What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Zombier Read online

  “I’ll buy it tomorrow, Okay? It’s been a shitty day. Anyway, when are you going to make dinner?”

  The old woman stepped on the edge of the stairs. “Don’t you dare to use that tone with your mother! You know I need the preparation. These calluses are killing me. I’m old, you know, and I can’t go shopping to the corner if my feet ache.”

  Charles ignored her and walked into the kitchen; he opened the fridge. A few moments in contemplation, then he went back to the hall. The old woman still on top of the stairs. “The fridge is empty! Are you saying that there’s nothing to eat tonight? Holy shit, Mother. I’m not in the mood for going to the store.”

  “I told you a thousand times to speak clean with me,” the old woman went mad, a flush of crimson to her cheeks. She got on the first step waving his threatening finger. “I said…” and then her pink hairy slipper betrayed her.

  She slid on the second step, and her leg flew away, lifting for a moment her skirt on her fat thighs. Her prominent butt bounced on the hard marble and made her fall. On the attempt of turning back to retrieve her balance, she rolled on the side, sliding down like a crazy bowling ball, until the end of the stairs.

  Crack.

  She landed with her limbs misplaced and her neck in an unnatural position. Her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

  “Fuck!” murmured Charles.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  He approached slowly, touched her with his foot. She didn’t move.

  The old lady was gone.

  Fuck.

  Holy shit. I’m free.

  No more callus preparation, no more slipping the nylons on that flabby hams, no more curlers in that dead hair, no more commissions and visits to the doctor and the dermatologist and incontinence pads that turned off every chance of picking up the girl from the shop.

  Charles, in the silence of his house, burst in a sullen satisfied laughter.

  “Tonight we dine out!” he announced, to no one in particular.

  He took back the keys, paying attention to make a long scratch on Aunt Adelaide’s dresser, and went out.

  For the occasion, he picked up a restaurant downtown, because it was a big day.

  He stopped for a few drinks in a bar, until almost midnight, when the sleep started to take over and the stress of that absurd day turned into tiredness.

  He came back home staggering, and burst open the door, a little high, mumbling: “Mother, I’m home!” and then laughing hysterically.

  He turned on the light in the hall, and the stairs were empty.

  The drunkenness disappeared suddenly.

  The old woman was dead. He saw her with his very eyes, her glazed stare and broken neck, and she didn’t move anymore.

  And now the body was gone.

  Was she still alive?

  A growl came from the kitchen. Like the sound of a wild animal.

  A dog came in and dragged her there to eat her up. No, nonsense, how could a dog come into the house? He was sure he had locked the door; the windows were always sealed because the old woman feared the drafts, and so what happened?

  He approached with caution and turned on the switch of the kitchen.

  The neon light wobbled a few seconds.

  And she was there, standing on a twisted ankle, her head tilted to the side in an impossible position, pale like a corpse and still... alive?

  From her mouth came a hoarse and guttural panting, like she was trying to say something, but she’d forgot how to articulate the sounds.

  “M... mother?”

  The old woman opened her mouth trying to emit a scream and jumped, a sprint unthinkable for a woman that age that had always moved difficultly. She ended up on top of him, with all her dead weight, flinging him to the ground.

  She plunged her teeth in his neck, biting with an unusual and fierce greed, ripping out his jugular, splattering a squirt of blood that stained the walls and the old lady’s face while she kept devouring his son’s body.

  When he stopped moving, the mother left, like she’d felt that there was nothing more to do.

  She stood up with clumsy and slow movements, went past him and headed to the entrance, ready for other lives to claim.

  * * *

  May 21th, 2011 – 01:00 a.m.

  In the empty and silent kitchen, the body of Charles twitched. First, he stretched his fingers, then his limbs started to work again. He gurgled from his ripped throat.

  With a push, he rolled to the side, and, leaning the hands on the ground, slowly stood up. He, too, walked toward the outside, following the trail of the smell of the livings.

  Mushroom Apocalypse

  “I say it’s the spores,” whispered Stanford while spying through a crack between the boards that barred the window. He was short on breath behind his surgical mask.

  Cooper made a snort in response; two black eyes of a face covered by a checked scarf approached to carve out a view on the street.

  “I say they are in the air, and you breathe them. They enter your brain and from that moment you are under their control,” continued Stanford. “Fucking mushrooms.”

  Cooper watched the people on the street; they walked slowly, randomly, dragging their feet. White spongy outgrowth sprouted out from their open mouths, from the nostrils, from the ears, even from the eyeballs.

  “They grow so damn fast,” Stanford moved away from the window and leaned against the wall, sliding toward the ground. “We must protect our breathing ways. We need something more efficient. Gas masks... yes, those would be perfect. Any idea where we could find them?”

  Cooper shook his head and sat near him.

  He took out a paper bag from his pocket and extracted a half-eaten sandwich. He gave a big bite, starting to chew ravenously.

  “Nervous hunger, my friend,” noticed Stanford.

  Cooper took out another sandwich from the bag and offered it to him.

  Stanford stretched his neck. “What’s inside?”

  Cooper swallowed. “Ham and mushrooms.”

  Zombie Birthday

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  “Don’t listen.”

  Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

  At the light of the gas lamp, Tommy’s eyes spy to the side, toward the front door.

  “I said don’t listen.”

  Mom grabs his face and gently turns it toward the table of the living room.

  From outside come the moans and that relentless sound. Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Tommy squints and shuts his ears.

  Broken glass noise.

  A hand makes its way through the planks that bar the window. The boy stares at it with wide open eyes. Petrified and ravished.

  The hand flounders in the air trying to catch something that isn’t there. A finger is twisted backwards, bent in an unnatural position. The nails are broken, ripped off the flesh; they stay lifted like beetle wings. The skin is dirty with blood, somewhere rent, the flesh split to reveal the tendons of the wrist. And the arm that pushes, pushes more and more to make its way through the planks. The wood skins it, but that thing doesn’t care. None of them cares. They can’t feel pain; the only thing that guides them is the hunger. An insatiable, senseless hunger.

  Mom grabs the rifle, chambers a bullet, and aims. She fires through the hole where the hand emerged. One shot, two shots, three shots.

  Bang bang bang.

  Blood splatters in the semidarkness and falls on the stained carpet. The hand disappears; it’s gone back outside in the world of the dead.

  Mom, as quick as lightning, takes a piece of wood from the stack near the chimney pot, grabs the hammer and some nail from the toolbox. She presses the wood on the crack, aims, and starts hammering.

  Bang bang bang.

  Before they could be back and try to enter again.

  A sigh. Mom wipes her forehead, then turns toward Tommy, with hammer still in hand and her hair all messed up. She’s got a stain of dirt above the eyebrow, but she doesn’t even notice. Her hands are rui
ned from handling raw wood, weapons and tools, but she smiles at her son.

  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.”

  Creeping

  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 21st, 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.