No longer able to summon voice, he whispered one last defiant “Fuck You,” before giving up on the rifle he could no longer lift and trying to fend you off with his bare hands.
That slowed you down for longer than you can now believe: maybe an hour, as the magnificent doomed bastard continued to refuse to submit. The best you can say about him is that there was a little less left of you by the time he was done. The worst is that it didn’t help him, and that he really should have saved a bullet for himself.
Afterward, you took your time, starting with his face while he made the few sounds he still could.
Reliving that now, just one returning horror out of many—and wishing for something solid in your stomach, so you could vomit something other than air—you finally understand why none of the other people you see would stir themselves to approach any of the others. All of these people are haunted by the people they killed, the flesh that they ate, and the loved ones who lived to see them become something reeking of the grave that wanted to drag them into the same bottomless darkness.
Who would want to see another human face, with that on their conscience?
Like them, you want to just sit alone and stew in your misery.
But then something drives you forward anyway. You select one of your closest fellow prisoners, a pale fat mound sitting on the ground about a hundred paces away. She looks up long enough to see you coming, but then turns her attention back to the dirt and doesn’t move at all as you cross the gulf between you. As you draw near, you see that her skin is just as colorless as the sky, except for the places where particles of grit now cling, like parasites. She’s not obese, not really, but she has enough excess flesh to form a donut around her waist. There is a tattoo on her arm, but it’s an old one and has become a faded purple smudge that no longer conveys whatever it had once been meant to signify.
When you stop before her, she glances at you, her weariness heavy enough to fill up a world. “What do you want?”
“What is this place?”
She barks a bitter laugh. “Did you just arrive?”
“Is it Hell?”
She shifts her weight just enough to set the excess flesh jiggling, a sad little dance that gives the impression of life for all of two seconds before inertia reasserts herself and the rolls of flesh once again take on the character of stacked corpses. For long minutes you imagine her intent on waiting you out, but there’s little point in that, not here in this place where every direction is exactly like every other. And then she murmurs, “I was a nurse.”
“What?”
“I was a ward nurse at an old age home, the floor where they kept all the patients with dementia. It was the last stop. They’d already been through the forgetful stage, the confused stage, even the dangerous stage most people don’t know about, when their frustration with a world they no longer understood turned them unreasonable and violent. They didn’t come to me until they’d forgotten who they were, and what they’d lost. Most of them were bedridden, and some were so weak with age that they didn’t have enough energy to move much…but always, always, there were some who’d gotten it in their sixties, or fifties, when they were still ambulatory, with energy to burn. I even had some in their forties, from time to time: one a college professor with a beautiful little wife twenty years younger than him, an ex-student who had to watch as her robust middle-aged husband suddenly started turning into an old man only two years into their marriage. He could run a marathon every day, that one. And we let him walk up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, nodding a kind hello to us on every pass, never remembering that he’d ever seen us before. Understand: we knew that he was in a terrible situation. We knew that he didn’t deserve what had happened to him. But, for a long time, it was almost pleasant, getting that smile from him every few minutes. He wasn’t unhappy, not at all. He didn’t know it was a care facility. He just thought it was a hotel, and figured that he’d be able to return to his life if he could just…if he could just find his room. He just needed to find his room. I always thought, if I ever come down with it, let me be like him. It wouldn’t be too bad, if all I cared about was…finding my room.”
You don’t understand why she’s telling you this. It seems random, not the answer to your question at all. As she winds down, you come within a breath of interrupting. But then she continues.
“After a while, he got worse. The smile went away. He forgot everything else but the shuffling walk up and down the corridor, and the skin of his face went slack, like a blanket draped on a chair. He was no longer looking for anything. There was nothing behind his eyes but the next step, and the step after that. He was transferred to another facility, so I never found out what happened to him. But when the dead rose…when they started coming after us…the look on their faces was nothing new to me. They looked like everybody in my ward. Some of the people I ended up with called them names like ‘those things,’ and ‘those sons of bitches,’ but I always remembered the old people on the ward, the ones who’d also forgotten everything, and had also never asked to become what they were. I never forgot that it wasn’t their fault, that they were just looking for something they couldn’t have anymore.” Her tired gaze, long fixed on the dirt, manages to move upward, long enough to meet yours. “Some of us may have been evil bastards before. But what we did after the infection took us was just the infection. It wasn’t our fault. Unless God’s a total maniac…it wouldn’t condemn us to Hell. And it hasn’t. I believed in Hell. I still believe in Hell. It may have taken me a long time to figure out, but this place isn’t even remotely terrible enough to be Hell.”
“Then…I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”
She stabs the dirt with her thumb, and draws an angry circle, one that fails to connect back to itself as the curve comes around to its starting point. She rubs it out and draws it again, once again breaking the curve at the point where it should become perfect. You get the impression that she has spent much of her time here, however long that’s been, trying and failing to make this one simple shape. And then she says, “After what we’ve done…why would anybody already in Heaven want us there?”
The size of it almost knocks you over. You spin in place, taking in hundreds, thousands of immobile figures with all that horror behind them and nothing that offers comfort in front of them. There must be millions, all told, maybe hundreds of millions or even billions: the poor, abused world getting pretty damn unpopulated by attrition by the time your own life was ripped out. You might be looking at much of the Earth’s population, but for those lucky few fortunate enough to suffer so much damage when they died that the terrible phenomenon was unable to affect them: the lucky few who had not been tainted.
You say, “But that’s so fucking unfair.”
She nods without sympathy before returning to her hopeless drawing. “The whole thing’s unfair. Isn’t it?”
You stumble away, so blinded by despair and horror that you don’t even thank her for the information. You are still stumbling as you pass the next hopeless figure, and the next figure after that; the ones who look up at you and the ones who don’t, the ones who seem half-mad and the ones who act that way because it’s the only rational response to an irrational eternity. You want to scream at them, raise an army of them, and march together toward that light in the east, the one you now know to be the Eden that will never let you in. You know that you will never get another to stand with you, let alone walk with you. They all know they carry the taint. They all know that while they’re not quite damned they’re as close to damned as human beings can be without actual consignment to the pit.
And then the rage rises out of nowhere and you throw your head back and you howl at the empty sky. You know exactly who you’re yelling at, but you don’t care. You only know that what happened wasn’t anybody’s fault. Or even if it was somebody’s, if the plague was some exotic bug escaped from a government lab or something, nobody who caught it had ever been given a choice. You we
re no more responsible than loving family dogs gone rabid, or sane men turned violent by tumors in their brains. You don’t deserve this emptiness, this punishment that amounts to no more than the stubborn refusal to judge you.
You scream until you run out of breath and stand there panting as you wait for an answer. But nobody answers. Nobody answers. You scream again and this time you face the gray sky and try to bring forth a pattern in the miniscule differences in shade between one patch of emptiness and another: the face of a kind and benevolent, or even stern and maniacal creator, looking down on you, taking note of what you say, and either changing his mind or smiting you for your temerity in daring to criticize him. But again, though you scream for a timeless time, maybe longer than you existed as one of the living dead, maybe longer than you existed as one of the warm, no face emerges. You are alone.
And again you wind down and sink to your knees and face the prospect of doing what all these other lost people have done, which is sit your ass on some forsaken patch of dirt and let the years, the centuries, the millennia accrue like dust.
You want to. That’s the terrible thing. You want to.
But the Bastard has left you with one thing worth doing.
And so you lurch back to your feet and begin to trudge forward, stopping in front of every immobile before moving on to the next, aware that there may be millions or even billions left to go, but not caring at all, because you have nothing but time.
She was just a little girl. Your little girl.
It may take about as much time as it takes some mountain ranges to crumble to dust…but sooner or later, you’ll find her.
When the Zombies Win
By Karina Sumner-Smith
Karina Sumner-Smith is the author of several stories, including “An End to All Things,” which was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her work has appeared in the magazines Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Flytrap, Challenging Destiny, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons. Anthology appearances include Children of Magic, Mythspring, Jabberwocky 3, Summoned to Destiny, Ages of Wonder, and Why I Hate Aliens. Sumner-Smith is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and works part-time as a bookseller at Bakka-Phoenix Books, Toronto’s science fiction and fantasy bookstore. She says she is currently battling a novel.
The ending of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is pessimistic about human nature but seems optimistic about the chances of human survival in the face of a zombie pandemic. After all, come morning, we see squads of militiamen rounding up zombies and consigning them to bonfires. However, in the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, we are presented with the reality that the zombie plague cannot be contained and will continue to expand exponentially and irreversibly, and by the time Day of the Dead rolls around the world is completely dominated by zombies and only a few clusters of survivors remain.
The final outcome seems inevitable. Sumner-Smith writes, “In a discussion about the apocalypse, I joked that someone should write a story set after everyone has been eaten or turned into zombies. What would the zombies eat? What would they do when there’s no one left to infect? Once I’d considered the consequences, a total zombie apocalypse seemed not horrific, nor comedic, but tragic. It’s not just that everyone has died, but that we have died and yet continue to stumble through the ruins of our world with no way to understand or acknowledge what’s happened, or mourn the loss of everything we once were.”
When the zombies win, they will be slow to realize their success. Word travels slowly on shambling feet.
It will take years to be sure that there aren’t still humans hiding in high mountain camps or deep within labyrinthine caverns; that the desert bunkers are empty, the forest retreats fallen; that the ships still afloat bear no breathing passengers.
And then: victory. Yet the zombies will not call out to each other, or cry in relief, or raise their rotting hands in triumph. They will walk unseeing beneath telephone wires and over cell phones, computers, radios. They will pass smoldering rubble without thinking of smoke signals, trip on tattered bed sheets and not consider making flags.
They are zombies; they will only walk and walk and walk, the word spreading step by step across continents and oceans and islands, year by year. And the word, to them, will feel like hunger.
When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a screaming buffet on the run.
Yet there will be only silence and vacant rooms where once there was food, and the zombies, in their slow and stumbling way, will be surprised. Stomachs once perpetually distended will feel empty and curve inward towards their spines, the strength of even animated corpses beginning to fail without fuel. They will look about, cloudy eyes staring, and they will groan, unbreathing lungs wheezing as they try to push out enough air to ask slowly, hungrily, “Brains?”
But there will be no one left to find. Only each other.
Zombies, they will learn, do not taste good.
When the zombies win, they will become restless. There is little to do when one is dead.
Their old pastimes—their favorite pastimes—will hold no satisfaction. They will shamble down streets, arms outstretched as they groan and wail, yet inspire no fear. Together they will pound on doors, beat on windows with decaying hands until the glass shatters, hide in rivers and lakes, stumble after cars on the highway. But the cars will all be stopped, forever in park; the breaking glass will elicit no screams; and no swimmer’s hands or feet will break the water’s surface to be grabbed. When the doors burst open there will be no one cowering behind.
There will be no people to stalk, no food to eat, no homes to build, no deaths to die. Lost and aimless they will turn as if seeking a leader’s guidance, and find none. With zombies, the only leader is the one who happens to be walking first.
So they will walk alone, all of them alone, with no destinations, only the need to keep putting one unsteady foot in front of the other, over and over without end. The world is a big place to wander, even when inhabited only by the dead.
When the zombies win, they will not think of the future. There will be no next generation of zombies, no newborn zombie children held in rotting arms. The zombies will not find comfort in each other, will not rediscover concepts like friendship or companionship, will not remember sympathy or empathy or kindness. They will not learn or dream, or even know that they cannot.
They will build no buildings, fix no cars, write no histories, sing no songs. They will not fall in love. For zombies, there is only an endless today—this moment, this place, this step, this need, this hunger, this hunger unrelenting.
And the streets will begin to crumble, and windows break, and buildings fall. Cities will burn and flood, towns will be reclaimed by grassland and forest, desert and ocean.
The human world will go to pieces, decaying to nothing as empty eyes stare.
When the zombies win, they will not fear. They will not laugh or rejoice, they will not regret, they will not mourn. And the world will turn and turn, seasons burning and freezing across the landscape, the sun flashing through the sky, and they will continue.
When they zombies win, they will not stop. They will still moan and cry and whisper, on and on until the lips rot from their faces, their vocal cords slide away. They will never truly think again, never know the meaning of the words they try to utter, only flutter endlessly on the edge of remembering. Still they will try to speak, bone scraping on bone as their ruined jaws move, and they will not know why.
One by one they will fall. In the streets they will fall, legs no longer working, arms too broken to drag them forward. Inside buildings they will fall, tumbling down stairs and collapsing in hallways, slipping behind beds and in closets, curling into the gap between toilet and wall, not knowing, not seeing, not understanding these trappings of the places they once called home. They will sink to the bottoms of rivers and oceans, and lie down in fiel
ds, and tumble from mountainsides, and fall apart on the gravel edges of highways.
One by one they will stop moving, flesh and bone and brain too broken to do anything more. And in that silence and stillness they will struggle—trapped and ruined, they will still yearn, still hunger, always reaching for that which was taken from them. That which they granted to so many of us, in such great numbers.
To stop. To sleep. To rest, just rest, and let the darkness come.
Mouja
By Matt London
Matt London is an author and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and a columnist for Tor.com. This story is his first piece of published fiction. He has no less than three escape plans should the zombies take Manhattan.
The samurai were a warrior caste in feudal Japan who wore distinctive armor and often fought with a sword in either hand, one long (a katana or tachi) and one short (a wakizashi or tantō). Though they were feared because they had the authority to execute any commoner who displeased them, they were bound by a strict code of honor—Bushido—which demanded they commit seppuku—ritual suicide—should they dishonor themselves.
The Living Dead 2 Page 9