Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  “I’m staying in an apartment at Woodlawn and Spruce,” he said.

  A zombie dropped to the pavement and started crawling under the truck toward him.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “Remember, it’s the Bent Tree Apartments. Woodlawn and Spruce, number 318.”

  More zombies had gotten under the truck now. The lead one held up a mangled, handless arm, the blackened, jagged tips of its ulna and radius extending from rotten flesh.

  “Gotta go,” he said.

  Several days later, with Christmas right around the corner, Kevin was putting up ornaments on a fake tree. There was a Hallmark in the Dayton Mall and he’d made good use of the Snoopy ornaments piled on the floor. Growing up, his mom had waited out front of the local Hallmark in order to scoop up whatever was new that year. At the time, he’d thought it was a stupid tradition. But they’re collector’s items, she’d said. Or they will be. Which, to his way of looking at it, hadn’t made it any less stupid.

  But now, hanging the Snoopy with the little typewriter and Snoopy as a World War I ace ornaments on his tree, he sensed a surge of painful memories trying to surface.

  Christ, he thought. He didn’t need this. Not now.

  He heard moaning coming through an open window and he jumped to his feet to take a look. There was no point in it, really. The zombies keyed off of what they saw and heard. Those were about the only two senses that seemed to work, and as long as he stayed out of sight and kept quiet, his little hiding spot up in this third floor apartment was as safe as any spot on Earth.

  But he crossed to the window anyway because checking out the zombies was a way to stay busy, and staying busy kept him from his memories.

  And that’s when he saw Mindy Matheson for the second time.

  Her group had wandered from the mall over to here, probably in search of the pack of wild dogs Kevin had heard baying in the night the last few days. This zombie herd wasn’t especially large. He counted about thirty, though there were almost certainly a few more somewhere out of sight. They wouldn’t be much of a threat when he needed to go out, but even still, there were enough of them that they would probably be sticking around for a few days at least. They hunted collectively, he’d discovered, so the bigger groups tended to stay in one place longer.

  Just as well, Kevin thought. It would give him a chance to talk with Mindy again.

  He slid out the window and into the chilly evening air. It looked like it would probably rain later. There was a ledge just below his window that led over to another building’s roof. From there, he climbed onto a billboard that looked down on the intersection, where Mindy and the others were wandering around, moaning.

  He kept a can of spray paint up here, just in case.

  He gave it a shake and wrote:

  HEY MINDY! I’M IN 318 OVER TO YOUR RIGHT.

  COME ON UP.

  He’d gathered quite a crowd. At a glance, he noticed that he’d underestimated the size of the group by at least half, probably more. Their mangled, upturned faces and ruined hands were all pointed at him, their moans taking on an urgent, pulsing quality that he had come to think of as their feeding call. He saw quite a few of them down there.

  But Mindy wasn’t with them. She was drifting away from the group, stepping back toward a screen of shrubs at the far side of the intersection while the others surged forward.

  “Good girl,” he muttered.

  Moving quickly, he went back to his apartment. The zombies wouldn’t be able to follow, and besides, he had some quick cleaning up to do.

  She wouldn’t sit down.

  He offered her a place on his couch, at his table, on the floor. She just shook her head every time he offered.

  Kevin tried small talk, but she wouldn’t answer any of his questions, and after a while, he began to feel foolish and stupid, like he was wasting both their time. He jammed his hands into his pockets and looked around the room for some glimmer of inspiration.

  Nothing.

  “So,” he said. “You know what they call a fast-moving zombie?” He waited a beat, hoping for another of her half smiles. “A zoombie.”

  She just stared at him, and the cold, lifeless emptiness there sent a chill through him.

  “How about a hockey-playing zombie?” he said, forcing a grin. “A zombonie. What do you think, huh? I got a million of them. How about this? A zombie, an Irish priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar—”

  “This was a mistake,” she said. “Coming here. I’m sorry.”

  She spoke quietly, her voice cracked and hoarse, as though she’d almost forgotten how to use it.

  “I’m going, Kevin.”

  “What? No.”

  He took a step toward her, but stopped when the smell hit him.

  He tried not to let his surprise and his disgust show on his face, though it probably did anyway.

  “Please, Mindy, don’t. It’s Christmas.”

  She didn’t answer. But she didn’t turn to leave either.

  “I’ve got some food. Are you hungry?”

  She nodded immediately.

  He went into the little kitchenette and slid a cube of Spam out of a can. He cut it into four big slices, then handed her the plate.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have—”

  Mindy snatched it from his hands.

  She ate with her fingers, jamming the meat into her mouth, barely chewing. Several times she nearly choked. Bits and pieces fell from the corners of her mouth.

  She stopped eating only once, long enough to look at him over her plate.

  “Don’t look at me while I eat,” she said, her words about as close to a snarl as any he’d ever heard a girl make. And then, more quietly, sounding damaged: “Please. Don’t look at me.”

  He nodded. “Sure. Okay.”

  Kevin went to the cupboards and took down some more cans. He had Vienna sausages, some fruit cocktail, applesauce, a jar of sauerkraut. Better take this stuff out of the can, he thought, remembering the way she’d jammed her fingers into the pile of Spam. Last thing he wanted was for her to cut up her fingers on the can’s sharp edges.

  He went to work putting the meal onto paper plates and then setting the plates onto the table.

  When he turned around, she was standing right behind him, and it startled him. He jumped.

  She was staring at his neck, and the look in her eyes, the way she wet her lips with every pulse of his carotid artery, disturbed him.

  “Shit,” he said, trying hard—and, he thought, uselessly—to hide his unease. “You scared me.”

  Her gaze drifted down to the food on the table.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I have tea and water, whichever you’d prefer.”

  She fell on the food without answering, without bothering to sit in the chair he pulled over for her, so he got her a cup of water and set it down next to her plates.

  She had asked him not to watch her eat, which was okay with Kevin. The wet, slurping noises she made were enough for him to know he didn’t want to watch. He went over to his couch and looked at some of the magazines he’d left there. A bunch of old Playboys he’d found at the used bookstore over by the mall. He gathered them up and hurriedly stuffed them under the couch, but not before catching a glimpse of the sleepy-eyed plastic blonde on the cover of the top magazine. So much had changed, he thought sadly. So much had been lost. The good and the bad.

  Eventually, Mindy’s eating noises stopped.

  Kevin walked over to the kitchen. Mindy was still at the table, looking around at the cupboards with a bovinelike vacuity.

  “Are you still hungry?” he asked. “I have more. You can have anything I have.”

  She shook her head.

  “More water, maybe? I can make you that tea I promised.” Again she shook her head.

  A joke about Little Johnny, a bucket of nails, and a zombie hooker came to mind, but for once his internal filter was working and he cut it off before it had a chance to get out.

  Instead, he let the silence lin
ger.

  She had turned to face him, and now she was swaying drunkenly, the same way she’d done in the mall parking lot. It occurred to him that she had probably internalized so much zombie behavior that, even now, when she was completely safe, she was unable to turn it off.

  But the silence was murder. He had never dealt well with uncomfortable silences. It was the main reason he told so many bad jokes. Better to fill up the void with inane nonsense than let a painful silence grow.

  He said, “Listen, there’s no need for you to go back out there. You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. I’ve got some Sterno. We could heat up some water, let you take a hot bath maybe. . . .”

  All at once the tears started. One minute she was watching him, quietly and vacantly, and the next she was crying.

  Big, muddy-colored tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Ah, shit,” he said. “Mindy, I . . . I’m sorry. What did I say . . . I—”

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “This was a mistake.”

  She moved hurriedly to the door. Every impulse in him told him to go after her, hold the door closed, take her in his arms.

  But he didn’t do it.

  He just watched her go without a word

  Mindy shuffled through the rain, her mind a blank.

  Or at least she tried to make it a blank.

  Right now, that wasn’t working out so well.

  It was cold—windy and rainy and cold. Her clothes were little more than rags; they offered no protection whatsoever. For too long now she’d wandered, mindless, emotionless, denying all pain and shame, a true ascetic. The rain tore at her skin like icy razors and chilled her to the bone, but she did not tremble, nor did she cry. She let her arms swing limply by her side, her fingertips grazing the ice that formed on her clothes, as she kept pace with the horde of dead things brushing against her.

  Thought was the enemy, not the dead. With thought came fear, and pain, and a memory of all that was gone. If she thought too long—if she thought at all—the dead would see it in her eyes, and she wouldn’t last long after that.

  But the mind was like a flood. It could be contained for a while, even a long while, but it could never be truly silenced. Sooner or later, the mind would turn to the low ground and dwell there.

  And right now her mind was turning toward shame.

  But it wasn’t the shame of what had happened to her that bothered her so.

  It was that damn Kevin O’Brien.

  When she was by herself, she felt no shame for what she was doing. Why should she? She was surviving. And she was doing it in the face of a universe that didn’t give a rat’s ass for what happened to her. Or the rest of humanity, for that matter. She was surviving, damn it.

  Then she thought of Kevin.

  He, too, was surviving.

  And he hadn’t given up anything. He hadn’t debased himself like this. He hadn’t sacrificed every last scrap of his self-respect just to draw another breath.

  She hated him. She hated him because he was still human. And because his charity reminded her that she was not.

  Not anymore.

  So she turned off her mind and wandered. Damn him. Damn the world. Damn life. There was nothing of the world left for her anymore. Nothing but emptiness and the slow, relentless crawl of time.

  One foot in front of the other.

  Forever after.

  The billboard came as a surprise to her.

  For a moment, just a fraction of a second, she stopped. And she stared.

  She hadn’t realized where she was. But up there, up above the mindless crowd, was a message written just for her.

  HEY MINDY, IT’S COLD. COME ON UP.

  I’VE GOT A WARM BED.

  A memory floated up into her mind, unbidden. The two of them, finishing off their shift, her letting him walk her out to the parking lot. He had a joint in his pocket and she didn’t have anywhere to go. They went around back to the loading dock and passed it back and forth, talking about random shit, nothing either of them really cared about.

  He was nice. A little dorky, but all right.

  She could tell he was getting interested. It was in the way he cracked his lame jokes when he should have let the quiet grow, the way his fingers twitched when they touched whenever she took the joint from him.

  She could have shut it down right then. He was the scared type. He’d back off and nothing more would ever become of it.

  But she wasn’t going to be doing anything else that night, or any other night for that matter, and they both knew it.

  She went back to his place.

  Sitting on his couch, her hand on his thigh, he actually asked if he could kiss her. That had never happened to her before. Most guys went straight for her tits. Or put a hand on the back of her head and guided her down to their open fly. At best it was a wrestling match to see how long she could keep her pants on.

  “You don’t have to ask,” she’d said, and eased in close to him.

  Before she knew it, they were some sort of couple.

  But he wasn’t wasting that kind of time now. The apocalypse, it seemed, had made him a little bolder.

  COME ON UP. I’VE GOT A WARM BED.

  Yeah, right, she thought, I bet you do.

  But she’d been careless. She’d thought too long, dropped out of character.

  One of the dead ones a few feet to her right had turned her way, and now his dead, vacant stare was locked on her. She tried to clear her mind, to stumble forward, but the zombie’s gaze never wavered.

  He raised his hands like he was trying to take something from her and staggered after her, a moan rising above the wind and the cutting rain.

  She pushed his hands away and looked around.

  This wasn’t going to work. Every moment she lingered, more and more of them turned her way. She scanned the crowd, and in the dark the only way out seemed to lead around the corner, where she had taken the stairwell once before up to his apartment.

  A limp hand fell on her shoulder and that was enough.

  She ran for the stairs.

  She stopped in front of 318.

  Had she really sunk so low? Getting torn apart by the walking dead almost seemed a joy compared to coming to him like a penitent. She’d thought she was done with guilt, with shame. But it hurt now more than ever.

  Utterly demoralized, she knocked.

  He couldn’t sleep.

  In the dark he rose and put on his boxers and went to the kitchen to light a candle.

  Enough light filled the room that he could see her sleeping in his bed. The rain had washed away a good amount of dirt and grime from her body and hair, but her breath had still been enough to turn his stomach. And even in his sleep he couldn’t quite hide his disgust. He had dreamt of a zombie forcing her face into the soft part of his neck, and when he awoke, he’d found her, pressing her cracked and ulcerous lips into the well beneath his chin.

  Flinching awake, he’d recoiled from her, almost falling out of the bed before realizing that it was only a dream.

  Now, fully awake, he watched her sleep and tried to hate her.

  But he couldn’t. He was feeling guilty.

  Who in the hell was he to judge her, anyway? She was desperate. She was lonely. She was scared. Wasn’t he all of that, and more?

  In fact, the only thing he had on her was the appearance of normalcy.

  But that was only appearances. The truth was he was drowning. His life was an act. His jokes, the Christmas decorations, his calendar keeping: All of it was a terrible, useless, stupid joke. He drifted from one empty apartment to the next, from one false front to the next, like a ghost blown on the wind, and he called it a life.

  Were they any different, he and Mindy?

  He couldn’t answer, not truthfully anyway; and eventually, he blew out the candle and crept back to bed and reluctantly put an arm around her as he drifted off to sleep.

  When he awoke the next morning, he was alone, the only sign she had
been there a muddy stain on the sheets.

  He sat on the side of the bed, asking himself why he even bothered.

  She had left him, again, and this time it was because she knew he was the one who was faking. He was the hypocrite. He was the disgusting one.

  And she had found him out.

  Mindy stopped in the doorway as she left Kevin’s apartment building and scanned the street.

  There were no dead in sight, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. She’d seen it happen a few times over the last year. She’d be shuffling along with the others, absolutely nothing going on inside her head, and suddenly there’d be a scream. Another careless person had wandered into their midst, completely surprised by the sudden appearance of a zombie horde that, in reality, hadn’t been trying to sneak up on anybody. Most of the group’s kills were made that way, completely by accident, people caught by their own carelessness.

  Without realizing it she had assumed the awkward shuffle of the dead. Her bare feet, no longer sensitive to heat or ice or even broken glass, slid across the cracked and weedy pavement as though on autopilot.

  She tried to turn off her mind as well, but she found that much harder.

  She kept thinking of Kevin.

  What, exactly, had happened last night?

  Not what. Not really. She knew what had happened. That had actually been quite pleasant. Better than she remembered it, anyway.

  No, what she really wanted to know was why. And why now? She’d seen others before him. She knew they weren’t the only ones. She suspected—and she believed this without reservation—that there were more normal people out there than she’d seen. There had to be. The world couldn’t simply be empty. That wasn’t possible.

  But none of the others had managed to arouse her pity. She’d watched them die, and in some cases rise again, and she’d felt nothing.