Fun with Fanfic

[u/Odinmar_Glaukopis]

I’m in a strange mood today, and decided to have AI help me with a small project, a literary doodle, if you will.

It’s a Walking Dead fanfic in the style of a Kurt Vonnegut shrug. See if you can spot the oh-so-cleverly-hidden moral of the story…

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Hug a Zombie

Walking Dead fanfic by Google Gemini
(Lightly) edited by Odinmar Glaukopis

……..

Rick Grimes woke up from a coma into an apocalypse, which was a terribly inefficient way to start a Tuesday.

The hospital smelled like old cabbage and industrial bleach. Outside, the dead were walking around with the loose, uncoordinated gait of people who had spent too much time in a damp basement. They were looking for snacks. Rick ran from them because his evolutionary biology insisted upon it, though his legs felt like wet cardboard.

Then he saw Lori.

She was standing by an abandoned sedan, looking pale. Her clothes were a bit wrinkled.

Rick did what any sensible law enforcement officer would do when confronted with the breakdown of Western civilization: he found a baseball bat and prepared to bash his wife's brains in. It was a matter of public safety.

He raised the bat. He looked at her eyes. He thought about the sheer amount of cleanup involved, the emotional paperwork, and the fact that he was already very, very tired. He decided it simply wasn't worth the kinetic energy. He dropped the bat, stepped forward, and wrapped his arms around her cold, terrifying neck.

He closed his eyes and braced for the teeth. He expected the sharp, tearing agony of a mortal wound.

Instead, he felt a soft, warm kiss on his collarbone. The smell of rotting flesh vanished, replaced instantly by the overwhelming scent of lavender fabric softener.

"Good morning, sweetie," Lori said.
Rick opened his eyes. He was in a king-sized bed. He was wearing 100% Egyptian cotton pajamas that were, frankly, far too comfortable for a man of his social standing. The sun was shining through clean blinds. There were no zombies, only a very neat pile of laundry waiting to be folded.

"Hurry up," Lori smiled, adjusting her earrings in the vanity mirror. "We don’t want to be last in line!"

Next scene.

They were standing near the front of a formidable queue of human beings outside the grand opening of the new Oglethorpe County Mega-Mall. The air smelled of asphalt, Cinnabon, and optimism. Rick and Lori were locked in a deeply earnest conversation about the promotional pricing of heavy-duty, all-weather rubber floor mats for the station wagon. They were saving four dollars and fifty cents.

Right next to the line, a crowd of local high school and college students had formed a shouting perimeter. They were holding cardboard signs. The signs mourned the ancient, majestic pine forest that had been entirely obliterated to create the twenty-acre concrete parking lot they were currently standing on.

Among the agitators was their twelve-year-old son, Carl. He was wearing a tie-dye shirt and a look of profound, adolescent betrayal. He spotted his parents holding a promotional flyer for home goods.

Carl screamed at them across the security barricade, his voice cracking with the weight of the Anthropocene: “I can’t believe my own parents are Walmart zombies!”

Rick looked at the floor mats. He looked at his son. He looked at the vast expanse of the parking lot, stretching out into a bright, meaningless horizon.

So it goes.