Creatures (3 page)

I took a thirty-ought-six with me and a machete hanging from my belt. I thought I could protect myself, make it to downtown Miami and back again. I forgot the car wouldn't start. Carrie's pleading had made me lose all sense of reality. Battery dead. I should have known, I
must have
known, but I only wanted to find the milk and watch the light return to my little girl's eyes so my family, my
sanity
could once again be secure.

And I wanted to be outdoors. I was stir crazy, itching all over to be out in the sunshine. God, how I wanted to feel the ocean-washed breeze on my face, to smell the mimosa, to touch the grass, to pretend, just for a little while, that the world was as it had been once.

I had to walk. It was four miles. I made three of them before I was attacked.

Surrounded by monsters who lusted to bring me down.

I killed a few out of sheer terror. My heart rocked against my ribs and I could hear myself screaming. But I didn't kill nearly enough. They came from abandoned houses and buildings. They came from broken storefronts and the front seats of wrecked cars still littering the curb sides. They crawled from bushes and from beneath porches and fell from trees like writhing snakes. The sounds they made were worse than anything I ever heard outside our house where they scratched fitfully against the doors and boarded windows at nights, moaning unintelligibly. The sounds I heard when they had me flat on my back and unarmed were deep growlings and stirring grunts of hunger. They filled my head so that I couldn't hear my own high-pitched screams anymore.

I don't remember the dying part. I had thought I would. If they ever caught me, I imagined at least I would be present at my own dying. But in the last moments I realized if there is a God that's all the good he managed to lend me--a forgetfulness. I woke feeling...different. Oh, very different. Numb. That hasn't changed and I don't expect it to. My limbs are like lead weights and I haven't yet learned how to make my legs and arms swing the way they should. I can't yet pass for a living man. I'm still trying to learn how.

My vision was strange. I had trouble focusing. At first my eyes watered and tears ran down my face because of the sun. My nose wouldn't stop dripping; it was as if I had stuffed truckloads of cocaine up my nostrils for a solid year. For some time I lay on the sidewalk where they'd left me, trying to believe I had been granted a reprieve. I was still alive.

So what if my flesh felt wooden and I couldn't see clearly? What matter was it that when I tried to move, my joints popped and it felt as if my ligaments were being stretched to their limits? I feared to feel for my heart, to check for a pulse. I feared to bring my hand to my mouth to see if I could discern air rushing from my lungs.

I had to be alive. I was thinking. I knew what had happened to me. I had a memory and a past. Zombies didn't think. We all knew that. They were automatons, hardly more than corpses in motion, possessed by the virus with an instinct to move and keep moving, to destroy the living, and to eat. If their brains had died and mine had not, then that was proof! I was not hungry in the least, not for food or for the flesh of my kind. Why should I doubt my good fortune, why check my pulse, feel for my heartbeat? I would not tempt fate, never again. I would get up and hurry back to my home, there to stay behind the walls until the army told us it was all right to come out. If it took two more years of waiting---the time minimum we'd been promised before there was a vaccine available--I didn't care, I'd never venture out again.

I could move a little, though the creaks and cracklings of my bones sent small thrills of worry through my brain. My clothes were torn and there was a nasty rippling series of bites on my legs and arms, even one on the back of my neck, and I could see congealed blood, but I wouldn't think about the infection. I thought I must be immune.

The only immune man in all the world because I was alive, surely I was alive for I felt alive. Dead wasn't just a numbness and a watering of the eyes and a few ligament strains, was it? Wouldn't my soul have fled had I really died? Wouldn't I be traveling through a tunnel toward light and peac€e and find those who had gone before me--my mother, my father, my two brothers, my grandparents?

Death could not be so simple as this.

Yet it was. It was.

But I didn't know that--or admit the possibility--for most of Saturday and Saturday night.

June 6

I crept to my house today. It was the first time I'd been back since my death. For days I couldn't do anything, but hide in shadows and dribble and beat the palms of my hands against my forehead. Once at my house, I joined the others at the door and stood there patting, patting at the wood, pressing my cold face there, moaning, trying to cry.

I cannot cry. I would weep all the time if I could. My eyes won't water anymore. My nose is dry. My juices are building inside, that's all I can think. Seeping all together inside, commingling, organs and blood coming together in one wet soggy mass.

Oh sweet Jesus.

I could not bear to speak, to tell Carrie inside that it was me, that I had joined in the ranks of the dead and that I could never again be with her or see my daughter's face. Because she wouldn't have me. Though I'd never hurt them! I have noticed a
hunger
awakening, but I intend to ignore it. It's a small hunger, a marble-size coal in my belly, and a sizzling in my brain. But I will ignore it forever. I hope never to sink so low as to feel a compulsion to betray my own kind, to cannibalize them. But there's no way for Carrie to know that or to trust me.

I had thought--let me tell you--I had thought the zombies created by the infection that took their lives yet let the bodies walk and terrorize the rest of us...I had thought there must be a soul and their souls had left them. I am not so sure now. I think there must not be a soul since there is no God, there is no hereafter, no tunnel of light, no meeting with dead loved ones, and no reward, good or bad. There seems to be nothing, but this aching, this wondering horror at what it has all come down to, this sad, unconquerable impetus to go on no matter what. And this gently gnawing hunger for the taste of blood on my tongue.

There was real death and darkness before the virus that has devastated the world and now there is walking death that has taken its place. But there is no soul.

I wish I didn't have to tell you this.

I wish it were not true.

I would die forever and enter that darkness except there is something that causes me to nurse the wish to survive. At all costs. Even though I am cold and numb, I can't cry and I can't find joy again. I still want to go on with this tired old beaten body for as long as I can. You see, I have this hope. A small one, but it keeps me out of the soldiers' line of fire and away from the depots where they congregate in platoons readying for search-and-destroy missions. My hope is that there might be another zombie like me. Somewhere. One who understands that he or she is dead and what it means. If there is just one more of us, it might portend a change in the direction the virus takes. Perhaps...there could be a reversal? A coming alive again?

No. I don't suppose that would happen. The blood is clotted and impure. The heart rots and curls into a knot. Each night I lie down to rest (not sleep, for I do not sleep), my muscles contract, and I'm forced to stretch them out again before I can even walk. I know this will never be put right again. Nothing modern medicine could invent would make the physical entity pink and pliant and warm once more.

But something makes me careful. I feel this powerful craving to preserve myself. I believe I have discovered something important about the infection. Part of the reason men who are dead still walk and become dangerous is that they are propelled by instinct. The instinct to survive. The
memory
of life. Even unto and beyond death. It is as if they walk in their sleep, hunting for relief. Or revenge for the injustice done them.

But why can they not think any longer? Or why can I? There is no fresh blood circulating in my body. I did finally check, late that first night, huddled with my coat pulled around my neck while cowering, fearful, waiting in the night behind a tall hedge of blooming hydrangea. The need to know took on a life of its own, dragging my thoughts back to my body. Throat. Heart. Was there a pulse or wasn't there? It became a circular, obsessive question.
Was there a pulse or wasn't there?

I couldn't take it any longer. My fingers brushed against the artery at my throat, the carotid, and I jumped as if I had been branded. Fear caught me round with steel bands and for some seconds I couldn't move. I didn't want to know! Not for sure.

But it was too late. I had already felt the stillness there. The perfect quiet. My blood was not rushing through that artery or any other. And hunched there in the dark, scared of the many shadows slipping through the trees and around the sides of the buildings, I realized with a shock that I had not taken a breath since I woke. That involuntary element of life was gone. My chest had never expanded, had never even moved except with exertion when I twisted or turned or pulled myself up.

I lay then, down on the spongy wet grass behind the wild blue noddng heads of hydrangea, and pushed my face into the earth, and for the first time moaned just like the rest of them, the dead ones, moaned deep, without air, with sheer misery vibrating the vocal cords.

I was one of them
. It was true. There could be no greater horror.

Why, why, why? Why me? I wanted to be like the others, unknowing, hardly more than amoebas squiggling around, hunting for someone somewhere to halt them in their tracks, to cut off their heads or blow them to pieces so they could never move again.

If there was a God who had let this plague overtake us, it was terror enough that he allowed us to walk when we should be resting in peaceful graves, but to let me know it,
oh no, that was impossible
.

I beat with my fists against the damp dewy earth and cursed him, cursed the thought of any god who might let me suffer this most unholy of unholy hells.

June 7

I slipped a note today beneath the door of my home. The brainless ones tried to stop me. They pushed and pulled and tried to take it from my hand, but I held them off. I wanted to say goodbye. That's all. I wanted to leave something behind saying that I loved them.

I didn't tell them I am one of the dead. I couldn't go that far. When these pages are found they might know then, but not yet. I just told them that I had to be away. The army recruited my help, they had actually drafted me, and I could not come home again. Maybe for years. Maybe
never
. Because everyone knew how the military needed warm, willing bodies. I told my wife to stay inside and obey orders. Never to come outside without an army escort.

I told them to be brave and that one day I hoped we'd be together again. I'd try everything I could to make that happen.

I told them I loved them. I would always love them.

Afterward, I wandered toward the edge of town, sorrow the guiding force. There is nothing else to do, nowhere else to go except away from the city. Downtown is empty except for the military. The army controls everything. The power plants, the telephone company, the farms, the deliveries to those few living urban dwellers who are left in their prison homes.

I couldn't follow the freeway until I learned how to walk better, how to control the jerky movements of my extremities. I knew I wanted to go south, toward the islands. I wanted to leave the country. But I would have to learn, very quickly, how to pass for human to ever make it to Key West.

There are people on the roads because the troops are there, coming and going, always on the move, hunting down zombies like rabid dogs, making deliveries of the goods that will keep civilization running for a little while more.

I tried concentrating on my legs, my feet. The contractions, when I rise at dawn, draw my fingers toward my wrist, my thumbs toward the palm, my feet outward, toes curled under, my arms bent at the elbow up toward my face. Each time this happens, it comes on slowly, while I'm immobile and at rest, and I fight it, but unless I get to my feet and begin moving, it always works this way. I expect this is a form of rigor mortis returning, trying to make me like the real dead, the way I should be. It's nature
insisting I lie down dead, fucker--lie down dead and silent and unmoving, you piece of shit.

When I work really hard at it, I can get all my parts to move naturally. Pick one foot up, set it down, pick up the other, set it down. I found a way to do it in a small loping walk, as if perhaps I had a hitch in my hip, or an old war wound.

Then I had to work on my arms, forcing them into a looseness so they would swing in rhythm with my strides. Flexing my fingers is the worst thing of all. The bones pop and I don't know for sure, I'm not conversant in anatomy or pathology, but I think those bones are breaking. Over and over again. The thought...as I flex and...stretch...makes me want to scream.

It took miles and miles before I could learn to walk decently. Every time a convoy passed I had to duck into the palmettos and lie flat on my belly, eyes braced on the ground. Then up again, working at it, finding it easier the more I tried. I believe the only reason the others can't do so well, why they stagger and stumble and walk stiff-legged is because they cannot think, their brains are dead, so they can't concentrate the way I have managed to do.

When I reached Interstate 95 it was like being drawn into an exodus. Whole families streamed north and south. They passed one another on each side of the freeway, staying clear of the rolling refrigeration trucks and the lines of green army jeeps. Again I brought my arm to my face to see how I smelled. I can suck in air and let it out. I can smell and taste, see, hear, and think. But I am corrupt. More and more each day. And I cannot speak. I have decided to pretend I am mute. I have no other choice.

I keep a small pad and a pencil for writing notes. I took it, this notebook, a knapsack, fresh clothes, deodorant, soap, a washcloth, a pungent aftershave, and a flashlight from a deserted house. It was there I cleaned and bandaged my wounds. I put a large adhesive bandage on the bite at my neck. If someone asks about it, I'll just say it's a boil. Lack of iodine, you know, not enough salt in my diet. None of us get enough salt these days, or sugar, or coffee, or tobacco. Or milk for our children, never enough milk. I expect the shortage has something to do with zombies eating the cattle, but I can't be certain of that.