Safe and Legal Routes of the Dead.
An entirely accurate prediction of the refugee processing system during the zombie apocalypse
The queue snaked out of the Civic Centre, down the street past Tesco, around the car park three times, and over the horizon. It was moving slowly, morosely, shuffling and groaning. As it inched forward, it expanded and contracted, swaying in the breeze, appearing from a distance, quite ironically, to be a living, breathing thing.
Inside the Civic Centre, Jacob made a point of performatively shuffling his papers and pushing his glasses up from the tip of his nose.
‘So, you say you were born in this country?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But you’ve spent the last several years where?’
‘Purgatory, sir.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘Nothing really, sir. There wasn’t much to do.
‘Ah, I see’, said Jacob. ‘Not the sort to seek out work then’.
This last utterance was definitively a definitive, not a question. He licked the tip of his biro so that the other applicants in the office could see, and put a large cross in a box on his page.
‘And how did you arrive in this country
Well, I woke up in a box. Underground. I had to claw my way out with my fingernails.
Jacob looked down at the zombie’s hand and saw the bloody mangled digits. He kept his gaze there.
‘That looks very painful.’ He said, without an ounce of sympathy. ‘We’re you not safe to stay in the box?’
‘Errrrm, safe, possibly, but not very comfortable
‘Not very comfortable,’ Jacob repeated slowly, before putting an even bigger cross on the page.
‘And did you bring any paperwork with you? Any identification?’ he asked.
‘No, I didn’t really think to pack it
The sarcasm went unnoticed.
Jacob had been processing this new surge of refugees ever since they rose a couple of weeks ago. He had never seen anything like it. Thousands upon thousands of new arrivals overnight. They shuffled around in tattered clothes and various states of decay. Body parts were missing and those that remained dangled limply at odd and unnatural angles. He was sure they were just here to scam the system.
Here — The United Kingdom, with its criminally underfunded healthcare system and medievally cruel treatment of the poor. With its chronic lack of housing, broken infrastructure, and mediocre education system. With its understaffed police, overcrowded prisons, derelict railways, and waterways full of raw sewage. The exact sort of country that an unscrupulous illegal would choose to make their home.
‘And do you have any work lined up?’
‘No, I’ve been dead. I thought at that point I might be allowed to retire
‘Any family?’
‘Yes, but we haven’t been in touch
‘Do you have money to support yourself
‘No. Again, I didn’t think to pack any’
The zombie was raising his voice now, the frustration palpable. Jacob though, was unperturbed. He was the coolest cucumber in the shop. The very sort of man you need to sniff out these scroungers.
He scrawled three more crosses in three more boxes, picked up a heavy rubber stamp, and loudly banged it down on the papers.
No body was getting past him.
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