Zombies would be better.

The problem with our virus, our plague, is its invisibility, the way its effect on its victims can't be seen until too late. Anyone could be carrying it. We can't fight it. We have no weapons yet. And the victims are innocent, we want to save them. We can't just disregard them and save ourselves.

But the true horror is that any one of us could be carrying it right now, all unwitting, infecting others and not even knowing it. We're under siege, but the enemy may be inside with us, invisible. I haven't seen my own daughter face to face in over two weeks because I'm forced to think of myself as a possible threat.

Zombies, on the other hand- you can tell a zombie. You can spot what they look like. They're different from everyone else, they're other. They don't walk next to you in the store or on the street or at work. And there's no saving a zombie. Zombies are lost to us, so all we have to do is fight them. It's a sport to hunt the zombies. It's fun, even! Sure, a zombie plague is dangerous, but it separates the survivors from the useless remnants who weren't fit to live anyway! It gives us license to live out our fantasies of video-game violence and survival horror! Whereas there's nothing fantastic about our real lives these days; just grinding out one day after another, watching the death toll, and hoping it will end, somehow, in everything going back to some semblance of "normal", whatever that means now. Whatever that will mean from now on.

No, in my darkest moments I think, "Zombies would be better."