Zombie Zero (11 page)

The only fast movement she was capable of were the involuntary twitches in her hands and neck. The slower her shuffling steps grew, the more her hands twitched and her head lolled uncontrollably. Even if the streets she trudged today had been familiar, she wouldn’t have recognized them. Everything was a dull haze of gray through her eyes, except the hot red living streaks that she needed to stay away from. She would have ordinarily been fascinated by her ability to see heat signatures if her mind had been working. Today all of her will was spent on the simple task of not grabbing one as it passed and sinking her teeth into it.

As the sun set on the second day, Elayna found herself standing on the steps of a police station. It took a full minute for her to pull open the door, another to shuffle to the counter. The woman behind the thick glass partition wrinkled her nose at her.

“There’s no loitering in here,” she said distastefully.

Elayna moaned. It was the closest she could come to words.

“Listen, lady,” the woman said. “We can’t help you here. There’s a mission a couple blocks down. Why don’t you go there?”

Elayna loosened her grip on her hunger enough to form a single word. She chose the only one that might explain the situation to the tight-lipped officer with her hair pulled back severely and knotted in braids down her back. She hated to have to say it, as if speaking the word would somehow make her transformation complete without any need for a mouthful of flesh. It was a one-word admission of her own guilt and shame at the aberration she had become, and she said it as clearly as her rotten lips would let her.

“Zombie,” Elayna gasped. Her voice was a chilling sound to what was left of her ears, and it conveyed the message as clearly as the word. Still the woman looked at her impatiently. She began to open her mouth, presumably to tell her to get lost again; Elayna gave up and gave in to her hunger. She pressed up against the glass, biting and clawing at it as she reached for the woman. The officer recoiled, and moved her hand to her sidearm.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Stop that!”

Elayna wasn’t in control anymore, and she didn’t stop clawing at the glass because she had been told to. Her hunger made her turn at the smell of fear and flesh behind her. A few people were waiting in chairs against the opposite wall, and she began to slowly advance on them. The woman continued to scream at her through the bulletproof transparency between them, but the sounds weren’t words to Elayna anymore. The only sign of intelligence left in her movements was the way she angled to block the exit before her swifter prey could escape. She needed to get her hands on one of them, and soon she did.

Her grip was so strong it hurt her own fingers as she squeezed the man’s arm who had moved to subdue her. He fought her off as she tried to bite him again and again. A tiny part of Elayna watched from deep inside of her hunger, hoping the man was strong enough and fast enough to resist her slow frenzied attack for however long it took for the precinct to marshall their forces. The rest of her was bent on biting him, drinking his blood and swallowing his flesh. There was not enough of her left to try and fight the hunger, or wonder at how she had resisted it for so long.

Chapter 11

Nestled in a small valley, shielded from the elements by the mountains, a small stone building stood in the same place it had for over two thousand years. It was rumored that the Christian messiah had visited this place during the long chunk of his life not recorded in their book. It was also rumored that the monastery had later become a haven for homosexuals, as many religious orders had before society began to acknowledge their presence and slowly grant them the legal right to exist as others did. David didn’t give the rumors any more thought than he gave his own quiescent sexuality. His only concern was finding God. His teacher had brought him here, telling him that this was where the holy spirit would find its way into his soul for good at last. Since the Master had died, David had tended to the food growing at the foot of the mountain as carefully as he tended to the secret garden of his soul. He plucked the weeds and harvested the fruit of his bittersweet aloneness, meditating for long hours in a search to find what he already was. At the same time, quite some ways away…

Everyone in the city had seen one of them firsthand by now, or become one of them. Neighborhoods were no longer segregated by caste or class, but by what the inhabitants hungered for. The power still flowed, and the digital stream of news that it carried was for once relevant to everyone. They all knew that the ramblers were easily outrun, and fairly easily taken out with a skillful swing of a sharpened sword. They knew not to let a rambler get ahold of them, or bite them, and that anyone bitten was lost for good. No one was afraid of the ramblers, unless they were caught in a tight space by a large group. Many went hunting them with the long slim swords that every other house in this city seemed to have hanging over a mantel, in the eerily quiet mornings. It wasn’t the ramblers that found the streets deserted long before the curfew horn sounded.

The howlers were the ones that ruled the city from early afternoon, through the long nights, to the wee morning hours. You could hear them when they hit the streets, howling their hunger and spreading their insatiable need. More neighborhoods went from tending fences and feeble gardens to feasting on flesh and hunting humans with each passing hour, as the howlers burst through walls and tunneled under the earth to get to them. Wooden fences shredded to useless splinters at their clawed hands, and even chain link bent and twisted and snapped under their frenzied onslaught. It soon became clear that it was only a matter of time before one army would overwhelm the other, and swell its ranks with the fallen troops.

The news said to avoid the howlers. It was hardly necessary advice, although it came with an emergency caveat every time: if you do find yourself having to face a howler, shoot it in the eyes with high-caliper hollow-point rounds, aiming along the straight line of the optic nerve. Cutting off their heads worked, apparently, but it was a task sure to ruin the strongest blade before the severing was complete. The howlers healed faster than you could cut them, and bullets glanced off their thick skulls and armored chests. The advice was always delivered in a hopeless tone, reiterated shortly thereafter by some form of the original message: don’t tangle with a howler.

Mallory was at the center of it all, peaceful professor turned zombie warlord. He organized the troops without having to speak with them, leading the hive mind to swarm one block after another. He had found the high-ranking officer that would get him into a military base before the word and the family had spread too far, and he had interrupted his lunch to feast on the man. They had gone together to the base, and soon their army had a headquarters and armaments.

Tanks roved the streets, smashing down the strongest walls and leveling the highest fences. Howlers walked beside the armored vehicles in orderly ranks, armed with machine guns and teeth and claws that made the enemy swords look like useless toys. The enemy rolled in their own ground troops; soon those tanks and guns and minds were manned by inhuman hunger as well. Mallory had to put jets in the air to fight off invading forces, with the advantage of not caring where planes or bombs fell to the earth. The enemy did far more damage to the people they were trying to save than they did to the cause, and Mallory welcomed every flaming explosion like he did his next bite of bloody flesh.

It wasn’t long before his task was complete, his duties discharged. The city was filled with howlers and ramblers, and the remaining heat signatures were being hunted by more of them every day. Mallory had kept three young troops unchanged, chained to each other and his desk in his office. For three days they had cowered at the end of their tethers, watching in horror as he gave mental or radioed orders to the swarming mass of howlers. Mallory had ignored them as best as he could, although the smell of their fear drove him out to hunt fresh meat regularly. It was always only one bite, and that one bite got harder to find as the news spread; but Mallory had managed to keep them alive by hunting every few hours. He had refused the slabs of flesh that his brothers and sisters tried to bring him, surprised more than once at how considerate zombies could be toward each other.

Now the tide had turned, and his long wait was finally over. Mallory sat at his desk, watching the three young men hungrily. They had gotten water over the last few days, but he wasn’t sure if anyone had fed them. All three of them looked thinner and paler than they had when he had first clicked the manacles about their wrists and ankles. Of course, he had never dared let himself stare at them for long minutes like this. They had good cause to be pale and drawn.

“Don’t kill them,” one said, elbowing the other two out of the way. “They both have families. Dillon here has a wife, and a baby. Billy’s parents mean the world to him, and he means everything to them. I don’t have anybody.”

Mallory smiled, and he saw the brave volunteer shrink away at the sight of his teeth. They had grown in all the way, thick rows of jagged sharp edges that curved inward toward his hungry maw.

“You wouldn’t try to use that argument if you had seen the streets lately,” Mallory responded, still smiling. “Dillon’s wife and baby are surely a part of my family now, as are Billy’s sweet old folks. There are more of us than there are of you, boys, and one number keeps getting bigger while the other continues to rapidly dwindle. I would say this is a great opportunity for the three of you, but there won’t be enough left of any of you to celebrate or join my family. As brave young military men ready to give your lives for humanity’s sake, you boys will be heroes in a few minutes.”

“How can you say that?” The same young man spoke. “You’re murdering thousands of innocent people.”

“Oh no, it’s way more than that,” Mallory waved his clawed hand. “And you aren’t listening. We’re not killing anyone. We’re growing our family. We’re saving humanity.”

“How can you say that?” he demanded again. “You’re not even human. You’re a…you’re a…”

“A zombie?” Mallory nodded. “Why do you think the image elicits such a dramatic response in people, even in movies? The collective consciousness of this planet remembers the other times nature has used this solution to man’s endless problems. It’s why indigenous people burn their dead, or eat them, instead of burying them. They live in a shared dreamtime, in which they can see the entire history of the planet because of the way they are connected to it and each other. They don’t want their dead coming back to life.”

“What?” The man’s face paled another shade. “The dead are coming back to life?”

“Just the ones that haven’t had their essential bodily fluids removed, mostly folks cooling in morgues,” Mallory shrugged. “Zombies are not magical creatures. We need many of the same things that people do, biologically. We’re just designed differently, deliberately, to carry out one sole single-minded purpose.”

“What?”

“To decimate your kind.” Mallory shrugged once more.

“I thought you said you were saving humanity!” The young troop was shouting now, either because he realized it was hopeless or because he had not received emotional training equivalent to his weapons training.

“Precisely,” Mallory nodded. “Do you not know the meaning of ‘decimate’? In the most traditional sense, it refers to the practice of selecting one in ten men from a tribe to be sacrificed, so the rest of the tribe might go on with full bellies instead of everyone dying from starvation. Even when the word ‘decimate’ is used to describe a great cataclysm, it implies that something is left. When a city is decimated, a few structures still stand. When a population is decimated, it is not wiped out completely. Humankind must be decimated, or it will be wiped out completely.”

One of the other young men screwed up his courage enough to speak.

“What are you, a zombie professor?”

Mallory laughed. “I was a professor before I became a zombie.”

He decided right then that he would eat that one last. Mallory had always been easily charmed by a sense of humor.

“Who are you to decide that humanity needs to be culled?” The brave and shouty one was trying to show a little intellect. Mallory would eat him first.

“I didn’t decide,” Mallory responded. “My mother did, your mother did. The Earth did.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he was shouting again. Mallory could smell the fear, could feel it twisting his guts into a hungry knot.

“We can’t take our warring ways to space,” Mallory sighed. “She won’t let us represent her that way. We have to learn that there is another way to be, and another way to expect others to be, before we can participate in the activities in the rest of the universe.”