It would be better, she thought, to work her way back.
So what was her most recent recollection?
It was a blurry memory, one bereft of judgment, just images of an old blacktop road, its surface fractured into a jigsaw puzzle by the grinding heel of the elements. Weeds fountained up through those zigzagging cracks. The night air was cool and moist and seasoned with the smell of fresh blood and flesh. She was hungry. She was so hungry it pained her, and she walked toward the smell of blood because she knew the pain would go away if she ate, if she fed the hunger that flesh and blood, for the hunger was like an entity set apart from her, its own autonomous being, a beast trapped inside her that raged and slashed at her innards with acid-dipped claws. Other creatures like her encircled a mangled carcass, like lions gathered around a kill on some Serengeti plain. They shifted aside as she approached, allowing her to kneel and shove her hands into the creature’s ragged torso. She pulled out a handful of slick, warm, slithering guts and brought them to her mouth. Pleasure, as the cold, fibrous material dissolved between her gnashing teeth. Relief as the raw flesh slipped down her parched esophagus, filling her belly, feeding the hunger.
“Oh, no,” the woman said in a trembling voice, and she touched her lips with her fingers. She shifted her fingers to her belly and found that her stomach was swollen, taut with the flesh she had recently eaten. Her belly was distended as though she was six months pregnant, protruding through the tattered remnants of her clothing. She blinked down at it with revulsion, and wondered again just what it was that she had eaten.
She turned back to the group, which was still feeding a few yards away. She knew they would not harm her, knew it instinctively, though how she knew this she could not explain. The creatures were familiar to her. This was her… herd. She had wandered with them for a very long time. She did not know their names, but she remembered them. She knew their faces. Their faces were as familiar to her as the faces of her husband and child.
It had once been a much larger herd, but now there were less than a dozen of them. A flood of memories swept through her mind then: the endless, aimless wandering, never stopping but to eat, never resting, never sleeping, just wandering all day and all night and in all kinds of weather, through the country and through the cities. The herd had swelled and shrank as newcomers joined and old members wandered off or died. They had merged with other herds and broken back apart from them. More than once, they had crossed paths with the living and either killed and ate them or were gunned down by the desperate survivors.
She remembered the killings then. So much killing! Her herd had attacked and killed countless living beings, tearing them apart and devouring them with terrific ferocity. Men, women, children, it did not matter. Mercy was a human trait, and they were human only in form. And she had participated in the feeding frenzies with the same mindless savagery exhibited by rest of the herd. Of course she had. She was one of them, just as mindless and brutal and insatiable as the rest.
But not anymore.
She had… changed.
She could think again.
She could remember.
But how? Why?
Tentatively, the woman walked back to the group. She approached them haltingly, cautiously, watching their faces for signs of aggression. A part of her expected them to attack. That was the thinking, remembering part of her brain, the part that knew what it was to be a living human being, to be hunted by the unthinking dead. Now that she could reason again, the fear of the creatures was as bright and stark as a stroke of lightning. She wanted to flee from them. Every instinct shouted for her to run! Run away! Yet she knew they would not attack her, not unless they were very hungry, not unless she showed some sign of weakness or injury. She knew she was safe from them because they had just eaten, but also because she was still one of them. Her mind might have returned to her, but she was still dead, and she remembered what it was to be one of the living dead.
Drawing close, she looked into the face of the big one. She supposed you could call him the herd’s alpha male. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Caucasian with rough-hewn features and tangled gray hair. His body was heavily muscled, his flesh pale and pitted. There were several gunshot wounds in his chest and stomach where armed survivors had shot him. His clothes had once been denim jeans and a button-up flannel shirt, but they were just rags now. His boots had fallen apart some time ago and flopped around his ankles. He stood chewing slowly, mechanically, on some tattered strip of bloody meat. Tacky blood covered his chin, neck and chest. He stared at the moon as he chewed, his eyes as milky as the lambent orb suspended overhead.
Could he think, could he reason, as she did?
And if he did not, would he reawaken as she had if she spoke to him?
“Hey,” she said timidly. She leaned toward him confidentially, her voice lowered, as if she were preparing to share a secret with him. She did not know his name so she could not speak it. Instead, she said, “Hey, big guy. Can you understand me?”
The big one’s filmy eyes twitched toward her. His lips curled back from his teeth, an instinctive reaction. He snarled low in his chest, like a dog protecting its bone.
She could see that he recognized her, that her face was familiar to him. He was warning her off with his grumbling, confused by the prey sounds she was making. She knew she should withdraw before he attacked her, but she was desperate, confused, frightened, and he was tall and strong like her Nandi.
“Please, can you speak?” she whispered.
He lunged at her then, the meat dropping from his jaws as he howled. He swiped at her with his right hand, fingers curled, missing her face by inches.
Soma stumbled back, clamping her hands over her mouth to stifle her scream. The scream, she knew, would provoke the entire group to attack her. She lowered her head and averted her eyes in a gesture of submission, trembling.
The big one, the alpha male, inclined his head toward her, still growling. He sniffed her hair and the side of her face and then turned away. He squatted and picked up his fallen meat and began, slowly and mechanically, to eat it again.
She did not attempt to speak to him again.
But she did not leave them, and when the sun rose and the herd continued on its way, Soma followed.
3
She did not know what else to do. She did not want to be alone. Not yet anyway. There was some comfort in staying with the herd, a sense of security she was reluctant to surrender. So when the sun peeked over the distant hills – a slice of brilliant light the color of hot coals -- and the group began to shuffle away to the south, she trailed after them.
By then, the animal they had fed upon had been reduced to a collection of sticky red bones. A few members of the herd carried a piece of the creature with them as they stumbled away: a leg bone, a hunk of ragged flesh. The smallest member of the herd, a little girl with ratty blonde hair, dragged about twelve feet of intestines behind her, a gory bridal train.
Day rushed in after the sun peeked over the horizon. The winking stars vanished in groups as the sky shifted from black to the faded denim blue of late spring. The clouds blanched from pastel pink to shaving cream white as the milky curds of fog that pooled in all the dips and ditches evaporated like tired ghosts. It promised to be a warm, arid day, the sky blameless but for the rim of clouds encircling the world just above the horizon. She was not certain if it was late spring or early summer. Not yet.
The herd drifted across the meadow, the wet stalks of the chest high wild grass cleansing the blood from their bodies with a thousand little licks. They crossed a culvert and started down a long, straight, empty highway. Several members of the herd stumbled on the steep banks of the ditch. The little girl fell twice trying to cross to the road, her hands full of animal guts. Nobody stopped to help her.
Soma stayed at the rear of the herd, walking alongside the little girl and a boy and an old woman and a fat man. They were the slowest members of the herd -- the youngest, the oldest and the most infirm. T
he boy was hardly older than the little blonde girl was. He was short, thin, his hair an auburn helmet framing a plump, cherubic face. His pale prepubescent body was naked. The old woman was bony and gray with a severe face that might have been pretty when she was younger. Her neck was as wrinkled as elephant hide, and she wore a colorless wool dress that was mostly intact. She was also missing an arm. Her left arm ended in a grisly stump at the elbow. A member of the herd had attacked her the previous winter. Soma vaguely recalled the event -- the old woman shrieking as the powerful young male, hungry and desperate for sustenance, fell upon her and twisted the limb from her body, joints popping, flesh tearing. He had scurried away with his prize, devouring it greedily as he fled, and the old woman had arisen and continued as if nothing had happened. The fat man was dark-skinned, his face round and jowly. He had lush features: thick lips, a broad flat nose with flared nostrils, a protuberant brow. His eyes, frog-like and silvery, stood in stark contrast to his gleaming black skin. His movements were ponderous, like he was swimming through oatmeal, though he was immensely strong. Soma remembered him tearing a door off a car to get to the occupants screaming inside.
Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.
They all trailed after the tall man, who strode out in front of the herd on long, muscular legs, seemingly without care whether they followed him or not. Just behind him were five others, three men and two women, all young and strong. The betas of the group. Their shadows scissored across the broken pavement as they moved in a loose group south.
She knew they were heading south because the rising sun was to her left, but other than that, she did not know where she was, and the tall man did not seem to have any sort of destination in mind. He was just following the path of least resistance, the highway, which was relatively flat and open and smooth.
She looked around curiously as they walked. Where were they? How far had she wandered from home since she died? She had lived in the Midwest all of her life. This landscape, though unfamiliar, did not seem much different from the rolling hills she remembered from her life before. Her exact location, however, eluded. There were no landmarks to indicate where she was, and the only road signs she had seen thus far were a rusting mile marker, faded from the sun, and a green metal sign that said INDUSTRIAL PARKWAY 2 MILES in plain white letters.
How long she was adrift in the murky waters of the River Lethe was another mystery she pondered as she followed the herd. In some ways it seemed, as it did sometimes when people roused from a long sleep, that hardly any time had passed since she was last awake. She remembered the outbreak and fleeing with her family to her parents’ home in the backwoods of northeast Indiana. The memories were as fresh as if it had all just happened a couple of weeks ago. She remembered the long season they had hidden there as the Phage devoured the old familiar world, ate it up like an aggressive cancer, and then the attack. She had stumbled upon a zombie straggler as she trekked to the edge of the woods that bordered her father’s property to dump the five-gallon bucket they were using as a toilet. It was a big male, its body heavy with muscle, dressed in the tattered remnants of some blue-collar work uniform -- olive shirt and pants. He had had a bald, bullet-shaped head and hands large enough to palm a basketball, would have killed her that very moment if her father were not watching from the porch. Her dad had snatched up his rifle the instant the big brute came lumbering out of the forest, but he was not able to headshot the rapacious zombie before the creature snatched an arm and yanked Soma into its virulent embrace. It sank its teeth into the meat of Soma’s shoulder, biting clear through her sweatshirt, infecting her with the deadly Phage. A moment later, her father’s second shot blew off the top of the monster’s dome, spraying her (and her wound) in cold, black zombie blood. She remembered the fever that had followed swiftly after, her husband and parents gathered around her, crying, praying, and then she had awakened here. Wherever here was. Yet she knew that time had passed, a long passage of time. She remembered her relentless wandering, the variegated landscapes, the passage of the seasons, and though her memories of that dark corridor of time were hazy and bereft of any subjective meaning, it was as real as the time before, as real as her living life and the family she had shared it with.
Judging by the state of the road she was walking on, years had passed since the eruption of the Phage. But how many? How long had she been dead? Did her husband still live? Had her daughter survived? And what of her parents? Could she find them? Should she seek them out?
Those questions swirled through her mind as she stumbled after the herd, the children shuffling to her left and right, the fat man and the old woman walking a little ways behind her.
After an hour or so of walking, they passed several broad, single story structures. The buildings had corrugated aluminum siding and metal roofs, large parking lots and open-faced equipment sheds full of hulking machinery. Large unmown lots of prairie grass hedged the buildings, saplings reaching for sun and sky. A few vehicles crouched in the parking lots, tires flat, windows shattered. There were no other signs of human occupation. All was silent and still but for the birds flitting in and out of the eaves, where they had made their nests. These were the industries the big green sign had heralded earlier, slowly succumbing to entropy in the absence of their human caretakers.
Soma was tempted to investigate, to walk up to those buildings and look inside the windows, maybe pilfer through the cars. Perhaps there was something inside one of the structures or vehicles that might help her figure out how long she had been… adrift. A book. A newspaper. A magazine. A calendar. But she was afraid she’d fall too far behind the herd if she stopped to investigate, and right now the herd was the only security she had.
She turned her head as the buildings drifted slowly past, hoping she did not come to regret her decision to stay with the herd. The old woman took note of her interest and made an inquisitive groaning sound. She seemed about to veer away, then looked to the tall man at the front of the group and continued forward, grumbling quietly in frustration.
The old woman wore a cameo at her throat, like an old-fashioned governess, and had long white hair that fell down almost to her waist. Soma wondered who she had been before the Phage turned her into this nightmare crone. What was her name? Did she have an occupation? A husband? Grandchildren?
It was still a wonder that she had remembered herself. Soma kept turning her sense of self over and over in her mind, examining it from every angle, looking for cracks or missing pieces, but it was all there, whole and unbroken. Her awareness, all of her memories, had returned, simply and without revelation.
I am Soma Marie Lashari, maiden name Tucker, wife of Nandi Lashari, mother of Aishani, daughter of Bill and Shmi Tucker of Brookville, Indiana. My father taught English lit at Goshem University. My mother was a nurse. I was a nurse, too. I was working at Saint Francis Hospital when the Phage broke out. That’s where I was the day that we fled. We did everything we could, the staff at Saint Francis, but there were so many people coming in, so many sick and dying. The rooms were all full. The hallways, too. Nandi came to the hospital when the military showed up. They were attempting to quarantine the city, to stop the spread of the infection. Nandi pulled me out of the ER and threw me in the car. I tried to stay, didn’t want to abandon my post, even fought against him as he dragged me through the parking lot, but Nandi wouldn’t listen. He knew. He saw the tanks rolling in from the windows of his office building, and he knew. He practically carried me to the car, threw me in the passenger seat and we took off. We escaped the city right before they bombed it. I remember the jets flying overhead. The sound of thunder.
It was all there, intact and intractable.
About noon, they passed a dead bird on the road-- a crow, or perhaps a raven. It was too decomposed to tell what it was for certain, just a ball of black feathers really. The others had passed it without stopping, but the naked boy stopped. He stared down at it for a moment, then squatted and used his fingers to pry the dead thing f
rom the asphalt. He stuffed the desiccated flesh into his mouth, feathers and all, and began to chew on it, eyes rolled back in their sockets.
Soma reached for him instinctively, saying, “No, honey, don’t eat that!” It was what she would have done if her daughter had picked up something nasty from the ground and put it in her mouth. She took ahold of the animal carcass and tried to pull it from his mouth and the boy mewled. “No, it’s too old,” she said.
The boy screeched at her and slashed her arm with his nails, gouging furrows in her flesh.
Soma recoiled from him with a gasp. She looked down at her arm as the child hurried on, glancing back at her sullenly, feathers sticking out of his mouth. He had slashed open her skin, exposing the muscle underneath. It hurt but the wound did not bleed. There was a moist sheen on the muscle beneath the ripped flesh, a viscid tar-like substance, but no blood. She dabbed at it experimentally, smelled her fingers. It had a ripe, rotten odor, like shit and spoiled fruit. She scowled, looking after the group, who trudged on oblivious of the clash between her and the child.
You cannot stay with them for long, she thought.
She stood still, watching them recede down the road. She was tempted to let them go, find her own way in the world, but she was uncertain what challenges might lie ahead of her. She would be -- must be -- safer in a group. For now. Finally, grudgingly, she followed after them, cradling her injured arm.
The others had all passed her, even the old woman. Soma hurried a little to catch up.
You’ve changed. You’re different now. You’re not like them anymore. Eventually they’re going to figure it out. You’ll slip up, or they’ll sense it somehow, and then they’re going to turn on you.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 3