CHAPTER NINE
We were all at the kitchen table. We each did not want to leave the other – dad, Eric, and me. I didn’t even want to go outside and work with the zombie watch. In fact, I hated them more and more.
I was already aggrieved, and as the day dragged on into the evening, and the evening into the night, the suspense for what to come just made it worse and worse as 0600 approached.
And I was getting hungry again.
Hungry…
Hungry!
I had an idea! Several ideas. All combined into a plan!
I was pretty happy my human mind still was fully intact.
Seeing me explode out from sorrowful silence into lively action made Eric and dad look up at me, almost hopefully.
I explained my plan, happily attacking my keyboard toy with my poking zombie fingers.
Dad didn’t say anything. Maybe because, with that tiny ember of hope still burning in his mind, he agreed more than he disagreed.
“You’re crazy!” Eric said, beaming at me almost madly. “So count me in!”
I’ve never been an actor before, but I was about to make my debut.
Eric grabbed his camera, and I went outside to grab a zombie, at zombie running speed. When I went outside, the zombie watch soldiers all had their attention on me silently. They probably were instructed to keep me in. Lacking my keyboard toy, I patted my stomach, indicating that I was hungry.
I fetched a zombie similar to my size. I killed it, and fed myself. My hunger stopped. But I had some brains remaining. I dropped his zombie body in a trashcan, which I carried and set by the back door, and then went on a circle around to the front of the house. Grunting, snorting, you know – looking odd. Looking like I was still hungry and kind of losing it. The soldiers looked concerned. “You okay?” one of them questioned. I zombie barked at him, and went into the house. I smiled. I really did - I actually felt a sort of authentic human smile form on my cold lips.
Dad and Eric had dragged the canned zombie into the house. They looked pale. Well, they weren’t used to handling zombie bodies, oozing brains out of smashed heads. I could relate.
We went upstairs. We chilled for an hour. Then Eric tied me up with rope. A lot of rope, so it looked real.
Eric grabbed his digital camera.
Lights…Camera…Action.
I snarled. I wrestled against the ropes. I barked, and glared animalistically into that recording camera of Eric’s’. Eric did a convincing acting job.
”I…I just wanted people to see the final moments of my brother,” he said, through “tears”. His voice was even cracking in grief.
“I know you’re in there, Alex!” dad said soothingly to me.
I grunted as I faked to break lose of my ropes and eat my dad.
“I love you, son! If you can hear me, I love you!” Dad said with apparently forced control over himself. He had the sledgehammer in hand.
“Before Alex went totally zombie on us,” Eric began, still filming me; “he made us promise to kill him once he went. He told us to thank you all for your support and for making him famous, and he hopes to inspire renewed efforts to find the cure for zombies!”
Ode to the cliché find-the-cure movement.
I twisted and wrestled with the ropes.
“We all love you son!” dad said with tears running down his face. Real tears. He gripped that sledgehammer. “I’m so proud of who you really are!”
He hammered upon my head with the sledgehammer.
I went limp.
And on queue, Eric paused rolling the camera.
The painted sponge that was the sledge hammer’s “head” left a black mark on my head.
“Did you stop the camera on time?” My dad demanded of Eric urgently.
Eric reviewed the shot in his digital camera’s screen. He nodded up at dad. “It was perfect.”
They untied me.
I picked up the trashcan with the dead zombie inside and carried it upstairs.
I excused my dad and Eric from the room. Eric handed me a wig of scraggly long black hair, and another outfit, as he left.
I dressed up the dead zombie guy in the clothing I was still wearing all this time – my blue jeans, olive drab army jacket, and black boots. Looked a lot like me – half it’s head was smashed in, with its dark dead blood covering the rest of its head. So I guess it couldn’t not look like me.
I then dressed up in some random striped sweater and khaki pants, and sneakers.
Dad replaced the sledgehammer’s fake sponge head with the real steel black pained head it originally had on.
I did something gross – but perfectly confrontable as a zombie. I bit my arm, deep, deep enough to reach the stagnant blood. I coated the face of the real sledgehammer head with a thick layer of my blood. Evidence that my skull was caved in by it.
Eric meanwhile loosened up the boards that were strengthening the backdoor of the house from a zombie breaking in.
Eric came from his door-sabotaging job, back toward the staircase to go upstairs. He looked grim. He averted my eyes as he passed me.
I mentally overlooked this indicator of his, and went to go out the back door.
“You ready for this?” my dad asked me. He was all in action mode about our stunt, but he had a glint in his eye I haven’t seen for a while. It was respect. And something else…
I nodded.
“Okay,” he acknowledged quietly, nodding back.
After a silent moment with me, he reluctantly turned his self to go upstairs for the next part of the plan.
I turned to watch him go up the stairs.
Eric was standing on the staircase.
And I couldn’t believe it.
He was crying.
This was goodbye. And I didn’t want to lose my chance to say goodbye.
I suddenly felt cold. Like very cold inside.
Very alone.
I stared at dad and Eric.
They stared back.
It was this moment that made me feel how short our time really was together. I couldn’t take it. I wanted to find the words of the moment and let them spill out of me. I wanted them to know I loved them and I would do anything to come back. And that maybe some day I would be able to, after things quieted down. I would think of something.
Eric…Dad…
“Dahhdrdrd…,” I said.
I said, with a throaty gurgle. I spoke.
My zombie body again learned from my efforts, and I re-learned that word. My first zombie word.
Even though I never breathe, I felt like I was holding my breath.
Tears spilled from my dad’s eyes down his wizened face.
And even though I wanted to say anything and everything to them, just getting out that one final word, being able to say that one thing, “dad”, all of my feelings translated through and they got it.
They got me.
As I went from human to zombie, and now from zombie to a runaway fake-death zombie refugee, I never got to feel this close before.
It only made me feel more certain I would see them again.
“You’ll come back, right?” Eric said, almost pleading.
I nodded with a grunt.
My keyboard toy was on the table.
I grabbed it. I looked up at Eric.
I’LL BE BACK, went the little mechanical voice.
I moved my hand as if to put on invisible sunshades. And I managed another human-like smile.
Eric managed to laugh, and smile.
I put down the keyboard toy. I actually patted it appreciatively. It saw me through tough times.
I couldn’t keep it with me though – it’d be a total giveaway!
I went to the door, and about-faced army style. I saluted with both hands at my brother and dad.
And by miracle, there was a zombie attack out front the house. An absolute Godsend of a perfect distraction. Guns went off. The zombie watch was definitely distracted
.
My dad raised his eyebrows. He and Eric shooed me about the door with wide eyes – they themselves seeing the same perfect getaway opportunity.
So perfect.
I closed the door. Eric did an intentionally crappy job sealing it behind me.
I counted to 15.
I put on the scraggly haired wig, making sure it was all over my face, which I also smeared with my own blood from my arm.
I broke through the back door of my home.
“Oh, shit!” I heard Eric yell upstairs fearfully, as I charged upstairs snarling and barking.
I stormed into my bedroom with a growl. Eric was on the bed, filming me, shouting profanities.
I scooped up the dead zombie on the floor – “me”, and dragged it down the stairs and out.
“Come back with my son!” I heard my dad yell insanely, firing his gun “at” me.
I charged on out the back of the house, hearing the gunfire still going off in the front. It must be a pretty large group of zombies…
I got a distance. I shrugged the dead zombie off of my shoulders. I hastily stripped him down to his boxers and threw his body between a couple trashcans.
I took the extra set of clothes with me and ran.
I kept running like a machine, with zombie energy, and I didn’t stop until I got out of the town, away from the main roads, and toward a mainly forested area where I knew a lot of zombie movement to be in – where I’d blend in under the radar.
And that’s where my new life began.
EPOLOGUE
I was able to chill out in the deeper, zombie-infested, human-forbidden wood. Not too close to home, not too far from home. I was sort of well disguised from radar there. Too many zombies around, and so the zombie cameras – which I knew were always scanning around – wouldn’t discern me out of the crowd. So I’ve been pretty safe.
And I was busy thinning the heard, too – taking out some zombies here and there. Making a living – literally.
I got kind of lonely, and tried to “make” a sidekick. I found a wandering dog. I glorified the vengeance of every mailman he may have assaulted in his past: I bit him.
I know, I know…
Anyway, let’s just say it didn’t work out. If humans zombified go mentally from humans to animal, well, an animal zombified goes from animal to – well, PMS times-ten.
I had to put him down. Again.
Moving along - after a few short months, some idiot went out camping with his girl friend, a little too deep in the wood. I didn’t find out about it until the zombies got to them first. Fortunately for me, the guy had brought his netbook, and I found a couple hot spots nearer to human population, and was able to hook back up with dad and Eric.
Well, to a degree.
You see, I couldn’t go – “hey guys, it’s me!” That would be stupid. I’d be discovered by the authorities to still be alive.
So I created a blog with a false identity. In the blog, I was acting as a writer who was deeply inspired by the Alex Henry zombie hoax, and wrote fan stories, sending them obsessively to dad and Eric as Spam. But the fan stories were really a sort of cryptic way of communicating of how I was doing and what I was up to. And they picked up on it after about only a week.
I implied above about my story being a hoax to the general public. Well, there is some background to that.
My Internet videos were pretty much uniformly regarded as fake. All of the blogs I found of me were like “Hey that’s cool I dressed up as a zombie for Halloween too” (32 likes, 0 dislikes), or “hmm…keyboard – looks like the mute kid just wanted attention” (16 likes, 0 dislikes), and otherwise hypercritical.
Also dad was able to tell me – cryptically, as a response on that blog – that the police had stopped monitoring him and the FBI and National Security got off of his back finally. Both of us were still being pretty cautious.
And on Halloween I was able to waltz back into my town and pay dad and Eric a visit. I mean, I wasn’t out of place exactly – in fact I looked the most normal in those circumstances. Everyone was dressed up like what you usually imagine people to dress up like. And hey, even zombies.
It was a nice reunion. By the way, I taught myself how to speak again. It’s kind of slow – I can now articulate words again, but my vocal section is pretty dead. When I speak my voice is like I’m a possessed gorilla. And Eric raises the dinner knife and fork in the form of a cross, and waves it around in front of me while uttering holy incantations to exorcise my demon. Joke got kind of old – at least for me. Dad still thinks it’s funny.
We were able to work it out how to rendezvous regularly now. But we keep it on the down-low and stay on our toes about it. I mean, I’ll pop up on the helicopter zombie cameras for sure, if I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And meanwhile, the zombie movements have been raising in number and the zombie attacks have been getting worse and worse.
And on top of that, the government not only couldn’t as of yet find a cure for zombies – they accidentally made something much worse in the process. I mean, it’s not known by the general public. But they made a sort of super-zombie that broke out of whatever laboratory, and then infected several humans, who turned into the same super-zombie. They were all taken out by the military, which then tried to cover up the truth on media lines. But people have cameras and voices, and the Internet.
One of the scientists went crazy with guilt and went to the news about it afterwards. He said something about the experiment being considered successful and how it was going to be exploited, although with all indications it was going to be uncontrollable. And so become the next widespread virus.
These super-zombies were described as being extremely developed – in the same way I had to develop strength and dexterity, fanged, and quite dangerous.
Fanged. Feeds on humans. Pretty much immortal. Made me think: Vampires?
I don’t want to get to cliché though.
That clip went only on the Internet and floated around for maybe about 24 hours before “they” got to them. Eric emailed me a zip copy of it, and I downloaded it.
I’ve been busy stemming the tide of zombie movements, or trying to, without getting out in the open. I battle day and night, never resting, as I never get tired. And my zombie body has been adjusting and strengthening. It became real to me why the government was rumored to be trying to create a super soldier with the zombie virus. Because I’m sort of turning into something super myself.
I’ve learned some pretty cool things about my body. I’ve learned to control the regeneration of my wounds for full (and pretty instant) healing instead of only being half-healed – you know how zombies usually look pretty messed up? Well, they only partial-heal. They don’t exactly go for making a statement with their looks. Also, the strength is crazy. Zombies are strong. But only as strong as they unintentionally train themselves to be. I can jump twice as high as I ever could. I’ve trained my body to the point where I can lift the rear end of a small pick-up truck, when I need to. And seriously, ONLY when I need to.
When I exert myself I get hungry, fast. And we both know now what happens to me when I get too hungry for too long. I go totally zombie.
When a zombie doesn’t feast enough, zombie’s bodies waste away by their zombie cells cannibalizing to stay alive. I think the first set of cells my body goes for is the “unnecessary parts”, the parts of my brain that are still intact. That’s my theory on what happens to me. Maybe some day I’ll be able to “teach” my body not to do that.
Well, I don’t know where my story goes from here. I haven’t decided yet, I guess. I have to really get the broad scope of things, really weigh out my chances and read the odds. I’m going to take it one step at a time though – I’m going to figure out where my place is now in the world. A world where zombies don’t have a place.
Not that I’m just a zombie…but you get me.
; But you know what? I’m happy. And I’ll tell you why. I am now what I couldn’t be as a human. I am living a life that qualifies for what kind of life I wanted to live. By my dullened zombie body emotional responses, I have overcome my fears. I’ve gone from ordinary to extraordinary – I really am “one of a kind”, now. I didn’t quite make it to ”popular”, but I made it to “infamous”, which is pretty close. I’m doing something for everyone – I’m killing zombies, day and night. I like that I’m doing something now. And I have super-human abilities now, which unfortunately require zombie brains as my fuel, but everything has it’s pro’s and cons…
I’m doing something. I’m being someone.
And I’ll be here for my fellow ex-mankind. I will. And if push comes to shove with the psychotic super-zombie experiments and the humans endanger themselves by inventing that much worse epidemic, I’ll be here doing my part about that.
Hi.
My name is Alex Henry. I’m 20. And I’m a zombie.
Well, mostly sort of.
…
I’m not going to repeat myself.
THE END
- Actually, I’ll try to keep you updated. ~ Alex Henry
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