The LONELY WALK-A Zombie Notebook (3 page)

June 10

Key West! I've made it this far without detection. I think I'm beginning to smell something terrible. Despite my bath, my washed clothes, the deodorant and aftershave, I notice people shying from me. Not in any rude noticeable way, just drifting back behind me farther or moving slightly faster to get ahead of me. A cloud of black flies hovers all around. They get in my face, crawl into my nose, ears, mouth. I hate them and it makes me want to slap myself all over, like a comedian into the worst physical comedy routine, hurting himself just for one more laugh from a sullen crowd.

Now I have to find a boat. I have to steal. There's nothing I have I could barter for a trip even if I didn't know I'd be found out because of my smell. Tonight I'll check among the zombies for someone sentient. And then I'll take a boat and leave this land.

There must be someone...

Please. Someone.

June 11

Here I am on the open sea. I'm afraid I've done something unspeakable. I've threatened another man's life. I made the captain of this ship take me off the island. I thought to go alone, but I was afraid I'd be lost at sea. I've only been motor boating off the coast of Miami and down through the canals in Fort Lauderdale. I'd never make it out of the sight of land. I don't really mean to hurt this man. Unless he makes me.

His name is Bailey. Raymond Bailey. He was tied at the dock I haunted and about to set sail himself. Fishing, he said, but come to find out his hold was packed with weapons and supplies. Gunrunner. Guns and drugs are the most precious and expensive commodities in the world now. As if making money means anything. He says it's not the money, it's the principal of the thing. He fancies himself a savior, a man bringing help to those less fortunate than the paranoid Americans who were prepared for this new world event with guns in every home.

He was on his way to Cuba anyway. I'm just a passenger, though he'd like to throw me overboard.

I tried to explain. I
feel
, I told him. I'm not an animal. I'm not like those others. I'm a man just as he is, and through no fault of my own I've become this dead thing. But I'm not like all the other zombies, I repeat. I'm a new breed. I might be one of a kind.

"You don't want to kill and eat me?" he asked, a waver in his voice.

I tell him I control the hunger.

He looks at me with distrust still.

I think,
Won't you try to understand anything I say, you cock-sucking moron?

Couldn't he help me?

He tried to blow my head off. I wrestled the gun from his fist and knocked him to the deck while the wheel spun and the boat circled in the moonlit ocean as we scuffled.

I let him up and then I bent over and grasped my knees and tried to scream. I wanted to scream in frustration so loudly that he would understand my anguish, my frustration, but what rushed out through my dry throat and shrinking vocal cords was a harsh rasping whine that scared even me until I quit it. When I stood up, Raymond had climbed to his feet and gotten hold of the wheel. I could see his shoulders twitching, and his head wobbling on his neck. He had wanted to kill me, and probably still did.

"All right," he said. "You want to go with me, just stay downwind out of my face, you understand that? I think you ought to throw yourself into the sea and be done with it, but if you want to go to Cuba, fine, we're on our way. But stay away from me. The next time you lay hands on me you'll have to kill because I won't have it. I just won't have
a dead man
touching me again."

I sat against the door leading into the cabin and watched him. He worked the little boat through the waters without ever glancing at me. A terrible longing came over me as I sat, staring. I thought of his arm, the hair there golden, the blood beneath the skin hot and red and ripe. The hunger seized me to take him. To possess him and to eat and to drink him as if he were a succulent pig roasted and stuffed and laid on a platter for my sole pleasure.

I shuddered. The thought of eating this way, so repellent before, seemed to be changing inexorably into something that was not so wrong, so bad, so diseased. What can I do! To deny the urge is the last vestige left of my humanity. If I ever give in to the seductive clamor for human flesh, I'll be lost, even to myself.

I began writing in this notebook to take my mind from the low rumble in my stomach and he heard the pencil scratching over the paper and he stiffened. I knew what he thought. That I was about to pounce, I suppose, catch him unaware. Eat him for supper. How close he came to that he'd never know. But he wouldn't talk to me and he drank whiskey, and once I saw him deliberately spill some of it on his clothes. Probably to keep my scent from making him vomit.

I am in terrible shape now. I can't take off the gloves I found. Skin came off with them when I tried. Peels of gray wrinkled skin.

I wonder if I'll disintegrate and know it. Watch it happen bit by bit, see my flesh fall from my bones, and then will my skeleton walk, will it still long for companionship, will this ever ever ever end?

If I could just...give up.

If I could just...let Raymond Bailey blow a round through my head.

I don't know why I can't, why I want to keep going.

I must be insane.

I know that I am.

June 27

So much happened. I can't put it all down. I don't have time. Raymond got me to Cuba and I was smuggled onshore in a case of rifles. I spent a week looking for a zombie who might have a working brain. No one. No one. A family by the name of Valesquez was coerced--I forced them in other words--to take me with them to Mexico. I still believed that somewhere I'd find a companion.

Oh, it was an awful time. One of the Valesquez boys, a blond child just six years old, died on the trip from a high fever. There was such uproar and breast-beating. They held a religious service and performed a hasty burial at sea. They were afraid I would turn the child into a zombie. They circled around me, holding up crosses as if I were a vampire to be held at bay by the Christian symbol, and I laughed, I made a laughing face, because although the heat of the hunger now so often tortures me, I fight valiantly against the desire to harm anyone, especially the quiet dead, especially them, the lucky ones.

In Mexico I had to stay hidden and only come out at night. My feet, you see, are falling apart. Both my small toes are gone, and the others are following suit each time I dare remove my shoes. And my hands, they're a mess. My gloves make squishy sounds while I try to write this. My face, oh Jesus, if you could see my face. Great chunks are missing. I've tried everything. Bandages. Tape. Staples. The skin is too thin and tender. Nothing holds. My testicles were lost on the boat over. I dropped the shriveled sacks gently into the sea when no one was paying attention to me. Also my nose is gone, thrown to the sea, bait for fish. Although I can't smell anything anymore, I know I must be a pit of vile odors. I can't even get close to the towns anymore. Their dogs come out, lunging and snapping, hoping to tear me to pieces.

A few days ago I met one person who made me feel that all of this bother and searching and hoping was worthwhile. I lay resting out on the plains outside a small village. I heard a rustle and thought it was a rattlesnake slithering across the sand, but when I sat up there crouched not three feet from me was a young girl who might have been twenty. She was dressed in rags and dishwater blond hair hung in front of dark haunted eyes.

"You're a zombie, aren't you?" she asked. She was not Spanish, but American.

The question was so startling that I could just dip my head a little in answer.

"I've seen you out here walking in circles, pacing at night. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

Again I nodded, but more vigorously. I grabbed for my pad and pencil. I threw a couple of sticks on the fire and motioned her forward. On the pad I wrote,
Why aren't you afraid that I'd attack and kill you?

She said, "I don't know. I just watched you for a while and it seemed to me that you aren't like the others."

I'm not!
I wrote quickly.
I was killed and infected, but I'm just the same as I was when I was alive. I don't understand it and I've come all this way from Florida trying to find another one like me. Have you met any?

She shook her head slowly. "You can't talk?" she asked.

I wrote,
No. My vocal cords are no good and my lungs...well, I have no air in them.

She did something incredible then. She crept even closer to me and she reached out and she placed her warm hand on my cold shoulder. She said, "I don't think I could have ever thought of something so terrible as what you must be going through. I've traveled three thousand miles, and I've seen dead children in piles waiting for burial, I've seen bombed out cities, and whole towns on the move with just what the people could carry on their backs, but to be...dead...and to know it...My god, I'm sorry, I'm really so sorry. The others, the ones who don't know, they must be better off."

I lowered my head and stared at the pad and pencil in my hands. My fingers trembled when I tried to write another note. I had to get a firm grip on the pencil.

Will you stay with me the night and just talk to me? I won't hurt you. If you'll just talk to me, I'd be so grateful.

And she did. She had me lie on my back. She took one of my gloved hands and despite how my scent must have made her want to gag, she sat beside me all through the darkest hours and she talked to me about her family, her travels, her hopes for the future. She had a bright optimism that made me glow, that made me forget, just for a while, that I had nothing whatsoever to look forward to. She even made me forget that I was ravenous and that without the greatest exertion of will, I would turn on my side, grab her in an unyielding vise, and bite a chunk from her smooth, white, fragrant abdomen.

When I thought of chewing, of swallowing, of satisfying that burning need that glowed like a large red ember in my belly, I wrenched my thoughts back to the girl's soothing singsong voice, remembering, with her tales, what it was like to be a man. To hear a woman talk to me in that tone of voice reminded me when I would reach out and take the globe of Carrie's breast into my palm, suck her lips separately between my lips, feel her strength beneath me in her heat, rising to meet me, clutching me as she peaked, riding down the escalator into the abyss of surrender... This girl reminded me of life and love and the fickle fate that had severed me from both.

After the girl left, no one came to the plains again. I have spent days and nights rolling across the sand, holding myself, the hunger so deep it's a scream locked inside me, a claw scraping through my innards. I am afraid now. I know it's gone too far. I would eat now, if given opportunity. If the girl comes back, I will tear her limb from limb and feast. There's no help for it. I'm driven by such tremendous need that when I think of Carrie now, I think of consuming her. When I think of Margaret, I think of what a small, pure, tasty feeding she would be. I would murder and eat that which I had left to protect, that which brought me to this place and in this condition.

I am now truly as obscene and inhuman as any other of the dead.

It has come down to this.

As I hunger, so am I hungered for. Now it's the coyotes who want me at night. Wolves. They come down from the hills and howl at me where I've climbed a tree. Flies have laid eggs in my crevices and I crawl with little white blind...I can't say it, I can't write it, I can't think it... I've always hated even the thought of wiggling, squirming, segmented things.

There are zombies here as there were in Cuba. I saw them, but the girl told me so, too. There are millions of them. More than live humans. The towns are dead. Stinking. People are on the move everywhere. People kill to get what boats are left. Rafts set sail with dozens on them. All the planes have disappeared from the country. Children are orphaned and have joined into gangs. They are worse than the military in the States, worse than the wolves even. They don't care if you're alive or dead, they shoot to kill, and then they dismantle you as if you were a Tinker toy.

I've made up my mind. I'm going to let them.

Shoot me. Why not?

I don't commit suicide because that's for the living. I commit
deathicide
. I'll simply walk out into the open and let them explode, with impunity, this long dead body.

There aren't any zombies like me. But I am becoming one of them. I either die to this world or I turn on men and I eat. I'm the only one who ever knew what this is like and I'm coming to pieces before my own eyes.

I have no ears. My hair fell out. My eyes are going. I can hardly see to write this. My dwindling muscles have contracted and my bones been broken a thousand times over. I stumble when I try to walk. It's only my brain that knows anything and what it knows it's tired of knowing. There's no pleasure, no curiosity, no hope, no reason to keep going.

The best I can do is go into that forever darkness where I won't worry about being alone again. I'm placing this notebook in an envelope and I'll hold it to my chest as the gangs shoot my head into tiny bits with their telescopic rifles.

What becomes of my testament is not of my concern after tonight. I could have sent it to the president in Washington, D.C.--if he's even still there. He's a good man trying to keep a nation together, though I could tell him it's no use. He would never reveal it to people, he couldn't, I understand that, and it doesn't matter that much to me anymore. I thought I could find a way to go on, find a reason why this happened to me. I thought my survival might help in stopping the plague, or that at the very least I could provide an enlightenment about life after death, but I don't think so now. It appears it was futile to ever begin this long trek across miles and oceans.

I don't mean to sound like suffering Jesus or the tortured Job. I thought I could still find a shred of happiness or some meaning, even a tiny pleasure left to me, but I should have known better. I can do one thing. I can tell you to stand and fight. The armies will fall eventually. You'll be on your own. Order will give way even more and there will be nothing but chaos, enemies, and insanity. If you don't fight to the end, are you worthy to be called human? Look in the mirror. Could you call yourself human?