Z- Zombie Stories

by J M Lassen

  “I want her with us,” Dustin said. “She’s in danger now. Any random dead person might get to her, damage her mind—destroy what makes her special. She’ll be safer this way.”

  Jack wondered: Why did I do it? Why betray Ashley? To protect his father, yes, but… the truth—he wanted to see her again. Would she accept him, if they were the same? If she were dead too?

  Jack said, “It won’t be easy.”

  “No,” Dustin agreed. “That’s why I need you with me. My soldiers follow orders, mostly. I tell them where to march, who to attack, what to say. But I can’t stop them from feeding, Jack, which means that most of my new recruits arrive as damaged goods. There’s not much officer material around here.”

  Jack was skeptical. “You want to make me an officer?”

  Dustin answered, “I can’t use regular troops for this. There’s too much risk to Ashley. I have to use officers—men I can trust not to damage her—and I’ve got few enough of those.”

  Some of the dumb, moaning ones wandered past, and Jack imagined them ripping at Ashley’s soft forehead with their teeth.

  “I’ll go,” Jack said then. “For Ashley. To make sure nothing happens to her.”

  “For Ashley,” Dustin agreed.

  Dustin called a meeting of his officers, and held up a photograph that showed him and Ashley standing beside a campfire and embracing. Dustin said, “This is her. Make sure she’s not damaged.”

  The army marched east, thousands of groaning dead shambling along the interstate. Dustin moved among them, shouting orders: “When we reach the town, seek out places you know, people you know. Remember what to say: ‘Don’t shoot! You know me! Help me!’”

  The mumbled replies echoed through the trees: “Don’t shoot… you know me… help me…”

  Dustin had a dozen officers—dead men armed with rifles and pistols—who stayed close by his side. Dustin himself carried a shotgun, and kept a combat knife tucked in his boot. Jack followed along behind them, and held his rifle limply, and stared down at the damp pine needles that passed beneath his feet. He was full of foreboding.

  Dustin lowered his voice and said to his officers, “They’ve probably never fought dead men like us before—fast, smart, armed. That surprise will be our biggest advantage.”

  One of the officers grumbled, “They’ve spent weeks boarding up this house. How are we going to get in?”

  Jack called out, “I can get us in.”

  Dustin turned and studied him, then nodded.

  The house was a sprawling Victorian that sat in the middle of a grove of white cedars. Dustin led the squad forward. They all crouched low and scurried across the lawn in a tight column, their weapons held ready. Jack and Dustin hurried up the front steps while the others ducked behind the porch railing or dropped into the long grass.

  Jack hammered on the door and shouted, “Let us in! It’s Sam! For God’s sake, let us in, they’re coming!”

  After a few moments, he heard the bolt snap out of place. The door opened a crack. Dustin rammed the barrel of his shotgun into the opening and pulled the trigger. Blood exploded through the gap, splattering crimson across the porch, then Dustin kicked open the door.

  The officers sprang up, firearms bristling, and charged into the house. Gunfire rang out all around. Jack was swept along into the foyer, which was already littered with bodies. A staircase led up to the second floor.

  “Cover the stairs,” Dustin ordered Jack. “Make sure no one comes down.”

  Jack aimed his gun up toward the second floor landing. The other officers poured off into the side rooms, and sounds of violence shook the house.

  Suddenly a doorway under the stairs flew open. Jack swung his rifle to cover it, but then a muzzle flashed and a bullet caught him in the chest, and he stumbled back against a small table and knocked over a lamp, which shattered on the floor.

  Dustin shouted, “The basement! They’re in the basement.”

  Three of the officers stormed down the basement steps. Beneath Jack’s feet the floorboards rattled, and horrible screams filtered up from below. Jack stuck a finger into his chest and rooted out the bullet.

  Another officer jogged up to stand at Dustin’s side and said, “Sir, we’ve got your girl. She’s in the study. Bleeding.”

  Dustin nodded. “I want to be with her when she rises. Finish this.”

  “Yes, sir.” The officer walked to the open front door and called out, “Come here. Come on. Now.”

  Jack watched, horrified, as crowds of moaning dead men stumbled in through the door and began to gorge on the newly fallen corpses.

  Jack grabbed Dustin’s arm and said, “What are you doing? We can use these people.”

  Dustin said, “They’ll try to shoot us as soon as they rise. It’s better this way.”

  Jack cast one last grim look at the feeding dead, then followed Dustin through several doorways and into a study.

  Ashley lay in an overstuffed chair, flanked by officers. Her pretty face was still. A trickle of blood flowed from a single bullet hole in the center of her chest.

  One of the officers said, “She’s not breathing. It won’t be long.”

  Dustin ordered, “I want to be alone with her.”

  The officers herded Jack from the room. He paced down a long, lonely hallway, then out the front door and into the yard, where he sat, leaning back against a tall white cedar and waiting for Ashley to appear.

  Finally she did, framed in the light of the doorway. Her figure was slender, her hair long and lustrous. But her beautiful face had been carved away, until there was nothing left but eyeballs and bone.

  Dustin came and stood beside her, and their twin skull faces regarded each other.

  Later that night, as Jack and Dustin stood together in the yard, Jack said bitterly, “I can’t believe you did that. She was beautiful.”

  To which Dustin replied, “Ashley will always be beautiful. To me. You loved her face. I love her. Who deserves her more?”

  “I want to talk to her,” Jack said.

  “No, you’ll stay away.” Dustin’s voice held a nasty edge. “Or I’ll tell her that you led us here. That you betrayed her.”

  Jack flinched, and Dustin strode away, calling over his shoulder, “I’m the only one who understands her now, understands what she’s going through.”

  For hours Jack wandered aimlessly among the dead, among the masses of rotting flesh. Their awfulness, their stupidity, was overwhelming, and made him want to gag.

  Then, through the clusters of corpses, he caught a glimpse of white skull. He walked away.

  He wound a path through the dead, and sneaked an occasional backward glance. The skull was there. It gained on him.

  Finally, it caught him.

  Ashley said, “Jack. It is you.” She leaned her horrible skull-face toward him, and her exposed eyeballs studied him. She said, “Dustin didn’t tell me you were here. Say something. Do you recognize me, Jack? Do you understand?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Then she was suspicious. “Did you have anything to do with this? Did you help him do this?

  Jack turned away and stumbled off into the hordes. In that moment he envied them—their lack of thought, of remorse. He couldn’t bear to confront Ashley. Now there was only one thing he could do, that might deceive her, that might make her leave him alone.

  “Don’t hurt me…” he groaned loudly, desperately. “Please… help me.”

  ;/{}

  THE

  HUMAN

  RACE

  SCOTT EDELMAN

  Paula Gaines felt herself quite ready to die.

  Or perhaps it was instead that ever since the phone call that brought her to this distant place to look into her father’s dead eyes and have to tell a stranger, “Yes … that’s him,” she was no longer ready to live.

  As she sat in the bathtub, stroking her forearm with the flat of a knife she had lifted from the hostel’s communal dining area, that fine a distinction no longe
r mattered to her. Whether she was racing toward her death, or racing away from her life, all that mattered now was the speed with which that race could be consummated.

  The reflection of her face in the still water, water turned lukewarm so long had she been sitting in it, was unfamiliar to her. Her years on this earth had been full of unfortunate life lessons, and thanks to this added insult from the universe, there seemed little point in going on. Before the call that startled her in the middle of another sleepless night, before her sudden trip to London, she saw herself as a person able to at least keep up a pretense of happiness, even though happiness itself was beyond her. But this day, she no longer had the energy for false smiles, and her expression was far grimmer than she had ever known it.

  Grimmer, and almost lifeless already.

  As she switched the knife from her right hand to her left, her slight movement gently rippled the water, and as her reflection distorted, she could almost see her sister’s face. And when the ripples were at their greatest, even her mother’s. She slapped the water angrily, so that the faces went away. She just couldn’t bear it. Her mother’s face, her sister’s face… they were both gone. The explosion that had taken the two of them had been so great that there had been no faces remaining after death, no body parts that the officials at the morgue felt it necessary for her to identify.

  While the terrorist attack had left her father’s body bloodied but intact, if she was ever going to see the rest of her family again, it would have to be after death.

  After her death.

  She turned the blade so that the edge pressed against her wrist. At the instant that she was about to cut deeply lengthwise—as she had learned was necessary for a successful suicide one time when she’d investigated it on the Web—there was a rap at the bathroom door. She startled, and as her hand jerked, the blade sliced shallowly into her flesh. A few drops of blood ran down her arm into the water.

  “Who’s there?” she asked, with a voice that sounded surprised it had the chance to speak again.

  “You’re not the only one who needs to use the bath, you know,” called out a woman.

  “Just a moment,” Paula said.

  She looked into the water as her red blood dissipated into pink and then was gone, almost as if the thoughts of suicide were a dream. But they weren’t, and never would be again. She tried to identify exactly whose voice had called out to her, to remember which of the women with whom she had shared a bustling breakfast it could have possibly been—Lillian, who squeezed her hand briefly after passing the marmalade, Jennifer, who found it hard to meet her eyes, or perhaps one of the others—and though she could not put a face to the voice, she remembered them all as friendly, and sympathetic once they realized the purpose of her journey. And so she thought…no, not here. Don’t do it here. Paula didn’t want to make friends, however new, clean up the mess she’d leave behind. Whatever she was going to do, it had to be done in front of people whom she had never looked in the eye, who would not then be forced to mourn their own failures to save her. The women she’d just met here, even though just passing acquaintances, deserved better. Her mother had raised her that way.

  Her mother…

  Paula slipped slowly into the water until her head submerged beneath its surface and her knees popped up to cool in the chill air of the room. She held her breath, embracing the silence, and wished that she could just keep holding that breath until all breath was gone, taking with it this room, this city, everything. She held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, but then the air exploded from between her lips and she sat up quickly, shivering in a strange room in a strange country.

  She dressed quickly and rushed back to her cramped room, which was all that she could afford, and only barely afford at that. She grabbed her backpack, stuffed it with her possessions, told no one she was checking out—almost laughing, but not quite, at the double meaning of that phrase—and fled the hostel.

  If she was going to die that day, she was going to do it in front of strangers.

  Paula gulped down a mouthful of coffee the moment the waitress brought it over, burning her tongue, which reminded her yet again that life meant pain. At least for her it did. She blew on what liquid remained in the cup, cursing her impatience. She had no idea how others managed to maintain pleasant lives, but hers was one filled with impatience, and blossoming with pain.

  She had hoped that the despair which had settled over her, initially back home and now deepening here, would do her a favor for once and demonstrate its own patience, so that she could stave off her suicide long enough to return to die in her home country. But her latest worries made that unlikely. The intricacies of getting her family’s remains released, negotiating with a local funeral home for proper caskets, dealing with the airlines to transport the bodies (or what remained of them)…it was all too much for her, and those details buzzed in her head, blotting out both sleep and reason. She found it hard to contemplate the enormity of suddenly being the responsible one in the family. No one could have ever mistaken her for the one in that role before, and now…

  Identifying her father’s body had been difficult enough. She just didn’t have the energy to do all of the other things that remained.

  And she didn’t have the energy to remain alive either.

  She had walked all morning through the streets of a country she had never before thought to visit, stumbled on until her aching feet insisted that she drop into a chair at a corner cafe. She’d sat in the sunshine for hours, unable to summon up the energy to move, shamed by the determination of the passersby rushing on with their lives. Picking at the remains of her plate of squidgy lemon pudding, an odd dessert with an odd name, she wondered why her father had always wanted to visit this odd country.

  He had always talked about it, studying maps, poring over guidebooks, and had finally done it, and look what good chasing his dreams had done him. She never understood his dreams anyway. That had always been part of their problem, she figured; she should have been able to understand him better. But then, he never seemed to spend much energy understanding her, either. Still, he had reached out to both Paula and her sister Jane, neither of whom had ever married, offering to pay their ways to London to experience it with him. Perhaps she should have taken her father up on it as her sister had. If she’d done so, she would have been on that bus with the three of them, and all of her worrying and despair would now be over.

  Instead, she had to sit in an unfamiliar place and contemplate how and when she would…do it. If she’d been home, she would have known exactly what to do. She had been thinking about it long enough, planning for its inevitability. It would have been easy. There was that lake, and the sunset that came with it, and those pills that since Mark had left she had been spending far too many long nights studying, even before every living relative of hers had been erased. She cursed her decision to remain home instead of taking her dad up on his invitation. The matter could have been taken out of her hands. She could have died with them, without thought, instead of just sitting there thinking about dying.

  Now, sitting at the cafe, eating her pastry, drinking her coffee, pondering both her loneliness and the short time she had left in which to be lonely…she had to find another way.

  Maybe she could climb up Big Ben, which her father had always talked of visiting. She could climb it and instead of admiring the intricacy of the clockwork and the view, just…jump off, giving herself over to the breeze. She wouldn’t have minded that feeling of flight to be real for once, but somehow, it didn’t seem right to mingle her father’s goal with her own shortcomings. And besides… she knew nothing of Big Ben. She had no idea whether that tourist magnet even contained an accessible window or ledge from which she could jump.

  Or perhaps she should fill her pockets with rocks, and swim out into the Thames until she could swim no more. A famous writer had done just that. She had even seen a movie about it. She liked the idea of floating off until consciousness faded, but the prepar
ations—finding a river secluded enough so that no one would try to save her, finding a grouping of stones sufficient to her task—it seemed like too much work for her, regardless of how romantic it might sound. She needed a way that was almost effortless. If it could be instantaneous as well, so much the better.

  As the traffic blared around her, she took another bite of her pastry and looked at the cars and trucks rushing by, and to the roadway, where she could see painted in large white letters a warning to walkers to look to their right. So many tourists visited London each year that there needed to be constant reminders that the world was not the same all over.

  Reading the warning, she realized that she had finally found her answer. She could step blindly into traffic. No one would even have to know that she had done it deliberately. Americans were known for stepping off the curb while looking in the wrong direction. If anyone bothered to research her reasons for coming to London in the first place, they would simply assume that she had been distracted by grief. Unlike the case with the women back at the hostel, no one would have to feel personal responsibility, carrying the weight that it was something she could have been talked out of. There would be no guilt. They would just think it was the unfortunate, accidental passing of another sad American.

  In fact, Paula could see one of those quaint double-decker busses approaching right then.

  She pushed back from her table and walked away from the cafe. Her waitress stepped toward her from amid the outdoor cluster of tables, calling after her that she had forgotten to pay, which only caused her to walk more quickly. As the bright red bus neared, Paula looked the other way, feigning confusion just in case there was a witness, and began to put her right foot forward to step into the street.

  Before she could set it down in the path of the bus, she heard a man scream. She hesitated, hanging there between life and death. When Paula turned, she saw that man pointing, not at her, but past her into the street. The bus went by, her opportunity gone. By then, additional people were pointing, and she followed their outstretched arms to what was revealed after the bus had moved on.