“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 were 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.