I, Zombie

I can hear footsteps occasionally, their percussion traveling through the seemingly endless feet of dirt between here and there. Like the strange muted voices of people gathered around the edge of the swimming pool that you have sunk to the bottom of, holding your breath and ticking off the seconds inside your head. Trying to break your personal record as you look up at their distorted reflections as the ripples in the water make a mess of their faces. I’m not counting anymore; I stopped a long time ago. In fact I don’t really have any use for oxygen. I stopped breathing a long time ago, too. I have no idea how long I have been down here, trying to swim back to the surface through this rock and soil. The hands of the clock bloodied and bruised and ripped, the ribbons of the flesh they used to be are back there somewhere among the scrabble that ruined them. A strip or two may still be in the back of my throat curled around my vocal chords like a bow; I think I can feel a tattered end tickling me, though it may just be me laughing at myself out of sheer frustration.

They jumped me, of course.

It felt like I had just woken up. My head was still full of fog from the dream I had been having; a walking dead version of Alice showing up at my door one afternoon. A small pile of bruises in a torn dress and bedraggled sweater, but her eyes gave away her intentions. Always ablaze with coppery fire, those two. Forever one of my favorite science lessons: if you heat copper up enough to burn, it flares with a green flame. I let her in, cleaned her up and she repaid me with teeth somewhere in the dark. I woke up, cursing the slippery edges of subconsciousness, only to find myself wandering down the middle of a street somewhere between dusk and dawn. I froze, fairly sure that I was awake, that this wasn’t a continuation of the dream, when my stomach began to growl. And I mean that literally. Loud twistings of my guts churning against each other with a hunger I thought could only exist in my head.

And then the noise.

It came from behind me, an explosion followed by firelight that stretched my shadow halfway up the block. Whisper thin and slightly darker than the pavement beneath my feet, I followed it back to them to discover I was missing a shoe. But it was not completely naked, that foot, as when I reached down to touch it my fingers came back wet. Sticky. I rubbed my fingers together and brought them to my nose, thinking perhaps I might understand what it was that my foot had gotten into, and found that it smelled acrid. Metallic. My stomach growled again as I turned towards the light behind me in hopes of revealing more of the mess gathering in my palm and my jaw dropped.

The skyline was on fire.

It looked like half the city was burning. There were plumes of smoke rising into the sky and casting themselves against the moon like clouds. A number of the taller buildings appeared as candles burning in the darkness, their tops all wreathed in orange as the moon’s face hung above them staring down as though it was her birthday and she was gathering breath to blow them out.

Maybe that is what is all over my foot: frosting.

I’ve been running around over the top of a birthday cake.

Louder now, the noises that woke me up. I can hear breaking glass, terrified screams amidst the pattern of thuds that are shaking the ground at my feet. Then gunshots. I wondered as I stood frozen in the middle of the street, was I somehow responsible? Perhaps this group of men running towards me might be able to tell me what is going on. As I watched their rapid approach I realized that something was wrong. The pattern of their gait was off. The way they were carrying themselves was far from normal. They were zigzagging, lumbering up the street in my direction, but not towards me. Past me, it seemed, with the intention their broken frames suggested. One of them was dragging its leg. Another passed me by with both of its arms hanging limp and slapping against its sides as it ran. I tried to get the attention of a man who was missing his pants, but he didn’t seem able to respond as a large wad of hair that ended in a chunk of scalp was hanging out of his mouth.

Then shouts. More gunshots rang out against the cacophony of voices. Someone runs up behind me, her attention turned towards the group that had lumbered past, and I reached out and grabbed her. Not out of thought, but of something instinctual. I yank her head towards mine and I tear her ear off with my teeth. My stomach unwinds just a little as her blood spills over my tongue and I find myself relishing the coppery sting as she shouts, “You bit my ear!” I quickly find the gaping wound on the side of her head and plunge my teeth back into her torn flesh, making quick work of it before the crunching of her skull against my jaws fills my ears.

It’s like music.

I take her down to the ground with me, my hands pulling skin from bone to the sound of her screams creating the score for this act. Finding purchase with my teeth at the edges of her ear canal and widening it with each bite until impatience and lust causes me to grab her head with both hands and slam it against the pavement. Again and again and again until it cracks open like a coconut and spills it’s sweet milk all around my knees. And I lap it up like a rabid dog. I pull handfuls of her brains out of the broken cereal bowl of her skull and devour every single thought she ever had.

That’s when it hit me.

The baseball bat.

It caught my shoulder and spun me around. The second strike landed against my ribs and I clearly heard something snap, but I didn’t feel anything. The third hit home at the back of my head. Fireworks went off inside my skull and I looked up at the moon, seeing Alice’s face reflected back at me through a gray haze just before my lights were turned off. I thought of her, her throat and the warm release of her blood. The world went black around me as I imagined eating my way through her bones.

Strike 3.

And now I am here. For how long I have no idea, and until when I cannot say. I cannot fathom the fathoms. I feel like I have been digging my entire life. I was born among the deepest of roots and nursed on the blood meal of worms. Taught arithmetic with the clicking of beetle wings. Told bedtime stories from the tongues of crickets. Down here daylight is just the dream of maggots. Their slick white bodies are the contrast to the underbelly of roaches. Like angels squirming through the loam above my head. Always above my head. Always just beyond my fingertips. But I am coming, Alice.

I am coming, Alice.

I whisper that mantra into the dirt with split lips.

I write that incantation into the rock with a ragged tongue.

It’s her name coupled with this insatiable thirst that keeps me moving through the dark, down here somewhere underground. No map lines exist to follow nor any light to read them by, just some instinctual narrative that escaped me in that other life, telling me when to bear slightly right or turn sharply to the left to correct my path. I imagine it’s her heart I’m navigating, that’s all this is. Practice. Eyes closed tight against the brightness that reveals the interiors of those chambers.

Chamber one, a roost for crows. A room full of murder waiting for my foretold arrival and the squawking that heralds it. They sing in unison, Who is that tapping, insistently rapping, rapping at our chamber door? And so coyly so, considering the carnage their claws are craving to create. My feet fall upon a floor of feathers as I enter, the target of 99 cocked heads regarding me with eyes of onyx. I am blinded by a rainbow of light streaming from beneath wings as they slip from their perches and their talons finding purchase in my skin. That rush of air that delivers the penance to be paid from the flapping as they struggle to maintain flight while engaged in the evisceration of flesh. The behavior once rendered now repaid in the rending of beaks. The pound of flesh, flayed and flung into the furthest of the four corners my limbs are pointing towards as I lay flattened upon that floor.

The second is full of rocking chairs. They move seemingly of their own volition until my eyes focus, still stinging from the blinding colors found in the first chamber, to see that each of those seats is occupied by a terrifying grin sitting on the face of a black cat. Each of them smiling between the strokes of their tongue across the surface of their paws while they lock their gaze upon my own. They take their time, torturous taunts delivered by the twitching of tails ending in a snap in my direction. I stand frozen, unable to see the other side as the joints of those chairs fill the room with creaking music that threatens to drive me crazy. All at once, just before I feel that sanity is about to give me the slip, the rocking stops abruptly and in perfect synchronization they all disembark from their stations and as silent as milk they pad into a congregation gathering around my ankles. They expertly zigzag between my legs avoiding the drops of blood dripping from my chest and hitting the floor beneath my feet in a pattern of soft splashes. "Safe as houses," I think as I lift a foot to step forward only to discover that I am quite mistaken. Several tails wrap themselves around my ankles and but with a slight tug countering my movement brings the whole mess crashing down. I look up and those furry smirking faces have all turned into leering, yawning chasms of teeth string down at me. I await a chewing that never comes. I discover that they have opted for an endeavor far more indicative of their nature as the sound of their nails snicking into place fills the air and they set upon my back. Ribbons of my flesh begin to fall in front of my eyes like the fluttering remnants of Christmas presents. They each take their turn dragging their claws across my back like an amorous lover, along with a farewell scrape of sandpapered tongue as a postscript.

The third chamber finds me walking barefoot through the doorway of a hedge maze whose walls stand so tall that they blot out the sun. I anxiously stick a toe through the archway before following with the rest of my bloodied and bruised body. Vaguely familiar this, as I come to a T intersection of a green barrier stretching out for what appears to be miles. I turn left and I walk for days. I walk for nights. I chase the moon into the sea and run the sun right over a cliff, looking for a sign in the twisted emerald walls I’ve become prisoner to. Counting my footsteps quickens the passage of time that never seems to end inside this labyrinth. Dawn creeps over the horizon and I see just up ahead a pair of trees situated in the wall much like the hundreds I have walked past, but I stopped to look and then I notice how two of their branches have grown into each other at 45 degree angles halfway up their trunks, giving the area between them an almost house-like shape, or perhaps…the thought is finished for me as a large, dusky owl flew out of hiding and regarded me skeptically as it climbed into the sky.

I noticed that the space between the two trees was somewhat recessed and upon further investigation I found myself inside a hidden opening in the wall. This time, I turned right. I was quickly led into a neatly manicured clearing, save for a hole located directly in its center. I made my way to the edge of that opening and got down on my hands and knees and peered inside. I could see nothing. A few distant lights began to flicker the longer I looked. A shadow moved against the darkness, and I bent down even further to try to see when a white paw reached out of the hole and firmly grabbed hold of my nose. I could see the silhouette of twin ears against the dim light of the stars on the other side and then two eyes staring up at me.

“Well, what are you waiting for?,” its voice asked from the depths.

It pulled me into hole.

The fourth chamber made me dizzy. My stomach flip-flopped over itself as I was turned upside down then immediately right side-up in the blink of an eye. My shoulders wedged tightly inside the opening of the portal and my hands slapped themselves helplessly against my sides on the other side. My legs kicked against nothing but the air underneath them as I attempted to find some footing. I looked around but the rabbit was nowhere to be found, just a short stretch of earth around me that was surrounded on every side by an ocean. Then I saw her. Alice, making her way out of the waves, her skin glowing. Luminescent. Wet and wild white locks plastered to her forehead just above those eyes that threatened to burn themselves right out of her skull. She bent down over me like the moon itself had come down out of the sky and whispered into my ear, “Darling, do you remember this part?”

The rabbit reappeared and chimed in, “Off with his head!”

I answered her, “I do.”

The blade, raised high above her head, catches the reflection of her throat and the hollow I never wanted to escape just before it falls upon mine and my head rolls down the shore and is carried out to sea. It eventually sinks to the depths to become home to some mutant crab, my tongue lolling out of my mouth like a welcoming mat for his crustacean compatriots.

I wake from this daydream to find my fingers wrapped tightly around a tree root and I realize that her heart is only a few minutes and handfuls of dirt away from me.

Can you hear me, Alice?

I have been down here for years digging my way home, dying to get my hands around her heart, to see to fruition the seeming eons of honing my finger’s skill to tear a hole into her chest and unmake the puzzle of bones keeping it safe.

Are you listening Alice?

Her heart belongs to me. Her brains belong to me. Her body is mine. There is nothing standing between her and I and this beautiful oblivion other than these pages. They are kindling to the fire burning inside this oven. Nothing but a thin sheet of glass in its door is obscuring my vision now. But for just a little application of pressure to its surface, I will be free from these constraints.

I'll be free to bind her in some of my own and consume her in kind.

As I climb out of the grave much worse for wear than when I entered it, I muse upon the idea of rebirth: Is this what it feels like to be born?

Did I feel this clarity back then, a wet mewling thing inside my mother’s womb? Was I nothing more than a blank slate, a thoughtless beast scratching at the walls of her guts to get out? Was I full of hunger then as I am now? Had i dug my way out of the darkness with teeth and fingers if only to use them again to get back inside? It is the only motivation I have, a raging desire to claw my way back inside her chest? Yes, I am the dead, dying to make a feast of her flesh and a bed from her bones. I can only think of her blood and the warm bath my face is waiting for. The thought maddens my tongue as it pushes up and out of this thin layer of soil my mouth has wrapped itself around. My fingertips begin breaching the ground far above the grave I have left timeless behind me in the depths of the dirt.

Much like my mother did so many years ago, the earth rolls her hips and spits me out. A wriggling mess of flesh, damp and heaving as I emerge from the darkness into the light above.

I use the roots of this tree to pull myself free of that space, the miles of hell between then and now, and towards the short distance that lay between me and her neck. I attempt to pull myself up, but my legs seem to be uncooperative. Perhaps their buckling is some kind of joke that they are making me the butt of as I seem to keep landing directly upon it. After a dozen or so attempts I finally manage to pull myself up and I lean against the face of that tree, my own pressing itself against and into the ridges and valleys of the bark that covers its trunk. I feel the wind scratching across the surface of the small areas of skin that aren’t covered by mud and for a moment the rage inside my head is soothed by the sensation. It rustles past my ears and I am reminded of the whispers that once fell from her lips and filled my head with a heat that still burns with a temperature my need for her own heat could only hope to attain.

Then my legs buckled again as my stomach, apparently awoken by the thought of a meal, churned and emptied itself of the unknown number of mouthfuls of dirt I swallowed during my graven exodus. A river of mud and bile and bugs comes pouring out of me and splashes across my hands.

There are worms, too, still wriggling.

I pull myself back up again to embrace the tree when I hear shouting coming from behind me.

“Holy shit, man, did you see that? I didn’t know that zombies tossed cookies!”

“That fucker just pulled himself out of the ground. I thought that only happened in the movies!”

I turned to see the source of that noise and spotted two men standing across the street from where I had unearthed myself. I was trying to ascertain the situation, gauge the danger when something bit into between my left shoulder and my chest. I looked down to find an arrow sticking out of that space. It had yellow feathers on it. An arrow. "A fucking arrow? Really?" It seemed that it had gone all the way through my body and pinned me to the tree that only moments before had been my salvation.

Another one hit me in the stomach.

Then another through my right arm. Another one struck my hip.

“Yeah! Got ‘em! Look at him, trying to get free! You see that shit, Johnny? I pinned that dead motherfucker right to that tree. And you said that taking archery classes was for pussies!”

“Yeah, yeah. You got him. Now grab your machete so we can go kill it.”

“But it’s already dead, shouldn’t we say something different?”

“Not this shit again. Look, it’s not fucking dead if it is up and walking around. Dead is dead. Dead is not breathing, not standing, not mobile and certainly not eating to sustain itself. Okay? That thing is only half dead if you have to get technical about it. Sure, it still has use of its limbs and it certainly seems to feel the need to consume, and it has the ability to do so. That is not dead. It is some kind of disease, you know? A disease that turns it into a mindless eating machine.”

“Yeah, but the TV said…”

"Fuck the fucking TV, Johnny. That’s your problem, well one of them, anyway. You believe everything you hear on it. Let’s just get down there and kill it before my next birthday, okay?”

I watch make their way across the street. They walk over to me. The shorter one pulls a knife from a sheath on his belt and starts poking me in the chest with it. It doesn’t hurt. I don’t cry out. But I do begin to feel that rage creeping back up from behind my eyes and it quickly spreads through my body. That space doesn’t belong to them. None of it does. That knife shouldn’t be wielded upon my skin by anyone other than her.

“See, man? It ain’t alive. It don't cry out or nothing when you poke at it.”

They turn their attention away from me for a moment, arguing.

“Are you serious? It’s doesn’t bleed either, but the fact that it is standing there, that it just minutes ago pulled itself out of the ground should be a rather large clue that it isn’t fucking dead!”

I think about pointing out to them that I actually am bleeding. When I began to get angry about them piercing my flesh with that blade and how that act is only meant for her. That thought made something stir within my chest. Something warm. Something with a life of its own. That thought motivated my legs, and I kicked the one closest to me. My foot landed firmly in the center of his chest and knocked him off his feet. He rolled a few times before landing on the pavement, looking up at me in shock as his own blood began to seep from a long scrape that the pavement left on the side of his face. His buddy was quicker, and his blade caught sunlight and momentarily blinded me as the edge of his machete cleanly sliced through all but one toe from my foot before my leg had dropped back to my side after kicking both of his stupid buddy’s out from underneath him.

I looked down at my foot in amazement, only my pinky toe remained.

I laughed, looking back and forth from it to the finger I have been missing since I was 2.

Then I realized that I had laughed.

I had somehow taken in and expelled oxygen. Maybe you don’t know shit about being a zombie either, I wondered, just as the machete cleaved the air again. I ducked just in time for him to bury it in the tree behind my head, along with a portion of my left ear.

I laughed again.

The fatal flaw in their plan was thinking that I had a single concern for a few pieces of flesh from my body, or the couple of holes that their arrows had made. My only concern was for the body that I hoped to find behind that door up the street, not my own. That saving my own was a worthless endeavor if it could not be delivered through that threshold. I don’t even need limbs, not really, as long as I had the teeth in my head firmly held between jaws that are up to the challenge of dragging my skull across that porch and into that house. With that thought I used my one good foot to shove myself free of those restraints. Those four arrows ripping through my flesh like a laboratory frog pulling itself from a dissection board. The feathers tickled my skin as Mr. Machete struggled to loosen his weapon from the tree behind me. I notice a gun holstered at his side, and I pull it from his belt just as he managed to pull his machete loose from the tree. I smiled as he looked down and noticed his mistake and I pressed the barrel of his gun to his chest and put the other hand around his neck.

I pulled the trigger and his body bucked.

His arms beat against my back like bird wings and I lowered him to the ground, my teeth finding purchase in his neck as I tore out his throat. I fed greedily on the sinew of tendons that had tightened as he gulped in his last remaining breaths. Too busy, too hungry, too famished to notice his buddy creeping up on this gruesome scene. Too loudly smacking my lips around the ragged flesh of his neck, tearing strips of flesh from him like ripping a piece of paper into halves to hear the approaching footsteps, or the cock of his gun.

The bullet ripped through the top of my back and exited my stomach. I looked down to see the hole it created, and I found myself wondering how deeply into the ground it went. Did it travel the same path as I did, but in reverse? Did it bury itself into one of the shoes I left behind?

I hear him cursing his miss.

Announcing his sin at the top of his lungs, he ejects the spent cartridge from his gun and fumbles with a full one. I pick up the machete lying beside his dead friend and with one deft movement I separate the lower half of his left leg from the upper half, and he drops like a bag of potatoes. I got up from my meal and I stood over him, my shadow falling across his face like a sundial. ‘Time to die’, the clock read. I slice open his throat with the edge of that blade and watched the intermittent jets of blood arc through the air. I stand and observe until it dies off, slowly losing the angle as it turns to seep. I picked up his head by the hair and flipped him over onto his back. With a firm grip on his scalp, I plant my good foot firmly against his buttocks and pull. Hard. A satisfying, wet ripping fills my ears like a new favorite song as his skull fully separates itself from his neck and is followed by his spinal column tearing free of connective tissue. I let go of his hair and pick up the end of his backbone and I turn and walk away, enjoying the rhythmic thud of his cranium bouncing against the sidewalk as I set eyes upon the walkway to her front door just down the street.

This is a dead man’s town.

Perhaps I am just lucky. Perhaps I conjured some kind of spell down there, whispering her name into the ears of insects. Their legs repeating my mantra over and over, rubbing them together like man making that first fire and creating magic out of desire. Or maybe it’s the thought of our friction that keeps me safe, relatively speaking.

I made it to her porch without incident.

But only that far.

I hear screaming over my shoulder. “Zombie!,” but I pay it no mind. I swung that spinal column through the air and it’s skull slams against her door with a pleasant “thwack,” announcing my arrival. A bullet screams its way through my right calf as I knock again with the bones of a dead man. Then another whizzes past my face and splinters the frame of her doorway to the left of my head. I knock again, and another bullet lands in my right shoulder as I hear footsteps rapidly approaching from behind me.

Finally she opens the door.

Standing but a few feet in front of me, and my legs threaten to give out under the weight of her gaze. Those eyes that lit my way through the ground, through the hours and days and weeks and months that I was in the dark. Those lithe porcelain hands and fingers that I dreamed about, plucking muscle from my bones like tearing stems from cherries. Those appendages that are now leveling a gun at my head. I toss the spinal column and skull at her feet. An offering. An appeasement. But I know that to die right at this moment with nothing more than this momentary glance would be fine. A gift, really. I close my eyes waiting for the penance of my brains being forced out of the back of my head like so much oatmeal splattering across a kitchen floor from a dropped cereal bowl, but all that comes is the deafening noise of two gunshots that missed their mark.

I opened my eyes to find out that she didn’t.

Two bodies just behind me, one on the right and one of the left now lay dead on her front porch. Each bearing pistols of their own as well as matching entry wounds in the center of their foreheads. No sin here, I notice, none at all. I turn back to face her as she stands staring at me, att the mess staring right back. Does she know of the fever that is now building in my fingers and toes? Well, what’s left of them. Does she know the danger she is in or the danger that she just dispelled being pale in comparison? Does she know that my tongue is but a whip driving my teeth into a frenzy?

She reaches out, takes my hand, and I realize with the look in her eyes that I am in no less danger than those that are decorating her front porch like Halloween. The nails on the ends of her fingers scratch deeply into my palms, disclosing her intentions as she pulls me further into her house and as death closed one door, she opened another.