The First Zombie

by James J. Stubbs

a silly question? The voice in his mind that used to be his friend was insulted for them both. How could he eat someone so afraid? What pleasure would he get from eating someone, even though he had just met them, that he admired so? Dave would eat his boss. Dave disliked his boss. He wanted to beat him, to pound him back into the earth from whence he came, but never did. Now that he was a zombie, he would go one better, and he would eat him. So he finally knew what kind of dead he was. The decomposing flesh hanging from his once strong frame. The rasping in his voice as he slowly let it die by the hand of his growing hunger pang.

  Do the dead get one last request? As those living, preparing to depart, demand all over the world. All over time. “Any last requests”? The cliché demanded. He didn’t know he was dead. He doesn’t remember dying or what it was like to be living once and dead next. Was it wrong that now, in his dead form, that he felt cheated of his last request? He tried to talk. He tried so hard to ask for one. But the words just weren’t there. The thought, though buried in the mire of the his dying and decomposed brain, as neurons failed to connect and synapses melted from one another, was there but the ability absent. The power to voice his last thoughts as he gave in to death, and surrended to Death, gave way themselves to the hunger boiling inside of him. So instead of asking, and giving in to his desire, he simply stood and staggered some more. He tried. He tried so hard that if you could see the pain and the power and the anguish in his heart you might even begin to feel sorry for the zombie that used to be Dave. He tried so hard to ask her for his last, and indeed his first, kiss in death and indeed in life. But he could not. More blood splattered on her polished floor. More gasps of fear and retreated steps vainly to the wall.

  With the wall to fail her as her crutch, her science rose up once more from primal fear and she chose instead to narrate her thoughts. Disguised by fear and buried by thinly masked detest she declared thus, “I’ve never seen anything like this before...” And just right there she stumbled upon, not just the wall or her desk in her way, but the unavoidable truth that we have all known since the beginning, that Dave was not just a zombie, but in fact, the very first of them. He lurched closer, ignoring the pivotal discovery that will change the Earth, and desired himself only with his last wish. Before giving way to the zombie that consumed him and became him. For his last wish. And too his first. And through her screams, that surprisingly went unattended, he shuffled on. To her side and to her cheek. To see her calm just for one moment. And with his last power he placed his dead lips upon her living cheeks. And enjoyed the thrill, his last thrill, which her skin sent to him from her cheek. He was hungry for flesh. But not just to eat it. And he could say no more. And the Doctor feinted with what Dave could only hope was guilty satisfaction.

  Back out onto the street. To work. Where his hunger took him. He found a new spring to place on his step, far better than wearing the shoes he took from Denail, that would carry him there with the promise of food. We missed a question back there. We broke the order as we got caught up in Dave’s story and we let his pain carry us over an important detail. Why does Dave hate his boss? Does everyone hate their boss? He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He only knows that he hates his boss. But that misses the pint. Why? Why does he hate him so much, that he is now fully equipped with death as his weapon and hunger as his motivation, to kill and digest him?

  Dave’s boss is a company man. Who throws all potential aside and follows the whim of whoever is in charge simply because they are in charge. Dave’s boss isn’t the policy maker. Nor is he the recipient of the policy when it is made. He is merely the conduit by which the man at the top fucks the man at the bottom. An empty suit. A cavernous man with no ideology to call his own. Only borrowed thoughts and stolen feelings. In times when he felt more alive, even before he forgot how to live and mistook existence for life. And comforting thoughts of a future beyond reach mistaken for love and comfort. Even before then he knew how much he hated his boss. Interesting people are crazy rich or crazy poor. Boring people sit in the middle and stupid people think that you need to start at the bottom, interesting poor, and rise through the ranks of the boring middle with the aim of transcending dull and becoming once again interesting by being crazy rich. A sticky web to be trapped in. A slippery pole to climb up. An easy one to slide down. Dave’s boss thought he was interesting and he thought he was happy. But Dave knew, and thought his boss ought to know in turn, that he was in fact the boring empty suit without a morsel of power to call his own. Only a conduit. A fake. A fraud.

  But that isn’t why Dave hated his boss. And it wasn’t why he wanted to eat him. Dave’s boss must have been bullied at school. You know the type. Bullied people who rise to some sort of false power, and abuse that power, to bully those types who he thought bullied him. Chicken-shit. That’s why he hated his boss. And that was why he was going to eat him. He knew, in more lively times, that his boss needed love. More so than most. But Dave was shallow and he was ok with it.

  It was raining. Out in the street. But he was dead, and he was ok with that now too, and he couldn’t feel the once friendly droplets on his dead head. His mind was sharp. The haze was gone. Replaced with the single minded hunger.

  Dave was still Dave. But he didn’t know how long for. Imagine being lost. All of us have been lost at some point in our lives. Maybe you were lost in a supermarket as a child and you couldn’t find your parents. Dave got lost like that once too. It was in a field by his Nan’s house. His dear old Nan. Long dead. The field was old, old like her, and overgrown too. The grass blades grew long like the knives of the dead piercing up from the other side of the lawn. He couldn’t see where he was. He was too small. His sister and his cousin, much bigger than he as they were at the time, leapt and bounded away and left poor Dave alone lost. Imagine being lost like that. Wandering and alone. He could remember. Not now, now he was dead, now he could remember little. But before, before he was dead, he could remember it well. He could remember, for that brief time when he was lost, feeling that his forever would be lost with him. That he would never be found and he would never find found. That he would remain lost for all time. Imagine being lost. In whatever way you have ever been lost. In emotion. In heartbreak or lost in loneliness. And remember, as you all will have felt, that brief time where you felt you would never be safe again. The time that passes quickly but remains intense while it lies. That single time, where you fear and fear becomes you, that you will be forever lost. And that you have lost your forever. That is how he feels now. Dave was still Dave. But he could feel him slip. That thing, whatever it might be, his soul, his face, his identity or his grace was passing over and relenting to death. Leaving Dave behind who was not Dave.

  But he was hungry. One step closer he staggered. Falling behind his weight and collapsing beneath his fate. Dying and living in death as he lost the sway with the price of death we must all pay. For our sins in this world, the next life and the last. Falling under the dropping sky of truth’s light past. Dave’s resolve was waning and his grasp on his lack of life straining. Only one more job to do. Only one more task for his dead mind to grasp. To kill one more. To feast on gore.

  The pavement didn’t feel the same anymore. Dave had lost his final friend. The voice from before, we met him just twice, and that is what will have to suffice. Because his friend from within had gone. And a beaming friendship which was once shone was over. And his last friend had passed, where he would soon follow, into Death’s last death. The rain didn’t feel nice like it did before. It could not cool him or soothe him or comfort him like it once did. His feet were no longer his own and lost with them was his heart and his compassion inside of it. His mind was lost and his shovel since dropped. No need digging anymore. No need toiling. He knew he was dead now and he was ready to go.

  The buzzer as he had left it in life there upon the wall. Just one press is all it would take. To summon his boss and with him the feast of the last of his desires. Like his legs his arms failed to obey. No longer his it s
eemed. He commanded them. He begged them and pleaded with them to allow him. All it would take. One press. A mad thrash. His voice would obey and agreed to vent his frustration as a harrowing growl. But screaming, no matter how throaty or intense, would not press the bell. At last! A glimmer in his shoulder. Spurred by his promise of food to them. Spurred by that only end. And lunged of their own agreed accord to the base of the buzzer. And thusly buzzed. An outburst of energy from them. An outbreak of power.

  “Where have you been?” No need to clarify the owner of that voice. “You were due to start over two hours ago!” He hated his boss. But Dave was no longer there and no longer present to care. The zombie that killed Dave was delivered; wearing Dave’s face and by the power of his dead will, to take revenge on his behalf. Cold and shallow revenge for crimes that seem so few. Dave was gone now. Gone over to re-acquaint with the friends he left behind. With the friends he let die. And the family he watched pass. But his hate lived on in the shell of the monster he used to be.

  The monster that