by Mariah Lynde
It sounded like a groan, at least at first. Eventually, it petered off, becoming a wet gargle of sound that made me shudder in revulsion while I fought my own need to gag. It was a sound I’d only ever heard before someone began to vomit and that was enough to have my own stomach doing back flips.
Between the sound inducing discomfort, the stress of the day, and the kick from adrenaline - I was already halfway towards regurgitating up what little happened to be in my stomach. All of this paled in comparison to the absolute fear that locked me in place as those shuffling footsteps crept closer to me.
Uneven, dragging foot falls that were reminiscent of those you heard by people who had stumbled away from some grievous injury or accident sounded just to my right. Terror kept me locked in place with my back pressed to the wall and that tire iron shaking in my grasp as I got my first real look at my new horrific reality.
Where last night I had believed Miss Gush and Flow had been a grotesque example of what was in store, it paled in comparison to this. In all the time I had worked on trucks and ambulances, responded to calls in volunteer stations to see any number of injuries or deaths, this made all of that seem like a cake walk.
The woman last night had been given the benefit of going down in a place where her body hadn’t been ravaged. This creature had not been so lucky. Looking at it now, I could tell this guy whoever he’d been had not had the luxury of being discovered quickly. What flesh remained on his face had taken on a dark, almost blackish gray hue that had a waxen sheen to it. The torn edges of flesh were lined with dark black and red goop that I could only assume used to be blood in some form.
However long ago this guy had died, the ravages done to his body had not done this zombie any favors. While I’d been in the house, there’d been a kind of absence of definition afforded to him by the shadows that night had brought about. Actually standing here before him served to eliminate all of that obscurity and instead gave me a full view of just what that body had endured.
Whoever he had been, I could tell that he’d been young. Well, guesstimate that he had beenanyway. There really didn’t seem to be a whole lot to judge by. One cheek was gone, it’s flesh shredded and hanging in strips off the side of his head. Those markings across his cheek were varying in size and shape - almost like some kind of creature had taken turns in gnawing and clawing at the flesh to obtain a meal.
As if that wound weren’t bad enough, beneath it one could see the shift and movement of muscle. Their presence lined and attached to the skull so that every time the mouth or jaw moved, your eyes were drawn to watching as the pink, dried out bits of jerky looking tissue flexed and moved to facilitate motion. I can admit, while I had worked in the medical field, actually seeing the twist mechanics of dried out muscle and tendon was as fascinating as it was sickening.
As the creature lumbered closer to me, I choked on the stench that assailed me. There was a sickly sweet smell that mixed with the fetid aroma of unclean skin and body odor. How much of that was actually rot I could not tell you. That bile churning in my gut steadily made its way up my esophagus and burned the back of my throat even as I held it back.
Fighting for a semblance of control, I let my eyes remain focused on the zombie’s face. Where the right cheek had been clawed and removed from this poor soul, the left side of the face had fared no better, leaving an altogether ghastly sight to behold. Even when this person’s corpse had been rendered completely lifeless, there’d be no comfort for the family. No last look at their loved one as they had once been because the damage was so extensive that it had rendered them almost unrecognizable.
No matter how cool you might have thought it looked in movies or television shows, the sight of a person’s face with an empty gaping socket where their eye should be was gross. In a zombie, it actually happened to be more than that. That empty socket held traces of dried blood that had solidified in dark black globs of a viscous consistency which looked like warm Jell-o. Worse, every time the body shambled forward, that gelatinous mass would shift, parts of it beginning to ooze out at the edge of the eyelid and roll down the waxen skin of the face in a series of small chunks that left little dots of color behind. I know what you’re thinking…couldn’t be any worse…right? Wrong, because to top all of this off, the eyeball itself hung outside of the socket. Connective tissue having dried out to become dark, black and ugly gray strings which appeared like thread and clung to a deflated, heavily mangled sac that one could only assume had once been the eye itself.
My own eye twitched in response. If there were one type of injury guaranteed to make me flinch, it was anything having to do with the eye. That sick feeling that settled in my stomach grew by leaps and bounds as that bile that I’d been choking back coated my tongue and made me breathe harder. The tire iron in my grip slipped a little, my sweaty palms and agitated state causing me to stumbleslightly in my intended mission. Much as I’d seen in my life, nothing had prepared me for the reality that this had become.
Seeing this…kid who had been full of life not so long ago, reduced to a walking mass of gore and rot brought everything into focus. This had become our reality − a place where a half-eaten, abused, and battered corpse could reanimate to kill others around it.
Whatever it happened to be that fate had in mind for me, I refused to go out this way. I wanted to go home. That would only happen if I survived this initial outbreak. Dragging in a shallow breath, I heard the shuffling steps that had been leading the creature away from me stop suddenly. Whatever I’d been planning went out the window as the situation changed.
Where before I’d had the benefit of surprise or even possibly being able to come at him from a blind spot – that was gone. I had taken too long and the wind had shifted, carrying my scent and whatever warmth remained in my body straight in the zombie’s direction. Now, those shuffling steps were carrying the creature straight towards me.
My breath stilled in my throat as the full picture of death formed before me. Blood and remnants of oozing tissue stained the clothing that covered the form of the corpse. Whatever else he might have been in life; this guy appeared to have been an athlete. Now, he was a shambling mess, his body for all its definition was already breaking down. The joints of his legs had already stiffened, leaving him with an awkward gait from the atrophy of muscles and tissue.
Exhaling a little as he drew closer I got an up close look at the ravaged and mangled visage that had become his death mask. With the remnants of that eye which clung to his cheek, the empty socket stared at me like a black abyss which threatened to swallow me whole. It was an eerie promise of death – one that I wanted no part of.
Without thought, my arm drew back and then swung forward in a lifting arc to catch the zombie on the chin with the heavy end of the tire iron. I flinched at the sudden crack that sounded as metal slammed into bone. Worse, I could hear the sound of teeth being slammed together in a jarring impact that made me shudder in sympathy. Living or dead, the idea of shattering teeth from such a blow happened to be a painfully sickening one.
Even while that registered I also realized the great folly in my plan. Not using one of the newer weapons I’d acquired in the day, left me hefting a metal object that had in no way been meant to deliver such a blow. The tire iron vibrated and hummed a soft note in the air to demonstrate the sheer power behind the strike, but it had nothing on the sudden pain that shot through my arm.
Just this morning I had figured out why it was that some kind of buffer in of cloth or rubber was important in wielding metal weapons. Too bad in the heat of the moment, I had let all that hard won knowledge slide right out the back of my head, because my body now shrieked in protest.
My shoulder felt like it’d been jostled and pushed out to flex to a point that it had almost been ripped from my body. All my strength suddenly disappeared in the wake of a numbness that spread from my hand all the way up my arm and made that limb feel like dead weight. Worse, that jostling on one side soon shifted beginning to spread to
make my other shoulder ache in protest with a dull, throbbing pain that refused to be denied.
My fingers went lax in their grip and the whole situation began playing out in slow motion. If there were a word for exactly how I felt in that moment, terrified would be it. My body had suddenly buckled under the pressure of exertion with an improvised weapon and left me in the cold on trying to eliminate the threat of my current situation.
For what good it had done, the zombie had fallen back, its jaw now hanging at an awkward angle from the force of the blow delivered. The end of the tire iron had caught him just right of the center of his jaw which appeared to have shattered some of the bony partition and leaving the lower part of the face malformed. Even with that amount of damage, the creature was forcing the muscles and tendons to work, manipulating the shattered and broken bits of bone to operate as if continuing to chew or bite.
I shuddered in revulsion, my arms feeling like limp noodles even as I forced my grip on the tire iron to steady. The nerves in my arms were either shrieking in pain or tingling with sensation that made them numb to anything else. In fact, the only reason I knew I was gripping the weapon was because I could see it with my own eyes.
The whole of my world narrowed, focusing on the writhing body of the undead on the ground before me. His movements were crude, lethargic even, as he grasped at the world around him but lacked control of his own body to do so and the sight brought me a combined feeling of pity and anger. Seeing what had once been a promising young life diminished to something akin to a worm writhing on a hook was disheartening.
Slow steps carried me forward, my eyes locked on the display of desperate, grasping hunger. This was what humanity would be facing. This is what would be waiting for us all at the end of the road to our fight for survival. Truth be told, most stories of an apocalypse via zombies left me with little to no hope. I couldn’t think of one where things seemed to work out the way they should with the living taking back the world.
Instead, it became a putrid, wretched existence of death and rot. No. I refused to let that, let this…be what my life would become.
Anger fueled me in that moment, allowing me to push my body into reacting as I fell forward onto my knees next to the zombie. Raising my arms over my head, I willed my fingers to tighten their grip as I brought both arms swinging down to slam the instrument into the creature’s already malformed face.
I can admit there was no rationality to this action. I was pushing the limits of my own sanity as the full weight of what was happening and that which lay on the horizon played out in my mind. No, there could be no softness, no pity for the monsters that would prey upon the living. Whether or not these things had once been people, they could no longer be considered such.
A future of horror and hardship stretched out before me. One that a part of my mind couldn’t accept, that it refused to accept. When it came to the end of the world via mindless, predatory monsters you either became the hunter or the hunted. Considering I had absolutely no intention of becoming one of the dead - that made me a hunter and I needed to start acting like one.
What had started as a simple swing, became a series of swift, brutal blows that were slamming into the head and torso of the grasping corpse squirming beside me. Hatred over what this all meant, frustration over the fact my life was going to hell, or just a sheer panic in trying to be sure I did not become the next on the menu – all of those things accompanied each vicious swing that my arms were able to produce. Every movement that my arms executed, resulted in the dull, muffled thump of the iron bar in my grip slamming into the zombies head.
Somewhere in the middle of the whole mess I heard a faint kind of gasping sob playing over the air. Slowly, I began to calm and become more aware of the world around me. Only then did I realize that the sobbing noise that had sounded so distant moments before was actually me. As my arms swung down with another blow, it registered that now instead of a solid thumb there was a distinct wet slurping sound.
The second thing I noticed was the feeling of some kind of thick, gel like substance covering my face and torso. All the strength left my body in a rush, the tire iron falling to the ground with a dull, muffled thud. Dragging in slow gulps of air, I struggled to fight back the black spots that were suddenly clouding my vision. I couldn’t pass out here in the open. Not when there seemed to be some zombies inside the walls. Until it became clear just how that had happened, I needed to keep on my toes and out of the open.
The bloodied mass of flesh had become unrecognizable now - so much so I couldn’t fathom which was worse: the mauled visage that this creature had presented with or the now gelatinous mass of brain and chipped bone that spilled out onto the ground in front of me. Grayish black skin had ripped and parted under the force of the blows delivered by my heinous attack. Now there was only a viscous sludge of gray and pink that was flecked with sharp cornered ivory bits of bone in place of a head.
Nausea turned my stomach, accompanied by the gasping pulls of air that seemed to grate against the back of my throat with each sob I uttered. Leaning to the side, my arm gave out and I slammed into the cool grass just a small moment before I heaved once again. For all my bluster and blow, now the reckoning came. Realization of my almost inhuman act with the picture of the damage I had just done to a human body had me shaking in despair and sick with disgust. The face of Miss Gush and Flow filled my mind only to be replaced by the vision of the busted melon that now spilled out onto the ground.
Oh yes, I could hold my own, spend my time between now and making it home wreaking havoc on the undead I came across, but it would still be horrific and violent. Each one a reminder of just how inhuman I could become.
Some would say that this attack of conscience could be a good thing. They would postulate that my remembering these were once people would be a window of salvation for my soul. Yet, I knew that there would be more of this in the months or years to come, all of it the same. How? How were you supposed to face such a reminder of your own mortality? You own weakness?
They always said, ‘But for the grace of god go I’ but how true could that really be? Who was to say that at some point, that mangled corpse on the ground wouldn’t be me? That the existence of being a reanimated corpse like he’d been happened to be a fate I would escape?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what part bothered me more: the idea that I had become capable of such acts of complete violence or that in so doing I could end up like the very things I was attacking.
Another choked sob escaped my lips even as my stomach rolled, my mouth parting as I choked on a sudden surge of bile that left my throat and spilled on the ground in front of me. For several long seconds I just shook while I leaned on the ground, my body revolting just as my mind and heart plummeted to the darkest possible depths imaginable.
“Miss Warren?” The sound of Cal’s voice from the back patio of my apartment filtered to me over the sound of my own retching sobs. Even if I’d wanted to answer, I couldn’t. The violent shock of everything that had taken place in the last day and a half seemed to finally be settling in.
Those realizations had me fighting the urge to just roll down into the grass and close my eyes to shut out the world around me. Another spasm had my stomach pushing up into my throat and choking off air which produced a strangled sound of wet coughing while I struggled to pick myself up enough to crawl. My shoulders ached and my arms seemed unable to offer any form of stability as I flopped forward, landing on my side only to cough into the dirt and have it speckle my already dirtied face.
“Miss Warren? Angel?!” This time his voice was closer than it had been and I still couldn’t bring myself to answer. My throat felt like it had closed in on itself, the sides rubbing one another in painful friction from the grating abuse of screaming, crying and vomiting in one day.
Gasping for air, the black spots swimming in front of my vision began to grow larger and I knew in that moment I was in serious trouble. Hiccupping coughs and sobs had given way to
almost full-fledged hyperventilation as I struggled to lift myself up.
“Angel!” That was the last thing I heard as my fruitless efforts to get up ended with me falling into the darkness with the sound of my own name ringing in my ears.
Chapter Twenty - A Hitch in the Plan…
Slowly, I found myself rejoining the world of the living. Wincing a little at my own poor choice of words for the action, I let my eyes slowly flutter open to adjust to the darkness of the room.
The first thing that hit me was relief – I was in my room! Then it happened to dawn on me that I had been outside last I remembered and covered in zombie guts.
Shit! Had I died? Was my soul now happily waking up here in heaven while my empty, soulless corpse roamed the Earth to make people into a personal snack?
That last thought had me grimacing as I slowly became more aware of my surroundings. I could hear mumbling in the room nearby, almost like I had left the television or something on in the living room. If this was the afterlife, I’d have to give them kudos on their attention to detail.
My hands moved to press down into the mattress, the heels of both my hands rolling down to let me push into the pillowed service in an attempt to lever myself up off the bed. It was an action I immediately regretted. A sharp slice of pain, much like feeling a blade slamming into my back and ripping upward across my shoulders rippled through my frame. I take it back, this could not be heaven, but instead some hell I’d been sentenced to for my actions over the last couple of days. Maybe it was considered murder to cap a corpse…or two.
Shuddering, I waited for my muscles to cease their protest and drew in a slow breath – surprisingly it felt far less constricting than I expected. My throat was still raw, but in that moment I felt comfortable. At least, right up until the point I looked down and stared at myself in shock.