Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose

by Jasmina Kuenzli

  I’m not sure how to respond, but it doesn’t matter, because someone screams, “INCOMING.” And everyone whoops like they’ve just won a football game.

  “That means it’s time, Rogue.” Malia gives that wolfish grin again.

  She pulls me to a group of people on the edge of the wall, who are sorting grenades into trash cans to be handed around the rooftop.

  “I assume you’re familiar with grenades?”

  I’ve never even seen a grenade, except in movies and video games. “Pull the pin?”

  “Correct. Pull the pin. And throw. Really hard. I swear to God, Rogue. If you ruin this for me by getting us blown up, I will scream in your ear in the afterlife for eternity.”

  “ETA?” she yells at the person who shouted the alarm, a kid around thirteen.

  “I’d say five, ten minutes until they’re in range. They’re coming out of that cluster of buildings over there.” he points back the way we came, to the old brick post office, swiping his other hand across his brow.

  “Excellent, Neverland. Take your position.”

  “I told you. My name’s Peter!”

  “Neverland, don’t argue with Malia,” Mason yells from the other side.

  Peter grumbles as he climbs down and grabs a bow and arrows from a group clustered near the edge closest to the post office.

  “Alright, listen up!” Mason yells, climbing up on an AC unit, so that the only thing taller than him is the steeple and the cross. Immediately, everyone stops checking their weapons, drifting away from where Peter sighted the zombies. Even though Mason doesn’t look older than seventeen, he’s got this air of confidence about him.

  “You know the drill.” Mason begins. His voice is deeper than it was when he was talking to me, more mature and clipped, without any trace of a drawl. “This is what we’re here for. Why we’re here. The world has gone to absolute shit, and it’s not going to get better. There is no cure. There is no ‘aftermath’. Depending on how the next hour goes, there might not even be a tomorrow for some of us. Or all of us.”

  He pauses, looks around, capturing us. Malia watches him with arms crossed, a half-grin on her face. “We are going to die,” he says. “We are going to die, and where once we would have thought that could be years or decades from now, it can happen at any time. And where some people got the luxury of drifting off in hospital beds, your death and mine will be brutal. It will be violent. It will be painful. If you’re lucky, you’ll be so afraid that you’ll die before the real pain begins. That’s what we have to look forward to. That’s the future. Pain and Death and Misery.”

  Someone sniffles, but when I look around, I can’t tell who’s crying. They’re all looking straight at him, and their muscles are tensed, ticking time bombs waiting to be set off. Perce perches on the edge of the roof, jaw clenched. His dark eyes glitter. Sensing my gaze on him, he turns toward me and lets his lips curl up at the edge, just a little bit. He winks. I look away.

  “So. Why don’t we just give up, right? Why don’t we just throw ourselves off this roof, put a bullet in our heads? It’s all over, it’s either die today or die tomorrow, and what does it matter? The world is so shitty; I don’t blame you if you’d rather be dead than stay in it for one more day. So I ask you, Hunters, should we surrender?”

  And as one, as though they rehearsed this, the call comes from all of them, ripped from their chests in a scream that holds no harmony, only rage, “NEVER!”

  “We only die once.” Mason smiles. “And if we only get to die once, then I want to die killing as many of those undead monsters as possible.”

  The cheering erupts then.

  “I want to see them bleed. I want to see them rip apart. If I’m going to be one of them, then I want to take as many of them with me first.”

  They’re yelling incredibly loudly now, some hugging one another, crying and Mason looks above us, past us, to the horizon and the enemies we can’t escape forever.

  “So here they come, Hunters. We are going to die. We are going to die, but we are only going to die once. And if we only die once, I’m honored to die with you.”

  He jumps down from the roof and strides over to Malia, and as he pulls her in for a kiss, the entire crowd breaks apart, still hugging and kissing and cheering, crying together, all the emotion poured out like rain, and me, watching from above the clouds, unable to let go

  . Ben still hovers at the edge of my mind, his voice calling for me to come back, mocking them, laughing, and I see how foolish they all are. So I close my eyes, trying to block him out, but I only see Mom, putting the gun to her head, and I open them again. The weight on my chest crushes into me, like it never left in the first place, like I was stupid to think it could every leave, now that it’s back on my chest and it won’t come off and I’m having trouble breathing.

  I can’t do this. They are hopeful and I am not. They hold onto each other and I ran away. They want to fight and I just want to live, and I run every time and I am selfish and I can’t be with them, these people who pulse with how alive they are, when most of the time I feel cold and dead already, and there’s a voice at the back of my head mocking them all, telling me it’s all for nothing and I don’t belong, and he’s right, he’s right and the only way to live is to run, so why am I still here?

  And suddenly Perce is in front of me, facing me down with that same recklessness in his eyes, and before I can do anything, he says, “I wanna die with you,” and his lips meet mine, and my breathlessness takes on a new meaning, and the weight on my chest feels less like it’s suffocating me and more like it’s challenging, me, daring me to push it off, and my hands twist in his hair to hold him closer, and his hands are on my hips and back, until he’s everywhere, he’s all I can see, and Ben’s voice fades away like a bad dream, leaving Perce, who tastes like tears and desperation and wildness. And hope.

  ***

  “A few more seconds,” Mason cautions, a hand on my shoulder. On my other side, Perce’s hip presses against mine. Malia and a few others already fired off arrows, after a group took down as many as they could with their rifles.

  “Why not just blow them all up?” I ’d asked Malia when she’d explained the plan.

  “Target practice,” she grins,

  “So why use grenades at all? Why not just use guns?”

  “Two reasons. One: Ammunition. We don’t have a lot of these things, and we don’t know when we’ll get more.”

  She goes silent. “And the second reason?”

  “Only way they’ll know what it’s like.” She walks away to talk to a girl loading a sniper rifle, her blonde hair held back with a purple bandana. The girl is visibly shaking, constantly glancing over the rooftop at the approaching horde.

  Malia leans down to whisper in her ear, taking the rifle away so smoothly that the girl is hardly aware it’s happening. She places it on the roof beside us, glaring at us all the while, as though daring us to say something. Mason walks over and puts a hand on Malia’s shoulder, and she closes her eyes at the contact for a second, before snapping them open and grabbing a grenade.

  “On my mark,” Mason says quietly, in a voice that somehow still carries across the whole line. They’re only ten yards or so from the church and the congregation beneath us, who are still singing, even though they must have heard the gunshots earlier, noticed the death approaching, surrounding their supposed safe haven.

  “Three, Two, LAUNCH,” he yells in his deepest voice, resounding across the roof, and I swear I see the first line of zombies stumble for a second, as though they already know what will come after Mason’s orders.

  I pull the pin off my grenade and throw it as hard as I can. It soars over the heads of the first lines, but it connects with one in the back.

  There’s a brief silence, as everyone waits for the grenades to go off, then the explosions start.

  I see one zombie, a woman, go up in pieces, her limbs flying up like she’s surprised, and clouds of blood erupt in the air, mixed with gore
and limbs. It all feels like a movie, like it isn’t really happening.

  I can’t seem to feel anything for these people, these diseased humans who happen to be at the receiving end of Malia and Mason’s horror.

  I don’t know what that means about me.

  I hear a chuckle beside me, and I look around to see that they’re all laughing. Every single one of them, laughing and throwing grenades, while balls of fire incinerate them, the enemies, who explode into bits without a hint of terror. Even the girl with the purple bandana who watched them approach with terror in her eyes wears a blinding smile as she lobs a grenade over the wall.

  Perce is yelling next to me, something melodramatic, like “Die! Undead scum!” a wicked grin on his face, like he’s just playing a video game in his basement. His eyes have that same glittering, blazing look they had when they looked down into mine.

  And looking at him, and hearing the yelling around me, and the explosions, finally bursts the weight in my chest, and suddenly I am lighter than air, and I am screaming with them.

  We are all together, watching the flames destroy them, the ones who rose up out of the ground and took everything from us, the ones who are going to kill us if we don’t die somewhere else first, the ones who become permanently dead as clouds of red fill the air, and it’s beautiful.

  Heavenly Dreams

  Perce has his arm around my waist, and we’re leaning on each other as we walk, trying to make the other stumble.

  I remember flashes, explosions of sound and affection—Hugging, kisses on cheeks, on lips, so close that our breaths mingled. Perce, looking down at me through dark lashes, eyes wide with desire. Kissing him fiercely, like he was the only thing in the world.

  And Malia and Mason, hand in hand, smiling at the people around them like a king and queen, congratulating their adoring subjects. Setting off toward the outskirts of town, still chattering and whooping like a crowd after a football game, all of us high on adrenaline.

  I’m not sure how long it’s been since we started walking, but the high of the crowd has died down. Now I am drained, and everyone else looks that way, too. Like the hour or so of rebellion and life on the rooftop had to be taken from somewhere, leeching us into bleary-eyed, wandering figures that pick their way through a dead town.

  We’re outside Chinook now, down a road shadowed by trees on either side, some of which have fallen into the road. A few cars lie abandoned on either side of the road, where families left them in their haste. When the first kid in our town attacked his mother at the grocery store, the panic didn’t leave room for rationality. It was get out, as fast as you can, and the traffic and car accidents and noise and smoke set everyone off even more.

  That first day, when everyone was sprinting out of town, trampling and falling on each other to get to the grocery store and the last of the supplies, panicking and fleeing out of some primitive response to crisis, like there was some fictional promised land where no one would turn into a zombie, was the highest in the death toll, at least until the news stopped coming and the cable turned off and the radios turned to static.

  It was the worst day, before the days got so bad that there was no one left to report anymore, before communication existed only from one military base to another, and the only way to know what was going on was to go to the nearest one and hope it hadn’t been overrun.

  And for Mom, who wouldn’t let us go no matter how much I begged, how much I told her I didn’t care what they did to Ben, that he’d be okay, refused to let me go see what was happening.

  Mom knew there wasn’t an answer. It was either die alone, surrounded by strangers, or die with the people you love.

  We pass a car that looks just like Jonathan’s, an old, beat-up pick up, and I have to close my eyes for a second, the knot in my stomach tightening up again, because he’ll never drive that truck again. He’ll never roar out of our driveway to go bowling, never lean across the front to kiss a pretty girl, never pack his stuff in the back and head off to college.

  When you lose someone, the littlest things come back to hurt you the most. Somehow, the idea that Jonathan won’t get to go to college, that no one in this god dammed town is ever going to go to college or go to a movie or lie out under the stars and miss curfew hurts more than the way it felt to run through the woods with Ben’s laughter at my heels, feeling the end of everything crashing down around me.

  I stumble a little, and Perce turns enough to look down at me. Where I’ve seen little but jubilation and triumph and desire, something else looks down at me now. There’s a crinkle in the middle of his forehead, and the set of his lips, pressed together and down, the way he pulls me closer against him, is more intimate than the kisses we shared like swords sparking against each other.

  And suddenly I can see the boy he might have been, too, the boy who snuck people out of their houses in the middle of the night and kissed girls in dark corners, and I mourn for that boy, because the one looking down at me now looks almost like an old man.

  “Who was it?” he asks softly.

  I shake my head, pressing my face against his chest. We’re stopped now, in the middle of the road, and the others stream around us, murmuring to each other. Perce kisses my head, pulls me into him, and he doesn’t ask again. I take deep, slow breaths against his chest, and he rests his chin on my head.

  I want to break down and scream everywhere. I want to stop breathing and stop everything and wake up from this nightmare, stop trying to keep it together and let go of everything, but if I do that I’m afraid I’ll never come back.

  So I just keep breathing against his chest, and I swallow the choking in my throat, and I give myself ten seconds to start walking again.

  Ten seconds later, we’re walking. The others are slightly ahead of us, but not so far that we have to try really hard to keep up.

  After a while, we rejoin the others, because I’ve stopped leaning against Perce, and he hasn’t tried to pull me back in, just quickened his pace beside me. I look to the side once, and his jaw is clenched, his eyes furious, and I wonder what happened to him, what winding path led him here, whether he ever feels like he’s coming apart, too.

  Even if Malia and Mason spoke of dying together, and Perce looked at me like I was the only thing worth looking at in the world, the reality is this: picking our way through the remnants of what used to be towns and lives and parties and school and grocery stores, and going toward another day that might be our last, journeying through hour after hour, wondering if the next bend in the road will end it all, and kind of hoping it will.

  ***

  I lick my chapped lips and try not to think of water, readily available. Water, gulped from the sink whenever I felt like it. Diving into pools on summer afternoons, the sunlight starbursts in the bottom of a pool. I ran from Ben over twenty-four hours ago, and since then I’ve had nothing but the last of the water from Malia’s flask, who must have seen something dangerous in the way I was walking, because when she turned to look for me, she rushed back without a word and pressed it to my lips.

  But that was hours ago, and I feel drained and dried out, and I am so thirsty.

  Everyone else is, too, I can tell. People are holding their heads and squinting in the sun, and someone up front is breathing so heavily that I’m worried they’ll fall over.

  I don’t know what to do. Malia and Mason are at the front—I spot them by Malia’s hair, sticking out even wilder than it did this morning. They blur in front of me for a moment, and without thinking, I reach to the side for my balance.

  Perce’s hand, unhesitatingly, clasps around mine. “We’re almost there, don’t worry. We had to go somewhere that was far out enough no one was really around for miles, but close enough that we could go into town to get supplies, or raid gun closets.”

  “We?” I ask, trying to keep my mind off the dryness at the back of my throat, the way the world is narrowing to the path in front of me.

  He brushes a thumb on the back of my hand. “Me and
Mason were the ones who found it first. We were rooming together at UT when the first case started. “

  The words are tumbling out of him, quick and fast. The slight clamminess of the hand that holds mine tells me that he doesn’t want me to know this, but the words keep falling out of his mouth anyway.

  “We were driving back to school when it started happening. Closed roads, the government everywhere, trying to get us to go to Fort Hood or some other base. But it’s the wrong direction so we tell them no, and they tell us they’ll take us there if they have to shoot us and drag us, so we just peel out and take off the other way, trying to find a way through.”

  “We’re all the way home in South Carolina, going through back roads and off-road. My jeep can take the ground and Mason’s dad knows people at all the Shell stations, some internship he had way back when, and the phones are still working so we’re making our way there, only a few miles out, when we hit a road block. So we ditch the car and run home, and— “

  He stops, and I don’t ask about what happened further.

  “So how’d you end up here, back in Texas?”

  He swallows. “The car was still there when we got back, so we just kept driving. Ended up in Chinook, looking for food and water. That’s about when the car crapped out on us.” Perce’s Southern accent wasn’t noticeable earlier, but now, as the words keep rushing out of him, I can hear how he must have sounded at home, all elongated syllables.

  “Neither of us know shit about fixing cars, so we started looking for a place to spend the night. By then, pretty much everyone was at the government bases, or— “

  “So why didn’t you go to the base?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Why didn’t you?”

  I look down. “My brother— “I stop, not wanting to reveal too much. That Me, Ben and Jonathan would have been subject to military training. That they drug tested everyone, and they kicked you out if you were positive, and we all knew Ben wouldn’t go straight, not even to save his life.