This morning, out in Harm County, where the white buffalo roam in their Dodge Ram 4-by-4’s, I was finishing up the frozen food case for Mister John, at Free Food For Fat F…s, when he entered’; a man with no name; a man worthy of no name; a sign of the times; a tic on the body politic.

I know that all of you liberals assume he is a handicapped ghetto kid, who, if you put Johnny Knoxville in charge of testing at an Ivy League school, might be able to gain admittance.

Of course you conservatives think he is a milk-sucking stay-at-home liberal dad.

Yes, and you MANLY ‘manosphere’ MEN are certain that he must be a she, or at least a he-she, at best a feminist.

You libertarians are certain that he is a government employee, like all of the cops that pay for their groceries with food stamps in Baltimore.

And you alternative right guys—and you, you loan alternative right babe—are certain that he is an illegal alien; probably some godforsaken ‘mud-person’ from south of the border, come here to take from you what your great, great, great, great worked-to-death grand daddy’s master took from some Stone Age holdover with a feather in his hair and a tear rolling over his cheek...

But really, who is this man with no name, this Clint Eastwood of State subsidized groceries?

The answer is: he is merely reprehensible. I began the Zombie Bait series so that those purely parasitical proto-hominid effluvia deposits on the body economic would not be elevated to the level of such Streets Have Eyes characters as Denizen Cane, Bruce the Bricklayer, Newnetthelove, Jervis the Cabbie, and other Harm City legends. This male of the Homo Foodstamponid branch of our devolutionary tree, is—merely reprehensible!

Just after 6:00 this morning, Merely Reprehensible strolled in as Angie—who is retired, but can’t make her gas & electric payment, so has to work the FFFFF register for the morning breakfast crowd stopping in for their bagels, doughnuts and yogurt on their way to work—logged onto her cash register.

He is a middle-aged white man who owns a small construction company and employs a mangy thirty-something drowned rat of a helper, who stood by nervously as they shopped and then cut into line with a full basket of meat and ice cream just ahead of a coffee and doughnut order. By the time his $218 worth of steaks and nutty buddy bars were rung up, there were three additional single item customers stuck in line behind him.

Then, as the order was totaled, and Angie said, “Enter your pin number Sir”, the order was denied, as he had entered the wrong pin number. This was retried numerous times. We now had six customers in line. Angie then paged the manager, who paged the courtesy babe, who called Merely Reprehensible over to the window so that he could call up the junkie that had sold him an EBT card with $220 on it for $100 dollars.

We were now eight working stiffs deep at the register as our NFL representative [he was wearing Baltimore Ravens attire] kept questioning the junkie on the other end of the land line as to the correct pin number. We can only presume that the junkie knew his baby’s mama’s pin number. However, he had apparently injected sufficient liquid assets into his bioconomy to render him Simply Incomprehensible.

The man and his helper said they would be ‘right back’, and left the store. Angie rang out her customers, placed the nutty buddys in the freezer, rolled the meat into the meat room, and saved the receipt. By 8:00 she was swamped by legit customers. By 9:00, when I left, the nutty buddys were looking right lonely.

Okay, let’s say next month, when Merely Reprehensible and his emaciated helper show up to commit food stamp fraud, the Zombie Apocalypse hits. What will my last act as an FFFFF clerk be before the Zekes overrun the store?

I will grab a 24 ounce longneck glass bottle of Everfresh mango-carrot flavored juice beverage, and use it to brain the emaciated helper. I will then kick his employer in the balls with my steel toe boot. Then, as I tell the FFFFF employees and customers to flee out the back door behind produce, I will deploy my trusty case cutter, eviscerate the helper, and use his entrails to tie his employer down on Angie’s now pretty funky register—sorry Angie.

In this way, as we make our way out the back and leap off of the produce dock, we will know that the Zekes are coming as soon as Merely Reprehensible ceases his I’m-being-eaten-alive-and-this-is-not-cable-TV-and-therefore-really-sucks howls of anguish.

You know, I thought Jack Donovan was nuts when he evoked the ‘zombie apocalypse’ as a solution to liberal feminism. But you know what Jack: I think I’m stoked for this thing. There is more than enough zombie bait to go around in this town.

No zombies were abused, injured or mistreated in the composition of this work.