Also Available From the Author
Do Stand-Up Bots Dream of Electric Hecklers? (And Other Stories)
No Place for a Hero
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Copyright © 2015 by James Aquilone
Contents
The Zombie Who Had a Name
She Will Be Home for Christmas
About the Author
The Zombie Who Had a Name
The dead have existed for as long as the living, give or take a few years. But what good has that done them? The living's numerous advantages — locomotion, speech, non-putrefying body parts — have given them a sense of superiority. Certainly, they were too high and mighty to share the world with these good-for-nothing, foul-smelling corpses. Besides, the living were terrified of the things.
So, what did the living do? They buried the dead in the ground, burned them, scattered their ashes, abandoned them in the wilderness for wild animals to devour. They spread nasty rumors about their dearly departed, cast them as nightmare monsters, blamed them for their own misdeeds. Sometimes they even ate the poor, lifeless creatures. But their worst insult? They ignored the fact that the dead were once the living.
Throughout the history of the living and the dead, corpses have had it bad.
Then, one day, the undead appeared.
#
No one knew how it happened. It was just one of those things, really — like the Big Bang or the popularity of NASCAR. Still, word of the so-called Zombie Apocalypse spread quickly after the first recently dead person rose from its grave. Years of paranoia, B-movies, TV shows and semi-serious how-to manuals had prepared the world for an undead outbreak — it was as if they were waiting for it, honestly. And it was met with a rapid response. Within hours, mass exoduses emptied entire cities. Doomsday-preppers locked themselves in their underground bunkers, while the unprepared barricaded themselves in their basements or went on the run.
In those first, frenzied days, information about the undead consisted mainly of legend and lies. Farmhouses were widely believed to be a favorite zombie target and were among the first places abandoned.
The farmhouse at 1515 Grove Road had been abandoned for three days now, and yet a zombie still headed toward it, stumbling along the gravel driveway, the creature's appendages at impossible angles, its head bent like a hanged man's, its eyes frozen and vacant.
The undead thing was not attracted to the dwelling because it was a farmhouse, per se. The zombie wouldn't have recognized it as such. Its eyesight, like most of its senses, was extremely limited. To the walking corpse, the structure was just a large, gray shape against the stark white sky. It wouldn't have been attracted to the lingering scent of the living. While alive, it wasn't able to smell other humans, at least not from a great distance. And since death does not give one super powers, there was no reason to believe the zombie could detect odors any better than a living person. The same went for its hearing. But there was one area where the creature did have an advantage: its sense of touch was practically nil. Physical pain is unknown to the zombie. With its senses greatly diminished, the reanimated human operates mostly on instinct, muscle memory. Perhaps this explained why it headed toward the farmhouse, much like a person coming home after a long day at the office.
The zombie struggled up the bowed porch steps and entered the house through the open doorway. Shattered and jagged pieces of the front door lay in the hall.
Sunlight shined in bright white bands through the broken window in the living room. It glinted off the picture frames on the mantel and caught the zombie's attention. The creature stumbled into the room and stopped before the mantel. It stared with black eyes at the dark shapes there. The photos depicted Christmas scenes, a wedding, a birthday party. The zombie picked up one of the shapes, seemed to regard it for a long while. Then it ran a bony finger over the letters engraved along the bottom edge of the photo, which showed a mother, father, and daughter on a camping trip.
Footsteps. Hurried and heavy.
The zombie turned. There was a white flash of movement. Then the undead thing was falling backward, crashing against the mantel. It felt nothing, of course, but its left arm had been severed at the shoulder. The appendage now lay on the floor among the fallen picture frames. The axe that severed the arm was firmly wedged into the mantel. The living human who swung the axe was backing away from the animated corpse, shouting, "Oh shit, oh shit."
A low, dark moan hissed out of the zombie's ragged, black mouth.
A voice from outside shouted, "Get the fuck out of there before that thing eats you!"
#
Death is the living's greatest fear. Cannibals run a close second. Add the fact that the living love to scare the piss out of themselves and the myth of flesh-eating dead people is born.
Why would zombies eat the living? Their taste buds, like their nerve endings, are dead. They have no need for sustenance. Their organs do not function. Therefore, there is little reason for the walking dead to eat anything.
Throughout the history of the world, there has never been a single instance of a dead person eating a living person. On the other hand, there have been innumerable cases of the living eating the dead, human and otherwise.
#
The human dashed out of the room. A few seconds later came the sound of a car door slamming and a car speeding away.
The zombie left the farmhouse.
When the creature stepped off the porch steps, dull, sepia tones replaced the blacks and whites and grays of the world. An arrhythmic electric buzz began to sound in its head. But, as the creature shambled toward the woods behind the farmhouse, something even more remarkable happened: The zombie had a thought.
The thought barely flickered inside its maggot-eaten brain, but it was there, like the memory of an echo.
The thought was a question.
The question was: What was my name?
The zombie entered the woods and followed a narrow path. But when the path hooked to the north, the animated corpse continued in a straight line, plunging into the chaos of the woods. Several times it stumbled over rocks or downed trees and fell to the ground, but each time it lifted itself with its lone arm and moved forward in as straight a line as possible.
The buzzing in its head grew louder. The edges of the sharp geometric shapes it saw softened and blurred. The zombie moved more quickly now, its tics and spasms becoming more pronounced.
It was making its way along the edge of a precipice when it stopped. The zombie watched a human shape standing in the middle of a clearing a few yards ahead. In time, the creature was able to discern that the shape was a young girl. The zombie didn't know how it knew this. It didn't know how it knew anything. It just did. Just as it knew its name was somewhere out there.
"Where are you, Evie?" A man's voice rang out.
At the sound the zombie leaped out of the woods and rushed at the girl.
#
Why are the walking dead attracted to the living? For the same reason the living are attracted to each other. Companionship. No one is lonelier than a zombie.
#
The creature was nearly on top of the girl before she noticed it. The girl screamed, a piercing, bird-like yowl. The walking corpse stopped, opened its mouth, but only zombie sounds came out.
The girl ran.
"Evie!"
The creature turned toward the voice and was greeted by an explosion of sound. It barely felt the slug ripping through the dry, brittle skin of its leg.
A man stood about twenty yards away, pointing a shotgun at the zombie. The girl was at his side.
"Daddy, wait!"
The zombie moaned, and the man fired again, hitting the creature high in the chest. This time the zombie was thrown backwards, and went over the precipice. The world tumbled and whirled for a few long seconds. Then, suddenly, the world righted itself and the zombie struggled up to a standing position at the bottom of a ravine. It felt no pain, of course, even though the side of its head was bashed in and a jagged piece of bone stuck out of its leg.
The creature stood, unmoving. The buzzing in its head faded to silence. For the briefest moment the zombie held an image in its mind of light breaking through the darkness and a gnarled hand — its hand — reaching up and into the world above.
Then the zombie remembered its question and its search and, even more slowly, it jerked and stumbled forward.
As the zombie traveled alongside a narrow, dry creek bed, it worked on its question, picking at it like a scab until it bled.
In time, the colors of the woods bled through and brightened. Now the zombie saw, not shapes, but trees and rocks and tiny animals flitting through the deadfall.
What was my name? Before. Before. Before...
Soon the zombie came to a gravel road where the wood ended. It had traveled only a few yards when it heard a sound rising toward it. It grew and grew until it was a roar that blotted out everything else. A dazzling light appeared around the bend in the road up ahead and expanded as it moved toward the zombie. Suddenly the world turned a bright white and was filled with a deafening roar. Then the creature felt itself being propelled backward at great speed. There was a crash and the light died, the sound died. The creature tried to continue on, but it could not move. Its back was pressed against the trunk of a tree and its front was pressed against the grille of a pickup truck. The two occupants of the truck weren't moving. The zombie pushed against the hood of the truck, and in a short while the creature's upper half tore off from its lower half like a perforated sheet of paper. The creature continued on its way, pulling itself along the ground with its remaining arm.
#
Perseverance is the zombie's greatest strength. But what would you expect from someone who doesn't stay dead?
#
A few minutes later the two men inside the truck awoke. One was bleeding from the forehead; the other from the mouth and eye. The driver tried to start the vehicle, but the engine only sputtered and coughed.
"What were you thinking, Harry? That's not how you kill a zombie."
"How the hell would you know? You've never killed one of them dead bastards before. You've been hiding in your basement ever since this started."
"Grab the guns and let's find that thing. I'll show you how to kill a zombie."
When they got out of the truck, Harry said, "Well, I'll be damned, Billy boy. Look over there."
He looked where Harry was pointing. Not far off the road, across a field, was a graveyard.
"Looks like our zombie is going home."
#
When the zombie passed the fallen gate, it smelled the cemetery air, the recently upturned dirt, the sour miasma of recently opened tombs. It crawled like a crippled beetle until it came to a row of headstones in the middle of the graveyard. The creature stopped, sat up, and faced one of the tombstones. The thought was coming bright and clear now, like a beacon. I had a name. My name is here. Here. Here. It stared at the square of stone, not seeing — not at first — but then the dim shapes began to resolve themselves into something understandable. The zombie traced the carved letters on the stone with its skeletal fingers.
Yes, I have a name. All living things have names. I, I, I...
The bullet swept through its skull like the wind through a keyhole. The zombie fell before its headstone.
The two men came stomping through the cemetery, hollering and howling like schoolboys.
"I told you. I told you. You have to shoot 'em in the head. Just like in the movies."
"Let me get the head. It'll look nice on my hood once I get the truck back to working."
Billy drew a long hunting knife from his belt and bent over the zombie's body.
He barely had time to scream.
My name is Evelyn Walker, the zombie growled in a black and gravelly voice, and then sunk her teeth into the man's throat.
#
It is a myth that you can kill a zombie with a bullet to the head. While the living enjoy scaring the piss out of themselves, they also like to give themselves a fighting chance; thus, they create magical means to defeat their monsters. Vampires are vulnerable to stakes, werewolves to silver bullets, zombies to head trauma.... But the dead cannot die. And death cannot be conquered. This is the most difficult idea for the living to accept.
#
And though zombies do not, as a rule, eat human flesh — they will if you piss them off.
#
What is not a myth is that when a human witnesses his friend being eaten by an animated corpse, that human runs. Just as this man's friend did.
#
Thoughts flashed through Evelyn Walker's mind like lightning in a summer storm. She remembered dying and the long, lonely quiet and rising from her grave and the farmhouse, and the men who chopped off her arm, shot her, ran her over, shot her again.
Evelyn Walker leaned against her gravestone, and tried to weep. But the dead cannot shed tears.
Footsteps. Labored and loud.
Evelyn looked up and saw a man stumbling through the graveyard. He wore a dark suit that was in tatters and covered in filth. Unlike her, his arms and legs were still attached to his body. His head, however, was not.
The undead stranger held his head by its long black hair, as if it were a grocery bag or a plastic Halloween pumpkin.
The decapitated zombie stopped two graves away from Evelyn. The two dismembered corpses looked each other over and exchanged expressions that seemed to say, "So they got you, too?" The man thrust his head forward. It was remarkably well preserved, except for a few scratches and bruises and a ragged scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his mouth. The head wobbled and swayed before Evelyn's face. The nose twitched like a curious rabbit. Then the mouth slowly began to open and close, the dead man's face twisting in agony. A low hiss emanated from the severed throat, followed by a moan, and then the zombie head purred: I...think...my...name...is...Ben...Gardner.
Another thought, as bright and clear as the first, came to Evelyn Walker.
She took Ben Gardner's free hand and led him down into her grave.
#
The undead are the same as the living: they try to make the best of a bad situation.
It is a well-established fact that anything can be endured. But it is also a fact that it is much easier to endure if you have a companion.
She Will Be Home for Christmas
My family has a Christmas tradition: Every year, they kill my mom. It's right up there with decorating the tree and exchanging gifts. Last year, my big brother Seth killed her by jamming a carving knife – the one we were going to use for the ham – into her right eye. The goopy sound it made entering her head still gives me the chills.
I'm carrying a wrapped gift down the stairs when Seth says, "Fran, why haven't you ever killed Mom on Christmas? Are you squeamish?"
I've killed plenty of the undead since they began rising from their graves. Sometimes you just have to do it. But a lot of the time I feel sorry for them. I mean, they're mostly harmless, unless you let them get too close and they bite you.
"Leave your sister alone," my dad says as he wraps garland around the tree. "She's only fourteen; she doesn't have to kill anyone on Christmas."
Dad still tries to keep the traditions like Christmas going. He says if we don't we'll fall into savagery. It's perfectly okay to kill Mom, but if we don't sing carols we're savages? He's such a hypocrite.
"I shouldn't have to kill anyone either," Seth says, "but that's what we have to do in the zombie fucking apocalypse, right? She should toughen up."
They're not really zombies, though. More like solid gh
osts. A zombie you can kill. Ghosts keep coming back, no matter what you do to them. Plus, it's not much of an apocalypse. We still have power and supermarkets and stuff. You just have to be careful now; like, you need to carry a weapon when you're outside and you don't want to be caught in the woods or around a cemetery at night.
"Maybe we shouldn't kill her," I say. "Maybe we should let her enjoy the holiday like the rest of us. Ever think about that? Ever wonder why she keeps coming back on Christmas?" I place the gift beside the tree, away from the other boxes, so I can grab it quickly. I won't have much time. I found it just lying against a tree on my way home from school. As soon as I saw it – so shiny – I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.
"Easy for you to say," Seth says. "She doesn't try to eat you. God, I hate Christmas." God, I hate my brother. He downs the rest of his rum-spiked eggnog.
He's right, though. Mom never tries to eat me. I was always her favorite.
Mama died the first time ten years ago on Christmas. She tripped over one of Seth's gifts – I think it was a skateboard – and cracked her head on the edge of the glass coffee table. A year later, she returned. So did a bunch of other ghost-zombies. No one knows why really. Some think it's a virus; others say it's a punishment from God or a sign of the End Times. I don’t care. I'm just happy that Mama comes back. Seth and Dad don't feel the same. They think she's dangerous, they say she's just a dead thing.
The first time Mama came back Dad killed her with a snow globe. He didn't even try to talk to her. I was so mad. I prayed and prayed for her to come back. And she did. But each time they killed her. Over the years, they’ve burned her, sunk her in the river, hacked her into little pieces. They even tried shooting her in the head. But no matter what they did, every December 25th, Mom returned. I think it's because she wants the family to be together for Christmas. Life has never been the same without her.
The bell Dad set up outside jingles.
Mom's here!
I hear her labored footsteps thump, thump on the kitchen floor and I run for Mama's gift.
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