Alone in his room, Lucas paced slowly around the small space available in his dorm. The pathway he took mostly consisted of a semi clean walking space between the dresser at the side of the room and the laptop at the desk beside the window. The few papers or discarded plastic bottles were kicked out of the way or disregarded as Lucas traversed the area.
The laptop's screen displayed the latest news headlines that had been loaded before he had risen to walk back and forth pointlessly. If this were a normal day, Lucas would have gone outside by now to either pick up food or meet with friends. Since finals were over, Evan, Ryan and the others would have probably been hanging out somewhere and they would have probably gamed together on their computers.
Although Lucas wasn't usually prone to pacing, the events today had been producing a nearly continual anxiety within him. Thinking about his own actions, Lucas knew it had nothing to do with the fact that there were real zombies out there; one even so close as to be right outside the building. It had more to do with what he had been doing: reexamining his conclusions and his idle thoughts in an endless cycle of repetition with no satisfactory answers to his most basic questions.
Although Lucas had devised a few curious conclusions about the zombies, what he had carefully considered only raised more questions than it settled. And even so, his most concrete observations barely rose above the status of tentative speculation. Everything he had concluded in deduction so far seemed perfectly reasonable, but that just made the situation more galling.
These things simply should not be. They defied natural explanation, and every tidbit of information only made their existence appear more impossible. Although much of what he had been considering was lingering in a state of wild speculation, every deduction so far seemed perfectly reasonable. That was part of what made it so problematic and uncomfortable to him. Extraordinary conclusions demanded extra scrutiny and Lucas didn't feel he could justify those conclusions on his own tenuous reasoning and the few brief videos he could examine.
Lucas craved evidence of a more definitive sort. And news sites hadn't provided anything suitable yet. Reliable sources of information just expounded basic facts- which while potentially useful for survival- didn't satisfy any deeper curiosity. Less reliable sources provided questionable assertions and vague evidence.
The only thing Lucas felt he knew for certain was that these infected were not functioning as normal life could. Their bodies got energy from somewhere other than what should be biologically possible. At least, as far as he knew about the subject. And he was only fully convinced of that because he had seen for himself the massive blood loss, and the continued function for long after what should have theoretically incapacitated its victim. While interesting by itself, that was one of those details that just raised more questions. Nobody that he could find had any explanation for it.
Despite Lucas not finding any good evidence to satiate his biggest curiosities, he still held out hope that somewhere, someone else would eventually come up with something. Or at least come to the same shaky conclusions about things that he had. Despite his best efforts to search, a myriad of theories were prepared and offered without any good evidence in support. The Internet was awash with information, but most of it was useless to him or contradicted one another. Often, it appeared people attempting to provide evidence had no first hand observations of the undead.
Lucas considered for a moment that if he could record the zombie and create a video of sufficient length, he could at least provide evidence to other people about the singular aspect he had witnessed for himself. Then people would be able to see for themselves that these things were not living in the traditional sense. But somehow, Lucas doubted that Simon would allow it. Besides, everyone except the mainstream news seemed to already recognize these things as zombies anyway.
However, the one thing many other people did seem to notice was the sudden appearance aspect. Of course, Lucas had noticed the trend earlier when he first checked online, but he had initially dismissed such things as simple ignorant paranoia. Nobody yet had a theory for the outbreak which made any sense. People latched onto those explanations of divine retribution or alien invasion or the like no matter how much sense they made. Those who did not were expounding upon stranger glorified guesses. Although nothing he had read so far was very convincing or even fully rational, an awful lot of people seemed absolutely certain despite those significant flaws.
Of course there had to be an answer for this, Lucas thought to himself. Every meaningful question that could be asked has an answer. Unfortunately, even if one could ask a meaningful question, it didn't mean that one could expect to discover that answer. But desiring an explanation very deeply didn't make accepting a bad answer okay. And right now, there was an overabundance of awful answers and far too many people seemed to be uncritically accepting them.
