On the far side of the hill atop which the church stood, the ground was heaped with indeterminate lumps of mass that swarmed with clouds of flies so dense that they resembled smoke. A stench emanated from the church and its grounds that reached them long before they had arrived there. Then they saw others who had been “captured,” as Kurt supposed they were, walking along the same road. They were human beings—men and women, like he and Randall, being led by the creatures, some with their wrists held fast, others that had been bound with ties of some sort. They were all being led into the church. It was more activity than Kurt and Randall had seen in a long time. By comparison to their previous weeks of wandering alone down vacant roads, through unpopulated woods, into abandoned settlements and across cemeteries bereft even of the dead, this activity seemed an almost metropolitan bustle.
As they approached the church, the stench grew stronger and more repulsive. Kurt had the impulse to cover his nose, but his hands were still held firmly behind his back.
They were led inside the building, into the church foyer. The room was enclosed under a low ceiling, unlit, and smelling, in addition to the unidentified, overridingly putrid stench, of mildew and decay. The walls were grimy, and the framed pictures and images that had been hung on the wall were discolored and unrecognizable. The floor was littered with scraps of paper that had been trampled and were now completely illegible.
From this room, they were led into the sanctuary, which was an ostentatiously large space that reverberated so fully that it was difficult to distinguish individual sounds in the din that filled it. There was a high balcony that hung over many rows of the pews at the back, accessible by stairs that flanked the rear of the chamber. They led Kurt and Randall up these. By this time, Kurt was beginning to feel acute hunger, and the climb made him feel it all the more, and he became light-headed as they reached the top.
From the top of the balcony, they had a clearer view of the main floor of the sanctuary. The pews had been uprooted from the floor and repurposed into makeshift pens or cells in which people—human beings, like Kurt and Randall—had been herded and confined. They were jammed in so close to one another that they stood one’s nose pressed against the other’s chin; another’s face buried in yet another’s slope of the back. There were men, women, and children, and in some cases, children had been herded in together where the only remaining space was in the vertical; they hung on their mother’s backs and rested their feet on top of another child’s shoulders.
At the front of the church, where the altar had been, there was a cluster of them, hunched around something that they could not see. There came a loud, rending, metallic, almost machine-like sound. There also seemed to be some metal piping that led from the altar to the side of the building, but of this Kurt could not be sure. The front of the church was at a distance that prevented him from making it out in any great detail.
Kurt and Randall were ushered into one of the cells constructed out of pews on the balcony. They stumbled over one another and bumped into a man who was already in the pen. There was still enough room left for them to stand at a distance at which they could look at one another’s faces.
The other resident of the cell was a short, middle-aged man with glasses. His head sprouted wisps of hair in a sharp widow’s peak that, despite its overgrowth, still did not fully cover his head. The uneven growth of his facial hair told that he wore a moustache in previous life, which had grown out and drooped now like the hands of a clock that no longer told time. He wore thick, heavy glasses that made his eyes look twice as large as they were, although it was clear that he could see nothing. He wore a dirty tweed jacket that, despite having torn at the seams and frayed at the edges, still lent him a bookish, learned look.
“Hello,” the man said, in a high-pitched and husky voice. “I’m Dr. Walter Smegma.”
Kurt held out his hand first. “Kurt.”
Dr. Smegma shook his hand. “Kurt.”
Randall gestured likewise. “Randall,” he said.
“Randall.”
Dr. Smegma smiled at them sunnily, almost as though, it seemed to Kurt, that he was unaware of their current situation—that they had been captured and put into a cell in an abandoned church commandeered by the undead.
“So you’re a doctor,” Kurt said. “What are you a doctor of?”
“I’m a scientist. Quantum mechanics. Ph.D.”
“I see. Did you just get here, too?” Kurt asked him.
“No, I’ve been here for some time now, some time,” said Dr. Smegma. “There was an overflow, and they were only just now able to put me in this cell here. I’ve been observing them the meanwhile. Fascinating.”
“What’s fascinating?”
“Why, they are,” said the doctor. “At least, from a scientific perspective.”
“What’s going on here?” asked Randall.
“Processing,” answered the scientist.
“What sort of processing?” asked Kurt.
The doctor tilted his head a little to the side, wrinkled his nose, and blinked his eyes. “Food processing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” said Dr. Smegma, smiling boyishly, “the human brain seems to be their main source of nutrition. In every attack I’ve witnessed, or that I imagine you’ve witnessed, the brain is the first thing they consume. Then they will move on to the muscles and consume them, likely for protein. Then they consume the organs last. It seems that these organs provide little or no nutritional value to them, only serving to satiate their appetite, albeit only for a little while. But what they’ve done here—what they’ve done is to streamline this whole process. You see, they’ve rounded us up, and at the front there—” He nearly chuckled as if from giddiness. “At the front, you see, they separate all of the parts. They remove the head from the body, and then they puncture the skull and remove the brain, and send it through a processor that makes a… a brain sauce, if you will. Then, you see, they suspend the bodies, headless. They work the arms, holding them up as well, to drain all of the blood from the body. And then they flay the meat from the bones. The remainder is discarded; they eject it from that chute.” He pointed toward the network of pipes at the front of the sanctuary. “It’s a very methodical process. It’s not very complicated, but it runs like clockwork.”
Kurt and Randall stood at the edge of their cell. They stood on their toes and strained their eyes to look to the front of the sanctuary. What the doctor had said was true. The two men watched as, at the front, an automatic saw of some sort bellowed and lowered in pitch as it severed the head of one of the “prisoners.” The naked body of the prisoner squirmed momentarily as blood sprayed up out of its neck. Then one of the creatures brought down a large metal hook which it drove through both of the feet of the body. This hook was lifted, hoisting the decapitated body up and hanging it upside down. The same creature lifted the arms, placing the wrists next to the waist of the upside-down figure, and squeezing the soft tissue of the arms. Blood gushed out of the neck into a metal bowl below. Meanwhile, another had taken the head and driven down some sort of piledriver, pulverizing the skull, sending up a wet spurt of blood, and extracted the gray matter, placing it in one of the chutes. After the blood had been drained from the body, the first creature stood next to it and, with the skill of a practiced butcher, separated the meat from the bone, discarding the organs as offal in a bin with the blood. The business was messy. By the end, it was difficult to distinguish which parts of the body were which. Except for scant white patches that revealed bone, it all blended together in a dark, soaked, and spattered hodgepodge, but it was clear that the creatures knew what they were doing. They were behaving automatically, as though programmed.
Kurt stood with his arms crossed, his face twisted into a sneer. But having had it explained to him, he felt a little easier in his skin, and he leaned back comfortably against the cell wall.
“You see?” said Dr. Smegma. “And on the other side of this building is a whole crowd
of them, grown fat from the labors of the others in here, no longer exercising from hunting and eating more than they can ever hope to digest.”
“I don’t know,” said Kurt. “This all seems too bizarre. They’re not nearly organized enough to—”
“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Dr. Smegma. “That’s what we would think, yes. We would think that they were incapable of complex thought, of planning, and organization, such as we have seen here… but we’ve seen it. You’ve seen it, gentlemen? We would think that they were only zombies, mindless… but they are clearly much more than that. Much, much more!”
“If they’re not zombies, what are they?” asked Kurt.
“I’ve no idea!” Dr. Smegma exclaimed openly. “But perhaps we’ve been wrong about them all this time.”
“But we’ve never seen—” Kurt began. Then he checked himself. He cupped his chin in his hand and gazed at the floor. The floor was filthy, and the concrete was cracked. “How could this happen?”
“How does anything happen?” said Dr. Smegma. “Biology! It must have been in their programming to become self-organizing. It was inevitable—only a matter of time. From chaos comes order.”
Kurt’s senses had acclimated to the vile stench that permeated the air, but a new wave of nausea hit him.
“Fascinating,” Dr. Smegma repeated.
Meanwhile, Randall’s face had grown white and moisture collected on it. Although the sanctuary was hot and the air humid, Randall was sweating also in a rage. “It’s inhuman,” he said at last.
“Well, of course,” Dr. Smegma said. “They are not human.”
“I mean, it’s cruel and disgusting,” said Randall, his voice quavering. “It’s…abominable. How can you simply say it’s ‘fascinating’?”
“Well, perhaps my scientist’s training has taught me to be too objective,” he said. “But look at the precision with which they operate. And furthermore, I have not witnessed any verbal communication between them. How do they know which stations to take? How does the one know what the other is doing? Is it, perhaps, like the activity of bees, where different castes are designed to perform certain functions—drones, workers, and so forth? Or rather, as I am more inclined to suspect given their connection to us as humans, do they communicate through some higher sense? Telepathy, perhaps?”
“Who the fuck cares?” blurted Kurt.
“Well, I admit my concerns are likely motivated by my academic predilections, but of course, you may care if you care for your own survival. I myself began to seek to understand the zombie (if he is indeed a zombie) and how he operates in order to learn best how to avoid or defeat him. You may, however, discover that he represents a higher order of life-form than yourself, and that your own survival is a concern only relative yourself, unimportant in the face of the overall thrust of…evolution.”
“So you’re saying,” said Kurt with an intentional note of insolence and disgust, “is that they are the next step in evolutionary progress? That they’re better than us?”
“Ah, no, not even that—” exclaimed Dr. Smegma, holding up a finger. “Even ‘progress’ and ‘better’ are relative terms. Those words are loaded with what we have already decided must be progressive, or superior, an appeal to some sort of system of our own. But you see, what is repulsive to us has no bearing in the long run. There is only what survives and what does not, and only by this advancement is a thing justified. Persistence is its own justification. Had we been able to weather this out, defeated the zombie—only then would we have been justified in judging ourselves superior to the zombie. But here we sit, we three, in this little cell, awaiting our decapitation and dismemberment—what grounds do we have to say that we are ‘better,’ or even that we are ‘worse’ than they? No, I will not debate with you and contend that they are ‘better’ while you say that they are ‘worse.’ I merely point to the fact that they have beaten us. That is all. ‘Better’ and ‘worse’ are ideas that we invent—and when we are swept away, they will matter no longer.”
Randall was visibly disturbed. His face had contorted and there were tears in his eyes. Kurt was still going over what Dr. Smegma had said, when Randall flared up.
“We can clearly see what is better and what is worse—what is good and what is bad! How can anyone look at that and say that it is neither?”
“I can.”
“But, what about…humanity?”
“What of it? Humanity is biology. Consider the Sphex wasp. A Sphex is a carnivorous insect that paralyzes its prey to take it to its nest. But before it brings its prey into its nest, it inspects the nest first to make sure that it is fit for the prey. Then it emerges, relocates the prey, and drags it into the nest. But—if the prey is moved, by say, an experimenter, and the Sphex emerges from the nest after inspection to find the prey missing, it relocates the moved prey, drags it to the nest, but then re-inspects the nest. Its programming has been reset. It will continue to do this as long as the experimenter moves the prey.
“Gentlemen, it is no different with us—we are operating according to our own programming which, admittedly, is much more complex, but nonetheless similar. And as you see, the zombie is operating according to his own programming, more complex than our own. It therefore seems strange to us, and perhaps we even see fit to pass a moral judgment on it. But I ask you, is it not merely a higher form of order? And in this case, is it not to be embraced?”
Randall was nearly shaking with rage. “Can a zombie love?” he uttered vehemently. He moved closer to Kurt, as though to stand next to him offered some sort of solidarity in this conflict.
Dr. Smegma seemed less interested. “Love is a biological impulse. If you mean the attachment to a romantic mate, a partner, then I have no idea. You know that they copulate. No doubt you have heard it, as I have. In either case, it does not much matter. Even if ‘love’ were a ‘thing’ that we possessed and the zombie did not, that is not yet grounds on which to dismiss the zombie as inferior.”
Kurt was growing more uncomfortable and found that he could identify with neither Randall nor Dr. Smegma. He was repulsed by both of them.
“From chaos comes order,” repeated the doctor, “and from lower orders come higher orders. You may resist it if you choose. I choose, rather, to embrace the inevitable.”
Randall locked his arms together across his chest and turned abruptly in a refusal to engage any further. Dr. Smegma turned, smiling, to Kurt.
“And what was it that you used to do?” he asked conversationally.
“We were gravediggers,” said Kurt.
Dr. Smegma made a noise like “ah,” and turned to watch the activity below.
Kurt directed his gaze once more to the floor and saw that, among the filth that littered the ground was a metallic object that reflected the light, sparkling. He bent down, brushed aside the clods of dust and human waste in which it was embedded, and picked it up. It was a child’s music box—without electricity, probably the only object that could reproduce music for a child. He turned the crank, and almost in the instant that it plunked out its tune, the words arose in his memory:
London bridge is falling down
Falling down, falling down…
He thought about the child who had likely owned this music box—a child who had had a greater fraction of its life consumed by dread of the zombie. Had the child listened to this tune to remember its home, its previous life? Had it listened to remember a lost loved one, perhaps even its mother? Did it recall these memories to console itself from the constancy of death, the knowledge of its own imminent annihilation? Kurt felt as though a thread that he had been working to unravel had just doubled back on itself and become hopelessly tangled forever.
There was a commotion at the boundary of their cell, and one of the planks was pulled away. Their time had come. A zombie pulled first at Dr. Smegma who, still smirking, followed with what seemed almost to be excitement. Randall flailed as they came for him, but they soon subdued him and brought him out of the cell behind the
doctor. Finally, they came for Kurt who submitted more out of apathy and weariness than the active cooperation of the scientist, and dropped the music box to the floor.
They descended the stairs, emerging onto the main level of the sanctuary. They walked forward amidst the awful din between the rows of wooden enclosures, and Kurt once again became aware of the horrible stench as it grew stronger at his approach. He looked at the pens as they passed, but the boards were too high to make out who, if anyone, was inside.
They brought Dr. Smegma up to the front of the church, where the altar used to be, where the machinery for human processing was. They stripped his clothes off with great efficiency, and he willingly obliged, helping them with their efforts. He removed his glasses, revealing how miniscule his eyes really were, blinking them in blindness at his surroundings. They laid him down, naked, in the machine, and the blade, powered mysteriously by something other than electricity—Kurt saw no wires or sources of power—began its awful whirr.
Suddenly, the two zombies who were attending Randall howled loudly, the noise blending with the noise of the saw. The saw ceased, and those operating the machinery bellowed and clambered down from the platform.
All throughout the sanctuary, the zombies broke from their stations and descended on the cells, tearing down the makeshift wooden structures, splintering and breaking the wood and throwing it aside. The cells were still packed as full as they had been when Kurt and Randall had arrived. The zombies attacked the people still inside, pulling them from the confines of the cell, tearing at them with their fingers and their teeth, ripping the flesh from their bones, cracking their skulls on the cement floor, devouring the brains, devouring the muscles, drinking down the fluids, discarding nothing, bathing the sanctuary with sprays and gushes of blood in a melee of carnage.
The Imminent Scourge Page 16