by J. K. Norry
“Hey!” she yelled. “Stop that!”
Elayna wasn’t in control anymore, and she didn’t stop clawing at the glass because she had been told to. Her hunger made her turn at the smell of fear and flesh behind her. A few people were waiting in chairs against the opposite wall, and she began to slowly advance on them. The woman continued to scream at her through the bulletproof transparency between them, but the sounds weren’t words to Elayna anymore. The only sign of intelligence left in her movements was the way she angled to block the exit before her swifter prey could escape. She needed to get her hands on one of them, and soon she did.
Her grip was so strong it hurt her own fingers as she squeezed the man’s arm who had moved to subdue her. He fought her off as she tried to bite him again and again. A tiny part of Elayna watched from deep inside of her hunger, hoping the man was strong enough and fast enough to resist her slow frenzied attack for however long it took for the precinct to marshall their forces. The rest of her was bent on biting him, drinking his blood and swallowing his flesh. There was not enough of her left to try and fight the hunger, or wonder at how she had resisted it for so long.
Chapter 11
Nestled in a small valley, shielded from the elements by the mountains, a small stone building stood in the same place it had for over two thousand years. It was rumored that the Christian messiah had visited this place during the long chunk of his life not recorded in their book. It was also rumored that the monastery had later become a haven for homosexuals, as many religious orders had before society began to acknowledge their presence and slowly grant them the legal right to exist as others did. David didn’t give the rumors any more thought than he gave his own quiescent sexuality. His only concern was finding God. His teacher had brought him here, telling him that this was where the holy spirit would find its way into his soul for good at last. Since the Master had died, David had tended to the food growing at the foot of the mountain as carefully as he tended to the secret garden of his soul. He plucked the weeds and harvested the fruit of his bittersweet aloneness, meditating for long hours in a search to find what he already was. At the same time, quite some ways away…
Everyone in the city had seen one of them firsthand by now, or become one of them. Neighborhoods were no longer segregated by caste or class, but by what the inhabitants hungered for. The power still flowed, and the digital stream of news that it carried was for once relevant to everyone. They all knew that the ramblers were easily outrun, and fairly easily taken out with a skillful swing of a sharpened sword. They knew not to let a rambler get ahold of them, or bite them, and that anyone bitten was lost for good. No one was afraid of the ramblers, unless they were caught in a tight space by a large group. Many went hunting them with the long slim swords that every other house in this city seemed to have hanging over a mantel, in the eerily quiet mornings. It wasn’t the ramblers that found the streets deserted long before the curfew horn sounded.
The howlers were the ones that ruled the city from early afternoon, through the long nights, to the wee morning hours. You could hear them when they hit the streets, howling their hunger and spreading their insatiable need. More neighborhoods went from tending fences and feeble gardens to feasting on flesh and hunting humans with each passing hour, as the howlers burst through walls and tunneled under the earth to get to them. Wooden fences shredded to useless splinters at their clawed hands, and even chain link bent and twisted and snapped under their frenzied onslaught. It soon became clear that it was only a matter of time before one army would overwhelm the other, and swell its ranks with the fallen troops.
The news said to avoid the howlers. It was hardly necessary advice, although it came with an emergency caveat every time: if you do find yourself having to face a howler, shoot it in the eyes with high-caliper hollow-point rounds, aiming along the straight line of the optic nerve. Cutting off their heads worked, apparently, but it was a task sure to ruin the strongest blade before the severing was complete. The howlers healed faster than you could cut them, and bullets glanced off their thick skulls and armored chests. The advice was always delivered in a hopeless tone, reiterated shortly thereafter by some form of the original message: don’t tangle with a howler.
Mallory was at the center of it all, peaceful professor turned zombie warlord. He organized the troops without having to speak with them, leading the hive mind to swarm one block after another. He had found the high-ranking officer that would get him into a military base before the word and the family had spread too far, and he had interrupted his lunch to feast on the man. They had gone together to the base, and soon their army had a headquarters and armaments.
Tanks roved the streets, smashing down the strongest walls and leveling the highest fences. Howlers walked beside the armored vehicles in orderly ranks, armed with machine guns and teeth and claws that made the enemy swords look like useless toys. The enemy rolled in their own ground troops; soon those tanks and guns and minds were manned by inhuman hunger as well. Mallory had to put jets in the air to fight off invading forces, with the advantage of not caring where planes or bombs fell to the earth. The enemy did far more damage to the people they were trying to save than they did to the cause, and Mallory welcomed every flaming explosion like he did his next bite of bloody flesh.
It wasn’t long before his task was complete, his duties discharged. The city was filled with howlers and ramblers, and the remaining heat signatures were being hunted by more of them every day. Mallory had kept three young troops unchanged, chained to each other and his desk in his office. For three days they had cowered at the end of their tethers, watching in horror as he gave mental or radioed orders to the swarming mass of howlers. Mallory had ignored them as best as he could, although the smell of their fear drove him out to hunt fresh meat regularly. It was always only one bite, and that one bite got harder to find as the news spread; but Mallory had managed to keep them alive by hunting every few hours. He had refused the slabs of flesh that his brothers and sisters tried to bring him, surprised more than once at how considerate zombies could be toward each other.
Now the tide had turned, and his long wait was finally over. Mallory sat at his desk, watching the three young men hungrily. They had gotten water over the last few days, but he wasn’t sure if anyone had fed them. All three of them looked thinner and paler than they had when he had first clicked the manacles about their wrists and ankles. Of course, he had never dared let himself stare at them for long minutes like this. They had good cause to be pale and drawn.
“Don’t kill them,” one said, elbowing the other two out of the way. “They both have families. Dillon here has a wife, and a baby. Billy’s parents mean the world to him, and he means everything to them. I don’t have anybody.”
Mallory smiled, and he saw the brave volunteer shrink away at the sight of his teeth. They had grown in all the way, thick rows of jagged sharp edges that curved inward toward his hungry maw.
“You wouldn’t try to use that argument if you had seen the streets lately,” Mallory responded, still smiling. “Dillon’s wife and baby are surely a part of my family now, as are Billy’s sweet old folks. There are more of us than there are of you, boys, and one number keeps getting bigger while the other continues to rapidly dwindle. I would say this is a great opportunity for the three of you, but there won’t be enough left of any of you to celebrate or join my family. As brave young military men ready to give your lives for humanity’s sake, you boys will be heroes in a few minutes.”
“How can you say that?” The same young man spoke. “You’re murdering thousands of innocent people.”
“Oh no, it’s way more than that,” Mallory waved his clawed hand. “And you aren’t listening. We’re not killing anyone. We’re growing our family. We’re saving humanity.”
“How can you say that?” he demanded again. “You’re not even human. You’re a…you’re a…”
“A zombie?” Mallory nodded. “Why do you think the image elicits such a dramatic re
sponse in people, even in movies? The collective consciousness of this planet remembers the other times nature has used this solution to man’s endless problems. It’s why indigenous people burn their dead, or eat them, instead of burying them. They live in a shared dreamtime, in which they can see the entire history of the planet because of the way they are connected to it and each other. They don’t want their dead coming back to life.”
“What?” The man’s face paled another shade. “The dead are coming back to life?”
“Just the ones that haven’t had their essential bodily fluids removed, mostly folks cooling in morgues,” Mallory shrugged. “Zombies are not magical creatures. We need many of the same things that people do, biologically. We’re just designed differently, deliberately, to carry out one sole single-minded purpose.”
“What?”
“To decimate your kind.” Mallory shrugged once more.
“I thought you said you were saving humanity!” The young troop was shouting now, either because he realized it was hopeless or because he had not received emotional training equivalent to his weapons training.
“Precisely,” Mallory nodded. “Do you not know the meaning of ‘decimate’? In the most traditional sense, it refers to the practice of selecting one in ten men from a tribe to be sacrificed, so the rest of the tribe might go on with full bellies instead of everyone dying from starvation. Even when the word ‘decimate’ is used to describe a great cataclysm, it implies that something is left. When a city is decimated, a few structures still stand. When a population is decimated, it is not wiped out completely. Humankind must be decimated, or it will be wiped out completely.”
One of the other young men screwed up his courage enough to speak.
“What are you, a zombie professor?”
Mallory laughed. “I was a professor before I became a zombie.”
He decided right then that he would eat that one last. Mallory had always been easily charmed by a sense of humor.
“Who are you to decide that humanity needs to be culled?” The brave and shouty one was trying to show a little intellect. Mallory would eat him first.
“I didn’t decide,” Mallory responded. “My mother did, your mother did. The Earth did.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he was shouting again. Mallory could smell the fear, could feel it twisting his guts into a hungry knot.
“We can’t take our warring ways to space,” Mallory sighed. “She won’t let us represent her that way. We have to learn that there is another way to be, and another way to expect others to be, before we can participate in the activities in the rest of the universe.”
“Are you saying that aliens are real?” The one with the sense of humor seemed to have a healthy curiosity as well.
“No,” Mallory shook his head. “I’m saying that if aliens are real, we can’t go looking for them with guns and presumptions about their possible viciousness. If there are aliens, they come from a living planet as we do. Their planet will no more let them colonize the cosmos with violence than ours will us.”
“So tell the governments that!” The yelling one was getting on his nerves now.
Mallory smiled. “They all know that they are driving the lot of you to catastrophe one way or another. They don’t care to listen. We have to show them.”
“How?” he cried. “How can you show them if they are all dead?”
“Like this.” Mallory moved before any of them could react, and he had a mouthful of the annoying one as he drew back. Chewing the meat shoved it down his throat, and it only took a moment to swallow the bloody warmth. During that moment the young man clutched his bare bleeding bicep, looking at Mallory with horror. Then his eyes went rusted red, his skin went even more pale, and he began reaching for the professor. The other two tried to stop him, befuddled, but he made as if to bite them with his new jagged fangs.
“No,” Mallory said. “They’re mine. You’re mine. It is time for me to feast until I get my fill. Then I must return to Maya.”
The man turned, and stepped into Mallory’s hungry embrace. The other two watched, their eyes wide, as he tore long strips of sinew from his arms and legs. Every time a vein or artery would start spraying or pumping blood, the professor would drink hungrily until the wound closed and the flow subsided. Mallory felt his teeth growing stronger, his armor getting denser, and he realized that he hadn’t quite completely transformed. The three strangely useless flaps of flesh at his throat still did nothing, but the rest of him felt as though he could do anything. He ate the first man and the second without pause, and he was nearly halfway through the third before his thinking mind came back to him.
The man’s thoughts flooded the professor’s mind as surely as his blood flooded his mouth. Mallory stopped drinking. He swallowed and looked up at the man.
“You can fly jets.” It wasn’t a question. The lolling head nodded.
Mallory wiped his face on his sleeve. It didn’t help. His clothes and face were still caked in layered death, and a stubborn piece of one of the other men was lodged between two of his jagged teeth.
“Let’s go get you some dinner, Dillon. I think I’m good.” Mallory smiled. “How would you like to meet the spirit of the Earth?”
Chapter 12
Megan couldn’t believe what an unprofessional sham the cruise ship gig had turned out to be. They were just using her name to fill the boat, and it had worked. Hundreds of thousands of her fans had responded to her social media posts, and the whole month had been booked in a matter of hours. Even when she had read the script and met the other performers, she’d consoled herself with the fact that it was all for charity. Then her manager had contacted her to tell her that the charity had diverted all the funds to an offshore account and disappeared, paying out zero dollars to the ‘Have A Dream’ foundation. She knew it wasn’t the cruise line’s fault, but no one was going to forgive her or them for calling themselves ‘Circus Cruise Lines’, or for running their events like one. Now they were saying that there was an outbreak at the port city, and all ships were being diverted to other destinations. She just wanted this ship and the nightmare experience of that dreadful show to be in her past for good. In the city with the closed port, a few miles away…
Elayna was handcuffed to a table, enough to move her arms about a foot or so in any direction. She had come out of the other side of her hunger to find herself here, alone and unchanged. It was still there, gnawing at her, but for some reason she had control of her mind and her thoughts once more. She sat there, calm and glad for it, until the door opened. The room was suddenly flooded with the scent of flesh and fear, and her guts twisted with need.
“You caused quite a little scene, I hear.”
She looked up at him. It was hard to see him as a person when her whole being was bent on seeing him as a meal. Elayna began to fight the hunger again, mustering everything she had to make sense.
“Hungry…” she moaned. That was not the word she was trying to say at all. Elayna looked at his hands, tried again.
“Flesh…” she gasped hungrily. That still wasn’t it. She frowned her frustration, looked the man in the eye, and tried once more.
“Brains…” she heard the horrific sound that had been her own voice not long ago. Her betrayed hunger was mocking her, speaking for her.
“You say you’re hungry?” The man was trying very hard to smile at her. “I’m Detective Stiles. If I can get you to answer a few questions for me, I’m sure I can find you a bite to eat. What’s your name?”
Elayna glared at him. She tried once more, with everything she had.
“Zombie…” she said. That was it. That was the word.
His eyes went wide, and he smiled a pained smile.
“You said that word in the lobby,” he said. “Why would you say that?”
She let the chains within her slip free. She allowed the hunger to rise in her once more, to find a way to show him what she was trying to say. Her hands went immediately to the
ends of their restraints. Flesh and muscle began to fray at her wrists as her strength pulled unrelentingly. Bone crackled, one of her thumbs went a strange new direction, and one of the cuffs slipped over the break. Elayna reached the free hand for him as she tugged at the one still restrained by unyielding metal. Blood dripped to the floor as she grasped at nothing, and an involuntary spasm threw her chin in a dozen directions randomly and rapidly.
When the spasm ended, she met his eyes with her hungered gaze.
The man exited the room as quickly as he could, slamming the door shut behind him. He watched her through the network of metal between the two panes of glass, the window that ordinarily made him feel safe. He wondered how long the other cuff would hold, and how long the glass and grate would keep her in after that. The detective saw her calming down almost immediately, to his relief. She settled back in her seat, and even refitted the handcuff to her wrist. Her thumb was pointed the right way again, somehow. His own pounding heart slowed. The detective turned the handle once more.
“That was rather-“ Stiles stepped into the room. Immediately she launched herself at him, straining at the end of her restraints. He stepped out of the room and locked the door securely behind him. After his heart stopped trying to pound from his chest, he pressed the button on the intercom next to the grilled glass.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
She turned her head, relieved. As long as she couldn’t smell him, it wasn’t so bad. Her hunger only consumed most of her thoughts. Like this, Elayna could talk.