CONUNDRUM

They’re staring at the healthy baby crying in the crib; he haven eaten the more nutritious portions of the young mother in the dining room, she the protective father in the front yard.  They’ve never seen each other before, but now, in this miraculous moment, they’re sharing something no living person could ever experience.  Satiated from their meals consumed moments earlier, they have no urge to feed on the baby and an impossible curiosity is welling up inside both of them like an uncomfortable itch.  With their reptilian brains still partially intact, they scratch at that curiosity though never quite grasp it completely.  Still, honest-to-goodness feelings, however unlikely, begin to surface.

HE

He’s been on his own now for several weeks following the more rural areas of Route 1.  Though not conscious of it, he’s fallen into a predictable pattern.  He finds a house, stares at it, concealed by the shadows near the edge of the woods with his head cocked off to the side as if thinking something deep, and waits… but no, there’s never much though, if any at all.  Just waiting for movement in the house, the sun to set and hunger to well up inside him.  He makes his move when the shadows are longest and just close to fading in with nightfall.  Each night finds him outside another house in the same position.

Tonight the pink rays of fading sunlight make his pale skin look almost natural.  His jeans and t-shirt, however, are the dead giveaway that he is indeed a zombie.  Nearly three weeks of carnage – a dozen uninfected lives in all – have left his clothes caked in blood and swarmed by flies.  All his meals of human hearts, brains, livers, kidneys, lungs and flesh are still processed by his partially functioning body.  His gut still secretes enzymes for digestion and the bacteria in his intestines still consume their share making for foul and uncontrollable flatulence and constant diarrhea.  Unaware, he never drops his pants to relieve himself which only adds to the gore and putrefaction that pervades him.  Ultimately though, he still processes food for energy and the not-so-silent pangs of hunger now launch him into action.

He is swift and thorough, perhaps the two reasons he has carried on as a zombie for so long.  Where throngs have been mowed down in every violent manner imaginable, he has survived.  This time would be no different.  He didn’t crash through the front door or smash windows when he made his move.  He simply walked through an unlocked back door and stalked silently and naturally towards his victim.

Tonight it was a young woman.  He tore through her chest and tugged on her heart and lungs with the precision of a chain saw.  Although his cerebellum had mostly rotted away and he tasted nothing, his medulla oblongata still functioned and there was an immense sense of satisfaction received after feeding on healthy human organs.  This time had a unique surprise as well.  As he chewed through the breasts of his victim they oozed milk with the blood.  The fatty, nutritious milk mixed with the blood and made his meal more fulfilling than usual.

As his pattern goes, he finished feeding, pushed the woman’s corpse off his lap then stood, ready to exit the house and disappear into the surrounding maple and oak stands.  It was automatic, instinctive almost, and when he heard a noise from the front room, what was left of his fight or flight response kicked in.  Despite the viral disruption of so many of his system, his hypothalamus still flooded his veins with a rush of epinephrine.

SHE

She’s been on her own for several weeks as well, the virus introduced into her system by her boyfriend, unbeknownst to both of them, through a passionate goodbye kiss. The queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach distracted her while she was driving and, going too fast to handle a corner, she found herself stuck in a ditch.  She began a panicked search from house to house for help as the virus continued to multiply and nest in her brain.  Then the search for help turned mechanical and was full of violent confusion when she finally found someone at home.  That was her first meal as a zombie.

Now she walks towards the front door of random homes no longer looking for help with her car but to satisfy her new and unyielding hunger for human flesh and organs.  Her accomplice in surviving for so long has been her good looks.  The level of threat she broadcasts is minimal.  Female, petite and pretty, her victims always let their guard down and, just as they realized their mistake, she attacks.  She latches on to their throats, blood pumping and spraying as their lives quickly drain from their bodies.  Then she feeds.

Before, when she was healthy and unaffected, she displayed several obsessive compulsive tendencies.  And the most obsessive of them all was showering.  She showered four of five times a day: in the morning, after class, before dinner, after working out and again before sleep.  This habit somehow remained even after the viral infection manifested.  Fully clothed, she would stand in the shower of the homes of her victims.  She wouldn’t lather up, but just stand there, sometimes with cold water on full blast, sometimes scorching hot.  Either way made no difference as she felt nothing.  But the blood and gore of her meal would rinse away.  Enough, at least, to keep her presentable, still petite and pretty even in the not-quite-dead, not-quite-alive state she was now in.

She approached this house like the others by walking straight up to it. She didn’t moan and groan; her hair was matted and her blouse, now pink from the nightly drenching in blood, no longer draped sweetly over her breasts.  Regardless, she looked normal enough for the man running out of the house with a baseball bat to bash her head in to pause and lower his weapon.

“You okay?” was the last thing he said before he flinched as the young lady in his front yard sprang forward, knocking him down and latching onto his throat.  He fought back but only died trying.  Unlike her first victim, she now knew how to dismember a human with precision.  It wasn’t so much that she learned how to do it but, like a lab rat that will repeat behavior when rewarded with a treat, she repeated the motions that led most efficiently towards her meal.

She ate then entered the house for her compulsive shower and the screen door slammed behind her.

THEY

Zombies have lost all cultural instincts that establish and predict how two people interact when meeting for the first time.  So, when the screen door slammed behind her and he stormed into the room an instant later, the two, recognizing the living-dead nature of the other, stopped abruptly in their tracks and stared blankly into space.  What was interesting was that the momentum from his rush into the room and her snappy entrance into the house carried each into the other’s personal space.  Their empty stares shifted slightly and they both were about to continue on their individual purposes when they were caught off guard again.

A baby’s cry rung out clear and loud from up the stairs.

His rancid breathe mingled with hers in an almost romantic moment as they incompletely tried to grasp the meaning of this new distraction in an otherwise comical happenstance.  He now stared at her and she at him.  Somehow the curiosity of the noise turned them both to the stairs and, unconsciously gentleman-like, he allowed her passage first and followed close behind.

They stared with an oddly impassionate curiosity at the crying baby as it kicked its blanket off and rolled onto its back.  When the baby saw that someone had arrived, it paused in its crying.  The two leaning over the crib, not necessarily dimwitted but obviously confounded, only continued to stare.  Something was there, deep in the corrupted grey matter, just too deep to retrieve completely then too distorted to comprehend when it did make it to the surface.  Of the three, only the baby finished its thoughts as it felt assured that succor had arrived.

Standing on the same side of the crib, inevitably, they brushed up against each other: first their shoulders, then arms and finally their hands.  Their pinkie fingers somehow clasped in a loving fashion.  What should have been blushing smiles was instead unsettled looks of incomprehension as their wasted brains struggled to understand.  Pheromones, the magic of which are hard enough to comprehend under normal circumstances, were working overtime, misfiring and grossly overcorrecting.  She stroked her free arm across her breasts as if to satisfy a sensual longing still somewhere deep inside her.  He sensed pressure in his groin as blood began to pump in an attempt to meet an instinctive carnal desire.

The baby began to cry again and she put her hand to it.  It grasped her soft, blood covered finger and made a loud sucking sound as it latched on.  The parents would have laughed at their baby bonding with them in a similar fashion.  This woman, however, didn’t necessarily find it funny, but exhaled slowly in response as if she formed the thought, “good.”  He grunted and scrunched his eyes up to look at her, maybe seeking help in formulating his own thought, maybe joining her in an attempt to relish this tender moment.  Then, unabashed, he screwed up his face further and forced out an obnoxiously loud – and what should have been excruciatingly painful – fart as the human remains shifted in his bowels.

REALITY

He is, after all, a zombie, and even the slightest hunger pangs trigger the feeding complex.  The precious humanity of the moment was lost.

The baby’s death was swift as the two fought over the scraps that comprised their gruesome dessert.  He then turned to leave, missed the first step at the top of the stairs and tumbled head over heels to the bottom.  Unhurt, or at least unaware of any injury, he rose and left the house to stand thoughtlessly in the woods near another house until the next evening.  She found the shower, turned the water on full blast and stood there as the day’s carnage was washed from her.  However close human emotions came to the surface, it was still just another victory for the zombies.