by Beth Mattson
“You know, you all did this.”
He threw her down into the water. She yelped.
He didn't drown her. He didn't strangle her. Instead, he threw her into a pile of reeking zombie heads that could be swarming with fish. It should be fine. I would just pull her out and dry her off. I could get her a new outfit and make her warm tea. I peered over the edge of the bank.
Juliet sobbed quietly. She was climbing up the piles of old, crushed heads, but something was attached to her ankle. My face went slack. It was a head. Biting her. A zombie head. The head from the ex-ten-year-old-boy. It was biting her. The one Hector hadn’t burned. The one I hadn’t shown him how to burn. It was biting her. The one I still hadn’t smashed. The one I had kicked into the stream while it was still snapping. It was biting her.
I leapt down into the head pile. I pulled her up by the hands. She was small, like Hannah. The fever would take her quickly. I had to hold her once more, one more time while it was still her, before she Changed. Hug her. Tell her I was sorry. Before she disappeared. Like Immogen had.
I pulled her into my arms. Squeezed her tightly. Nestled her head against my shoulder. Cradled her shivering form. Tried to warm her hands form the crisp spring water.
And then I felt the sharp pinch. The pinch of a bite. I was being bitten. I was holding my little sister with a head attached to her leg. Now attached to my leg. Did I make this mistake on purpose? I shook myself, trying to clear the fog from my thoughts. I was making so many mistakes.
The head was clamped onto my calf with its mildewy teeth, chewing and flailing its tongue out the corner of its broken jaw. I clenched my molars in a thundering rage, laid Juliet down on the damp bank, pried the head off of my leg by its ears, walked it down to the bottom of the stream, found a gigantic rock and cracked it open like a coconut. I smashed until it was pulp and shards. It floated downstream, crushed with dark green tar brains spilling into the burbling current around my ankles. It was finally dead.
I shivered. I had the chills. I looked up at Juliet. She was shaking too. We were both sweating. I heard Uncle Donnie peeling out of the driveway in their Apollo.
I should take us into the House. I should lock us someplace safe, where Mom and Dad could find us and bash our heads in more easily. My knees trembled. I fell down. As my hips and shoulders sank into the cold, rushing water, I could see Hector swinging from branch to branch and chattering above us. He waved at us as he swung on by.
The Leaving
I woke up freezing. Mucky water raced over my belly and burbled away down the channel. I sat up, held my head. It pounded. Throbbed. Where was I? Was I in the stream? Why was I in the stream?
I looked around. I couldn’t see much. It was dark and there was no moon. I could hear the light thump thump thump of Dad’s pendulum striking the Kitchen wall. I wondered how many zombies were gathered around it. I should go check. Get rid of them and go to bed, Warm with my family.
I crawled up the stream bank. It was slippery with mud and I could hardly walk on my cold, numb toes. A sigh burbled in my throat. How long had I been unconscious down there? Why was I down there? What a horrible place to sleep. Had I fallen from a tree? Been pushed? And where was my hammer? Where were Mom and Dad? Hector and Juliet?
I stumbled across the Lawn to the Kitchen. There were only three zombies at the pendulum. That many I could take out with a lump of chopped wood. I grabbed a thick, knotty piece of pine with a broken branch for a handle. I felt my shoulder stretch and pop as I swung it over my head. It tingled slightly.
The first zombie, an ex-man, dressed in safety pins and torn cotton stripes, fell down motionless after just one clobber. The second, an ex-woman wearing a flaming guitar hoodie, I tapped on the shoulder to turn it around so I could get a better shot at its bent head. It fell down, heavy as timber. The third zombie was tiny. I spun it around, raised my lumber.
It looked up at me, lunged for my belly.
I paused, looked at my hands in the faint light of the tiny lamp over the pendulum.
My hands were grey. Or green. Grey and green.
The little zombie dug its fingers into my belly. I looked down. I wasn’t bleeding. I was seeping thick, black goo. Shiny black. Pitch black. And my skin was pale.
I removed the little zombie’s fingers from my skin and held it back. I cupped its chin in my palm. Looked at it good and long. It was Juliet. It had been Juliet. It wasn’t Juliet anymore. It was ex-Juliet. I knew that it wasn’t Juliet anymore. I dropped my log. It wasn't her.
She wanted to eat me. She didn’t know that I was me. Oh Gods, was I me? I looked down at my hands. They were grey and green. Grey and green. And cold. The tiny hole in my belly didn’t hurt. It tingled and oozed thick, pungent tar. Was I an It?
Juliet lunged at me. It lunged at me. She was an It. It was missing one shoe. Its skin was as cold as mine.
Was I an It? I didn’t feel like an It. I didn’t want to eat anybody. I didn’t want to eat at all. Food sounded terrible. But I looked like an It. My throat gurgled. I sounded like an It.
“Hello?”
I could speak. I couldn’t remember anything, but I could think. I wasn’t biting, but ex-Juliet was. She was biting me.
Where was Hector? Was Hector an It now, too? Mom and Dad? Were they all Its? Were we all Its? Where was everybody? I couldn’t remember.
I left my ex-little-sister by the Kitchen. I stumbled to the front door. I turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. We never worried about it, because zombies couldn’t use doorknobs. But I did. I opened the door without letting it creak. I remembered how.
The living room and bathroom were empty. The whole place was dark. I crept up the first five stairs, stepped over the sixth. I looked in my room. The .22 was lying on the floor. One empty shell lay next to it. What had happened?
I pressed my ear against the bedroom door and quieted my breathing. Mom was sobbing, muffled a little bit by a pillow or a blanket. Dad was hushing her, the sound of his hand on her back louder and warmer than the whistle coming from my nose. Hector tap tap tapped on the window, ignoring the sobs from the nest.
So, my parents were sad. They were not Its, but they knew that Juliet and I were zombies. Then why hadn’t they killed us? Why had they abandoned us to wander alone forever? Didn’t they Love us? Not as much as they had Immogen? Hadn’t they seen it happen and weren’t they going to finish us off? Didn’t they want to make sure that Juliet and I met an honorable end?
I put my hand on the door to knock the secret knock and ask them to explain themselves, but then I saw my hand again. My fist was grey and green. If I knocked on the door and they saw me, they would kill me for sure. Did I want that? Should I run? Had I already run once?
Is that why I had been in the stream? Had Dad been shooting at me with the .22? I had jumped in the water to hide from him? Why hadn't they finished Juliet either? They were probably just waiting for daylight so that they could come and finish the job. How had he missed?
What was wrong with them? Couldn’t they see that I wasn’t a regular zombie? They had already tried to shoot at me and had missed and couldn't tell that I was different, like with the wobble pox? I could talk and think and not bite. I had used the doorknob. I was their daughter! They should be able to tell that I was Immune. I pressed my fists into my temples instead of the door. What should I do? Is this how all zombies felt? Or just some of us? How many of us? Poor Immogen. Had my older sister been Immune? Had they killed Immune Immogen?
I backed silently across the hallway, into My Room. I stumbled over the gun lying on the floor. I knelt and looked out of the open window that Dad had been shooting out of at me. There were skid marks carved deep in the gravel of the driveway. Somebody had peeled out quickly. I wondered if it was Dad, trying to run us over or get away from us.
Either way, they wanted us gone. They didn’t bother to check if I was Immune, and they didn’t bother to kill us. I was dead. I wasn't dead. I was alone. Not alone, I had an ex-little-sister.
I hung my hammer and my ax off the back of my pants. Maybe she wasn't regular either. Maybe she was Immune, like me. I should go check again. I stepped over the creaking stair and let myself out the front door, closing it securely behind me. Juliet was scratching on the screen wall and groaning, trying mindlessly to bite the beetles that were trapped there. I held my ax above her head, and spun her around by the shoulder, looking down into her little, lime-colored face. She wasn't Immune. She was regular undead.
I should kill her. But if I killed her, I would be alone. I certainly couldn’t leave her behind to be handled by the family that had so horribly botched our deaths. She couldn't hurt me anymore. I was Immune. I would take her with me. We could wander together until I found a way to deal with us both.
“We have got to get out of here,” I told her.
I pulled her by her arm. When I let go, she stopped, heard my footsteps in the grass, and then followed me. Hector tapped on the window above us. He waved. I blew him a kiss. He pressed his nose against the window, steaming the glass with his slippery nostrils. He waved again, tilting his head onto his bony shoulder. Juliet bit me on the side. I walked away, Hector clutching the curtains above me and Juliet following behind, letting me go first, still the Big Sister.
She followed me away from the Farm through the end of the Summer. We never went back; never even looped nearby. We had to hide from those who couldn't handle us. It was my job to deal with us now, not anyone else's.
After days and days of hot sweaty afternoons and avoiding our Neighbors, I took us deeper and deeper into the woods, trying to think of what to do. Yellow, red and orange leaves started to fall on us and stuck to our exposed skin in the rain. First we plodded through the browning tree rubbish and then through the snow that was carelessly discarded by the clouds in the mottled, sickly sky. In our corduroys and t-shirts we slipped on patches of ice and frostbit the tips of our fingers and noses. It just tingled. It never hurt anymore. We were mostly numb. And sometimes foolish.
We risked walking down a road so that I could skitter to the first abandoned car that we saw. Somebody had already walked off with the engine and the tires, but there was still a body inside. I stole its pillowy down jacket and lashed it around Juliet. I pilfered a torn canvas tarp from the trunk and made myself a filthy, ragged poncho. When I heard a tractor approaching, pulling a trailer full of something that we couldn't afford to stick around and steal, I dragged Juliet away by her new hood. She wasn’t fast enough to avoid getting caught. She wasn’t like me. She wasn't thinking at all anymore
She got stuck with her feet wedged under logs instead of climbing over them and she wandered away every time I stood still, so I tied her up at night, to whatever tree I slept up in. She never spoke. She never slept. She never ate real food, only sticks and bugs. And tried to go after bigger things, too, like deer or opossums. Anything she could hear or see or smell moving.
I didn't eat real food either. I wasn’t hungry, so I didn’t mind that there was no food to find further and further in the wilderness. I stole a sesame bun, once, when it smelled good, cooling on an open windowsill of a Farm. I ran away with it and crouched with it held under my nose. It smelled so good. Almost as good as Mom could make.
I held it for a long time before I chewed it up and swallowed. It was too dry and crumbly without enough spit in my mouth to dissolve it. I could still feel it sticking in my stomach a week later. Two weeks later, the bun just sat in my stomach, rotting and making my goo smell like garbage, until I couldn’t stand to have the festering lump bulging out of my side anymore.
I took my ax and used the corner to make a slice in my grey-green skin. It oozed and tingled a little, but it didn’t hurt at all, so I went ahead and cut through my stomach lining as well. It tingled some more. I used my fingers like tweezers to pull out the moldy, greasy bun pieces and dropped them onto the ground. Juliet sniffed them as they hit the dried pine needles, but she opted to chew on my ankle instead.
When I had all of the bread removed, I pinched the walls of my stomach back together until they started to congeal, and then I did the same with my skin. I didn’t need stitches or bandages. Everything that cut me just felt tingly, and then it healed, slowly, like a slug inching along. Didn’t matter if it was Juliet’s teeth, a sharp twig that snapped in my face, or my own ax performing surgery. My zombie parts wouldn’t die and my Human parts just kept repairing them.
Juliet’s cuts didn’t heal like mine did. She wasn’t Human at all. She had a permanent gash where I let her walk into a tree trunk, a patch of dry skin where I let her rub against a boulder while she tried to rip her the hood off of her jacket, and her worst injury was a broken ankle from when I didn’t stop her from wandering off of a steep cliff. She just walked right off of it without even looking; fell forty feet. I ran to her, but by the time I got there she was already walking around again, rocking from one foot to the bent stub of the other ankle.
She kept stumbling away from me and everything that was best for her. I hoped that she would become Immune, that I could teach her to follow me, to sit and stay, maybe to talk someday. To not chew on my skin. To sleep at night. That maybe an Immune person could spend the time to train them safely. But she walked off after coyotes. And empty farmhouses with snapping screen doors. Or a truck rumbling past. Always the other zombies.
The creatures followed each other to food, noises, smells, anything that moved, and water. Water of all things – our zombie bodies needed water to keep going. No wonder streams and lakes and oceans were so dangerous – water is what kept the black goo flowing. That’s all the zombies would follow: moving things that they tried to chew on and the water that they would lap up and snort in through their noses if they still had them, drinking until their guts were engorged. Then they rolled and sloshed like balloons with skeletons.
I tried to drown Juliet in a small river. When she went in to drink, I held her under for twenty minutes. It would have been an easy way for me to end her, without having to see her face, but she never stopped moving. She just emerged from the current chilled to the bone, refreshed and ready to gnaw on my arms.
I couldn’t bring myself to bash her head in. I tried. I raised my ax. I raised my hammer. I took aim, and then I let my hand drop to my side. Maybe I should have stolen the gun from Home, so that I could have had some distance. But no matter how cold and green she was, she wasn’t a danger to me. I was already Infected. Maybe it took longer than anybody knew. Maybe an Immune person could train a zombie to sit, stay, and talk without getting Bitten. Or take care of them until they grew better. I wasn’t going to bash her head prematurely, not while she had me to look out for her and keep her Warm.
We were always cold. We had no fire inside of us anymore, so I had to brush the snow off of logs and branches and build flame after flame after flame, night and day, but Juliet wouldn’t stay near any of them. I held her in my lap while she writhed to get away. When I tied her nearby, she stretched as far away from the licking fire as she could, as far as the rope would let her. The only moving things that she hated.
I tethered her like she was Interesting, wrapping my hair ribbons around the end of a found scrap of rope so that it wouldn’t rip her skin too badly. When I couldn’t keep her near the fires, when she got too cold to move, I pulled her behind me on a sled of sticks that I tied together with my shoelaces. The blisters on my heels only tingled as I dragged her past the other zombies who froze solid without Big Sisters to look out for their core temperatures and dehydration during the terrible Winter.
I slid her past the rigid monsters with stone-stiff slack jaws, our own, personal sculpture garden. They didn’t snarl. They didn’t care that they were half-naked and dripping with icicles. They just stood, silently gaping in their worn-out and out-dated outfits.
I tipped them over into the drifts of white powder. I snapped off their reaching limbs and laid them down on the ground, in front of their feet, so that when they woke up in the Spring, they would trip
over their own arms. I put a pair of eyeglasses back on the face of a zombie who had frozen with them in its mouth. I broke the lenses first, though, and made it a moustache out of pine boughs. I laughed and pointed for Juliet to look, but she just ground her teeth against her rope.
Every day that I could force myself to stand up, I kept us hiking through the forest in elaborate circles that would keep us out of Human sight. But I couldn’t make myself stand up every single day. Some days I just sat, letting the fire shrink down to cinders, my eyes leaking grey waterfalls down my green cheeks, which I could only see when I looked into a frozen pond. But my hands, my hands I could see everyday. They were right in front of me, showing off my grey and green hue every hour. Every minute I knew I was doomed.
The sun would come up, we would blink into it, Juliet would chew on me, and then, if I could make myself stand up, I would hike us over another random stopping spot, safely out of sight, next to the zombie corpses that I had already defiled on our last pass. We passed the same stump shaped like a bear six times in two months. We were circling, staying away from everything dangerous that moved – coyotes, farmers, their dogs that barked themselves hoarse whenever we passed. What else were we going to do but keep walking?
The first time that I saw the distant outline and the inky mass of the big city, Turington, I turned us around and marched us back to our safely established paths. I was losing what was left of my mind in the woods, but the city was full of people that would love to crush our skulls, and I had decided not to let that happen, maybe. Not yet. But from every hilltop for the next two days, I could see the silhouettes of Turington’s apartment buildings and factories and the smoke from other people’s fires. Living people's fires.
I could see lanterns bobbing up and down the highways. I thought about all of the Hikers heading to the city while Juliet’s barely thawed jaws worked rhythmically against my shoulder. I held her closer. All of those Hikers had Propane and mittens and matches and lighters and scarves that we could borrow and she only grew harder and harder to control while I walked farther and farther from our paths to find kindling.