Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  “Please!” Gary shouted. “Please! I’m not like them!”

  “Joojin!” someone shouted. He heard booted footsteps running up behind him. “Joojin!” The rifle in front of him steadied in the girl’s hands. Was she receiving the order to fire or to not fire? Gary’s forehead began to feel hot, anticipating the bullet.

  Another girl came up in front of him. She barked orders at the others and Gary felt the bayonet yank backwards out of his body. The girls argued amongst themselves—he kept hearing the word “xaaraan”—but clearly their orders were to stand down.

  “You talks,” the girl who’d given the orders said. She studied his face, obviously confused by the dead veins in his cheeks.

  “I talk,” Gary confirmed.

  “You fekar?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She nodded and threw a complicated hand gesture at her soldiers. Gary gathered by the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her navy jacket that she must be an officer of some kind, though that made no sense. What army in the world had officers who were teenage girls? Gary couldn’t shake the idea that he had been captured by a school field trip gone horribly, horribly awry.

  “We kills you, if you says any wrong thing,” the officer suggested. She shook her rifle at him. “We kills you, if you dos any wrong thing. You do only right thing, maybe we kills you anyway because of the smell of you.”

  “Fair enough,” Gary said, slowly lowering his hands.

  15

  I wedged myself through the spring-loaded emergency room doors and ran down the wheelchair ramp to the sidewalk, half-expecting to find myself alone. Commander Ifiyah and her company were there waiting for me—with a prisoner, it looked like. They had somebody kneeling on the ground with a rope around his neck.

  It didn’t matter—I had to tell Ifiyah what had happened. It had been stupid of us to think we could actually find the medical supplies we needed in this haunted city. We had to leave, and now, before anyone else died.

  “Ifiyah,” I shouted, waving her over. I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and tried to get my wind back. “Ifiyah! At least one of your soldiers is dead. The enemy is in there, and they are coming for us!”

  The commander turned to face me with a look of passionately studied disinterest. “Three, is dead,” she said. I saw then that Ayaan stood next to her. Oh, thank God, I thought, at least one of the girls survived. “Ayaan kept her head on and made slaughter with your enemies, Dekalb. They are no more.”

  I headed over to where they stood looking down at the prisoner. “Great—but still, there’s no reason for us to stay here. There were no drugs in there. The place had been looted,” I told Ifiyah. She just nodded distractedly—of course Ayaan would have told her as much. A cold pang went through me as I thought of what else Ayaan might have told her commanding officer. How I ran at the first sign of trouble, for one thing (although surely they would understand—we were talking about the living dead here), abandoning my team-mates.

  It was while pondering the fact that not only would Ayaan be within her rights to give such a report she would be duty bound to do so and that I was, in fact, pretty derelict in my duty back in that hospital that I finally spared the time to glance down at the prisoner and see he was one of the dead.

  Jesus fucking Christ they’ve got one of those things on a leash—

  My brain sputtered to a stop even as my feet danced backward, carrying me away from the animated corpse. For one of his kind he didn’t look so bad—you could see the dark veins under his pasty white face and his eyes looked kind of yellow but otherwise his flesh was intact. He showed me his teeth though and I gave out a startled yelp until I realized he was smiling at me.

  “Thank God, you’re an American,” he said.

  That just made my brain hurt. The dead didn’t talk. They didn’t moan or howl or whimper. They certainly weren’t capable of distinguishing between people of different nationalities—true believers in diversity, the dead were equal opportunity devourers.

  “You have to help me,” the thing started but we heard a thumping sound then and looked back to see two of the dead—including the eyeless one who nearly got me in the hospital—slamming up against the emergency room doors. There might have been more of them inside. It was too dark to tell.

  “Ifiyah, we need to head back to the boat now,” I said but the commander had got there before me. She threw hand signals to her squads and with only a couple of barked words we got moving. Ayaan fell in beside me. “I thought you said you got them all,” I told her, not feeling very generous at that moment.

  “I thought I had,” she countered. She squinted back at the hospital but the doors held—the dead lacked the mental power to figure out they needed to pry the doors open instead of just pushing at them. “The two that ate my kumayo sisters are no more. I did not hear you firing in our defense. You are not a man, Dekalb, are you? At least we know that much.”

  My face burned with something that was a little bit anger, a little bit guilt, and a lot of annoyance that she didn’t get it, that she just didn’t understand what I’d been through. I knew better than to say anything, though. Even to myself I would sound like a spoiled brat. I grimaced and stepped up my pace to get away from her. I guessed correctly that she was too disciplined to break ranks. Moving ahead I caught up with the captive dead man and the girl soldier who held his leash—it was Fathia, the bayonet expert.

  “Listen, just talk to them for me,” the dead man pleaded when he saw me.

  As we turned onto Fourteenth Street I shook my head sadly. “What the hell are you? You’re not one of them, not really—”

  “Yes, really,” he admitted, hanging his head. “I know what I am, you don’t need to humor me. That’s not all I am, though. I was a doctor, originally.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. “Okay, to be honest, a med student. But I could help you guys—every army needs some doctors, right? Yeah, like on M*A*S*H! I can be your Hawkeye Pierce!”

  The massacre in the hospital had left my imagination stoked up. “A doctor. Did you—did one of your patients attack you? Somebody you thought was still alive?”

  “My name’s Gary, by the way,” he answered, looking away from me. He held out his hand but I couldn’t bring myself to shake it. “Fair enough,” he said. “No, it wasn’t one of my patients. I did it to myself.”

  I must have blanched at that.

  “Look—there didn’t seem to be any choice. The city was burning. New York was burning to the ground. Everybody else was dead. It was either join them or be their dinner. Okay?” When I didn’t answer he raised his voice. “Okay?”

  “Sure,” I mumbled. This didn’t make any sense… except that it did. I had done terrible things to survive the Epidemic. I had entrusted my seven year old daughter to a Fundamentalist warlord. I had locked up my dead wife and just abandoned her. All because it seemed like the logical choice at the time.

  “I’m a physician, like I said, so I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew my brain would start to die the second I stopped breathing. That’s why the dead are so stupid—in the time between when they die and when they stand back up there’s no oxygen in their brains and the cells just die. But it didn’t have to happen like that. I could protect my brain. I had the equipment. Christ, I bet I’m the smartest one on the planet right now.”

  “The smartest of the undead,” I clarified.

  “If you don’t mind, I prefer the term unliving.” He shot me a grin to show he’d been joking. He seemed so desperate and lonely—I wanted to reach out to him but, well, come on. Even for a bleeding heart like me this was a stretch.

  “I put myself on a ventilator and then submerged myself in a bathtub full of ice,” Gary explained. “It stopped my heart instantly but oxygen kept flowing to my brain. When I woke up I could still think for myself. I can still control myself. You can trust me, man, okay? Okay?”

  I didn’t answer. The soldiers had stopped and Ifiyah was yelling orders I couldn�
��t understand. I looked up the street, trying to figure out what was going on. We were in front of Western Beef, the meat market. You couldn’t have got me to go in there for a million dollars. Two doors down was another kind of meat market—a swank nightclub called Lotus. That’s the Meatpacking District for you. You could cut the irony with a spork.

  Ayaan dropped to one knee and brought up her gun. Had somebody heard something? I couldn’t see any movement amongst the piles of cardboard crates in front of Western Beef. The smell was god-awful but what did you expect of a warehouse full of meat when the power goes down?

  It was the door of Lotus that opened first. A short squat man in a fashionably cut black suit stumbled out into the street. At this range he might just have been drunk, not dead. Ayaan lined up a shot with perfect slowness and precision and caved in his left temple. He fell to the street in an ungainly heap of black cloth like a dead crow.

  “There may be more of them,” I said out loud. One of the more superfluous comments I’ve ever made. The shot made the air around us vibrate like a bell, the noise of it echoing off concrete storefronts and brick buildings long after the dead man fell. Summoned by the sound, others came.

  Dozens of them, big burly guys in white aprons stumbling out of Western Beef, Eurotrash out of the club, not even stopping to acknowledge one another, sometimes crawling over each other in their frenzy to get at us. Dozens turned into scores.

  When you added the dead who came staggering out of the buildings on every side, well.

  Scores turned into hundreds.

  16

  They filled the street ahead of us, a shambling horde with gaping jaws and rolling eyes. Some looked pristine, nearly as healthy as they must have looked while they lived. Others lacked limbs or skin or even faces. Their clothes hung in tatters or in perfectly-creased folds and all of them, all of them, were coming for us and they wouldn’t stop until we were torn to pieces.

  “We’ve got to go,” I shouted at Ifiyah. I tried to grab her arm but she shrugged me off. With short clipped words she ordered her girl soldiers into a firing formation—the same one she’d used back on the docks.

  There were a lot more of them this time and their movements were less constrained. I just didn’t know if we could survive this.

  “We can outrun them, head down a side street,” I suggested. The dead took another step toward us. And another. They would never slow down. “Ifiyah…”

  “They have no guns, Dekalb,” the commander said as if she were brushing off an insect. “They are so stupid, to lie for us in wait here and they even have no guns.”

  “This isn’t an ambush—they’re not capable of that level of planning,” I insisted. I looked at Gary, the smartest dead man in the world, and he nodded a confirmation.

  But Ayaan ignored me studiously. Unlike the others she had to know what was about to happen. She’d been there, in the hospital, when the girls died. I could see her breathing hard through her nose, her jaw clamped shut but she didn’t move from her firing crouch. Orders are orders, I guess. The girls opened up with their rifles, going for head shots only. Maybe, I thought, maybe it was true. Maybe I was just a coward. The girls were trained soldiers and they weren’t panicking. Maybe making a stand here was exactly the right thing to do.

  “We’re fucked,” Gary moaned, tugging at his leash. The other end had been securely tied to a fire hydrant.

  The dead fell without a sound one by one but others merely crawled over the inert bodies and continued with the advance. Ayaan and Fathia knelt together and spotted for one another, thinning out the ranks of those closest to us but even as their rifles snapped and spat more of the dead spilled out into the street. I could remember this place in happier times and just how crowded and noisy it had been then but it was nothing like this. The noise we made must have been drawing every animated corpse in the Village.

  “It is too dangerous to run now. We will not leave here,” Ifiyah shouted, “until every one of them is dead! Then, inshallah, it will be safe.” I don’t know who she was talking to—she certainly wasn’t looking at me.

  I moved back just to scout the side streets and saw that they were blocked as well—not with the solid wall of the dead that stood between us and the river but with dozens of straggling corpses moving toward us from every direction. To the west—away from the river and therefore farther from safety—the street looked relatively clear but who could know what we would find even if we ran now?

  Right next to me one of the girl soldiers—a skinny one with scrapes on her kneecaps—switched her rifle over to full auto and sprayed bullets at the oncoming horde. Panic had gripped her—at this range she couldn’t hope for accurate head shots firing that quickly—and Ifiyah moved quickly to smack at her hands and make her stop. She was wasting bullets if nothing else.

  I could see the girl’s eyes as she felt the cold intensity of her commanding officer’s anger suffuse her. I had expected to see fear there but instead I found only shame. The soldiers were ready to die here if Ifiyah ordered it, certain that to die for a noble cause is better than to live without honor.

  Personally I’d rather live even if it meant having the word COWARD tattooed on my forehead. When the dead emerged from the side streets and began to flank us I snatched at Ayaan’s arm and howled into her ear our need to retreat. I figured if anyone could talk some sense into Ifiyah it would be her.

  The air went out of me as the stock of her AK-47 slammed into my stomach. “You don’t give me my orders!” she shrieked over the noise of the company’s rifles. “You give no orders at all, gaal we’el! Sedex goor I tell you this, and still you chirp like a baby bird at me! Waad walantahay!”

  The dead came at us thick and fast while I tried to get my wind back. They came right for us, never deviating, never turning aside. The bullets weren’t even slowing them down. Ifiyah ran back and forth shouting encouragement or abuse at one or another of her kumayo sisters. A dead woman in a green cardigan and wingtip shoes came up on her left, having slipped through the cracks in the girls’ defense. He reached for her trying to get a handful of her jacket, her headscarf, her flesh and she cut him in half with automatic fire, literally separating his torso from his legs in a roiling haze of torn skin and bone fragments. “Sharmutaada ayaa ku dhashay was!” she howled, her face lit up with exultation.

  The dead woman in the cardigan didn’t even pause. The second her top half hit the ground she began crawling toward Ifiyah again. The commander emptied the rest of her cartridge into the body but completely missed the head. Before she had a chance to reload two skeletal hands were clutching her knee and broken teeth sank deep into her thigh.

  Two of the girl soldiers pulled the corpse free from Ifiyah’s leg. They stomped on the dead woman’s head with the heels of their combat boots until there was nothing left but grease and bone fragments. It was too late, though. Ifiyah clutched at her wound, her rifle forgotten, and gazed up at her charges as if looking for ideas.

  “We need to find a secure CCP,” Ayaan said to me, “and you’re our regional specialist.” So engrossed with what had happened to Ifiyah I didn’t see her come up and I yelped with startlement. “Get us out of here, Dekalb!”

  I nodded and stared west on Fourteenth. Only a few of the dead staggered toward us from that direction. “Somebody untie him,” I said, pointing at Gary. “He’s a doctor. A takhtar. We need him.” They did as I said. The dead man claimed he couldn’t run so I detailed two of the girls to carry him. If they disliked this duty they were too well-trained to say so. I picked up Ifiyah myself—a little disturbed to find she weighed only a little more than my seven year old daughter Sarah—and then we were running, tearing down Fourteenth, our weapons clattering against our backs. We dodged around the dead there as they clawed at us. One of the girls got snared by a particularly dextrous corpse but she kicked him in the face and got free again.

  Out of breath before we’d covered one avenue block I didn’t let myself slow down until we ran past a buildin
g covered in scaffolding and the street opened up into the tree-lined expanse of Union Square. I realized then I had no idea where I was going. We were headed away from the river and the safety of the ship. What kind of shelter could we possibly find from the dead?

  17

  I called for a stop and we clustered around the statue of Gandhi at the edge of Union Square. I looked up at the smiling bronze face and issued a silent apology for surrounding him with heavily-armed child soldiers. I could remember when hippy kids would put garlands of flowers around the pacifist’s neck but all I saw there now were loops of wire.

  “They ate the flowers,” Gary pointed out. I looked back down at him.

  “Flowers?” I demanded.

  “Anything living. Meat is better and living meat is the best but they’ll gnaw the bark off a tree if they have to.” He stepped over to a big bowed oak and laid a hand on one of its thick branches. Strips of bark were indeed missing, leaving big parallel gouges in the wood.

  “Why, damn it? Why do they do this?”

  Gary shrugged and sat down at the base of the tree. “It’s a compulsion. You can’t fight it for long—the hunger just takes over. I have a theory… I mean, they should have all rotted away by now. Human bodies decompose fast. They should be piles of bone and goo by now but they look pretty healthy to me.”

  I glared at him.

  “Okay, okay, that was a brain fart. By ‘healthy’ I mean ‘in one piece’. I think when they eat living meat they get some kind of life force or whatever out of it. Some energy that helps hold them together.”

  “Horseshit,” I breathed. I looked at the girls to see if they agreed with me but they might have been statues themselves. They had shut down, unable to contemplate just how bad things had gotten. They needed someone to tell them what to do and now, with Commander Ifiyah out of action, they didn’t know where to look.