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Not too far from him, Wendell Kohler, the next oldest to me in the community at 46, is talking animatedly to his children. Wendell, who is tall and rangy with perpetually ratty facial growth and a worn baseball cap to cover his thinning hair, is the oldest local left, even though he was only 14 when it all began. Despite his relative lack of intellect, he’s managed to corral his local origin into a powerful position in the community. Much to my chagrin, those of a more academic persuasion have little sway above his, and even worse, his son Wayne is naturally smarter than he is. When Wayne sees me approaching the fountain, his eyes go directly to the papers under my arm, and when his eyes meet mine again, he smiles.

With that, he climbs inside the empty water fountain, walks to the center, and bangs a lead pipe against the center water spire, sending its silencing metallic reverberations throughout the crowd. "Quiet down… quiet down y’all… I got Sund’y, 19^th uh Se’tember… and if ya’ll got old bidness, na’s the time to come foe-wad." As always, I marvel that the southern dialect, rather than growing and changing over a violently different generation, has slid back into what I would have expected to hear in a Saturday Night Live skit about the South in the early 1900’s. I leave my crowbar behind as I step forward into the empty fountain to take advantage of the edict, surrounded by at least a hundred people clad in the fashions of 2000.

"I don’t see any need for preamble, so I’ll get right to the point…"

"Y’know, some people might not a’been here last week… or week ‘fore. If this is old bidness, you’d best refresh us."

"Right… well, we’ve had this issue for awhile now… maybe I could chalk that up to the fact that you’re all getting past the point of just accepting what your parents say…" I say it with a laugh, but I’m met with stern silence. I clear my throat. "So I want to have it out in the open, finally, because we have to discuss it. I’ve learned quite a lot in the last thirty years, and experience has taught me a few things. One of them is that the undead are, for lack of a better term, evil incarnate."

Unsurprisingly, this assertion is met with derisive groans.

"Hear me out, now… their mere existence goes against the very laws of nature. We’ve spent decades now, seeing our loved ones suffer their transformation into death… death being the one thing that was guaranteed us at birth… only to be ripped back into existence moaning, shuffling, dangerous, and above all, merely a shadow of the person we once knew… once they’ve made the transformation, they’re all one and the same… thoughtless, marauding killing machines that exist merely to perpetuate by bites and scratches… we’ve talked about this, and I’ve listened, and I’ve drawn upon all my mental faculties to understand your perspective, but I cannot abide a live-and-let-live policy with creatures that aren’t even alive!"

The crowd explodes into a litany of long-winded retorts that I cannot follow. I hold my arms up to quiet them down, settling on the voice of a young man I do not know.

"Yer up there sayin’ this crap like there’s somethin’ gonna change… I jes wanna know why yer bringin’ it up in the first place."

"Okay, just last week a few hundred were gathered at the wall just outside the Dixon Street interchange… god forbid some or all of them manage to get through… could you imagine what…"

The rabble takes over again. I put my hands up again to quiet them down. When it takes longer than anticipated, I grab my crowbar and bang it into the center spire.

"Look… I can’t reply to a hundred screaming people…"

"So what do s’pose we do about it?" Wayne asks. "Line up and ask you one at a time? We’d be here fer days, way you talk…"

"Then caucus together or something… before the breakdown, formal debates used to take happen in one-on-one discourse…"

"There you go again… ‘’fore this’, ‘’fore that’… as you’re so fond ‘a pointin’ out, it’s been thirty years. Don’t you think it’s time we come up with some rules ‘a our own?" The other young man asks.

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