The Z Chronicles

by Ellen Campbell

  Even though there were no living there, my body decided it liked the train station. Up and down the platforms. The doors to the place where the tickets were sold—I don’t know if it had a proper name—were locked. There were bodies inside. Dead ones. Proper dead. People had hid there to escape the zombies, I suppose, and finally shot themselves when they realised escape was hopeless. I could see the gun they passed around; the last of them had used it on herself.

  The audio recording at the platform was stuck in a loop.

  "We are sorry— We are sorry— We are sorry—“

  Canada, eh.

  I reached the end of the platform and turned, walking back. Sometimes I would pass by the windows of the ticket stand—that was it, the ticket stand!—and, although the glass was caked with dust and snow, sometimes I would see myself in it. A rotting, shambling corpse, still wearing that dark green dress, now stained a rusty brown colour because of all the dirt and blood.

  I liked seeing myself like this. I couldn’t imagine many others of my kind would; all rot-ten, flesh falling off, almost unrecognisable except for our secondary characteristics. My green dress. Broken glasses, still on my face. Long hair.

  Truth is, for the first time, I looked like a real woman.

  I was born a boy named Brian.

  Being trans affects everything. How you look. How you walk. How you talk. Dating. Masturbation. Sex. Even beyond that sphere; work, travel, family. My family disowned me which, in some ways, made the transition a lot easier. Having a supporting family is excellent for trans people, but if people don’t support you, they can’t be a part of your life.

  Canada is a very safe, very accepting place for trans people, but even the safest place on Earth’s still far from perfect. Even if most of my fear was irrational, it was still real; present, like a sour taste in your mouth you can’t get rid of, just kind of learn to ignore.

  Sometimes people ask me what this fear is like.

  Imagine, for a moment, you just got the following text from your parents:

  Call us now, urgent.

  Picture your phone with that message on it. That feeling you’re feeling—the tightening of your chest, the ache in your body, those flashes of almost-memories as you try to imagine why they might send something like this and what it could mean—that’s how I felt walking down the street on an average day.

  These days, though, I didn’t feel anything like that at all. And it was good.

  I reached the end of the platform and my body turned to do another endless lap. And then it stopped.

  I could hear a train coming.

  There hadn’t been trains since…whatever had caused the zombies to come. Yet there it was; a whistle in the distance, so faint I thought I was imagining it. The faint clatter of wheels on tracks. The faintest change in air pressure.

  The smell of living humans.

  Then it came. The front of it was covered in bloody spikes; bodies, some still moving, were impaled upon it. A grisly machine tearing down the tracks, faster than any train I’d ever seen. I could sense my body wanted to go to it, to leap upon the metal cage, tear it open and devour the people inside. There must have been dozens. Hundreds.

  Yet, my body just watched the train thunder by. It was full of people, a cacophony of steel and flesh. Going where, I didn’t know. Further down the lines. How the humans aboard had managed to get that thing to work, I had no idea.

  The scent of human flesh was ambrosia to me…or whatever part of me controlled my body. It turned, following the metal carriage as it passed, looking at all their faces. Their horrified, disgusted faces.

  At least, this time, they looked that way for an entirely justified reason.

  The train disappeared down the tracks, its cargo of flesh taken with it, and I followed.

  * * *

  As I followed the train tracks, drawn by the scent of the living, my body did so on autopilot—even more than usual. I barely noticed the changing scenery. The train’s arrival, and the loathing on those people’s faces, had got me thinking.

  My parents hated me for becoming a woman. But, you know, I didn’t hate them.

  It’s hard to avoid meeting hate with hate, even if you try not to. Everyone wants to be good; everyone wants to feel that they’re right, justified, correct. They want to feel that anyone they hate deserves it and anyone they love is worthy of their affection. This can work in reverse; for some, there is a feeling that everyone you love must be good, and everyone you hate must be bad. Good people don’t hate good people.

  When it doesn’t work out this way, cognitive dissidence occurs; that uncomfortable feeling of knowing your beliefs are wrong but trying, as hard as you can, to justify them.

  Parents are probably the most extreme version of this. They get a picture in their head of what their child should be, and will try as hard as they can to make sure that said child becomes that vision. A parent might want a football player or the opposite of a football player, they might want them to love or hate Dungeons and Dragons; a thin daughter, an outgoing daughter, an A student…an image is painted before the child is even born.

  My parents wanted a son. A strong, lacrosse playing, frat-boy son, and for a time, I really tried to be that for them. It never felt right; it was a mask, a lie, a painting over another painting. Children pick up on these. They know, consciously or subconsciously, when they’re not meeting their parents expectations. Eventually, when I went to college, I had to be me. The real me. I shed Brian like an old skin, and I became Diane.

  Parents may not stab their children, but they wound them with a thousand tiny cuts whenever we say, “Your brother always got A’s,” or “Why don’t you have more kids over?” or “Maybe cheerleading just isn’t for you.”

  So many people are so in love with the imaginary kid in their heads, they miss the kid right in front of them.

  Mine sure did.

  The scent of the living grew stronger, carried on the wind, along with oil and metal. The train was up ahead; it had stopped. At first I suspected mechanical failure, but as my body drew near—drawn by the scent of flesh, I could only assume—I saw something else was afoot.

  They were offloading the people into an area surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire. It looked like some kind of safe zone. Men stood at the top, weapons in their hands.

  This was a dangerous place for me to be. Those weapons weren’t just for show.

  They hadn’t seen me yet. I pleaded with whoever—whatever—controlled my body to take a different route. That walking down the tracks, in clear view, was suicide; I would be gunned down. There was no cover, and even if there was, the single minded, animalistic “me” didn’t seem to care; it walked, casually as you like, towards the tall wall. A shout from the wall alerted everyone to my presence; they sighted me in.

  As a living corpse, could I even die?

  They didn’t shoot. I didn’t quite know why, at first. They just let me slowly walk towards them. There were no other zombies around; for some reason, only I had caught the train’s scent.

  “Hey,” called some woman through a megaphone. “You, on the train tracks. Are you alive?”

  I said nothing, of course. Just lumbered towards them. I could feel their eyes on me; see the glint in their scopes. At least it would be quick.

  One of them fired some huge gun with a barrel opening the size of my fist. Instead of a bullet, however, the projectile blossomed into a net on a rope. It enveloped me, entangling my hands and feet and blasting me back onto the railroad tracks.

  I thrashed. Kicked. Hissed inhumanly at them as they pulled me in, dragging me toward the safe compound. My dead flesh fell apart as the gravel scraped it away. A part of the wall opened, revealing a cage. I was dragged inside, a woman inside a zombie inside a dress inside a net inside metal bars.

  “Nice shot, Sally,” said one of the men. A tattooed woman wearing a blue cap stood on top of the cage, peering down at me with indifferent eyes, cropped blonde hair peaking out fro
m the edges of her hat. This woman was a hunter. A fighter. She disliked seeing me alive.

  My body hissed and thrashed at her. My mind asked all kinds of questions: why did she have a net? Why had they gone to all this trouble?

  Then I saw it. Around me, beakers, machines, diesel generators pumping life into computers. Everything here was assembled by hand; cobbled together from scrap. No consistency, a DIY job in the middle of dead Vancouver. The people I’d seen were wearing a mixture of military uniforms and lab coats.

  This wasn’t a sanctuary.

  It was a laboratory.

  “Get to work,” said the woman, jumping down off the cage. She walked away without looking back.

  * * *

  The first thing they did was feed in catchpoles and hook me with them. They were the kind of thing one would use to catch dogs; hollow poles with thick wire. They got my arms, legs, and neck, holding me securely.

  Then they injected me with green stuff.

  It was a huge syringe that seemed too big for a human. As it pierced my rotten abdomen—why could I still feel that pain?—one of the people in lab coats said something to one of the people wearing the army uniforms. It was a horse needle. 14 gauge apparently; I didn’t know what that meant. It was a big one, though.

  Some fluid was squeezed into my dead flesh. Every human face was hopeful, excited even; as though I was a lucky break, the pinnacle of some great achievement.

  My skin swelled with the amount they injected. It felt like pressure; not really pain, although it was uncomfortable. As the minutes went down the swelling likewise abated. I had no circulatory system anymore so I had no idea how this happened.

  My body, of course, reacted violently; it lashed out, thrashing against its bonds, trying to break free. The catch-poles held me tightly, the net and the cage all containing me.

  The humans around me waited. Nothing happened.

  “It’s not working,” said the warrior woman, looking at me instead of the person she was talking to. Frustration tainted every word. For a brief moment our eyes met—I don’t know why my body made that happen but it did—and I sensed her anger, her frustration, the growing sense that she was wasting her time. “The injection doesn’t work, Frank.”

  “Don’t worry,” said a short, balding, middle-aged man I could only assume to be the person in charge of this operation. They spoke without care that I could hear. “It might take some time to take effect. Simone, you know as well as I do that we don’t truly understand what drives the former human’s biology.”

  Simone folded her arms. “What’s the next step?”

  Frank smiled nervously. I could sense he liked this warrior woman; and who wouldn’t? She was fit, strong, and pretty. “We have several options,” he said, folding his hands in front of him. “We can try a larger dose; we can try localising it to areas of the flesh less damaged, or we can try an injection directly into the brain.”

  “Will any of those work?”

  He clicked his tongue. “Only one way to find out,” he said. “I suggest perseverance. This one is perfect for our aims; whole enough to still be alive, if the rejuvenation is successful, smart enough not to run in front of the train, but alert enough to follow it to the destination. We couldn’t ask for any better.”

  It wasn’t intelligence that prevented my body from leaping in front of the spikes in front of the train. I didn’t know what it was, truly, but I truly had no control over my body. I didn’t know why I was different.

  “Right,” Simone said. “Frank, make it happen.”

  “Of course,” said Frank. “Of course.”

  Frank and the other people in lab coats went away. They couldn’t have gone far—the compound was not that big—and my body and I were left in the care of the military personnel.

  They didn’t like me being here. They looked at me with distain, fingers on their weapons, especially Simone.

  The sun began to set. Frank returned, with three syringes, all the same size as the first.

  He inspected my body through the bars, disappointment palpable. He prodded my side where the needle had gone in; the flesh seemed almost pink, almost alive, but it weeped the same black ichor all the other zombies did.

  “A stronger dose, perhaps,” he said to himself, and injected the first of the syringes into me.

  Nothing. The flesh pinkened slightly—or perhaps it was a combination of wishful thinking and the dying of the light—and then nothing.

  Frank’s nervousness returned. I could smell the sweat on his oily skin; see the slight tremble in his hands as he slid the next needle deep into my chest, at least four or five inches in. The plunger was depressed, and more green fluid pushed into me.

  The slightest tingle, like pins and needles, and then a warm sensation moved from my feet to the top of my head. It was brief—fleeting, almost—but it remained, as heat clings to coals.

  “Fuck,” said Frank. He seemed so mild mannered to me; his foulness came suddenly, as though some built up emotion had seemed through the cracks of the emotional dam he’d built to keep them in.

  The last syringe. He slid it into my ear.

  A most disturbing sensation. I could feel the metal scraping against the inner ear canal, feel it ever so gently rupture the eardrum, poking a hole. That ear went silent. The needle felt its way into my head, scraping past the bone, and then into softer stuff. I felt, rather than saw, Frank inject it.

  This time I felt something more; shock coursing all up and down my spine. My body jerked as though it were alive, howling. Frank jumped back. He watched, eagerly, excitedly, as the warm feeling spread from my hands to my fingers, from my feet to my toes, and I felt heat—so much heat—inside, as though I might suddenly burn alive.

  I clenched my fist. I clenched it, not whatever had controlled me for the last age. It was me. I was in control again.

  And then the feeling faded and the zombie returned.

  Feet came running. Booted feet. It was Simone, flanked by two soldiers.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did that sound come from…?”

  Frank nodded, the smile on his face almost consuming it. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  Simone, however, seemed less impressed. My body hissed at her, at Frank, at the world.

  “It still didn’t work,” she said.

  “It’s a reaction,” Frank said, his voice gilded with hope. “Much stronger with the third dose, straight into the brain.”

  Simone smiled, the first genuine reaction I had seen out of her yet. “Look at the skin,” she said. “Look.”

  My skin was pinkening all over, as though blood was returning. The warmth was a fire within me, growing stronger once more, and my dead flesh started to take on some vague semblance of life.

  And then, with the sound of rain soaked shoes splashing through a puddle, the flesh on my abdomen liquified and dropped off.

  My entrails flopped onto the ground, limp worms and lumpy hunks of meat. The flesh—what was left of it—turned blistery, fiery red and inflamed, bubbling as it turned to goop.

  “Looks like your formula requires some work,” said Simone, the ambivalent scowl on her face returning. “I’m guessing that will be happening to the brain soon enough.”

  “Soon enough,” conceded Frank, gritting his teeth in frustration. “Still, we might be able to study the—“

  Simone’s tone was firm. “Enough, Frank. We’ll collect another sample. This one’s no use to us any more.”

  For a moment he seemed like he might fight the issue, and then he sighed, running his hand through the rest of his hair. “Put her down then,” he said, practically spitting the words.

  The woman drew her pistol and lined up my head.

  Put her down.

  These people had no reason to like me and every reason to hate me; whatever experiment they were running had failed, and they didn’t seem happy. Every living human had every reason to say I was worthless…enough reason to throw aside the pretence of po
liteness and say what they really thought.

  It’s a freak, a man in a woman’s dress, a fake girl, a pervert. Just like other people whispered behind my back but didn’t have the guts to say to my face.

  Maybe they knew I still had a penis, but I felt these two recognised, in some way, what I was trying to be and respected that. Respecting the living person I had been and that person’s wishes.

  Simone fired and I died my second death, happy.

  A Word from David Adams

  This story is designed to challenge you. More than just a book about the dead, “Her”, and its companion book Eh, Zombie—just like Hugh Howey’s I, Zombie before it—is a look into the minds of the living.

  Some of what you will find there is disturbing. Shocking. Challenging.You should, at some point, be offended.

  Being offended is good. It means you have principles. It means you have beliefs and they are worth defending. The scenes in this book are a fiction, but there is realness too; Her is a story spun from the threads of reality. We are peeking inside the hearts of fictitious undead. Genuine horrors don’t gnaw on brains in post-apocalyptic Canada.

  The real monsters are inside us.

  Read more stories from Hugh Howey’s world of I, Zombie in my novella length work, Eh, Zombie!

  Thank you for reading! If you got this far, please consider leaving an honest review at the place where you purchased this book. Reviews help us out a lot. :)

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