I heard someone murmur something in the crowd. I couldn’t tell who, but I swiveled my head in that general direction. I began to feel stirrings of my own anger. “How do I know? ‘Cause I saw it. There’s no mistaking when someone’s dead from having been eaten. You can just kinda tell. This isn’t a movie where there’s gonna be a happy ending. The dead are rising, folks. If you get bitten or killed by these things then you will get back up. And when you get up you will be hungry for flesh. Those things out there are zombies and they’re eating people. If you doubt that then why are you here?”
No one would meet my gaze. I don’t know why their doubt made me so angry, but it did. I could feel my rage as an almost palpable thing. “Not an hour or so ago me, Wash, Felix, Rodriguez and Stubby all went out to save some kid that was trapped by the zombies in a car. Stubby didn’t make it back. Do you know what happened to him? Do you?” I was shouting. “He got attacked. A zombie shoved her arm down his throat and pulled all of his insides to the outside. I saw his lung in her hand. I saw her eat his tongue. And then do you know what happened after that? He got back up and came for us. Do you really think that’s something that could happen under normal conditions?”
I could feel my eyes blazing as I look down at the crowd. My throat was on fire yet somehow I’d found my voice.
“Couldn’t it be some kind of disease?” Some small voice queried from the crowd.
“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “It is a disease. It infects dead tissue and makes it living again. But don’t be mistaken. They’re not alive anymore. There’s no cure for death, people. The only cure for death is what’s outside these walls. And it wants to eat all of you.”
Washington helped me off the chair as I got down, muttering to myself. Damn fool bastards. I looked at Wash and saw the haunted look in his eyes. Saw the tremors and his clenched jaw, the sweat running down his shaved head. Then I said, “We’re all going to die.” That was when all hell broke loose, of course.
I don’t suppose you recall way earlier, less than 24 hours ago, when Barrett told me and Fannie Mae the rules of zombies movies? Well I did. That was when we’d all stripped for each other and I’d noticed Fannie Mae as a woman for the first time. A young woman, granted, but still. The whole point of our little striptease was Barrett’s assertion that in the zombie movies when you get a whole bunch of people together, survivors like us, that invariably there will be someone who’s hiding a bite from the zombies or someone with a scratch who doesn’t know it. He’d made us strip because he said that the zombie infection is insidious and it burrows down into the body and that if you’re not critically injured that it will works its way on you and then boom, you’re a zombie.
I’d forgotten to share that information with Washington. Don’t really know why. Guess it hadn’t come up and I’d forgotten been too tired from trying to survive to mention it. You’d be surprised at what slips your mind when you’re jumping from one hell to another.
Know where I’m going yet?
Rodriguez had been jumped by Tamara. Remember what I said? That she dug her hands into his shirt and just shoved him out of the way? One fingernail, one lone fingernail, had cut Rodriguez in the chest. Just the tiniest little scratch. How long does it take the infection to take hold throughout the body from a tiny scratch? Apparently about 45 minutes or so.
When we’d all gotten back from our failed rescue mission Rodriguez had snatched Wilkinson’s bottle of booze and thrown himself down into a corner to get as drunk as he possibly could in as short of a time as he possibly could. He’d been haunted by the visions of what we’d all seen and done outside. He was a sharpshooter, having taken his gun to the range every weekend to target shoot, but it was a different matter entirely to shoot people in the head. Logically he knew that those people would have happily eaten him and that he’d done the right thing, but that doesn’t change what you feel when you line up the sights on a fellow person. He saw them coming for him and saw himself shooting head after head over and over again.
Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. Children. All coming straight for him and us and wanting to feed. He’d shot them all. With no thought and no pity in his brain, he’d shot them all.
I think that more than anything else was what he wanted to drown out: how he’d felt nothing as he pulled the trigger. It was all about survival instincts and his brain had shut down to the trauma. But it woke up when it was all over and he knew that no matter what excuse you used that all of that was on his head.
So he drowned it all out. Or tried to. The booze was like fire going down his throat but it wasn’t affecting him. He wasn’t getting a buzz and he wasn’t passing out. As he sat there in his corner all he could feel was a wind rushing through his mind and his brain and body were in a vise of pain. His chest itched and he didn’t know why and didn’t really care why.
Rodriguez was alone in the world. No family to tie him down. Very few friends. He rented his trailer month to month and at any given time he might be inclined to just move on. He didn’t believe in roots and had a past he was running away from and all he cared about was being able to move. There were demons chasing him and every time they got close he’d run as fast as he could.
He hadn’t run fast enough this time.
The scratch on his chest was the tiniest thing. The smallest little pinprick you could ever see. Imagine taking your sharp, jagged fingernail and just pressing it into your skin. That’s it. Not even a drag across the flesh to mar the skin. Just a little blip on the radar. But it was enough. The bacteria or virus or whatever the hell it was that travelled from zombie to zombie found purchase there and began to replicate through his body. It began to permeate the flesh and the organs and eventually found his brain.
His alcohol-infused brain.
He was sitting there while I was railing against the crowd and trying to convince them of the existence of zombies. Scratching at his chest absently like he was a dog infested with fleas. He finally got up and stumbled to the bathroom to see what was going on. Looked in the mirror as he felt blackness creep into his brain and saw shadows moving at the edge of his vision. Clumsy fingers that had lost all feeling slowly undid his buttons and when he couldn’t manage to do that he just ripped it off in a fury, buttons flying everywhere.
Numb horror filled his brain as he saw the black, weeping flesh above his heart. Saw the red lines of infection spread from the wound like a spider web and travel around his body. Suddenly noticed the paleness of his flesh and felt the rot creeping into his brain. Opened his mouth to cry out in rage, but before the cry could escape his lips, in the time from one blink of the eye to the next, he was suddenly not alive.
Dead but not dead. Alive but not alive.
And with a terrible hunger.
He stood there staring at himself in the mirror for a few minutes. If the eyes are the window to the soul what does a zombie see when it looks in the mirror? Does it recognize that it’s looking at itself? I have no clue. But I do know that he was just standing there gazing at his own reflection and probably would have stood there for God knows how long except that someone opened the door to the bathroom without knocking.