What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Zombier (3 page)

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Tommy turns toward the door. But the planks are strong; they won’t break. So he thinks. Hopes. Desires. It must be true.

And mom smiles.

“It’s all right, Tommy.”

She puts down the tools and rubs her hands on the combat trousers, an involuntary reaction. She brushes her brown hair, sniffs a bit. And smiles again.

“Wait here now,” she says before disappearing into the kitchen. For a moment, Tommy shivers. Every time she goes out of his sight, the first thought he has is that she’ll never come back. Or worse, that she’ll come back wrong. And hungry.

But after a few minutes she’s back.

A candle lights up her face with a yellow and quite spooky reflection; in a different situation, it would have been a magical moment. But Tommy understands: that’s a cake. A birthday cake all for himself.

Ok, it’s not a real cake; it’s more like some kind of collage made of snacks, the ones with sponge rolls and chocolate cream, and in the middle there’s a candle, the white ones – the anonymous ones for when there’s no power.

Actually, the electricity has been gone for a few weeks.

So it’s a patchwork of cake, but it still looks good. Indeed, Tommy’s mouth waters. He no longer hears the unceasing
knock, knock, knock
.

Mom puts the cake down on the table, again with her wide and warm smile, but with a note of bitterness lying at the bottom. “Come on, make a wish!”

Tommy stares at the candle; his look and his thoughts fade in the flame that shivers restless.

The world is dead, then resurrected from its grave – civilization ended. What could an eight-year boy desire from that kind of world?

He closes his eyes, concentrates, then quickly reopens them and blows.

The flame flickers for a moment and disappears in a thread of smoke. The room fills with the smell of wax. Tommy smiles – looks at his mom and smiles.

“Now eat your cake and then straight to bed,” she says, caressing his cheek.

Knock. Knock. Knock.
Reply the undead from the front door.

* * *

The first lights of the sunrise.

Tommy rubs his eyes, sensitive to the rays of light that filter through the cracks.

Mom is already awake; she sits near him, the rifle tight in her hands – her knuckles are white, her face is pale, her hair is disheveled, and her forehead is still dirty. She’s staring at the front door.

Tommy sits up, emerging from the sleeping bag. He listens.

Silence.

No one is knocking at the door anymore.

Then suddenly a tumble, and another, and the house trembles.

Something heavy is flung against the door. A softened sound of breaking bones and nothing more.

Mom stands up and goes to peek from a slit. “What the
fuck
is that?”

Tommy reaches his mouth with his hand; it’s the first time he hears his mom saying the F word. He doesn’t know if he should laugh or be scared.

Slowly he goes near, crawling through her legs. He finds a little slit and he, too, can look outside.

In the light fog that rises from the fields in that morning of December, between bunches of trailing undead looking for living flesh, a big, black, deformed figure appears. It’s got long skeletal arms, a stubby body, one with the head, and a huge mouth, wide open, that shows irregular, yellow teeth, long and pointy. He growls with the roar of twenty lions; it looks like the monster from a fairytale.

With its thin limbs, it grabs the undead by three, four, five. It lifts them and drops them in its deep throat and it chews noisily, guided by an unstoppable hunger. It’s making clean house, a bellyful of rotten flesh and bodies without consciousness.

Mom shakes; she’s almost paralyzed in front of that inexplicable vision.

Tommy takes her hand. “Don’t be scared, mommy.”

She stares at him, eyes wide open, with too many questions for a woman that saw the world collapse.

“My wish has come true. Now he will save us because I called him.”

Mom looks back outside at that freaky creature. “What… who did you call, Tommy?”

Tommy smiles, full of pride.

“The
zombie eater
.”

I cannot explain why it began.

People were dying as usual and the next moment the first corpse woke up.

I don’t know where it happened and how, I don’t even know who was the first lucky bastard that saw a dead body, a stranger, or maybe a beloved one, open its glassy eyes and start moving again.

I only know that it happened everywhere around the world, with no distinction by ethnicity or religious belief. Simply, from that day, the dead were not dead anymore.

It didn’t happen to everyone, at least not to the ones who died before February 21
^st
, 1998; authorities are unanimous on that, and that’s our only certainty.

The news spread around the world, on every newspaper, TV channel, radio, website.

At first they were few, mostly in little towns. You don’t realize how many people die every day. Ten people every thousand, as average, per year. Put this way, they don’t seem so many, but they’re seventy million people. Almost two hundred thousand a day.

The police first, and then the Army came to contain them.

And that’s the strange thing: they didn’t fire a single bullet.

My generation, grown up in the Eighties, lived the myth of the Zombie Apocalypse; we were ready to fight with the strangest weapons the undead horde. But deep inside, none of us believed that it would really happen. It was just a game.

And when it happened, it was totally different. No blood, no infected bites. We just stood there stunned and scared watching how the world was changing forever.

These undead aren’t aggressive, they don’t crave for human flesh. They’re nothing more than shadows of living beings.

Science studied them; theories were discussed and published. Simply put, after death, something – what it is remains unclear – restarts the brain, just the little needed to ensure the minimal functioning; the corpse comes back to life and begins to wander, with no purpose. While the body becomes thinner, lacking its nourishment, to the point only skin and bones are left. A lot of gruesome skeletons that keep on walking and moving until their joints break and they collapse on themselves; until their physical matter is completely consumed.

At first there was panic. People screaming in terror; the assault to supermarkets for subsistence goods, citizens that barricaded themselves in their houses and didn’t open to anyone. But the news kept on circulating, there were still the basic services: electricity, water, gas, food. Nothing was missing; it was not the apocalypse. It was just a very strange and macabre phenomenon that seemed totally under control. Or so said the politicians and the Generals.

But then another thing happened.

No more children were born.

We didn’t notice it right away, because after the fateful date the women that were already pregnant carried safely their babies full term. But after that, no woman got pregnant anymore. Some tried and tried until desperation. Others simply gave up.

Scientists made every kind of experiment, but nothing. The eggs and sperm were no longer able to recognize themselves as belonging to the same species and even when the first phase of fertilization was successful, the cell died shortly after. Without a reason.

Humanity became infertile.

The authorities initially tried to deny the news, to cover them; no one wanted to talk about it. But then the information leaked, and soon everyone knew. Everyone was aware that we would be the last generation on earth.

No one was born, and the dead continued to wake up.

Then came the religions, bringing their theories of divine punishment and Judgment Day, which was near and everybody had to repent and prepare for the inevitable.

Then it happened that someone started to hide the dead. Who had a sick relative at home, who lost someone suddenly, by accident, even those who paid the mortuary staff to take their loved ones, to get them back home where they would wake up, even if they wouldn’t be the same persons, but they would still be there, present and able to move.

Therefore, they kept them locked in a room, still trying to take care of them and feed them, even if they did not respond and merely stared into space with their blind eyes and wandered those four walls, speechless, sleepless, barely breathing from their more and more rotten lungs.

Suicides started. Solitary or in groups. Without a tomorrow, without a future, without a legacy, what was left? In the end, the idea of becoming unaware zombies until the total disintegration seemed tempting, or worse, almost natural. Some were just hopeless who blew their head off in their basement, others were real executions organized by religious groups or fanatics.

The fact that the military did not shoot the dead is not to say that among the people there weren’t those who, hyped by too many horror movies, improvised themselves gunslingers and went hunting for zombies. It’s easy to be a hero when your enemy is a harmless and dumb being that moves slowly and doesn’t run away because it’s blind and deaf. Better than a videogame.

Many bodies were found with a hole in their forehead or various wounds from firearms and knives. The strange thing, if in all this madness still the word “strange” makes sense, is that it was not like in the movies. Destroying the brain didn’t work, or maybe just one bullet wasn’t enough, since even after being hit they continued moving and...
creeping
. This is the term that the media used to describe the way they never stopped going, albeit slow and crawling.

However, the situation seemed under control, at the beginning. The number of deaths was still contained, before the outbreak of collective madness, and so it was still possible to keep them in the appropriate structures. But then things worsened and people started to die more than ever, especially among the elderly population. It was as if the whole world had lost the will to live.

Maybe because there were no more children.

For the first few years you didn’t notice, but then time passes and you realize that you are missing something, and the whole world loses its color, it becomes just a dead gray stone bouncing in the universe and you’re nothing but a parasite, a flu virus to which someone has finally found a cure.

You’re alive and healthy, but you know you’re dying, because you have nothing to leave behind and the finish line is approaching inexorably, day after day.

I was eighteen when it all began.

Now I’m thirty and I tried to do a calculation. Fifteen years have passed. I live in a city of forty thousand people, which is an average of four hundred deaths per year. It would be around six thousand people, if the data were correct. But actually, as I said before, people started to die much more than usual. Since the last census – now it’s done every year – we were twenty thousand. Half the number. Because nobody is born and we just die. And now the dead are so many that we do not know how and where to keep them, and they roam the streets. Creeping.

For five years I’ve been a member of the Volunteer Committee for Public Order. The
dead catchers
, we were called. It’s not a dangerous job, but it takes guts.

I had a colleague who shot himself.

Only that he pulled a bit on the left and failed to blow up his head. We found him in his mother’s room, wearing a flowered robe with his skull half ripped and one liquefied eye pouring down his cheek as if he wanted to cry; an abstract painting of clotted blood on the half of his face, while he did back and forth from wall to wall and seemed at peace with the world.

We caught him and brought him to the containment structure.

Now we keep them on the University campus. It’s been a couple of years since the classes were suspended, nobody wants to study anymore, no one has projects for the future. The most required jobs are those that allow the remaining population to have at least basic services. Food and energy. But in large cities some courses are still open and not just those of medicine. Somewhere there are still people who wants to study literature, although probably in eighty years there will be no one left to read books.

We will leave an abandoned planet full of useless things, as long as nature doesn’t claim them, deleting their traces forever. Who knows what will happen after us and which will become the new dominant species on the planet. The disease has also affected the primates, all those animals that are somehow related to us. There will not be a new evolution, not even in a million years. The human race has come to an end.

And in the meantime we are getting older and we look with concern to a future in which we’ll be weaker and weaker and we will just have to let ourselves die. There’s nothing we can do. The time is a straight line that goes in one direction, towards an inevitable chasm.

I can’t go on anymore. Writing all of this it just seems to me like a futile exercise.

To whom will I leave my words? No one will preserve them; these will be just painted pages, senseless, food for the mountain goats.

It’s been a few months since I left the city, I could not go on living every day on the edge of insanity, although after so long it has become almost like a habit.

What was the point on staying to patrol the streets? To collect those wandering and apathetic bodies? The citizens aren’t afraid anymore, they perceive them as an inevitable part of their lives and so you see things like two girls, among the new ones, those born soon after, those who came to the world when the world was already upset, walking on the street, chatting with each other, laughing. You are doing your duty, with your black uniform, the cross-shaped pin and your nametag. A dead man comes out from the corner, staggering, all gray, he has a short-sleeved shirt and you can clearly see the signs of the cuts on his forearms and the clotted blood that poured out. Another one that couldn’t take it anymore, you think, while the girls stop. They stare at him, make a comment in disgust and then burst out laughing again, passing over, as if everything were perfectly normal. And a knot squeezes your stomach, the ice freezes your veins. Is this the world we have become?