Zombie Road Trip

by Miller, T. Alex

  Zombie Road Trip

  T. Alex Miller

  Chapter 1. New reality

  People don’t taste like chicken.

  That was the first thought that went through Timothy Lipton’s disheveled brain when he got his first taste. The others were there before him, getting what he could only imagine were the “good parts.” On the menu was a woman in a little black dress, at first screaming wildly then gurgling into silence as they piled on and, quite simply, tore her apart. Eight or ten of them were on her, and Tim saw one with a chunk of breast in his mouth, another with her liver, someone else with a length of intestine.

  Tim got a finger. At first, he had most of her arm, but one of the others had torn it from him just as he’d started to bite into the pinky.

  Well, OK to start modestly, he thought. Although he was ravenous. He could see it in the others, that surging hunger. And they weren’t hiding it or holding back. Oh, no. In some ways, the naked orgy of flesh consumption he’d been witnessing since he’d crossed over was almost gratifying. After the typical adult lives of managing the id with all manner of hedging, politeness and reservation, he was seeing the Zees — a demographic he’d now apparently joined — dive in teeth first. Earlier, he had no idea whether it was hours or days, he’d seen a Zee female rip the genitalia off a still-alive black man with her bare hands while another was sucking his eyeballs out. She’d fallen back on her haunches and started her feast, eyes darting, mandibles slavering, blood everywhere.

  It’d looked pretty chewy, he’d thought, before averting his gaze. He imagined the other males Zees in the area wincing at the sight, but none of them paid any attention. None of them ever paid much attention to each other, except if one was in the way of a meal. Then they were all sharp elbows and animal grunts and moans.

  Now, walking away from the freshly dismembered woman and gnawing on the pinky, Tim tried to make sense of what he was doing, his addled brain feeling half drunk, half asleep yet somehow razor sharp in the flesh consumption department. It seemed both all wrong and utterly right. He needed this pinky, this flesh; that much was clear. There was more in there about this new world he was inhabiting, buried, that he knew he needed to think about. But thinking didn’t come easy.

  Eating the pinky was like consuming a buffalo wing. Messy, with lots of bone and not much meat. Plus, the bloody digit was raw, unseasoned and rather tough. The nail had polish on it, which he somehow knew not to eat, and he could see the fingerprint — which meant something once. He got one or two tiny bites of flesh into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

  There, he’d done it. And no, it didn’t taste like chicken. It didn’t taste like anything.

  He’d had worse. But he needed more.

  Chapter 2. Marilyn

  It was late autumn, just a day past Halloween, although Tim would no longer know from seasons except as it related to his joints. On that first day as the sun went down and the temperature dropped, he felt the mobility going out of his arms and legs as the synovial fluid gelled in his joints. He wanted only to sit, to rest.

  And all this time he’d thought zombies were more nocturnal.

  And there, he’d said it: zombie. A Zee. A stupid flesh-eating ghoul. Except so far all he’d had were two tiny bits of pinky. He was starving, but the place he’d wound up had no live (i.e., ready to eat) people anywhere he could see. There were the requisite burning buildings and upside-down cars; at some point a plane came hurtling into the ground and burst into flames. Tim had perked up, thinking the roasted bodies within would be more palatable for his newbie sensibilities. But as he started lurching toward the wreck, he came to realize it was much farther away than he realized.

  Everything, in fact, was much farther away. For all the lurching zombies are known to do, there was a little-known fact you’d just never know until you became one: It hurts like a mother fucker to be a zombie. You’re dead, or dead-ish. So of course it hurts. Makes sense. It hurt to walk, hurt to move at all, hurt to see. It would’ve hurt to breathe, but so far as Tim could tell, he was no longer breathing. Or was he? He tried to take a deep breath and feel the air coming into his lungs, but it only caused him to gag.

  Didn’t make sense. Zombies don’t make sense. Must learn to live with that. Or was it “die with that?” That didn’t make sense, either.

  And then, on top of starving, Tim had, well, gone ahead and messed himself. Felt it coming, nothing to do but let it happen. Piss too, of course. He’d tried to fumble with his pants to try to crap like a man, but nothing doing. Hands of concrete. His piano-playing days were over.

  That’s another thing they never mentioned in the zombie movies: Zombies smell awful. They’re dead, of course, so there’s a certain amount of decomposition going on. Their diet is raw human flesh, so no amount of Tic Tacs in the world would chill the vulture breath on these fuckers. They don’t care, of course, nor can their deadened senses even register the colossal reek that emanates from them.

  Scary zombies: They’re all walking around with a load in their pants — sans diapers.

  Except for the naked ones, and there were plenty of them around, for whatever reason. People sleeping naked or in the shower or having sex when whatever happened happened. Tim always felt like laughing when he saw the naked Zees, since most people looked pretty bad naked in the best of times. Dead, they were comedy — all saggy asses and wrinkled tits and dangling johnsons and man-boobs bathed in blood and gore. But the laugh center of his brain was damaged. It was like there was Point A that knew something was funny, and Point C where a laugh might occur, but Point B that put it all together was completely gone.

  Another note, then: Zombies have no sense of humor. Or irony, for that matter. After a few days, Tim felt he’d seen it all: women chewing on tits, guys munching on balls, a one-armed Zee with a length of knotted intestine around his neck. It would all be so terribly funny in a sick, sick way, if only …

  Yeah, no funny bone.

  But he was different, that much he knew. He was watching the other Zees, checking them out and making observations. And he never once saw any of the others looking at him or at one another. What was he, some kind of high-functioning zombie? A genius Zee? Maybe the next step on a fast-moving evolutionary train? He desperately wanted to look in a mirror, wondering if he’d have a “smarter” look about him than all these dumb-ass Zees bumbling around him. Sure, Tim had very soiled jeans and some kind of burrs stuck in his hair, but at least he didn’t spend all day walking into the same wall, like he’d seen one guy doing. And he’d seen this one half-naked chick walking around with a toilet seat around her neck and a plunger stuck to her ass. No telling how that’d happened, but she sure as hell wasn’t doing anything about it. She was just going about her business like nothing was wrong. And she could do that, because none of the Zees reacted to her, and the only living people she got close to were soon dead. Not that they’d be concerned with ridding her of her embarrassing accoutrements, of course. They’d try to blow her head off. That’s just the way it was, nowadays.

  It was now probably something like Day 5, a few days after the pinky, and Tim had been on the move, painfully, for some time. He’d been walking through fields and woods with no houses around and no prey, and his hunger was approaching crazy levels. He imagined he now looked pretty much like that super-scary zombie that always sent people screaming into the woods in those movies: ferociously hungry look, wild eyes, lurching forward with grasping hands and evil intent. Terrifying!

  He was now outside a farm house, looking in the kitchen window. It was the only house around for miles, so far as he could tell. He figured he could see himself in the window, but there wasn’t anything there. What, was he like a vampire who didn’t have a reflection?

 
He doubted it. In the world of the undead, vampires, Tim figured, were like the French poodles sleeping on scented pillows, while zombies were the mutts left out in the rain. Vampires could turn into bats and fuck women and wear cool clothes. But there was absolutely nothing cool or magical about being a zombie. It was sort of like waking up to the worst imaginable hangover in the entire universe, times the power of a thousand or so. Add shit, blood, dirt and someone’s colon for lunch on top of that and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to be a zombie.

  Still, the “smarter zombie” idea had grabbed hold of Tim, and he’d become convinced he’d be able to see some manifestation of those smarts if he could just get a look in a mirror. Inside the farmhouse, there had to be one — plus food — but Tim had no idea how to get inside the house.

  Genius Zombie couldn’t figure out a door knob.

  That was OK. None of these others could, either. They were all starving, and there was obviously some fresh meat inside — but no one could do anything about it. There were hundreds of Zees outside, stinking up the joint, milling around and, every now and then, stopping 30.06 rounds being fired from an upper story window.

  Snipers: A zombie’s worst enemy. Tim was on the good side of the house now, but that morning he’d been standing over by the garage lifting up this dead chick’s dress when the head of a Zee next to them had just literally exploded. One minute, he’d been standing there with his dumb-ass hungry look, doing the milling/drooling thing, and then there was the sound of a shot and his whole head just turned into red and gray paste splattered on the wall.

  Tim got the hell out of there. True, the chick whose dress he was lifting up was the best-looking zombie he’d ever seen, but she wasn’t worth dying for — again. She looked like a hot chick who’d dressed up as a zombie for Halloween — like she was “Zombie Marilyn Monroe” or something, with her platinum wig. She wasn’t all that fucked-up looking, either. Most zombies have big, nasty neck or face wounds from when they were attacked and made into zombies, but Zombie Marilyn Monroe had nothing bad Tim could see — other than some blood and dirt stains on her short white dress. No biggie. As a zombie, you’ve got to expect that kind of thing. She had smeared makeup all over her face and neck, confirming Tim’s theory that she’d been made up to look like, maybe, a zombie. Talk about irony! Her wig and massive fake books were slightly askew, but otherwise she looked pretty well put together.

  In life, she was the kind of woman he’d probably have been terrified to talk to. But when he found himself at the zombie version of a cocktail party — standing outside a farmhouse with a bunch of other undead waiting to get picked off by a large-caliber weapon — he figured what the hell. He reached down and lifted up her dress, just to get a look-see.

  This wasn’t exactly the smoothest move of all time. Tim still had major hands of stone, but even so, lifting up a dress was a lot easier than unzipping a fly. And after a couple of tries, he got it up high enough to check out the situation.

  Thong and tattoo, as he might’ve guessed. Sadly, though, what must’ve been a pretty nice ass had good-sized bites taken out of both cheeks. It was like some sick bastard had gotten her while she was sleeping. A real mess, but at least it hadn’t interfered with the whole top-of-thong tattoo-above-the-crack thing he’d loved so much as a warm-blooded biped. The tattoo was a flower of some sort; nothing special. But it was nice, pretty classy, he thought. Except for the big missing chunks of ass. If she weren’t a zombie, he figured, she’d be pretty upset about that, because it was obviously an ass she’d put a lot of work and thought into.

  Perusing the Zee girl with her chewed-up ass, Tim waited for the expected signal from brain to penis, but as he expected, the link was broken. All his dick was good for anymore was dribbling urine down his leg. Even so, the Point A brain part that enjoyed the sight of a thong-and-tattoo combo was still more or less in place, so he looked for a while, wondering if he should feel guilt for what was no doubt an incident of sexual assault on his part. If that kind of thing applied to dead folks, at least.

  Zombie Marilyn Monroe didn’t pay any attention to Zombie Timothy Lipton lifting her dress up and down. She was standing there looking up at the clouds, her mouth agape and drooling. There were so many zombies standing around that there was no room to move much. And when the guy next to them got drilled by the farmer, no one paid any attention except Tim. He turned to run — OK, lurch — away, and he took a good look at Marilyn to see if any of this had registered with her. Her vacant, empty eyes were stone-cold blue, and her formerly pouty, probably moist lips were dried and cracked. In another world, Tim would’ve paid her money to let him apply lip balm. Now, he would’ve been happy to see just a glimmer of anything in there.

  But then WHAM! A slug hit her in the shoulder, spun her around and dumped her on the ground.

  Tim kept moving.

  Chapter 3. Hunger

  Nothing to eat.

  Zombie hunger was much different than the regular kind Tim had experienced as a human. It was more gnawing, more visceral, more frenzied. He’d even seen some Zees chewing on their own arms, albeit not too seriously. Even dead, it seemed, self-preservation mode had some meaning, and it didn’t make any sense to chew off the arm you might need later to pull someone’s tongue out (one of the more disturbing things he’d seen since his rebirth as ghoul). Besides, if Zees wouldn’t eat each other, there wouldn’t appear to be any inspiration for self-consumption.

  Zees wouldn’t eat each other, wouldn’t eat animals, so far as he could tell, wouldn’t eat bugs or any kind of plants. There was obviously something about live human flesh that kept the impossible possible. That, and the need for the flesh-eating trope as the cornerstone of any zombie flick. If they only ate worms or kumquats, well, not much dramatic tension there.

  And so it was that Tim started working on a new theory about what was going on, as his hunger grew and the apparent availability of fresh humans to attack and eat declined precipitously. Tim’s theory was this: He was actually in a zombie movie, the producers of which had created this outbreak or disease or whatever to create a more realistic landscape. After all, he reasoned, all the makeup was probably the biggest expense in a Z-flick, after the explosions and stuff. If you could cast a film with the real thing, wouldn’t that be a big cost savings?

  So far, though, Tim had seen no cameras, lights, craft-services tents or other signs that would indicate movie-making. He hadn’t ruled out the hidden-camera possibility, but he also knew zombie-movie gore relied on the close-up, and you can’t get that with a camera in a tree.

  Compared to Z-flicks he’d seen, the real deal was much more disturbing to Tim. He’d never taken any kind of classes on anatomy, for one thing, so in the course of seeing folks being ripped apart, he’d come across things he never knew were inside the human body. It occurred to him that he didn’t really know the difference between a liver and a spleen, and he’d wonder about some of the stuff going by: Was that a gall bladder disappearing into the bloody maw of the Zee in the Dracula outfit? What’s the difference between a vein and an artery, and how come the thicker ones seemed so much chewier?

  In those first days, when there were still a fair amount of squealing live ones to feast upon, Tim had gotten over his early inhibitions pretty quickly. Even so, he didn’t go for the low-hanging fruit of soft belly and genitalia. He recalled a book where he learned that’s the way wolves and other predators worked: After a kill, the first thing they ate was the anus, the genitalia, the entrails – the easier stuff to get to. Personally, Tim found intestines revolting. They were full of shit – or stuff on its way to be shit – and the texture was simply too slippery to handle. He’d be damned if we going to eat some guy’s balls, although he certainly wasn’t averse to a nice, fresh tit. Tits weren’t genitalia anyway, were they? Certainly part of the reproductive system.

  As for going downtown on women, he’d never had a chance. Thankfully. The guy Zees went after that like mad, and it was the source
of the only real Zee-on-Zee violence he’d seen. This was early on, when he was still around the home where the big Halloween costume party had taken place. The woman in question was having her arms torn off, her tits devoured and her legs fought over by the Three Musketeers and, he guessed, D’Artagnan, and she’d caught Tim’s eyes at the height of it. For the briefest moment, the imploring look almost caused him to do something: to help, to pull the face of the guy in the Porthos outfit out of her crotch and save her.

  But it passed, and he sank his teeth into a calf as her screaming turned to that whimper-gurgle that always signified the end. His pity soon turned to anger, though, as he discovered she’d been wearing pantyhose, some of which was now stuck in his teeth.

  Note to self, thought Tim: Avoid women wearing pantyhose.

  Although now, with live squealers so rare, he doubt he’d have any scruples about what the fresh meat was wearing. At some point, the hunger became so agonizing to some of the Zees that he saw them running into trees, walking off cliffs, shuffling into fires to be immolated rather than suffer the hunger.

  So much for his self-preservation theory. Of course, the ones who ran into trees or walked off cliffs were more or less OK. The one thing that continued to hold true, so far as Tim could tell, was that the only way to kill a Zee was to shoot it in the head, chop or lop off its head, or hit it really hard in the head. Or burn it. Freezing would probably work, too, he figured. And he’d get a chance to observe that theory before too long: It must be November now, and it was already starting to get below freezing at night.

  So add constant cold to the world’s worst hangover.

  Actually, even when it was warmer out, Tim felt cold. It was different from the cold he remembered as a live person, though. Zombie cold was all encompassing and unpleasant, but it also felt more natural — like it was to be expected. Thinking about it, with what was left of his brain, Tim arrived at another apparent truism: The only thing that made him not feel cold was when he was eating squealers. And the glow lasted for a few hours, after which he’d be freezing again. Zees must have digestive systems like cheetahs, he thought, fast and adapted to quickly processing raw meat. The key to Zee happiness, then, was consumption of fresh human flesh and a constant replenishment of such. It was the only way to feel warmer, more human.