| A Jubilant Mass Editor
Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: In a jar, mate.
Posts: 17,265
| Fiction: I, Zombie
[image=left]http://www.alternativenation.net/gallery/files/1/izombie.gif[/image]I’ve been dead for about twelve years now. Twelve years, three months, and eighteen days, to be precise. I’ve been counting. Sure, it was my own fault, and I’d do things differently now if I had the choices over again, but I know I’ll never get that chance, and I have learned to accept my fate.
It’s not so bad, really, being a zombie. The worst part is the isolation. Now that I no longer have a life, I’m shunned by those who do. All I have for company is my fellow zombies. When I look around, all I can see is grey. There is no colour, no vibrancy any more. Not for us.
We’ll have the last laugh, though, when we eat their brains.
Daylight hurts my eyes, now. I prefer to travel at night, when no one has to see my face. I must look like hell. I haven’t been able to look myself in the mirror since the day I died.
My muscles ache. I can force my limbs into a lethargic shuffle, not much more. The others seem to have a similar problem. We perambulate in this fashion, like an army of grey clones marching to a beat that only we can hear, though our hearts, such as they are, lie still. None of us truly feel. None of us are capable. Each day flows into the next, each day we continue, eating the brains of the living. I sometimes think we do it out of spite as much as to survive. Everyone has to make a living somehow. Heh.
I used to worry that people will find out what we do here. That we’ll be caught, persecuted, hunted, destroyed. As our ranks continue to swell, our activities become ever more obvious. They must know, surely they must. Perhaps we’re tolerated. Perhaps we’ve already eaten too many brains.
They are so dreadfully thick, the general populace. I do wonder about them, sometimes. And yet, on some level, I know that the atrocities I commit make me far worse than them, something less than human. I deserve to be spurned, reviled by those upon whom I prey. Yes, everything good in me died the day I took a job in TV Advertising.
…still there? Oh. You scare less easily than most.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course. No one grows up thinking: “Someday, I’m going to become a corporate shill.” I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Then, of course, I got a little older, and a little wiser. I wasn’t going to fight other people’s wars for them. I went to university, studying physics. I’m not sure why, really—it was just something that had always interested me. Of the two hundred or so people in my year, only three of us were anything other than insufferably dull.
We picked each other out immediately, of course, and quickly became friends. Johannes had came over from Berlin the previous summer, and always seemed to have plenty of superb dope, which he was more than happy to share. He was taller than I, with shoulder–length straggly brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Chloe was five foot two of stunning beauty. Her hair was died pillar-box red, and her eyes were a glorious, dazzling emerald. Her skin seemed to glow, almost, like nothing I’ve ever seen. She seemed so ridiculously out of place amidst that sea of grey-complexioned, blank-eyed faces in the lecture halls. I never did work up the courage to ask her out. I think she knew, though, and maybe pitied me a little.
We all dropped out at the same time; in the year that Margaret Thatcher declared war on an island of puffins. The three of us attended demonstrations wherever possible, and Chloe even organised a couple. There was always something new, under Thatcher. We visited Faslane Peace Camp, after the miner’s strike. There was more than enough there to keep us busy, and our visit became a stay of almost three years, before we moved to a squat in Glasgow. I never could stay away from this city for too long. Those were happy times, probably the best years of my life. And also the last. Somehow we wound up hitching all the way down to London for the Poll Tax riots, and that was when I lost Johannes and Chloe forever.
It was a hell of a day. I don’t believe the reports that no one was killed—I saw people go under horses. I was nearly crushed myself. Too many people were being herded into spaces far too small to contain them. The stink of stale sweat and terror lay heavy in the air. I remember staring right into the cold, dead eyes of a policeman, bodies packed tight around me, just before something struck me on the back of the head, and everything went black.
It was two weeks before I regained consciousness. The doctor told me I had been comatose. I asked about Chloe and Johannes, but he’d heard of no one matching their descriptions. He gave me an injection of some sort, and told me that I would have to cut red meat out of my diet or suffer complications. He also said to avoid salt wherever possible. The injection had left me feeling dizzy and somewhat nauseous, so I didn’t really stop to wonder about that at the time.
The squat had been abandoned when I got home. My stuff was gone, too, save for a couple of letters (we knew the postie; he was a decent guy and delivered our stuff even though he wasn’t supposed to). All of them had been opened. The first was from my bank, telling me that my account had been frozen. The second was from the DSS, letting me know that my dole was getting cut. The third was a piece of unsolicited trash from some recruitment agency. I nearly threw it away, but realised that if I did I’d probably be fucked. I didn’t want to wind up like those poor homeless guys you see shambling along the streets at night, eyes rolled back into their skulls, sallow flesh hanging off their bones as they moan and stumble and eat whatever they can get their hands on. I called the number on the back of the letter with my last ten pence in the world.
They offered me an interview that day, for a position as an office junior. I felt atrocious and knew that I looked worse, but there was really nothing else that I could do. They were incredibly understanding when I turned up, a dishevelled, stinking mess. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to give me a job in that condition, but they seemed somewhat eager to employ me. When I explained my situation they offered me my first month’s salary in advance, so that I could get myself sorted out and get some better clothes. I guess I should have been suspicious then, but I was still feeling half-dead from whatever drugs the doctor had given me. Never one to pass up my only chance in hell of getting by, I took the job.
It took me three days to realise that I wasn’t eating. I just didn’t think about it. I wasn’t hungry. I’d get home from work late, almost immediately pass out (very deep sleep—not a single dream that I could remember) get up the next morning and go straight to the office. It was another two days before I noticed the dried blood under my fingernails and the slightly metallic taste I usually woke up with. I think I panicked a bit, then.
The blackouts got less severe, over time. At first I thought I was having nightmares—vague, half-remembered visions of dark alleyways, creeping up behind vagrants and late-night revellers, clawing and biting. The dreams became more substantial, until I was left with no doubt whatsoever that I was actually committing these acts. I do it by choice, now. I tried to stop, once—I lasted a little over two days before the pain in my chest became too much to bear. In order to survive, I am forced to eat the brains of the living.
Not literally, of course. There are far too many of us, and we must feed so very often. We need only occasional morsels of flesh and blood, and there are plenty of cats and dogs around. No, what we eat is intelligence. We drain it, little by little, from drunkards and vagrants. And you never remember in the morning. A splitting headache, perhaps. Gaps in the memory. These are our calling cards. And every single time, you’re getting dimmer.
At least, that’s how it used to work. We have people for that sort of thing, now. Some of the furthest-gone vagrants, we brought to our side. It keeps them going. No one even looks at them, wonders at the spittle-flecked lips, the sallow flesh, the shambling, muttering mounds of rag and bone. It makes them perfect for the task. And we have richer feeding grounds.
“Centralisation”, they call it. We’re told it will make us more…efficient. That’s what we’re working on, here and elsewhere. I don’t know how, but it works. The hunger never comes when I’m in the office. I feel…sated, there. I’m not even sure who we’re working for. The government, I suppose. They stand to gain the most from all of this. They’re the only ones who could arrange it all, and keep it covered. It goes far beyond any one corporation. Everyone who works in marketing is dead. Those we cannot reach through television, we get with telesales. We have people out on the street with clipboards, in broad daylight, who will suck your brains out while-u-wait. Enormous billboards which offend the eye and dull the mind festoon the sides of buildings in major cities, and line the more important roads. We convince people to wear advertising. “Brand names”, they call them. Someone’s little joke, there, I’m sure. The fact that we get away with such blatant activities is only proof of their effectiveness. Those who fight back we watch until we can turn them to our side. Like me.
I long ago gave up any hope for my own salvation. I don’t really deserve it. I do wonder about Chloe sometimes, though. I guess I’m saving the last of my hope for her. In my fantasies she always escapes the crowds, ducks through a gap between police officers, slips off down a side street and somehow gets out of there, to the underground, to safety. In reality I know I’m kidding myself. Even if she did escape then, she was always so active, so high profile. She must have been caught. Once, at a seminar, I thought I caught a flash of bright, pillar-box red amidst the sea of grey-complexioned, blank-eyed faces in the hall. I never did see it again, though. Probably somebody had brought in a snack.
I don’t deserve to see her again, anyhow. I’ve known this from the first day I started to enjoy my work. It’s the only thing I can take pleasure in, really. I think it was mobile telephones that ensnared me, caused me to appreciate the sheer elegance of the whole operation. Millions of people wilfully clamping the things to their heads, gleefully serving up their own brains. Every handset is a transmitter, every cell a receiving station. I couldn’t help but admire such breathtaking gall. And I, tiny cog in the corporate apparatus, secretly, disgustingly delight in being part of it. Like I said, it’s not such a bad un-life.
I often used to wonder just how the dead were returning and being given jobs in marketing. I guess there’s no more room in Hell.
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