Zombies' End: Aftermath

by Feren, Todd C.

  By this point, the news about how the virus spreads and what it does to you was public, so there was no lie I could make that she couldn’t see through.

  “I love you, Julie.” I said, crying against the door.

  She told me she loved me too. Her voice was low to the ground—she was sitting or kneeling on the other side of the door.

  I laid down on my stomach and looked under the door and I could see the side of her face against the tile. I could see her tears, and on the floor around her, I could see her blood.

  She slid her slender fingers under the door, and I reached out and touched the only part of her that I could.

  It wasn’t fair!

  She was dead, but she was still right there.

  I could feel her and talk to her—My father died in a car crash, and he died instantly.

  This just wasn’t fair. I wanted to hold her again. I wanted to kiss her.

  She knew.

  I begged her to open the door, and she refused me every time. I sat there by the door for the next two days and we just talked.

  We talked about everything and anything. We reminisced about the time we first met, our first kiss, and the first time I heard her fart.

  She laughed at that —It was really nice to hear her laugh.

  After a while, her voice started to get hoarse. Like it was dry. I told her to get water from the sink, but she said it hurt to swallow.

  Soon after that, she started to get disoriented and confused.

  We would be talking, and she would revert to a conversation we had days before. Sometimes a conversation I didn’t even remember that we had years before.

  I woke up the following morning next to the door, and I heard her crying.

  Then I heard her say the last words I could understand—

  “The pier.”

  The pier was our first date. It was a long pier that went out over the ocean. There were rides and games—I bought her cotton candy.

  I loved her the minute I laid eyes on her.

  She was better than me—better than I deserved.

  She stopped responding to my voice after that.

  I sat there in silence for a few hours. I couldn’t believe that she was gone. The idea of her no longer existing just didn’t make sense.

  Then, I heard it— It was soft at first.

  I could hear scratching against the bathroom door.

  I could hear her voice, but it wasn’t HER voice.

  It was just a sort of vocalization—Like a baby crying just to hear its own voice.

  I went downstairs with Wally and cried.

  Wally licked my cheek and leaned against me. I could feel his full weight as he leaned on me. He knew why I was crying—He was a good dog.

  After another month passed, my ears stopped hearing the constant scratching and moaning from the upstairs bathroom. It just became white noise to me.

  Sometimes I would hear a crash or a thud as she—it— would fall. Wally stopped barking at those sounds too.

  Another few weeks passed and I was sharing the last of the canned food with Wally. I opened up our last can of Tuna a week before, and I would feed Wally a pinch then give myself a pinch. By the end of the week, the tuna was rotten, but we both ate it.

  I could hear a loud noise from outside. Big trucks. Military. Wally barked a few times, and I’m glad he did. It alerted some people to us being inside. I just didn’t have the strength to call out.

  Some soldiers came to the door and took us away. What remained of the military was acting on its own to save as many people as they could.

  They told me everything was okay. They tried to take Wally into a separate truck as some sort of quarantine, but he bit the soldier who tried to separate us and he and ran straight to me.

  The soldier he bit ran after him, but someone else stopped him. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it was pretty clear the other guy was telling the soldier that I’d been through enough.

  They let us ride together. I could see more soldiers running into my house, and as the truck pulled away, I heard several gunshots.

  Wally looked up at me and licked my elbow.

  I think he knew what happened, but part of me really wishes he didn’t know.

  My Julie saved my life.

  Her sacrifice gave me insulin. She gave me a chance to survive by sacrificing everything. I wish it had been the other way around.

  I really wish she were hear telling you her story.

  Jessie

  Jessie (Unknown last name) was the next one to the microphone. He pulled the mic out of the stand and paced back and forth like a crazed tiger in a cage for a few minutes before actually talking. He was wearing old military fatigues that looked ragged and dirty. While talking to the group, he never stopped moving, and he would alternate between making uncomfortable eye contact with every single person listening to him and closing his eyes for long moments.

  They’re fuckin’ zombies! God Damn mother fuckin’ ZOMBIES! I don’t care what the god damn scientists say. I don’t care how many times you say it. I have never IN MY LIFE seen any flu that makes dead people eat the living fuck out of living people! Then the living people become dead fuckin’ people who eat the living fuck out of other living people.

  I call ‘em like I see ‘em—Fuckin’ Zombies.

  Look, I fought in the first gulf war, I did my fair share of killin’. Let me tell you something—I like killin’.

  I’m real good at it.

  Coming back home after the war was somethin’ awful.

  I look out the window and see a damn bike marathon going through the streets. People are cheering at the fuckin’ riders peddelin’ their little bicycles, and I don’t see riders.

  I see ducks in a fuckin’ pond!

  Boom! Click click! Boom! Click click!

  Don’t look at me like I'm crazy! I wouldn’t go shit nuts crazy and kill everybody in a Waffle House or nothin’, but believe me, I thought about it.

  I know where I am and I know the war is over— Well, my term anyway.

  But I never felt like I fit in when I came back. I was like a fish outta water, ya know?

  Then I get the best news I’ve ever heard.

  MOTHER FUCKIN’ ZOMBIES! I get to shoot mother fuckers legally!

  So I went to the first “weapon drop” if you could call it that.

  God damn M-9s and M16A2s? Small arms?! FUCK YOU! I’ve got better shit in my shitter! I got an M4, a fuckin M249 SAW, a M82A1 that shoots 50 caliber horse dick bullets that will put the biggest fuckin’ hole in a bitch you’ve ever seen.

  Hell! I even have a damn light anti-tank weapon! So don’t come on MY tv in MY house and tell me to stay inside! Fuck you!! I’m killin’ Zombies!

  I know, I know—People say they are infected—with the flu.

  Listen, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and craves human flesh, it’s a fuckin’ zombie!

  When this shit went down, I was prepared. I patrolled my neighborhood every night till the sun came up! And IF I saw one of those dead fuckers, you better believe I fucked it up and made it wish it had never been dead to begin with!

  I remember one night, I was on patrol and I saw one of those dead fucks draggin’ ass over the little bridge by the playground in the park. It was all by itself, and so was I.

  So I pulled out a grenade—

  This is the part where I should mention I was drinkin’.

  I had a few drinks, but fuck you! I’m riskin’ my life so you don’t have to “shoot something that looks human.”

  Anyway, I lob this grenade a good 30 yards, and it rolls right under this mother fucker! He looks at it like it’s a fuckin’ talking potato! He doesn’t move, he just looks at it, then BOOM!

  His god damned legs blew off. So I walked over to where his body landed, well, most of it anyway—and sure as shit that cock suckin’ legless mother fucker was crawling towards me. Even with no legs—and I’m sure he lost a nut or two— this fucker is cra
wling to me like a fag after a hard cock!

  I pull out TWO M4 Berettas and stick one in each eye and BLAM! Swiss cheese!

  I straddled that monster’s chest like some sort of prize titty fuck for about an hour. I remember looking up at the sky and thinking about how god damn clear it was.

  Sometimes, I don’t get it. Are they dead, or aren’t they?

  I shot people before! You shoot a guy, and there’s a reaction. You shoot a guy in the knee and he drops to the ground and screams like a mother fucker! These things—They don’t do anything. It’s like shooting a side of beef being pushed down the road. No reaction.

  Rounds just tear into ‘em and out of ‘em. Sure, you shoot the knee enough, you’ll blow the thing off, but they don’t seem to give half a fuck about that... They just keep comin’.

  I was patrolling one night; this was just after the Walmart fire—bout a week after. I was walkin’ around checking things out. I cut through the school playground to get back to Oak street, and I trip over a fuckin’ soccer ball. I turn around to kick the shit out of that ball, and as I shine my light to it—It wasn’t a soccer ball at all.

  It was a god damn zombie head. Starin’ right at me. Just the fuckin’ head! No body! Not even a neck. Severed just under the jaw line.

  Who knows how long the shit’s been sittin’ there, but it was still trying to eat!

  It was sitting on its side lookin’ at me. Its mouth was movin’ but it wasn’t makin’ a noise.

  No voice box—

  It kept showin’ me it’s teeth like it was trying to chew through the air to get to me.

  Even if I did let the thing bite me, where the fuck is it gonna go?

  It’s like a piggy bank with a whole in the bottom. If it bites my finger off, I could pull my finger right back out through the mess under its chin!

  I looked at it for a while, then I picked it up.

  Still no sound. Just movin’ it’s eyes back and forth to follow me, and chewin’ at the air.

  Every once in a while I would hear the clink of its teeth chompin’ into each other., but that was it.

  I took it home.

  Look, I know, it was illegal, but who the fuck really cares?!

  I was fascinated by this thing.

  By NO stretch of the imagination should this thing be rollin’ eyes and trying to bite me, but there it was—On a TV tray in my living room.

  It was kind of a novelty item for a while. I opened beers in its mouth, or put it in the toilet so that when this lady friend from down the hall came over to use the toilet, she lifted the lid she just saw this fuckin’ head sticking out.

  It was fuckin’ hysterical!

  Then it moved from a novelty, to an experiment. I put that head in my freezer for forty-eight hours. It froze solid! A piece of ear even broke off when I was takin’ it out. I put it in the garage, and the next morning when I got out there, it was starin’ at me and chompin’ teeth.

  I know, I could have blown its brains out, or stuck a screwdriver in its eye to kill it—Well, “kill it” is a relative term.

  I just couldn’t—

  Not this fucker.

  Just think about the odds of how this head got to me. I go off to the war, survive and make it back. I spend years thinkin’ of different ways to kill myself, but I never had the guts to.

  I work at a dead end piece of shit job, then the “Zombie apocalypse” happens.

  My time to shine.

  I could have just stayed in that night and not gone on patrol. I could have taken a different route that night. I could have NOT taken the shortcut through the playground. I could have missed kickin’ him altogether!

  I never would have seen him layin’ there—Seen it layin’ there.

  I would sometimes fall asleep looking at it.

  It never slept.

  Then one morning I wake up to the sound of screaming! I jump up and grab my M-9 and spun around to see my mama in the kitchen, cryin’ on the floor. I yelled at her!

  “You know you shouldn’t walk outside alone! What the FUCK are you doin’ over here!”

  She looked up at me angry. She pointed at the head sitting on the coffee table.

  “Why?!” She screamed at me. “Why?!”

  And the answer is, I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t.

  I thought about it. I thought about it a lot.

  I thought about it every night! I thought about it when I was six fuckin’ years old and had to listen to that cock sucker smack my mom around! I thought about it when he used to beat me when I got home from school! Oh, I thought about it a lot! He used to beat me and my brother till we couldn’t see! My brother died in a car accident, and that NOTHING of a man didn’t say a God damn word. It was like my brother never existed— Like he never mattered!

  I thought about killing him a lot. I thought about it when I was in Iraq, and he never wrote me a fuckin’ “howdeedoo!”

  He’s the god damned reason why my mama walks with a cane.

  He’s the reason I’m so fucked up to begin with!

  I don’t know why she still loved him. I don’t know why she never left—She could have left at any point! She could have taken us away from him a long time ago!

  And when that mother fucker disappeared after this shit went down, we thought he just ran off. like the coward he was. I thought it was for the best.

  Then to see that fuckin’ face staring at me on the playground—

  I gave my mama a hug, told her I would take care of it. Then, I took the head outside and shot it right in the back of his head.

  He didn’t know.

  He didn’t care.

  He never did.

  Peter Francis

  When Peter Francis approached the microphone, he looked professional and disheveled. I’d seen him watching the other speakers along with a small camera crew from a local news station. At first, when he began to speak, I saw a professional giving a performance. Very quickly, I could see his sincerity and pain leaking through the brave facade he was trying to put on.

  Hi. My name is Peter Francis. Reporter for WEJR in South Florida. In the news world, when an end of the world type of story arises, there’s only one thing you can do. Face it head on and report the horrors to the rest of the world. That’s why when the time came, I volunteered to be the man on the streets giving the viewers at home a taste of the danger they were avoiding.

  Pretty stupid, right? Nobody was ready for what hit us. Up until the big arrival, nobody was sure what to expect.

  America was pretty clean. Not too much action as far as a “zombie outbreak.”

  We weren’t allowed to call it that on the air. We had to call it “the infection,” or “the infected.” Once this turned into the reanimated dead, nobody even called it Nanjing flu anymore—Well, except the president. He was trying to do everything in his power to blame someone else.

  Funny how he kept claiming victory over the infection while it was ravaging the country. He was so worried about losing face during an election year that he just kept pretending like it was going to go away.

  Imagine pretending everything is fine just so you don’t look stupid.

  The thing about burying your head in the sand, is that your ass is exposed and you’re probably going to get fucked.

  Sure, we had small pockets of infection in the Midwest, and California, but they were all contained pretty quickly. We were showing the rest of the world how to deal with an outbreak like this. What was the problem in China? Why were they unable to contain it? Why was it so bad in South America and Mexico? It’s funny that all those fences that were so easy for illegal aliens to cut through and dig under ended up making the perfect barrier to keep out the infected.

  The infected don’t climb, or dig, or cut through anything. Sure, there were a lot of them, and if they were organized in any way, they could have pushed it over.

  That’s why the army stepped in and did what they do best.

  Watching those reporters on
the American and Mexican border standing there while the United States military fired shot after shot into the hordes of infected was awe inspiring. Gun shots were fired nonstop for twenty-four hours before masses had slowed. Those reporters just stood there at the border and covered the entire thing.

  That’s the type of coverage that gets remembered.

  When we started hearing that some infected were washing up on the beaches of southern Florida, I knew this was my chance to be that brave reporter on the front lines.

  Some weather and ocean experts used the Gulf currents to predict when and where the infected would start washing up.

  After all the experts weighed in, they all agreed that there would be pockets of infected washing up around Naples Florida.

  The army sent in a small unit—Mostly snipers who peppered the roofs and balconies of the hotels and condos that spread across the beach.

  When I saw the small response unit, I was a bit underwhelmed and kind of disappointed. Not disappointed in the lack of help—Disappointed that the threat was so small.

  Well, that and the fact that the president didn’t want it to look like a bigger threat than it was.

  The optics of not sending more military personnel out of fear it would make him look weak.

  John Ruskin once said, “In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”

  If he were alive to see this one…

  Sure, it’s great that every prediction of how many infected might come washing ashore was in the low hundreds. But I have to admit, I wanted to have a story that had some staying power. Somewhere between two and five hundred infected washing up over the course of twelve hours would have been amazing if it wasn’t already happening everywhere else.

  You had thousands of them along the Mexican border, and in France there were a hundred thousand outside the Notre Dame cathedral. Everyone remembers that. The French soldiers who stood on the roof of the cathedral firing down into the crowds of infected. The sounds of that many infected all gathered together was like an orchestra of pain.

  To me, their sounds— I know, the studies say it’s the lungs’ muscle memory squeezing out any trapped air inside past the vocal chords— But you have to admit, not only does it sound creepy as hell, it also sounds like they’re in pain.