by Dayna Ingram
“Ah,” Fury says with a renewed smile, “then you are not a scientist, either.”
As if this should satisfy us, Fury turns back to the doctor and the prone zombie. “Make the first incision.”
My wounds begin to throb again and the ache travels through my body and into my head. I close my eyes as the doctor nods and lowers the bone saw against the zombie’s forehead. Renni wraps me in her arms and for a second, I get lost in her, the closeness and the solidity of her body, the familiar musk of her skin. Then the screaming starts.
The guards stationed outside burst into the room behind us. My eyelids fly open as my heart stops. Fury is against the wall, .44. Magnum—not the little replica lighter but an actual beast of a handgun—drawn and aimed, slightly unsteadily, at the zombie on the table. The zombie who is currently screaming as a stream of bright red blood runs in rivulets down the side of his head.
“Motherfucker!” the zombie screams. “That fucking hurts!”
Chapter 8: A Zombie For Your Thoughts
Zombie lore, much like the virus Fury told us our government has created for use as a biological weapon, mutates every few years to suit the needs of those who invoke it. As I’ve covered earlier, zombies were once summoned forth by witches and their ilk, to act as tools with virtually no autonomy of their own, maiming and killing according to their master’s whims, not their own. Spells gave way to viruses, air- or blood-borne pathogens that reawakened dead tissue, reanimating corpses and turning humans into soulless monsters. Some lore even insists that you can take the whole “undead” thing out of the zombie equation, like they essentially did in that movie 28 Days Later, but there is much debate about this.
However, one thing there has never been a debate over—never, ever, not once, not even a little—is the ability of a zombie to speak: they simply cannot do it.
Yet, here we are.
The zombie on the table stops screaming, giving way instead to a kind of dry sobbing. He struggles against his restraints, but the duct tape holds fast. He blinks some of the blood out of his eyes, then suddenly jerks his head to the left, to look at the doctor who still brandishes the bone saw. Then he jerks his head to the right and looks at me and Renni. His eyes no longer look glassy and lifeless, but they do look bloodshot and crazed.
“What the hell is going on here?” he booms. “Answer me!” He scans the room again, wriggling his head around as wildly as the restraints will allow him. “Somebody answer me, goddammit!”
“Well,” Fury says, pushing away from the wall and lowering his gun. “This certainly is interesting.”
“Who are you people?” the zombie continues to shout. “What are you doing to me? Where am I? Help! Help!”
Gracefully, Fury takes one solid step forward and cracks the zombie in the side of his face with the butt of his Magnum. The zombie’s head whips back with the impact, and then lolls to a stop, his mouth silenced.
“Did you kill him?” Renni screams, furious.
“He’s already dead,” Fury reasons back.
“Bullshit!” Renni lets go of me and runs up to the zombie’s table. Fury waves back the militia men, who have trained their rifles once again on Renni. They fall back under Fury’s silent command.
Renni rips open the zombie’s already shredded shirt and presses her ear to his chest, simultaneously ripping at the duct tape that binds his neck to the table. She manages to get it loose enough to dig two fingers under the tape. After a couple of seconds, she whips back up.
“He’s got a fucking pulse!”
Dubiously, Fury goes to the zombie’s side to check for himself. His face reveals nothing as he runs his own fingers under the tape. He motions for the doctor to check, and he too places his hands on the zombie’s flesh.
“Yep,” the doctor confirms. “His heart’s beating.”
“Impossible,” Fury exclaims. He runs his hands over the rest of the zombie’s body, tearing at his pants leg until he reveals the wound on his calf. “There,” Fury says, pointing at the bloody teeth marks with the barrel of his Magnum. “You see? He was bitten. He’s a zombie.”
“Just a sec,” the doctor says, pulling down his paper mask to reveal a frowning mouth. He leans over the body and uses the dull handle of the bone saw to scrape at the dried blood caked over the bite wound. The leg twitches under this new stimulant. It doesn’t take long for fresh blood to seep out of the uncovered wound, bright red, like a warning.
“For fuck’s sake,” Nick Fury says, backing off and scratching his eye patch in consternation.
“I don’t understand,” Renni says. “I thought bites transmitted the virus.”
“Yes, yes,” Fury nods his head vigorously. “Undoubtedly, they do. At least, the virus we’ve all been trained to fight against does. Most certainly.”
“So you’re saying this isn’t the same virus?” I ask. All eyes turn to look at me. “This is something new?”
Fury thinks for a minute, chewing the insides of his cheeks. The doctor puts down the bone saw, snaps off his gloves. One of the militia guys coughs into his elbow. “Or,” Fury says, turning back to the never-really-was-a zombie. “It’s not a virus at all.”
“Then what the fuck is it?” The forcefulness of my voice surprises even me, but Fury responds well to it.
He snaps his fingers at the doctor. “Get the smelling salts.”
The doctor rummages noisily through some drawers as I become increasingly impatient. I feel my body seizing up, preparing to betray me. Everything starts to feel heavy, to feel like a chore, breathing, blinking, swallowing. A cold sweat breaks out all over me. Finally, the doctor finds the salts and brings them over to Fury. Fury waves it in front of the nose of the man on the table. The man awakens with a jolt that morphs into a sneeze.
“Where am I?” he asks, kind of groggily.
Thankfully, Fury’s patience has grown as thin as my own. He plants his hands roughly on either side of the man’s head and looms over him, so that all the man can see is his large, hairy, one-eyed, imposing face. “Who are you?” Fury demands, voice booming, punching the table for emphasis. “What’s the last thing you remember? Something bit you. What bit you? Tell me!”
The man coughs a little and struggles against his restraints again, but only briefly, until he finally realizes there’s nowhere for him to go. He starts to cry, to whimper, but he manages, through stops and starts, to tell his story:
“It’s all a fog, man, I don’t know. I was…I was visiting my grandmother’s grave. She just died a few months ago and I go once a month to check on it, to make sure…make sure the grounds crew is keeping it maintained, you know? They neglect the graves no one visits, I know this, I’ve seen it, every time I visit, I see it. I loved my grandma, oh man, I loved her. She was great, she…. I owe her, man, you know. So I go to check on the grave, and this time…this time…it was disturbed. I remember walking up to it and knowing something was wrong, something…. As I got closer I saw what it was…the earth had been dug up, and then replanted. It was rough…it looked terrible. I was upset. I was going to go tell someone, someone who worked for the cemetery, you know, to come out here and fix it, but then…. Then….”
The man sputters through his sobs and cuts off. But then Fury slams his fists next to his head again, and the man starts up, as if by hitting the table Fury had punched his “on” switch.
“I saw my grandmother. Oh man, grandma. ‘Grandma,’ I said, even though I didn’t really believe it was her, but…but…she was wearing her purple dress, the one with the veil, the one we…we…the one we buried her in. Oh man. She was coming toward me, kind of unsteady like, reaching out to me. I couldn’t see her face under the veil but I could…I could smell her. I knew something was wrong, something was terribly, terribly wrong, but there she was, reaching out to me. She fell down, and I ran to her, it was instinct, you know, to help my grandma up. I got close and she reached out. Oh man, the shivers that ran through me when she latched onto my ankle with her bone-dead fingers, oh fuck, oh man
, like a ghost walking over my own grave, oh man. I tried to run then but she was strong. She pulled my foot to her and she bit me. Right through my Dockers, man, I love these pants! I yanked free but by then…by then…there were more people…people like her…dead people, in their funeral clothes, all over the hills of the cemetery, coming after me. I knew then, I knew, as I was running full tilt the hell away from them, I knew what they were. Zombies.”
The man sputters and stops again. Instead of slamming the table again, Fury leans in mere centimeters from the guy’s mouth and prompts, gruffly but less violently, “And that’s the last thing you remember?”
The man shakes his head slowly. “No. No. I remember sitting in my car. I couldn’t get my fingers to work. I was trying to put the keys into the ignition but I couldn’t hold onto them. Kept dropping ’em. My leg hurt something awful, kept cramping up. And then…then I felt this rumbling, deep down inside me. This hunger. I remember looking out the window at all them dead people, moving around on broken feet, and thinking, ‘This is it. I’m one of you now.’ And that’s the last thing before everything went black.”
One of the militia guys behind us clears his throat and speaks up. “Sir? We did find him a few blocks away, near Pine Fork Cemetery. He was lying next to a stalled Lexus, eating the guts of a dead dog.”
“Oh God,” the man exclaims, struggling once more. “Oh man, fuck, I ate a dog? Oh God, what else did I do?” He licks his tongue out around his bottom lip, tasting the old blood on his chin for the first time. “Oh man, no, oh God. I’m a vegetarian! I’m gonna be sick.” His stomach makes a loud gurgling sound and convulses against the duct tape. Fury moves lightning quick away from his face, and just in time too, as he begins to projectile vomit. Except the vomit is shot straight up because of how the man’s head is secured, so it has nowhere to go except straight back down. The man sobs and vomits again as the stuff splatters back onto his own face. It’s a cycle I don’t see ending any time soon, and don’t particularly think I need to be here for. I bolt.
No one tries to stop me. I take some random corners until I find an open, quiet room that smells like old book pages and lemon-scented floor cleaner. This room has a little supply closet behind a row of desks and I go in and shut the door. The light is out in here and I just sit with my back against the wall, sandwiched between a box of computer paper and a tub of papier-mâché paste.
What the fuck is going on? The once-zombie, or never-really-was-a zombie’s words echo through my brain, which has heated up with pain, exhaustion, and more than a little confusion. I try to review the facts but there don’t seem to be any. No one knows what’s going on, and we have less than three hours to figure something out or we’re all dead.
There’s a small knock on the door. “It’s me,” Renni says through it. I lean forward and twist the knob, pushing the door open a little. There’s a little moonlight to see her by, coming through the classroom windows. “You want to be alone?”
“I can be alone with you,” I say.
She comes into the closet and sits down cross-legged in front of me, closing the door behind her. There’s barely enough room for both of us; our legs are practically on top of each other. In the dark, her hands find mine and hold on tight.
“This shit just gets crazier and crazier,” she says, sighing.
“Yeah,” I say. I can’t think of anything else to say so we just sit there in silence, listening to each other breathe.
Finally, Renni says, “Psychosomatic.”
“What?”
“That guy in there,” she explains. “The pseudo-zombie. It was a psychosomatic reaction to a traumatic experience. It was all in his head. He was overwhelmed. Can’t beat ’em? Join ’em.”
“Is that your clinical assessment?” I ask, not trying to sound like a dick, but come on. Psychosomatic? That’s not her word.
“You’re constantly underestimating me, chica,” Renni says. I can’t see her face in the dark so I can’t tell if she’s pissed, and her voice reveals nothing. “You listened to the same story I did. What did you think of it?”
“No, your theory sounds right,” I say, my voice betraying everything. “It’s just…it’s scarier.”
Renni lets go of one of my hands to massage my knee with her thumb. “Why is it scarier?”
I’m starting to cry, not even making any effort to hide it. I haven’t been able to hide anything from this woman since the moment I met her, why try to start now?
“Because,” I say wetly, “because if there’s one of him, then there’s probably more of him. More people who think they’re zombies. More people going around out there, hurting even more people, and those people thinking they’re zombies, and everyone just fucking everybody else up. And then there’s us, people like us and literally us, out there shooting them because we think they’re zombies, we think they’re already dead, so we’re killing them, just shooting them like it’s a fucking video game, murdering—”
“Hey, hey.” Renni stops my rant before it can get any more hysterical. I’m breathing hard and my face is a mess, and I’m glad she can’t see me. She holds my face in her hands and wipes at my cheeks with the backs of her knuckles, but the tears keep coming. “I get why that might scare you, but, Devin, listen. Try to remember, okay? Remember what those zombies looked like—”
“—but they weren’t zombies!”
“Shh, shh, listen. Remember what they looked like, outside of the porn shop, and the guy in the furniture store. You remember?”
I do remember. “Dirty,” I sob. “Smelly, old.” My hysteria has reduced my communication skills to that of a monosyllabic first grader.
“That’s right.” Renni smoothes my hair back behind my ears. “And what else?”
I scrunch my eyes shut, thinking back. “Dusty. Broken. Dripping. Rotting.”
“Like they’d been buried,” Renni says.
I open my eyes. “Like they’d been buried,” I repeat.
“Because they were buried,” Renni says. “A long time ago. Those ones we fought, those ones we put down? None of them looked like that man over there in that lab, did they? No. Because the ones we put down, Devin, honey, those were zombies. The real fucking zombies who started all this shit. You got that?”
My breathing gradually calms down as Renni continues to stroke my face. I start hiccuping, and this makes me laugh. I sniff back my tears. “You called me honey,” I say.
Suddenly her face is directly in front of mine. She whispers, “You got a problem with that?”
My spine begins to tingle. I shake my head before I remember she can’t see me in the dark. “Not at all.” I start to call her “pumpkin,” but she kisses me, cutting off the term of endearment in the middle.
The kiss doesn’t last long, but it’s sweet. She pulls her lips back first, but keeps her forehead resting against mine. I can smell her breath as she speaks, which smells like how she tastes, which is like Tater Tots.
“We still have to get the hell out of here,” she says.
“But that Mister Machina guy was wrong,” I say. “Whatever caused these zombies, it wasn’t the government’s virus.”
“Unless they created a new strain they didn’t tell him about.”
“I guess that’s possible.”
“But that’s not your theory?”
I shake my head, moving hers along with mine. “I don’t think so. Why would they hide what they were doing from the very soldiers they’ve been training for the sole purpose of being able to defend against what they’re doing? If this was an experiment, it was to test out these soldier’s ability to contain the virus should it ever be used against us, not to test out the virus’s ability to trick even their own soldiers. It wouldn’t benefit them at all, to create something so amorphous that it can’t be brought down by their own guys.”
“Then what’s your theory?”
That’s when it hits me, that’s when I know. The thing I’ve been thinking all along, alluding back to in my ow
n internalized history of zombification. “Someone summoned them.”
To my surprise, Renni doesn’t laugh in my face. “Didn’t I tell you it was some whack job just trying some shit out in his basement? Didn’t I say that from the beginning?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“I did. I said it was some bored scientist with a god complex.”
“You didn’t say that exactly.”
“Close enough.”
“Anyway, summoning them is a little different from creating them in your basement.”
“Right, sure. But if they were summoned, there must have been a purpose, besides general chaos and destruction.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I hear the fabric of her shirt crinkle together as she shrugs. “Is summoning a zombie very easy to do?”
“Probably not.”
“Then whoever did it must have had a very good reason to go through all the trouble. Don’t you think?”
Just then, the door opens behind Renni and light from the classroom spills into the closet. She peels her face back from mine and twists her body around to see who has disturbed us. It’s Mister Nick Fury, AKA Mister Machina, standing with hands on hips, fresh stogie jutting out of the corner of his mouth.
“Okay, ladies,” he says. “Play time’s over. We’re heading out.”
Renni stands up, then helps me to my feet. “What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you understood English.” Fury laughs at his own joke. “Evidently this little zombie problem isn’t ours to fix. Our government didn’t cause it, so me and mine no longer feel responsible to end it. But we did make a commitment to get any survivors out of here, and we’re not going back on that. We don’t have to worry about infection anymore, so we can just walk out through the decontamination blockades. Let’s go.”
“Wait,” Renni says. “But they think there’s still an infection.”
“They won’t after we talk to them, and present them with evidence of our man formerly known as zombie.” He plucks the cigar out of his mouth and squints at us. “What’s the matter? Don’t you ladies want to get out of here? Put this whole mess behind you? Get back to your families and loved ones?”