Z- Zombie Stories

by J M Lassen

  It was a dead man walking.

  With his shredded clothes, bloodied body, and gray pallor, another might have thought him merely a man in make-up, costumed for a party or on his way to a movie set, but unfortunately, Paula knew what death looked like. As the creature grew nearer, she could see into its eyes. They were like those of her father; there was no there there.

  Unlike her father, however, this corpse walked.

  It shambled amidst the traffic in her direction, the cars honking for him to move and then swerving when he did not. A few drivers slowed to a crawl so they could look more closely at the impossibility. One man got out of his car and ran over to the thing, placing his hand on its shoulder. Paula could see from the driver’s face, no more than ten yards away, that this was only a gesture of concern; perhaps he’d thought the bloodied walker an escapee from a hospital. As a reward for the man’s good Samaritanship, the shambler slapped out with a bloodied fist and knocked him dead.

  Pedestrians screamed and scattered around her, but Paula simply stood there. She wondered if she was frozen in shock, but no, she was only waiting, though she wasn’t sure for what. She watched as the walking corpse punched a second man to the pavement, then lunged to bring down a third, biting deeply into a woman’s neck with crooked teeth.

  Then the thing saw her.

  With everyone else fleeing, she was the only still target in a sea of flesh. Its lips parted, and she could hear a low, dull growl. She looked away from its bloody lips into its eyes, and thought she now saw an empty hunger there, one that was not unfamiliar to her. She began to ask what force had animated him, what had brought him back to the land of the living, but before she could utter her question, a shot rang out. A police officer had fired on the thing from behind the shelter of a car, hitting the creature in its back. It staggered slightly under the affront, but did not close its dull eyes.

  “Wait,” she said, holding out one hand toward the officer and the other armed men who joined him. “You can’t do this. Not yet.”

  She took a step forward, the step toward death that she’d been interrupted from taking mere moments before, and further shots rang out. The thing’s head exploded, splashing brain matter across her. It crumpled, its knees slamming into the pavement first. Then it sank forward, what remained of its head hitting the roadway at her feet, blood splattering her shoes. Only then did she sag, sitting down hard on the curb. A policeman dashed over, skirting the broken body at their feet.

  “Miss?” he asked her. “Are you all right, Miss?”

  She didn’t know how to even begin to answer. She looked up into the policeman’s face and for a moment was unable to tell whether he was alive or dead, or even remember whether she herself was alive or dead. Someone thrust a cup of water into her hands and draped a blanket over her shoulders. Someone else attempted to wipe the blood from her face.

  As she sat there limp, hearing the sound of sirens and smelling the scent of death, voices reached her through her fog of shock. The police were saying that this tableaux hadn’t just happened on this one street. It was playing itself out all over London. All over the world.

  The dead were coming back to life.

  And they didn’t seem to like us.

  She let herself be helped back to her feet, and then she let herself be tugged along, as she had allowed for most of her life, but when she realized that the destination she was being shepherded to was the back of an ambulance, she broke free from those who thought they were helping her. She ran as swiftly as she could, ran away, into the cafe, out a back entrance, and down an alleyway. This was no time to live meekly, to be swept along by the tide.

  If the dead were coming back to life, her place wasn’t in a hospital, with the living and those who hoped to rejoin the living. It was in the morgue, with the dead.

  Her dead.

  Paula stared down the barrel of a gun held in the shaking hands of a guard standing in the doorway to the London morgue, and was surprised to realize that all she felt was a calm disinterest.

  She felt no alarm. She only thought…how ironic.

  Hours before, she would have acted as provocatively as possible in the hopes of setting off the trigger finger of the jittery young man in a uniform at least one size too large for him. She would have made a lunge in his direction, walked with the staggered gait of the living corpses she had seen wandering the streets of London as she’d zigzagged her way to the building in which she’d identified her father’s body…anything to provoke that bullet. But now everything had changed, for suddenly she had hope, and so she put her hands out slowly beside her, palms up, and then chose her words carefully.

  “I’m not dead,” she said, hoping that her calm words would distract from the bits of brain matter that had spotted the front of her blouse when that first corpse had been shot, and from the blood stain that remained on her face, impervious to washing. The guard lowered his gun slightly, but it did not appear to Paula that he had loosened his grip.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked. One of his shirt sleeves was missing, and the other was dripping with blood. “This is the last place you should want to be.”

  “My father’s here. Do you remember me? I remember you. You were standing by the elevators when I came in, I think. He died last week and I had to come here yesterday to identify him. What happened to your arm?”

  He shook his head, unready to talk about it. He looked like the sort of person who might never be ready to talk about it, holding things in for a lifetime, as she had.

  “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. “You should leave.”

  “I need to be here,” she said, taking a careful step forward. “I need to see him. Please.”

  “No one needs to be here,” he said, standing aside and letting her pass through the door to stand beside him in the entrance hall. “And I’ve been here long enough. They’ve been coming to life all day. I hope never to see this place again.”

  Then he was where she had been, outside looking in.

  “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for,” he said. “But you’re welcome to try. The place is all yours.”

  He tossed her the keys.

  “Just remember—some doors you’re not going to want to unlock.”

  And then he was gone, leaving her alone in a lobby that looked even less welcoming than it had been the day before. The floor was slick with blood and littered with body parts. As she picked her way through the building, that no longer fazed her, because that’s what the city had looked like as she’d made her way here. Only luck had let her get this far. She retraced her steps to the room in which she had been asked to identify her father…but it was empty. She feared that she was too late, that her father, animated by the plague that had infected the planet, had already gotten up and staggered away. It could have been his blood on the guard’s sleeves. It could have been his body parts on the floor, shredded as the guard had defended himself. But as she looked around the bland room, she realized that no single body ever stayed there for long. This was just a place where people like her came face to face with death. The bodies were shuttled here from somewhere else.

  Paula returned to the hallway to find that somewhere else. The floor had become so slippery that she had to steady herself against a wall to stand upright. She’d watched enough television to know what she was looking for, but it wasn’t her eyes that first found her goal, that by-now clichéd room with columns and rows of refrigerated cubicles.

  It was her ears. She heard her destination before she saw it.

  With her hand on the doorknob and the sounds of violence raging inside, she was afraid for the first time that day. The thought that her father was inside, and that she might be stopped from reaching him, stirred up that fear. But she was more afraid of what she would learn about her father than of what would happen to her, and so forced herself into the room.

  She had to lean against the door to open it, and only when she had it fully open did she see that her way h
ad been blocked by body parts. A coroner, his internal organs chewed, was split into four pieces. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped into the room, which still echoed with noise. Nothing moved to stop her, so she moved slowly to the center of the large room lined with small doors with handles.

  She could hear muffled howling, and the dull thuds of bare feet beating against metal doors. People were trapped inside many of the refrigerated cubicles, struggling to get out.

  No, not people, she reminded herself. What used to be people.

  And behind one of those doors was her father.

  She moved respectfully through the room, pausing before each column of doors. She noticed that some of the compartments emitted no sound, presumably because they contained no body. She walked by someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone’s child, and wondered if others like her were coming to try to collect them. Slots in the doors held cards on which names had been scrawled. She had almost circled the room and returned to where she’d started before she stopped, at last, in front of a door which bore a name she shared.

  She placed her hand on the cool metal handle. There was silence within, a silence that sickened her. For it could mean that he was already gone. She rested her head against the door, and was surprised to find herself praying, something she had not done since she was a small child.

  She pulled the handle. Once the door opened, she tugged at the tray inside and slid it out from its compartment. It rolled out so effortlessly that she was surprised to see that her father’s body was still there, unchanged since the day before.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she moaned.

  He appeared the same as he had been when she had come to identify him. Though they had washed the blood from him as best as they could, the evidence of death was unmistakable. Whatever had brought the other dead back to this new sort of life had not yet touched him. No force had come to animate him again, to wake him so that he could say the things as yet unsaid, so that she could retract the things said that shouldn’t have been said.

  She dragged a chair over beside his pallet so that she could watch him, and then she sat down to await his transformation.

  She jerked awake, startled to realize that she had been asleep. All she remembered was studying her father’s face, just as she was doing now. There was no change. Her father still slept.

  “He won’t be coming back, you know.”

  She leapt up at the sound of the voice, tumbling her chair on its side. The guard who had earlier abandoned her knelt to pick it up.

  “I’m sorry that I frightened you,” he said. “But I couldn’t leave you alone to face this.”

  Paula backed away, keeping the righted chair between them. She had not known men to act kindly to her in the past, and she doubted that it was about to start under these circumstances.

  “What did you mean when you said that he wasn’t coming back?” she asked warily.

  “Only that it’s too late for him. I’ve been listening to the news, what news is still broadcasting. All the others, the ones we’ve seen, the ones we’ve had to fight…they died today, and yesterday. But your father…he died last week. No one knows why, or what happened, but it’s only the newly dead who return.”

  She sank into the chair and began to cry.

  “He wouldn’t have been the same anyway, Miss,” he said, trying to comfort her. “He wouldn’t have recognized you.”

  The guard didn’t understand. That wasn’t why she was crying this time, not because her father couldn’t join her in life. She was in tears now because it was too late for her to join him in death. She was even worse off than she’d been before. Suicide had been rendered useless. There could be no end to life now. If she were to kill herself, she would just come back for another chapter. And she wanted no further chapters. She wanted her book of life to be closed.

  She wanted to die, but the time for death was past. She no longer had a goal. All purpose had been stolen from her.

  She dried her tears, but did not get up. She simply sat there, continuing to stare at her father.

  “You should go home, Miss. If you can.”

  “But what about my father? What about him?”

  “There is no him anymore.”

  “I was supposed to bring him home.”

  “I don’t know that there’s any home anymore either. From what I hear, the States are just as bad. And at a time like this, I doubt they would let you return with a dead body. I’m sorry. But it’s best to just say goodbye.”

  The former guard backed away from her, giving her space she did not need, inviting her with his body language to leave with him.

  But he didn’t get it. She was dead inside. She may have looked alive, but inside, she was just like her father.

  She belonged here.

  By day, she wandered the wounded city, sure that her wounds were even greater, studying those who still dared to walk the streets in an attempt to get on with their lives in the midst of chaos, and being studied in return. At night, she slept by her father’s side, surprised that she even could sleep, for the noise in that room, the moaning, the pounding of creatures that could not escape, was unceasing.

  As she moved through the city, it was as if she were leading a charmed life, though she was not sure that what she still had was life. She would come upon scenes of great carnage, small battles between the living and the dead, and walk through them unscathed. It was as if the undead took her for one of their own, so dead was she inside. The fugue state in which she existed had seemed to make her invulnerable, though she didn’t entirely think of herself as so, because she no longer had the level of consciousness to be self-aware. She existed without conscious choice. She just continued her walking through the city, eating when hungry, returning to sleep when tired.

  Around her, some people seemed to be going about their business, but many had abandoned their routines, fleeing the city in search of sanctuary in the countryside. London had become depopulated. It was as if a great city had become a small village in a matter of days. There was no longer a problem getting a seat on the tube, though people now looked at each other with suspicion for new reasons that were just as deadly as the old.

  One day after walking, she aimlessly rode the tube for hours, letting it take her where it would. It seemed as useful as anything else she could have been doing. She no longer had anywhere to go. She no longer had anywhere to be. And besides, this is how she felt closest to her family. Riding the public transportation of the city, she felt closer to her father than when she slept next to him at night, propped up in a chair waiting for a metamorphosis she now doubted would ever come. This was the sort of place in which he’d died, after all. This was the sort of place in which her entire family had died, taking her along with them.

  She watched others come and go. Most were afraid, eying each other passenger and wondering whether this one or that one was a reanimated corpse. She knew no fear, for she no longer cared. No force, living or dead, had any answers for her.

  But at the next station, she felt fear again, as the doors opened to reveal another who was also fearless, though for different reasons.

  The man who entered the car wore a hooded sweatshirt, even though the weather had been warm that day, and on his back he carried an olive backpack. Paula tried to read his expression, but there was no expression there to read, and that told her everything she needed to know.

  “Don’t do it!” she shouted, no longer desiring what came after.

  Then came the explosion, brighter than the sun, and then the darkness, as black as death.

  Paula heard no screaming as she came to, and she thought at first that the explosion had deafened her by shattering her eardrums. But as she lifted her head, she could see that the reason there was no screaming was because she was the only one on the train left alive. She was on her back, and as she moved her hands about her to rise, her fingers swept against glass that had been blown from the windows.

  She sat up in the unmoving
train, and through the smoke could see the bodies of the few other occupants of the car that had been brave enough to ride the tube. She had been furthest from the bomber and had only been knocked out, but the half-dozen others had been lifted and thrown against the walls of the train.

  She felt an odd sense of cognitive dissonance; it was as if she was visiting the past. This is what her father’s last home had looked like, filled with smoke and dust and blood. But somehow she had escaped her family’s fate. She leaned against the buckled walls as she moved along the car. She walked gingerly past the dead, the blood streaming from their ears, and threw herself against the door, which would not budge. She looked nervously at the dead, knowing what would happen next.

  She had to get out.

  Then she saw him, the cause of all this. Or what was left of him. A head, its hair matted with blood, was on the floor, facing away from her. The body that had supported it was nowhere to be seen. She approached the head slowly, circling it and then pushing at it with her toes so she could stare into its face. Yes, it was him. He had thought that he would be in heaven soon, but there was no heaven waiting for him in this new world.

  She removed her jacket and kicked the head into the center of the cloth, hands shaking. She tied the corners together so that she could carry her burden along without having to touch it. She had to hurry, for not only would the others soon come back to life, filled with hunger, but she could hear the sounds of rescuers approaching as well, and both living and dead would only be obstacles to her now. She tucked the package under one arm, crawled through a shattered window, and ran down the tracks as quickly as she could in the opposite direction of the voices.

  Back at the morgue, Paula unwrapped her parcel and put the head upright on a plate, balanced on its ragged neck. She knew that she might need to move it again, but she never wanted to have to touch it. She placed it on one of the operating tables, turning it carefully away from her, away from her father, so that all she could see was the back of its head. But then she turned it back again, so that she could watch it as she sat by her father. She needed to see the transformation when it came.