This could be the end of our road...
Kaveh stood over Lisa's corpse, not eating her brains.
The dead wandered the street at random. They couldn't speak. They couldn't think. Kaveh could, but only as long as he had brains and they stayed somewhere in his digestive tract.
Eating Neil's brain had brought him back from the edge of total mindlessness, but it was already fading, and Kaveh struggled again to hold on to even the most important memories, like cooking with Speedy, his own sister's face or losing his last chance to kiss Lisa. While he had any mind left in him, he put a hand on his stomach and strained it to decide what to do.
Watching Lisa die, he'd been reminded what being alive was all about, and he knew this wasn't it. Zombies were incapable of emotion, and nothing he did would have any meaning. He touched her forehead. He was as hungry as ever, but for some reason, he didn't want this woman to get eaten. How long would her brains even last him? He'd felt this kind of hunger maybe two or three times in his life, but he knew it wouldn't go away no matter who he ate. Whatever happened, zombies would never stop being hungry for the living.
If he left the body alone and Lisa became a zombie, was there a chance she could become aware again? He'd tried it with Speedy, but Speedy's head had stayed vacant of thoughts, and then it was blown open by the National Guard. The remains of Kaveh's closest friend were sprawled on the street next to Lisa's. He turned away. There was nothing that would bring her back.
Lisa had wanted him to destroy what was left of her, so he picked up the rifle. With concentration, he slid his finger over the trigger. He removed the safety and pointed the gun at her head. Her eyes were still open, but there was no life in them. She could have killed him a dozen times that night, but she hadn't. He had killed and eaten his sister's husband earlier without thinking, but this seemed wrong somehow. He couldn't bring himself to desecrate her body. He dropped the rifle and walked away.
Kaveh called out to the rest of the zombies with a moan. They hadn't noticed her body yet, and they followed the sound now without question. They ignored the armored car and its racks of weapons, and Lisa's remains laid undisturbed in the contorted position where she had fallen and died.
He staggered through the streets, eyes wide, limbs heavy, hands groping, stomach almost empty. The rest of the zombies each tried to follow all the others and got nowhere, but Kaveh clung to his fading self-awareness, searching for those bundles of gray and white matter he needed to keep from losing the last memories of who he had once been.
He wandered the dark town, entering building after building, but all he found was human food. He had no use for these kinds of chops now. He couldn't augment his endless consumption with spices. The longer he walked, the more it looked like all that was left of the town were zombies. There were no more brains, and he was the only one left who even understood what he was.
He stumbled blindly. By the time Neil's brains came out through the hole chewed into his intestines, he would become like the rest of his kind, forget everything and stagger randomly without thought or reason until he was destroyed. Speedy's final death flashed into his mind, and Kaveh stopped looking for food. He didn't want to be a zombie anymore.
He found himself in a place he'd never been before. The moon hung low on the horizon, and nearby trees bristled, casting menacing shadows across the headstones. He didn't even know whose brain the idea came from, but maybe this was where a man like him belonged, a place designed to preserve the memories of those who had died. Kaveh had finally found his way to the graveyard.
He walked the rows of graves. It was strange, in a town swarming with people back from the dead, these grounds were undisturbed. His awareness was fading, taking with it the ability to choose the circumstances of his own demise. He would have to crawl into a deep hole, one he would never get out of. His memory would rest in peace, and his body would stay where he put it.
He found a spot under a tree that looked good, a narrow rectangle of ground where the grass was shorter than the rest of the graveyard. Without ceremony, he knelt down and tore at the earth with his fingers.
He threw dirt behind him by the handful, his injured shoulder creating an uneven rhythm. His consciousness continued to fade. Soon, he perceived nothing but the action of his arms digging and an odd noise coming from somewhere close by.
With each clump of dirt he ripped away, he sank lower into the earth. The rhythm of the noise was broken and uneven, and he instinctively started to follow it with his arms. He knew that sound. Somehow, logic managed to draw his remaining attention. Someone was crying. Zombies didn't cry.
He stood up, and a pile of ground organ meat landed in the dirt. He forgot the noise. He forgot about Neil and Lisa and Speedy, and he forgot himself.
His hands moved to the hole in his intestines, but there was nothing left inside of him to hold onto. The ground came up to his shoulders. He stood silently, alone in the grave, understanding nothing.
Lisa's body woke up against a dark wall.
She was so hungry, nothing felt real, and she looked at things without really being able to see them. Her business suit had blood on it. Her skin was pale, and the bite wound on her hand seemed important, but she couldn't figure out why.
She put her hand to her chest, but she felt nothing. She ran her fingers through her hair, but she couldn't remember what had happened. Nearby on the pavement was a dark shiny object. She lifted its strap, but it was too foreign to understand.
She stood. Her limbs were heavy, but they responded. She shuffled her legs to the end of the block. She'd forgotten to let go of the shiny thing, and it dragged behind her. Her motions were sluggish. The rest of the street was scattered with dead bodies, but none of them moved. Was that what was missing?
She reached the corner and kept staggering forward, one foot vaguely in front of another. Her objective was unclear, but something was wrong. She had to keep moving until it went away.
Somewhere, she turned a corner into the Pine Street Shopping Center. The shops all around had windows smashed in and doors pulled off their hinges, and a lifeless crowd wandered the parking area without purpose. Most of them looked empty and dark, but she dragged her feet to the one with the fluorescent light shining out through the slats of its heavy metal gate.
She pressed her hands against the storefront, but the tight ladder of bars protected the glass doors just behind it. Her instincts told her this was where to find what she needed. Two motionless figures in clean white coats sat on the floor with their backs against the inside of those doors.
She called out to them, but the air she pushed from her lungs came out as a series of loud guttural H's. She slammed her hands into the gate, and the crash of its metal joints echoed across the parking lot.
A long low moan came from behind her. She turned around to find a member of the wandering crowd coming closer. She reached a finger through the slats of the grating. He looked inside, saw the two figures and moaned louder.
Two more people from the parking lot moaned in response. They staggered closer and all joined their voices together. One of them even slammed an arm against the gate, but their heart just wasn't in it. The gate rattled limply.
Through the doors, one of the white coats started to move. The woman inside it reached up, wiped sleep from her eyes and turned her head slowly. She saw who was outside and jumped to her feet, shaking the man sleeping against the other door. They weren't dead.
The man in the white coat stood and turned. The woman pointed through the doors. "Look," came her voice, barely audible over the increasing moans. "Look, it's Lisa."
Lisa recognized something familiar. She took a step back. She saw the green and white sign above her head and the white of their coats, and she knew on some level that this was her pharmacy.
She had to get inside. She found herself moaning with the others and slammed her hands against the gate again and again, the heavy strap around her hand giving her arms an uneven rhythm. Her pharmacists would give her exactly what she needed to fix what was wrong. They were alive, and they would be delicious.
The first rays of dawn crested the horizon, erasing the stars one by one, lighting the tops of the eastern walls and giving the world a vague sense of color. The group's combined moan grew louder as more and more people came to join them. They staggered up with rigid limbs. Their clothes were torn. Their decomposing features made them unrecognizable. Many of them pounded on the gate, but their random blows only rattled across its framework. The gate held strong, and the pharmacists stood silently out of reach, the clashing of metal links never rising above the group's collective wail.
Lisa noticed someone specific wander up to the gate. His clothes were torn and bloody like the others. His skin was just as pale, his eyes as lifeless and unresponsive, but there was something different about him. He started pounding on the gate, and his arms made a slightly uneven rhythm of their own.
The two of them looked at each other, and the two rhythms they made to break down a gate to eat pharmacists moved closer together. Someone nearby heard the merging pattern and started to follow them both. Someone else followed that person, then another joined in, and the noise of that rhythm emerged from under the moaning and random smashing.
The pair of pharmacists backed away from the other side of the doors. More and more of the crowd on the outside was now pounding against the gate with the same coordination as their combined voices. The steady sound of that pounding filled Lisa's perceptions, and her voice began to echo it with her sharp guttural H sounds. She looked again at the new arrival. Was there something familiar about him?
The tearing of metal on metal drowned out everything else. The gate collapsed. Glass shattered. The crowd surged forward down the aisles of the pharmacy.
Feet shuffled across the smooth linoleum, any possibility of connection lost in the chaos. Grabbing arms reached for the two figures in white. Someone shouted. There was a struggle up ahead, and the pharmacists broke away, outrunning the slowly shambling horde. They successfully disappeared through the door in the back of the pharmacy, but a second later, they came back into view from the room behind the prescription counter.
The group crowded in and scratched at the customer service window, but its thick glass didn't break. Through it, Lisa saw shelves lining the walls filled with rows of tiny medicine boxes. She saw the man trying to catch his breath as the front of his jacket soaked red with his blood. She heard the woman scream. This was all so familiar, but she couldn't remember why.
The window was too narrow for them all to climb through at once, so she struggled to be the first in line. She groped and shoved to get closer to the counter, but she found herself face to face with the familiar man from outside, and she stopped.
The two of them stood in the middle of the chaos and looked into each other's eyes.
Something sparked in Kaveh as he looked at this woman. Around them, everyone was moaning and banging. That sound had pulled him here and told him there was food, but this was also important. He reached for her hand and felt something there.
He traced along her fingertips and pulled on the strap. He lifted the black shiny thing on the end of it. This meant something.
Without thinking, he pointed it at the window and closed his hand on the trigger. Glass shattered again. Kaveh dropped the rifle and went back to shoving with the crowd. They surged forward again, but this time, there was nothing more to protect the two humans.
The first of the zombies tumbled over the counter. The two humans screamed and ran in panicked circles. More zombies climbed in and did their best to follow them but ended up spread around the room.
Kaveh reached the counter and started to climb. Someone grabbed the man and bit his shoulder. Kaveh felt his own shoulder give out, and his stiff body fell head first into the smaller room.
He stood up, his hand pressed tightly to his shoulder. Both humans were now being eaten. Kaveh staggered into the fray before the food was all gone and grabbed at the woman's chest.
Her screaming turned to gurgles as Kaveh reached into her ribcage and tore out her quivering heart. The rest of the crowd continued to stream in through the narrow window and tear at the bodies to get their individual portions, but it didn't matter. Kaveh had food.
He shoved the heart into his mouth with both hands, blood gushing down his arms along the inside of his sleeves. He couldn't get the meal into his mouth fast enough to meet the sheer enthusiasm of consumption. His mouth was saturated with taste, and he felt the rapture of cuisine.
Too quickly, the meal was over. He couldn't eat enough of these people.
He looked around for more. The torso of the man was picked clean, a few reddened scraps remaining of his dismembered jacket. Crouched over it was the woman who'd brought the rifle, gnawing out the inside of his heart. She looked up. There was something about her eyes that Kaveh wanted to remember, but he couldn't. The other zombies chomped vacantly on whatever organs or appendages they had gotten their hands on, but they ignored the two leftover body parts on the floor. In the center of the room were the human heads.
Kaveh was starving. He picked one up, held it sideways and bit off its nose, but it didn't do anything for him. He turned it right side up and was confronted by the remains of the woman's face. He saw the terror frozen in her remaining features, and something stirred inside him. He didn't like it. He couldn't stand the look in those eyes. He threw the head, and it slammed against the edge of the counter.
Lisa watched the head crack open and shuffled over to pick it up.
She ran her fingers through the woman's hair, and the crown of the skull peeled away from something meaty underneath. Lisa felt a strange tightness in her throat as she reached in, but she was just as hungry as before eating the heart, so she grabbed a morsel of food and brought it to her mouth.
Lisa took her first bite of brains, and it was incredible. She felt her emptiness ebb. She ripped out more of the brain and shoved it into her mouth, her eyes rolling back in ecstasy.
This was the solution she'd been looking for. She smiled and looked around, and she realized she was surrounded by a dozen zombies.
Her breath sped up. Thoughts and memories flooded her mind. Every zombie film she'd ever seen came back in a flash. Would they eat her? Could she escape? As she tried to figure out what to do, her hand absently went to her mouth, and she took another bite of what she was holding.
Her whole body froze, and she looked down. Staring back at her was Judy, a pharmacist she'd been visiting for years. Actually, it was Judy's head. Anything else that had been this woman was splattered across the boxes of medicine lining the room. Lisa felt dizzy. She'd seen this room a hundred times, but seeing it like this was truly horrifying.
She noticed the wound on her hand, and she started to realize why the zombies weren't eating her.
Her body went weak. Her hands were shaking. She remembered dying. Her mind was a clutter of scattered memories. She should have stayed dead. How had she gotten here? She didn't want to be a zombie. Why hadn't Kaveh eaten her? If she was a zombie, how could she think again? She looked around the room for something to jog her memory, but then she remembered Kaveh and how he had become intelligent by eating brains.
She looked down again into the half-empty chasm of Judy's skull. She reached inside for another helping, but a wave of revulsion came over her. She couldn't.
Something was wrong. Zombies didn't have revulsion. They couldn't feel remorse. That's what made them monsters. She had to figure this out, but she needed more brains to do it. She tried to reach in again. She was still famished, but this was a human head. She couldn't eat Judy. She dropped to her knees, and Judy's head rolled away across the ground.
The pain of what she'd just done threatened to overwhelm her. She wished she could pull out this feeling and throw it on the floor. Her hands pressed against her chest. Her heart wasn't beating, but she knew she was feeling again. What else had she eaten? Nothing. Nothing but a heart.
She stopped shaking. If eating brains let her think. Could eating hearts make her feel?
To Be Concluded...
