The zombies are sublime, extant cannibals that pursue hunting for their endurance: “The city where we do our hunting is conveniently close. We arrive around noon the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don’t feel it in our stomachs – some of us don’t even have those. We feel it everywhere equally, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating. Last winter, when so many Living joined the Dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friends become full-dead.” Isaac Marion renders zombies animations that exist; the survival is contingent on the handiness of flesh which is the staple that brooks them. This delineation is comparable to humans starving owing to the unavailability of food. Being cannibalistic suggests that once living transmute to zombies they subsist on flesh. Moreover, in the zombie-world, living and vanishing emerge as they do in the orthodox world surmising that corporal expiry is not the only outright formula of departure.
R is a ‘humane’ zombie that rises above cannibalistic proclivities that are typical among other zombies: “I don’t know why we have to kill people. I don’t know what chewing through a man’s neck accomplishes. I steal what he has to replace what I lack. He disappears, and I stay. It’s simple but senseless, arbitrary laws from some lunatic legislator in the sky. But following those laws keeps me walking, so I follow them to the letter. I eat until I stop eating, then I eat again.” R’s avowals parade solid humaneness that may not be palpable in various conventional humans. Murder is ubiquitous among humanity; correspondingly it emerges when zombies pursuit the existing and gobble their flesh. Furthermore, R critiques humans, meanderingly, by alluding to the predisposition to steal from others with the resolve of elevating oneself. The arbitrariness that is palpable in zombie-land mirrors the colossal egocentricity that administrates conventional humans resulting in a long-lasting antagonism.
Human existence is not indisputably overseen by Death versus Life binary. Julie contends “Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilisations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? … My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory – hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.” According to Julia’s philosophical surveillance, life cannot be disentangled from death because passing is the eventual terminus of life. Innate beings do perish after consuming their ‘useful life,’ so they do not subsist perpetually. ‘Hope and Memory’ are the ingredients that outline the eminence of one’s being; memory wholly profiles the past whereas hope conceptualizes the future.
