Zombie Series

The Graveyard: The moon rode high in the sky. Moonlight gleamed from bits of gravel in the dirt road that lead into the barn. Silence held, and then a scraping came from the ground, muffled, deep. At the edge of the woods, eyes flashed dully in the over-bright moonlight. Shapes shifted among the trees and then emerged from the shadows onto the gravel roadway. One dragged a leg as he walked, clothes already rotted and hanging in tatters. A second seemed almost untouched, a young woman, maybe a little too pale in the wash of moonlight. She walked as easily as any woman, stepping lightly as she went. The third and fourth moved slower, purposefully, as they made their way to the freshly turned soil. They stopped beside the grave, and silence once again took the night, no sounds of breathing, no puffs of steam on the cold night air. “Do you think...?” The young woman asked in a whisper. “Shut up,” the one with the dragging leg rasped. His words were almost unintelligible. His vocal cords rotted and stringy, no air in his lungs to move his words. The noises came once again from the earth and the four fell silent... waiting... A hand broke through into the moonlight. A few minutes later a young woman's head pushed up, and then she levered her arms upward and began to strain to pull herself up and out of the hole. She noticed the four and stopped, her pale skin nearly translucent, her black hair tangled and matted against her face and neck. Her lips parted, a question seeming to ride on them. “It's okay,” the young woman whispered, “it's okay.” She and one of the older ones moved forward, fell to their knees and began to scoop the dirt away from her with their hands. “It'll be okay,” the young woman mumbled in agreement through her too cold lips. “It will... It will,” the other woman repeated. Johnny: I got up a second ago just to move around. The silence is killing me. How can it be so quiet? I made the circuit, nothing. The whiskey is gone and no effect left from it either. Maybe my body just can't respond to it any longer. Maybe there is nothing left that can shock it. I don't know. I DON'T KNOW! Sorry... I should just say to hell with writing this out. I mean it's like some sort of penance, isn't it? Feels like it is. I hate it, but it is so real in my head, and I don't really know that it can't help someone else if it's down on paper... Maybe it can, maybe it can't. Where was I at... Arizona... I remember that night in Arizona... I thought Lana was dead...

I walked through the park. There were hundreds there already. In the coming days those same people began to make the park home. But that day they wandered aimlessly. In shock. The subway was shut down, most of it flooded. The buses parked. You could not find a cab. The same with the cops. Everything that was the same about the city. The things you could depend on to be the same day after day, were gone. A few short days and they were gone. No more. And it had a feeling of permanence to it. A feeling of doom. I sat down on a bench and watched the people shuffle by. No noisy kids. No babies bawling. No Joggers. No dog walkers. Hopeless people shuffling by. The occasional panicked whack job running around crazily. I saw no one shot that day, but in the coming days, they, the hopeless ones, began to shoot the crazies. Chase them down and kill them. But that was later. That day I sat on the bench and wondered what had happened, and that was when the planes had overflown. We all heard them from a long way off. Military cargo planes. Slow, sometimes seeming to hang in the sky. That droning sound as they overflew, blocking the sun from the sky. This was no fly over to see how New York was, that much was evident immediately. I was torn between running, and needing to know what this was. Once you start down that path of just reacting to fear, it gets bad fast, so I sat there, as calm as I could be. 'They will not drop bombs,' was my thought. I remember it. And they didn't. What they did was spray the entire city. Trails of blue-tinged vapor drifting down out of the sky. That was the first time. I finally did give in to the fear and took off through the park, thinking, like nearly everyone else, that it must be some sort of poison. The government solution to whatever it was that was going on in the city. We didn't know what the blue shit the government planes sprayed us with right after everything went to hell was. And I am still not convinced I know all there is to know, but I suspect things. I have been told things. I met a guy a few weeks back that said he worked at the Army base over in Jersey. He said he knew what it was. He said the planes came from somewhere down south, but stopped there on the way back to re-fuel. What he told me was it was designed to strengthen us. Keep us alive a little longer. Make us stronger somehow. Some dip shit scientist's idea. I suppose it was meant as a boost for us. A help. The world slowed down, fell apart, everything stopped working. They knew they couldn't get to us. We would die. So they sprayed the blue shit on us. And I could suppose further that some of us survived the first few months because of it. I can't prove it, but I suspect it did help us evolve into... I don't know. Whatever the hell we are now. I know we're alive? I know our hearts beat. I still feel human and I truly think I am still human: If it made changes to the living they are very small changes... At least so far. But the dead. Oh the dead, that is a different story. It did something else to the dead.