Zomtropolis

by A. P. Fuchs

  I hate myself for it. I’ll never forgive myself for what I did. Not only did I lose her all over again, but I lost what might have been a chance at happiness.

  Death came for me, but instead of taking me out directly, it once again had its way by destroying what was left of my heart.

  I apologize to those out there reading this and recapping things like I am, but I ask for your indulgence because there might be those out there who don’t know what’s going on and might be wondering what this partial journal they’ve stumbled upon is all about. We’re all in this together, remember? Strength in numbers and all that.

  Are there any numbers, though? The haunting feeling that I’m all alone has been with me since I got home. I was already giving into the notion when I first started writing this, but when Selena showed up, I admit a part of me considered there were others out there, too. And if not, then maybe who- or whatever finds these bytes of information can catch a glimpse of what it was like to live during these dark times.

  I just hope the darkness doesn’t last forever. To have a break . . . even a hope . . . the words escape me.

  Are you there? Is anyone reading this? Or is this just once giant exercise in catharsis and that’s all?

  . . .

  . . .

  My heart’s racing. Something knocked on my door. It could be them, the undead.

  . . .

  There it goes again. Something’s not right. If it was a zombie or more, they’d just slap at the door with decaying palms, hoping that eventually it’d give and fall down.

  I don’t have any weapons. I dropped my bat coated with razorblades when trying to fight off the dead earlier.

  . . .

  I can’t take this. The bangs are becoming more urgent now. Hold on. I’m going to check to see what’s going on.

  ·30: Broken

  Things are getting worse, and this might be my last entry. I . . . it’s like someone took my brain and threw it in a pot, only to boil it a thousand times over then stick it back in my head.

  I’m losing it.

  This city . . . the undead . . . it’s finally taken me down.

  You look in a mirror and see yourself staring back. You might like what you see, you might not. But it doesn’t matter how you feel about yourself because at the end of it all, it’s still you looking at you. You know you’re real, you know your thoughts, your feelings, even the taste in your mouth. You know it’s you looking at yourself.

  I don’t know me anymore. My head is so full and all I get are static images of soggy cardboard instead of my brain. All I get is a honeycomb with a thousand entry points, each hole leaking out what’s left of my sanity.

  You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

  Just need to tell you how I feel, what’s going through my head.

  I was just at my door.

  I checked the peephole.

  I saw Selena.

  Even now, as I’m typing this, she’s banging on the door, screaming for me to let her in.

  Inside myself, all I hear is me screaming that she’s dead, that there’s no way that’s her outside. Intellectually, I know better. I know that it’s either a ghost beyond my door out to slit my throat for letting the real Selena die the way she did, or I’ve completely lost it.

  This is where obsession with a girl leads to the slippery slope of a psychotic break. This is the part where I become the monster and she is forever cemented as the victim.

  This is the part where I become worse than the walking dead outside because I know better than to allow my fixation on a relationship gone wrong become some sort of imaginary reality, whereas the dead outside act the way they do because they function on pure instinct.

  Selena . . . banging on my door.

  If I answer—if I let her in—what does that say about me?

  If I could step outside myself and watch me open that door and somehow see what’s really going on, would I only see myself opening a door to nothing at all, react to nothing at all, even talk to nothing at all?

  My apartment door is more than just a door right now. It’s a portal into a state of mind that could end up killing me in the end.

  Selena, the zombies, the isolation, the heartbreak—it’s finally ripped me apart . . . silently, but eventually.

  In one way or another, the next few moments will decide my fate.

  If I open that door, I will no longer be the man typing this.

  I will have become something else.

  But—there’s always a “but”—if that is indeed Selena out there, if somehow she’s alive and her body has been put back together, then I can’t just leave her there banging on my door. If she needs help and has come to me like she did before . . .

  That banging.

  My girl.

  I have to let her in.

  ·31: Delusions of Selena

  Have you ever looked at a dead person?

  Death . . . it’s one of those things our brains aren’t built for. We see the person in front of us yet know there’s no one there at the same time. It’s the same brainfreeze I get when I see the undead walking—ghosts, physical forms with no substance.

  It was like that with Selena.

  I let her into my apartment, not knowing if it was a ghost coming to haunt me or if, somehow, she was healed and back from the dead. Even stranger: back from the dead in a good way.

  She didn’t shamble. Didn’t have gray skin. No bruises or cuts or gashes. Just my girl. And she was beautiful even in the filthy garbage bag she wore.

  Just like . . . before.

  When I opened the door, she ran in, shoved it close behind herself, then threw her arms around me and held me so tight I couldn’t breathe.

  “You’re alive,” she said.

  I couldn’t find the right words to respond. The best I could come up with was a gentle, “So are you.”

  I didn’t know if I was holding a ghost right then or someone with special healing abilities . . . and I didn’t care. Not when it came to her. When you lose something, you’d give anything to get it back, risk it all and just be happy you got a second chance no matter how it came.

  “You’re shaking,” she said as she pulled away. “Did they get you? You know, those people outside?”

  I simply shook my head.

  “Good. There was no one else to turn to and I knew . . . I knew you’d help me if you were still . . .” She didn’t finish, but I knew what she meant.

  Then I processed what she said. “Wait. You knew I’d help you if . . . um, if what?”

  “If you were still alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? Still alive. Breathing. Living. Not one of those creatures.”

  I furrowed my brow. Was she okay? Didn’t she know? “Selena, the undead have been around for a while. Don’t you know that?”

  She appeared as if to say something, then held back. Her eyes searched the air, as if seeing something I couldn’t. “I came here. I saw those things.”

  “Where were you? How did you–?”

  “I was home.”

  Déjà vu hit me like a punch to the face. We had a conversation like this before. She had on the garbage bag, but this time she wasn’t hurt.

  “Selena, we’ve already crossed this road. Don’t you remember? This isn’t normal. We were just together. We were . . . and then . . .” Why couldn’t I tell her what happened? It was those eyes. Her beautiful brown eyes. The way she held my gaze told me everything: she didn’t remember. She looked at me with nothing but question marks for irises, her brow slightly furrowed as if I was the one with the screwed up memory. And to be honest, that very well could be.

  The blessed relief at her resurrection fled and I wondered if I was truly talking to someone or, in reality, was merely talking to myself. This shouldn’t be so hard.

  Are you supposed to entertain imaginary friends? Or do you give in to the delusion because if you don’t your brain—that create
d the delusion in the first place—needs to take part in the fantasy or it’ll fry itself from within.

  All I could say was, “Are you real?”

  Her gaze softened and she smiled just a little, in that way where you knew she was happy and thought you were cute. “I’m real, Marty.”

  I took her in my arms again. She didn’t embrace me back right away, but after a moment, she held me tight.

  Ghost or not, we were together.

  ·32: On the Move Part One

  I’m writing this on a telecom handheld, one I swiped from a corpse after I drove my razor bat into its head. Please excuse any typos or lowercase words. My hands are shaking.

  The telecom seems to have a signal. At least the display says it does. Whether this is joining up with the regular entries I’ve posted, I don’t know. I’m doing this “just in case.”

  Selena was like the last one–if I could say such a thing–in that she was worn and tired. She napped on my couch. I paced the room, out of trance of “at least we were together” and looking at her as objectively as I could, wondering what or who it was I was really looking at. Like before, wondering if the girl in front of me was actual real so some mad hallucination. Regardless, I watched her, reminisced a little bit, then grew so uneasy with her presence that bile snuck up the back of my throat and spilled over into my mouth. I left the room to go spit in the kitchen sink. Right in the middle of doing so, selena screamed. Glass broke. I spat out the wad in my mouth then ran back into my living room only to find selena had smashed the front window and was up against the frame, my lamp in her hand.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted.

  She didn’t reply but instead searched the ground below. I went beside her and saw the walking dead gathered outside my building, six of them.

  I pulled her away from the window. “They’ll see you.”

  She elbowed me in the gut, ran up against the window frame again, and this time threw the lamp out the window. I heard it crash somewhere on the other side, down below.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked.

  She shoved me aside again with both palms to my chest, searched the room, then grabbed my clock. She hurled it out the window, too.

  “Leave me alone!” she shrieked at the living corpses below.

  “Selena!” I said.

  She ran past me, went into the kitchen and ripped the pots and pans from the cupboard. She tore back into the living room like a savage waving a couple spears, each hand clutching a pot by the handle.

  She swung one at me the moment I came near, so I jumped out of the way. She was back at the window and hurled the pots down at the dead.

  “Now they know someone is in here for sure,” I said. “There will be others. Lots of them.”

  She ignored me and was back in the kitchen for more pots. I ran after her and the moment she stood with a pan and a pot in her hands, I jumped on top of her and took her to the floor.

  “Stop it!” I said.

  “They have to die,” she said, her eyes wild.

  “You’re not going to kill them with you got. Think about it.”

  She jerked around beneath me. “Get off me!”

  “No! Shut up and listen to me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “neither can I, but don’t you know what you’re doing. Your throwing pots out the window, for crying out loud.”

  “I have to hurt them.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Please! Let me kill them!”

  “Snap out of it.” I reached for her hands and managed to pull the pots away. I tossed them to the side of the kitchen floor; they crashed against the cupboards.

  Selena lay there, arms spread out, wailing at the top of her lungs.

  A shudder ran through me. She was crazy.

  At least right now.

  I got to my feet and carefully walked over to the window. I peeked out as best I could, hoping I wasn’t seen. The dead stood below, a couple of them looking up, the rest just rocking side-to-side as if they didn’t know what was going on.

  From the kitchen, Selena spoke, her voice thick with tears. “never again. Never again. Never go on top of me again.”

  I didn’t know if I could let her cry it out, clean out her system, or if she indeed was having a meltdown and any interference on my part would only make things worse.

  The zombies remained below.

  I went back to the kitchen, knowing that to leave selena alone would be a bad idea. When I came back, she was still on the floor, this time with her hands covering her eyes. I sat down beside her, tears of worry forming in my own eyes.

  “it’s dark,” she said. “so dark.”

  “What’s dark?” I asked as gently as I could.

  “This world. Me. So many of them.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.” What I meant was I got what she was saying, but I didn’t know the exact circumstance she was referring to. Then I asked, “before, when you were sleeping, was it a dream? Did you dream about . . . them?”

  She slowly pulled her hands away from her eyes, her gaze blank. “Yes.”

  ·33: On the Move Part Two

  Telecom handheld transmission:

  We didn’t stay in my apartment long. The undead below broke into the building. I don’t know how. They’re strong, sure, but smart? No, and in order for strength to be effective, you need to have a certain amount of wits about you. Either way, they got in, not long after I asked Selena about her dream.

  In a panic, and knowing going out the front door was a deathtrap, we ran down the hallway and headed for the back door. The undead were there, too. They hadn’t gotten through the door, but we heard them outside just beyond it.

  We were trapped.

  The only option was to hole up in the laundry room. It was in the basement, the door heavy, and it had a lock. I should know because when I first went to use the washing machine when moved in here, I locked myself in, not knowing where the lock release was on the door.

  Anyway, we ran that way. Just as we entered the room, I saw the dead at the other end of the hallway, making their way toward us. There was a pack of them, probably around ten.

  For a moment, I thought I saw Selena among them, her face bitten off at the cheek, dried blood running down her jaw and neck. Then I glanced forward and was relieved to see she was still with me at the laundry room entrance.

  What that little episode was, I don’t know.

  We got into the room, closed the door, locked it, and a few seconds later endured the dull thumps of dead fists banging the metal-lined door on the other side.

  Sitting in the dark, Selena and huddled next to each other, our hands over our ears, the dull beats of the dead against the door in time with the rapid beat of our hearts.

  They wouldn’t be getting in. As said, the door was too heavy and it was locked.

  Our problem was how we were going to get out.

  “I guess we can wait until they’re gone,” Selena shouted above the thumping.

  I bobbed my head side-to-side. “Maybe. Who knows when that’ll be, though.”

  She merely nodded.

  There was no way to tell exactly how many zombies were in the building, but judging by the pounding on the door and the sound of heavy footfalls above, each floor was soon covered in the diseased corpses. I could only imagine them knocking down the doors to each suite, even getting into mine after I locked it, and rummaging through my stuff for something to eat.

  My computer. My journal.

  As I send you this transmission, i don’t know if I’m going back. I hope my previous entries are still intact on my harddrive. If not, I guess I can lift them off the blog itself, if needs be. Regardless, I wasn’t ready to leave home.

  It was in that dark laundry room with the sounds of the dead echoing throughout it that selena began to shake. At first I thought it was merely a shiver, but when she started coughing and fell into a seizur
e, all I could do was lay here down, hold her head and let her body work it out.

  ·34: On the Move Part Three

  Telecom handheld transmission:

  It was happening again, me caught in a world of death.

  Selena shook and convulsed in my lap, a yellow milky foam dribbling out the corners of her lips.

  The zombies banged on the door to the laundry room, the incessant thuds making it difficult to concentrate.

  “Selena, please, you have to stop,” I said, but why I said it I didn’t know. Probably just voicing my thoughts.

  She kept shaking, her body bouncing up and down in rollercoaster-like waves.

  Heart racing, I asked her if there was anything I could do. She didn’t reply, and her eyes were rolled back in their sockets. For a brief moment I thought she was trying to look up at me, but I had lost her beautiful brown-eyed gaze as the whites of her eyes became all I saw.

  The undead beyond the door continued drumming against it.

  Selena stopped shaking. Her body kicked out a few more jolts then lay still.

  Tears in my eyes, I gently brushed her hair off her face and leaned in, listening for breath. There was none. I put her head on the ground, got beside her and started CPR. Each press of my palms against her chest grew more and more intense; each time it seemed her nonresponsiveness intensified even though I know now it had only been my imagination.

  Why was this happening? How many times could I lose her?

  I didn’t know what was worse right then: losing Selena from my life, but knowing she was alive somewhere, possibly happy, or losing her and watching her die. After all, they both ended with the same result: her absence from me.