Etiquette for the Undead

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Etiquette for the Undead

By Plot Roach

I thought that it was hard working a retail job during the economic collapse known as the Second Depression. Had I realized then that I had it made compared to what my “life” would later become, I wouldn’t have complained so much. Sure, it was tough, standing in lines for food handouts, trying to decide which utility to let go unpaid in order to keep the others working. Standing on my feet all day in the hope that Uncle Sam wouldn’t tax the hell out of it so badly that I couldn’t pay rent for the month.

A lot of us lived out of cars, abandoned buildings and even in tents on city land. It was hard to keep a job that way, always smelling of depression and homelessness, no matter how hard you worked to maintain a civilized façade. Summer passed into winter, the worst the country had seen in a hundred years. People froze in their homes, or else died when they started barbeque pits in their bedrooms, but forgot to let the smoke out. A lot of us living ‘on the road’ died of weird diseases not seen since the time of our grandparents that mutated into new threats untreatable by modern medicine.

And just when you think that things couldn’t get any worse, that’s when the zombies came crawling out of the sewers, abandoned buildings and hospital morgues. It was a little trickle at first, nothing to really alert the media about. But it was hard to keep under wraps when the city’s mayor was attacked while giving his usual speech that the economy would turn around and that we all needed to do our part to keep the city together.

His stern lecture turned into a pig’s squeal when a dead homeless man that looked like Abraham Lincoln in a jogging suit took a chunk out of his cheek. The mayor survived -but never recovered, he turned into a zombie a few weeks later and attacked three of his personal aides before his wife put him down like Old Yeller. By that time, the streets were overrun with the undead. The living humans eked out a living by dashing from one safe haven to another. But found that they couldn’t stay long, since the dead knew where to find them almost as soon as they settled into a new location.

And what about me? I should have left when my roommate did. By that time the landlord had quit collecting the rent and the utilities only worked every other day of the week. I kept listening to the “officials” who promised that everything was under control. She was wise enough to see the signs of complete social collapse like a rat that knows when the maze experiment is over and the scientist wants to put slices of its brain under a microscope. She left after the mayor got bit, but before he could become a biter.

I was the idiot who continued to pay the bills, stand in line for food at the local churches and try and do my part during the neighborhood nightly watches to patrol the area for ‘undesirables’. I was at work, trying to sell a woman a pair of earrings I knew that she couldn’t afford, but wanted anyway, when I was bit.
It was somebody’s kid. Some snot nosed punk that looked about eight years old, dirty blonde hair gelled into spikes, whose clothes looked in better shape than mine -even if he had been a zombie for several days. He ducked behind the cash register area and my boss yelled at me to grab him and toss him out of the shop. I excused myself from the customer, another one of my coworkers swooping in to take my place and, no doubt, my commission. Grabbing the kid wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, which should have warned me. He bit my arm as I pulled him out into the open. That’s when we saw that he was a zombie. My boss brought out the shotgun and aimed at the kid, who dashed out the door. Then he aimed it at me, and fired. At least the bastard had bad aim, because he missed me and took out the plate glass window at the front of the store. I ran back to my apartment, cursing the fact that I would not be getting my severance pay. Halfway home it hit me that he would probably call the cops to come and get me or else wait until dark to come and shoot me himself.

I used the last of my money to get some medical supplies from the nearest pharmacy, even though I knew that they wouldn’t do a bit of good. Still, I had to try. I spent the night in an abandoned building, hoping not to get eaten or shot as I lay in my feverish state. I knew that I was going through the ‘change', and was afraid at what would become of me.

The first thing I experienced, besides the fever, was a jumbled mess of memories mixed with nightmares. I woke one afternoon, the sunlight warming my stiff muscles. There was tingling itch in my brain, like it was being eaten alive by fire ants. I was sore and I tried to clear my throat, only to find that I couldn’t speak a word. I panicked, and couldn’t feel a heartbeat or the intake of breath into my lungs. The sensation of fear was washed out, like a black and white photocopy of a sunset. There was no anger, only acceptance of my current condition. The only thing important in my mind, above everything else, was the hunger inside me. I left the building, creeping around in the shadows to keep from being seen, lest someone decide to shoot me. But it seemed in vain, as the city appeared to be abandoned. How long had I been under? I asked myself.

“The change usually takes a few days to a week at most.” said a voice behind me. I would have jumped, if I had the reflexes to pull it off.

“I’m over here, by the dumpster.” said the voice. And then I realized that I hadn’t heard the voice with my ears, but in my mind instead.

“Can you hear me?” I asked with my itching brain, my vocal cords no longer under my control.

“Clear as birdsong.” the man beside the dumpster said. He wore a football jersey and a pair of cargo shorts. One of his shoes was missing, while the other foot featured a tattered white tennis shoe. “And you want to know the real bitch of it?” he asked.

“What?”

“You probably don’t speak a word of Spanish, and I don’t speak English, and yet here we are, talking to each other like we’ve been friends all our lives.”

I let the thought sink in for a while. It probably would have shocked me, but the urge to feed was a greater influence. “I’m hungry, anything to eat around here?”

“Ah, yes. First words from the newly dead.” he said with amusement. “Stick with me kid and I’ll show you the ropes.”

I followed him at a slight distance, I might be dead but I wasn’t taking my ‘unlife’ in my hands with a total stranger. As we wandered the city, I saw more of our kind in various stages of decomposition. There were quite a few clustered around a fresh corpse, feeding like sharks. My guide, who I now thought of as One Shoe, snagged a part of an arm that had fallen away from the main feeding frenzy and beckoned me to follow him onto a side street. “Here, you need to eat.” he said, passing me the body part. I looked at it in my hands, my hunger fighting my squeamishness. Eventually my hunger won out and I tore chunks off the bloody stump with abandon.

“Eat slowly” he advised. “Or else you’ll end up chewing your lips off.”

I touched my lips, or where they should be with my fingers. But every part of my skin was too numb to feel any sensation. “Don’t worry” he said. “They’re still there. But you need to be more careful with your body now more than when you were alive, since you can’t feel the damage as it happens.”

“What else am I missing?” I asked, eating slower and studying my companion.

“We ceased all major biological functions when our hearts stopped beating. We don’t need to breath, our blood doesn’t pump, and we don’t need to pee or poop.”

If I had had a voice box, I might have laughed at the last bit. “How do you know about the last part?” I asked. “Have you tried?”

“Yes. Let’s just say… it didn’t happen. Maybe what we consume goes to fuel our new bodies in such a way that there’s no waste leftover.”

I offered him what was left of the chunk of flesh that I hadn’t eaten and we continued to talk while traveling. He let me in on some of the “rules” of the undead. Which weren’t really laws to be enforced so much as zombie common sense.

If you were a smart zombie, or at least less dumb than your peers, you did not get into the middle of a feeding frenzy, but pulled off a piece of a body and ate it away from the crowd. A hungry zombie will eat anything in its path, including body parts of other zombies, thus the missing fingers, noses and other biological damage some zombies walked around with.

Zombies could smell one another as well as healthy -and still breathing- humans. We also had keen hearing. Something had to make up for the fact that we moved like, well, zombies.

We communicated telepathically within a certain range of one another. Evidently when you don’t need your brains to run the organs of your body or interpret unnecessary senses, it freed up a lot more gray matter to serve other purposes. The living could not understand why we could find them so fast and coordinate our movements so well. And now I knew why.

“Do different humans taste the same or different from one another? Is it taboo to eat your own ’kind’?” I asked.

“You know, I don’t know” he said. “It never came up at a feeding site. And no one seems to be asking these questions but you.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No, it might help our kind to have someone who can ’think’ like a human. And ask the questions that might lead to our continued ’survival’.”

“Don’t the others 'talk’?”

“Not much more than ‘I’m hungry’ or ’Get out of my way, I’m feeding’.”

I watched a zombie shuffled down the block before collapsing into a heap, maggots wiggled through its flesh. It was so damaged by violence and its own decomposition that I could not tell if it had been male or female. “Do we all end up like that?” I asked One Shoe.

“Some of us last longer than others. I’ve been around for a couple of weeks. But some ’newborns’ only last a few days. I think it has to do with feeding and keeping yourself intact. The bugs take their toll, though.”

“Is the whole city abandoned?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I have an idea.”

An hour and a half later, we found ourselves at a Super Wal-Mart. Living humans scattered like roaches when we threw the trashcan through the window to enter the store. “Guess we won’t be feeding here.” One Shoe said, a little disappointed.

“We’ll get something later, I want to try something first.”

I walked the aisles, pushing a shopping cart and filling it with various supplies. By the time I was done, I had us both change into full body work suits, heavy boots and hats we could pull down to cover our faces when necessary. I treated all the clothing with a stain resistant spray as well as bug repellant.

“I understand about the bug repellant -but the stain resistant?” One Shoe asked.

“When we’re done feeding, we can rinse ourselves off. If we look like ‘normal people’, the living might make the mistake of letting us get close enough to get them.”

“Get them how?”

“How good are you with a crossbow? Or wielding a baseball bat?”

“Why not use a gun instead?”

“And have every other zombie in hearing range fight us for the kill when we could quietly feast on it for days?” I asked.

“Speaking of which…” I pulled aside boxes of Ziploc and garbage bags, I threw in a few plastic tarps and a gallon of vinegar. “The bags we’ll use for storage, the tarp and the vinegar we will use to hide the body from other zombies. We’ll have to package the parts up fast though.”

“Why?”

“Do you really want maggots in your food eating you from the inside out?”

With our cart full, we left the store. I grabbed a crowbar from a nearby abandoned car and was testing its weight in my hands when the little bastard who bit me and changed me tried to scramble past, running after a stray dog. I tripped him and smashed his brains in with the crowbar, feeling an odd sense of fulfillment which overtook my constant urge to feed.

“Was that really necessary?” One Shoe asked.

“It was something personal” I explained. “And now it’s one less mouth to feed.”

“Where to now?”

“That depends on the meal you had in mind. Do you feel up to Chinese, or maybe some spicy Thai?” I asked. “And are Jewish people automatically considered kosher, or does it have to be the way that they were fed and killed?”

“I think it has to do with the type of animal, like no non-cloven hoofed animals and no scavengers.”

“Right then, lawyers and politicians are okay, but no bill collectors.”