They left through the service door—the one the librarian kept unlocked for students who came in to study after hours—and stepped into the hush of deserted streets. Neon signs blinked and died. A dog called once and then was quiet. Doorways gaped like missing teeth. They moved as the zine suggested: quiet, in pairs, hands free to help and to fight.
The schoolyard had been turned into a fortress of sorts. A bus lay on its side, windows boarded with plywood torn from doors. Kids with tarps had stringed lines between the flagpoles. An older woman with a bandana had a spray-painted sign that read: MEDICAL. A group of teenagers—older than the scouts—had taken to patrolling the perimeter with baseball bats and caution-lamped flashlights. They looked at Troop 97 with the kind of cautious appraisal reserved for people who might be trouble or might be useful.
The zine’s silly guidance softened into actual usefulness. The handbook—if you could call it that—had sections scribbled by multiple hands: “If you have to amputate, sterilize first,” read one note in purple pen. “Don’t kill the carrier unless you have no other choice” read another, in blue. Someone had underlined the line about bandaging wounds and added a calming checklist: breathe, reassure, apply pressure, immobilize. scouts guide to the zombie apocalypse free download
They huddled in the bay of the hardware store while Leon stood watch at the wide plate-glass window. The zine’s suggestion to use reflective surfaces as signals seemed quaint until Jonah picked up a small mirror and flashed it at the highway overpass. A silhouette answered: a person waving from the other side, a mark of separation in a mazelike town.
Later, they would argue that the zine didn’t tell them everything. It lacked nuance—how to comfort someone who’d been bitten, how to decide when someone had to be left behind, how to tell if the person you were sleeping next to had become something else overnight. But right now its blank spaces were invitations. They filled them with plans. They left through the service door—the one the
Years later, long after the word “zombie” had been replaced with a clinical term in police reports, a new generation of children would find the guide in someone’s storage trunk. They would brush dust off the cover and read the annotations that smelt faintly of smoke and iron and optimism. They’d learn how to make a splint, how to boil water, and how to decide when to say goodbye.
They called themselves Troop 97 because the number sounded official; because it fit on the back of the hand-me-down jackets; because when the scoutmaster had retired, the town hadn’t bothered to reassign the number. The four of them—Maya, Leo, Jonah, and Priya—kept it like a talisman. They met in the old pavilion behind the library, trading snacks and badges and conspiracy theories about what the mayor did in the office after three on Tuesday. Doorways gaped like missing teeth
“Be prepared,” she would say, and then add, because you always needed to hear both parts, “and bring someone with you.”