Dave has been collecting every piece of information he could find since the first sign of the outbreak. It’s kind of a driving obsession for him, and I think his house must be filled with creepy scrapbooks on the subject. But I do see the value in that; amidst the chaos, I think it’s good that at least someone is trying to keep track of things. There ought to be some record of what has happened to be left for posterity, for humanity’s children, if there are any. That’s really why I started writing this, I suppose—the desire to leave behind some sort of record of what has happened and of my own existence.
It was from Dave that I learned that there is an underground group of people who have begun to try to salvage mankind’s history and piece together what had happened. Within their subculture, an elaborate slang has developed, and a new designation for calendar eras has naturally emerged as part of their lingo: Before Zombie Era (BZE) and Zombie Era (ZE). BZE might as well be prehistoric times at this point. It feels just as far away.
As our meeting began to wind down, without intending to, my gaze kept returning to Tempest. I had to admit a spark of interest in spite of myself. It felt odd. I hadn’t had time for anything as frivolous as interest in the opposite sex since ZE began. Why now was this hint of life stirring inside of me? I wasn’t even sure where it was stirring. My heart? My loins?
Before I left, I spent a few minutes lingering in a corner staring as nonchalantly as I could manage at Tempest. I just couldn’t get enough; I was trying to drink in her image.
I couldn’t help myself and was seriously beginning to wonder what the hell was wrong with me. I hadn’t been like this, like a teenage boy at the mercy of his raging hormones, in decades.
Chapter 4
Nothing Left to Lose
WELL, I WENT TO THE survivor’s meeting on a lark and, though I wasn’t sure what to expect, it still wasn’t what I expected. I guess I thought a group of survivors meeting together would feel empowering in some way, but it really just felt small, enclosed, feeble, and sad.
As I was leaving the meeting, I had a bit of a run-in with the guy named Nathan. Nathan is sort of attractive in an awkward, geek-chic sort of way. He’s probably in his early forties, tall and slender, brunette, and a bit scruffy, with floppy hair and two-day stubble from rather adorably haphazard attempts at self-grooming. He has a self-conscious way of carrying himself, as if he’s not quite comfortable wearing his own skin. He’s the only remotely attractive one of the bunch, of course. Well, actually, Gabe is physically attractive, but even just from briefly speaking to him I can see that the loss of his wife has left him utterly shattered. The loss permeates him, overshadowing his looks and everything else about him. So, realistically, Nathan is the only attractive one. Not that I’m really looking, but still, one can’t help noticing these things. I think, if we’re honest about it, all people have a fuckability meter against which they measure all new acquaintances of their preferred gender. Nathan may not be at the very top of my scale, but he definitely ranks.
Unfortunately, it turns out that he’s a nutcase. He apparently lives with a zombie. I couldn’t hold my tongue when I heard someone mention that.
“Wait—you what? You keep a zombie in your house?” I blurted.
“She’s my mother...”
“We don’t make judgments here.” Dave interrupted, trying to neutralize the situation. “This is a safe place where we can speak without shame.”
“Okay, sure, but at the cost of honesty? None of you are good enough friends to him to explain to him why that’s a really bad idea?”
The woman there, Maggie, was looking agitated; her eyes seemed far away and teary.
Dave put a firm hand on my shoulder and just led me away from the group.
So, as usual, I seem to have made a stellar first impression. Anyway, if I’m going to write this, I guess I should do it right. So, I’d best start by officially introducing myself. I am Tempest. Who I was before I became Tempest is of no consequence. She doesn’t exist anymore. Tempest is who I am now, and Tempest is strong and free—above all else, free.
After I lost the baby, I stopped caring. It is having nothing to care about, including myself, that has rendered me utterly free in this world. I think it was Janis Joplin that sang “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” It’s so true.
The thing about stillborns these days is that they don’t stay still.
A mother prepares herself to shower her newborn with unconditional love, and then, on a dime, she has to completely alter her thinking and act before her new baby infects her with necrotic scourge.
That babies aren’t typically born with teeth is the only saving grace to this situation. Few mothers are actually infected during the course of birth for this reason. Of course, the scent of all that the fresh blood and afterbirth attracts any zombies capable of motility for miles around. A woman still recovering from birth, typically struggling to even stand upright, can find herself in a precarious position, suddenly surrounded by hundreds of the ravenous undead. However, even if she safely escapes the post-labor hordes, the mother of an undead infant is so utterly traumatized by the experience that she frequently takes her own life shortly thereafter anyway.
Apparently whatever umbilical fluid exchange that may occur between mother and child wasn’t enough to do me in. Or maybe the baby died only in the last stages of labor. I don’t know. I try not to think about it. Or to remember the past. My parents. My sister. My friends and co-workers. My zombie baby gumming my vagina on its way out...
Push it out of my mind. The past no longer exists. Concentrate on the present. Concentrating on the present is the only way to survive.
I’ve taken on a job of sorts that firmly roots me in the present; it forces me to concentrate on the tasks at hand with no time whatsoever for reminiscing or pontificating. It’s difficult to put labels on anything post-apocalypse, but if you had to give my job a name, “bounty runner” might just about cover it.
I mostly take assignments to procure highly sought after black market goods. It’s considered extremely dangerous work, but it pays well in supplies and luxury items. Not that I really care about the pay. I do it because I don’t really care about anything. So why not? The thrill of danger produces an adrenaline rush. And when the adrenaline is pumping, at least I know that I’m alive.
When all the seriously bad shit went down a couple of years ago, there were two types of survivors—those who stayed put and those who were uprooted. Most people, at least most of the ones that survived the initial onslaught, were those who were mobile. I suppose remaining stationary was more viable in some places than others. For someone like Nathan, for instance, who lives in the suburbs, staying put would have been a lot easier to pull off because his home must be easier to defend. Though clusters of dead may make it to his residence at times, it has to be nothing compared to the throngs that congregate within the city. Sometimes they are so tightly packed that they form massive walls of dead, an absolute sea of animated bodies.
A lot of people moved at first because these initial migrations were necessary in order to flee the hordes. After that though, most people barricaded themselves in somewhere they deemed fairly safe and have steadfastly remained there since. The average survivor probably doesn’t travel more than a few blocks from his or her safe haven. Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, it turns out that, once a month, members of the Survivors typically travel a couple of miles to reach the group’s meetings. And since Nathan, that sort-of cute nut job, still lives in his original home in the suburbs, he must have to travel a bit in order to hunt for supplies, but he drives a Hummer and has pre-scouted routes through which he knows he can pass.
But the big exceptions to the shut-in lifestyle are those who are involved with the black market. As one of those, I go pretty much everywhere. While most people sought a safe place to hunker down, some of us adopted the lives of nomads, moving from one location to the next. I guess I like to imagine myself as a ninja,
skirting the shadows, scaling buildings (at least figuratively), lithe, agile... I’m sure this little fantasy will probably get me killed one day. Until then, the fantasy makes life a little more fun though, and fun is hard to come by, so I suppose that it’s worth it.
The nomadic lifestyle suits me because I have made the conscious decision to let go of everything, both emotionally and physically. I prefer not to let anything get too familiar these days. I move before my surroundings develop too many psychological associations, too many emotional attachments. Objects are infused with our associations—when I looked at a vase in my apartment, I would think of the person who gave it to me, the conversation that I had with my mother about it, the spot where I super-glued it together after my cat clumsily knocked it over... and so on. Every object in my apartment was the same, as were the rooms themselves. Everything familiar was suffused with memories and elicited associated emotions. A clean break from my apartment meant freeing my mind of constant reminders. That place was a memory mill. Give me a sterile white room over that any day. An empty, unfamiliar room is a clean slate; within it, I can purge myself of memories and start fresh once again. By constantly moving and keeping myself busy, there is no time for the past.
The jobs I take for the black market definitely keep me busy.
There is probably a black market in every major city in the country, but I couldn’t say with certainty since I don’t know if there are even survivors in other cities. With no communication, this city might as well be the whole world for those of us who survive here.
Our black market functions based upon the work of a network of individuals. The network consists of runners, who obtain desired goods from across the city, delivery guys, who go to people barricaded within their homes to deliver their goods and take new orders, and Jack. Jack is management—he keeps the books, sends out runners for goods, stores the goods, sends out the delivery guys to distribute the goods and collect payments (usually in the form of other desired goods), pays his employees (again, with other goods), and generally gets rich, sitting high on the hog. He has an extensive list of customers—just about every living person in the city. If, in the course of our procuring goods, we run across a survivor, they are added to his list. Everyone wants something, and most have at least something that someone else might want. And Jack gets a cut of every exchange.
Jack also takes some very specific, less savory, requests—sometimes for the occasional dispatch of a troublesome person (living or dead) or for meat (generally it’s human, but etiquette dictates that customers don’t ask). Mostly though, the lurid requests are for young, attractive female zombies to be used as sex dolls (or young, attractive living females to turn into zombie sex dolls). Why not keep them alive, right? Well, zombies don’t have to be fed (What are they going to do, starve to death?). More importantly, most patrons of zombie brothels feel no qualms about shoving their dicks in a non-sentient being. The zombie may be moaning and spluttering behind its gag, but that’s more appealing than it pleading and crying. Some men might have second thoughts about raping a living woman, so it’s easiest to just kill the women. Lovely, I know. I hate the sex trade, but it’s a booming industry, and nothing I can do is going to stop that. Jack doesn’t run the sex trade, but he does supply it. A customer is a customer in his book. They order, and he delivers. I’m one of Jack’s runners, but I steer clear of any jobs related to that particularly unseemly aspect of Jack’s business.
After that odd self-help meeting (if that is what it was), I started my trek back to the my current place of residence, but there was still some daylight, so I decided to postpone returning home. Instead, I took a slight detour, figuring that I might as well kill two birds with one stone. There was a place very nearly on the way that I knew was likely to contain my current quarry: fashion magazines. Go figure. Shut-ins get hankerings for some odd things.
So I diverted course in order to check out an abandoned dentist’s office that was about a mile from where I was bunking.
The door was ajar; the office had probably been ransacked shortly after the outbreak had begun. Hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and anywhere else that contained medications were at the top of the list when the looting began.
Cautiously peering inside, I saw no signs of movement. I pulled my prized flashlight out of my rucksack and turned it on, shining the beam inside.
I hated to even use my flashlight. It was a good quality light torch with a strong beam, and I lived with a constant needling worry in the back of my mind that it eventually, inevitably, would cease to work or that I would simply run out of batteries for it.
The office was, as expected, in a state of disarray. There were patient files strewn across the waiting room’s chairs and over the floor. A partial corpse was propped in one very stained corner of the room. Otherwise, the waiting room seemed normal.
I eased in carefully and checked to make sure that there was nothing nasty lurking behind the reception window. Then I began to pick up the files, absent-mindedly wondering if the piece of a body in the corner had once been the receptionist. As I suspected, I unearthed a magazine here and there as I proceeded to gather up loose file papers and folders. I came away with two issues of Cosmopolitan magazine, which would bring me a surprisingly hefty sum, and my efforts also unearthed a few issues each of People, Sports Illustrated, Retirement Magazine, and Parenting Monthly. I took the People and Sports Illustrated, stuffing them into my pack along with the Cosmos. I had no personal interest in them, but they might be sought by customers later. The retirement and parenting magazines were far too cruel a read for our current world climate; they were physical artifacts embodying our collective shattered hopes and dreams. The few children who might still survive were unlikely to ever reach adulthood, and the concept of earning a peaceful retirement was just another heartbreaking relic of a world that was now forever lost. I left those magazines behind, tossing them into the corner with the mangled human remains—both remnants of the bygone era they had once shared, now unceremoniously laid to rest together.
Unfortunately, if things go right for me for too long, I get cocky—and careless.
Coming out of the dentist’s office, I wasn’t paying attention. I just about walked smack-dab into a staggering, pus-laden bucket of stench that had formerly been a teenage girl. It wasn’t exactly fresh—its eyes were gone, and it had long, stringy hair matted to its scalp with oily tufts stuck out in every direction. A good hunk of the zombie’s right cheek was gone, exposing a row of its teeth. With a direct view of its dental work, I couldn’t help wondering for a brief moment if, in its former life, it had been a patient at this dental office.
The zombie girl pivoted on her heels to face me with relative alacrity. Perhaps the weight of my backpack slowed my reaction time, or maybe I was just more lost in thought than usual, but for whatever reason, I was slow to respond; the zombie’s hands were already on my face before I even processed that it was there. Its hands were slimy with rot but with mercilessly jagged, clawing tips. The bones must have been sticking clean out at the ends of its fingers, because fingernails simply aren’t that hard. Besides, corpse’s fingernails are incredibly dry and brittle (trust me).
I jerked back, thrusting my arms out defensively to push it away from me. My machete was hanging at my side from my makeshift belt, as always. I reached desperately for it with my right hand while trying to keep her at a distance with my left. This wasn’t easy; the zombie girl’s gaping mouth was hovering dangerously close to my arm as it dove at me again after every shove.
Freeing the machete from my belt, I drew my arm back and then swung down at its head with all my might. The misbegotten zombie girl stopped in mid-lunge, instantly losing animation as the blade connected with brain. She collapsed to the ground, dropping with such force that it wrenched the machete from my hand.
I wiped my hands on my jeans to make sure they were free of zombie goop, then felt my face for scratches. I could feel a couple of scrapes where it had raked its fin
gertips along my cheeks. Hopefully they were surface abrasions and the skin had not been broken. I cursed under my breath; I wanted to get home now and slather my face with Neosporin.
Bending down, I was able to see the zombie more closely as I removed my machete from its head. Noticing its features, its auburn hair and high cheekbones reminded me a little of my sister. Damn it. There it is—the past, memories of it always slipping in when they aren’t wanted.
Not that my sister is dead, necessarily. I put my sister on a boat. Sometimes I let my mind wander to her. I know the odds are against her, against all of us. I don’t dare hope. But sometimes I let myself think of her, the one person from my former life that I don’t know with certainty has met an end yet. I will never be able to communicate with her again, so I’ll never know if she’s okay. But I’ll never know with certainty that she is dead either. That’s the brightest spot I have.
Chapter 5
Unburdened
I’M NOT SURE WHY, BUT I went back for the next meeting. After a month of my standard solitary pursuits, I guess I just wanted the change of pace.
The group’s meeting began like the last one: breaking the ice by exchanging meaningless pleasantries, a solemn moment of silence, a brief summary of the minutes of the previous meeting, and then the floor was opened up for members to speak.
Things got heavy quickly this time. Gabe decided to share his story.
Gabe looked to still be in his late twenties and was built; his swollen muscles were positively popping out of his t-shirt. His appearance would have been that of a roughneck if it weren’t for the haunted, far-away look in his eyes. It seemed painfully obvious that he was limping around on a broken soul, and I kind of dreaded finding out why.
Making the Best of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 3