Written by RF Wilson – I couldn’t sleep. Few of us can. That’s the deal. Wandering around, night after night after night. It’s not like we have homes to go to where we could close the blinds to shut out the light during the day. I could have killed for a nap. It’s true that some of us roam around when the sun’s out. I think they’re mostly the younger ones. Because, the other thing about not being out and about during the day is that, in the dark, it’s harder to see how gross we all look.

It’s lonely. No sitting around the dinner table, or watching TV together, or going off with friends to a club. None of that. Although, most of that really ended for everybody, the living and the undead alike, when it all hit the fan. Our kind doesn’t have a clue about what happened. I’m not even going to speculate. Can’t, actually. Whatever it was that made us this way did something to our brains. Nobody talks. We grunt. Moan. Sometimes I think someone is trying to tell me something. But, man, I don’t know. Something to do with how we make language, I think. And memory. That’s pretty screwed up, too.

I had been thinking that it would be nice to have a friend, a special friend, you know what I mean. A companion, a lover – like that’s going to happen – someone to hang out with. But you know what we look like, with all those movies and TV shows about us. The people who made those up have never really seen us. Most of them anyway. But they’ve got it pretty much right. We are an unsightly lot. Haggard. Worse than haggard. You’d look bad too, if you had to wander all over the place and never get any sleep, and, you know, “recruit” people. And since the recruiting involves biting people, not just like a little kid bites, but, well, it’s actually, I’m sorry, eating. So, we often have unsightly “blemishes.” Chunks of flesh gone. Bad teeth is an issue, too. Nobody brushes or flosses. What’s the point? And baths? I mean, come on.

So, here I was, aimlessly wandering, and this woman – girl, female, we are kind of ageless – appears near me. I could tell she’d been a looker, once. I wasn’t bad looking either, back in the day, if I may say so myself. Anyway, as unlikely as I thought it would be, she and I have kind of paired off. It’s a stretch, though. I mean a person has to look really hard, you know, try to get beneath the surface. ‘Cause the surface – well, jeez. Most of us, our clothes are in pretty bad shape, mostly just tatters. Same for her, except she had this pretty scarf around her neck that somehow had survived. That caught my eye. I think we hit if off because we sensed we were not always creeps. That’s it. I know, it’s a kind of discrimination. I mean, we think we were better than this, once. But, this is all we’ve got now. Death, the great equalizer. I think somebody said that once. So, almost death, almost an equalizer.

Excuse the disjointedness of this. That’s another thing. I can’t keep a thought going for more than a minute or two. So, we’re out here, looking for – excuse the expression – fresh meat. I mean, that is what we do. That’s it. Not a lot of nuance to it. Talk about your nature over nurture. We could straighten out some people in those Psych 101 classes. It’s nature, baby. Not many of us grew up in homes that taught it was okay to go out and eat other people. But there’s nothing we can do about it now. One of us takes a chunk out of your hide, now you’re one of us, like it or not. It goes against my grain, really. I’m a damn liberal, for crying out loud. I mean, I could understand some of your more reactionary people like Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh ending up like this. But me? I’m for legalizing marijuana. Separation of church and state. All that stuff. Volunteered at the damn food co-op. Drove a hybrid. Kids in Montessori. Carpooled. Recycled. And now we’re all reduced to the same thing. Wander around. Find flesh. Eat. Sleep if you can. Repeat.

I remember when it happened. It was a night in early fall. The season was just beginning to change. The trees had begun to turn, what there was left of them. You might think, well sure, Halloween’s a good time for that sort of thing and the world had sure turned creepy. As I now know though, this is a year-round occupation. I’m in this, like, melancholy state. One season over. The beginning of another. The stuff poets write about. I’m out walking with my dog in the woods around the house, the mist settling in. Gets a little spooky. It’s like the fog, well, all of a sudden it’s not just fog, it’s dark. I can’t see three feet in front of me. Then Boyd – my dog – he starts barking. Like he’s seen something. I figure it’s because of the weird fog. But he keeps it up.

And then.

Out of the mist, there they are. I don’t know how many. I mean, I wasn’t counting, you know. Just this phalanx of, I don’t know how to say it. Especially, since I am now one of them. The ugliest things I have ever seen. Really ugly damn people. And the mistake I made – and why I am writing this, is to let you know what not to do – what I did was to hesitate. You’ve heard the old saying, “He who hesitates is lost.” Well, yeah. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Don’t you make the same mistake. You see a horde of people who look like zombies, THEY ARE ZOMBIES!! Run for your life. I mean, as in, RUN FOR YOU LIFE. This is not hyperbole. This is literal. Run for your life. Or, you’ll end up like me. Without one.

You can try to kill us. Smashing our brains is what does us in. Decapitation. Blunt objects to the head. Gun shots. Shotguns work best because you want to blast away as much tissue as you can. Severing the brain from the body. I’m not sure what the mechanism is that keeps us going even after our hearts stop. (Do you know how the heart keeps you alive? I doubt it, so don’t act all surprised that, just because I’m a zombie, I don’t know all the biology of the condition.)

 

Here’s the worst thing. The sheer boredom of it. You’ve heard people talk about Hell on Earth. This is it. Every night. Same thing. Wander around and look for people to chew on. I used to love music. Still do, actually. Every once in a while I’ll hear something off in the distance. A Mahler symphony, maybe. A little Bartok. The other night I heard “Wild Horses,” you know, the Rolling Stones. “Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away.” That one. I almost cried. Because, you see, we’d go toward the music, toward the people making or listening to the music. And try to bite them. I’m here to tell you that if you want to stop a concert, show up half dead and start biting people. Puts a damper on the proceedings, I can guarantee you that.

I’m not sure how this thing is going to resolve itself. I can’t stand the thought of roaming around forever, short on sleep, no other motivation than to bite people. That’s all there is. Some people may like the idea of life everlasting. Even the lady I mentioned, Greta, (you knew it had to be a name like ‘Greta’ didn’t you, foreign sounding, like from the deep woods of Bavaria or somewhere) she’s only half-alive. Like the rest of us. We have an occasional good moment. Like when we heard “Wild Horses” the other day. We did a little dance together. But we both knew it wasn’t going anywhere. I mean, where would it go? Maybe somebody could make a movie, “Zombie Romance.” Somebody who’s still alive might be able to imagine what that might be like better than a couple of half-dead people trying to figure it out. Half-dead with their brains fried.

So, what was the point of even talking about this? Oh, yeah. A heads up, as they say. A warning. We’re out here. It’s just a matter of time until we find you. I hate it. But that’s the truth. I sometimes wonder whether there will come a time when there are more of us than there are of you. The numbers seem to be in our favor. Then what happens? Just us. That would be, well, infinitely sad. No more Bartok. Or Satie. Or Emmy Lou. I’ve already lost books. I can’t really carry them around with me. Then I tried carrying a Kindle, but the battery went dead. Where am I going to charge a battery? I can’t concentrate while I’m wandering around anyway. And when I’m not wandering round, I’m trying to sleep.

PAY ATTENTION. As I said before, if you see something that makes you think, “I wonder if that’s a zombie,” think no more. Run! Far away. You can move faster than we can. But we have the advantage of single-mindedness and resoluteness. We will keep coming.

Okay. Sun’s going down. Here I come. Nothing personal, you realize. Just the nature of the beast, as they say.

________________________________________________________________

RF Wilson writes in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, Beth Gage. He is the author of the novel, “Killer Weed,” recently published by Pisgah Press and the short story, “Accident Prone,” in the anthology “Carolina Crimes” published by Wildside Press.