Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Read online

  Call Me Zombie

  Volume I: Rose

  By Jasmina Kuenzli

  This book is dedicated to my brothers, Jeremiah and Joseph.

  --“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human— “

  --“THEN—I—DON’T—WANT—TO—BE—HUMAN!”

  --J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 824

  Table of Contents

  October

  August

  Run

  I Want to Die with You

  Heavenly Dreams

  Stay

  September

  Levi

  Anchor

  The Jackals

  October

  We Fight

  Girls’ Night

  The End

  Gideon

  Beyond Repair

  Call Me Zombie

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  October

  Rose

  He stands there, the dark son, returning from the grave, and all I can see is the blood on his hands, and the black, moist dirt, and the rotting look in his eyes and hair. He reaches a hand up to me, begging me to pull him out of the pit he’s fallen into, but I can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t. You’re too far down and I can’t reach you I won’t please, please just lay back down and die why are you coming back I can’t.

  “Ben,” I choke out, as he looks at me, wounded and desperate, like he can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t reach out for him. And I feel something inside me harden and turn cold, because sisters aren’t supposed to be like this. I’m not supposed to be callous and cold and why are no tears coming, shouldn’t I be at least crying as the black-red dirt clings to his skin and it drips from his hands; shouldn’t I feel something?

  I drum it into myself. I’ve failed I’ve failed I’ve failed but still nothing happens; there’s just the dirt and the grass and the stench of smoke and blood and rotting flesh, and I wonder if this is how the Civil War smelled, of blood and death and decay. Did someone stand feet away as their brother lay dying, watching as he reached out for them, watching and feeling nothing?

  Maybe this is how I’ll die, watching him sit in his grave and shudder out his breaths and doing nothing, nothing because I can’t reach him, he’s too far down and he’s covered in blood and dirt, slipping and scrabbling at the edge, sliding down and grasping onto the mud, desperate to get up.

  I shouldn’t even be standing here, I should be running, leaving him to succumb on his own, to lose the shred of whatever it is that has him looking at me like that, like he cannot believe God sent him the only sister in the world who doesn’t cry.

  He’s still looking at me, and I know it should burn me, that tears should fall hot and thick out of my eyes like molten metal; I should cry for him, but my fingers are numb and I am so cold.

  I can feel his black, bloody hands choking me, pulling me into the grave, turning me into one too, someone who reaches up and grabs for help to lure someone else down, and suddenly I’m unfrozen, set free like a game of tag. I turn and run, sprinting through the graveyard, through mist that feels like a light rain as it caresses my skin, until I burst through it, and I feel cold and clammy, his hands. I’m jumping over the smaller holes in the ground, holes dug for children and the small and the ones who came first, rising out of the ground like the worst sort of retribution.

  It was all us, all our fault, running around thinking we were invincible. Thinking that in the modern era nothing like disease would ever be threatening, ever be more than a bedtime story to fool children into brushing their teeth.

  Until it became real. Until it became Patient Zero and blood pouring out of the eyes of infants, wailing through the night. Until they started burying the babies in mass graves. Until we noticed that the virus mutated, taking infants one week, toddlers the next.

  Until the first three year-old burst out of his dirt and bit an unsuspecting widower on the knee and the entire world collapsed in on itself. The next weeks were full of running, me and my brothers and our mom, stockpiling food, sprinting to relative safety through crowds and mobs of people desperate for anything that would make them think they stood a chance, standing guard every night, terrified of the monsters with innocent faces.

  Something looms up at me out of the shadow of an angel, and I veer to the left, almost falling into another hole. I don’t stop to see more than flying black dirt and smell blood, but my brain fills in the gaps. Snarling, eyes filled with inhuman rage and malice, swallowed up in black.

  The face is always the same though. It’s Jonathan, my little brother. My responsibility. The one I held in my arms when he was born. The one I taught to apply to college and drive a stick and all the other things Ben wasn’t around for. Jonathan, the look of horror on his face as the blood started pouring from his eyes. Bearing Ben’s admonitions to ‘suck it up’ with a straight face. Jonathan, holding a gun to his head before I could stop him.

  Two shots. Two people, gone. First the eyes, then the brain, that’s what they said. So my mom saw a little blood on her eye and she had lost her youngest son and her husband had been dead for years so she gave me the gun and told me to look away and I shot her, I shot her because she wanted me to and I always did what she asked and Ben was lighting a joint and there was no one else.

  I’m still running, and I’m about to reach the road. Monsters line the road, too. Monsters who reach for your breasts and your wallet in the same motion. Monsters with sadness in their eyes and beer on their breath. Monsters who have chosen to deal with it all by not giving a fuck about anything. Monsters that Ben joined, before tonight and the graveyard and the dirt

  I can hear them over the rasp of my breath, their slow shuffling, inexorable and endless, and I know Ben is among them, gaze burning into me, face a mask of desperation, ever closer and endlessly forward. I finger the weapons that hang at my belt, wondering if it will be easier to stop.

  Stop and turn and shoot and end it, end him once and for all, before he drags me down and makes me spill blood from my eyes like tears.

  I picture it, turning and facing them all, aiming carefully, a headshot to the figure in the red, dirt-stained hoodie, and I stumble, almost falling flat. The image of his face, despair and pleading and accusation, marred by the blood and the dirt but still mine, my fault, my death, and I can’t shoot him. I can’t help him but I can’t shoot him either.

  But I can run. I leap over the line of shrubbery lining the cemetery and onto the road, my stride lengthening as my feet find confidence in even ground. I can always run.

  My feet pound on the pavement, my breath coming out in short gasps until I settle into a rhythm tap tap gasp tap tap breathe, breathe okay but I’m still so cold and my chest is tight and now I’m remembering the day I ran away, the day I said fuck it they’re dead you’re not family you’re not anything and I left. Grabbed the Glock they left out by accident and my knives and ran through the whole night, because fuck if I was going to die in a secluded corner of the woods, head in a cloud of smoke and alcohol, too wasted to even fight back when they inevitably came. I ran and I left him, and I didn’t look back.

  And that was the last I saw of him until tonight, when I ran into the graveyard hoping to pull him out, hoping that he wasn’t gone yet, I could come back, I could still save him. Still save him.

  But I can’t I can’t he’s gone he’s too far away he’s gone. I pick up my pace; I’m sweating now but the damp air is making it feel like a fever, and are those tears or blood?

  Still I see him, dripping and covered in grime, hair matted to his head and glistening blackly in the moonlighted mist.

  Jonath
an, eyes shut tight, bright blood tears staining his face, holding the pistol to his head.

  Mom, big brown eyes begging me to end it, end it before it gets worse. The squeeze of my hand on the trigger, and a sound like fireworks that isn’t fireworks. Jonathan’s hand squeezing the trigger, and the dual explosions that crashed down into my life like atomic bombs, destroying all, merciless and necessary.

  I’m running, fleeing, flying, but they’re all right behind me. The flames slice through me like knives, and the coldness isn’t keeping them at bay, and there is an old red barn on my left and a dead horse on my right, and the flies swarm me, landing on my hair and biting my neck like I’m already dead.

  ***

  I get back to the farmhouse at dawn, and I am still alive.

  He comes toward me, bursting out of the house, and I collapse to the ground and I scream. I scream and scream until he gets to me and puts his arms around me, and he says, “Shhh, they’ll hear you.” So I clench my fists into his shirt and bend my head, mouth against his chest to muffle the sound, and I scream until I feel like my throat is bleeding,

  He is still holding me, and I cannot breathe. I am choking on my own tears; they’re going to drown me, and I start gasping harder for air but there isn’t any. There isn’t any air and oh god I’m going to drown I’m going to die I can’t I can’t.

  “You are not going to die,” he says, and I realize that I have been speaking out loud. I feel my heart racing in my ears, and I can barely hear him as he untwists my hands from his shirt and raises my face to his.

  I am looking at him, and he is alive. His eyes are blue-green, not black, and they blink at me anxiously, and he has a smudge of dirt on his cheek that fails to conceal the pinkness of his skin, the flush that promises life.

  “You are not going to die.” He says.

  “I am not going to die.”

  ***

  We sit around the living room, stabbing beans out of cans with our forks, and he pretends not to see the way half the time I miss my mouth, my hand shaking too hard to stay in a single trajectory.

  After the third spill down my already bloody, ripped shirt, I put my mouth around the rim of the can and drink until it is empty.

  He’s still eating beside me. Neat, economical, not the least hint of waste or extravagance. Quick and wary, a soldier.

  He notices that I am looking at him, and he moves closer to me, plopping down on the sofa, making me bounce with the weight of him. His dark hair curls out from his forehead as though it is trying to escape him, and it only draws more attention to his eyes, slightly bloodshot but still mesmerizing and arresting, human.

  I try to say something clever and funny, because he is a boy and he is sitting incredibly close to me, thighs touching thighs through our jeans, and he has a scratch on his cheek that makes him look vulnerable, a tragic hero, the last soldier against a numberless army.

  But my hands are still shaking way too much, and I see that his are too, as he brings them to the edge of my lips. “You’re bleeding,” he says. “You must have cut your lip on the can.”

  I try to hold still, but my hands are still shaking. I clench my fists to stop it but it just makes my whole body shake, throwing me off balance, and I grab onto him for support as he swipes a thumb across my lip and wipes my blood on his jeans.

  Even though I am holding onto him, I can feel the shaking inside me, and I feel like if I sit any longer, I will explode, burst and smash into nothingness.

  Gideon

  She is shaking so much, a fever-ridden drug addict on her last high, that I start to shake too, looking at her, fists clenched against my shirt, entire body a ball of tension and pain. Shell-shocked.

  I want to talk to her, tell her that she is not going to die. I want to tell her that I am sorry about her brother, but we have to move quickly or they’ll find us. I want to tell her that she can still live, but I am having a hard time believing it, because her shaking has become mine now. So I pull her into my chest, hoping she won’t notice the trembling in my arms and the tears that start in my eyes.

  As my eyes close, the images come, careening into me like a car accident.

  My mother, screaming through a haze of tears and blood, pointing the gun at me. Words whose painfulness comes in the truth of them, slashing across my face like whips.

  My hands, gloved in blood, listening to the gasping rattle of breath from the girl who changed everything, who challenged me and gave me the courage to leave, and who I led into a line of fire.

  Blonde hair, stained with blood, rain that pours down around the grave that I dug, from the hole in the ground to the small, rotting body inside of it, with its crimson and black blood still on my hands. The one person I had left to keep safe.

  And her, hours ago, the girl with the torn jeans and the ripped hair, hands cracked and covered with dirt, doing my best to hold her together, because maybe I failed everyone else, but maybe I can still save her.

  “I am not going to die,” she whispers now. And I shudder; I can’t help it, and her arms circle me more securely, and we are crying together, holding onto each other like we are the only things left in the entire universe that matter, because we are. I wake up next to her hours later, and she is looking at me urgently out of the dark, a finger pressed to her lips, the light from the flashlight muted underneath the blanket.

  And that’s when I hear them, feet dragging outside the door.

  We drew the curtains before we went to sleep, but I can still see them, silhouettes, slumped shoulders, limping forward, around and around the house in endless circles. We are surrounded.

  I reach for her hand. It’s cold and slippery with sweat, but I squeeze it anyway.

  She does not respond to my touch, only looks at me, eyes wide in terror, like the fear has frozen her shut.

  With a crash, one of them breaks through the window by the door. It falls on the ground, face covered in cuts from the glass, but before it can move out of the way, more of them come pouring in, stepping on it as it tries to rise. Two girls with matching ponytails and red ribbons, pink dresses barely shining through the thick layer of dirt covering them. An older gentleman, clad in a black suit, his black hair grey at the roots, still slicked back like it must have been the day he died. You wouldn’t know he was a zombie if you didn’t see the gaping hole in his abdomen, where what remains of his entrails hang in an approximation of a smile.

  I should be moving, but I cannot look away from the gentleman and the two girls, who could be father and daughters, a grisly family photo.

  My vision blurs for a moment, and I see another little girl with pigtails, blue eyes wide and looking at me, begging me to play with her dolls. But I am seventeen and selfish, so I tell her to get her fat little face out of my room, and I shut the door.

  The father and daughters advance on me, stumbling over chairs and the dining room table, blocking the door. I open my mouth to scream.

  She pulls at me hard enough to almost dislocate my shoulder, and I stumble forward, my unmanly shriek of terror cut off into a grunt of surprise, catching myself on the edge of the couch.

  “Upstairs,” she shouts, and I wish she knew my name, even though we have been so careful not to tell each other anything about our past, to reveal any weakness, to look at each other as a means of survival and nothing more, knowing that an inevitable night would fall and one of us would have to point and shoot and hesitation would only mean pulling the pin on a grenade you hold close to your heart.

  About halfway to the stairs, I begin to run with her.

  I don’t need her pulling me anymore, but I hang onto her hand.

  We ascend the steps as quickly as we can, two at a time, and I don’t know what we will do. They may be slow, but they can climb. What will we do when they get to the top? Fly?

  She runs to the master bedroom, yanking me in behind her.

  “Help me,” she says, gesturing to the huge wooden vanity spanning the space next to the door.

  I pu
ll it across the door while she runs to the window, yanking back a blue, frilly curtain and peering out the window like Rapunzel. Damsel distressed.

  The zombies are surely coming up the stairs right now. They might stop at the door for a while, but eventually they will hit it hard enough that it will break. Hopefully, they will tear us into enough pieces that we won’t rise again and follow them to another farmhouse and another graveyard and another set of people who have only each other to hold onto.

  I had resigned myself to that fate after Penny died, realized that I would soon be going to join her, and my parents and Monroe and everyone else I’d watched die. I even hoped for it, like maybe I could finally tell them how sorry I was. Or maybe I would burn for what I had done, burn a thousand years for every year I had taken away from them. That would be okay, too.

  It would be a relief, not running and fighting and watching everything that was beautiful and precious burst into ashes, watching Penny die over and over again, feeling Monroe’s blood on my hands no matter how many times I washed them, waking up every night screaming as my mother accused me of the truth, that I put my sister in a shallow grave when I should have saved her. It would be a relief for it all to stop, the way it all must have stopped when my mother shook her head at me, resigned and empty, and placed the barrel against her temple. The way everything stopped for Monroe, when the last breath leaked and shuddered out of her, and she went so still that I knew she was gone.

  But now I am at the top of a two-story house with no way out, and this girl is looking out the window. She is beautiful and fierce, and I remember her icy determination, refusing to let me talk her out of going, and holding her in my arms and letting myself shake with her, holding onto her, and the moonlight catches her blue-grey eyes, making them gleam almost silver.