It wasn’t as embarrassing as you might think, because the realization dawned so slowly. Sometime around 2017, although you could argue that it took a few years after that for the expectations to really die down, no pun intended. Certainly by spring of that year, even the most die-hard of the holdouts had deleted their Zombie 5k training apps and relabeled their emergency kits “Earthquake Supplies.”
The first thing to go were the movies. Everyone agreed on that. Then the organized zombie mobs, the zombie pub crawls, the zombie parties, the zombie marathons, the zombie games, the zombie-themed rifle targets, the zombie workouts. We all wordlessly and mutually agreed never to talk about Zombie Zumba again.
No one’s hard work finally paid off. No one got to say I told you so before throwing their supplies and rifle shells in the van and heading north. No one headed north at all, unless north was the direction their job was in. Everyone went back to work.
No one really wanted to admit they were so disappointed that something they’d only ever half-believed in wasn’t coming along.
The survivalists found something else to prepare for. They always do. You’d think it was silly, if you knew what it was, but they think the same things about you. The buried stayed buried, as they always had, and it was more than a little upsetting to realize that the promise of a bloodthirsty, decaying revival was the most any of us had come to expect or hope for after dying. It was a way of resetting the game, even if it wasn’t exactly a second chance. Immortality without responsibilities.
And that was it, really. Most discredited end-of-the-world scenarios had a specific end date in mind, so you could at least agree upon whatever day it became confirmed idiocy. This one we had to get rid of from our own volition, which made things harder. Trading a vague sense of expectation for a confirmed sense of sheepishness isn’t a tradeoff most people are happy to make. It was a reason to do pushups, to buy a flashlight and a set of freeze-dried meals to put in the back of the pantry, to make a checklist, to joke about your mile time.
There were the usual reasons for believing. It would have been nice, in a lot of ways, to return to a simpler, more rural existence. That’s why so many young people living alone in cities they didn’t grow up in were so excited for it. They all thought they’d be the likeliest to survive it, too, being young and relatively limber. It would have been kind of like a party. Sort of like a kibbutz, but with more free love. You and your closest friends, banding together on a collective farm, taking turns guarding the tomatoes from roving bandits and the moaning undead. You’d have a job you liked, finally, or at least a job with measurable goals and definable levels of success. Were anyone’s brains eaten today? Did the squash vines blossom? Great. You earned your hearty, simple meal. The metrics were all there, right in front of you.
So when it didn’t happen, and nothing changed, the general free-floating sense of disappointment in most major metropolitan areas thickened and condensed, for a few months at least, until the next end of civilization that never came.
We never realized how much we’d wanted civilization to come to an end, until it didn’t.
