Walking is hard. With every step, I hear the bone creaking and I am obliged to drag the other foot, already beyond use.

The pain doesn’t affect me, it feels like it has afflicted someone else, long ago. I can feel the degeneration working its way upwards, I can feel the maggots starting to make up for most of my mass. And I can do all but care, that part of my being died a long time ago. Along with the rest of it.

I was one of the first, I can feel a flimsy pride in that. I don’t remember much apart from lab coats, glasses, microscopes and screams. Can’t be sure if they were mine or someone else’s. Since then, our numbers increased exponentially, I faintly remember this being in a white board somewhere… “exponentially”. I saw a lot of difficult words there, they stuck with me for some reason. There are more of us now than there were in the beginning, that’s all I know. I see the living doing everything they can to survive, but they seem to forget that for us, it is even harder. There’s hardly enough food for everyone and our food often becomes more mouths to feed. Top that off with our being every one’s number one target and the degeneration of moral along with our bodies, and you have the worst chances of survival ever. I shamble through a dirty street as my mind races at a fraction of the speed it used to. It is like perpetually having a word at the tip of your tongue and not remembering it nor being able to let it go. It’s maddening.

Something fell… I feel lighter, but I’m afraid that if I look down, my neck will snap. I keep walking, it was probably just my intestines. Ahead of me, I see the sea of us, the legion that we constitute, but there’s no one, really. Mindless masses, I can see why the living are so swift to get rid of us, why they are so quick to kill us. By the curb, I see a pack of us eating away at a young man, the blood washing the broken street. There’s little left of him now, but the urge is too strong. I begin making my way towards the pack, aware that by the time my broken legs get me there, only the crimson drink will have remained. I feel envy, all of a sudden. Not because I’ll have to get by without lunch, but because that food will never have to be like us, never have to scavenge those that we once called coworker, friend, family, lover. Perhaps, if my cognitive functions were better, I could laugh at the irony of thinking that a man who has just been eaten to the point of nonexistence is “lucky”.

But perhaps our kind is not as mindless as we seem to think. Case in point, my current inner monologue seems to hint at a somewhat high cognitive hability. Perhaps we are all like this, oblivious to our past life but intelligent in our own right. Perhaps we just don’t use what the living would recognise as logic or language. After all, when one of us see food, we all know where it is. It’s primitive communication, but it’s there. I think my eye just fell off.

I hear a loud noise. It stands to reason, in a city comprised of slow moving beings without any motor skills, that a noise like that was made by a living. I can already see the masses slowly moving, rising, starting the inexorable march for lunch. Before I can even think about it, my feet are already moving. The urge is stronger than anything. I can hear gunshots and screams, I can see the living, bloody, sweaty, tender and scared living. They are the first I see in a long time. Weeks? I don’t even know what that means anymore. Sleep is a useful way of keeping track of time, once you don’t need it anymore, the days just sort of pile up and become a huge block of time. The living are still a long way away, but I keep walking, my warnings to my fellow dead a hoarse mumbling without meaning. I see some of us fall, some rise again. I see the perpetual cycle of life and death in the blink of my lifeless eye, a mere sham of what once was real, reenacted in the decaying theatre of what remained. A bullet hits my chest and I remain undeterred. The ones that fell begin to form a blockade, but the urge propels us forward, over the corpses of our kind. As I near the living, the urge now larger than myself, my feet finally give in to decay.

I see the blade hurl towards me.

By popular (notausername) demand: a zombie story.