Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose

by Jasmina Kuenzli

  We run together, hand in hand, the way I always imagined we would, in the darkest corners of my heart, from the moment that her eyes met mine across the ring of slavering animals, and I saw compassion that pulled me out from beneath the suffocating blanket of blood that sought to drown me.

  We leap over the bodies as one. I feel Penny’s death like a punch to the gut, but this is enough to keep it at bay. This, leaving and taking her with me, is enough to keep me moving, to stave off the grief and guilt that threatens to roll and crash into me, knocking me to where I won’t be able to get back up.

  There are shouts behind us, and gunfire, but I am not surprised when it misses us.

  We are invincible.

  We disappear into the trees, and I let the squeeze of Monroe’s hands guide me away from the pit of bodies and blood.

  Eventually, I pull on Monroe’s hand, and she stops running long enough to look at me. I can tell that she is trying to look brave, and alive, and dangerous, the way she did at the gates, but her eyes flick with something that I cannot identify.

  “Did you see which way my mom went?” I ask, the words leaving my mouth in puffs of air.

  Her eyes flit toward the trees, and I recognize the look in her eyes for what it is. Pain.

  “She’s just up ahead,” she says.

  It is well and truly getting dark now, too dark for us to move at all through the pitch black forest.

  I hate them so much, I wonder if Monroe and I can sneak back after we make sure Mom is safe. Sneak into the weapons shed and light enough grenades and small bombs to light the whole place up.

  I promise myself that one day, I will stand in front of as many people as I can and tell them what happens in the military. What they’re hiding. What I think they might do with it. I will tell my story, and enough people will hear that the place will become nothing but smoke.

  I hold onto my hatred, stoke it, let it fester inside me like an infected wound. It fills me with a kind of warmth, enough for me to ignore the chill that’s set in because of the rain, the sun going down.

  Monroe squeezes my hand every few seconds. She’s ahead of me, moving easily through the forest.

  I wonder how she knows where to go. I wonder why she didn’t leave before, if she could plan an escape so thoroughly. I wonder why she said, “I can’t” when I asked her to come with me.

  The air has that dusky gray film that only comes with twilight, and the rain has slowed to a soft drizzle by the time we stop at the edge of a stream. I don’t know how far we have walked, but my eyes feel heavy with tiredness, and even Monroe stumbles as she approaches the edge, uncharacteristically clumsy.

  I reach forward to keep her from falling backward as her feet slide out from under her. When I catch her, she’s heavier than I expect, deadweight. She’s not holding herself up at all.

  And that’s when I notice the sticky wetness on my arm, the gasp of pain she gave when I caught her.

  When I push her to her feet, the blood coats my arm in a red glove, before the rain washes it away

  The amount of blood, the way her eyes are fluttering open and shut, the sweat standing out on her skin, means that it’s bad. Really bad.

  “Hey,” I say, lowering her gently to the ground. “Hey.” I don’t know what to say, what to do. I feel for her side, and find a gaping hole in her abdomen.

  “Hey, why are you falling asleep, Monroe? We got a lot to do before we set up camp.”

  “Shut up, Gideon,” she tries to sound intimidating, but it comes out as barely more than a whisper.

  “Everyone’s always telling me to shut up, as if they don’t like the soothing notes of my voice.” I’m brushing the leaves off the ground, laying her head onto my lap. I pick up a wad of leaves and press it to her side. She hisses in pain.

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” I say. “It’s not that bad.”

  Her eyes flutter open, and she pins me with her gaze, strong and fearless, and shadowed by a haze of pain. “I know I’m not going to make it, Gideon.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re gonna be fine.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m dying. Listen— “she licks her lips. “Listen, your Mom is supposed to meet us a mile downriver. I gave her a map I made of the area and a compass. She’s probably there now, if she hasn’t gone full zombie yet.”

  I touch her cheek. “You have to live. I can’t do this without you.” I can tell she doesn’t want me to say it, but I throw the words at her anyway, watching them settle against her mouth. “I love you.”

  She closes her eyes, and that cynical smile finds her face again. “No, you don’t.” she says. “And it doesn’t matter anyway.” She looks so old, the circles around her eyes pronounced against her pale skin, her eyes crinkled with frown lines.

  She’s so far away.

  “I can’t do this without you,” I whisper it again. My tears fall onto her cheeks.

  “You’re gonna have to try,” she says.

  “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have let you help me. This is all my fault.”

  She shakes her head, or tries to. It’s really just a jerk with her neck. “No.” She grimaces. “I knew this would happen. I wanted it to happen.”

  ‘I knew it was over for me. I could feel myself slipping away, more and more. Even with you, it was like I was just watching. Like everything was happening to someone else. And whenever I went into the Field, I—” she coughs, and blood bubbles on her lips.

  I wipe the blood from her lips with my hand.

  “Y-You’re not gone.” I stammer. “I wouldn’t have let you go.”

  She gives that wistful smile again, the one that shows how much she wants to believe what I’m saying. “Gideon,” she breathes, and it looks like she’s going to say something else, but suddenly her eyes widen, and she’s coughing again. A wet, rattling sound comes out whenever she inhales, and I sit her up, hoping it will help her breathe better.

  But she just keeps coughing. Her hands clench and unclench. It feels like it takes hours for the coughing fit to stop, but eventually it subsides into weak, shallow breathing. She leans back, and I hold her against me.

  Her blood seeps through my wet clothes and onto my skin.

  I feel her back against my chest, the soft beat of her heart. I close my eyes, and I imagine us in the shed, holding onto each other. Whispering everything we’ve thought but been too afraid to say. Kissing, devouring, making with our bodies the manifestation of the sorrow that weighs our limbs. The way she looked at me, like we had a secret all our own, a world where there was a light at the end of the tunnel and people were better.

  I hold her until I can’t hear her heart anymore. Until I don’t feel her chest rise and fall against me. Until the rain stops, and the moon breaks through the clouds. Then I lower her to the ground.

  I close her eyes and press a kiss to her forehead.

  I am freezing from the rain, soaking wet and shivering, but the ice in my chest feels like something else. I stand, and the ice falls down from my heart and settles around my stomach.

  And I walk downriver, feeling like I am just a few breaths away from floating in it, facedown.

  ***

  I don’t know how long it is before I become aware again, fall enough outside myself to notice Mom facing me across the river, standing in the predawn light next to an oak tree that stretches heavy leafed limbs toward the sky. Her lips are moving, but it’s like there’s cotton stuffed over my ears. I can’t hear her.

  My face feels raw, the stickiness of tears coating my cheeks, and my hands shake with exhaustion. I take a step toward her, opening my mouth to ask her something. To tell her something, something important.

  The world tilts crazily around me, and I don’t so much fall against the grassy bank as meet it with my shoulder, banging into it all too soon for how far I felt from the ground.

  Mom’s sneakers land on the bank in my field of vision, and my ears open enough to hear her say, “Gideon,” again, in that voice that is loving
and frustrated, all at once.

  I feel the sun before I see it, harshness against my eyelids, a warmth that feels like it’s steaming my dampened skin and clothes. I feel sticky, sweaty. I rub my eyes, which are swollen and crusty from my tears.

  Mom sits next to me, watching the water flow by in the stream. Her long curly hair, the hair people always commented on when we were together, the hair that marked us as mother and son, stands out from her head in a frizzy halo. The frown lines at the corners of her mouth and the crow’s feet next to her eyes look deep, like they’re crevices in her face. She looks so much older than I remember.

  And she doesn’t know that I am awake yet, or doesn’t care. She holds her bitten arm out on her knee, so that the wound is exposed to the Sun. She sits with perfect posture, and her eyes are furrowed in concentration, like she’s trying to solve a difficult math problem in her head.

  I clear my throat, and she jumps, pulling her hand in to cross it with the other over her chest.

  She still glares at the water, as if she is searching for something that has fallen beneath the surface, and she speaks so softly that at first I don’t know whether she is speaking to me, or to whatever she thinks she can see within its depths.

  “You’re awake,” she says, her voice blowing away into the wind, progressively silenced by the time the last syllable whooshes out of her lips. As if the wind is carrying her words, drifting them onto the stream, letting them dissolve and dissipate like they were never uttered to begin with.

  “Obviously,” I try to laugh, but my mouth feels like sandpaper, swollen and too big to get the words in the right shape, and it comes out as more of a rusty croak. She hands me a water bottle, and I chug the whole thing.

  I feel more alert, but she looks farther and farther away. I have never seen her look like this before.

  “I waited until you got up,” she says, and that’s when I notice the gun, one of the standard-issue Berettas, lying next to her, on the side furthest away from me.

  And suddenly I am afraid.

  “Mom?” I ask, unable to do anything more than call her name, say the word that would make her come running whenever I needed her, make her banish the nightmares and the monsters.

  But the woman who held me when nightmares kept me awake does not face me now.

  Neither is the woman who let me break, for only a few moments, against her when I went to the Field for the first time and I worried that I had left everything that made me her son, made me Gideon, with the first bullet in the first zombie’s head.

  That woman doesn’t look anything like Mom now.

  She smiles the same smile Monroe had before she died, and it feels like I’m falling, pushed off a cliff and unable to do anything but wait for the bone-shattering impact.

  I try to catch myself anyway. “Mom, you don’t understand. I saw someone last night, a zombie, except she wasn’t really. She tried to talk to me. She--she was trying to help this little girl. They’ve been lying to us this whole time, if you would just— “

  But she’s already standing, the gun still held loosely in her hand, pacing toward the very edge of the river.

  I get up and follow her, wondering if I can overpower her, if I can knock some sense into her so that she won’t do this.

  But even as I’m thinking it, her hand is tightening on the trigger, and she holds the gun up to her head. “Gideon, I want you to know that I love you.”

  “Mom, are you not listening? Come on, I can save you. I can figure this out. You’re not going to die!” My voice breaks on the last word, and the speeches I planned, the conviction that she will get better, sit in my throat unsaid, choking me.

  She presses her lips together, and I take another step forward. “Come on, just put the gun down and let’s go, let’s just go. You can get better— “

  And now she’s shouting, loud enough to make the birds in the trees flutter into the sky, calling out in indignant alarm. “You think this is just about me, about this?” She brandishes her wounded arm in my face like a weapon, a flash of black and red over her pale skin.

  “Fuck, you had to go and ruin it, didn’t you?”

  “Mom, I”

  “Shut up!” she screams, and now her throat is raw from the words she’s hurling at me, scraped against her throat. “You’ve ruined everything! We had everything we wanted there, we were safe! You were supposed to keep us safe, and you led one of them back to us.”

  “Mom, we can make it out. You can run away with me!” I’m yelling too, trying to get through to her, but it’s like she’s on a completely different frequency. She doesn’t even hear me.

  “Go away with you? Take care of you, be your mom, when you’ve ripped everyone else from me? Your father’s dead, Gideon. And you fucking walked your sister’s murderer into her play pen, and now you’re going to talk to me about how we can leave and I can ‘get better?’” She laughs harshly, and her next words come out without any of the tearing screams that resonated in her last ones.

  “I don’t know what kind of fantasy world you’re living in, what kind of ideas that girl has poisoned your mind with—where is she, anyway?”

  I take a step back, and her eyes darken, the black surging across them. “She died too, didn’t she, Gideon?” She’s almost triumphant, now, vindicated. Her words find me but are thrown into the sky, her head is thrown back; she is performing for an audience only she can see. “You couldn’t even save her. This,” she sweeps her arm in a circle. “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.”

  She looks back at me, right into my eyes, and for a moment the blackness recedes. Her eyes are their normal brown again.

  She shakes her head, blinks. “I--“she starts, holding a hand to her forehead.

  “Mom,” I step forward again, my hand reaching for her. If I can just get the gun away from her, I can make sure she doesn’t hurt anyone. Doesn’t hurt me. I touch her shoulder.

  She jerks away from me with a cry, as though she has been burned. “Don’t touch me!” she screams, putting the gun against her head again.

  “Mom, please,” I speak as softly as I did to Penny in the cell, as though she is a horse that will bolt.

  Mom stops moving and looks at me. A black ring surrounds the whites of her eyes, and as I watch, it creeps further and further in.

  She shakes her head again, and she bites her lip so hard that blood starts to dribble down her chin. “It’s all your fault,” she whispers, and the black oscillates along with her expression. Fury. Despair. Desperation. Hunger. White, Black.

  And then she closes her eyes, and there is a bang that I don’t so much hear as feel in my heart, the sound of something breaking off and falling, falling forever.

  And I am kneeling on the ground, staring at the remains of her brain, the body crumpled on the ground, dressed in my mom’s clothes and smelling like a mixture of sweat and blood.

  When the smell of blood and rot overpowers the smell of her, the scent that lulled me to sleep every night, that made me feel like I was safe even when the world was falling apart, I stand. I step over her body, wade through the stream.

  I emerge on the other side of the river bank. And I walk down the river, away from the camp, down the mountain.

  My footsteps plod through the grass, and the beat of my heart pounds in my ears, spelling out my descent over and over. Down and down and down.

  Beyond Repair

  Rose

  The days blur into each other, their passage marked only by the steady progression of day to night, turning on the headlights of the cars I hotwire and turning them off.

  I don’t really know if I’ve slept.

  It’s just drive, drive, drive, eat, drink, drive. Survive.

  Sometimes I wake up enough to wonder where I’m going, to wonder why I’m bothering to survive at all.

  Sometimes I brush a piece of hair out of my eyes and find that my cheeks are wet, but I can’t remember crying.

  Now and then, it comes back in flashes, crowding across my visio
n in clumps and mobs. When that happens, I can’t see well enough to drive.

  Figures with black beards and red plaid shirts and wicked grins, glazed eyes and mocking laughter, pulling at me, threatening to drown me.

  It is then that I feel a spark of something. But it’s so painful, it’s like my consciousness detaches from the rest of me, and I’m experiencing the pain but not in it. I am the girl pulled over on the side of the road, curled into a ball, crying so hard she can barely breathe.

  And I am the girl who looks around for threats, who never sleeps because she’s always watching, the girl who picks up food wherever she finds it and eats when she is hungry.

  Sometimes I can’t decide if I’m remembering or dreaming.

  And Jake laughs as he says those prophetic words to Malia: you are dead.

  After a while, that grief sharpens to an anger, and it’s burning, almost as painful as sadness, but it electrifies me. It makes me want to keep moving, even if I never make it out alive.

  Even if I never feel happy again…

  I will not be dead until he is.

  Gideon

  I always thought that people could recover from heartbreak. That nothing could be bad enough to keep you from functioning forever.

  Like when Dad died, and I had to start my whole life as a soldier, I felt like I’d been punched into the ground. But eventually, I clawed myself to standing up again.

  I didn’t think, even in my nightmares when I imagined Mom and Penny dead, that there would be a grief that I couldn’t recover from.

  But now it’s different. Now I wake up and I do what I have to—I eat, I drink, I hide when I hear zombies coming. I steal cars and avoid other humans, and I tell myself that I do all of this to stay alive.

  Except I’m not sure if I want to stay alive anymore.

  I see them bleed whether I close my eyes or open them.