It was a shit deal, being a zombie. Well, maybe being wasn't the right word. Zombies didn't really think. Plus, I, per se, wasn't really a zombie.
My body was, though, and I figure that's close enough to give me the right to complain about it.
Being a ghost was alright by comparison—and "being" was the right word here. Moving through walls was cool, of course, but the fact that I was still me was the most apparent perk when faced with the alternative. Ghosts could go pretty much wherever they want, too. Well, most ghosts anyway. I was unfortunately bound to my body. Some sort of mix-up, I guess. Having the spirit of a body that was still upright must have confused whoever was in charge of such things. The rules seemed pretty arbitrary from where I was standing. Maybe it was just my luck that's shit.
How does that saying go? "Life sucks, and then you die. And then it sucks even more when you come back as a ghost, and, even worse, your body is also reanimated—as a zombie." Or something like that.
The worst part, really, is that I can still sort of feel whatever he does. "He," because that thing isn't "me." I could feel the ever-present hunger eating away at my stomach. I could feel the strain in my jaw when he finally caught a good meal. I could taste the meat and feel the sinew stuck in his teeth. "Phantom Limb Syndrome" might be too on the nose, but I wasn't sure what else to call it. Maybe I wasn't what researchers had in mind when they named it, but I figured it fit anyway and, well, they weren't exactly there to stop me. I wasn't going to be publishing a paper anytime soon. Or ever.
Neither were they, for that matter. Academia crumbled shortly after the virus hit the schools. Turns out, huge populations of reckless students who were pressured to attend classes even when they felt like shit were perfect petri dishes for the spreading of a zombie infection. Go figure.
I got it at school too, actually. Fucking Bio 101 or whatever; I’d always said I hated taking GEs, though I’d never been too fond of my business courses either. We’d been studying viral infections, if you can believe it. How’s that for ironic?
I came home from school moaning and groaning, but that was normal nineteen year old shit so no one thought anything of it. Big mistake, clearly. It was sort of funny, when I thought about it—so long as I didn’t think about it for too long. It was the ultimate teenage revenge on a family who ignored their angsting.
Then again, dying alone in the middle of the night, a fever having fried your brain like an egg, wasn’t anybody’s dream probably.
I died, and then I opened my eyes and watched my body tumble out of my bed. I’d thought it was some sort of fever dream at first, watching it trip down the stairs. My grandma had been watching TV on the couch instead of sleeping quietly, like everyone else in the house had been. She turned to face it, smiling gently. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but she’d probably asked if I had trouble sleeping. Maybe even if I wanted her to make me something. I’d thought it was a dream right up until she started screaming and the warm, metallic wetness of her blood flooded my mouth.
She almost tasted like a roast duck, if both saltier and more bland—human is a very greasy meat, you know. I’d always heard it was more like pig, but I’d had bacon plenty of times before I died and it didn’t taste anything like that.
Then, of course, everyone else in my family woke up too, started screaming after they came downstairs and saw, and then my stupid fucking zombie body moved on and killed them too. He didn’t leave the house for a long time after turning. I had a big family, so there were plenty of leftovers.
I’d tried to leave several times, of course, but no cigar. I spent the time trying to figure out how to be a ghost and what the limits were. Well, after figuring out that’s what I am, anyway.
No one else in my family came back, either, which sucked. Not even as zombies, actually, which was instead bullshit. Turns out my zombie self was a bit of a food snob—he had a particular taste for brains. Almost no one he hunted down turned after. Getting into their skulls took time—days, even, at the start—but the difference in flavor was clear enough that I couldn’t grumble about it too much.
It was kinda cool, actually, to watch him hunt. He got faster, more agile, like his prey instinct turned what remained of my faculties to eleven. He was better at breaking into skulls too, cracking them open on the pavement in only a few blows. He gets it down to a science, at some point. I hadn’t known zombies could learn. His muscles, new memories. If he’d eaten recently, he could even pull them apart the rest of the way once they’d been split, almost dexterously.
The rest of the time however…
“Dude, can you not be embarrassing for, like, ten seconds?” I said, entirely sick of watching my body bump into anything and everything possible between meals. I’d never been the most coordinated person while alive, in fairness, but this was just pathetic.
He didn’t answer me—he never did, but we rarely ran into anyone else I could futilely talk to, so needs must. Keeping my mouth shut was never my strong suit. He got worse, actually, when we hadn’t eaten in a while. Fell over more often, got stuck sometimes. I didn’t get hungry, myself. Well, not really, anyway. I could feel his hunger gnawing at what used to be my stomach though. I’d gotten pretty used to the taste, too. It wasn’t half bad even, when it wasn’t my family screaming as we ate. The warmth of fresh meat in my belly was a pleasant one. It should have been more repulsive than it was. I don’t know if I could have stomached it if I had to actually do it myself instead of just watching and feeling it happen. I couldn’t even eat sushi when I was alive.
Different people tasted kinda different too. Most of my family was about the same, but he’d expanded my horizons plenty since then. Some were more bitter, or lean, or sometimes
sweet even. Some people were tougher, harder to chew. While others were soft or tender. I think it has something to do with what they usually ate or did. I wish I had some way to tell beforehand or steer him clear of certain flavors. Sometimes someone looked like they’d be a good meal and, once he’d hunted them down, turned out to actually be pretty flavorless. Either way, eating was a far more enjoyable sensation than the pseudo-bruising I got when he walked into another pole, at the least.
Sometimes he ran into someone I’d known, too. An old math teacher who’d failed me or some shithead bully from middle school. I can admit to feeling some degree of satisfaction when he hunted them. It’s easier to be honest with yourself when there’s no one else around to be honest with. Or to find out.
Speaking of. I squinted against the sun. Yep, someone was headed towards us. Poor sap. I licked my lips, even if it never did anything for the dryness in his.
Slowly, so slowly, we inched toward them. Normally, he sped up when he stumbled upon a meal.
When we got closer, though, I realized the problem. Another zombie. Great. Two, actually. One was trailing slowly behind the first one. The second one wasn’t limping or stumbling or dragging a bum foot like most zombies tended to, but they were moving around and there was no way a living person would get away with being so close to a zombie and survive to tell the tale.
I hurried ahead of him to get a better look.
There was indeed a zombie leading the way but, behind it, there was someone else. Something else.
Over a year as a ghost, and I’d finally found another one.
“Holy shit,” I said. She blinked at me.
“Holy shit,” she repeated. “You can see me?” I nodded. “But you’re… alive. Or..”
I shook my head, way too eager to be talking to someone again and not just at them. “Ghost,” I said, gesturing down at myself. I hadn’t really considered before what I looked like to other people. Was I translucent, like in the movies? I thought I looked solid, but that could just be from my own perspective. She looked pretty see-through to me. There was a large chunk of her neck missing, presumably where a zombie had gotten her. The one she was following didn’t have a matching wound, though, which raised the question.
“Was that you?” I asked, gesturing at the zombie.
Her nose wrinkled. “Ew, no. She killed me, though, and I didn’t have anything else to do. I wasn’t in a camp when she got me. Just on my own.” I nodded, contemplative, and her eyes widened. “Wait, was that you?” she asked, pointing at my stupid zombie body, slowly inching toward us.
“Unfortunately,” I muttered. “You’re better off for it. I’m stuck anchored to this asshole for some god damned reason.”
She whistled. “Man, that must suck. And here I was so grateful ghosts are able to wander—you know, if I wanted to.”
“I’m Clyde, by the way.”
She stuck out her hand. I shook it. “Sylvia.”
I smiled. “Like Plath?”
She rolled her eyes. “Where’s Bonnie?” she asked mockingly.
I winced. “Point taken.”
She nodded firmly. “Good. We both got plenty of that while we were alive, I’m sure. No need to carry it into the afterlife.”
“I’m just happy to be talking to someone again, honestly. Is that sad?”
“Nah. Same, if I’m being honest.”
“How long you been dead for?” I asked. I wondered, briefly, if that was rude to ask. I wasn’t up on my ghost etiquette.
“Six months or so, maybe.” She shrugged. “Harder than I expected to keep track of the days without a calendar or some way to write ‘em down.”
“I know what you mean. The longer it goes on the harder it gets, too.”
“How about you?” she asked. “How long have you been haunting this ‘mortal plane?’”
I snorted. “Two years, give or take. I was one of the first infected, I think.”
“God…” she said, face paling even further. I wondered how that worked, without blood.
“No offense and all, I guess, but that just inspired a whole new level to this whole thing. I didn’t even think about how long we could be stuck like this.”
That was kind of surprising. I thought about little else, if I was being honest. I opened my mouth, and then stumbled forward. I turned to see that my body had passed us and was wandering farther away. I was being tugged helplessly along. I swore, fighting against it. I wasn’t quite ready to leave behind the only bit of socialization I’d had in years.
Sylvia tilted her head, watching me resist futilely against whatever invisible force chained me to my undead body. She turned to glance back at the zombie that had killed her, and then, miraculously, she skipped back toward me.
She laughed at whatever ridiculous surprised expression I was making. “I know it hasn’t been two years, for me, but I miss having company too, you know. I’d rather follow your rotting corpse around with you than follow her.” I’d forgotten she even had a choice. “Seems like there are fewer living people every day, anyway. It’s getting less and less likely I’d get to watch one of ‘em take her out.”
I grinned. “Is that why you were following her around?”
She waved a hand uncertainly. “I guess. Didn’t really wanna risk not finding anyone or anything else, either. I was already worried about going crazy, but at least I had a semi-living body for ‘company,’ you know?”
I looked forward, staring at him as he walked ahead of us. He had my own face—or what remained of it, anyway—but he’s also been my only sense of companionship since I died. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
We lapsed into silence, then. That was nice too.
***
Sylvia was very passionate about a great many topics, I discovered. We’d gone to the same university, somehow. We were miles away by now. We’d never met there, as far as we could remember. She’d come from out of state, apparently because “the campus seemed nice. I liked all the programs they offered.” She was undeclared, trying anything and everything.
I told her she probably should have started at a community college, if that was the case. She’d laughed, and agreed easily. “But they offered me a scholarship, and I’d always liked the idea of Washington.”
God knew why.
I understood why she was undeclared, at least. It would be hard not to if you talked to her for more than an hour. She knew all sorts of shit about literature and philosophy and art and math and science—even biology. She had a few theories about how the virus worked and, after she took the time to actually explain them all until I understood, I found them fascinating. She could have published a paper or two, if academia was still around. Or if she was still alive.
I gave as good as I got on a few subjects too. It was nice, filling in the gaps for each other. It was frustrating when we couldn’t settle a debate, though. I desperately missed my phone. And my local library.
I missed most things, but she made it easier.
I think we would have been friends before too. We didn’t get along in a “last two people on Earth” sort of way, we just did. We’d liked a lot of the same things when we were alive, apparently. TV shows and movies and authors and games. When we mentioned something the other didn’t know, we’d talk about them. Plots in any medium became stories to tell each other as we walked endlessly.
I imagined sometimes that we weren’t walking at all. That we were lounging on her supposedly shitty dorm room couch and drinking, laughing, having a movie night. That she’d come over for a good home cooked meal instead of something from the shitty on-campus cafes and my family was still alive to embarrass me. Grams would have loved her. My sister too, I think. My parents could always go either way with my friends, but it was my imagination, so she fit in like a member of the family. Like she’d always been there.
I sometimes forgot she hadn’t been. I hadn’t seen her dorm. She hadn’t met my family. We hadn’t spent weekends texting and complaining about professors or trying to match our schedules to take as many classes together as possible.
If soulmates were a thing, she was probably mine. A universe-assigned best friend. I just wish we didn’t have to wait until we were just souls to meet.
***
The world-turned-empty was like an entirely different place. The more time passed, the starker the difference. When he first turned, it looked pretty much the same, if a bit emptier. He didn’t get to go inside places much, so he only had the outside to go by.
Sylvia said things changed quickly, if in a different way then they changed now. Everything was either picked clean or overrun or both almost immediately. People panic fast when they’re undeniably in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Apparently, denial hadn’t lasted long on that front.
There weren’t many people left around these days, undead or otherwise. I was grateful. So far, my zombie body had only caught one decent meal since Sylvia joined us. I worried she’d hold it against me, somehow. A zombie had killed her, after all, and she’d spent years being afraid of them. But she’d just turned away and closed her eyes. She didn’t look while he ate. They didn’t talk about it.
***
“What do you miss the most?” she asked.
“Food,” I said. “My mom’s enchiladas. Dad’s lasagna. You?”
“My old house. Hadn’t been home in over a year when this whole thing started.” “You ever try to make it back?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not for long. In the early days, when no one knew what was happening, sure. But the planes shut down first and Vermont’s a long ways off, on foot. Got to Oregon before trying to find somewhere to settle. Being on the road was too dangerous.”
I found it fascinating when she talked about those early days. I hadn’t been there, not really. I’d never had to try and survive in this new world. I hadn’t had the chance.
“Did you?” I asked. “Find a camp, I mean.”
She didn’t answer for a long moment. She watched the cracked asphalt pass by under our feet.
“Once,” she said quietly. “I left a month later.”
I wanted to know more. I opened my mouth to ask, even, but then I really looked at her. Her hunched shoulders, the way she’d wrapped her arms around herself, the horrified, haunted expression she was trying to hide behind her blonde hair.
Maybe later. We had eternity, after all.
***
Sometimes, on the nights where the days we were alive felt so distant they could have been a dream, we didn’t say anything. Sometimes, on those days, we only said one word each, over and over again.
“Clyde,” she’d say.
“Sylvia,” I’d answer.
“Clyde.”
“Sylvia.”
We’d do it for hours, sometimes days.
You were alive, once, it meant. You were a person. You had a name. You still do.
***
“God, when was the last time you had McDonald’s?” she asked, staring at the crumbling facade and the peeling yellow arches as we passed.
“I don’t even know,” I bemoaned. “I almost never went. I feel deprived.”
She tsked and shook her head. “Should have known better,” she said. “Lived while you could.”
“My bad,” I said. “I never got around to taking Predicting the Apocalypse and Preparing Accordingly 100. My guidance counselor was shit. Said I had to take that public speaking course instead.”
She sighed dramatically. “Shame. I took it, actually, but I got a D. Thought we had a few more decades in us.” She said it so seriously that I couldn’t help but laugh. She cracked quickly, joining in with a smile.
Usually, when we got loud enough, she’d quiet down and check our surroundings nervously. Like she thought we’d be overheard. Like she thought something would come for us. That something could come for us.
The more time passed, the rarer it was.