Call Me Human: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

by Sergei Marysh

  It was alive in my memory again now. The dream was long; I remember myself spending several months in the world contaminated by zombie virus and even turned into a zombie myself. The major points of it were that the virus had been brought to us from a parallel world by the Devil himself; I managed to seal the passage between the two universes by gluing together a magic figurine — a bronze angel on a malachite pedestal. It didn't offer much protection-wise, but as long as I clutched it in my hands, the world would remain stable. From my dream-like zombie experience I'd learned that a strong person possessing enough spirit and willpower wouldn't become a dumb undead, but would most likely turn into a quite smart zombie, boasting some motivation and his own interests which he mainly used to save his loved ones.

  Shuttered by this incredible and possibly mystical coincidence, I decided to keep the figurine. Even now as I write this, it's here next to me on my bedside table. Sometimes I look at it, puzzled and unable to solve the mystery it contains: an object that belongs to two worlds at once, one of reality and the other of dreams.

  I really wanted to stay in the apartment: apart from the angel, it also had a writing desk. But unfortunately, the door couldn't be bolted, and I couldn't find the key anywhere. So I had to go back downstairs — a deceivingly easy maneuver which, taking into consideration my feeble physical state, took me a lot of time. Once back "home" — it was pretty obvious that this apartment would be the last home I've ever had — I fell onto the bed and crashed out.

  Next morning — or one after that, or the third one, you could never tell those days — I opened my eyes at dawn, to the birds' singing. Scraps of yesterday's nightmares still flashed through my head, but I forced some food down my throat, gave myself another injection and took a few pills from the supply Alex had so caringly planted into my backpack. Later I regretted it: Promedol and whatever else I'd taken could distort my experiences which I intended to document. But I hadn't thought about it: I was unwell and tried to help myself with whatever medication was available, even though I didn't believe in its efficiency.

  This impromptu treatment only made me feel worse, so I couldn't start the diary before evening. I dragged all the couch cushions onto the bed and made some sort of soft chair out of them; sank into it and started working. I placed the notebook onto a plastic tray I'd found in the kitchen; the first pages had been covered in its first owner's handwriting. To-do lists, phone call reminders and shopping for an upcoming holiday now looked meaningless and totally removed from reality. On the first clean page I wrote in a shaking hand, Igor Bernik's Diary. I turned it, paused and started writing, covering page after page of narrow lines. I was telling my diary my whole life in the past year.

  For some reasons mentioned earlier, I wanted to restore, at least superficially, the contents of my first diary. Almost all of the events I'd encountered were not something special in the big picture of things; the two things that were more important than the rest I'd learned from Alex: new society forms after the outbreak and a proven case of virus immunity. And still I dedicated many a day to describing other events, as well as some of my impressions and speculations. You might be surprised that I spent the precious last days of my life this way, but I literally sensed it slipping through my fingers, leaving me empty-handed. Still, writing it wasn't a waste of time, for two reasons. Firstly, all those events, starting with the disappearance of my family, my return to the places of my childhood and especially meeting Alex, mean a lot to me. Or should I already put it into the past tense — "meant a lot"? So I thought it would be a good thing to preserve the memory of my dearest and beloved, whether they were dead or alive.

  The second reason was obvious. As I sat down writing, nothing special could possibly happen to me — nothing worth writing down, so I could happily indulge in reminiscing. I was growing weaker, ate little, rarely got off the bed, and just kept writing, in the morning, afternoon and in the evening, whenever I felt capable of doing so.

  The very changes that had been the motivation behind my diary idea were rather insignificant, and I could list them all in just a few lines. Apart from feeling weak, I noted changes in my appearance which were the only obvious symptoms: I kept losing weight, my skin had grown paler, and I developed deep dark circles under my eyes. But all these changes could be caused by my not eating properly: not out of principle, I just didn't feel like eating.

  The blasted wound, cause of my ruin, didn't bother me much any more. After a few days, it had stopped itching and felt as if it had been anesthetized. Occasionally, I lifted the bandages to take a peek. It didn't heal, but didn't get any worse, either.

  The only thing I could call extraordinary was the deafness I'd got during the shelter shootout. It just didn't go. Normally, when your ears get blocked after a gun shot, it goes on its own in a few days; I had no means of measuring time without my watch, but I must have spent a least a couple of weeks writing — possibly more — and my hearing hadn't come back. It never did.

  I really regretted leaving my watch behind. These notes of mine could sound more convincing were I to support them with an exact chronology of each event. I proved to be totally incapable of measuring time units longer than twenty-four hours. If the position of the sun in the sky combined with lighting conditions allowed me to tell mornings from evenings and afternoons, I couldn't even approximate the amount of days that had passed since I first arrived. I had nothing to measure time against. Sometimes I felt weak and blacked out, only to regain consciousness under the strangest of circumstances. A few times I came to on the kitchen floor, and once, in a different stairwell altogether: this last incident scared me.

  I started making "calendar notches" by drawing little dashes on the last page. Each of the "notches" corresponded to a day I remembered clearly and could distinguish it from the rest, equally indistinguishable. As of today, they are thirteen in total, but I have a funny feeling I've lost quite a few in between, probably, just as many as those I've recorded consciously.

  Probably, like every survivor, I often wondered what it felt like to become a zombie? Even a normal human death scares us, whether we face old age, a bullet, or a car crash; but to be contaminated with zombie virus is something totally different. The mere notion of it petrifies people out of their wits: the mere perspective of becoming one of those monstrosities sends shivers up one's spine.

  Is it death, or maybe some new weird life form, or something even worse than death itself? This must be the second most important philosophical problem of our time, far more important than others: what it's like to be a zombie? What do they feel, if they have feelings at all? How do they see our world, provided they can see? The problem number one was that of survival, naturally, but I didn't have to find an answer to it any more: without solving it, I had moved on to problem number two.

  Ages ago — at school, I think — I'd read what I believed to be a theater play by Moliere — I may be mistaken, but at least I think it was. I can't remember any of it now but one line, which came to me today and, for some reason, I thought it very funny. I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the bed. One of the characters, some posh society dame, couldn't get it in her head that there were other species in the world besides her posh society type. All through the play, she kept exclaiming, "How is it possible, to be a Persian?" Apparently, Persian natives were a rare sight in the France of those days, much more so than zombies are today. So I thought that I was about to find out for myself whether being a Persian was at all possible and what it felt like. Don't you think it's funny?

  XV

  All survivors had a certain knowledge of zombie properties, acquired through observation and experience sharing. This knowledge was basically trustworthy. Everybody knew, for instance, that zombies couldn't stand sunlight, for which reason you ran a lesser risk of encountering them at daytime than at night. You could safely use this information by planning your relocations at daytime. But why they couldn't stand sunshine, no one could tell you.

  What other information
about them did we have? I decided to list here everything I knew, so that in the future I could attempt to explain their behavior and particular traits, this time based on my own experience of crossing to the "other side".

  The main question was: what exactly were zombies? I never had a chance to dissect one: destroying them was more than enough. But I once met a group of survivors who told me about this doctor who tried to study the victims. He'd dissected dozens of specimens: some whose brain had been destroyed by a head shot, and others caught alive. According to him, physically there was no difference between them. In both cases, he studied what seemed to be dead human bodies, all evidence pointed to that. All biological processes in them had stopped, their metabolism was nonexistent. Or at least that was what he could observe in the absence of instruments. And still, until their destruction, those dead bodies could move, walk and even run. Their movements were spookily cartoonish, the way normal people moved only if they tried to dance hip hop — and mastering hip hop takes hours of daily practice in order to get the hang of the moves totally alien to human anatomy.

  We didn't know what made their bodies come alive. Once brain tissues were destroyed, a zombie turned into a regular cadaver which decomposed at an abnormal speed. At other times, contaminated bodies boasted remarkable survivance. I use this word on purpose, knowing it's not normally used to describe living beings. You could still meet zombies who'd been contaminated in the very beginning of the outbreak, almost a year ago. They looked a bit too worn for wear, but still alive and kicking, if you excused the pun, roaming around in search of new prey. No idea how much longer they could last if they went on like this, but apparently, as long as the muscles and ligaments in their legs and feet had not fallen completely apart, they would walk.

  Their behavior, for all its simplicity, showed some purpose. Zombies' whole activity targeted prey seeking, which allowed us to relate them to all other predators. They attacked everything that moved; human beings, cats, dogs, rats, birds, everything within their reach. They even ate insects, leaves and moss. I witnessed some zombies gnawing at young tree bark. The only thing that left them disinterested was other cadavers: they were absolutely indifferent to their own kind and didn't even seem to notice each other. I couldn't tell you what caused such selectivity.

  They were absolutely devoid of self-preservation instincts. They couldn't identify danger and didn't attempt to avoid it. They didn't seem to experience pain — they might even be absolutely senseless, now that I think about it. It looked as if their senses and nervous system itself had given up the ghost, or even were completely destroyed.

  I had the pleasure of meeting an experienced middle-aged zombie face to face. He must have been infected a long time ago and spent a lot of time in the street — it was winter, too. He couldn't see, period. He couldn't see me with his eyes which had decomposed and leaked out. And still he sensed me somehow, heading for the very place where I stood.

  All other human functions were absent in infected zombie bodies. Their self-identification, speech, social behavior were all gone. No one who'd ever seen a zombie would question their inability to revert to their original human state: the answer was an adamant no.

  Unlike all other creatures, zombies, as their lifeless nature suggests, were unable to reproduce. It might look though as if they did propagate their kind, and rapidly at that. One infected person was enough to create an exponential rise in the numbers of the diseased around him. But in fact, it's the parasitic virus that propagated, using the human population as a breeding ground. As far as I remember from the last TV programs and Internet news, the virus had never been singled out, due to either lack of time or medical research. There had been several reports of the vaccine produced in several countries independently, but there were no known results of its application; possibly, such results had never existed to begin with.

  We all knew how a person got infected. For this to happen, the virus had to get into the blood or onto mucous membranes: in this latter case, there was a chance to survive if the infected area was cleaned immediately and thoroughly. Most often, infection was spread through bites: a zombie always tried to devour a human, sinking his teeth into anything he can reach. Like in my case, this was a sure dead sentence. From Alex I had also learned that infection could spread through sexual contacts or by consuming the flesh of those already infected; you might find it hard to even imagine, but as I knew the Hospitallers' story, I was positive it could happen.

  Cuts and wounds left by zombie claws didn't lead to infection, unless they'd been in contact with infected blood. This I knew for sure because I'd seen many people literally clawed to near death, but since they hadn't been bitten, they later recovered and led a normal life.

  If a bite or other injuries lead to death on the spot, the transformation of the corpse into a zombie took place immediately, often within seconds. Otherwise, if the person hadn't died at once, the process took longer. I heard of some survivors who managed to conceal the bites from other group members, for fear of being killed or ostracized; they managed to hide their problem for several weeks and more. It always ended badly: they inevitably died, after which the instantly-mutated corpse jumped up and attacked his ex-mates.

  In my case, the wound was small and not life-threatening. So my transformation could take a long time: weeks, maybe up to a month, even.

  Earlier, I already described the possibility of being immune to the virus. I didn't need to hold my breath expecting to be the second or third person in the world who could boast it, after Valentine Ivanovich and, possibly, Cholera.

  This is basically all we know about zombie phenomena as of today. The bitter truth is that everything I've just said we already knew a month after the outbreak. It's been a year now, but our knowledge of the phenomena hasn't grown one bit. To study it further, we need experts, adequate facilities and a safe place to conduct such experiments. Without the above, our ability to study it differs little from that of caveman. Naturally, we're able to analyze and deduce, which our ancestors weren't; but honestly speaking, it's not that they help us a lot in our fight for survival.

  So, what do I have to show for those supposedly thirteen days? I should have said, thirteen notebook notches, as the real amount of days, much to my grief, has escaped me.

  My deafness didn't go: on the contrary, it had grown worse. It worried me at first: I was used to relying on my hearing, trusting it with my life. Especially in apartment blocks, and also in the woods where direct visibility was limited, it was paramount to be able to hear potential danger. Now it felt as if I had cotton wool in both my ears. The most unpleasant thing about it was that I couldn't hear what I did: somebody who wasn't hearing-impaired like myself, could easily pinpoint my presence. So I tried to do everything as noiselessly as it was at all possible without feedback. I was also sorry I couldn't hear birds' singing any more: I used to love the sound of it, especially the nightingales which started their songs just before dawn — the songs that reminded me I was still alive.

  By then, my eyesight had suffered transformations, as well: everything looked blurred, as if you were peering through badly focused binoculars. Everything I looked at lacked contrast: I saw everything in double and treble, which caused things to smudge, and those smudgy edges were tinted with non-existent colors, a bit like a misty rainbow. Occasionally, I also saw colored spots before my eyes — some of them small and barely visible, but more often they looked like dazzling dots, a bit like sparks or bolts of lightning. I saw them clearly but couldn't name the color: there was no word for it because human eye can't normally see this part of the spectrum. They came suddenly, two or three at once, and hovered in my field of vision to disappear completely after a while. They created a strange impression. I don't know how to say it, but it felt as if these dots didn't belong here in our world. They were alien, as if they were pressed into the fabric of our space from some different dimension. It may sound weird, but this is how I'll put it: they were more real than their background �
� that is, more real than our physical universe. Don't know how else to say it. A yet another weirdness: I've just said, "small" and "for a while", but I knew that these notions couldn't be applied to them any more than I could call them "dots". I'd no idea what they were but these dazzling dots seemed to be devoid of time and space. You couldn't really put it in words, but that's how they felt like.

  After noticing all these changes, I decided to give my other organs a check, and was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my olfactory perception was gone. My nose wasn't blocked, and still I couldn't tell the most apparent smells, even if I stuffed their source right up my nose. I experimented with fresh leaves and grass — I even ventured out of my apartment to do so — but I didn't sense anything.

  My taste perception was gone, too. Even though dry rations had never been known for their appeal to taste buds, and I had no other foods to check my suspicions on. In any case, when I ate, I did feel there was something in my mouth.

  Tactile sensations... this one isn't easy. The biggest changes in me did concern my self-perception. If you could, in theory, write off problems with sight, hearing and taste as caused by exhaustion and fatigue, these excuses didn't work for your whole body. It seemed that the numbness in the bitten area started to spread. I first noticed it when I realized that I didn't feel the pain in the bashed ankle of my left leg — the bitten leg. At first I thought that the damage had gone, but a quick inspection of my purple ankle showed that I was wrong. Normally, when you see a bruise like that, you're scared of even touching it, for fear of the pain it might cause. But I tapped it with a pen without feeling anything.

  From that moment on, I was paying close attention to the changes in my body. After a couple of notches in my notebook I noticed that my whole leg had gone numb from foot to thigh. I even tried to prickle it with a knife, and still felt no pain. I kept my eye on it all.