I Fell in Love with a Zombie Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Sean Kennedy

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  I Fell in Love with a Zombie

  By Sean Kennedy

  Jay didn’t expect to be one of the very few survivors of the virus that decimated the country, leaving shambling, ravenous zombies behind. Fighting for his life amongst the dead, he keeps moving until the day he’s surrounded and facing his bloody end—and shockingly, another zombie saves him. But not just any zombie... it’s Dave, the first man Jay ever loved, and there’s something special about him even now, in the midst of the horror around them.

  I

  WHEN THE world as we knew it ended, it didn’t happen the way we expected it to. There was no meteor strike or rapid ocean rising due to global warming or melting polar ice caps. It was a lot closer to those pandemic scares, the ones that we always worried about but that never eventuated. Except that this one actually did. One day the news was reporting that cases of swine flu were starting to cross from Mexico into the United States, and then other cases began to surface in other countries as travelers brought it back home with them as holiday souvenirs you didn’t have to pay for.

  As I watched footage of people buying surgical masks and walking the streets like there was a Michael Jackson lookalike convention in town, I turned to my boyfriend Mike and said, “If this thing is as bad as they say, that flimsy piece of material isn’t going to do any good.”

  “You are such a pessimist,” he replied. “How often have we been threatened with these viruses? Nothing ever comes of them.”

  Mike. I don’t even want to think about him, but I still do. Ironic that he should be the one to fall to the virus, when he thought it was just a scare.

  I don’t know how many survivors there are. But there are less than there used to be. You can tell who they are if you see them on the streets; they just have that haunted look on their faces that suggests they’re ready to run. You can’t stay static now. You have to be a nomad.

  If you want to keep living.

  And boy, do I want to live.

  I always thought that if the apocalypse came, I’d rather die straightaway than have to eke out some kind of survival in a nightmarish world without the benefits of the mod-cons I loved. But when the apocalypse came, I fought tooth and nail to keep living.

  Literally. Survivors had to become fighters.

  I didn’t really think the flu was as bad as they said. But then people started dying. First in the hundreds; then in the thousands. Panic started gripping the nation. Borders were closed; other countries refused to help in case they came down with the illness as well. Bodies were buried quickly, to try and defuse contamination.

  But something weird began happening.

  There were a number of those who were infected, and died, who came alive again after a day or so. But they didn’t come back the same. Doctors hypothesized that brain damage from lack of air while they were “dead” caused the lack of speech, the stumbling gait, the dead look in the eyes. What they couldn’t account for was their strength, which came in fits and starts. They were uncontrollable, and tended to kill people who got too close to them.

  For the better want of a name, they were called “zombies”. That only contributed to the panic, even though they were really nothing like movie zombies. They didn’t want to eat our brains; they tended to raid garbage cans, homes, and stores. That’s why nowhere was safe: the zombies would break in anywhere, and if you got in their way, you likely wouldn’t survive.

  By the time this became public knowledge, though, Mike was dead. He had gotten sick; I didn’t. Now that I know what I know, I have to hope that he actually died… that he wasn’t a zombie. Because then that means he would have been alive when he was cremated—

  Like I said, I don’t want to think about it.

  The cities are now mostly deserted. I think I’m one of the last ones left in this city; survivors seem to head for the country, where they think they’ll be safer. The zombies are everywhere, though. The best thing to do is just keep moving. They’ll eventually come across you if you stay in the one place too long.

  At the moment, I’m in a high-rise apartment complex on the outskirts of the city. I’ve holed up on the top floor, with a pair of binoculars I stole from a sports store. I keep a vigilant watch, making sure nothing enters the lobby, which I tried to barricade as best I could. I figured it would give me at least a week. I sleep at night; for some reason, the zombies move less at night. Maybe there’s something human left within their addled brains, who knows?

  I don’t know what happened to my family. The last time I got to speak to my mother, she was worried because my father was in bed sick and she wasn’t starting to feel that well herself. Nobody could get hold of my brother; he and his wife weren’t answering their home phone or their cells. And by that stage, nobody liked taking to the streets to check up on anybody. That would come later, when you began to get paranoid and thought you were the only person left alive.

  I had seen my first zombie when I emerged from my house a week after the television stations stopped broadcasting. I had run out of food, and was desperate. I tore through my house looking for anything that resembled a weapon; all I found was Mike’s old baseball bat. It would have to do.

  As I removed the furniture shoved against my front door and stepped out onto the street, I was disturbed by how normal everything seemed. The birds still sung and flew about, the houses looked remarkably the same, and cars were still parked in driveways and on the street.

  But there was a smell. And it was unmistakable. The smell of rotting bodies.

  When I turned the corner, I found my first corpse. And I knew him. Pat Devon, the owner of the 7-Eleven just farther down the street. I couldn’t look at him for long, even to try and figure out how he died; the smell was just too bad. I could feel the bile rising in my throat, but I swallowed it back down. Food was too rare to waste.

  And then I heard the footsteps.

  It was such an alien sound, one I hadn’t heard for so long. And because it seemed so out of the ordinary, it filled me with absolute terror.

  I slowly turned around.

  He was about two blocks away, but because the street was so quiet, the sound was carrying the distance easily. And he wasn’t human. At least, not human as I used to know it. I could tell by his stagger and the way his hands hung limply by his sides.

  My first zombie. Sighted in person.

  He moaned, long and drawn out. Immediately, I worried for my brain. After all, I had seen zombie movies my whole life, and that isn’t something you can shake easily. No matter how often they had said on the news before they stopped broadcasting that the zombies weren’t movie zombies, I still thought they possibly hungered for brains.

  I started to back away slowly. And of course, tripped over my own feet.

  The metal baseball bat dropped to the concrete, the sound ringing, echoing, bouncing off the houses and buildings around me. I painfully got to my feet and picked it up.

  The zombie had stopped groaning.

  He had zeroed in on me instead.

  There had been a report on Dateline on scientists hypothesizing about what made the zombies tick. They could change from shuffling, clumsy dead things in one moment to frenetic attack machines that would put sharks to shame in the next. It could be a current in the brain that swi
tches on, one had said. It taps into the need for violence, it has to get rid of this pent-up energy somehow. We don’t know why.

  Conspiracy theorists claimed that it was a form of germ warfare, perhaps of military origin.

  But none of that was going through my mind when my life was at stake.

  Gone was the lurching. He still moved bizarrely, but at a greatly increased speed. I started to run, but his footfalls were rapidly getting closer behind me. Out of breath from weeks of being housebound, I knew I wasn’t going to make it to safety.

  So I stopped and turned.

  He didn’t even pause, his desire to do damage was so strong.

  I gripped the bat in my hand, hoping I was holding it correctly. Mike was the jock, not me. The only sports I ever deigned to watch with him were the Super Bowl and the Olympics. I was covered in sweat, and my breathing was hoarse. But the zombie’s was louder.

  Stupidly, I found myself yelling, “You want my brains, motherfucker?”

  My voice was loud, hoarse and jubilant. It sounded a little rusty, as it had been a while since I had spoken. I liked hearing myself again.

  “Come and get them!”

  As he neared me, so close I could smell the unwashed state of his clothes and the skin beneath them, I struck with the bat. It was just a glancing blow off his shoulder, but it deterred him for a brief moment. So I struck him again, aiming for the head. He hissed, and moaned again, his eyes glazed with anger. My shoulder twinged as I hit him across the jaw, and I yelled with disgust as I heard the crunch of bone.

  He fell to the ground, and it was my chance. I hit him again. And again. And again. His moaning became a burbling as blood filled his mouth. The red, viscous agent was flying through the air with each blow. But I couldn’t stop. Not until he was dead for good.

  When his skull was opened, and I could see gray matter.

  That was when he stopped moving, and no more sound came from him.

  The street was silent again.

  His blood began to pool on the sidewalk, and I stepped back. The bat was gleaming with his blood and flecks of brain. The bile rose in my throat again, and this time I couldn’t hold back but heaved where I stood, my vomit becoming part of the small river I had created.

  I couldn’t believe I had killed someone.

  Logically, I knew it was in self-defense. It was either him or me. So why did I feel like shit?

  I wanted someone to talk to, someone to tell me everything would be okay. But I knew even if there was someone there to tell me that, it would be a lie anyway.

  Was this what my life was going to be from now on?

  It was enough to make me wish I had died with everybody else.

  But back to the present. As darkness fell, I shook myself back to some semblance of normality and made my way to my old 7-Eleven. The store was almost pitch-black; the power had finally gone out three days ago. I stayed close to the front just in case there was something lurking in the darkness and I needed to make an escape. With my bag bulging, I left and made my way home, making an effort not to look at the now-decaying zombie corpse that lay on the ground. The corpse that was there because of me.

  Back at the apartment complex, I barricaded myself back in, opened a can of baked beans, and ate them cold. I then wrapped myself in blankets in the small fort I had made myself in the dining room and tried to sleep.

  II

  I DECIDED to move on the next morning. I knew I couldn’t stay there forever.

  Part of me wanted to try and find out if there were any other humans left in the city, but I guessed that there weren’t that many in my vicinity. After all, when I had killed the zombie, I had yelled enough to alert anyone to my presence, and nobody had come running.

  It made me wonder: if I had been the one holed up in my house and heard someone yelling, would I have left my little sanctuary to investigate? I really wasn’t sure.

  It was time to find new pastures. If I didn’t get some scenery, I would go crazy.

  So I made my way back to my house for the final time. It was painful walking back in; I expected, or maybe just hoped, Mike would be sitting there waiting for me, wondering where I had been. The house was empty, yet everything reminded me of his absence.

  I had to pack as light as possible. Food and water were necessary, until I could do another food run. I had to allow myself a small measure of sentimentality: a picture of my family, and a picture of Mike which I stuck in my wallet. I couldn’t allow myself to forget them; I stupidly felt like it would be losing my own humanity. And if that happened, I might as well be a zombie myself.

  There was also a book. Mike had bought it for a laugh. Neither of us had guessed that one of us would need it in the future. The Survival Handbook. It had tips on how to gather fresh water, survive a fall from an aircraft if your parachute didn’t open—you know, all that everyday stuff. I figured it wouldn’t hurt, although now I wished Mike had bought The Zombie Survival Handbook instead.

  But the book had paid for itself already. Because now, in theory, I knew how to boost a car.

  Logic dictated that if the zombies tended to rest at night, it would be better for me to travel at night. But I was nervous about driving in the dark with no streetlights, especially when there would be any number of obstacles in my path: bodies, abandoned cars, accidents. It would just be my luck to crash the car and lie in pain until I starved to death or a zombie stumbled along and put me out of my misery.

  I hoped zombies were late sleepers, took one last look around my house, saying goodbye to all my familiar things, and walked out the door. I hoped maybe one day I could return, but shrugged it off. Even if things got better, I would want to start life somewhere new, where memories of Mike, my family and my friends wouldn’t haunt me everywhere I turned.

  I knew my own gas tank was empty, so I headed across the street to where the Davisons lived. They were a responsible yuppie family, with a double income and two kids. They had also been the first to die on our street. I was home from work, looking after Mike, when I saw the ambulance arrive and cart their bodies away, sealed up in hazmat bags.

  Anyway. They would surely have a full tank. They were that kind of people.

  I picked up a strip of wood from their garden and used it to wedge the window down. I didn’t want to smash it with a rock—the thought of driving with an exposed window where anything could reach in to grab me or attempt to gain entrance left me cold. After some banging, I got the window down far enough to unlock the door. I climbed in, locked it again, and rolled up the window. I opened the book in my lap and found the section on hotwiring.

  I pulled out the screwdriver I had packed last night, knowing that I needed it from skimming through the chapter. Nothing like preparation. I removed the access cover from beneath the steering wheel, and felt around until I found the wiring. I pulled the harness down, stripped the red wires, and twisted them together. I then stripped the brown wire and touched it to the red.

  The car roared into life, and I quickly pumped the gas so it wouldn’t stall.

  “Thanks, book,” I said happily. Now that the car was making noise, it was time to put the pedal to the metal. I checked the fuel gage; it was at three quarters. Thank you, Davisons—rest in peace.

  I roared out of their driveway. Time to put home behind me, and take to the road.

  As I turned the corner, scene of my own private carnage, I was surprised to see the corpse was surrounded. By other zombies. Did this mean they had intelligence of some sort? That they knew one of their numbers had been killed by a human who was still in the area?

  Well, good thing I was leaving, because my cover was now blown.

  They swung around to face me as one. I revved the engine as if I were a bull facing down a matador. And there it was again, that change in them as they went from shuffling cadavers to angry predators.

  The tires spun, burning rubber, as I kicked the accelerator and held it down as far as it could go. The car lurched forward at breakneck speed.
The zombies didn’t even try to get out of the way as I mowed through them. There was a sickening bump as one of them disappeared under the wheels and a crash as one flew over the bonnet and hit the windshield. Blood sprayed the glass, and it began thumping with its fist, trying to break it and get through at me. A crack appeared, and I knew the windshield would be shattered if the zombie continued to punch at it. I took a corner sharply, and the zombie toppled over and hit the road. I looked back in the rearview mirror, and saw it lying behind me and rapidly becoming a speck in the distance.

  Only then did I allow myself to breathe a sigh of relief.

  And headed for the highway.

  III

  I TURNED on the radio and set it to automatic scan, hoping that I could pick up something, anybody, anything. All that it picked up was static.

  I couldn’t be the only person left in the country. Too bad The Survival Handbook didn’t have a chapter on flying 747s so I could escape. Surely some country would take pity on me and give me refugee status.

  Guess I still believed in pipe dreams.

  The Davisons had shit taste in music. I pawed through their CDs and grimaced. Whitney Houston—obviously hers. Creed? Why they weren’t using that as a coaster, I don’t know.

  Then I found The Wiggles. And my hand just hovered over the case.

  Jackson. He was five. And Maddie was seven. I wondered how often their parents had to listen to this CD, the songs getting stuck in their head until they were going to bed at night with “Hot Potato” lulling them to sleep.

  I couldn’t think like that.

  I slammed the console shut and concentrated fully on the road again. Occasionally I would have to swerve to avoid a car parked on the highway, and tried not to think about the story of the occupants.

  Small towns had become ghost towns. Once again, nobody ever came out of their houses or businesses to investigate the sound of a car driving through. At a truck stop, I managed to stock up on food and moved on quickly, as the sound of the wind through the empty streets unnerved me.