The Ghosts of the Zombie Apocalypse

by Kayes, Greg

  After a moment Henrietta swore as she remembered the raids. She would like to have asked Billy and Tom about them if her stupid corpse didn’t wander away. Well things can’t be helped now. It just frustrated her cause now she probably won’t even get a second hand rendition of the events. Stories got so degraded every time they changed hands until it got so bad that they just became gossip.

  Well it was still better than risking your corpse for the story. The raids were always a high risk high reward situation. The corpses at the front always ran the risk of getting felled, but if not, their ghost would be front row to the events and the first to welcome the new followers, which was always a huge celebration. New people always meant new stories and it always paid to be nice to the new guys. After surviving the apocalypse for so long they always had some really good stories to tell.

  Henrietta was never one of the lucky ones at the front. She was always in the middle crowd to the back row. Well at least she could count her luck that her corpse was still in one piece, and in remarkably good condition for being dead as long as it has been. She’d seen some corpses with only one arm and leg. That was as good as being fallen in most people’s books. At least those ghosts got treated better. It scared her to no end that one day her corpse would be put down and then she would be rooted to the spot like a sad house plant begging for a free story.

  Henrietta stopped walking and leaned on a wall in the alley as she stared at her corpse try to scrape a live beetle out from a crack in the brick wall. She yawned as she began to zone out.

  “I really hope I don’t lose you someday.” Henrietta said as she closed her eyes and went into autopilot.

  Two blocks away a man was holding himself up in a building. Outside the zombies moaned and lurched by his door uninterested. Uninteresting was the best way to describe this man. He was a short kind of tall with dark to light hair. No one ever took notice of him which was how he was able to survive this long. Mainly it was because he kept out of everyone else’s way. When panic struck the population he stayed put and waited alone by himself while the chaotic irrational people rushed into the streets like lemmings diving into the wild fire of death and zombies.

  But it was easy for him to go unnoticed for so long because no one paid much attention to him even before the pandemic. He was just one of those people in the background. The only other person to know he had lived in that building was his mother[2] who lived far across the country. To his benefit the zombies didn't know he existed either, at least hopefully not yet.

  The man survived off looting his neighborhood. Currently he was trying to figure out how to pick a lock to one of his neighbor’s doors. He grunted as he twisted the paperclip before making the door click open.

  Honestly. He thought. Who locks their door behind them in a panic to flee the city?

  The room was a mess. Cloths were thrown all over the place as if someone packed up in a hurry. In the kitchen a meal for three lay half eaten and rotten. The pantry was mostly empty except for a box of cereal and some assorted can goods. After packing them up and cracking one of the cans open to have a quick lunch he began to explore the rest of the place.

  Most of the drawers in the place were empty of anything useful except for a few batteries. On his way to the bathroom to look for soap and medicine the man slipped on a child’s toy sending him crashing through the window and down three stories. Landing with a *phwump* in a pile of old cloths and garbage on a crusty discarded couch. He moaned in pain just as Henrietta’s corpse walked next to it. He looked up and froze as he saw the corpse stop and glance over at him. With a groan the corpse turned back uninterested and began to continue on shuffling down the alleyway.

  Nothing else noticed as the man struggled his way out of the garbage pile, nothing except Henrietta that is. The disturbance had woken her out of her autopilot. She stood there with her mouth agape and at a loss for words. She didn't even pay attention as her corpse turned the next corner. What just happened before her ghostly eyes was something that no other ghost had ever talked about.

  Never had she seen her corpse turn down a helpless survivor. Sure her corpse had eaten earlier but never had it turn down anything when it was right in front of it. A grin started to slowly form on Henrietta's face as the man feebly made his way along the alley. Without really thinking about it she followed the man for a few steps before glancing back to see her corpse had gone on without her. Panic quickly set in as she glanced back the other way to the man, who was also gone.

  Panic quickly turned to hysteria. Henrietta had never lost her corpse before and what made it worse was she was hesitating to find it! She had heard the stories about the hesitation a ghost gets when they get lost. It was as bad as being a fallen ghost but with the hope that somewhere out there was her corpse to reunite with. But somehow this didn’t feel like that kind of hesitation.

  In one direction was her corpse but in the other...was something else. She couldn't think in terms of something else. There had never been something else for any ghost for as long as she could remember being dead! But now that something else was gone and so was her corpse and she had no idea what to do any more.

  Tragically, Henrietta was now lost. She sat down on the piles of trash the man crawled out of, completely at a loss for what to do. She thought more about the stories from the others about ghosts who have lost their corpses. It was bad. It sounded as bad as being single without the cats. But at least some are able to catch up quickly with their corpse while others...anyways the point was just to stay put till someone comes along.

  I just hope I have enough to pay someone for a hitch. Henrietta thought.

  Henrietta looked down the alley then down the other way. There was a lot of clutter here. It seemed like this alley didn’t get a lot of zombie traffic. She began to feel tragically rooted. It was often thought that a ghost would stay rooted to a spot for the same reason why they can't make up new stories. There was something about death that just killed your imagination.

  Unfortunately she heard somewhere that you had to have some imagination to make decisions. Just imagining decisions like "Sooo...which way do I go now?" could give a ghosts a bad headache and quite often nightmares, if they didn’t have their corpse with them. At least that’s what everyone else said the lost feel like. Things get garbled in translation after it’s been told so many times and she never met someone lost and found before. But surely some make it back to their corpse or else no one would be talking about it. Right?

  Henrietta shivered in paranoia.

  I really need to start thinking of something else.

  Henrietta surveyed the alleyway again.

  Just got to stay put. She thought trying not to panic.

  Henrietta sat and stared at the brick wall. What else was there to do?

  The building to Henrietta back exploded. Rubble cascaded into the alley way and the surrounding streets burying her underneath tons of bricks.

  Henrietta sighed as she drifted up through the rubble. She sat down on top of the pile and surveyed the carnage. She wasn’t surprised. This happened sometimes with abandoned buildings that were left unattended and had unmaintained gas lines, boilers, and nowadays homemade explosives and napalm left behind from scavenging survivors. There was something about the apocalypse that made everything so accident prone.

  No other ghost came out from the debris so it must have been completely abandoned by survivors and corpses. She pouted to herself. She could see a bit further now and no other ghosts were close by. On top of that the rubble now made it impossible for anything to cross her path. This weird day was beginning to really frustrate her.

  Some movement in the distance caught Henrietta’s attention. Well there was that weird man again, she thought absentmindedly as she watched him climb out of a hole in the adjacent building. Casually he brushed the dust off himself. It wasn’t particularly interesting but she kept watching him like a bored person taking a mild interest in the bug crawling along their wall.

&nb
sp; The man had clambered his way to the top of the pile of debris where Henrietta was sitting when the building he just climbed out of exploded as well, knocking him over and through Henrietta while she watched a cylinder blast out of the building and trail a cloud of steam behind it high into the sky.

  More rubble piled up everywhere as Henrietta drifted to the top of the pile again. Movement caught her eye when the man stood up out of a protective pocket he happened to fall into moments before as he staggered a few uneasy steps just as the water boiler crashed down where he had been standing. She giggled. She hadn't giggle since she heard the one about the leprechaun and the horse's blouse. And that was a long time ago.

  Quickly the man picked himself up and made his way down the rubble in a hurry. Henrietta blankly watched him as he tripped and slid his way down when she shrugged with an "eh." and got up to follow him. To her surprise no corpses had come to investigate the explosions.

  They did tend to get more attracted to faint noises more than the louder ones. Henrietta thought as she followed close behind the man. It must be because faint noises tended to mean food as where louder ones meant trouble. Corpses could handle bullets, so long as they weren’t head shots, but they were useless against explosions. Her corpse may be dead but somewhere in that decaying skull of her former habitation was a thin sense of survival instinct.

  None of the other ghosts talked much about what their corpses did, well other than the big things. They would tell stories about how their corpse would overcome a survivors obstacles or about how many people they brought down and introduced to the community. In an odd way it was kind of like Valhalla. The survivors fought like brave or terrified warriors till their last breath and when they were turned they got greeted by a crowd of cheering faces welcoming them to this odd afterlife. Resentment by the newly deceased didn't last long when greeted like that. Besides the worse had already happened, being dead and all, there wasn't any reason to retaliate or punish a ghost for what their corpse had done, especially when they realized that everyone on this side were all just spectators to the dramedy of their former apocalyptic life.

  But Henrietta did pay attention to what her corpse did, almost to a fault. There was so much more going on behind those dead eyes than most would have noticed. She didn't think much of it though nor did she go into detail with the others about it, except for the funny things it did. Those always got a laugh when she set them up right.

  The weird man made his way uneventfully through the city completely devoid of wandering corpses, which struck Henrietta as odd especially because he didn’t move stealthy in the least. Honestly he walked like a drunken elephant trying to tiptoe through a china store. So many things broke, tinkled, or clanged by accident as he made his way through the side streets. The only thing that noticed him besides her was that bird that flew into him as if he wasn’t there at all. Henrietta was starting to feel a bit sorry for the man. He seemed to live in a world that never noticed him.

  Eventually he arrived at what she assumed was his safe house. After navigating a tricky doorway he made his way in while Henrietta floated through all the obstacles without effort. The safe room the man had obviously built over time looked as ignored as he was. It was very unkempt, even by apocalypse standards. One might think that there should at least be room to put your feet on the actual floor but somehow he ignored that fact and again to her surprise, walked through it like a fish in water. The effect made you feel a little disoriented after you saw it. It was as if he had a little bit of ghost in him as he passed through dimensions that were not meant to normally yield.

  Henrietta sat atop the mess and watched him with dismissive interest. She couldn't understand why her interest was so underwhelmed because the things that this man did in the last hour (or more what happened to him) would have easily gotten her a good story from Story Master Mike. It felt like she was only really paying attention to him because she really didn't have anything better to do. But honestly how enthusiastic should someone feel when they watch a person cook themselves a meal. She then giggled as the man caught fire to his sleeve on his alcohol stove, at which point he spilled his drink on himself dousing the flame while never realizing that he was burning in the first place.

  This is where Henrietta became physiological[3]. Clearly he must know that all this is going on...right? He can't be so ignorant that he is unable to pay attention to the danger he is in? Or is he so ignorant that danger just ignores him like an afterthought? Is that even possible?

  It was then that the man began to smell his burnt fabric. He looked down at his sopping wet sleeve and sighed. Henrietta then felt bad for being cynical[4]. Clearly the man has some deep pain about...whatever this was.

  Then man then finished his meal and laid down in the mess. Nothing actually happened the rest of the day. He just lay there staring at the ceiling breathing peacefully. Henrietta found herself enjoying it immensely. Her corpse never breathed much nor looked peaceful and every survivor she had seen since death had a look of terror on their faces. It was the first time in a while she really got to watch anything else. Even with this odd sensation of passive interest it was a nice change of pace.

  Night started setting in as the thin slivers of light seeping through the boarded up windows started to fade. Henrietta looked up from her absentminded gaze and went to poke her head out of the window[5]. Dusk was her favorite time of day, when vibrant colors erupted throughout the sky and then exploded into a million brilliant stars.

  Henrietta let herself float to the roof of the building for a better look. Since the city’s power went out she couldn't remember a time when the night sky looked so open and bright. It was funny how the total collapse of civilization made the world appear as such a beautiful place…Aside from all the death, decay, and dilapidation of everything everywhere of course. But the dead can't be choosers in this regard. That kind of thing was for the living.

  Behind the crescent moon the main bloom of stars cascaded down over the city like a soft blanket as the crickets disturbed the corpses throughout the city who replied with their moans.

  The sound of something springing open caught Henrietta's attention. As she turned to see what it was the man emerged from a hatch and unknowingly sat beside her on the roof. He sighed as he silently stared out at the twilight of the sky. If a ghost could blush she would have. It wasn't about attraction, because honestly the man looked like a disfigured foot after surviving this long in the apocalypse. It was more about the company. She rather liked that he was quiet.

  All the other ghosts were good company to a fault. They were all friendly and very talkative but they were extremely bored and the story economy took its toll on everyone. Whenever she saw two ghosts together they would always be gossiping, retelling second hand stories or just filling up all the air between them with as many words as they could before their corpses would wander away from each other and cut the conversation short. She realized that she never saw any pairs of ghosts just sitting and gazing quietly with one another, like she was now. But she never saw Billy and Tom when they were alone. She imagined that they did stuff like this all the time. It kind of hit her somewhere that she didn't know she could be hit.

  The two of them sat for some time side by side just watching the stars twinkle. Eventually the man began a really long yawn before getting back up to go inside. Henrietta elected to stay on the roof. As she looked out over the city she heard the latch behind her shut shortly followed by the trumpeting of him crashing noisily down the stairs. She smiled inwardly at the outburst. Never had she realized that she could do that. Until now she only smiled with her face. It came as a mildly delightful surprise, like being wrapped with an unexpectedly soft blanket after a really long day.

  Ghosts don't sleep. At least not how people understand sleep. The same goes for corpses. At some time or other everything needs a moment to rest or recover.

  Henrietta drifted off to sleep on top of that roof. It was kind of like getting lost in a sea of static
shocks but without pain or discomfort. Imagine getting massaged by genital lightning as you sorta felt coherently incoherent. Can you imagine all that? Good, now forget all of it cause it's not a thing like that at all. Sometimes things are just too much for words to describe. It just one of those things that needs to be experienced for anyone to understand.

  It's not uncommon for ghosts to dream in this kind of state but due to the nature of death the dreams aren't exactly what you call dreams. It's more like a sensation of phantom body[6]. There is a thing where people dreaming often feel like they are ghosts where they can fly and walk through walls. Well when a ghost dreams it's like they have a physical body that respects gravity and the solidity of matter. It's just another one of those things that they don't know why it happens. If they had the creativity to figure out problems they would probably leave that one up to ghost Stephen Hawking to figure out.

  Currently Henrietta was dreaming that she was a middle aged fat man eating a block of cheese on a couch. Well that was a new experience, she dreamily thought. After finishing a second block of cheese and starting on a third she woke up to find herself on autopilot in the middle of the city following that weird man. It was well after day break and she was feeling plenty confused.

  Autopilot was an important thing about ghosts. If they didn't have it every ghost would wake up and would frustratingly spend their entire day, every day, catching up to their corpse. Henrietta was use to her autopilot following her corpse but she never heard of it following someone else’s corpse. To that matter she never heard of anyone talk of a ghost following a survivor around. She had no idea what was going on. After getting some orientation of where she was she looked back at the man and saw him eating a block of cheese.

  How far am I going to take this? Henrietta thought as she tried to forget her dream. I should be trying to get back to my corpse. The only trouble with that is there aren't any other corpses around to hitch a lift from. This man appeared to be a superficial trouble magnate based on everything that happened yesterday. So where was all the trouble for him to miraculously avoid?