* * *
“Order! Quiet, everyone! Shut up! For Tipote’s sake, shut up!”
The hubbub died down and everyone took their seats. Mayor Baldwin banged his gavel once more, just for effect. The sun had set and three-hundred of Archi’s most concerned citizens had filled the city hall to protest the Mainlanders in their midst.
“Thank you,” Baldwin said. “We meet tonight to discuss the intruders in our town.”
“Kill them!” someone yelled.
Baldwin shook his head. “The Mainland will simply send more.”
“Kill them!” someone else yelled, to general agreement.
“Kind people, we are not in the habit of murder, are we?” He had to wait, but eventually there was reluctant agreement. “What we need, I think, is to expedite their departure.”
This was met with mild confusion.
“That is, get them off Archi as fast as possible,” he translated.
This raised a mild cheer.
“Which may involve helping them.”
The cheer died.
“I understand,” the mayor said, plunging on, “that they are looking for Miss Tanner. Once we hand her over, they should leave and take her with them.”
The cheer was loud this time.
“All those in favour of finding and handing over Lisa Tanner?” Baldwin asked.
There was a near-unanimous, “Aye!”
“All opposed?”
“Blarg!”
The gargled call came from a dozen corpses staggering in the hall’s main entrance. Cold, white eyes stared at the assembled citizens. Dead mouths opened to reveal rotting teeth. Pallid skin peeled off skeletal arms that strove for the nearest living being.
The meeting erupted into screams and panic. Men and women threw whatever was in their hands at the corpses, or beat their fists against them. The wooden fold-up chairs made hollow whump sounds as they hit the zombies’ flesh.
Baldwin stood at the podium, transfixed, as the dead sank their teeth into his citizens. Arms grappled with festering limbs and stumps. Chairs were shoved aside. Screams drowned every sound except the corpses’ unearthly moans, which gnashed against Baldwin’s spine from the inside.
The entire audience, all three hundred of them, ran for the stage. With the main entrance blocked, the only other exit was a single door at the back of the stage. Baldwin remembered someone complaining that the city hall would be a death trap if there was a fire.
The front row reached the stage and tried to clamber onto it, but the second row was pressed against them by the third row, which crushed most of the front row against the platform. Some managed to climb up, but many fell. From the podium, Baldwin heard ribs break as three hundred people viced the front row.
The crowd surged, arms outstretched and mouths screaming wide. From up here, they didn’t seem all that different to the undead.
People at the back of the crowd disappeared. Splurts of blood fountained up. Screams loudened. Moments later the victims reappeared, fixed their dark gazes on the nearest human, and feasted.
That was enough to get Baldwin to move. He fought his way through the tide on the stage. Looking back, he saw the manic dead sweep through the people at the foot of the stage, rolling toward him, a wave of biting and blood and moans.
Baldwin needed to get to his office, activate the emergency zombie plan, but the stage was packed and the door had jammed after a foot, its hinges rusted from years of neglect and disuse. Very slowly, the crowd squeezed through the gap and ran.
They were trapped. People shoved, but there was nowhere to go. The newly-infected zombies bit and grabbed, turned on their neighbours, brothers, wives, and children, a mad lust in their slowly-clouding eyes. The humans tore at hair, punched, and shoved others toward the dead.
The door was ten feet from Baldwin, but it might as well have been fifty; the humans were pressed together so tightly that they couldn’t fight, couldn’t dodge, couldn’t run. Cattle for the slaughter.
At the back of the room, a few of the braver humans grabbed chairs or dashed around the maze of corpses toward the main doors. The decaying zombies – those with white eyes and peeling flesh – fell much easier than the newly-bitten. Their decomposing limbs dropped off, necks snapped, bones broke. They were weak, almost pathetically so. Maybe if everyone had stood up to them at first, they’d have had a chan—
Teeth pressed into Baldwin’s left arm. He turned, swinging, and broke a young man’s nose, but he was already covered in blood and didn’t seem to notice.
Baldwin became acutely aware of the crowd around him. They were vividly, undeniably, there.
And so were their brains: a kaleidoscope of experiences and lives, of dreams and hopes, of fears and failures, of information and knowledge. He had to know what their lives tasted like.
Within him, like a geyser, burst a longing so powerful that ignoring it was as absurd as not breathing. Around him were the most delicious creations on Tipote’s green earth, ripe and ready for the tasting, so Baldwin grabbed one. She struggled, but he was behind her so there wasn’t much she could do.
Baldwin heard her scream, “Please! Mayor, please no!” as her fingers crawled for purchase. His teeth latched into her crown. The brain was just inside. Baldwin tasted blood and spat it out – rivers of ink, not food – and went back in for another go, then stopped.
The mayoral dentures were stuck in the back of the woman’s head.
“Hon of a ’itch.” Baldwin grabbed and reinserted them with one hand. He released the woman, unsure what he’d been thinking. Her brain was clearly unsatisfactory. He didn’t want a zombie’s brain; that was disgusting. He needed a brain more like…
His!
Baldwin grabbed the man and held him still.
I’m sorry! someone shouted.
Baldwin dug into the skull with his dentures, which pushed awkwardly against his gums and fell onto the floor.
What’s going on?
Maybe this one!
Forgive me!
Where were those cries coming from? They were close, bold, clear, and mostly behind him. Was that the zombies? But if they didn’t want to attack, why did they?
Didn’t matter. Not with so many delicious brains around him. Baldwin turned back to his prey, then shoved him away. He was spoiled now. Baldwin wanted a pristine brain.
Barely five minutes later, when the last human had been converted and Baldwin could no longer control his hands to pick up his teeth, the horde calmed down. Limbs lay abandoned on the ground by the stage. Blood formed a new coating on the floorboards, and many of the zombies had lost their footing and were flopping around like fish.
The horde slowly drifted to all corners of the hall. Some zombies tumbled from the stage, with sickening thuds and cracks; some of those didn’t get back up. Most took the stairs, slowly. There had to be a hundred of them, maybe two hundred; it was hard to tell with everything out of focus.
Two of the decrepit zombies were arguing. The male was thin, fiftyish, bald, and missing his left arm. The female was younger and had more remaining muscle. Both had pallid skin where it wasn’t covered in blood.
What did I tell you? the man yelled.
Yeah, fine. You knew that not one of us would get a brain, did you?
We never do! When are you going to get it through your thick skulls that their skulls are too thick to get through?
The woman paused in thought. We need a jackhammer.
What?
Woo! Brains!
Shut up, Reg, the woman said.
What’s going on? Baldwin asked. He found he could talk perfectly well, despite lacking teeth.
I’m Norm. You’re all zombies, the man said. Blame Sophie.
Yeah, blame me for being true to myself.
Stay away from humans, Norm told the crowd.
Don’t listen, Sophie said. Embrace your death. Come on, we’re going to hunt for more brains!
Baldwin thought this a gruesome thing
to say: he didn’t want to eat brains. The six zombies he’d converted were all unfortunate mistakes. He’d been swept up in the confusion.
You know what we need? Sophie asked. Babies.
Sophie, Norm said, not to put too fine a point on it, we males no longer have the drive, let alone the, uh, capacity to—
Ew, Norm. Not even if you were the last man ali… dead. Sophie shuddered. Or she convulsed, it was hard to tell. Babies have soft heads. We could bite through that.
What? Norm shouted.
Woo! Babies!