Having a very bad day...
Lisa stumbled into the night, her eyes clouded with tears.
The cold air hit her hard as the house disappeared somewhere behind her. It made her shiver, every muscle twitching as she wandered through the trees.
She sank into the earth with every step. The ground underneath her was unstable. Her legs felt rubbery and caked with mud. She raised her feet as high as she could to climb out of the bog or whatever it was that was sucking her down, but she couldn't seem to escape.
Everything she reached for to stabilize herself receded. The giant trunks of the trees danced away from her as their wiry branches stretched out to block her path, jabbing her shoulders and face as she pushed through them.
She wanted to feel normal, to feel something solid underneath her. She staggered down the side of the mountain, back to town, but she knew the town was overrun. She turned to climb again. She didn't know where to go. She squinted tight and tried to scan the trees for any sign of motion, human or zombie, something she could run away from or towards.
Her legs buckled, and she dropped to her knees. She flailed her arms to keep from sinking any further into the earth, but her fingers scratched at solid ground, even as she felt her body sinking into it.
She looked down and discovered she wasn't in a bog at all, and the thick layer caked on her legs wasn't mud, it was Speedy's dried blood. Still, something pulled down on her arms, her eyebrows, her chest. Every part of her was falling. There wasn't anything solid enough to support her.
Her breathing was quick and shallow. She fought the pangs of emotion swelling her chest and shooting from her fingers. A light hit her eye, and she looked all around, panicking at not being able to find its source. She finally looked up and saw the moonlight filtering down between two branches. The moon was a thick crescent, like someone had reached up and taken a huge bite from it as it hung full and high above the horizon. What time was it? How long since she'd shown up for work that morning, half a lifetime away?
She started crawling. If it wasn't the ground falling out from under her, the feeling was from something else, and she had to get away from it. She couldn't take it anymore.
At the bank, in her life, she'd been afraid of people learning her secret illness, but she could lose more tonight than her job and her reputation, she could get killed. Worse than that, she could be killed and trapped in a rotting corpse forever. She was scared. She realized for the first time how afraid she was of zombies. She had to keep moving.
"Don't panic," flashed into her mind, one of the rules of zombie survival. She tried to calm herself and remember the lessons about zombies that would keep her alive in this scenario, but all those lessons she thought she could hold on to were wrong. Kaveh had disproved them by protecting her, by speaking, by looking into her eyes. The rules as she knew them were wrong. She had no support from them either. She continued to fall.
She thought about her overwhelming happiness in the house. She'd lost control in there, fallen into Kaveh's arms, and it'd felt so good. After all those years having to keep herself under control, she'd wanted to know what it was like to let that go. Now it was here, and she couldn't stop it.
She had to go back. Where was the house? It wasn't safe out here. She couldn't fight this on her own. She couldn't even stand, the feeling was so strong. She crawled in the direction she thought the house might be, but she couldn't be sure. She was all turned around. The night was too dark, and the trees were too thick. She'd gone too far.
She was lost. Her arms shook. Her hands stung. She groped for anything familiar as the trees danced around her again. Were they spinning or was she? She wanted her old life back. She even wanted to go back to work and have Mister Shankly pick which loans got approved, to let him do her thinking for her again, but she knew that was impossible. Mister Shankly had died twice in twenty four hours because of her stupid rules.
Panic took over. Her head swam, and the trees became a blur. She wanted to close her heart back up, but she couldn't do it without her medicine. She tried to remember the way she'd felt all those years on the medication, but she couldn't control anything anymore, and knowing that only made her panic worse. She couldn't put the cork back in the bottle, and the earth sucked her down. As good as it'd felt to be with Kaveh, it couldn't be worth it to go through all this.
Hand over hand. Knees rubbed raw. Logan, Vince, Mister Shankly were all dead. Now Kaveh and Speedy had joined them. The tension in her stomach radiated through the rest of her body, and every one of her muscles locked up. Helen was gone. Even Farah couldn't protect her. She tried to force herself to move, but her body wouldn't respond. She was alone in the woods in the middle of the night, paralyzed and disoriented. The tears pooled up inside her but froze before they reached her eyes.
It was over. She knew the rule, this was when the zombies showed up. She'd seen it a hundred times. Emotions took over, fear made people run, and the next time you saw your buddy, they were one of the walking dead, but was that even true anymore? She didn't know. Strange thing was, it didn't seem to matter.
Her breathing got louder, more percussive. Her diaphragm forced loud H noises from her lungs.
Then those stopped, and she couldn't breathe at all.
Her shivering elbows gave out, and she fell forward into the dirt.
She was the one who'd been ready. She'd lived with the fear of zombies taking over, and she'd thought all that fear, watching movies for years, would prepare her for tonight. She was wrong.
"Please," her lips somehow managed, but she didn't know who she was talking to or what she wanted them for. Had she been bitten? Was this how it ended? Her shoulders shook her face against the dirt, and just before she lost consciousness, she realized it wasn't a zombie bite that was doing this. Her greatest fear came true, and epilepsy took away the last of her safety.
Speedy lay dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood, and Kaveh's head spun with possibilities. He wasn't sure how long he had before Speedy came back as a zombie, but he wanted to be ready.
In daylight, the kitchen's large windows had a view of the town below, but the bright lights bounced off of them, and Kaveh saw his own reflection. His face wasn't totally intact anymore. His skin was pale and flaking, showing signs of decomposition underneath. Blood seeped through his apron from the hole in his stomach. His limbs were rigid, but they remembered this kitchen better than his mind, and with quick, efficient movements, he filled a pan with ingredients, garlic, peppers, peacock kale. Why didn't Farah have more Iranian foods in her kitchen?
He laid out every piece of food he liked and visualized an elaborate feast, half a dozen courses, each course a different brain, each bite bringing Speedy closer to his level of consciousness.
He couldn't imagine the experiences and awareness that Speedy would consume in such a short time, but he was confident that he could guide his best friend through this awkward rebirth. Then they could pick up where they left off and try to make sense of this new life.
As the vegetables simmered, Kaveh unpacked his suitcase. He set up each of the human heads he'd collected on the kitchen's ample counter space and examined them. This was something sacred to him, the chance to apply his skills to a brand new palate, and he wanted Speedy's first meal to be perfect. His friend would be confused when he woke up, and the memories of other people would have to be reconciled with his own. Kaveh had to pick the ingredients carefully.
He took sample bites from each skull as he prepared the meal. From one mind he picked out the memory of a spring day in the park, which he sprinkled over the salad. Under a few folds of another human's gray matter, Kaveh discovered a juicy slab of learning English and set that aside for the appetizer. His habits of cooking came back quickly. They'd filled his mind for so long, even death couldn't wipe them away.
Still, something was missing. He was going through the actions of cooking mechanically. They had none of the joy he'd taken from them in his human life. He sliced the potatoes in jerky zombie motions so different from the fluid slicing he'd done for so many years. What if Lisa was right? Had he lost something he couldn't get back?
Kaveh stared into the emotions on the faces of those severed heads, horror, surprise, pain, the last expressions those faces would ever make. He remembered feeling things like them, sharing the pain and joy of those around him, but now they stirred nothing.
He yanked out more memories and ideas he thought Speedy would appreciate and set the heads aside. Speedy had always loved food as much as Kaveh did. He deserved the choicest cuts. The other zombies could eat the scraps if they changed their minds, but Speedy deserved more than those idiots outside the kitchen, scratching at the door because they couldn't understand there weren't any humans left in here. Lisa was gone.
Kaveh looked at the back door, where Lisa had left. He wanted her, but somehow he'd made an enemy instead. All the other humans could be against him, but he wanted her on his side. She knew things.
He turned back to the counter and noticed something in the ingredients he'd collected, American cheese. He hated that stuff. Why had he put it here? Was he trying to ruin Speedy's palate before it had any chance to develop a taste for fine brains? And what was that, Wonder Bread?
On the other hand, he had some fond memories of eating those things as a kid, the smell of his mom's grilled cheese coming out of the oven, all warm and gooey. No, that wasn't him. He was Kaveh, the Iranian chef, and that was all he'd ever wanted to be. Even now, being what he was, driven by the desire to eat, he had standards. He wished Farah had kept eating the foods they'd grown up with. He wanted to be reminded of his own childhood and keep it apart from the other minds he'd eaten, to be sure of his own memories again.
Kaveh went to the stove. He had to be careful not to overcook the brains. He'd never seen a zombie eat anything but raw flesh, and he didn't want to fry all those delicious synapses. Speedy's experience, the first meal of his new life, needed to be more than mindless consumption.
Lisa came to, a light in her eyes. She was lying on her back with faces above her. She wanted to run, but her body was sore and slow to respond. Before she could move, the light went out, and she heard Helen's familiar voice. "Sorry, the screen doesn't stay lit."
"Helen?" Lisa said. Her mouth tasted like pop tarts, blood and stomach acid.
"Are you okay?" asked Farah.
"Were you bitten?" Helen added. The cell phone screen lit up again, and Helen shoved it back in Lisa's face. It was one forty-three AM, and Helen still had no signal.
As Lisa's mind scrambled to figure out what was going on, her hand went to her mouth to explain a stinging in her cheek. She ran a fingertip over the rough bite mark inside her mouth and pulled it out. Not only was her hand disgustingly filthy, her cheek was bleeding. She must have bitten it during her seizure.
Farah saw the blood in the light of the phone. "Blood!" She scrambled back against a tree trunk. Helen saw the blood too, and jerked away into the darkness.
Only Doctor Neil stayed with Lisa. "Don't you know a seizure when you see one?" he said. "She's not a zombie. She has epilepsy."
Lisa's body froze again, this time out of shame. She felt embarrassed, naked that the secret she'd kept for so long would come out like this, when everything else was going so wrong. Just when she thought her worst fears had come true, here was another reminder that things could always get worse. She looked into their faces and waited for the shock and disdain to rain down on her.
Farah came back and stood over Lisa's body. "You're lucky my husband's a doctor. We might have killed you."
"With what?" Helen intercepted Farah. "Somebody didn't bring any weapons."
Farah poked a finger in Helen's face. "I'm not the one who got lost trying to find the back door."
"I couldn't help it," said Helen, "your house is huge."
Farah smiled. "Did I mention my husband's a doctor?"
The doctor shook his head in apology. He held out his hand to help Lisa get up, and Lisa struggled to her feet. "Why aren't you wearing your medical alert bracelet?" said Doctor Neil.
"I lost it," mumbled Lisa. The chain had broken years before, and she hadn't bothered to fix it or planned to wear it ever again.
"At least you're not one of them," said Farah. "Hey, wasn't Speedy with you?"
Lisa's breath caught in her throat. They deserved to know Speedy's death had been because of her, but she couldn't tell them yet. Her heart couldn't take it. "He lost it," she said. "Kaveh came back as a zombie, and Speedy lost control." The only people who knew it wasn't true were already dead. Lisa avoided eye contact and tried walking. Her steps were uneven, but she was surprised to find the world had stopped spinning and sucking her down.
Lisa sat down against a firmly rooted tree trunk, and Helen knelt down next to her. Helen put a comforting arm around her old coworker. "It's okay, Lisa. What do we do next?"
Lisa didn't know. She pulled her suit jacket tight around her. What was she doing out here? Was there even a chance they would get through this? She didn't have any words of comfort, and she couldn't put on a brave face this time and pretend she wasn't scared.
She didn't want to do this anymore. She didn't want to make any more life or death decisions. Every decision she'd made had been wrong. She'd asked for the empty gun instead of the bat. She'd stayed with Kaveh when she should have run out the door. Was she that girl now, the bimbo in the monster movie who died because she ran up the stairs instead of out the door? Just because she wasn't dead yet didn't mean she hadn't screwed up.
Helen tried again. "Do you remember in the vault, when you told us not to feel sympathy for the zombies? Say that again."
Lisa stared into the dark woods all around them. She could have killed Kaveh when they were in the kitchen together. She'd been holding the sword. He was the enemy, wasn't he? And she'd done nothing. Where was that sword now? She hadn't kept track. These people needed better protection. The humans had already lost. They just didn't know it yet.
"Lisa," said Helen. "It's just, I keep thinking, what if Logan came back? Ever since I saw Mister Shankly in that doorway, I mean, if it's possible..." Helen trailed off.
"Oh, God," said Lisa. She hadn't thought about Mister Shankly. He'd been with Kaveh, and she'd shot him before she knew. Had there been any humanity in him? Was there a chance he could have had some redemption, and she'd taken that away?
No, they were dead. Kaveh was one of them. He had to be. Lisa had been confused in the house. She'd been wrong again. Maybe it was the drugs leaving her system. Maybe she'd seen something in Kaveh she'd wanted to see all along, but those things were monsters.
She turned to Helen. There was something she'd been waiting to say for a long time. "I never understood you and Logan. He never had a job. He never respected you. You're better off without him." Lisa felt relieved. She wished she'd said that a year ago.
Helen was shocked. "How dare you? He treated me like a princess. He bought me presents all the time."
"Yeah, with your money," said Lisa. "Honestly, you were a bank teller, and he told you you couldn't handle your own money."
Helen started sobbing. "I love him," she said through the tears and moans. "Even if he's dead, I still love him."
Lisa started to panic. She wanted to stop and comfort her friend, but she fought the urge to open up her heart. She couldn't handle that again. "That's not how zombies work," she said. "Listen to me, Logan's gone. Even if he was still out there somewhere, it wouldn't be Logan. Whatever you felt for him when he was alive, that feeling is going to drag you down, and it'll get you killed. It'll get all of us killed."
Lisa felt calm, in control again, but she knew she wasn't. She had no idea how long that feeling would last or what might set her off again. It was more important than ever to keep up her guard. She couldn't allow herself to feel safe.
She stood up and came face to face with Farah, the only woman to make worse decisions than her. Lisa spoke. "Do we have any food?"
Farah shook her head and motioned to her husband. "Go on, tell her what you told me."
Doctor Neil stepped forward. "I listened to the radio in the house before you came. The National Guard has been mobilized across three states."
Farah smiled. "You hear that? They're coming for us. They know we're in trouble, and they're gonna solve this."
Lisa wished she could believe that, but she heard something different in that piece of news. Zombies were spread across three states. So far. The National Guard wouldn't be able to handle that. Things could always get worse.
Will they? To find out in Chapter Nine, be sure to send your Best Wishes for a Speedy Recovery.
Or read about a couple of real world zombifying experiences I had, first a flash mob, then some massive head trauma. Thank you all for your best wishes.
