闲人

I see them everyday now. Shuffling along, eyes dead. Once a day they go on a mass exodus from their nests to their hunting grounds, and once more back. Looking on from outside (if there is still an "outside"), it seems to be their only activity, their only purpose in life.

How did it come to this? How did it spread so completely before we realized it? The thing is, it's not like in the movies where the dead are obviously dead and are something to avoid. The dead often don't realize they are dead. Some do, and they kill themselves because they can't take it. Some feel a deadness in their heart, or soul, or whatever you call it, but they ignore it or write it off as something else. Most, when they are turned, just go about their new lives (perhaps "undeaths" would be more accurate) without missing a beat, as if it as been that way all along.

The living are somewhat more perceptive, but not that much more. Often they don't realize they have been mixing with the dead until they are infected and it is too late. There is even the strange phenomenon where people want to join the swarms. I guess I can see the charm. Wake up, hunt, come home, sleep. Undeath is simple, stable. Perhaps for many, more preferable than the uncertainty of life these days. So we see parents encouraging children to join swarms, or people fighting for the privilege to join a 'good' swarm.

Am I still alive? I really can't tell. The dead often don't realize they are dead. I join the swarms, day after day, telling myself it is just a matter of convenience, that I am different from those who can't help themselves, those that are in the swarm driven by instinct and nothing else. But perhaps, that is what all the dead tell themselves. I feel the remnants of a tattered soul fighting for its existence, and sometimes I feel, why fight when it is so easy to succumb? But again, maybe all the dead are fighting for the last bits of their soul.

I can only hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will be able to save the Working Dead.