. I’m drawn to the earthquakes and lightning storms that signal the end; a plague of locusts or blood wouldn’t be half bad either. In one book I read, there’s a virus not in the water supply but in the gasoline, and everyone dies trying to get out of the cities in the vehicles that are responsible for their undoing. Sometimes I think about this desperate crush of humanity, all the honking and swearing and flesh against metal, and think there’s no better way for us to go.
I want something a little more hyperbolic. A little fantastical, even. Where are the gods descending from the sky after centuries of civil war? Where are those four horsemen?
When I was in high school, I used to go to church sleepovers, lock-ins where a couple dozen young adults would watch movies and make a game of seeing who could get the least amount of sleep. We’d keep each other up with games of never-have-I-ever or twenty-questions, fueled by soda and stubbornness. During one particularly late night, one of my friends turned to me and asked, “So, zombie apocalypse. What’s your survival plan?”
I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “If the zombies come, I’m done,” I said. “No way am I getting out of that one. I’d probably just lock myself in a library and read until they came for me.”
My friend laughed, and the conversation soon moved on. But months later, I found myself making lists of emergency supplies in the back of my notebook. Essentials for a zombie apocalypse: food, water, first aid kit, knife. I’ve weighed out all the odds of how best to defend myself, settling on a combination of close-quarters combat and tactical evasion. I’d have to do some strength and endurance training, but as far as end-of-the-world scenarios go, the concept of undead cannibals holds a certain undeniable thrill.
At least in a zombie apocalypse you get a chance to go down fighting. At least when the monsters get to you, after the blood and thirst and all that running, you get to fall apart before the world does.
I wrote a play once, a one-act. It’s about two kids who find themselves in a bookstore right before a world-ending nuclear war is launched. They start talking to each other to stave off this frightening new reality, and when that doesn’t work, they keep talking to find something—someone—to hold on to. They can’t stop the bombs from coming, so they just stop each other from falling apart, and the production ends with a long, tempestuous kiss before their whole universe cuts to black. Cliché, overwritten, but sometimes I still think about this play and its hopeless yet hopeful romanticism, the way I imagined these two strangers falling in love right before it didn’t matter anymore. Sometimes I wonder if that kind of end might not be the most devastating of all.
I don’t like to think about a documentary I saw about what the planet might look like without humanity. The scientists or filmmakers, or whoever constructed this imaginary future, were operating from the premise that every human on earth might just disappear all at once, leaving our cityscapes and highways to be slowly reclaimed by flora and fauna. Packs of dogs settled into suburban homes, ravaged forest reseeded themselves through fires and freezes and floods. Our skyscrapers quietly crumbled into dust. All of these images are too peaceful, too forgiving—with no definitive moment where our loss is omnipresent. No storyline in which we can imagine ourselves the martyrs.
When all of this ends—when we hit that breaking point—when we finally can’t turn back, I want a bang, not a whimper. I want Thor’s hammer or Katniss Everdeen’s burning arrow. I want Harry Potter walking into the forest alone, making the ultimate sacrifice for everyone he loves. The end of the world in capital letters, in grand gestures, in prophecy.
I don’t want to think about the way we’re going now: inching toward an abyss so deep we’ll never feel the bottom. If I have to live through an apocalypse, I want to get straight to the point: I want to stare right into the face of something so big and bright that it can’t possibly have been our fault.