The next time I sat, with my head in my hands, he scooted up next to me and whispered, “I can help you.”
“What?”
“I can save your wife,” he said.
I started to say, “How do you even know,” then stopped myself. “Yes,” I said, just as impulsively as I had made the previous decision.
When the doctor came out, the mysterious man told me to wait, then went into the room first. He came back out, and said, “Okay.”
My wife smiled at me as I walked into the room. She was holding our new baby boy.
As I held my son in my arms, I finally asked my wife, “What did he do?”
She looked sad for a moment. “I’m a zombie now.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s okay,” I said. “I am so grateful just to still have you, and love you even more for it.”
(back to TOC)
****
Graduation
There comes a point in high school where parents just aren’t as interested anymore. It’s another concert in another auditorium, like the dozens of others they have been to.
It’s not that they didn’t care. I knew they did, and they were very proud of me. I talked about quitting orchestra, and they talked me out of it. But I was the youngest of four kids, and they were getting older, so I couldn’t blame them for not coming to every single performance.
I didn’t hold it against them. And I always had family support. My older sister, Sarah, never missed a performance. She was always in the front row, for concerts, events, awards ceremonies, anything that I did.
Except for the last concert of my senior year. When I peeked out from behind the curtains, my dad was there (it was my last concert, after all), but the seats next to him were empty. At first I thought that maybe Sarah was in the bathroom. Or maybe she was driving separately and was just late.
It was probably the worst performance of my life. I kept looking around my violin to that empty seat. I couldn’t concentrate on the music. When it remained unfilled, I started to look at my dad. He looked sad and agitated, and his eyes were all red.
After the performance, I quickly grabbed my case and coat and ran out to meet him. Before he could tell me that I did a good job, the words were out of my mouth. “Where’s Sarah?”
“Come on,” he said in a tired voice. “Let’s go see her.”
On the way to the hospital, he told me what happened. As they were getting ready to leave, Sarah collapsed. They called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. The doctor explained it was a late stage of cancer, and there wasn’t much they could do.
We got to the ICU and waited in the lobby forever. Finally the doctor came in. “I’m not sure how she got this far without any symptoms, but I don’t know if she’ll make it through the night.”
“What about zombies?” I asked quietly.
“What?” asked the doctor.
“She’s young, she never got a chance. Can we make her into a zombie so she can keep going on?”
The doctor said he’d be right back. He lied. He was gone for about two hours, but he did finally come back.
“Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you want, we can do that.”
I looked at my parents and brothers hopefully. Both of my brothers nodded their heads in agreement.
“What do you think, honey?”
“I think Sarah deserves another chance.”
When I graduated two weeks later, as I walked on the stage to receive my diploma, I looked to the front row. And there, smiling back at me, was my sister Sarah.
(back to TOC)
****
Friends & Enemies
The Unemployment Line
Like many zombies in this economy, after my transition to the undead, I lost my job.
I had been an accountant at the firm for twenty years, and one of their most prized employees, but they still had the audacity to fire me after I became infected. There was still no such thing as state of living discrimination, so I had nothing to sue them for.
I tried to apply for unemployment benefits, but being both dead and fired, I didn’t qualify.
First, I pursued job openings for accountants. I got plenty of interviews, but employers many wouldn’t even meet with me once I got there. They gave me excuses like, “I’m sorry, he had a conflicting appointment,” or “He had to leave for a family emergency. We’ll call you to reschedule.” Of course, they never called back.
Then there were the excuses. Most of them boiled down to, “You don’t have the qualifications we’re looking for,” even though I had a master’s degree and several advanced certificates. What they were really saying was, “Zombies aren’t smart enough for this job.”
As time went on, I lowered my standards more and more. After I was rejected for bookkeeping jobs, I applied for tax preparer jobs, then bank teller positions, then customer service associates, then general retail jobs, and finally even fast food openings.
Eventually, I had applied to nearly anything. I was living in a homeless shelter, relying on the food bank for meals. Many times, even the soup kitchen wouldn’t serve me, asking zombies to let living people who could die without food go first.
When an opening in the paper was posted for a general laborer to work in a rather dangerous position at the saw mill, I applied to it like I would for any other job. I was surprised when I was called in for an interview.
It was the most unusual interview I ever had. It seemed like for the first time, they ignored the politeness of pretending I was living, and instead focused on the fact that I was a zombie. I went with it, and talked up the benefits to being undead.
They also seemed sympathetic to my plight and offered housing and meals as standard benefits. They hired me on the spot, and I started the next morning.
When I arrived at 7 am, first a nice young lady showed me to my bunk. It was in a cabin similar to one I stayed in at camp when I was in grade school. It wasn’t anything special, but at least I had a roof over my head. She also gave me a locker to put my few meager belongings in.
Then she gave me a tour of the grounds. She showed me where to clock in for the day and where the cafeteria was. I got a cup of coffee. Afterwards, she handed me off to the supervisor.
He was a gruff man with a blunt way of speaking, but I thought that wasn’t unusual for this sort of work. He put me to work running boards through a table saw.
The first thing I noticed were the condition of the safety features. Most of the guards and precautions were missing. The ones that were there were broken or working improperly. They had told me it would be a dangerous job, and it’s not like I could die.
At around noon, I noticed no one had left. I asked the employee working on the machine to my right when the lunch hour was.
“Lunch hour?” he said. He laughed dismally. “We don’t get lunch.”
My stomach rumbled, but I was used to that and kept working. I worked straight through until five o clock. Then I shut down my machine and went to the door.
“What are you doing?” demanded the supervisor.
“Isn’t it quitting time?” I asked.
“No, get back to work,” he yelled.
I went back to machine and kept ripping boards. No one else left their machine. I was just as hungry and tired as I was on the street.
After it had gotten dark outside, a zombie on the other side of me fell asleep at his machine. He awoke with a start when one of his fingers got caught in a belt and got ripped off.
“It’s about time,” my neighbor said.
At the same time, the supervisor yelled, “Quitting time!”
I wasn’t sure if I needed sleep or food more, so I mindlessly followed the crowd and found myself in the cafeteria. Someone handed me a bowl, and someone else filled it with a spoonful of... something. It was brown and smelled meaty, but had the consistency of oatmeal.
“What is this?” I asked someone after sitting at a table.
He took the spoon away from his mouth and said, “
It’s better not to think about it.”
I took a taste. It was mostly disgusting. If I had any choice, I wouldn’t have eaten it, but it wasn’t so bad I couldn’t choke it down.
After “supper,” I followed the crowd back to the cabins and collapsed at my bunk. Sometime in the morning, while it was still dark, an air horn blew. My coworkers started to get up, and I noticed none of them had gotten undressed or taken a shower.
I expected to follow them to breakfast, but we went straight back to work. This day was much like the last. We worked straight through with no lunch or breaks until someone fell asleep at their machine. This time was worse than the last. He was at a sander, and he fell face first.
When everyone else went to the cafeteria, I headed for the office. I would rather have been unemployed than work in these conditions. Before I got to the building, a guard stopped me. “Get back to the cafeteria,” he said in a stern voice.
“No,” I said. “I’m quitting.”
He laughed humorlessly. “No you’re not. There’s no quitting.” Then he grabbed my arm and forcefully escorted me back to the food line.
It went on like this for weeks. One coworker committed suicide by putting his head through a machine. After that, enough safety guards were put on the machines so heads couldn’t fit through. That also meant that there were fewer accidents, so we had even longer days.
One day, it was still morning, at least as far as I could tell, and I was cutting boards as usual. Sounds of a commotion came from outside. The supervisors left to investigate, so we took the opportunity to go outside and actually see some sunlight too.
The police were raiding the compound, arresting anyone living. I heard the captain having a conversation on the radio about what they should do with us. “You’ve already got shelter for them. Shut down the mill, but anyone who wants to stay in the housing there can. I’ll call the Red Cross and get some food, clothes, and showers set up in there.”
Eventually, the old mill was turned into the Occupational Rehabilitation Center for the Differently Animated. While wood products were still produced there, the conditions were safe and pleasant, the work days were reasonable, and zombies were matched to jobs that suited their qualifications.
I got a promotion. I am proud to be the new CFO of ORCDA.
(back to TOC)
****
Operation Reanimation
The third world war introduced many new types of warfare to the global arena. Perhaps the most incredible was Operation Reanimation.
Although technology led the way, there were still many scenarios where troops were needed. As it is in war, many soldiers were wounded, killed, or lost. Messages of condolence were sent to families, who sometimes grieved over a loved one whose body was not able to be interred.
The military provided a number of excuses why the body could not be provided. The soldier was captured by the enemy and merely a video was presented with evidence of the soldier’s death. No, the video could not be shown to the family, it would be too disturbing, and it was top secret. Or perhaps the soldier was killed in a roadside bomb, and his body was burned beyond recognition. Or he could have been caught in a fire and there were no remains left to recover. Or sometimes they simply told the families that the soldier was missing in action and presumed to be dead. In desperation, the family would keep their hopes up that their loved one could eventually come home.
In some of these cases, while what the families were told was partly true, the explanation for the missing body was false. Instead the body was taken to a lab for military purposes.
Scientists had developed a way to reanimate the bodies, essentially making them living again. They saw it as recycling soldiers. In addition, since they were dead and certain conditions were not necessary to survive, the top secret operation didn’t feel the need to provide the amenities that living soldiers required. During the course of Operation Reanimation, these recycled soldiers were not given meals, times of rest, or consideration for their mental state.
The mental and emotional state of these zombies was fiercely debated. Some personnel merely saw them as walking corpses.
The people who abused them as such stood by the fact that they were not mindless, but instead full of rage, which needed to be targeted at the enemy. In reaction to this theory, they would dress up in enemy uniforms and torture the zombies. They would treat them like fighting dogs, channeling their aggression.
Finally, the scientists and assistants who often worked with the zombies realized that most of the reanimated actually retained not only their mental capacity but also the personalities of the people they were before they were killed. They campaigned for humane treatment and rights for zombies, but were denied.
This last group was right.
When the zombies were put out in the battlefield, many of them were scared and conflicted. With limited armor and extreme conditions, many refused to fight. They were brought back to camp and “given another chance.” Before they were sent back out again, they were trained to hate the enemy, abused, and finally told that they could be heroes if they fought. And if they refused to fight, they would be executed for cowardice.
Due to their fragile after-life mental state, most of these soldiers were in fact put to death. Since they were designed to be the perfect soldier and therefore by definition hard to kill, most were executed in ways no longer authorized by the Geneva Convention. The two most popular styles of execution were by guillotine or by forcing the victims onto their knees and shooting them point blank in the back of the head. Then, since the cause of death explained to the families did not match the fatal wounds of the soldiers, the bodies were cremated en masse.
When Operation Reanimation was finally leaked, the public was outraged. First, they insisted that their zombie relatives be sent back to them. They were told that none had survived, although it was widely believed that the remaining zombies were executed once the operation was outed.
Then, by public demand, the president of the United States officially pardoned these soldiers, saying they were honorable upstanding members of the military and not the cowards they were made out to be. He also posthumously awarded these zombies Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.
Now, plans are in the works for a memorial in Washington D.C. for these special zombie soldiers, the victims of Operation Reanimation.
(back to TOC)
****
A Soldier Back from War
I thought the journey to the front lines in the Middle East would be the longest trip of my life. I was wrong. The trip back home was the longest.
It wasn’t the ride in the caravan through a zone known for its roadside bombs that was the longest. It wasn’t the walk through the Kuwait airport in uniform, the wound on my face quite evident, while being stared at by the local people. It wasn’t the flight to Dubai. It wasn’t even the flight from Dubai to New York. It wasn’t the time waiting on layover. Nor was it the flight from New York to Indianapolis. The bus ride from Indianapolis to Bloomington was short compared to the rest of the trip.
No, the longest part of the trip back home was from the time I switched over to the public bus until I got to the Deeters’ front door. But I had made a promise to a dying man, and I had him to thank for saving my life when I couldn’t save his.
I slowly walked from the street to the front door. There was a young boy playing in the back yard. He stopped what he was doing and stood at the fence next to the house to watch me approach. When I got closer and he was able to get a good look at me, he ran into the house screaming for his mother. I continued to the front door.
I didn’t knock. I couldn’t bring myself to raise my knuckles to the door, and I knew my presence would be known anyway. Shortly after I reached the door, it was flung open and a hunting rifle was pointed right between my eyes.
“You can’t take my brains or my son, zombie!” the woman screamed.
I held up my hands and stepped back to show that I meant her no harm. “I don�
��t intend to do anything to you,” I said. “Please, are you Mrs. Deeter? If so, I just need to talk to you.”
It was at that point she saw the fatigues I was wearing and lowered the gun. “Yes. I’m sorry,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”
I followed her inside. The boy was peeking around a corner, and when he saw me, he started screaming, “But mommy, a zombie!”
“It’s okay honey,” she said, taking his hand. She led him away, down a hall. “Just play in your room a while, okay?” I heard her say.
As soon as she came back into the foyer, I was startled by a knock on the door behind me. “Excuse me a moment,” she said, and went to answer the door.
By the greetings they exchanged when she welcomed the older couple in, I could tell they were happy to see each other. “Have you heard anything from Alec?” the older lady said, but immediately stopped dead in her tracks when she saw me.
“Maybe we should all go into the kitchen,” said Mrs. Deeter. We followed her into the other room and sat ourselves around a small kitchen table while she prepared coffee.
“Are you here about my son?” asked the gentleman.
“Is your son Alec?” I asked. He nodded. I said, “Yes, I am.” The older lady started crying.
“I served with Alec in Afghanistan,” I explained. “I was a medic. A suicide bomber attacked a church that Alec was stationed at. He was hurt in the explosion.”
“He was near death when he was brought in to me.” I leaned forward in my chair. “What I tell you next is classified information. If anyone finds out that I told you, I can get into a lot of trouble. But Alec asked me to tell you, and I think you need to know. So it doesn’t leave this room, okay?”
Brains for the Zombie Soul (a parody) Page 3
