Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose

by Jasmina Kuenzli

  She is looking at me, and I am looking back, and all the world is falling away for only the two of us.

  I allow myself to hope that she will come with me.

  And so I am utterly unprepared for Stavros, coming up to me in the middle of dinner, and ordering me to make myself presentable and report to General Laos’ office.

  In the excitement of my planned escape, the eagerness for freedom, the horror of the zombie who looked human, I had completely forgotten General Laos’ promotion.

  The flags at central command wave and snap in the breeze; it’s been cloudy all day, and the air carries the charged electricity of a storm threatening to break. I can feel the air hum, raising the hairs on the back of my neck.

  I stride to the doors, and they open, allowing me to maintain my pace as I walk into the lobby.

  I keep my shoulders back and my eyes forward. The receptionist’s gaze sweeps over me. I’m certain she can see the sheen of sweat that coats my skin, a product of my nerves. I don’t know anyone who’s gone to see Laos.

  What if he knows?

  I try to speak to her, but when I open my mouth, she shakes her head, giving me a glare that could cut glass. So I wait.

  Finally, she smiles. Sort of. Her mouth curls upward but she just he looks like she’s getting a root canal.

  “General Laos will see you now,” she gestures to a set of heavy gray double doors.

  I nod and march toward them with perfect military posture.

  I am getting out. I pull the handle and swing the door open, walk toward the door at the end of the long, black carpeted corridor, the white walls meeting the floor at a sharp, perfect right angle.

  I am getting out. I turn the wooden handle, carved in the likeness of an eagle, that opens the door to the General’s office.

  I am getting out. General Laos, whose face looks more careworn up close, shakes my hand and invites me to sit.

  He can see everything. My hope. My plan. My disgust at the army and what they want the world to become.

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  “I would love to hear it, Sir,” I pipe back, knowing that I will have to accept, no matter what he says.

  “As you are aware, you engaged in a certain exercise that sought to determine your fitness for command.”

  It’s like he’s pinned me here, forcing me to listen to him prattle on and on, listing every single thing that I believed before I came here, that I still tried to believe before yesterday. “We are here to make the world ours again. We are humanity’s last, best hope. We have chosen you to provide for us a better future. We will claim the world for the living over the dead.”

  It all once sounded beautiful to me, but now I taste blood in my mouth every time someone utters a single one of the phrases I recite every morning.

  And then he asks the question that is designed to break through the barriers I have set up, the refrain that I’ve been repeating in my head since that night, and all the nights after, as we planned and plotted, cultivating the golden light in my chest.

  “How is your sister doing?”

  Everything crashes.

  The shock jolts me in my seat, and I do my best to disguise it by scratching my chin.

  “Sir”? I school my face to blankness. “Is she not with the other civilians, sir?”

  The general smiles, and his mustache hangs over his teeth. He looks like the type of person who pins a grasshopper under a rock to watch it squirm.

  “I know you visited your family a few weeks ago, Gideon.”

  “Sir, I— “I try to think of an excuse, a reason for the frantic run through the compound after that first day.

  I needed my Mom. But soldiers don’t need their parents.

  He waves a hand. “It’s not a big deal, Gideon. They’re your family, right? You want to keep them safe. Means you’ve gotta check in on them from time to time. Make sure they’re okay. Let them know you’re okay.”

  Every word is cloaked in something else, something that is cloying and sticky sweet. But even though my bones are screaming danger, there is nothing for me to do but reply, “Yes, sir.”

  “I know you haven’t seen them since then,” he begins, and I can tell that the bomb is about to drop, that the next seconds hold a truth so absolute and life altering that it will shatter my world to nothing.

  “So I went to them to tell them of your impending promotion.”

  I start to thank him for doing that, knowing what an honor it is to have the general visit your family, but Laos waves me into silence again. “But when I went over there,” he shakes his head. “I was stopped before I got too close to their quarters.”

  He exudes the satisfaction of a cat with a canary, and I know what he is about to say, but I am desperate for him to say something else, desperate enough to ask the question he wants, to fall into his trap. “Why couldn’t you go to their quarters?”

  He does best not to smile, to look grave and sympathetic, but it’s not working. He relishes the killing blow.

  “They have been infected. Both of them.”

  The silence after his words stretches forever in my mind, leaving a gulf between Then and Now, a point of no return. Endless.

  I try to bridge it. “That’s impossible. They’ve stayed inside the compound since we got here.”

  “Yes.” And he can barely conceal the glee from his face, the bastard. “But last night, you saved a little girl. We welcomed you back as a hero, and promised you a promotion, but you made a grave error,” He leans forward, gripping the edge of the table with both hands. “You did not check over her to see whether she had marks.”

  As I’d been taught to do. As I’d been drilled, over and over again. Symptoms can take hours to manifest, sometimes days. Too many of us have died because our friends turned on us when we were lulled into lowering our guard.

  Maya had clung to my leg like it was the most important thing in the world, and I’d thought it was an aspect of the trauma, clinging to the person who saved her from the zombies, but it must have been something else.

  How could I have thought that she hadn’t been bitten, down there all that time?

  “Sir, yes sir.” I confirm, knowing that owning up to mistake is all that I can do.

  I remember Maya, clutching her hands around the neck of the zombie, begging her. Please. I just wanna go home.

  I hadn’t realized that she might be talking to me, might have realized what had happened and what it meant, and what it would mean when I took her back. If I took her back.

  “Maya was— “

  “Infected,” he nods. “A bite just below her neck. And she was a playmate of your sister’s.”

  Was. Whether a zombie or a human, Maya is no more. I wonder how they did it, destroying a girl so small, so trusting. Did they shoot her execution style, or stick a knife in her brain to save the bullet? Did they even wait for her to turn, to attack one of them, or was she still begging, pleading, crying to go home?

  “I’m— “I begin, but bile rises in my throat.

  Before I can move to leave the room, a trashcan is shoved beneath my nose. I lose all of the contents of my stomach in the next few minutes, wiping my mouth and starting again, retching until there is nothing left.

  When I am recovered enough to wipe my mouth and the tears from my eyes, General Laos hands me a glass of water. I swish the liquid around in my mouth and spit it in the trashcan.

  Laos doesn’t say a word. He just looks at me. Weighing me up, finding out where I measure.

  There is no other reason for him to call me here and tell me about my family. There is no other reason for the lack of reaction to my horror. There is no other reason that he looked so self-satisfied when he told me the news.

  He must know something about what I feel, what really happened with in the tunnels. He must know that I didn’t kill it, that I couldn’t. He might even know about Monroe.

  General Laos is not done with my testing.

  I want to jump to
my feet and demand to see them. I want to tell him about the zombies in the tunnels, the ones I moved through like they were water, slashing through them gracefully, mercilessly, until I came upon the woman who held Maya like a parent, not a monster.

  I want to tell him that Monroe and I whisper to each other in the dark, and those secrets are more important than a dozen drills, and more effective than the bloodiest fighting rings.

  I want to tell him that he is a monster, to take his smile and his ‘cure’ and his desire to remake the world and burn in Hell.

  But General Laos is testing me. And if I want to see my family again, I cannot fail.

  I swallow, and I paint my face like a canvas, brushing emotions across it. Guilt. Disgust. Fear.

  “I regret that I failed to follow all of protocol, sir.” I say.

  He nods, as though I have given the correct answer in an exam. “Your regret does nothing, Gideon. I have two infected civilians, and you are the one to blame for it.”

  “S-Sir,” I stutter. “If I had known the harm that would come to them— “here at least, I can speak honestly. He expects me to regret the loss of life, to feel remorse for the fact that my actions have led to my family’s deaths.

  Because the infected are dead, from the moment they’re bitten. That’s what they’ve always told us.

  “Son,” he begins, in the same voice he used when I first sat down, and I know what I will have to do.

  When he finishes speaking, I can feel my hands shaking. I clench them into fists at my sides, hoping he will mark it as fear and adrenaline, and not fury. I stand and salute.

  “Thank you, General, for allowing me to personally correct the mistake I have made.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Private Huston. Dismissed.”

  When I am almost to the door, he barks, “Wait.”

  I stop, turning to face him, all thoughts of protocol forgotten. It is all I can do to keep from strangling him.

  “Once you return from your assignment, go to the quartermaster and get captain stripes added to your uniform.

  “Yes, sir.” I say. “Thank you, sir.” The words taste like acid in my mouth, burning away the light I carried in my chest, snuffing it into darkness, into a place that is not unlike the tunnels I spent hours wandering. My blood thunders in my ears, but when he dismisses me, I look as calm as when I entered.

  Before I leave the building, I give the woman with the iron hair a smirk, twiddling my fingers in a false wave. Let her think that I am nonchalant about the whole thing. Let her think that I am giddy with the excitement of a promotion.

  Let them think that I am eager to eradicate the mess I have made.

  I know that they are watching me, that all of my plans with Monroe, plans involving supplies and weapons and unconscious guards, have fallen to pieces in the light of General Laos’ ‘test.’

  I walk to the quartermaster, and he opens the shed Monroe and I have spent so many nights inside. He hands me my semiautomatic and machete knife, and I strap them to my belt.

  By the time I come to the scientific research building, the medium-sized cube next to the command center, I can see the men Laos has watching me.

  One walks a few paces behind me, always just far enough off not to look like he’s doing anything but going somewhere else, just happening to be near me. I walk past a woman doing push-ups in the grass, and her eyes lock with mine as I pace past her.

  The doors slide open, but the scientists inside barely look up. The screen, with its list of dead and infected and living and unaccounted for, blares the harsh figures in front of me. I wonder why they keep it up there, a discouraging reminder that if they’re looking for a cure, it’s too late for most of us.

  I wonder if they’re even looking for a cure, if they have yet to discover what I found out in moments last night. I saw something in that woman that was not supposed to be there, that changes everything.

  It confirmed everything Monroe and I had been speculating about since the first day.

  It was always too easy for the whole thing to happen. Too easy for the infection to pass by saliva, even though it had begun an airborne strain. Too easy for us to hole up in military bases that sprang up way too quickly, that kept the lights on and the houses heated all around the area, like they knew that some people would break off and scavenge for the scraps left over when the world went to Hell.

  Too easy to train soldiers who would not hesitate at the sight of a human face.

  The scientists weigh what looks like dirt in scales, and they pour thick liquids out of one beaker into another. They peer into microscopes. The room is filled with a low buzz too full of jargon that I can’t make out more than “symbiosis” and “strain” and “event” before it is all swept away in the cacophony.

  One scientist, a guy who can’t be much older than me, stops and stares with a beaker full of blood in his hand, head tipped to the side. His long white fingers stand out starkly against the blood in the beaker.

  He frowns, as though I’m a difficult math problem.

  Before he can ask me any questions, a pair of gray double doors below the screen opens, and a woman in red comes out of it. Her suit fits her impossibly tightly, highlighting her curves and showcasing the muscles that practically burst out of the sleeves of her blazer. She looks ruthless, terrifying, in red lipstick and red-streaked hair. She is all red.

  She waves me toward her impatiently, like there are a billion places she would rather be.

  I rush over, almost stumbling in my eagerness to approach her.

  I must play the part of the eager soldier, desperate to rectify his mistake. I must display the same unquestioning obedience that sold General Laos enough to trust me to come here and do what he asked, even though what he asked was too awful to think of.

  The woman doesn’t say a word, just turns and walks back through the double doors. I follow her into a gray hallway of identical doors, each with little windows on them. In this hallway as well as the laboratory, she practically glows red. She’s a beacon, a blinking light that I follow silently until we are so far in the building that I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the exit again.

  It doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I get out of this alive.

  All I knew, as General Laos spoke, was that I could not do what he asked.

  And I could not leave without at least trying to save them.

  She points me toward an interrogation room, with a window facing in the room and a table with three chairs

  And there they are, sitting shackled to their chairs like animals.

  I can see the marks of needles on their necks from here. The scientists have already started experimenting on them.

  I used to think it was because they wanted to find a cure. But after last night, after the tunnels and the convenience of having my last ties to humanity snuffed out just before I become a captain, I do not believe in the Army’s pledge to protect and serve.

  Seeing the needle marks in their necks, I flash back to the Holocaust, slideshow after slideshow of the concentration camps, the Nazi scientists who used Hitler’s obsession with cleansing the world of undesirables to take apart people and see how they worked. To infect them with diseases. To see how much pain they could stand.

  I never thought something like that could happen again.

  The woman in red tells me about the safety precautions. What to do if they become hostile, if they start to become hungry. The buttons under the table that will get rid of them faster than Laos wants, too fast for him to find out whether I really have the stomach to take care of them.

  More than anything else, I have wanted to take care of my family. And now I am.

  Laos wants to test my bravery. He wants to see if I am brave enough to save my mother and my sister the suffering that comes with going zombie.

  “They are not your family anymore,” Laos said, back in his office. I nodded, even though the room spun around me. It was dizzying, the stunning realization that I would have to k
ill my family.

  It pushed me over the edge, to here, to this suicide mission that hinges on the emotions in a zombie’s eyes.

  I do not know what happens when someone goes zombie. I do not understand the full science of it, the pathways of the brain that are rewired and cut off, that turn them into slavering, bloodthirsty monsters.

  Like everyone else, I believed that you were gone after you were bitten. That it was only a matter of time before the symptoms would manifest and you would lose everything that made you you. Your entire personality and hopes and fears and desires would all be crushed beneath one single, all-encompassing need: hunger.

  I believed all of it, even when I felt the kick in my gut after my first day of killing in the Field, even as I talked to Monroe about it all being too easy.

  I never really believed that the zombies might still be human.

  Until yesterday.

  And until now, standing in a room with a chair for me, almost like dinner at home.

  My family, looking at me like I’m what they’ve been waiting for.

  Penny looks worse than Mom.

  Mom’s arm oozes a deep gash, her blood red mixed with black, eyes puffy and swollen with the beating they have already given her.

  But Penny looks nothing like my sister. The angry, outspoken, fearless girl who screamed of the zombies she wanted to kill, who promised to keep me safe, is now silent and shackled to a chair. Her blonde curls are matted with dirt and blood, and her blue eyes pierce me through her dirty face.

  I can see their dullness from here.

  The disease has not blackened her eyes yet, but it will. I can see rings at the edge of the whites, like a black fog creeping in.

  I draw the knife and place it on the table, and Mom goes still like a rabbit.

  Penny just stares at the floor dully. It’s like the life has already been sucked out of her.

  I speak so that the red woman and the soldiers watching through the cameras in the corner will hear.

  “You know why you have been brought here. According to Protocol 131, all personnel suspected of infection are placed in quarantine until we can fully assess whether their blood has already been contaminated.”