by Sean Kennedy
So I kicked at her, and she stumbled back.
I got to my feet and took off again. I had to try and get a little distance between us, and then I would have to choose a house, regardless of whether it had bodies or not inside it, and barricade myself up.
As I rounded the corner, all hopes were dashed.
A group of zombies were shuffling in my direction.
This is it.
There was no way I could get out of this one. I was lucky I had survived this long, really.
Five of them were after me now. It was mere seconds before one of them raced around me and shoved me back into the arms of those behind me. I fell to the road again, and they started pawing at me. Above their moans I could hear my screams. I wasn’t going to go out silently.
I was still trying to protect myself from their attack when one of them went flying back in the air. The other zombies looked around in surprise, slack-jawed. It was almost amusing until one of their heads burst off their neck and landed at my feet in a shower of blood. The remaining zombies left me alone to face down whatever it was that was attacking them. I scrambled away, accidentally kicking the decapitated head. It went rolling for a few feet, its tongue obscenely flapping out of its mouth.
It was a war zone. I couldn’t help but watch with some interest; if there had been innocent human victims involved, I would have looked away, but I had no sympathy for those who had just tried to kill me.
I gaped: it was another zombie that had come to my rescue. Once again, I was expecting something from the movies: maybe a zombie slayer, or a self-made vigilante fighter. But no, it was a zombie. He was a bloody blur as he ripped through the other zombies, tearing them apart as they tried to get at him with little success. Already sickened by the head that had almost landed in my lap, I had to turn and vomit when I saw an arm ripped off one of the zombies and used to beat their own skull open.
When I looked up again, it was all over. One lone zombie stood amongst strewn body parts, panting heavily. He dropped the arm he was holding and groaned.
Had he done this so he could have the pleasure of killing me all to himself? That would have to be the most psychopathic zombie in existence. Lucky me to have strayed across his path.
He groaned again, and turned slightly so he could look at me directly. He was covered in so much blood that I couldn’t even tell what color his clothes had been originally.
His groaning continued, but this time it sounded like a word.
A very familiar word.
“Jaaaaaaayyyyy…”
My sweat turned so cold I thought my body would shatter, as if it had been exposed to liquid nitrogen. I got to my feet, shakily, and tried to look past the blood, and at the zombie’s features.
“Jaaaaaayyyy…”
It couldn’t be. No, this was wrong. On every level.
Yet it was him.
The zombie was Dave.
V
OH DAVE. Not you.
At least Mike had been spared this particularly cruel fate. But to know Dave had been turned, and had been living in such a way… and for myself to now be witness to it, well, I just wondered how much more of all this I could take before I ended up going insane. Surely it was too much for any person to bear?
Dave took a tentative step forward, and I couldn’t help but step away. I felt the hardness of a fence at my back. I was trapped no matter which way you looked at the situation.
Dave moaned my name again. I wanted to block my ears, yell at him to stop, do anything to not have to hear that sense of humanity that still remained within him. It seemed perverse, this one speck of normalcy in a body so radically changed.
So I did the one thing I thought could stop him.
“Dave,” I whispered.
Even crueler was the fact that his eyes seemed to light up with a spark of recognition. He responded to his name. Perhaps it was the first time he had heard it in weeks; or maybe it was some innate response, like a dog knowing its name even though it doesn’t understand human language.
I couldn’t believe I was thinking of him as an animal. This was Dave… the man I had shared my bed with for three years.
We had shared so much more than that. He had known everything there was about me. He was the first guy to tell me he loved me. He was the first guy that I had ever told I loved him back. How could I look at what was before me now, and reconcile it with the man I remembered?
He moved toward me again, and I flinched. And amazingly, he froze as if he didn’t want to frighten me.
“Dave,” I said. “Are you in there?”
It was a stupid question to ask, but I didn’t know what else to say. But he knew me, he remembered me, so maybe he remembered his past and everything that happened before his… illness.
But if I was hoping for him to suddenly regain his speech or some form of other advanced communication skills, it was too much to wish for. He just tilted his head slightly, his mouth twitching as if he was trying to say something.
But all that came out was the one word he could say. “Jaaaaay.”
“Great, you know my name,” I said, already becoming impatient. “What about yours? Do you remember who you are?”
Again, that delay in response, as if it took a great amount of effort to speak, or moan, or whatever he could possibly do.
The tip of his tongue even appeared at the edge of his mouth, as if he were concentrating, even though that wasn’t a characteristic he had ever displayed when we were together.
“Daaaaaave.”
There was a part of him in there, no matter how small.
Which was further evidence that what we had called “zombies” weren’t zombies at all. There was obviously something that had happened to them, but they weren’t mindless. They were still human.
I retched, but there was nothing left in my stomach. That zombie I had killed… I had killed a person. Not a thing. Sure, it was in self-defense, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
Unless Dave was the exception to the rule. He certainly acted differently to the other zombies I had encountered.
I felt his hand upon my shoulder.
I couldn’t look up. I didn’t know what I could say. In fact, I was creeped out. Because even though it was Dave, he wasn’t fully all there. He wasn’t exactly the Dave I had known.
He moaned my name again.
Don’t do this to me. I can’t handle it.
But the survivor instinct kicks in. As much as I would have liked to lie down on the pavement and just give up, I wasn’t going to. I had to look up. I had to accept this, and whatever else was going to come my way. If I had been a more spiritual person, I probably would have divined that I had survived for a reason, that my life had some purpose in this new world. Bitterly, I wondered if my purpose was to just get fucked by guys like Richard and have my brain fucked over by situations like this one where I discovered an ex that had been zombified.
I lifted my head and looked back up at Dave. It wasn’t exactly a look of concern on his face, but his hand on my shoulder seemed to symbolize that feeling.
“I better find shelter,” I finally said. “In case more come along.”
I was now being the dog that had rejected my company earlier, and in this reversal of roles, Dave had become me. I readjusted the bag on my back and began walking away.
“Jaaaaaaay.”
This was my chance to keep walking, to put all this new knowledge behind me and pretend it had never happened so that it would just become one more nightmare causing me to wake me up in a cold sweat like so many others had since the virus began.
But that simple act, the calling of my name, caused me to turn around.
“What do you suggest, Dave?”
It wasn’t fair to ask him such a question, as it wasn’t likely he could give any kind of coherent response.
Instead, he turned away and began shuffling down the street.
Oh. I was being abandoned again. Did he just want to get the last word in?
That was so fucking like Dave.
Then he turned, and saw that I wasn’t following him. He grunted, and jerked his arm.
“All you had to do was say so,” I said, and for the first time in weeks, I couldn’t help but smile.
So this was what my life had become.
VI
DAVE WAS leading me somewhere. He moved with a purpose. We didn’t walk for very long; only a couple of streets from where the zombie massacre had occurred. He stopped outside a two-story cottage that looked like it had seen better days, like us all. He looked back at me, as if he was seeking my opinion.
“Uh, it’s nice,” I assured him. “Better than some of my past digs, that’s for sure.”
Seemingly satisfied, he hobbled up the steps of the porch. The front door wasn’t barricaded; I guess if you were a zombie, you didn’t have to worry about other zombies breaking the door down to kill you.
But why didn’t Dave want to kill me? This was not a normal thing. One of the last news reports I had seen showed a mother getting killed by her fifteen-year-old zombie son. Obviously emotional bonds didn’t stop you from killing as a zombie, and quite frankly, if they had, Dave might have been more inclined to harm me. After all, I was the one who had broken us up.
There were too many questions and no way of knowing if they would ever be answered. Inside the house, I only felt much safer once I had pulled some furniture across the door, even though it seemed I had my own personal bodyguard now.
When I turned around, Dave was watching me.
“Sorry,” I said, realizing I sounded quite nervous. “Just making myself feel at home. And, well, this makes me feel safe.”
He continued looking at me.
“Whose house is this?” I asked. “Is it yours?”
He nodded toward the lounge room. I walked in, surprised at how clean and orderly it seemed. Did he bring out the duster every now and again just in case there was company?
I headed for the coffee table, on which there was a collection of framed photographs. I picked up the largest. It was Dave, with a guy who I didn’t know. They had their arms around each other, obviously a couple. It seemed to have been taken at a party. They looked happy.
I heard Dave enter behind me. “This is your house,” I said.
He grunted.
I pointed at the other man in the photo. “Where is he? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Dave shuffled over to the window and pulled the blinds open. I squinted out into the last rays of the disappearing sun at a small yard. There was a pleasant looking flowerbed, and to the left of it—
—what looked exactly like a fresh grave.
I stumbled back. Of course, my immediate thought was that Dave killed his partner. Can you blame me, after everything that had happened to the world as I knew it? But reason prevailed. Dave was different—he had saved me. He wouldn’t have buried his partner if he had killed him in a zombie rage. To bury someone was an act of grieving.
“I’m sorry.”
He grunted again. I was already getting used to his method of communicating. The grunts were expressed with different tones behind them. This one had pain behind it—genuine emotion.
“I lost my partner as well,” I told him. “His name was Mike.”
Dave raised his hand and pointed at the mantelpiece above the fire. On it, I found a man’s wallet with a watch laid across the top. In the wallet behind the clear plastic was a driver’s license for the man in the photo. His name was Eric Walshman.
“Eric,” I said.
Dave grunted in agreement.
I closed the wallet, and set the watch back upon it. Seeing Dave’s partner as he was in the past, along with the stark reminder in the back yard of where he had ended up, only made me think of Mike even more. “So many people gone,” I said. “I don’t even know what happened to my parents in the end. I can only—”
I was about to say that I could only hope they hadn’t become zombies. Which wouldn’t have been very tactful of me seeing I was now a guest of one.
“—guess,” I finished lamely.
Dave watched me, as if he were a therapist waiting for me to unload.
Strangely, it worked. “Mike got sick not long after everything started. And before we really had time to think about it, he died. The Center for Disease Control was still working at the time, and like a good citizen, I reported his death.” I had to pause to take a deep breath, because the emotion I had felt at the time and become numb to afterward was threatening to take hold again. “They came to take his body away. I stupidly thought I would have to arrange a funeral, a service, all that stuff. I didn’t know they were taking his body to be burnt in a mass grave along with all the others who had the virus.”
I looked up at Dave. “At least you didn’t allow them to take Eric.”
I wished he had more of a vocabulary so he could tell me what his story was. Had things already degenerated so much by then that the government was in hiding and the citizens were left to fend for themselves? Was Eric buried in the backyard because there was nobody to dispose of him? Had Dave started to turn by then?
I felt a hand on my shoulder and realized that Dave had crossed the room. He was comforting me, or at least trying to. I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks. But shit happens, right? We’re all in the same boat now.”
He gave a dismissive groan.
“Okay, some of us are in worse boats than others. Yours, for example, is leaking and on fire, with a meteor heading for it.”
His answering groan sounded close to a laugh.
In the silence that followed, I had one more question to ask.
“Were you happy, Dave?”
He nodded.
I looked back out at the rough grave. “Yeah. So was I.”
VII
ZOMBIES STILL like to sleep in beds. At least, Dave did. I didn’t actually think they needed sleep, but I heard him snore through the night. Some habits never got broken.
When I had found the guest bedroom, I had debated on whether to close the door or not. In the end, I decided not to. It seemed comforting to have another presence in the same house as me. For the first time in weeks, I wasn’t alone. And no, I couldn’t count Richard within all of that.
It was the best I had slept in ages. Knowing Dave was on the other side of the wall and knowing his prowess in fighting his fellow zombies must have had a subconscious effect on me, making me finally able to rest without being on edge and alert for any trouble. I probably even snored myself.
In fact, I was so calm when I woke in the morning I had a hard on. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like. I silently pleasured myself, and felt much better about it than my fuck of shame with Richard. Lying there with my spunk rapidly cooling on my stomach, I felt horny enough to do it again. But I heard Dave moving around downstairs, so I cleaned myself up and got dressed.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully as I entered the kitchen. And I was cheerful, funny enough.
Dave nodded at me. He was standing near the kitchen window, a saucepan in his hand.
“You eat?” I asked stupidly, before I could stop myself.
He looked as if he wanted to brain me with the pot.
“Sorry.”
With trembling hands, he placed the pot upon the woodstove.
“What’s for breakfast?” I asked. “Boiled brains?”
Dave’s head shot up, and he glared at me.
I burst out laughing. “Sorry, sorry! Have you lost your sense of humor?”
Dave grunted an affirmation that he must have.
“So all the… others. They eat normal food as well?”
Dave nodded. He sat across from me at the table. A crust of dirt flaked off his arm and fell onto the surface. He caught me looking at it, and stared at the wall over my head.
“Is it hard to clean yourself?”
He held out his hands to me, and I saw that even though he remained still, his hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“I can help
you,” I told him. “After coffee.”
He didn’t say anything.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe it would make you feel more… human.”
Dave got to his feet and lurched back toward the stove.
I pushed my chair out and followed him. “Let me.”
He groaned, a more pissed-off yodel that he was perfectly capable of doing this and that he had been doing it long before I had reentered his life.
“You’re always such a pain about letting me do things for you,” I spat, pushing him away from the stove.
We both froze. I was speaking in the present, as if we had slipped through a crack in time and were revisiting a scene from our relationship and the time of cohabitation.
Finally, I said, “Guess nothing’s changed.”
Sulkily, he made his way back to the table; I started preparing coffee.
I carefully poured the hot water into the mugs and watched the chemistry of the granules turning the water dark and releasing that aroma which always managed to perk me up in the mornings. I placed a mug before Dave and sat back down.
“Does feel like old times, though,” I said, eager to fill the silence. “Remember when you made us get that bread oven, and you always made a fresh loaf to bake overnight? Then in the morning, you would make us BLTs and cut the bread so thick it was like we had half a loaf each. Those sandwiches were so thick you could have used them as doorstops.”
I could see his lips turn into a smile around the rim of his mug.
“Don’t suppose you still have it, do you?”
He shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter anyway. No power. Unless we find a generator.”
What was I saying? I was talking like my staying here was a sure thing, and that I was moving in for keeps. Dave may have just taken pity on me, giving me shelter for a couple of nights, and I was ready to start hemming curtains and plumping cushions.
“You ready for that bath?” I asked.
VIII