After about an hour of telling me in great detail exactly how cute his cat Smoky was and why, Edric said to me that "it's easy to get down when walking corpses are trying to make your flesh into a tasty mid-afternoon snack. Sometimes what you really need in a zombie apocalypse is perspective."

Sometimes what I really need is for Edric to stop trying to make me feel better. You know how some people just love to hear themselves talk? Not only is Edric like that, I'm fairly certain he doesn't like to hear other people talk because it reminds him of the fact that he isn't the one talking.

I first met Edric on the day of the outbreak while he was on his way to a talk show he was going to be on. I picked him up in my taxi, but we never made it to the studio. We were attacked by the first wave of the infected and were forced to take shelter with about ten or so others in a parking garage downtown. Since then we have been on the move, trying to get food and weapons while avoiding detection. Slowly though, our numbers dwindled until Edric and I were the only ones left. Usually when you go through hard times like this with someone you form a special bound, you appreciate their little quarks or at least you learn to deal with them. Not with Edric. There's no learning to deal with Edric. Being with Edric is subjecting yourself to a non-stop bombardment of pointless and boring stories, longwinded opinions about nothing in particular, and ramblings about a cat who sounded even more boring than he was.

I'm running out of things to distract me when he goes into one of his speeches, which is really any time I'm around, which is all the time. When he was telling me about where he would usually pet Smoky I was thinking about where I would shoot a charging zombie cat and what range would be optimal to ensure accuracy but at the same time not let it too close. When he was telling me about what cute things Smoky would do with a ball of yarn I was thinking about this one time a zombie tried to eat one of my grenades. When he was telling me about how Smoky would attack his feet as he lay in bed I was thinking about laying bear traps for unsuspecting zombies loaded with the flesh of some small animals, maybe a cat.

Why was it that out of the ten survivors that we started out with, the only ones left were me and this guy who couldn't shut up? I wondered what he would do if I was eaten, just as he was telling me something about positive thinking. Would he just talk to himself until he bored himself to death?

But what if he was the one who was eaten first? Would having no one to talk to be worse than being talked at constantly? Now he was saying something about sushi, I must have missed a segue somewhere.

Despite him telling me to be positive and think good thoughts, I knew neither of us were going to last very long. Would it really matter if he was eaten a bit earlier? Maybe I could even be humane and throw him off the top of a building. A quick, painless death is better than having your flesh torn off anyway. Then when the zombies flocked to his splattered remains I could take them out with a sniper rifle so his death wouldn't be in vain. See, it would all be for the greater good. After all, in a zombie apocalypse, you've got to have perspective.