THE CHICKEN OR THE
EGG
Roy Dorman
4:15 PM, Friday
August 12, 2125
Carol Ferris had materialized a
little to the left of the escalator.
That had been the plan. No one
seemed to have noticed her entrance. So far, so good.
It was late afternoon and the
mall was crowded with people who were getting off from their day jobs and
needed to get some shopping done so they could have their weekend free. Also in
attendance were people sitting at tables in the Food Court dawdling over a late
lunch.
Carol was cautiously
negotiating the crowd in front of her, and was not prepared for the violent
shove she got from behind. She fell to the floor and immediately started to get
up intending to give someone some serious shit.
Before she could, the shover
fell on top of her, slavering and pinning her to the floor.
He had the look of a deranged
person, and his face appeared to be rotting in some places. Carol had never
felt so scared in her life.
“Help me!” she screamed.
“Somebody get him off me!”
The people sitting at the
tables outside of mall stores continued chatting, and many others walked past
her without stopping or even looking down at her.
She screamed again and kicked
out at her attacker. And then his face exploded, sending bits of gore onto her
face.
A young woman with a very large
pistol rolled the now really dead undead off of her.
“Where’s your fuckin’
assistant?” she yelled into Carol’s bloodied face.
Carol stared at her rescuer.
And then said, “I think I might be having some sort of hallucinatory episode.”
The woman reached down and ran
a probing finger across Carol’s cheek. Carol cringed at the touch and then
looked at the finger held in front of her nose.
“This look like a
hallucination?”
“What’s an assistant?” Carol
asked, ignoring the question.
“You new on Earth?’
“Something like that,” Carol
muttered.
She was puzzled that no one
else seemed to take any interest in what had gone on just now. A robot-type
service tech trundled over and gathered up the zombie. Another tech cleaned up
the mess on the floor.
“I’m Dora. Come on, before one
of them thinks you need to be “cleaned up.” You could use a little soap and
water, ya know.”
“Where are we going?” Carol
asked.
“To my store. DORA’S DRUGS.
It’s right over there. I’ve got a small bathroom where we can get most of the
blood and shit off of ya. The bastards can smell blood a mile away.”
Carol gulped and quickly looked
around.
“I saw that undead shove you,”
continued Dora. “And seeing that your assistant seemed to be AWOL, came to your
rescue.”
“Thanks for saving my life. But
where’s your assistant?’ Carol asked, trying to get herself acclimated
into this setting a hundred years from the one she’d just come from.
“Look over at my store.”
Carol saw another woman
standing in the doorway of DORA’S DRUGS with a rifle. The rifle was pointed at
her.
“I grabbed my Glock….
“Still making
Glocks…,” Carol thought to herself.
…. and told her to stay and
guard the store. And you never did say where yours was.”
“Does everybody have a personal
assistant?”
“Look around you.”
Carol looked at the twenty or
thirty tables in the near vicinity. None of the tables had just one person. All
tables had multiples of two.
All of the people walking past
her were also in twos, fours, sixes….
“I’m not from around here,” she
said. “Maybe we could talk after I get cleaned up.”
***
“And I’m supposed to believe
that?” Dora said after the cleanup had been completed. “I sell recreational
drugs for a living and I hear some wild tales….”
“I decided I had to tell somebody,” Carol
said. “My mission was to just come here, check it out, and get myself back home
when I was ready. But I trust you. You seem to know what’s going on, but don’t
necessarily feel the need to comply with all of the norms.”
“Probably the drugs,” Dora
snorted. “Always sampling the merchandise.”
“I figure if I come back with
some good information, a lot of good information, I could get a
promotion. And I’m also interested in this “assistant” thing. People have to
have an armed bodyguard when they’re out and about?”
“Either that or be really fast
runners,” said Dora. “I wouldn’t be without mine. She comes home with me, eats
dinner with me, and watches the vid with me. She even sleeps in my room.
“Now, you can rent them for
times you’re going out if you don’t go out that often. Lotsa old, retired
people have everything delivered to their apartments and only rent an assistant
if they want to go to an outdoor concert or something. You don’t have
assistants back in 2025?”
“We have police forces. Kinda
like a bunch of assistants who work together to keep people safe.”
“But they usually aren’t called
until after somebody’s been robbed, raped, beaten, or killed, right? I
read about those days. Sounds scary.”
“Zombies are scary,” said
Carol. “We don’t have zombies.”
“Not yet, you don’t,” Dora said,
nodding her head.
Carol thought about that. “So,
is this assistant job a good gig? Mainly protecting people from the occasional
zombie attack?”
“My assistant, Jessica, likes
it. There’s not a lot of jobs to be had. AI took over most service sector jobs
about fifty years ago. Malls recently made a comeback when people decided they
didn’t want to just sit at home and surf the net.”
“I could see me and a couple of
my friends being zombie killers,” Carol mused. “Could I stay with you for a
couple of days and gather some data?”
***
8:00 PM, Sunday
August 14, 2125
Carol spent two nights with Dora and
Jessica. There weren’t sexual orientation questions, so trying not to be too old-fashioned,
Carol just went with the flow.
Sunday evening, Dora and Jessica walked
her to the escalator. Carol had filed her report on her phone, a little unsure
if it managed the hundred-year trip, and was ready to go back and receive her
well-earned accolades.
Leaving her at the escalator and waving
good-bye, Dora and Jessica watched in horror as a zombie came out of nowhere
and fastened its teeth onto Carol’s shoulder just as they both disappeared.
***
8:03 PM Sunday
April 14, 2025
The three techs waiting to receive Carol
heard her screaming before they saw her. One of the techs ran over and tried to
pull the zombie off of her and was bitten for his efforts.
A second tech managed to throw the zombie
to the floor, but was then bitten herself when it scrambled to its feet.
The third tech wisely decided to leave the
room and call for armed reinforcements.
But the reinforcements were too little and
too late. And woefully ignorant as to how to handle the situation. Dora’s
prediction of “Not yet you don’t” had proven itself to be too true.
Thanks to Carol’s expedition, the year
2025 now had its first zombie outbreak.
And if 2125 was an accurate picture of the
future, it appeared that 2025 was not at all ready for the inevitable onslaught
of a zombie apocalypse.
People who were bitten were taken to
hospitals where hours later they were biting nurses, doctors and patients. In
less than twenty-four hours, a good portion of the city was infected.
***
Experts in the field of time travel
discussed, and more often argued, the fine points of what had gone wrong with
this first-time time travel experiment.
If Carol hadn’t been bitten in 2125 at the
time of her return, and started the zombie apocalypse in 2025, would there not
have ever been a zombie problem?
Much to the dismay of these experts, jokes
about which came first, the chicken or the egg, were often in newsfeeds.
And many lay people not in the time travel
field thought that old riddle summed it up nicely.
THE END
