Everyone Died+My iPhone Stopped Working: An Oral History of The Robot Apocalypse

Holy Shibblets!

Ed Weiss, 45

Tollbooth Operator

When I met Marietta, she was the sweetest person you could ever imagine. She always had a smile on her face. She smiled so much that my friend, Chuck, thought she might be "simple." But she wasn't. She was just a naturally happy person. Yes, sometimes she got mad, like when she found aphids in her rose bushes or that one time I accidentally ran over her foot, but even then, she said adorable things like "Oh, crab cakes!" and "Holy shibblets!"

[Note: Not even Lucas knows what a "shibblet" is.]

How could I not fall in love with her? We got hitched and started a nice, quiet life together. I would do my Sudoko while she made dinner from recipes she found on the internet. Ham-based mostly, which was just another reason to love her. We would eat together and I'd tell her funny stories about my day at work: the cars with mufflers scraping on the ground and the people who thought they could trick me into taking Canadian money. We would laugh and laugh.

Then everything changed.

Her friend Sheila suggested that she watch The Walking Dead. It was a weird suggestion, because up until that point, Marietta mostly watched shows about people re-doing their back yards or selling coffee tables at swap meets. So a show where rotting corpses were being stabbed in the head didn't really seem like it was in her wheelhouse. If the zombies were scrapbooking or something, that would have at least made some sense.

But she was hooked. She watched them over and over. There reached a point where she knew that she was watching a show... but at the same time, she didn't know. She started talking about the characters as if they were real people, people she knew. People who talked to her.

Plus, she really fell behind on her housework. When I asked her about it, she told me that nobody was ever saved from the zombies by a freshly mopped floor.

I thought it was a phase. And I tried to help her by pointing out all the things in the show that didn't make any sense. You know, to remind her that it was fiction. But it just made her angry. She kept referring to me as "abusive." Calling me "Ed." Which is my name, but that's not the Ed she meant. She meant the Ed from the show. Abusive Ed.

And she said I was a drunk because I had a glass or two of Mike's Hard Lemonade every now and then. Believe me, if your wife started babbling about the Zombie Apocalypse you'd toss back a Mike's Hard Lemonade or two yourself.

Eventually, I decided I couldn't deal with it anymore, so I moved out. And that's when the neighbors started calling me.

"Marietta has a Samurai sword!"

"We're separated."

"Marietta is stabbing rotten fruit! And it's attracting flies!"

"We're separated."

"Marietta is trying to shoot our cats with a crossbow!"

"We're separated."

"Can't you make her see reason?"

"If I could make her see reason, we wouldn't be separated."

After weeks of this, I agreed to talk with Marietta, just to get the neighbors off my back. Also, I was hoping maybe she could do a load of laundry for me. I'd been hand-washing my skivvies in my motel room sink, but it wasn't the same.

I found her in the back yard, where she had set up some kind of weird obstacle course. There were tires, a climbing wall, a balance beam, a rope swing, all that stuff. And there were cardboard standees of characters from the show, and some cardboard zombies, and some random cardboard celebrities as well — Marilyn Monroe, Eeyore, New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronko, that guy from KISS with the long tongue, Walt, Jr. from Breaking Bad — all of which had been repeatedly mangled and stabbed.