Uninfected

The dark is quiet without the roar of zombies from all around, and the screams of humans that wandered in for undiscovered food. The mall, everything, used to be paradise. All the cars on the roads stopped, the lights went off, and there was only the dull hum of hunger.

There was easy quiet for a long time, other than in small corners of the world: Nantucket, Norilsk, all of Iceland, and some scarce towns were hardly touched by the virus, and it was those small corners out of which fought and crawled the strain of this antidote they found.

Although the world is still quiet, they said the virus has been eradicated, and that all the zombies have been turned back. All that were left, at least. The humans shot many, but even more just went hungry for so long that they fell apart. I am hungry, he feels.

It is only a matter of time before they break through the front doors and find him and infect him with the antidote. The last surviving zombie would be gone. He is so hungry, though, that he could give in. Let them come, at least he wouldn’t be hungry anymore.

He just groans and waits. He does not build a barricade, or hide under a table, find a gun, or sneak away to some tundra where no one would ever stumble upon him. He is not like people with their exaggerated, almost spiritual urge to self-preservation. He is already dead.

He will fall apart eventually and be a hungry dust stacked up in the mall’s corners. But, more likely, they will find him and turn him back. It would be horrible to be human: Scuttling around finding food like roaches, refusing to die despite God himself sending them a plague.

There is nothing righteous or sacrificial in it. They are just proud in their species, and their assumption that the way they are is the best way to be. The last zombie knows this isn’t true. There is nothing prideful about being dead. He doesn’t want to be like them.

But instead he is now the last one, hiding from them. It is all upside down, like someone with their shirt inside out. It makes him angry; hungry. They made walls and towers and guns; they were the last ones. Then the drug came, and they don’t need guns anymore.

They are returning to their streets, to happiness, as if nothing ever happened. Their children will be born without knowledge of him, without knowing he had wiped them out. They were once him. They will never know they would like it more to be dead. Maybe their parents know, though.

What of them persists so greatly for their own survival when backed into a corner? What jumps up and demands existence to go on living? Nothing he has seen. It must not be in their brains, then; the cockroach persistence. That is nothing like the hunger — but quite the opposite.

They shamble as I do, he thinks. And I shamble like the grass in the wind, the waves in the night. I used to know what waves were, but I can only now know that they shamble, and that is all of it. He shambles and groans in the dark.

He only wishes that he could infect one more. Then, perhaps, the world would be beautifully overrun by corpses. But he could not infect the whole world himself; he could eat one brain, but he would start to ache if he ate more than one at a time by himself.

Despite his hunger, he wobbles around like before. He doesn’t care where he steps or ends up, but he hopes for a brain. Even a small one. A child’s brain for a snack at least, but there is no one in the mall but him, and the radio’s battery dies.

The next sound he hears is outside; some voices. He stumbles away from the front of the mall and over to the escalator. His shriveled legs can barely clear the steps, but he does not want them to find him, so he climbs. He walks up to the second floor.

Banging erupts through the mall. They pound the wood that long-dead scavengers bolted against the glass door. He used to be the one pounding on the door. He stands high above the floor covered in his broken brothers, knowing the world will no longer be quiet, and he had failed.

He could eat them and keep on his death march, but quelling his hunger isn’t worth having to live: that’s why he is hungry. Light smashes into the mall, and a group of explorers witness the last dead man in the world plummet to the ground and explode into dust.