“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, nigh.”

She stabbed her bare toes at the dry, hard-packed dirt to get some purchase to turn her swing in circles until she would eventually let the chains spin her around as they unwrapped themselves.  But though she had the single-mindedness of a child, she seemed to forget what she was trying to do.  She’d freeze and the swing, turned only once, would quickly right itself.  Then she would sing the same chant in the same way and, using her toes, would turn the swing again.

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, nigh.”

She stopped and remained perfectly still.  It was as if she were listening to something.  But it was night and the playground was deserted except for corpses, her, and the people hidden behind the bushes.  It was impossible to say what she was looking at, if anything, or what she was listening to, if anything; who knew what her kind thought?

After about twelve minutes she took up the chant again and began turning herself around.  The television crew kept filming, gaffer tape covering the lights on their camera.  The reporter turned from spying on the child and addressed the camera in a whisper.

“We’re filming in infra red so we don’t disturb her.  She showed up at this playground a few days ago.  She seems to have broken away from some group, apparently coaxed here because she knew this place in life.

“But that was then, when corpses did not litter the grounds and she would have been here during the day.  Now she is one of the zombie plague, less aggressive than the others seen so far but that may be a function of the age she was when she died.”

He waited until she brought herself half way around before speaking again.

“She displays childlike behavior and a child’s lack of attention span.  But as you can see, her skin is a corpse’s skin, her flesh is already partly rotted and bone shows through at her left eye socket and the fingers of her left hand.”

The chant stopped and the swing righted itself.  The child did not stare into the distance.  This time her head was cocked to one side and her eyes watched the bushes behind which the two-man crew hid.

They held their breaths.  Eventually the chant began again in the same way, with the same beat, and her toes pushed the dirt until the swing was half-way around again before letting it turn back.

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, nigh.”

Scott Gordon poked his head around the camera.

“Maybe we should go,” he whispered.

“Are you kidding?  Nobody’s filmed one of these things for this long.”  Dave Franklin pursed his lips.  “If we do this right, we can write our own tickets.”

Dave counted down from five with his fingers.  At zero he began talking.

“These creatures have been terrorizing south eastern Ohio for months.  They were raised from the dead by a scientist who was pretending to be some kind of Voodoo priest, but they escaped his control.  Since then they have broken into small groups which the military has dealt with on an extended search and destroy mission.

“This is the second night this little girl has been turning herself on this swing.  Has she just … run out of steam?  Will she stay on that swing until she runs out of energy or will she make a move to another place?

“To understand that, we need to know who this little girl was before she died.  We’ll find that out right after these important messages.”

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, nigh.”

“Scott.  I wasn’t happy about this last night.  We’ll go, tell the soldiers, they’ll get rid of this thing.”

“Then all we’ll have is some background shots and too many other people have gotten those.  They’re crawling on the internet.  We’ve got to come up with something better, something that’s Pulitzer Prize material, something that will make people want to pay to see the documentary.  We could get rich from this.  We could get famous.  Our names would be up there with Woodward, Bernstein, and Cronkite.”

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie…”

And then she stopped.  The swing rocked round and back until it came to a stop.  All the while the little girl remained silent and immobile, staring in the direction of the camera operator and the journalist.  Her eyes glowed, not the reflected light of an animal’s eyes but instead a yellowish glow set in gradients, brightest at the outside of the iris.

That glow and the gray, rotted flesh left no room for an sense of facial expressions.  After a while she began her chant.  She repeated that chant over and over, every time with the same inflections, the same tones, the same spacing and pitch of words.  It would be possible to record her once and repeat that in an endless loop and it would have the same result.

The camera operator and the journalist held their breaths as long as they could.  Then they breathed as silently as possible.  They remained that way until the child finally finished her chant.  Scott looked at his watch to discover the zombie had been chanting for twenty two and a half minutes.

“She was a victim of the serial killer called Mr Dandy.  She was one of over twenty victims.  Like all of them except the last, she was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, raped, and murdered.  From all known evidence, she was taken from this playground, perhaps from that exact swing.  Mr Dandy is still in prison, and we cannot give you this little girl’s name for legal reasons.  But we’ve brought her mother here and now you can experience her mother seeing her daughter in this state.”

Dave Franklin left and came back some minutes later with a woman in her later thirties or early forties in tow.  She was not overweight, or remarkably thin.  Neither tall, nor short, nor particularly beautiful nor scarred.  She was typical of the victims of crime, especially the second-hand victims, the ones who loved someone who became the victim of crime.  They seemed to suffer less pain, or they were of less importance than the victims of second hand smoke.

“Tell me, how does it feel to see your daughter like this?”

The woman looked both stunned and horrified.

“You never told me … you said something about the case had turned up …,” she said.

“Something did turn up, your daughter in the form of one of those … things.  How do you feel about seeing her again?  Please, lots of people out there want to know.”

Dave Franklin realized too late that he’d forgotten to get her to stare into his eyes, a trick journalists used to ask any question they wanted and the person would respond as if they were a friend rather than an interrogator. Since the woman was uncontrolled she responded to the most compelling need.

She dove through the bushes and called to her daughter, repeating her name continuously.

The zombie stopped her chant for a moment.  Her head to one side, she stared at her mother with phosphorus-colored eyes.  Her toes curled into the dirt, her body flexed as if she were trying to remember.  Then, in the same tones and the same tune as always, she shifted her head and sang her chant.

“Hey, mommy, mommy, hey mommy, mommy …”

“My darling you remember.  I’ve missed you so much.”

“…hey, mommy, mommy, die.”

With that change of her chant, the little girl launched herself.  With a speed beyond the human she wrapped her arms and legs around the woman’s torso and sank her teeth into her former mother’s neck.  There was the sound of sucking broken by blowing of large bubbles of blood.

The woman’s reaction was instant and instinctive.  She pulled an arm free and pushed the face away from her.  Blood spurted and a sickly black pus stretched between them.  The monster who was once her child worked its head free and buried its teeth deep in its victim’s neck again.  There was sucking and black-and-red bubbles of ichor and blood.

“This is extraordinary.  No one has ever filmed this before.  This woman completely ignored our warnings and …”

“What warnings?  You lured her here, Dave.  You …”

“Shut up, Scott, you’re ruining the take.  We’re going to have to take the sound out and we’ll lose the slurping.”

Suddenly the mother was screaming.  She hadn’t screamed when she was attacked, when she pushed the face away, when the teeth sank into her, or even when the pus began to flow.  It was only now, when the pus reached some critical point.

She clawed at her neck and the zombie suddenly released her.  The little girl stood up as if to admire her handiwork.  The woman writhed, clutching at her neck and her face.  She tore flesh away, opening tears in her face seen on so many zombies of the recently dead.

“This is extraordinary.  This is exclusive footage that shows this is an infection and how it is passed on.  It proves zombies are created by science, not by magic.  Only uneducated, unscientific people believe magic is involved.”

Just then the monster came crashing through the bushes just like children do.  She leaped on David Franklin and wrapped her arms around him as she had done with the woman who was once her mother.  Instead of biting his neck she sank her teeth at the edge of his eye socket.  Blood flowed and the screams did not stop as bone was torn and the skull was broken open.  When the eye socket was opened wide enough, little hands pressed in and began gouging out the brains.

Memories and feelings flooded into her.  He was sitting behind the desk, ready to start the broadcast.  It was a beginning.  A new beginning.  He was going to get out of this one horse rustbelt town.  He just had to find someone he could call dangerous and turn it into a campaign.  Better if they really were dangerous, but they just had to look the part.  He’d teach them all when he sprung the trap.

Scott had run when the little girl headed toward the bushes.  Despite the head start, she was on him before he got out of the playground.  She bit into his neck and tore, opening enough of a gap to allow black pus to be spat into the wound.  Scott couldn’t help but think how she had become more efficient at this.

It felt like fire was spreading outward from the wound.  He looked into the creature’s eyes, but seemed to see out of them as well as in.  Somewhere in the distance there was a drum trying to break through a cascade of memories.  But none of the memories were Scott’s.  His thoughts passed through her and then dissolved into nothingness.

When the memories had passed away, the little girl dropped the dead figure.  She stood, absorbing the memories from the brain she had eaten.  They would rise.  When they joined her they would grow their number.  Eat brains to gather memories, suck and spit to raise the numbers.  Always more will always make it work.

Her head drooped.  Her body froze as the sun came up.  With the last of her night’s strength she sang.

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, hey, nahnie, nahnie, nigh.”

She remembered her murder and what went before, and how she hated her mother for not being there.  She stood and they remained lying down, and with one voice in the same notes and the same tone as all along, they sang.

“Hey, nahnie, nahnie, rust belt town, hey, nahnie, nahnie, take you down.”