Dead World Resurrection

by Joe McKinney

  And that was all it took.

  One tiny slip, one momentary distraction, and the zombies they moved with swarmed them.

  Usually, at least as far as Kevin was concerned, it wasn’t much of a loss.

  The fakers only tried it because they had given up on their humanity. Surviving among the ruins of what the world had once been was hard. It sucked, in fact. In order to survive, in order to stay sane, you had to work at it. Every day was a fight. Every breath was bought with tears and sweat and loneliness. And sometimes, living free didn’t seem much of a payback.

  The fakers couldn’t hack it. The world they’d lived in, believed in, trusted, had collapsed. Many had made weapons, built strongholds, fought bravely, but in the end, their spirit of resistance had collapsed. Everything had collapsed, leaving them alone, scared, miserably vacant of purpose. They looked at the world and saw ruins, they saw emptiness, they saw a pointless future without faith, without hope, without meaning. They accepted that this was the end, and that going on with this world didn’t matter anymore.

  But they didn’t have the courage to end it all, either.

  They were the real walking dead, not the zombies, and Kevin had never felt anything but disgust for them.

  Until now, of course.

  He and Mindy Matheson, they’d dated right after high school. She’d never said two words to him during school. Neither one of them had been all that popular, but it had been a big school, and she had her friends and he had his. But afterward, when they found they were working at the Home Depot together, neither one of them with the foggiest notion of what they were going to do with their lives, they sort of fell together.

  For about eight months.

  They didn’t end on an obvious note. No cheating, no fighting, nothing like that. They just drifted apart. At the time he’d figured they just weren’t right for each other. That explained why they hadn’t noticed each other back in school. What happened while they were working together was just the natural gravity of two lonely people. And so, just as their orbits brought them together, those same orbits carried them apart. She grew distant, he grew irritable. She stopped calling, he stopped caring. Soon they were basically strangers again. The brief interlude was forgotten, and the two of them went back to their lives of uncertainty and quiet desperation.

  He found it funny that the world had changed so much, and yet he and Mindy had changed so little. It made him laugh, the way the two of them were still living their half-lives, midway between life and death.

  But he laughed louder than he wanted to, and she had heard him. He saw her cock her head to one side. She turned toward the truck where he was hiding, her shifting, searching gaze the only thing that separated her from the wandering corpses nearby.

  Kevin whistled faintly, just loud enough for her to hear.

  She staggered forward.

  For a moment, he thought of running away from there. What did he think he was doing anyway? What could he do? It wasn’t like they were going to run off together or anything. Not now. To fake it for any length of time at all, she would have had to go native in a mighty convincing kind of way.

  And that she certainly had.

  Kevin looked her up and down, from the stringy, matted mess that was her hair to her bare and blackened feet, and tried not to grimace at the stench that came off her. Her face was filthy, her lips cracked and flaking. Her clothes were so stained and ratty he couldn’t even tell what color they had once been. Flies swarmed about her face.

  But she was standing right in front of him now, watching him. She swayed drunkenly, her mouth hanging slightly open. He wanted to hate her, but her eyes were over-bright, pregnant with the suggestion of pain, and despite his loathing, he felt his heart breaking out of pity.

  He could, after all, still see the girl under all that grime and slathered gore. She had gotten skinny in a ghastly kind of way, but the curves, at least the hint of them, were still in the right place. And she still had that cute little upturned nose that used to drive him wild when she smiled.

  “Hi, Mindy,” he said.

  She just stared at him, no expression on her face.

  “Hey, you know why they put fences around graveyards?” He waited a beat. “Because people are just dying to get in.”

  Again, he waited.

  Her expression didn’t change. She just stood there, swaying.

  “You heard that one, huh?”

  She might have nodded, but if so, it was faint, and he couldn’t be sure.

  “How about this one? A guy finds out he only has twelve hours to live. He goes home to his wife, determined to live it up for his last night on earth. So they have sex, and it’s great. An hour later, they do it again, and it’s even better. And then, a few hours after that, he tells her he thinks they can go at it a third time. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t have to wake up in the morning.’”

  He beat his index fingers on the truck tire in front of him like he was firing off a rim shot. Ba dum bum. He smiled at her, and then the smile faded. Why in the hell was he doing this? There was no reaching this girl.

  And was he really so lonely that he was talking to a faker?

  But then he saw a flicker at the corner of her mouth, the faintest trace of a smile, and that brought a huge grin to his face.

  “Are you doing okay, Mindy?”

  The smile disappeared. He saw what looked like a tear forming in her eyes.

  He almost reached up for her hand then, and had one of the real zombies not let out a moan at that very moment, he might have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from there.

  But a few more real zombies had spotted him. Several were moaning now, staggering toward him. He’d been careless, and now it was time to go.

  “I’m staying in an apartment at Woodlawn and Spruce,” he said.

  A zombie dropped to the pavement and started crawling under the truck toward him.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “Remember, it’s the Bent Tree Apartments. Woodlawn and Spruce, number 318.”

  More zombies had gotten under the truck now. The lead one held up a mangled, handless arm, the blackened, jagged tips of its ulna and radius extending from rotten flesh.

  “Gotta go,” he said.

  §

  Several days later, with Christmas right around the corner, Kevin was hanging ornaments on a fake tree. There was a Hallmark in the Dayton Mall, and he’d made good use of the Snoopy ornaments piled on the floor. When he was growing up, his mom had waited outside the local Hallmark in order to scoop up whatever was new that year. At the time, he’d thought it was stupid. But they’re collector’s items, she’d said. Or they will be. Which, to his way of looking at it, hadn’t made it any less stupid.

  But now, hanging the Snoopy with the little typewriter and Snoopy as a World War I ace ornaments on his tree, he sensed a surge of painful memories.

  Christ, he thought. He didn’t need this. Not now.

  He heard moaning through an open window and jumped to his feet to look. There was no point in it really. The zombies keyed off what they saw and heard. Those were about the only two senses that seemed to work, and as long as he stayed out of sight and kept quiet, his little hiding spot in this third-floor apartment was as safe as any spot on Earth.

  But he crossed to the window anyway because checking out the zombies was a way to stay busy, and staying busy kept him from his memories.

  And that’s when he saw Mindy Matheson for the second time.

  Her group had wandered over from the mall, probably searching for the pack of wild dogs Kevin had heard baying the last few nights. This zombie group wasn’t especially large. He counted about thirty, though there were almost certainly a few more out of sight. They wouldn’t be much of a threat when he needed to go out, but even still, there were enough of them that they would probably be sticking around for a few days at least. They hunted collectively, he’d discovered, so the bigger groups tended to stay in one place long
er.

  Just as well, Kevin thought. It would give him a chance to talk with Mindy again.

  He slid out the window and into the chilly evening air. It looked like it would probably rain later. There was a ledge just below his window that led to another building’s roof. From there, he climbed onto a billboard that looked down on the intersection, where Mindy and the others were wandering around, moaning.

  He kept a can of spray paint up here, just in case.

  He gave it a shake and wrote:

  HEY, MINDY! I’M IN 318 OVER TO YOUR RIGHT.

  COME ON UP.

  He’d gathered quite a crowd. At a glance, he noticed that he’d underestimated the size of the group by at least half, probably more. Their mangled, upturned faces and ruined hands were all pointed at him, their moans taking on an urgent, pulsing quality that he had come to think of as their feeding call. He saw quite a few of them down there.

  But Mindy wasn’t with them. She was drifting away from the group, stepping back toward a screen of shrubs at the far side of the intersection while the others surged forward.

  “Good girl,” he muttered.

  Moving quickly, he went back to his apartment. The zombies wouldn’t be able to follow, and besides, he had some quick cleaning up to do.

  §

  She wouldn’t sit down.

  He offered her a place on his couch, at his table, on the floor. She just shook her head every time he offered.

  Kevin tried small talk, but she wouldn’t answer any of his questions, and after a while, he began to feel foolish and stupid, like he was wasting both their time. He jammed his hands into his pockets and looked around the room for some glimmer of inspiration.

  Nothing.

  “So,” he said. “You know what they call a fast-moving zombie?” He waited a beat, hoping for another of her half smiles. “A zoombie.”

  She just stared at him, and the cold, lifeless emptiness chilled him.

  “How about a hockey-playing zombie?” he said, forcing a grin. “A zombonie. What do you think, huh? I got a million of them. How about this? A zombie, an Irish priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar —”

  “This was a mistake,” she said. “Coming here. I’m sorry.”

  She spoke quietly, her voice cracked and hoarse, as though she’d almost forgotten how to use it.

  “I’m going, Kevin.”

  “What? No.”

  He took a step toward her, but stopped when the smell hit him.

  He tried not to let his surprise and his disgust show on his face, though it probably did anyway.

  “Please, Mindy, don’t. It’s Christmas.”

  She didn’t answer. But she didn’t turn to leave either.

  “I’ve got some food. Are you hungry?”

  She nodded.

  He went into the little kitchenette and slid a cube of Spam out of a can. He cut it into four big slices, then handed her the plate.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have—”

  Mindy snatched it from his hands.

  She ate with her fingers, jamming the meat into her mouth, barely chewing. Several times she nearly choked. Bits and pieces fell from the corners of her mouth.

  She stopped eating only once, long enough to look at him over her plate.

  “Don’t look at me while I eat,” she said, her words about as close to a snarl as any he’d ever heard a girl make. And then, more quietly, sounding damaged, “Please. Don’t look at me.”

  He nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

  Kevin went to the cupboards and took down some more cans. He had Vienna sausages, some fruit cocktail, applesauce, a jar of sauerkraut. Better take this stuff out of the can, he thought, remembering the way she’d jammed her fingers into the pile of Spam. Last thing he wanted was for her to cut her fingers on the can’s sharp edges.

  He went to work putting the meal onto paper plates and then setting the plates onto the table.

  When he turned around, she was standing right behind him, and it startled him. He jumped.

  She was staring at his neck, and the look in her eyes, the way she wet her lips with every pulse of his carotid artery, disturbed him.

  “Shit,” he said, trying hard—and, he thought, uselessly—to hide his unease. “You scared me.”

  Her gaze drifted down to the food on the table.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I have tea and water, whichever you’d prefer.”

  She fell on the food without answering, without bothering to sit in the chair he pulled over for her, so he got her a cup of water and set it down next to her plates.

  She had asked him not to watch her eat, which was okay with Kevin. The wet, slurping noises she made were enough for him to know he didn’t want to watch. He went over to his couch and looked at some magazines he’d left there. A bunch of old Playboys he’d found at the used bookstore over by the mall. He gathered them up and stuffed them under the couch, but not before catching a glimpse of the sleepy-eyed plastic blonde on the cover of the top magazine. So much had changed, he thought sadly. So much had been lost. The good and the bad.

  Eventually, Mindy’s eating noises stopped.

  Kevin walked over to the kitchen. Mindy was still at the table, looking around at the cupboards with a bovine vacuity.

  “Are you still hungry?” he asked. “I have more. You can have anything I have.”

  She shook her head.

  “More water, maybe? I can make you that tea I promised.”

  Again she shook her head.

  A joke about Little Johnny, a bucket of nails and a zombie hooker came to mind, but for once his internal filter was working and he cut it off before it had a chance to get out.

  Instead, he let the silence linger.

  She had turned to face him, and now she was swaying drunkenly, the same way she’d done in the mall parking lot. It occurred to him that she had probably internalized so much zombie behavior that, even now, when she was completely safe, she was unable to turn it off.

  But the silence was murder. He had never dealt well with uncomfortable silences. It was the main reason he told so many bad jokes. Better to fill up the void with inane nonsense than let a painful silence grow.

  He said, “Listen, there’s no need for you to go back out there. You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. I’ve got some Sterno. We could heat up some water, let you take a hot bath maybe....”

  All at once the tears started. One minute she was watching him, quietly and vacantly, and the next she was crying.

  Big, muddy-colored tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Ah shit,” he said. “Mindy, I...I’m sorry. What did I say...I—”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “This was a mistake.”

  She moved hurriedly to the door. Every impulse in him told him to go after her, hold the door closed, take her in his arms.

  But he didn’t do it.

  He just watched her go without a word

  §

  Mindy shuffled through the rain, her mind a blank.

  Or at least she tried to make it a blank.

  Right now, that wasn’t working out so well.

  It was cold—windy and rainy and cold. Her clothes were little more than rags; they offered no protection whatsoever. For too long now she’d wandered, mindless, emotionless, denying all pain and shame, a true ascetic. The rain tore at her skin like icy razors and chilled her to the bone, but she did not tremble, nor did she cry. She let her arms swing limply by her side, her fingertips grazing the ice that formed on her clothes, as she kept pace with the horde of dead things brushing against her.

  Thought was the enemy, not the dead. With thought came fear, and pain, and a memory of all that was gone. If she thought too long—if she thought at all—the dead would see it in her eyes, and she wouldn’t last long after that.

  But the mind was like a flood. It could be contained for a while, even a long while, but it could never be truly silenced. Sooner or later, the mind would turn to the low ground and dwell th
ere.

  And right now her mind was turning toward shame.

  But it wasn’t the shame of what had happened to her that bothered her so.

  It was that damn Kevin O’Brien.

  When she was by herself, she felt no shame for what she was doing. Why should she? She was surviving. And she was doing it in the face of a universe that didn’t give a rat’s ass for what happened to her. Or the rest of humanity, for that matter. She was surviving, damn it.

  Then she thought of Kevin.

  He too was surviving.

  And he hadn’t given up anything. He hadn’t debased himself like this. He hadn’t sacrificed every last scrap of his self-respect just to draw another breath.

  She hated him. She hated him because he was still human. And because his charity reminded her that she was not.

  Not any more.

  So she turned off her mind and wandered. Damn him. Damn the world. Damn life. There was nothing of the world left for her any more. Nothing but emptiness and the slow, relentless crawl of time.

  One foot in front of the other.

  Forever after.

  §

  The billboard came as a surprise to her.

  For a moment, just a fraction of a second, she stopped.

  And she stared.

  She hadn’t realized where she was. But up there, up above the mindless crowd, was a message written just for her.

  Hey, Mindy, it’s cold. Come on up.

  I’ve got a warm bed.

  A memory floated into her mind, unbidden. The two of them, finishing their shift, her letting him walk her to the parking lot. He had a joint in his pocket, and she didn’t have anywhere to go. They went around to the loading dock and passed the joint back and forth, talking about random shit, nothing either of them really cared about.

  He was nice. A little dorky, but all right.

  She could tell he was getting interested. It was in the way he cracked his lame jokes when he should have let the quiet grow, the way his fingers twitched when they touched whenever she took the joint from him.