The Undead (Zombie Anthology)

by D. L. Snell

  6.

  What’s so scary about zombies, you ask? They fall apart if you bump into them hard, they move so slow that my grandmother could escape them with her walker, they don’t even have enough brains to come up with a good military strategy. . . . Not much of a threat, are they? This is what you ask.

  Yes, but zombies don’t just hunt you down and kill you. That would too easy to avoid, as you say. No, the problem is, you see, that the living dead are contagious. Their saliva functions as a powerful agent of contagion. One bite infects and one bite kills. Those infected rise again to carry the virus further.

  The living dead work together to spread their condition. They are the perfect viral life form. As they are on the microscopic level, they are on the human level. They form a perfect, continuous consciousness, the microscopic directing the macroscopic. Each zombie represents a huge, shambling germ, spreading the disease, being the disease. Zombies are viruses, which carry the virus that created them.

  This is why you fear them, the zombies. We are half-baked in comparison. Do you know what your micro-organisms are doing tonight?

  7.

  He wakes and doesn’t know why. He had been dreaming, his skull full of darkness. What was it? He couldn’t remember. If he could hurt, he’d feel agony. His muscle fibers scrape against each other like straining wires, and his skin is as dry as a salted slug. His throat bleeds and his eyes adhere to dry sockets. He knows this, can sense that some corner of this mind acknowledges that there should be pain, but the nerves just under his skin are incapable of carrying the message.

  He searches his mind for something to think about. A part of him realizes he should wonder more at his singular condition. He is dead, isn’t he? But, for some reason, he can’t seem to get too excited about this. He tries to remember darkness, or even the time before, but can only recall with any certainty the moment of this wakening. Somewhere, though, somewhere deep within him, he can feel a hunger steadily growing.

  The hunger pulls at his guts. Though his skin sloughs off in several sections, he can only feel the hunger. He knows that he is not hungry for just anything, but can’t recall his hunger’s goal. Something soft, something delicate, a subtle flavor he can almost taste in the back of this throat. It sends thrills throughout the surface of his tongue.

  Now, his hunger overcomes him. He aches with it. His hunger fills him with a vacancy. Though he cannot feel the rotting of his fingers, he can feel his stomach itch, can feel it grow tender, feel it shrink into itself, like a tightened knot.

  He groans and shuffles. He senses others that are like him and moves to join them. Perhaps they will know what substance will satisfy him. He finds them and they bump and stumble together. Now, they suffer together and their suffering feels better for it. They are together in their urges. The aches in his stomach spread to his chest, filling his useless lungs. It spreads to his throat. His Adam’s apple is like a rusty ball bearing. It spreads to his head, and his head fills with agony. Every curl on his cerebellum is allergic, every neuron shorting out. He smells brain.

  Brain, he realizes, is the substance he craves. He can smell it in the live ones, in the space between their ears. He knows it will make him whole, satisfy his pain. Why should they have it? Why should they be allowed to keep it? We need it more. I need it more. It’s the only thing I need, the only thing that will make me whole, make me stop missing, missing what, missing what the brain carries.

  He can smell it underneath the floorboards, the brain like a meaty grapefruit. The little girl screams when he rips apart the wood flooring to find the little oubliette where the girl hides. She is six years old and very scared, with hair in rows and a bow as bright as a birthday balloon. He uses ragged fingers to rip the scream from her throat, because he doesn’t want the others to hear. He wants this one to himself. Her brain in his gullet sends shivers through every pore. He can feel his lungs fill, can feel the bright taste of fresh water. He can feel sunlight and being safe under blankets. He can smell mother’s coconut hair, and feel father’s beard tickle his belly. The shivers stop, and he moans, and he searches for more.

  8.

  As seen from the clouds, there appear to be maggots in the carcass of the Midwest. Throughout the old rust belt, from Philadelphia in the east to as far as St Louis in the west, wriggling pale figures surge from mutilated soil, from the guts of America.

  Streets empty of the living. The streetlights out, the freeways vacant, the shopping malls transformed into hilltop fortresses. The dead inhabit this emptiness; they cling to the darkened fractures of urban habitats.

  With so many maggots here, so many worms and beetles, I have tried in vain to find a space for life. I have looked to the daylight and found suppuration, looked to morning and found a bacterial stench. Just as I have always suspected, our history will waste us.

  9.

  “Tonight, we’re gathered to discuss the religious implications of the ongoing living dead crisis. Cemeteries throughout the Midwest are emptying and their tenants rising in search of victims. Because of the ongoing nature of this crisis, we really don’t know what the death toll is. We apologize to our viewers, but reports from the area are sketchy at best.

  “But tonight, we have three representatives here of religious orders: Reverend Whitehead of the Northeast Baptist Ministry, Father Tom Connell of the Pittsburgh archdiocese, and Rabbi Ben Scholem, of the Reformed Indianapolis Synagogue. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

  “By telephone connection, we will also be talking to Mike Begin, a Navajo Shaman based in Gallup, Mew Mexico, to listen to his unique perspective. But first, Reverend, you’ve been quoted as saying that this ongoing crisis represents the first in a series of events leading up to the apocalypse. Will you explain your views?”

  “Of course, Tina. We know that the Book of Revelation describes what will happen before the Second Coming of Our Savior and we also know that some of those events are pretty traumatic and unreal. What could be more traumatic and unreal than the rise of the dead? John specifically addresses the rising of the unsaved dead in an army that will—”

  “Excuse me Reverend, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have breaking news from the frontlines in Philadelphia, where reportedly the worst outbreak has occurred. Let’s go to Sean Hallinan in Philadelphia.”

  “Good evening Tina. I’m here in front of the Liberty Bell in this most American of cities. Reports are coming in from all over the Midwest and parts of the Northeast that the armies of the dead are falling back. Our early reports say that crop-dusting aircraft are spraying the dead with some form of chemical release. Some reports suggest that the chemicals used are greenish in color, and others have reported that the chemicals smell like, quote, lemon polish.

  “Wait, Tina. Can you hear that? It sounds as if there are planes flying above to the southeast. I can see searchlights scanning the sky. Over, there! It looks as if there are three or four small, prop-driven aircraft circling an area about a quarter of a mile from where we are. I’m not able to identify any chemical spray at this point, but, yes, it does smell like lemon polish. And perhaps . . . mineral water? Tina, we’re going to attempt to get closer to the spraying. We’ll update you when we can. Sean Hallinan, CMM from Philadelphia.”

  10.

  Zombie love: Zombie 1 leans over an oozing skull, dishes up a handful of jelly. Brain spills from purple-black lips. Zombie 2 leans over to lick the stuff from Zombie 1’s pus covered chin. Takes a piece of jaw, crunches it and grins. Their tongues meet. Planes overhead, the drone covers spreading gas, which seeps into their pores as they slurp. Pink health grows from their eyes. Rot and wounds vanish. With blood still flowing from their full red lips and smelling sweet as a bottle of liquid detergent, they stroll off hand in hand, under a chemically colored sunset.

  11.

  Dear Vince: I think it’s over now. I wouldn’t have believed it a week ago, but the worst seems to have passed. I can still hear the dusters outside, but the engines seem rarer now, more like a
mopping up than a battle. I suppose you wonder how we came up with what the papers are calling a “miraculous cure” for the zombies. You should be, after all, since it was your foundation that paid for the original research.

  Your man Dr Roderick did not realize what he had. He was so concerned about the creation of life in the dead that his success, the triumph that led to his untimely death, stopped his work. His unbending concentration blinded him to the truth and probably killed him. A few of us here in the operation center have already realized the underlying cause for his single-mindedness. What did you do with his wife and kids, Vince?

  What he didn’t see was that his failures were actually the cure for the condition he manufactured. Roderick made four formulas, but only one of them could give life to the dead. The others, he abandoned as useless. It turns out that the three failed formulas individually act as an inoculation against some of the more disturbing symptoms of being dead. We have synthesized these other formulas, refined them into a gaseous form and are now using crop dusting aircraft to spread the concoction around.

  What’s the worst thing about being dead, Vince? You look like shit, you smell bad, and you can’t stop the processes of decomposition. One of the formulas, which we’re calling in the lab the green goddess, acts as a powerful odor inhibitor. It stops the spread of the bacteria that cause the odors. Another formula, yellow fever, completely inhibits the process of decomposition. It may even stop the process of aging. Finally, we also use a formula we call super-Perrier to clean up the appearance of the living dead. We’re still not sure how the hell that works. We think that Roderick may have begun some early experiments with nanotechnology.

  We’re not killing them, Vince; we’re not even curing them. We’re just cleaning them up, giving them a makeover. They’ll never be terribly intelligent, but they won’t be that much stupider than average. Your bizarre fantasy of creating a military force out of the living dead seems not to have been fruitful. In fact, Vince, look around you. In another couple of days, there will be the living dead all around you, surrounding you on every side. And you won’t even say, “I had not thought death had undone so many.”

  Rather, you will not even know the difference. The dead will be among us; they’ll be our employees, our children, spouses and bosses. They’ll be washing your car, auditing your taxes, reading the evening news. They’ll be in front you in the check-out line, next to you on the subway, in that car honking at you for not using your turn signals. We’ll never be able to tell the dead from the living again. In fact, you might say, that these days the living are indistinguishable from the dead.

  12.

  Not far from here, in a laboratory tucked under some ivy-covered building, the night janitor Peter shuffles his mop back and forth over sickly green tiles. The bristles catch on broken grout lines, but Peter doesn’t notice. Peter thinks of the water. He dips his mop in the suds and dark grease, and he thinks of the bubbles forming as he carefully lifts his mop. The bubbles are dark. They roil when he twirls the mop head. They undulate and shake. So dark, almost burgundy with the dirt. They remind Peter of something. Something he needs, but he can no longer remember what he needs or why he needs it. He stops. He leans over the bucket and dips a perfectly healthy and normal index finger in the filthy liquid. He brings his finger to his lips, opens his mouth, and sucks deeply at the grease.

  13.

  These fragments I have shored against my ruins. . . . I’ve collected these scraps, these little pictures of the time when the living dead walked the earth. I had hoped to understand what happened. I had hoped that there would be some message, some lesson here, some way of never letting this happen again. These pieces, from published reports, letters and first hand interviews, remain only fragments. The bigger picture remains obscure.

  I was one of those who finally located Dr Roderick’s laboratory and his work. Roderick was the first victim, and one of the first to take the cure. He’s a night janitor at the University of Chicago now. In his lab, we are still cleaning his blood and brains from the masonry walls. What did Roderick learn from his research?

  Is it that we’re so afraid of dying that we keep looking for ways to overcome death? If so, this will happen again. Why are we afraid of dying? Do we fear extinction, emptiness? I don’t believe so. Failed suicides report extinction as their aim. No, we don’t fear death so much as we fear justice. We fear retribution, and we’re not even sure why.

  The pathetic zombies that Roderick created are a pale simulacrum of death, a wind-up jack-in-the-box designed to startle children. The real living dead move swiftly, not slowly at all. They race from victim to victim, to suck the life from every experience of sunlight and warm feelings. The dead move in memories and regrets. They paint the sky with their color.

  Grinning Samuel

  David Dunwoody

  The air was musty and stale, choking Ryland with every ragged breath. Seated on a rickety old chair before a table coated with dust, he imagined he was in the waiting room of a mausoleum. He’d been here two hours. Seemed the Reaper was overbooked today.

  Before him yawned the mouth of a maze, a series of catacombs cut deep into the earth. A bitter cold whispered at him from the blackness, further constricting his lungs. In contrast was the warmth of klieg lights on his back; his long face was made longer in shadows cast sharply upon the table.

  On second thought, this seemed less a mausoleum than a television studio. Backlit like a late-night host, Ryland crossed one leg over the other and tapped his gold wristwatch and waited on his guest. Flanked by the klieg lights at Ryland’s rear, his audience sat, a huddled contingency wearing insect-like nightvision helmets, hugging their M4 carbines, which would punctuate his words like a laugh track if the guest wasn’t being cooperative.

  The hush in the entrance of the catacombs was as palpable as the mold in the air. His men’s breath, filtered through their helmets, was inaudible. Ryland coughed on a mote of dust. The sound cracked and echoed like a rifle report. Then the hush returned.

  The hush was anticipation.

  Something shifted in the catacombs. Ryland straightened up a bit, as a formality; although what was shuffling through the dirt towards the klieg lights likely couldn’t see him. Not because of the lighting but because its eyes, Samuel’s eyes, had long crumbled from their sockets. Still, Samuel always found his way to the table. Sometimes Samuel found his way to other things as well.

  He was attired in a soiled and worn shirt from the colonial era that had once been white, but was now a dingy brown; the same with his loose-fitting trousers. Samuel never requested new clothing. He probably only wore these threadbare threads out of habit. If they finally fell from his shoulders, revealing his emaciated husk of a frame, he’d likely not react.

  Everyone always noticed his hands first. Ryland’s gunmen heard the rusty creaking of Samuel’s metal fingers, crude constructs tethered to his wrists with wire, fitted over what remained of his original appendages with an intricate system of antique clock parts housed within the palms. The mechanical hands flexed continuously as Samuel plodded along.

  Once interest in the fidgety hands had waned, there was nowhere else to look but his face: brown flesh-paper so fragile thin, stretched over an angular skull; the holes where eyes and nose had once been to serve purposes now fulfilled by other means; and the jaws, another mechanism, screwed into the bone and affixed with steel teeth. Ryland stared in wonder, imagining Samuel seated somewhere deep in the catacombs, working with his mechanical hands to build his razorblade smile.

  “Grinning Samuel” was his full moniker, Samuel not being his real name, (no one knew what that was). He settled in a chair opposite from Ryland and placed a small burlap sack in front of him. He stared, eyeless, at the living.

  He was uncommonly picky, and any transaction came with certain rules of conduct. Some had been established from the get-go while others were learned at great cost. Most important was the invisible line running down the middle of the table, separat
ing Ryland from Samuel, a line of principle as effective as an electric fence. No one crossed that line. This cardinal rule had been established when Ryland’s predecessor had reached out to grab that little burlap sack.

  In the ensuing melee, all the gunmen had swarmed past the now-screaming-and-bleeding liaison with every intention of dismembering Samuel. And he’d killed every single one of them. Every one. The liaison had watched and died as blood jetted from the stump of his wrist. Watched and died while the blind, smiling Samuel had stuffed the gunmen’s remains into his stainless-steel maw. He didn’t feed often, yet he still thrived down here, in these catacombs beneath a defunct Protestant parish, a walking testament to the potency of the earth around him . . . the earth contained in that burlap sack.

  Opening a briefcase, Ryland turned it towards Samuel. This was the transaction. He slid the case to the center of the table, just shy of that invisible line, and the zombie’s mechanical fingers rummaged through its contents. Watch gears, springs, miniature coils and screws. Although whatever it was that infused this accursed earth had kept Samuel from rotting away entirely, he still needed to maintain his most-used joints, his limbs, his appendages, those terrible jaws. They creaked as he fingered a brass cog.

  Seemed like it’d be so easy right now to snatch the burlap purse with its pound of dirt and to riddle Samuel with bullets, throwing the table in his face, cutting him to ribbons with automatic fire, to finally storm the catacombs. Ryland felt his own fingers jumping anxiously in his lap, but he forced himself to picture his predecessor, dying on the earthen floor beside this very chair, dying on his back in a shitty paste of dirt and blood.