A lot has changed in the past two years, the title for one. Be Still My Formerly Beating Heart is now Night of the Loving Dead. Now that it's finished, I encourage everyone to read the newly restructured and revised version the way it's meant to be experienced.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Finally
Two years ago today, I posted the first chapter of this story on this blog, so this seemed like a fitting moment to finally make the end available. I considered charging for it, but I figured, the rest of it was free, why not?
A lot has changed in the past two years, the title for one. Be Still My Formerly Beating Heart is now Night of the Loving Dead. Now that it's finished, I encourage everyone to read the newly restructured and revised version the way it's meant to be experienced.
A lot has changed in the past two years, the title for one. Be Still My Formerly Beating Heart is now Night of the Loving Dead. Now that it's finished, I encourage everyone to read the newly restructured and revised version the way it's meant to be experienced.
Chapter Twelve - She is Legend (Part Two)
Why not? Nothing else about the situation made sense. She stopped shaking and looked around again. The violent blood splatters against the walls and the blank rotting faces of the other zombies made her sick. She could definitely feel again, but she didn't want to feel this. Behind all that blood, the prescription medications were still there.
She got to her feet and staggered to the wall. In a room full of identical boxes, she somehow went straight for the one she was looking for.
She opened the box. This was her medicine, the anticonvulsants that had let her live a normal life. She lifted them up. There were more of them here than she'd ever had at one time, but she stopped. Zombies didn't suffer from epilepsy. Their medicine wouldn't work for her. She had to find something else. She shuffled over, opened the door and walked out into the pharmacy, her mind trying to list all the things her new body would need.
Kaveh picked up the man's head. There was a feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn't a physical pain, and it wasn't hunger either. He put a hand to his gut and felt the missing portion of his intestines. The woman's face had affected him strangely, but his hunger was stronger than anything. He slammed the head on the counter, and the meal that opened up to him made his mouth water. He forgot everything else and buried his face in the skull.
His mind came alive with the flavors and thoughts that poured down his throat. This was more than food. It was the culmination of an entire lifetime of experience. Kaveh could never create a meal like this, but he remembered trying.
He remembered being a chef. He remembered being a pharmacist. Things were coming back so quickly now, he could't make sense of them all. He remembered fighting soldiers on a dark alley, cooking brains for his friend Speedy, stumbling through the night to find his sister's house, even waking up on the floor of the bank. He remembered dying, and he stopped eating.
Creatures had climbed over this exact counter and torn his limbs from his body while he screamed.
Kaveh felt each of his limbs. They were still attached. He had that memory, but it couldn't have been him. He looked down at the torn off head he was eating. This man's name had been Tom. He had worked here, and Kaveh knew he had the memory of this man's death.
The strange feeling was back. Kaveh couldn't stand to see the look of pain paralyzed on Tom's lifeless face, but he also had the powerful urge to eat more brains, so he made a choice. He turned the head around and kept on eating.
With the face meat pointing the other way, he scooped out the crumbling chunks of brain and dropped them into his mouth, and he concentrated on the pleasing experiences that his meal reminded him of. He thought of his friendship with Speedy. He remembered Lisa. He even knew her prescriptions. No, that was from Tom's memory again. He reached in to see if he could remember any more, but Tom's skull was empty.
Kaveh took a deep breath. He knew what was going on now. It was like coming back from the dead all over again, but it wouldn't last. He would digest these brains too. He would have to watch himself slip away, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it, slowly starving and still unable to feel. He didn't want to go through that again.
He remembered the plan he'd come up with earlier. The graveyard was still out there. If he put himself in the ground, nobody else could do that for him, and this would be the last time he would go through this. He had another chance to make his own decisions, and it was time for him to crawl into the grave. He dropped Tom's empty head on the ground. It was no good to him now.
He noticed the other head on the other side of the room. He went closer and recognized Judy. This was the face that had bothered him before. He didn't want to see her like that, but there was still a little brain matter in there. He might need that.
He went over to it and looked out through the shattered service window. Lisa was out there. He sighed, disappointed to see her like this but relieved that she would never understand what she'd become.
Lisa went down her mental list. She had an anti-inflammatory for joint stiffness, ointments to prevent her skin from peeling and a tanning gel to stop it from looking so pale. She wandered the aisles at random, clutching her shopping basket. Was there something she could use for embalming fluid? There was nobody left to ask for help, but there was also nobody left to charge her for the medicine, which was good, because she'd left her purse at work the day before.
She turned to search the next aisle and found her shiny black rifle abandoned on the floor. She remembered her joy with that thing, how alive she had felt while killing zombies. She shuffled over and picked it up. She remembered the time when she'd found herself unarmed in Farah's foyer and immediately checked the ammo. There were two bullets left, one in the chamber and one in the clip.
She turned to where the featureless pack of zombies were trailing away from their feeding frenzy in the back room, all smeared with blood, and she lifted the rifle's sight to her eye.
Her chest tightened, and a familiar burst of emotions swelled inside her. One of the zombies wasn't just another decomposing face. In the midst of all the horror that surrounded her, she couldn't help but smile when she recognized Kaveh.
He walked over to her, a plastic shopping bag under his arm, staring at the front doors. He glanced over at her, and Lisa saw the recognition in his eyes. He had brains. She opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to share her discovery, to tell Kaveh what eating hearts could do for him, but her throat would only moan. She couldn't form words. Kaveh shook his head and walked out towards the front doors.
She took a step after him, trying to call his name, but it was no good. She looked out across the pharmacy. There had to be something here that would bring her voice back.
She stood in the aisle with the gun in one hand and the shopping basket in the other. There was no medicine out there for someone who was already dead. She knew what she really needed to ingest, those that this kind of medicine was meant for. Kaveh knew that. That must have been where he was going.
She let go of the basket, and the medicine spilled everywhere. That wasn't her solution. She slipped the gun strap over her shoulder and followed Kaveh out the doors.
She followed him for block after block. Should she stop him? She didn't know where he was going, but there was still that gun store on Pine. She thought about getting more ammunition, but she couldn't say that to Kaveh, and she didn't want to lose sight of him. As long as they were together, things didn't seem as bad.
Kaveh kept going, his short zombie steps possessed with purpose, and Lisa followed behind, just trying to keep up, but she stopped when she saw him walk into the graveyard.
She stood, staring out at it in the slowly growing light. The stars were gone, and the approaching sun gave half the sky a hint of blue. It was strange, graveyards had frightened her all her life, but that was one thing she didn't feel again. She went through the gates.
Kaveh stood at the edge of the open grave and saw the path his own footprints had left climbing out and staggering mindlessly away in search of food.
He took a deep breath. He wouldn't let that happen this time. He had to climb back down there and bury himself, but something held him back. Lisa came up and stood next to him, and they looked down into the hole together. Things were different when she was around. He didn't know what was going on, but he was starting to like it.
She climbed into the hole, moaning in anticipation, and started digging deeper. Kaveh reached out a hand to stop her, but near the head of the grave, her hands uncovered the surface of a coffin.
It hadn't occurred to Kaveh that the grave was occupied. He climbed into the hole with her. They uncovered the rest of the casket and lifted the lid. The man inside looked fresh as the moment he'd died, and he stayed motionless as a corpse was supposed to. There had been a food source under Kaveh's feet the whole time.
Lisa slammed her fist in and tore out the man's heart, but Kaveh had something else in mind. He tore off the head and cracked it open against the nearest solid object, the tombstone. A dark liquid cascaded down the dates of the man's birth and death and his name etched in stone. George had been dead for almost a month. How did he still look so fresh?
Kaveh wedged his fingers into the fractured cranium, pried it open and bit into George's brain, anticipating the rich flavors of life it would hold, but no, this tasted terrible. The flesh was soaked with the taste of formaldehyde.
This must have been why zombies only went after fresh kills, they hated artificial preservatives too. They did have discerning palates after all. Lisa reached for the head, but Kaveh held it back. He couldn't serve this.
She held out the heart, and she smiled. Her eyes weren't dead like the other zombies. How was that possible? She tapped her chest and moaned, "Heaaaarts." Curious, he took the heart from her and handed her the open skull.
Lisa could talk again, sort of. Eating people was starting to have its effect, but she needed more.
She took a bite of brains, trying to swallow her guilt along with it. This man's death wasn't her fault, she told herself. Hunger tried to overwhelm her thoughts, but each bite brought back memories of a life that wasn't hers, making her more aware that George had been a living person. Her appetite was strong, but her humanity was getting stronger.
She thought of everyone she knew who would never make it to the grave, Logan Swanson, Helen Witherspoon, Eli Shankly, Farah Halsey, Fidel Gonzalez. She and Kaveh had come back from the dead, but all those people were gone forever.
Lisa's entire body shook, trying to hold back the pain that came over her, but she couldn't stop it. An agonized moan emerged from her throat, but she shaped it into words, "All those people." Her hands pressed against her face, but something was missing. Her eyes burned, but no tears came out. "I can't cry. I can't cry! Kaveh, I'm a monster."
She abandoned all rational self-control and gave into her emotions. Her pain emerged in a long, horrifying wail.
Kaveh put his arms around her. "I know. So am I, but there's nothing we can do about it now. We can't change what we are."
Lisa shook her head. "Look around. Everyone's dead. We're dead. It's the zombie apocalypse." Forced sounds like weeping came out of her mouth against his shoulder.
"Exactly," said Kaveh. "The world is coming to an end. It doesn't matter what we do, but there are things worth living for."
She broke out of his grasp and shouted, her teeth flashing. "What? What's left?
Kaveh stroked the side of her face. "Hearts. Look, we can feel again. Now there's no reason not to be a zombie."
Kaveh watched the rage drain out of Lisa's eyes, and the sorrow that replaced it was hard for him to look at. He wanted to protect her. The feeling was more intense than anything he could remember. He reached out of the grave and picked up the shopping bag. "You're gonna be okay," he said. "This should help. I brought it from the pharmacy." He opened the bag and handed her the mutilated remains of Judy's head. "I was saving it for later, but you should take it."
"Are you sure about this?" she asked.
"Don't worry," he said with a tender smile. "I ate a doctor."
She was still shaking, and he put his arms around her again. They stayed like that until Lisa started to calm down.
She shook her head. "When I was a kid," she said, "my father used to say, 'Work hard, whatever it takes to make the world a better place. There's sleep aplenty in the grave.'" She looked up at the surface of the earth above their heads.
They reluctantly choked down what was left of the two brains and George's heart, Kaveh because of the taste and Lisa because of her guilt. When the food was gone, Kaveh gazed into Lisa's eyes. "So, you're the zombie expert. What do we do now?"
Lisa said, "I was hoping you would tell me. I'm new at this."
Kaveh said, "If we don't find more to eat, we'll digest George. We'll forget what we've done, everything we are, and we'll be nothing but zombies again."
Lisa turned away. "Maybe that's a good thing. Listen, I have two bullets--"
"Sh." Kaveh cut her off. There was a noise somewhere outside the grave, someone crying. Zombies couldn't cry.
Lisa and Kaveh looked at each other. They clasped hands and helped each other out of the grave.
The pair of zombies walked towards the sound together, driven forward by their shared desire. There was a small church next to the graveyard. Peeking through the window, they saw dozens of humans inside, huddled together for warmth and safety.
Lisa admired their cleverness. This was a contagion, and those already in the grave were beyond the spread of the infection, so the graveyard was actually a pretty smart place to hide out, but their plan was useless if the zombies ever figured out what a buffet there was here, which Kaveh just had.
Her body wanted to go into the church, to devour those people, to squeeze the juice out of life again. She looked through the window again and saw the faces of those who had survived this long in a world of zombies. She heard the sorrow in those uneven sobs. It was the sound of a person whose life had been wiped away, and she felt they had that in common. Lisa wondered what painful memories of loss those minds would never let go of, even in death.
She turned to Kaveh. "We can't do this."
Kaveh was already walking to the large double doors. He turned back. "If we don't eat, we're gonna be back for them anyway. Would you rather the real monsters get them?"
"Let's go back to the graveyard, Kaveh. We can survive on corpses." The words made her wince.
"That jerky? You call that survival?" Food had always been the thing that kept him going. He thought she would understood. Kaveh's eyes went dim. "The people we were are dead, but there's still something standing, and it needs to eat or it'll die. We're monsters. It's true, but if I have to live with myself, as long as there's anything left in here," he pointed to his chest, "I have to be proud of who I am. If it's a choice between their survival and ours, I don't think that's a hard decision."
Lisa put her hand to Kaveh's chest and held his hand. her eyes were sad. "They're human beings. Talk to them." He had feelings now. He couldn't do this to them.
"It's easy for me to look at anything and see food. It doesn't mean I don't care. I honor their memories. I'll savor every bite and carry on the memory of who they were." It was what Doctor Neil would have done.
Kaveh walked away from her to the front doors, and stood for a few seconds to collect himself. The suit he'd put on the day before was coated with blood and dirt. His jacket was missing. His torn shirt exposed the bite on his left shoulder, and his intestines threatened to fall out onto his shoes at any moment. He smoothed his hair and knocked slowly.
There was a shuffling from inside. After a few seconds, a woman's voice came through the sealed door. "Someone alive out there?"
Kaveh cleared his throat. "I need your help," he said in his most human tone.
"We're armed," she said. There was something strangely familiar about her voice.
They might kill him, but that was a risk he had to take. These might have been the last brains in town. "I'm scared," Kaveh droned. He felt that strange tightness in the pit of his stomach again, and it surprised him when he realized he wasn't lying. He'd forgotten what fear was like. He was out of practice at feeling, and it barely made sense anymore.
The woman's voice said, "Kevin? Is that you? No, you're one of them. I told you, I'm armed." He recognized the sound of a bullet sliding into the chamber of a gun.
Kaveh looked around and spotted the military Humvee parked halfway up on the lawn, its weapon racks picked clean. He did recognize that voice. It was the bank teller from the day before.
"Teller," he said, but his consciousness failed him. He couldn't remember her name. "Teller girl, let me come in."
A defiant shout came from the other side of the door. "Not by the hair of my chinny chin motherfucking chin."
Lisa walked forward. "Helen?" She had to calm her former coworker before this got out of control. "It's me, Lisa. Helen, I'm here. Don't shoot."
Helen's voice lost its bravado. "Lisa? I watched you from the car. You died. God, you must be one of those things."
"I'm not a thing, Helen. Don't be so closed minded." Lisa looked at Kaveh and jerked her head. "Let's go. Please."
Kaveh turned and threw his weight against the doors. They rattled. Helen squealed. A bullet came through the doors but missed him.
"Stop!" shouted Lisa. She pressed her body against the doors and her hand on Kaveh's chest. He stopped.
"I won't be one of you." Helen sounded shaken. "I don't want to come back and kill people." Lisa smelled Helen's sweat though the doors, partially masked by the fruity flavor of her Dolce and Gabbana perfume, and she craved the taste of the living, but she held still.
She spoke slowly, her old technique for keeping people calm. "I know. I don't want that either. Remember how you asked me to shoot you if you were going to be a zombie? You watched that happen to me, but you didn't shoot me then. Listen to my voice. I'm not like the rest of them. You don't want to shoot me now either, do you? We'll just live and let..."
Three bullets exploded through the doors of the church. One of them grazed Lisa's ear. She held it to stop the bleeding, but there was no blood, and it didn't hurt.
Kaveh pulled her away from the doors and shielded her with his body. "You see, they'll never accept what we are." He knew how these people thought. He'd eaten others just like them. These were the same people who had treated him like a monster, even when he was alive. At the time, it had made him angry, but now he knew they were entitled to their opinions. All he felt for them now was hunger.
The two of them weren't getting through those doors by force, but Kaveh was part of a community now. He would call on that community and serve up the humans like so much sirloin. As loud as he could, Kaveh called out with a chilling moan.
"No, don't," said Lisa, but it was too late. From all around them, other voices moaned in the distance. She backed up slowly, eyes darting back and forth. She called out, "You hear that? They're coming to get you, Helen. They're coming for you, Helen, and they're bringing friends. What happens to you when there's no more bullets?"
Kaveh moved through the crowd, organizing the zombies into a single force and pointing it at the front doors. The pounding got louder, but there were too many of them to control. A window broke somewhere. Human screams sounded under the crowd's scattered moaning.
More zombies were arriving every minute. There was nowhere left for the humans to go. They were already as good as dead.
Lisa watched the zombies fighting to get into the church, standing at the edge of the crowd. More gunfire came out through the door, but Helen was firing blind and hitting nothing important. "You used to listen to me," she said, but she was sure Helen couldn't hear her anymore.
The doors crashed inward. Guns fired impotently from untrained hands, but those who were already dead mingled freely with those who were about to be. Lisa stumbled forward in shock and watched the slaughter. The remains of a flimsy barricade were scattered on the floor. She reached back for the rifle over her shoulder and held it limply in front of her, not sure who it could help anymore.
She spotted Helen falling back behind one of the pews, cornered and frantic but still shooting zombies all around her. Anderson had been right. She was a natural.
All around them, zombies were tearing people apart. The gunfire and sharp dying screams of the humans became less and less frequent, giving way to the low drone of the undead, and Lisa couldn't help but be reminded of microwave popcorn. Her mouth started watering, and the urge to start eating was almost uncontrollable.
Gunfire thundered from behind her head. Lisa ducked, but several zombies around her collapsed forever. She looked up to see Private Anderson. He was fighting through the crowd, a gun in one hand and a combat knife in the other. How had he survived?
Helen emerged from behind the pew and met Anderson in the center of the church. With all the other zombies either killed or busy feeding, the last two surviving humans moved cautiously towards the front doors, their faces frozen in expressions of panic. Helen's hands no longer held a gun. Instead, she had the rocket launcher from earlier.
Struggling for awareness outside of her hunger, Lisa realized that she was standing between them and the doors, and she had exactly two bullets left. Hunger raised the rifle in their direction, but her brain kept her from pulling the trigger.
Anderson saw her and turned his gun, but Helen stopped him. "No, she's right. I should do this. We had a deal." She hefted the rocket launcher onto her shoulder, but Lisa saw the doubt in her eyes.
Lisa spoke quickly, the first words that came to mind. "Helen, you don't have to do this. Our boss is dead. There's no rules anymore, nobody left to tell us what to do." She wasn't sure where she was going with this.
Kaveh, who was chewing on a brain nearby, stood up and started towards the humans, but Lisa grabbed his shoulder and held him back. The bite on her hand resting on Kaveh's similarly mutilated shoulder. "It's not going to be okay, Helen. All it takes is one mistake, a fraction of a second to destroy everything it took you a lifetime to create. You can fight. You can run. You can put up all the defenses in the world, but you'll live every minute of every day controlled by fear. I used to live like that, but I don't anymore. I don't have to be afraid of zombies now. All I have to be afraid of is you."
She wrapped her arm around Kaveh, and he felt good against her. She pulled him away from the doors, giving the two humans a clear path of escape. "I have a second chance to really live this time, and I want it so much. I choose to live, in whatever form I can, and I'll do whatever it takes to keep it, tear the world apart for even one more minute if I have to, but I want you to live too."
The tip of the bazooka in Helen's hands dipped. "What about Logan Swanson? I loved him, and they killed him."
Anderson turned to her. "Hey, you know how they say, 'if you were the last man on Earth?' I'm calling that one in." He smiled.
Helen and Anderson walked nervously down the aisle, through the front doors and out towards the Humvee. Kaveh watched them go, then spoke to Lisa. "In a way, I'm glad there's something still out there, so we don't forget where we came from, but I would have eaten those two."
Lisa's head bowed in relief. "Aw, come on, Kaveh. Have a heart."
Kaveh slipped out of her arm and knelt over one of the dismembered bodies, reached his fist up through the bottom of its ribcage and pulled out the heart. He handed it to Lisa.
Lisa's laugh sounded like it bordered on tears. Her body was shaking, but she took the heart. "It's true," she said. "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
Kaveh moved around the room. He watched the other zombies eating food that he had provided, and it made him proud, but the organs he needed weren't their priority. Picking through the piles of body parts, he was free to gather the meal that would be the most mentally and emotionally stimulating. When he looked over, Lisa was doing the same thing.
Kaveh smiled. "I guess great minds--"
"Taste alike. I know." Lisa gave another sad smile.
They walked outside. The sky above them was blue, and gentle clouds were visible in the light of the new day. They put their collected organs down together on the lawn of the graveyard.
"It's been a long night," said Kaveh. He looked at Lisa and felt how he had in the bank vault the day before. He didn't know for sure whose heart the emotions were coming from, but all that really mattered was that he was capable of them again. "Do you feel the same way you did when you were alive?" She had told him she loved him. He smiled. "I think I love you too. I never thought I would feel like this again."
Lisa looked down at herself. She was covered in blood, and her body was decomposing. "How could you love me? I'm a monster."
"Don't you understand? We're the same. You and I, we've been to hell and back, if you believe in that sort of thing."
"Actually, there's no more room in hell." Lisa shook her head, but then the laughter tumbled out. "Well, maybe you can't believe everything you see in movies."
Kaveh's body moved without thinking. He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her close. He was filled with a powerful desire, but this wasn't hunger. Lisa pursed her lips, and they kissed.
Lisa felt like she was blushing, but she knew that was impossible. Circulation was the first thing that zombies lost. She pulled her face away and looked into his eyes. Her feelings for Kaveh overwhelmed all her self-control, but the reason she'd always had to hold back was her epilepsy. That was gone. "Learning to have feelings all over again, it's kind of intense. I'm glad we're going through it together."
Kaveh had felt this intensity of desire maybe two or three times in his life. Even though his life was over, he got to feel it again, but it also hurt because he knew it would only last as long as the food. "This time yesterday, I had my life all figured out. I had a plan, and I believed in something. Part of me wishes everything had stayed just like it was when I put this suit on."
Lisa pulled her face out of a half-eaten heart and smiled. "But this isn't really so bad, is it?"
Kaveh put his arm around her and spoke with a touch of sadness. "Things are never going back to the way they used to be."
Lisa said, "So we'll start a new life."
He raised a playful eyebrow. "It'll be dangerous. We'll never know who our next meal is going to be."
She smiled and spoke mischievously. "Kind of makes you feel alive, doesn't it?"
He smiled back. "The battle for America's hearts and minds."
The world was different than it had been the day before. This was a world where being a zombie could be a good thing.
Lisa looked around. "What should we do first?"
Kaveh sat down in the grass, next to the pile of hearts and brains. "How about breakfast?"
Together, Lisa and Kaveh sat back and watched the sun rise, and they were dead happily ever after...
The End
She got to her feet and staggered to the wall. In a room full of identical boxes, she somehow went straight for the one she was looking for.
She opened the box. This was her medicine, the anticonvulsants that had let her live a normal life. She lifted them up. There were more of them here than she'd ever had at one time, but she stopped. Zombies didn't suffer from epilepsy. Their medicine wouldn't work for her. She had to find something else. She shuffled over, opened the door and walked out into the pharmacy, her mind trying to list all the things her new body would need.
Kaveh picked up the man's head. There was a feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn't a physical pain, and it wasn't hunger either. He put a hand to his gut and felt the missing portion of his intestines. The woman's face had affected him strangely, but his hunger was stronger than anything. He slammed the head on the counter, and the meal that opened up to him made his mouth water. He forgot everything else and buried his face in the skull.
His mind came alive with the flavors and thoughts that poured down his throat. This was more than food. It was the culmination of an entire lifetime of experience. Kaveh could never create a meal like this, but he remembered trying.
He remembered being a chef. He remembered being a pharmacist. Things were coming back so quickly now, he could't make sense of them all. He remembered fighting soldiers on a dark alley, cooking brains for his friend Speedy, stumbling through the night to find his sister's house, even waking up on the floor of the bank. He remembered dying, and he stopped eating.
Creatures had climbed over this exact counter and torn his limbs from his body while he screamed.
Kaveh felt each of his limbs. They were still attached. He had that memory, but it couldn't have been him. He looked down at the torn off head he was eating. This man's name had been Tom. He had worked here, and Kaveh knew he had the memory of this man's death.
The strange feeling was back. Kaveh couldn't stand to see the look of pain paralyzed on Tom's lifeless face, but he also had the powerful urge to eat more brains, so he made a choice. He turned the head around and kept on eating.
With the face meat pointing the other way, he scooped out the crumbling chunks of brain and dropped them into his mouth, and he concentrated on the pleasing experiences that his meal reminded him of. He thought of his friendship with Speedy. He remembered Lisa. He even knew her prescriptions. No, that was from Tom's memory again. He reached in to see if he could remember any more, but Tom's skull was empty.
Kaveh took a deep breath. He knew what was going on now. It was like coming back from the dead all over again, but it wouldn't last. He would digest these brains too. He would have to watch himself slip away, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it, slowly starving and still unable to feel. He didn't want to go through that again.
He remembered the plan he'd come up with earlier. The graveyard was still out there. If he put himself in the ground, nobody else could do that for him, and this would be the last time he would go through this. He had another chance to make his own decisions, and it was time for him to crawl into the grave. He dropped Tom's empty head on the ground. It was no good to him now.
He noticed the other head on the other side of the room. He went closer and recognized Judy. This was the face that had bothered him before. He didn't want to see her like that, but there was still a little brain matter in there. He might need that.
He went over to it and looked out through the shattered service window. Lisa was out there. He sighed, disappointed to see her like this but relieved that she would never understand what she'd become.
Lisa went down her mental list. She had an anti-inflammatory for joint stiffness, ointments to prevent her skin from peeling and a tanning gel to stop it from looking so pale. She wandered the aisles at random, clutching her shopping basket. Was there something she could use for embalming fluid? There was nobody left to ask for help, but there was also nobody left to charge her for the medicine, which was good, because she'd left her purse at work the day before.
She turned to search the next aisle and found her shiny black rifle abandoned on the floor. She remembered her joy with that thing, how alive she had felt while killing zombies. She shuffled over and picked it up. She remembered the time when she'd found herself unarmed in Farah's foyer and immediately checked the ammo. There were two bullets left, one in the chamber and one in the clip.
She turned to where the featureless pack of zombies were trailing away from their feeding frenzy in the back room, all smeared with blood, and she lifted the rifle's sight to her eye.
Her chest tightened, and a familiar burst of emotions swelled inside her. One of the zombies wasn't just another decomposing face. In the midst of all the horror that surrounded her, she couldn't help but smile when she recognized Kaveh.
He walked over to her, a plastic shopping bag under his arm, staring at the front doors. He glanced over at her, and Lisa saw the recognition in his eyes. He had brains. She opened her mouth to speak. She wanted to share her discovery, to tell Kaveh what eating hearts could do for him, but her throat would only moan. She couldn't form words. Kaveh shook his head and walked out towards the front doors.
She took a step after him, trying to call his name, but it was no good. She looked out across the pharmacy. There had to be something here that would bring her voice back.
She stood in the aisle with the gun in one hand and the shopping basket in the other. There was no medicine out there for someone who was already dead. She knew what she really needed to ingest, those that this kind of medicine was meant for. Kaveh knew that. That must have been where he was going.
She let go of the basket, and the medicine spilled everywhere. That wasn't her solution. She slipped the gun strap over her shoulder and followed Kaveh out the doors.
She followed him for block after block. Should she stop him? She didn't know where he was going, but there was still that gun store on Pine. She thought about getting more ammunition, but she couldn't say that to Kaveh, and she didn't want to lose sight of him. As long as they were together, things didn't seem as bad.
Kaveh kept going, his short zombie steps possessed with purpose, and Lisa followed behind, just trying to keep up, but she stopped when she saw him walk into the graveyard.
She stood, staring out at it in the slowly growing light. The stars were gone, and the approaching sun gave half the sky a hint of blue. It was strange, graveyards had frightened her all her life, but that was one thing she didn't feel again. She went through the gates.
Kaveh stood at the edge of the open grave and saw the path his own footprints had left climbing out and staggering mindlessly away in search of food.
He took a deep breath. He wouldn't let that happen this time. He had to climb back down there and bury himself, but something held him back. Lisa came up and stood next to him, and they looked down into the hole together. Things were different when she was around. He didn't know what was going on, but he was starting to like it.
She climbed into the hole, moaning in anticipation, and started digging deeper. Kaveh reached out a hand to stop her, but near the head of the grave, her hands uncovered the surface of a coffin.
It hadn't occurred to Kaveh that the grave was occupied. He climbed into the hole with her. They uncovered the rest of the casket and lifted the lid. The man inside looked fresh as the moment he'd died, and he stayed motionless as a corpse was supposed to. There had been a food source under Kaveh's feet the whole time.
Lisa slammed her fist in and tore out the man's heart, but Kaveh had something else in mind. He tore off the head and cracked it open against the nearest solid object, the tombstone. A dark liquid cascaded down the dates of the man's birth and death and his name etched in stone. George had been dead for almost a month. How did he still look so fresh?
Kaveh wedged his fingers into the fractured cranium, pried it open and bit into George's brain, anticipating the rich flavors of life it would hold, but no, this tasted terrible. The flesh was soaked with the taste of formaldehyde.
This must have been why zombies only went after fresh kills, they hated artificial preservatives too. They did have discerning palates after all. Lisa reached for the head, but Kaveh held it back. He couldn't serve this.
She held out the heart, and she smiled. Her eyes weren't dead like the other zombies. How was that possible? She tapped her chest and moaned, "Heaaaarts." Curious, he took the heart from her and handed her the open skull.
Lisa could talk again, sort of. Eating people was starting to have its effect, but she needed more.
She took a bite of brains, trying to swallow her guilt along with it. This man's death wasn't her fault, she told herself. Hunger tried to overwhelm her thoughts, but each bite brought back memories of a life that wasn't hers, making her more aware that George had been a living person. Her appetite was strong, but her humanity was getting stronger.
She thought of everyone she knew who would never make it to the grave, Logan Swanson, Helen Witherspoon, Eli Shankly, Farah Halsey, Fidel Gonzalez. She and Kaveh had come back from the dead, but all those people were gone forever.
Lisa's entire body shook, trying to hold back the pain that came over her, but she couldn't stop it. An agonized moan emerged from her throat, but she shaped it into words, "All those people." Her hands pressed against her face, but something was missing. Her eyes burned, but no tears came out. "I can't cry. I can't cry! Kaveh, I'm a monster."
She abandoned all rational self-control and gave into her emotions. Her pain emerged in a long, horrifying wail.
Kaveh put his arms around her. "I know. So am I, but there's nothing we can do about it now. We can't change what we are."
Lisa shook her head. "Look around. Everyone's dead. We're dead. It's the zombie apocalypse." Forced sounds like weeping came out of her mouth against his shoulder.
"Exactly," said Kaveh. "The world is coming to an end. It doesn't matter what we do, but there are things worth living for."
She broke out of his grasp and shouted, her teeth flashing. "What? What's left?
Kaveh stroked the side of her face. "Hearts. Look, we can feel again. Now there's no reason not to be a zombie."
Kaveh watched the rage drain out of Lisa's eyes, and the sorrow that replaced it was hard for him to look at. He wanted to protect her. The feeling was more intense than anything he could remember. He reached out of the grave and picked up the shopping bag. "You're gonna be okay," he said. "This should help. I brought it from the pharmacy." He opened the bag and handed her the mutilated remains of Judy's head. "I was saving it for later, but you should take it."
"Are you sure about this?" she asked.
"Don't worry," he said with a tender smile. "I ate a doctor."
She was still shaking, and he put his arms around her again. They stayed like that until Lisa started to calm down.
She shook her head. "When I was a kid," she said, "my father used to say, 'Work hard, whatever it takes to make the world a better place. There's sleep aplenty in the grave.'" She looked up at the surface of the earth above their heads.
They reluctantly choked down what was left of the two brains and George's heart, Kaveh because of the taste and Lisa because of her guilt. When the food was gone, Kaveh gazed into Lisa's eyes. "So, you're the zombie expert. What do we do now?"
Lisa said, "I was hoping you would tell me. I'm new at this."
Kaveh said, "If we don't find more to eat, we'll digest George. We'll forget what we've done, everything we are, and we'll be nothing but zombies again."
Lisa turned away. "Maybe that's a good thing. Listen, I have two bullets--"
"Sh." Kaveh cut her off. There was a noise somewhere outside the grave, someone crying. Zombies couldn't cry.
Lisa and Kaveh looked at each other. They clasped hands and helped each other out of the grave.
The pair of zombies walked towards the sound together, driven forward by their shared desire. There was a small church next to the graveyard. Peeking through the window, they saw dozens of humans inside, huddled together for warmth and safety.
Lisa admired their cleverness. This was a contagion, and those already in the grave were beyond the spread of the infection, so the graveyard was actually a pretty smart place to hide out, but their plan was useless if the zombies ever figured out what a buffet there was here, which Kaveh just had.
Her body wanted to go into the church, to devour those people, to squeeze the juice out of life again. She looked through the window again and saw the faces of those who had survived this long in a world of zombies. She heard the sorrow in those uneven sobs. It was the sound of a person whose life had been wiped away, and she felt they had that in common. Lisa wondered what painful memories of loss those minds would never let go of, even in death.
She turned to Kaveh. "We can't do this."
Kaveh was already walking to the large double doors. He turned back. "If we don't eat, we're gonna be back for them anyway. Would you rather the real monsters get them?"
"Let's go back to the graveyard, Kaveh. We can survive on corpses." The words made her wince.
"That jerky? You call that survival?" Food had always been the thing that kept him going. He thought she would understood. Kaveh's eyes went dim. "The people we were are dead, but there's still something standing, and it needs to eat or it'll die. We're monsters. It's true, but if I have to live with myself, as long as there's anything left in here," he pointed to his chest, "I have to be proud of who I am. If it's a choice between their survival and ours, I don't think that's a hard decision."
Lisa put her hand to Kaveh's chest and held his hand. her eyes were sad. "They're human beings. Talk to them." He had feelings now. He couldn't do this to them.
"It's easy for me to look at anything and see food. It doesn't mean I don't care. I honor their memories. I'll savor every bite and carry on the memory of who they were." It was what Doctor Neil would have done.
Kaveh walked away from her to the front doors, and stood for a few seconds to collect himself. The suit he'd put on the day before was coated with blood and dirt. His jacket was missing. His torn shirt exposed the bite on his left shoulder, and his intestines threatened to fall out onto his shoes at any moment. He smoothed his hair and knocked slowly.
There was a shuffling from inside. After a few seconds, a woman's voice came through the sealed door. "Someone alive out there?"
Kaveh cleared his throat. "I need your help," he said in his most human tone.
"We're armed," she said. There was something strangely familiar about her voice.
They might kill him, but that was a risk he had to take. These might have been the last brains in town. "I'm scared," Kaveh droned. He felt that strange tightness in the pit of his stomach again, and it surprised him when he realized he wasn't lying. He'd forgotten what fear was like. He was out of practice at feeling, and it barely made sense anymore.
The woman's voice said, "Kevin? Is that you? No, you're one of them. I told you, I'm armed." He recognized the sound of a bullet sliding into the chamber of a gun.
Kaveh looked around and spotted the military Humvee parked halfway up on the lawn, its weapon racks picked clean. He did recognize that voice. It was the bank teller from the day before.
"Teller," he said, but his consciousness failed him. He couldn't remember her name. "Teller girl, let me come in."
A defiant shout came from the other side of the door. "Not by the hair of my chinny chin motherfucking chin."
Lisa walked forward. "Helen?" She had to calm her former coworker before this got out of control. "It's me, Lisa. Helen, I'm here. Don't shoot."
Helen's voice lost its bravado. "Lisa? I watched you from the car. You died. God, you must be one of those things."
"I'm not a thing, Helen. Don't be so closed minded." Lisa looked at Kaveh and jerked her head. "Let's go. Please."
Kaveh turned and threw his weight against the doors. They rattled. Helen squealed. A bullet came through the doors but missed him.
"Stop!" shouted Lisa. She pressed her body against the doors and her hand on Kaveh's chest. He stopped.
"I won't be one of you." Helen sounded shaken. "I don't want to come back and kill people." Lisa smelled Helen's sweat though the doors, partially masked by the fruity flavor of her Dolce and Gabbana perfume, and she craved the taste of the living, but she held still.
She spoke slowly, her old technique for keeping people calm. "I know. I don't want that either. Remember how you asked me to shoot you if you were going to be a zombie? You watched that happen to me, but you didn't shoot me then. Listen to my voice. I'm not like the rest of them. You don't want to shoot me now either, do you? We'll just live and let..."
Three bullets exploded through the doors of the church. One of them grazed Lisa's ear. She held it to stop the bleeding, but there was no blood, and it didn't hurt.
Kaveh pulled her away from the doors and shielded her with his body. "You see, they'll never accept what we are." He knew how these people thought. He'd eaten others just like them. These were the same people who had treated him like a monster, even when he was alive. At the time, it had made him angry, but now he knew they were entitled to their opinions. All he felt for them now was hunger.
The two of them weren't getting through those doors by force, but Kaveh was part of a community now. He would call on that community and serve up the humans like so much sirloin. As loud as he could, Kaveh called out with a chilling moan.
"No, don't," said Lisa, but it was too late. From all around them, other voices moaned in the distance. She backed up slowly, eyes darting back and forth. She called out, "You hear that? They're coming to get you, Helen. They're coming for you, Helen, and they're bringing friends. What happens to you when there's no more bullets?"
Kaveh moved through the crowd, organizing the zombies into a single force and pointing it at the front doors. The pounding got louder, but there were too many of them to control. A window broke somewhere. Human screams sounded under the crowd's scattered moaning.
More zombies were arriving every minute. There was nowhere left for the humans to go. They were already as good as dead.
Lisa watched the zombies fighting to get into the church, standing at the edge of the crowd. More gunfire came out through the door, but Helen was firing blind and hitting nothing important. "You used to listen to me," she said, but she was sure Helen couldn't hear her anymore.
The doors crashed inward. Guns fired impotently from untrained hands, but those who were already dead mingled freely with those who were about to be. Lisa stumbled forward in shock and watched the slaughter. The remains of a flimsy barricade were scattered on the floor. She reached back for the rifle over her shoulder and held it limply in front of her, not sure who it could help anymore.
She spotted Helen falling back behind one of the pews, cornered and frantic but still shooting zombies all around her. Anderson had been right. She was a natural.
All around them, zombies were tearing people apart. The gunfire and sharp dying screams of the humans became less and less frequent, giving way to the low drone of the undead, and Lisa couldn't help but be reminded of microwave popcorn. Her mouth started watering, and the urge to start eating was almost uncontrollable.
Gunfire thundered from behind her head. Lisa ducked, but several zombies around her collapsed forever. She looked up to see Private Anderson. He was fighting through the crowd, a gun in one hand and a combat knife in the other. How had he survived?
Helen emerged from behind the pew and met Anderson in the center of the church. With all the other zombies either killed or busy feeding, the last two surviving humans moved cautiously towards the front doors, their faces frozen in expressions of panic. Helen's hands no longer held a gun. Instead, she had the rocket launcher from earlier.
Struggling for awareness outside of her hunger, Lisa realized that she was standing between them and the doors, and she had exactly two bullets left. Hunger raised the rifle in their direction, but her brain kept her from pulling the trigger.
Anderson saw her and turned his gun, but Helen stopped him. "No, she's right. I should do this. We had a deal." She hefted the rocket launcher onto her shoulder, but Lisa saw the doubt in her eyes.
Lisa spoke quickly, the first words that came to mind. "Helen, you don't have to do this. Our boss is dead. There's no rules anymore, nobody left to tell us what to do." She wasn't sure where she was going with this.
Kaveh, who was chewing on a brain nearby, stood up and started towards the humans, but Lisa grabbed his shoulder and held him back. The bite on her hand resting on Kaveh's similarly mutilated shoulder. "It's not going to be okay, Helen. All it takes is one mistake, a fraction of a second to destroy everything it took you a lifetime to create. You can fight. You can run. You can put up all the defenses in the world, but you'll live every minute of every day controlled by fear. I used to live like that, but I don't anymore. I don't have to be afraid of zombies now. All I have to be afraid of is you."
She wrapped her arm around Kaveh, and he felt good against her. She pulled him away from the doors, giving the two humans a clear path of escape. "I have a second chance to really live this time, and I want it so much. I choose to live, in whatever form I can, and I'll do whatever it takes to keep it, tear the world apart for even one more minute if I have to, but I want you to live too."
The tip of the bazooka in Helen's hands dipped. "What about Logan Swanson? I loved him, and they killed him."
Anderson turned to her. "Hey, you know how they say, 'if you were the last man on Earth?' I'm calling that one in." He smiled.
Helen and Anderson walked nervously down the aisle, through the front doors and out towards the Humvee. Kaveh watched them go, then spoke to Lisa. "In a way, I'm glad there's something still out there, so we don't forget where we came from, but I would have eaten those two."
Lisa's head bowed in relief. "Aw, come on, Kaveh. Have a heart."
Kaveh slipped out of her arm and knelt over one of the dismembered bodies, reached his fist up through the bottom of its ribcage and pulled out the heart. He handed it to Lisa.
Lisa's laugh sounded like it bordered on tears. Her body was shaking, but she took the heart. "It's true," she said. "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
Kaveh moved around the room. He watched the other zombies eating food that he had provided, and it made him proud, but the organs he needed weren't their priority. Picking through the piles of body parts, he was free to gather the meal that would be the most mentally and emotionally stimulating. When he looked over, Lisa was doing the same thing.
Kaveh smiled. "I guess great minds--"
"Taste alike. I know." Lisa gave another sad smile.
They walked outside. The sky above them was blue, and gentle clouds were visible in the light of the new day. They put their collected organs down together on the lawn of the graveyard.
"It's been a long night," said Kaveh. He looked at Lisa and felt how he had in the bank vault the day before. He didn't know for sure whose heart the emotions were coming from, but all that really mattered was that he was capable of them again. "Do you feel the same way you did when you were alive?" She had told him she loved him. He smiled. "I think I love you too. I never thought I would feel like this again."
Lisa looked down at herself. She was covered in blood, and her body was decomposing. "How could you love me? I'm a monster."
"Don't you understand? We're the same. You and I, we've been to hell and back, if you believe in that sort of thing."
"Actually, there's no more room in hell." Lisa shook her head, but then the laughter tumbled out. "Well, maybe you can't believe everything you see in movies."
Kaveh's body moved without thinking. He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her close. He was filled with a powerful desire, but this wasn't hunger. Lisa pursed her lips, and they kissed.
Lisa felt like she was blushing, but she knew that was impossible. Circulation was the first thing that zombies lost. She pulled her face away and looked into his eyes. Her feelings for Kaveh overwhelmed all her self-control, but the reason she'd always had to hold back was her epilepsy. That was gone. "Learning to have feelings all over again, it's kind of intense. I'm glad we're going through it together."
Kaveh had felt this intensity of desire maybe two or three times in his life. Even though his life was over, he got to feel it again, but it also hurt because he knew it would only last as long as the food. "This time yesterday, I had my life all figured out. I had a plan, and I believed in something. Part of me wishes everything had stayed just like it was when I put this suit on."
Lisa pulled her face out of a half-eaten heart and smiled. "But this isn't really so bad, is it?"
Kaveh put his arm around her and spoke with a touch of sadness. "Things are never going back to the way they used to be."
Lisa said, "So we'll start a new life."
He raised a playful eyebrow. "It'll be dangerous. We'll never know who our next meal is going to be."
She smiled and spoke mischievously. "Kind of makes you feel alive, doesn't it?"
He smiled back. "The battle for America's hearts and minds."
The world was different than it had been the day before. This was a world where being a zombie could be a good thing.
Lisa looked around. "What should we do first?"
Kaveh sat down in the grass, next to the pile of hearts and brains. "How about breakfast?"
Together, Lisa and Kaveh sat back and watched the sun rise, and they were dead happily ever after...
The End
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