by Platt, Sean
The third zombie continued feasting on the dead man, pulling at his intestines like overcooked spaghetti, one eye on Chris the whole time, like a mad dog glaring at those who threatened its food.
Stay away; my meal!
Chris bent down and looked into the doghouse. The girl cried out.
He wanted to tell her to come out, it would be okay, he would help her. But he knew his mouth wouldn’t work. And to her, he probably seemed no different than the creatures who were trying to eat her. As he got closer to the entrance of the doghouse, she stopped screaming, as though she recognized him. The girl scrambled from the doghouse, running right to him and wrapping her arms around his waist, crying. The buzzing in his head again grew louder as he tried to remember the girl. He’d seen her before, but couldn’t remember where. She obviously knew him, and was looking to him for salvation.
He picked her up, drawing attention from the last of the monsters, who looked up from its meal as if considering a snack. Chris growled at the monster and bared his teeth, a primal don’t you fucking dare.
* *
Chris brought the girl inside his house and lay her on the sofa.
“What’s wrong with your head?” she asked as Chris bolted the door, checking the window to make sure no one had followed them. He saw three more creatures a few houses over, shuffling about, not seeming to have taken notice of them. He turned back to the girl, who was sitting, staring at him, clutching one of the pillows. He tried to answer her. His words came out as a groan and the girl’s eyes widened, but not with the same fear that the man had. Maybe the girl wasn’t aware enough to know what he was becoming; she merely sensed that something was wrong.
“Are you okay?”
The buzzing in his head wasn’t as loud, but it was as pervasive as it had been, and seemed to change frequencies often, making it even more difficult for Chris to organize his thoughts. The sound was like someone were turning a radio station dial in his head, except the static was replaced by buzzing, and they could never find a channel with anything resembling a clear signal. He felt like half his brain was focused on trying to interpret the buzzing, and was therefore unable to handle other functions, such as remembering how to speak or names or faces. As he tried to figure out how he could talk to the girl, an image managed to break through the confusion – the magnetic message board on the fridge.
Chris went into the kitchen, removed the board from the fridge, then wiped the words, a shopping list, off with his shirt. He sat in the recliner across from the couch and wrote with the dry erase marker, “I’LL BE OK. MY NAME IS CHRIS. WHAT’S YOURS?”
He set the board on the coffee table, which sat between his chair and the couch. He watched her read it. Judging from her reaction, his words were not nearly as clear to her as they were to him. Maybe his brain was so damaged he couldn’t make proper words by mouth or hand. Or maybe she couldn’t read, though she seemed old enough. She wiped the board on her pink and blue tee shirt, and wrote back, “My name is Summer.”
Chris breathed a sigh of relief.
She wrote again, “I’m 9.”
He stared at her, stomach growling. Images flooded his mind: biting her, tearing into her flesh, chewing. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine something, anything else, to make the images, and the hunger, go away. More thoughts swam through his mind: reaching out, pulling her head back, biting her cheek, then into her soft stomach, tearing at her fatty flesh and swallowing it. He closed his eyes tighter, trying to cast the images out, only to have them sharpen. He opened his eyes and squeezed his injured arm, in a desperate attempt to create pain that would overrule his hunger and horrible thoughts. The surge of pain worked, and he was able to look at her again and keep the violent impulses under control . . . for the moment.
Summer erased the board again, then wrote, “Are you sick? My parents got sick.”
He stared at her, not wanting to say yes, not wanting to scare her away. He tried to tell himself that he only wanted to keep her safe, to keep her in his house to protect her. And it was true . . . of part of him. Another part had calculated that the minute she left, he could no longer eat her, so this monster inside him would keep her around as long as possible until it won the battle brewing in his head.
The bees were seething.
Tell her yes, you’re sick. Scare her. Save her!
He swallowed, shook his head no; he wasn’t sick.
He held out his hand, asking for the board. She wiped her words away and slid it across the table.
He wrote, “WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS?”
He slid the board to her. The girl started to erase it, then laughed. Chris was confused.
“I don’t know why I’m writing,” she said, “I can talk just fine.”
Chris laughed. At least it started as a laugh, but came out sick and congested.
“My dad got sick and ran outside so he wouldn’t infect us. He was shot by soldiers two days ago. My mom locked me in the cellar and told me she was sick, too, and not to come out no matter what. She put a bunch of food and water in there, but in the middle of the night, someone came in and shot her. I heard voices asking if anyone else was in the house, but I was too scared to say anything. I came out this morning and was looking for anyone I knew.”
He held out his hand and she slid the board to him.
“DO YOU KNOW ME?” He held the board up.
“We live . . . lived, four houses down, but no, I don’t know you or . . . Is your wife here?”
Chris’s mind flashed on the body upstairs, trying to remember her name, which had been deleted from his brain and replaced by incessant buzzing. He shook his head and the girl seemed to understand.
How can I not remember her name?
To not die beside her was a cruel enough fate, but to surrender her memory to whatever disease that was ravaging him? That was beyond cruel.
“Does it hurt?” the girl asked, pointing to his head.
He nodded.
“Can I help?” she asked, standing up and walking towards him.
As she drew closer, his hunger stirred and his hands started to tremble. He put one on top of the other, trying to hold it down. He glared at her, shook his head, and tried to say, “No!”
Summer jumped back, startled, eyes wide.
“You are sick, aren’t you?”
He stared at her, his inner-buzz near deafening. He wanted to shake his head no. Draw her closer. His eyes were glued to the part of her arm, just beneath the sleeve of her shirt. He wanted to grab it, sink his teeth in. Snap her neck, bite her throat, drink her blood. Then he’d tear open her soft stomach, shove his hands into her, and feast as the monster had done on the man across the street. Chris’s body began to shake as the buzzing grew louder and his humanity struggled to maintain control.
“Are you sick?” she asked again, eyes wide, so innocent.
She will believe anything I say.
That vulnerability made him cry inside. If she left his house, she would be doomed by the first infected to find her. But if she stayed here, he was the danger. Reluctantly, he nodded his head yes, tears streaming down his face. He grabbed the board, erased the words quickly, and scribbled, “GO AWAY! HUNGRY!”
The girl stared at the board, eyes tearing up.
“Please, mister, don’t make me leave. It’s so scary out there. Do you have an attic? You could lock me in?”
“NOT SAFE.” he wrote, turning away from her, unable to look at her without surrendering to the violent images. The swarm had multiplied, buzzing with different frequencies, all clamoring to be heard. To be understood.
He shook his head, as if it would silence the sound or numb his hunger.
“You’re not one of the bad ones,” the girl said, “I can tell.”
He slowly lifted his head, arms shaking violently now, and stared at her.
Why won’t she fucking leave?
Suddenly, a window in the kitchen shattered. The girl screamed.
Chris stood up and made
his way to the kitchen, legs stiff and splintered in pain, every step an effort. One of the creatures had broken the sliding glass door and was pushing his way into the house, moaning loudly, crimson eyes looking past Chris and toward the living room as if catching a whiff of the girl’s fresh scent. The buzzing grew louder, as if it were no longer just in Chris’s head, but also being broadcast from the open mouth of the monster in his kitchen.
Chris screamed at the girl to run upstairs, but his warning came out as grunts, and the girl instead hid behind the couch. Chris grabbed a knife from the butcher block with both hands and rushed at the monster, shoving the blade deep into its face, and up through the top of its skull. The zombie fell to the ground, dagger still in its skull.
It wasn’t alone. At least a dozen more were stumbling through his back yard, slowly making their way towards the breached kitchen door, all of their mouths open, broadcasting that horrible buzzing sound.
Chris grabbed another knife, the last of the big ones in the butcher block, and realized there was no way he could kill them all. They would swarm him before he could bring down two.
Shit.
As the creatures drew closer, he noticed that while most were slow and ambling, others were fast, almost animal-like in their movement. The buzzing increased, in his head and from their mouths. It was only then that he realized the sound was also coming from his mouth. He closed his mouth, though it didn’t silence the buzzing in his head. Chris turned to the living room, forcing himself to move faster. He dropped the blade on the carpet, grabbed the girl into his arms, and raced through splintering pain upstairs. As he reached the top step, he could hear creatures banging into the furniture downstairs.
Won’t be long now.
They entered the bedroom and the girl screamed, seeing Chris’s wife in bed, blood painting the wall.
He fumbled with the doorknob, freezing for a moment, struggling to remember how to lock it. The buzzing was now so loud in his head, it made thinking through the simplest act nearly impossible, like trying to figure out a Trigonometry problem in a burning house. Finally, he was able to think his way through the buzzing enough to slide the lock closed just as one of the creatures slammed into the door.
The girl, whose name he could no longer remember, screamed.
He turned, saw the gun on the bed, then picked it up, grabbed the girl, and pulled her into the closet, closing the door behind them. There was no lock on the closet door and he wasn’t sure how he’d hold them off. All he could do was hope that they wouldn’t look in the closet. The girl was crying incoherently. He pulled her to his lap, wrapped an arm around her and placed a palm over her mouth, trying to keep her quiet. The banging in the hallway grew louder as the swarming sound in his head grew louder, still. More banging against the door. He didn’t know how long the door would hold, but didn’t think it would be much longer.
Once the girl’s cries turned to whimpers, he removed his hand. Her back against his chest, her scent stirred his hunger. Though the closet was dark, it wasn’t pitch black, and he could see the outline of her neck where it met her shoulder before vanishing beneath her shirt collar. He leaned forward, sniffing the sweetness of her scent, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth, inching ever closer to her neck. The hunger twisted inside him, thoughts of ripping flesh fueling his thoughts. Flesh would make the buzzing go away. Would sate him.
Would fill him.
The buzzing in his brain swelled, rising to a tea kettle-like pitch, as he moved his mouth closer, ready to bite.
“Are we going to die?” the girl cried out, her voice so broken with terror, it snapped him from his daze.
The buzzing receded to a lower hum, and he shook his head, as she turned to see his response. He held the gun out, in front of both of them, checking the chamber. Three bullets. One for a monster, one for the girl, one for him. This time, he would not miss.
The door burst open. He heard them flood into the room, groaning and buzzing as they bumped into things. A glass shattered and the girl jumped. Chris quickly palmed her mouth before she could cry out. He prayed that the zombies’ thoughts were as consumed by the buzzing as his own. Maybe they’d not even look in the closet. Maybe they’d keep moving. The sounds outside the closet seemed to be dying down a bit, and Chris hoped that some of them had moved on and the rest would follow. Maybe he and the girl would be safe.
Then a bang against the closet.
The girl screamed, and the closet door began to shake as one, two, or more of the fuckers clawed at it, desperate to get to them. He held the door in place with his feet, but as it began to slip, he realized he couldn’t hold it forever. They would get in. It was only a matter of time or numbers.
Chris brought the gun to the girl’s head, closed his eyes, and held his finger on the trigger, waiting for the closet door to open.
Suddenly, automatic gunfire erupted in the bedroom like thunder. Chris, startled, dropped the pistol and it fired a deafening shot in the closet. Seconds later, the door burst open and light bleached their world. Two soldiers with masks stood, automatic rifles aimed at he and the girl. Dead zombies lay in pools of blood behind them.
“We’ve got survivors,” one of the soldiers said into a radio. “Adult male, female child.”
The soldiers reached down to help the girl up. The hunger surged with the introduction of two new bodies. The buzzing began to rise and whistle again. He could eat them both, and spare the girl. If she saw him eat them, she’d run away, be saved by whatever other soldiers were waiting outside. Chris began to stand.
“Oh my God!” one of the soldiers said, staring down at Chris. “We’ve got an infected!”
“No!” the girl screamed, “He’s one of the good ones!”
Too late.
The soldiers opened fire, and Chris fell back into the closet, collapsing as bullets tore into his flesh. As his life faded, he could see and hear the girl wailing as a soldier pulled her from the room. He hoped she’d be okay. That he hadn’t infected her, whatever her name was.
The remaining soldier lifted Chris’s body, dragged him to the bed where his wife’s corpse lay and dropped him on top of her.
Chris stared at what was left of her face. Her soft lips. Her beautiful, now blood-soaked, hair.
Goodbye, my . . .
His soul twisted in agony that he couldn’t remember the name of his life’s true love.
The soldier stepped from the room. Another came in with a heavy-looking flamethrower. As the sound of fire erupted, the swarm’s buzzing mercifully ceased. Silence, at last.
Then his world exploded in a fiery blast.
And he remembered . . .
Allison.
- THE END -
Author’s Note — Chris Wakes Up
Monster movies don’t scare me.
Well, unless that monster is a zombie. Even a mediocre zombie movie will give me a few chills. Done well, like The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, or 28 Weeks Later, then I’m at the edge of my seat.
Zombies have plagued (no pun intended) my dreams before I even knew what they were. I’ve had recurring nightmares of fighting them since I was a child. The dreams almost always involve a mob of them, countless hordes, which I have to fight with little more than blunt objects like bats, machetes, pipe wrenches, and whatever else is lying around. If it’s big, awkward, and bulky, it’s likely to find its way into my hand in a dream where I need weapons. You’d think I’d at least get some cool guns or something, but nope.
Writers have used zombies as metaphors for things like rampant consumerism or the spread of enemy ideologies, often pitting “us” against “them.” Fighting off hordes of zombies taps into a universal fear of being helpless against a mob, a very real fear, which is likely a holdover from a time before we had societal rules (or fears of gods) to keep people from savagely attacking one another. The real fear of zombies isn’t a fear of monsters, but rather the monsters within us — the monsters that linger just beneath the surface, waiting for the firs
t sign of societal breakdown. Hell, we can see monstrosities in our world today. It’s not hard to imagine the shit hitting the fan and chaos erupting. We don’t even need a virus to undo years of evolution, reverting man to savage.
Zombies scare me because man scares me. We, as a species, scares the fuck out of me, to be blunt.
I’ve always been fascinated by the evil that men do — from slavery, to war crimes, to bizarre medical experiments (by governments, no less), to murder. I don’t think the fascination is morbid curiosity, as I don’t like to read of or see people or animals in pain, so much as a desire to understand what causes such monstrous acts. There’s a disconnect in some people that allows them to do the most horrifying things. And while we often attribute these acts to monsters that were made through abuse, mental illness, or some other causality, I don’t think it really takes all that much to turn men into monsters. Just turn on the nightly news (or any of the 24-hour news channels) and you’ll see evidence of man’s horrible acts upon his fellow man. I think that zombie fiction’s appeal, is that it’s about holding onto humanity even as the rest of mankind turns to monsters.
In Chris Wakes Up, I wanted to write something from the perspective of a man who has just been infected, battling against this monstrous change in him. Trying to hold onto humanity even as animal instincts and a hive mentality work to overcome him. As the story progresses, he is losing his memory and what makes him human. Sort of a de-evolution, if you will. In an early draft of the story, I referred to Chris in the last half of the story as “he” or “him,” to further illustrate how removed he was becoming from his prior life. However, in writing the story, it became difficult to refer to him over and over without it seeming forced or confusing.
Chris Wakes Up is our first foray into zombie fiction, unless you count our post-apocalyptic serial, Yesterday’s Gone, which has zombie-like creatures; but those aren’t true zombies in the sense that you know them. Given how much zombies scare me, I doubt this will be our last time visiting Chris’s world, even if he’s no longer part of it.