To adults, all that seems like common sense, but kids ranging in age from newborns to young adults need these reminders. Children are idiot savants at finding danger where there is none. Products designed specifically to keep minors alive are constantly being recalled because a few random kids somehow managed to kill themselves with them. It takes skill to make an inert wooden crib spontaneously burst into flames, but if anyone can do it, it’s a six-month-old. Then the company that made the crib will get sued because it didn’t anticipate the need for a baby sprinkler system. It’s amazing the human race survived long enough to be wiped out by zombies.
Safety Devices That Inexplicably Kill Children
Device
Hidden Danger
Warning Label
Detaches and becomes a choking hazard.
Child Lock
Draws attention to the dangerous thing you’re protecting. Takes kids seconds to break.
Safety Scissors
Just regular scissors with the word “safety” tacked on. Can still cut an artery during arts and crafts time.
Bike Helmet
Makes kids feel invincible. Leads to concussions and chronic headbutting.
Car Seat
Suffocates sleeping children. You must poke children every 30 seconds to keep them awake on long car rides.
Stuffed Animals
Teach kids that animals want to be cuddled. Lead to preschoolers jumping fences at zoo exhibits.
Baby Dolls
Teach kids that babies have hard, plastic heads and can be swung like a mace.
Only the prompt intervention of parents stops children’s haphazard suicide attempts from succeeding. Moms and dads weren’t always so effective. Back before modern medicine, parents had a much harder time protecting their kids from self-inflicted stupidity and child mortality rates were higher. Fatal mishaps weren’t as big of a deal, though, because kids weren’t viewed as unique and irreplaceable. Families were machines, and the children were interchangeable parts. There was no way to fix them, so if one broke, you swapped it out for a new one. Parents mass-produced children assuming almost none of them would survive to adulthood. Today, parents only have a few kids out of fear they all will.
Modern parents are right to dread their own living children. Caregivers innately understand that kids get worse as life gets better—even if no one is brave enough to admit it out loud. Officially, children are wonderful miracles in all circumstances, and anyone who says otherwise is a heartless troll. Rather than violate this taboo, parents fight back silently but decisively by having fewer children as the world improves. In that way, the population growth curve levels out. Eventually, society achieves an equilibrium where life is good and children are monstrous but scarce. It’s an ideal situation—as long as you aren’t a parent.
THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
All of this is important to remember once the zombie apocalypse arrives because the luxury and ease kids today are used to will suddenly vanish. The children you have to drag kicking and screaming through the end of the world will be the same ones who thought it was child abuse when you wouldn’t buy them a new smartphone in middle school. They won’t have an epiphany where they become cooperative and grateful to be alive. If they didn’t thank you for raising them when your house was the nicest one in a great neighborhood, they definitely won’t thank you when it has no electricity or running water and is surrounded by the damned.
The truth is kids understand the challenges parents face. They just don’t care. Children have certain expectations, and they won’t accept a lower standard of parenting simply because the dead are killing everyone. Young humans complain constantly even when the world revolves around them. On a whininess scale of one to ten—with one being silence and ten being Caillou, an insufferable Canadian cartoon character created in a deliberate attempt to destroy America—most kids are normally around a three or a four. If civilization suddenly collapses and all its comforts disappear, that number will skyrocket to a figure calculable only by supercomputers or God. Infinity times ten sounds about right.
Anyone who thinks children will selflessly rise to the occasion has only read about kids in books. Real human children are narcissistic tyrants at best and slightly louder narcissistic tyrants at worst. Once the world ends, moms and dads will be tasked with keeping their tiny monsters alive in the face of adult-size monsters who want to eat them. In return, parents will be rewarded with an endless series of annoyed sighs and condescending eye rolls. Good luck.
The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Over time, the child behavior trend will reverse: As the world gets worse, successive generations of children will get better. Your children’s children—if by some miracle your own sheltered offspring make it that long—will be born into a hard, uncaring world with few physical comforts. Nobody will give a damn about their self-esteem, and participation trophies will be as extinct as Wi-Fi and cable TV. A few generations later, your great-great-grandchildren will be like the hardscrabble pioneer kids of centuries ago who were happy if the only thing they got for their birthday was surviving dysentery. But you’ll never meet those admirable descendants. You’ll be long dead by then, hopefully in a hole in the ground but possibly as a zombie wandering the earth. It’s too late for your own children, but it might be possible for your distant descendants to raise good kids. Let a more competent parent give it a try.
YOUR LOT IN LIFE
By now you understand that most generations of parents get either good children in bad times or bad children in good times. But present-day parents will have the unique distinction of raising bad children in bad times. It’s your burden to protect bored, self-destructive kids as they plunge headlong into a world that actively tries to kill them. If they keep up their old ways, they’ll be dead before the world’s last pot of coffee gets cold. Hard times and caffeine shortages lie ahead. Enjoy that last cup.
The first step to prepare your kids is to make them understand the world has changed. The way you break the news will set the tone for the entire apocalypse. No pressure.
How to Tell Kids the World Ended
Age
Method
Baby
Make some cooing noises and maybe jingle some keys in their face. They’ll get the message.
Toddler
“Remember how you were biting everybody? Well, it caught on.”
Preschooler
“I can stay home and play with you today. There’s no more work. There’s no more anything.”
Elementary School Student
“Everyone you’ve ever known or loved is dead. Pancakes?”
Junior High Student
“Puberty should be less awkward for you now that we’re never going outside again.”
High Schooler
“That college you wanted to get into should have a lot more openings.”
Adult Children
“Time to move out.”
EMOTIONAL APOCALYPSE
Your children will be devastated by the end of the world, but not for the reasons you think. The loss of human life won’t faze them at all, but the fact they can’t stream cartoons anymore will make them lose the will to live. Add this to children’s already highly refined self-destructive tendencies and you’ll be lucky if they don’t spontaneously combust. It’s your job to help them through this transition, not because they deserve your sympathy, but because without them the human race will cease to exist. They’ll hold all the leverage in the zombie apocalypse. That much, at least, will stay the same.
Your children will go through all five stages of the grieving process. Since the cause of the zombie apocalypse is still a mystery, expect all blame to fall squarely on your shoulders. That’s a familiar role. The only two qualifications to be a parent are to have a child and be a scapegoat.
It’s possible that after the trauma of the apocalypse, your children will retract into themselves and withdraw from the world. They might even cut off all communication with others and ente
r a permanent sulk. If this happens, give your spouse a high-five. You hit the jackpot. Enjoy weeks, months, or even years of blissful quiet. Don’t try to bring them out of their funk until they’re close to adulthood. Then rouse them just enough to turn them into functional human beings and kick them out the door. It’s the perfect system. Emotional trauma for the win.
A CLEAR VIEW
As long as you’re honest about who your kids are and how they’ll react to zombies, you should be fine. Actually, that’s not true at all. There are hundreds of pages of other things you’ll have to do to stay alive. But lowering your expectations for your kids is an important first step. As long as you count on them being absolutely no help whatsoever, you’ll never be disappointed.
CHAPTER 3
EAT OR BE EATEN
Young kids are picky eaters. If it isn’t a plate of chicken nuggets or pizza, it’s basically poison. Children are prepared to starve to death before they’ll touch food that isn’t precisely the right flavor. It’s a hunger strike without purpose or principle, and no force on earth can stop it. Give me pepperoni or give me death.
None of this will change when the zombies come. Kids will demand their favorite foods long after the nation depletes its precious reserves of breaded bird chunks. In the opening moments of the apocalypse, the food supply chain will break down. The groceries in stock right then will be the last edible goods most retailers will ever get. Panicked shoppers will grab whatever they can carry, leaving store shelves stocked only with the stuff that wasn’t worth looting. Good luck getting a kid to eat pork tongue and extruded beet paste. Be sure to loot some ketchup.
SAVVY SHOPPER
Your last grocery trip ever will also be your most important. You’ll have to grab enough food to last the rest of your life, and what you bring home will determine how long or short that life will be. Hoard any food you can, no matter how much it makes your kids gag. If it’s edible, it goes in the cart. Resist the urge to share with other shoppers. It’ll only get you killed. Altruism is just a sappy form of suicide.
Head for the organic section first. The food there isn’t any better, but the people who eat it are thoughtful and socially conscious. That makes them weak. Shove that vegan hipster aside and take the last head of locally grown cabbage. The worst he’ll do to you is write a huffy post on social media. He won’t survive the blackout.
Chances are all the good stuff will be gone long before you get there. Serves you right for sleeping in at the end of the world. Honestly, the grocery store shouldn’t be your first stop anyway. While everyone else is preoccupied with getting the food they need to stay alive, head to the liquor store. Nobody will be there. It’s a 100-percent-off sale, and everything must go. I am so looking forward to the apocalypse.
Looting a healthy assortment of food isn’t hard. As always, the real challenge is getting your kids to eat it. Their very survival depends on it, but that won’t make them take a single bite. It’s possible they won’t want to live in a world where pizza is extinct. I respect that decision.
FREEZER PARTY
It’s best to ease your kids into survival-mode cuisine. I recommend kicking off your post-apocalyptic subsistence lifestyle with a huge feast of almost-expired food. Without electricity, everything in your fridge and freezer will spoil anyway. Let your kids eat anything they want. This is your chance to make the world’s first and last sherbet hot dog casserole. Round out the meal with a snow cone salad and a hearty glass of chocolate syrup. That’s the kind of whimsical, lighthearted fare you can only find at the mass extinction of humanity. Your kids will enjoy a brief moment of happiness followed by a lifetime of crushing disappointment. But that’s how the world has always worked.
This final junk food binge isn’t a shallow attempt to get your kids to quit whining for a few hours, although that’s certainly a side benefit. It’s actually a vital step toward survival. Like a bear preparing to hibernate for the winter, you need to build up your family’s fat stores to endure the food shortages to come. Parents are uniquely well suited to this task. The pounds you’ve put on since you gave up on life will carry you through months of zombie-induced famine. Your stomach has been stretched by oversized portions and all-you-can-eat buffets. It’s time to eat as much as humanly possible and then go back for thirds. The survival of our species depends on it. An entire lifetime of poor eating habits has been leading up to this moment. Those fit, healthy models on the magazine covers will be the first to die. The fat shall inherit the earth.
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?
Eventually, your kids will wake up from their food comas hungry and irritable. The banquet you gave them will instantly be forgotten. The only long-term memory children have is the grudges they’ll have against you for their ruined childhoods. The good news is there won’t be any therapists left to blame everything on you. People who help others are always the first to die. Serves them right.
After the final feast, the menu at dinnertime will be decidedly bleaker. Meals will consist of whatever will fill up your stomach without killing you. Admittedly, that’s the standard I’ve always used for my cooking. I take “almost edible” as a compliment.
It’s important to accept that this really is the best you can do for yourself and your kids. There’s no point in uprooting your family to search for food elsewhere. The only thing worse than almost starving at home is almost starving on an endless road trip with a vehicle full of kids. After enough miles, you’ll hope the zombies eat you just to end it.
The idea that there will be food somewhere else, especially in the countryside, is a myth anyway. Zombies will turn cities into devastated wastelands. Rural areas will just be devastated wastelands with more elbow room. When the zombies attack, food will be scarce everywhere, even on farms. The majority of tillable acreage in America is tied up in field corn, which is inedible to humans in its natural form, and soybeans, which are poisonous if eaten raw. Chowing down on either food without running it through a processing plant first is a bad idea unless you want to spend the rest of the apocalypse in a bathroom. Keep in mind there’s a finite supply of toilet paper.
Even if catastrophic bowel movements are your idea of a good time, the harvest would be a one-time deal. There won’t be enough fuel left for tractors to plant and then bring in thousands of bushels of crops. Fields will turn into giant, unkempt yards full of tall grasses, weeds, and hidden zombies. Avoid these at all costs. They’re the perfect place to lose a child or a Frisbee.
The only farms with the potential to provide food beyond the initial outbreak are the ones with livestock. Expect those to quickly be overrun by hungry, armed survivors with no idea how to raise animals. If there’s not enough food for humans, there won’t be for any other species, either. Starved, desperate animals will battle clueless looters on more or less even footing. Don’t be shocked if pigs come out of this as the dominant species on earth. Keep your family far away from the fray. It’s better to starve at home than to die being outsmarted by a walking pork chop.
URBAN GARDNER
Once the apocalypse begins, the only ones eating meat will be the zombies. The undead devour farm animals, too, so it’s a bad idea to keep livestock around. Chickens, pigs, cows, and goats make more noise than children and are harder to control, although in terms of smell they’re roughly equal. Putting animals in your backyard will attract a swarm of zombies who will stick around to eat you when they’re done. They’re ungrateful dinner guests. That leaves parents with only two options: Raise livestock inside your house or become vegetarians by default. Unless your spouse is more tolerant than mine on the issue of indoor manure piles, meat is officially off the menu. Cross your fingers that all the vegetarians in your life are already dead or you’ll never hear the end of it.
Don’t commit seppuku because there’s no more bacon. The world ended. You don’t deserve to be happy anymore. Your kids won’t notice a difference anyway. The only meat they eat is hot dogs, and that doesn’t come from any animal currently
known to science.
Resist the temptation to eat the animals you already have. Murdering a beloved family pet and serving it for dinner isn’t the best way to win your children’s trust. Also, it would teach your kids an unfortunate lesson about how you treat family members when they’re no longer useful. Remember that if you want to end up in a nursing home and not on a buffet table. And even if you make the mistake of slaying a cat or dog, your children won’t eat it. They’ll be so traumatized they probably won’t eat anything ever again. That’s great if you want to save on your grocery bill but less than ideal if you want your kids to stay alive. It’s your call.
Just because you aren’t going to eat your pets doesn’t necessarily mean you should keep them around forever. A pet is an extra mouth to feed in a time of famine. The best plan is to discreetly turn them loose to fend for themselves some night after the kids go to sleep. When your children ask, don’t make up some stupid lie about sending the family dog to a farm. Instead, make up a better lie about sending your animals to pet college. That will also explain why there’s no money to send your own kids to people college on the off chance the world gets up and running again.
Only Dead on the Inside Page 3