Poe wasn’t sure how one goes about about embracing a zombie version of their redheaded childhood crush. He’d never been given a script or a set of guidelines on how to deal with something like this, when one was faced with their unrequited love once again. In fact he wasn’t even sure if he could call it unrequited love, considering how Bella was unaware that Poe was in love with her before she’d died.

Back on campus, much of his free time had been spent reading the Harvard Crimson, where it had been something of a perennial tick of the student editor to print the official CDC zombie guidelines on the back of each new issue.

No, one couldn’t get a bug from a zombie. No, one does not simply turn into a zombie when bitten. We’ve tried that one out before guys, trust us. The zombies aren’t out get you, trust us. Yes, we’re living in a strange, new world now, but zombies will be apart of that world from now on, like midterms. Get used to it.

The smug, self righteous tone turned him scornful, but slowly, when he’d burnt out after reading one drab book or another on the lives of Locke or Wittgenstein, he began to memorise the routine and habits that the CDC expected of him when he had little else to do.

He’d wondered if there was any philosopher who’d written about such things - what would they do in a moment like this? The term philosophical zombies still hadn't been hijacked yet by those who spent their free time thinking themselves into a headache over consciousness. He could still salvage it, and create another branch of philosophy that dealt with the ethics and meta-ethics that came when one was still crushing hard on a zombified version of a young redheaded woman. And Bella was a young woman now, having grown in stature to nearly match his own lean 5’10” intellectual frame, despite spending the past decade trapped underneath in the ground.