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“It waS a LoT OF FUN KnOwINg YoU, But NOW I HAVE tO gO, okay? you hAVE to STop DOiNg this. I knOW HE’S MAking you foRGet, And it’S Hard, BuT You Have tO, beFoRE he fINds SomeOnE elsE. yoU Can dO It, OKAy? I L o V E y o u . . . ”
I nearly lost the closest thing I ever had to a significant other, today, and the thought terrifies me so badly that I never want to allow him out of my sight ever again. Admittedly, it was our faults that we got caught off guard, as the elated high we’d been on from finding so much food resulted in him kissing me, and we were so busy making out that we hadn’t noticed the pounding on the door until they had broken in and invaded the room.
Will’s first instinct was to shove me towards the window, and I scrambled frantically towards it before realizing he wasn’t behind me. I’d stopped, stymied by the thought of sacrificing someone else’s — let alone Will’s — life for my own. He, on the other hand, had stubbornly yelled at me to get out, promising that he was right behind me… and so, after a moment’s hesitation, I jumped out the window.
I’d nearly broken my ankle with the landing, but I cared little about myself, instead staring anxiously at the window for Will to come leaping out after me like the bumbling blonde he is. I waited… and waited… and waited…
…and finally he’d emerged, flailing through the air like a dove knocked out of the sky and landing in the bushes with a sound somewhere between a laugh and a grunt, before popping out with a grin and a hand extended to me; he yelled “Run!” and so
we
ran.
You awoke on a forest floor, greeted by a lingering sense of déjà vu, a disorienting nausea, and the scent of pine aggressively invading your nostrils. You sat up and struggled to remember what happened, with insignificant little details coming back as you do so; your name, your age, your favorite band, and how your family died are among them, but try as you might I hadn’t allowed anything that was concrete enough to inform you of exactly how you landed yourself in this situation, which is just awesome, you think, because that’s exactly how you wanted to spend your morning. I figure that was probably the sarcasm that you all are so fond of employing the use of.
Your hand brushed a cold metal object as you moved to stand up, and you discovered that it was an aluminum baseball bat with metal spikes welded to the end of it. You realize belatedly that this was your weapon, and the epiphany occurred in tandem with a shuffle and a moan off to your left. The source of the sounds was an emaciated man, with mottled gray flesh reminiscent of your father’s disgusting oatmeal, decaying teeth from behind which a terrible snarl is emitted, and a gait that was somewhat like that of an inebriated bovine, all accompanied by a stench so terrible that was a wonder your delicate human palate didn't make you gag.
Admittedly, your first conscious thought was that you wish you had a bottled version of the smell to ward off cheek-pinching grandmothers in the years before you hit puberty. Then, you figured you should probably try to help him, figure out what happened to him and get him to the nearest hospital. These two thoughts occurred within the breadth of merely a couple seconds, but clearly your body had something else in mind, because before you could actively process your actions, you were raising the bat and swinging.
It was only while you were pulverizing the remains of the head of the corpse did you pause and think: I just killed someone.
No, I responded helpfully, it was already dead, just like you.
The onset of the apocalypse was like a cookie cutter exposition taken straight out of a B-horror movie, with an idiot scientist experimenting with something he shouldn’t have and subsequently being infected with a virulent strain of rabies that spread first to everyone else in his facility, and then to the world outside the initial hospital the victims were brought to.
The farthest back I can recall is awakening alone in a forest a fortnight ago. I don’t remember what happened to me before that, or how I wound up there. What little memories I’ve been able to dredge up are insignificant things about myself, like how my family died and what my name is.
Ever since I woke up, I’ve been alone, not even having it in me to trust the few and far in between people that I did occasionally encounter, because even before the dead started walking I had issues trusting others.
I’d finally understood the deep emptiness that Forever Alone Guy experiences… but then I met Will.
You heard a twig snap, and your attention to what’s in front of you momentarily lapsed in favor of perusing the new distraction that had entered the environment. Every muscular fiber in your body tensed in lieu of a startled jump, as your brain told you that you were, in fact, seeing a hooded blond head peeking through the bushes, a single tanned finger rising up to closed lips in the universal gesture for “Shhhhh…”
Your makeshift mace stopped, halfway before reaching the peak of an ascent that would have turned into a killing blow, and your eyes shifted back to the undead woman in front of you. It had stopped growling at your miniscule movements and continued to peer at you in a manner not unlike curiosity, as if it were merely wondering what you were and not contemplating whether or not it should consume you like a black hole does a dying star. You’d never seen one of them behave like this before, with hesitance and indecision, and it befuddled the heck out of you. You didn’t know that it was because the dead had no reason to attack the dead.
The blond boy peering like a creeper from behind the bushes, however, intrigued you, and in a way that only idiot teenagers can rationalize, you absurdly decided on a whim not to act, to see what he was going to do. The thing’s rank breath came out in slow, raspy exhales, and its attention didn’t waver as the unknown blond boy slowly stood up. As you watched, he raised a bow you hadn’t noticed before, nocked back a sleek black arrow, breathed, and released.
You thought he was beautiful.
I knew he would be the next one.
As sickeningly cliché as I’m being right now, Will is the light of a life that I hadn’t realized was so devoid of illumination. At first I’d dismissed his relaxed countenance and constant positivity as idiotic naiveté — which definitely wouldn’t last long in a world so grim as the one we had the misfortune of living in — but he quickly proved me wrong. His sunny smile brightens the dark void in my heart; his bright disposition is the perfect counterbalance to my constant cynicism; and the contrast between his tanned skin and my unnatural pallor when he wraps his arms around me makes me smile with an elation I’ve never experienced before. He is my solace, and for the first time since realizing there’s no WiFi for Netflix in a zombie apocalypse, I’m actually kind of enjoying life again.
I’m actually grateful you met the blond angel, because your thoughts in isolation, as always, were annoyingly depressing. Your days were monotonous, pockmarked with the periodic spikes of heart-stopping adrenaline that are inevitable in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead walk and stalk the living. Traveling alone left ample time for introspection, for contemplation of your purpose here, and you did exactly that all too often.
This is living, you guessed, going on a day-to-day basis, where every day is nothing but wake up, walk, fight, eat in no particular order, where the physical and social constructs that humanity spent millennia building no longer matter, and one can no longer enjoy the air they breathe because they’re busy using it to fight for their next inhale.
If I had eyes to roll at your hypocrisy, I would, because isn’t that exactly what the beings you fight are doing, stalking and devouring for no purpose other than a dark, insatiable hunger? Though, I have to admit, this is no hunger of your own; it’s mine.
And as if you were conceding as well, you would think about how they have it much simpler, because they don’t even have the capacity to think, to worry, to love, to fear. They’re monsters, you’d remind yourself, no matter what they were before they died, you kill them to survive, so they don’t hurt you or anyone else. So then the question you asked yourself was… How does one destroy a monster without becoming one?
That, that was just too rich, and I would silently, mockingly, chuckle my response.
We live with a small group of other teens, people that Will used to go to summer camp with before everything hit the fan. When Will found me, he’d been out scouting for herbs that apparently had medicinal purposes. He serves as the group’s medic — having been on track to becoming a doctor before the dead didn’t stay dead — and his father was apparently the god of natural remedies or something, because Will learned nearly everything he knows from him.
At first I was wary of them, and admittedly I still am, because even before the apocalypse started I was not one to trust easily. Will is an exception, however, and even though I’ll never know how he managed to worm through the cracks in my walls, I’m eternally grateful that he did, because I don’t know what I would do without him.
The baseball bat drip… drip… drips its crimson accusation onto the decrepit wooden floor, and thanks to me your heightened awareness picks up each drop hitting the ground like a gunshot hits a wall. Drip… drip… drip…
A familiar head of blonde hair lies a short distance away, matted with dark blood, and attached to a prone body with tanned skin dulled by the gray pallor of death, and I cackle at my victory over you.
I know something has changed, everything has changed, because the others give me these forlorn looks when they see me with Will. Perhaps it’s the fact that we have two new members in our little group as of recently, and the confused (and later pitying) looks they give me are changing the others’ perceptions of me, questioning my place even though Will vouched for my integrity when he brought me here.
Something has changed with Will, too, though, because the amicable guy I knew that could make friends with anyone is now speaking to nobody aside from me. Okay, that is a bit of an overstatement, but he no longer has conversations of sustenance with anyone, and when he does talk, it is like they cannot even hear him.
“Wait, so who is Will?”
A heavy sigh. “Will was our medic, I guess you could say, and the two of them were really close. They, uh… they went out on a patrol one day, and—” A helpless gesture to a lone figure standing stoically by the fence that borders the makeshift camp, hearing every word of the conversation unbeknownst to the two speakers. “—came back covered in blood and water, but alone. We all figured that something awful happened, and Will had to have died.” A wistful sigh. “We’ve stopped trying to ask questions about what happened, and we just… I dunno, play along. None of us have the heart to say it aloud…”
My dreams have begun turning into nightmares. At first, they seemed simply to be memories, such as the memory of when I’d woken up with no recollection of the first decade and a half of my life, — which, to this day, I still cannot recall — or the memory of when Will and I first met. Then, they got darker, like the other members of the group talking about a patrol gone wrong or something, like me being infected and biting Will after our first kiss, like me murdering him and then standing over his body victoriously.
The dreams and nightmares are never from my perspective, however. Well, they are to some extent, but it’s more like an alternate version of me, a more menacing one, one that exists inside me every waking minute of every day, like me but not me, as if it is me watching myself from a different, more sinister perspective that somehow manages to live in the shadows of my conscious thoughts.
I just thought you might want to know… his blood COATED your hands as you dragged his body back to our dumping grounds.
“Look none of the others want to tell you the truth, so I will.”
I stare at her, trying to remember her name and coming up blank; she is one of the two that just appeared recently, and we’ve never really had cause to interact before, so all I can say in response to her statement is an eloquent, “What?”
“Will is dead.”
If she’d punched me in the gut, it would have had less of an impact on me than those three little words, and they swirl around in my head over and over, thrown into a cyclone of tumultuous feelings and unspoken words, but then: “Don’t listen to her, please.”
I look over, and Will is standing right next to me, a heartbroken expression speaking of so much pain on his face, but the feeble attempt at a smile he gives me in response to my relieved beam concerns me, and I don’t want to think about it right now so I turn back to her and respond, “He’s standing right here, so I don’t know what you’re talking about, and that was kind of a jerk thing to say because you gave me a split second heart attack.”
“No, he’s not ‘standing right there,’ because whatever you’re seeing is a delusion!” — What? — “Will has been dead, gone for months,” —no, she’s lying— “and what you’re seeing is nothing but a demented coping mechanism your brain made up to help you hurt less!” — No! — “The others have all been too chicken to tell you” — they’ve gathered, the looks on their faces confirm — “so I have to do it. WILL. IS. DEAD.”
She’s wrong she’s wrong, she’s lying, I WON’T BELIEVE IT, because Will is standing right next to me, tears streaming down his face as he shakes his head and mouths my name and reaches out to me but she grabs me by the shoulders before I can touch him, and she’s not letting me focus on anything else except for her bellows in my face, her yells at me to REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED ON YOUR LAST PATROL.
Only the dead see ghosts.
I run, I run as fast as I can, away from the liars. They’re trying to get between me and Will. Of course that’s what’s happening. He can’t be dead. He’s not dead. That’s ridiculous. He would have told me if he was dead. That’s not something that you just hide. It’s totally a relationship breaker.
But he’s not running with me. He’s disappearing, then reappearing a distance away, almost like how a ghost teleports. But that is only something he’s always been able to do, right? I never questioned it before. It'd just happen. It was one of his quirks.
Normal people don’t teleport on a whim.
But that’s just Will.
WHAT HAPPENED ON YOUR LAST PATROL?
My thoughts whirl as my sneakers crunch against the dead leaves beneath them.
Our last patrol? We went out, just like any other patrol.
We found a building. We snuck inside. We found a mother load of food, and we were so happy, and in the heat of the moment he kissed me. Then… then zombies found us and I jumped out a window, and Will followed, and we got away and went back to the group. That’s what happened.
That’s what happened, right? Right?!
But then why do I remember coming back dripping with blood and water?
Why didn’t the group ever let us out on patrols after that?
Why do they look at Will and I with so much sadness sometimes?
WHATEVER. That doesn’t matter. That’s what happened. We went out, we kissed, we were almost overrun, but we made it back.
The glimpses of Will I catch out of the corner of my eye as I run are all shaking his head.
That’s not what happened, and you and I both know it.
It's almost time to reset.
Why do I know I’ve traveled this path before?
Why do I feel like I have a destination in mind?
I hear the sounds of water approaching. Before I know it, I’ve found a small creek.
Small enough that the dozens of bodies that litter it are not washed away by the current.
One thing about my bat, my makeshift mace, is that it makes a very distinct pattern of holes whenever I strike a zombie’s body with it.
All of the bodies here, they have that pattern all over them.
And the closest one…
The closest one…
The closest body is the freshest.
Bloated, with the gasses of death, but I would recognize that blonde hair anywhere.
I walk over to Will’s body and collapse onto my knees next to him, not caring in the slightest how the red creek water stains my jeans.
In the water, my distorted reflection grins at my agony.
Will’s ghost flickers into existence beside me. I lift my head to look up at him.
“I’m so sorry,” I manage, through choked sobs.
He only smiles wistfully and shakes his head.
“It’s not your fault. It’s his.”
I can feel the menacing laughter somewhere in me, and I realize that I am not alone in my own mind.
But then again, this isn’t the first time I’m understanding that, is it?
He always wins.
Will starts to fade.
I try to hug him, to hold on to him, to keep him here and do whatever I can to make up for this awful thing that I have done, but my arms only circle air.
After all, being dead will only get me so far.
“I’m SORRY!” I scream.
His fading visage echoes the numbed melancholy I feel as my memory of him begins to slip away, just like it did with all the others.
I ebb away the last of your memories, taking control of your body and walking you to some remote part of the forest, miles away. The stubborn ghost of my latest victim follows, stupidly using the last of his energy in the same intrepid attempt to “get through” to this body that all the others try.
I select a new spot and lie down on the forest floor. The apparition lies down next to me, trying to stroke this face and failing because he no longer has the energy to touch flesh. I mock him, but he ignores me and stares intently into my vessel’s eyes. Just like always, I relinquish just enough control so that the soul of my prisoner can hear the fruitless words.
“It waS a LoT OF FUN KnOwINg YoU, But NOW I HAVE tO gO, okay? you hAVE to STop DOiNg this. I knOW HE’S MAking you foRGet, And it’S Hard, BuT You Hav e tO, beFoRE he fINds SomeOnE elsE. YoU Can dO It, OKAy? I L o V E y o u . . . “