“Yes and no,” I said.
“Explain.”
“Well, how they died doesn’t seem to matter…but the really young and the really old don’t seem to rise very often.”
“So is age a factor?”
“Not always,” Zach said. I was so thankful Zach had spoken up. Usually he was a shit who would say the wrong thing at the wrong time. But I was on thin ice. Mr. Lewis didn’t want memorized facts, he wanted us to think about the subject. So I knew my grade depended less on my speech and more on what stupid things I did or didn’t say in response to his questions.
“I.L., do you know the age of the youngest person to rise?”
“I’ve heard some stillborn kids came out zoms,” he said.
“Not true,” Mr. Lewis said. “Children as young as four have risen. But for most the lower threshold seems to be about five or six. People, this is an amazing phenomenon. Why only humans? Why not dogs? Or cats? Or apes? Think about it. One of you could end up being the person who unlocks the key to this whole mystery. Chris, that was a really good report. I.L., you seem eager to speak. Why don’t you go up next?”
I got a B on my presentation. And I got really curious about what caused the dead to rise. I watched everything I could on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel and the National Geographic Channel about it. I looked all over the internet too. They still don’t know exactly what brings them back. Some of the experts claimed it was a virus. Some said a bacterium or a fungus. Some said something about some prions, which are some goofy-ass kind of protein, like the ones that cause Mad Cow Disease. My dad says it’s just a bunch of scientists trying to drum up more money so they don’t have to get real jobs. He says as long as they keep researching the problem they’ll keep getting more funding. He talks about how they were able to cure polio and plague and small pox years and years ago but how nowadays, the big pharmaceutical companies keep researching AIDS and herpes and whatever raises the dead without ever finding anything out.
Anyway these scientists, who can’t find the cure or the cause, said something about fight or flight. The zombies rise up and we always assumed they’d be urging for a fight. It turns out they run around like a bunch of chicken shits. The littlest things spook them.
To us, this was the source of endless amusement. We didn’t think it up but we did hop on the bandwagon. People had all kinds of names for it. The one that seemed to catch on was “creeping the corpses.” That eventually got shortened to “corking.” To this day, I still don’t understand where the “k” came from. But then again, scientists who get millions of dollars in grants can’t figure out how the dead rise up and heal, so how the hell should I know how creeping the corpses became corking. But that’s what we called it.
The funniest part about corking was you never knew what would spook them. You could yell “Boo!” at the top of your lungs right next to one and the zom might not even acknowledge your existence. Then someone fifty yards away would clear his or her throat and the damn thing would spook and run. So corking had some challenge to it. I got real good at corking them.
Zach had a theory that it was the pitch of my voice. Zach thinks of himself as a musician. He can play about six songs on the electric guitar and one of them is Smoke on the Water. I don’t really consider Zach to be the next big thing in music.
But he likes to throw words around like timbre and pitch, like he knows what they even mean. So just to shut him up, I mastered a way to cork a zombie just by snapping my fingers two or three times in a row. Of course, Zach had another theory that it was just my rhythmic timing or some bullshit phrase like that. I think Zach should put down the guitar and get a job spending grant money without finding a cure or a cause for the zoms. I’m sure his rhythmic pitch and harmony theories alone could burn through a couple of million bucks.
So we spent most of the next two and a half years corking the dead when we weren’t going to high school or first year of junior college (go T-Birds!) or working at our shitty fetch-a-cart-in-the-lot part-time jobs. We corked the zombies, but we weren’t as bad as some kids.
I heard stories about kids setting zoms on fire or beating them with baseball bats. Saw a video of it on YouTube. Why the hell would you film that? Then again, why would you do it in the first place?
To me, corking a zom was kind of like chasing birds when you were a little kid. I might chase some sparrows or a robin. But I would never set one or fire or hit it with a stick. That’s just heartless. I even heard some rumors that inner city gangs made raping a female zombie a right of initiation into their gang. Who is the genius that chose that as the welcome to the group ritual? I mean even if a chick had been pretty when she was alive, zombies are like dirty mannequins that scream. I never heard or saw any evidence of it being true, but it did become legend enough to earn its own moniker, “scoring a stiff.”
We never carried it that far. When we went corking, we would just make some noise or maybe shine a flashlight at them. We didn’t want to touch the damn things.
We must have corked close to a hundred zoms back then. Everyone our age was doing it. It really didn’t seem like that big a deal. The cops made a lot of arrests and talked to us a dozen times or so.
They charged us with disturbing the peace, creating a public nuisance, and in the cases where kids hit or tripped or spit on zombies, they got charged with some bullshit like disturbing a corpse or disrespecting a dead body. We never pushed it that far so we never got charged with anything that serious.
So like most kids my age, we corked zombies whenever we had nothing better to do, which was a good part of the time. And we thought it was funny and harmless. Maybe they’d knock over some garbage cans or run into the middle of the street and get clipped by a car. We thought it was funnier if a car clipped them.
Then my mom plowed into a couple of zombies someone had corked. She died in a three-car pileup the panicked zombies caused. And all of the sudden, corking was no longer funny to me.
The real kick in the teeth wasn’t just that corked zombies had caused her death. The real poetic injustice of it all was she became a zombie herself.
It was weird to go to her wake and see her in the Plexiglas box on display like some kind of circus side show freak. She didn’t look like my mom anymore. She looked like a wax dummy robot of my mom. She was dead, but she was up and walking around.
Display boxing the dead had become the new fad in funerals. Instead of watching the dead lay in a coffin like they were taking an everlasting nap, now you watched them stand and walk around a little ten-by-ten box that you could see in but they couldn’t see out because of the one way glass.
It was supposed to give people closure, a last chance to see the dead and say goodbye. Not for the dead, they were already gone. It was supposed to be for the living. It bothered the shit out of me.
There was my mom. But she wasn’t really there. She didn’t recognize me. I couldn’t hug her or talk to her, she would just freak. At least if she were laying dead-dead in a coffin, I could touch her hand or kiss her forehead goodbye. Instead she was in a little booth like some weird science fair project.
It pissed me off. My dad talked to me. I finally understood what he meant about respecting the dead. The zombie in the glass booth had been my mom. And now she wasn’t. She was still there in her physical form but she wasn’t my mom anymore. It was a mockery of my mom. Losing her was tough enough. Seeing her as one of the reanimated mannequins we spent so much time taunting and spooking was like God was rubbing my nose in what a shit I had been for the last couple of years.
We had her cremated. It was the law. If you buried someone, they would just dig their way back up and go walking and running and freaking out.
And it wasn’t just having them walk around that was the real pain in the ass. As creepy as that was to the squeamish and as funny as that was to the immature, the real threat was their hunger. They weren’t hungry for us. But all that walking and running made them hungry for food. They’d
strip farmers’ fields like five-foot locusts. They’d wander into a grocery store and eat all the fresh produce and meat and baked goods.
It started to dawn on people what a threat these things really were. They were dead. No longer able to work or reproduce or speak or share a thought or feel love. Not that the disabled or the sterile or the mute are any less human, because all those groups are still alive. The zombies were dead. We had people starving to death in third world countries and the zombies were eating any food they could find while forever trapped in their own little self-moving, self-healing bodies.
My dad applied for the job first. The Department of Homeland Security paid private contractors to shoot the dead and stick them with locator beacons. A shot zombie will heal in a day or two and get up and start wandering again. So we shoot them and tag them and trucks come to haul their bodies to the crematoriums.
I think my dad first took the job to get some vengeance for my mom. Like killing the zombies would somehow ease his pain or make up for her loss or even the score. It was good money and he was a single dad. He got me in.
I do it for different reasons than him. My first reaction to the zoms was ignorance and immaturity. I corked them because they creeped me out and it made me feel better. Like I was smarter than death and better than what they had been in life.
My second reaction to the zoms was attempting to understand it. My mom became one and it was like God was shoving it in my face. I wanted to be angry, but I couldn’t. I missed my mom, and nothing I could do would ever bring her back. And it made me appreciate that every zombie had a family and some friends, someone who loved them and missed them and wanted them back. I learned to respect the dead because of the life they had led and the living friends and relatives they had left behind.
My third reaction to the zombies was respect for the living. I don’t shoot zoms for some cheap thrills or for some twisted sense of vengeance. Whatever they are, they are no longer what they once were. They eat food that could feed the living and they wander around in confusion and fear and every once in a while one of them wanders or gets corked into traffic and they kill someone’s loved one. You can’t really blame the zoms. They are what they are. So someone has to put them back down so they have their chance to shuffle off this world for the next. I learned to respect the dead. And now I have learned to respect the living. In a lot of ways, it’s the same thing.
Our Dead series
Dead: The Ugly Beginning and Dead: Revelations
DEAD:
Fortunes and Failures—The third book in the Dead series will be
available December 15 2011!
In Zomblog you find Samuel Todd
...a regular guy...
...Failed husband...
...Loving father...
...Dutiful worker...
...Aspiring rock star.
He had no idea if anyone would care, or take the time, to read his daily blog entries about his late night observations. But what started as an open monologue of his day-to-day life became a running journal of the first-hand account detailing the rising of the dead and the downfall and degradation of mankind...
Zomblog II continues with Meredith Gainey
She is a survivor…and determined to retain that status as the zombie apocalypse wipes out most of humanity. Unable to accept an existence behind walls and fences, she finds herself in constant danger…and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Look for Zomblog: The Final Chapter
coming August 2011
THE DEAD WALK!
Slip into the skin of common men and women and experience the horror through their eyes. Follow the Zombie Apocalypse from its initial stages to the brink of the abyss, and over…into the pits of an unthinkable Hell on Earth. Tune into your local radio stations for the latest updates or stay here and follow the story as it unfolds on…
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A Man of Letters by Eric Pollarine
A Soldiers Lament by Patrick D’Orazio
Blackout by Amber Whitley
Childish Things by William Wood
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Shear Terror by Chantal Boudreau
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Abandoned and scared, but less alone than he could have ever imagined, Sam awakens to the screams of the other children on the island of Fervor, and the absence of all adults. To make matters worse, despite hearing this chaos in his head, he finds himself deaf to the normal sou-nds around him. His only answers are now being provided by a strangely charismatic boy na-med Francis who is about to lead Sam to a gathering that will alter his life. Why have things chang-ed so drastically on the island, who is responsible for these changes, and what does this mean to the remaining inhabitants of Fervor?
Dakota Riley is a member of the Seattle Drug Task Force. During an investigation into an international drug smuggling ring, he loses his best friend and partner. To add insult to injury, he is assigned an African-American rook-ie, Marc Bradley. Seeking revenge rather than justice, Dakota ditches the rookie...and almost gets himself killed. After leaving the hospital for a ‘forced’ vacation, Dakota and Marc head to Marc’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. A day out on a fishing boat goes wrong when a mysterious storm arrives. The boat is destroyed, and the two men wash ashore...in 1861, just prior to the start of the American Civil War.
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Chivalry Is Dead Page 24
