Warm Bodies

‘Or you’ll die?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t eat me.’

I hesitate.

‘You rescued me. Like three times.’

I nod slowly.

‘And you haven’t eaten anyone since then, right?’

I frown in concentration, thinking back. She’s right. Not counting the few bites of leftover brains here and there, I’ve been gastronomically celibate since the day I met her.

A peculiar little half-smile twitches on her face. ‘You’re kind of… changing, aren’t you?’

As usual, I am speechless.

‘Well, goodnight,’ she says, and shuts the bedroom door.

I lie there on the love seat, gazing up at the water-stained cottage-cheese ceiling.

‘What’s going on with you?’ M asks me over a cup of mouldy coffee in the airport Starbucks. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I’m okay. Just changing.’

‘How can you change? If we all start from the same blank slate, what makes you diverge?’

‘Maybe we’re not blank. Maybe the debris of our old lives still shapes us.’

‘But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.’

‘But can we choose that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re Dead. Can we really choose anything?’

‘Maybe. If we want to bad enough.’

* * *

The rain drumming on the roof. The creak of weary timbers. The prickle of the old cushions through the holes in my shirt. I’m busy searching my post-death memory for the last time I went this long without food when I notice Julie standing in the doorway again. Her arms are folded on her chest and her hip is pressed against the door frame. Her foot taps an anxious rhythm on the floor.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Well…’ she says. ‘I was just thinking. The bed’s a king-size. So I guess, if you wanted to… I wouldn’t care if you joined me in there.’ I raise my eyebrows a little. Her face reddens. ‘Look, all I’m saying — all I’m saying — is I don’t mind giving you a side of the bed. These rooms are kinda spooky, you know? I don’t want the ghost of Mrs Sprat crushing me in my sleep. And considering I haven’t showered in over a week, you really don’t smell much worse than I do — maybe we’ll cancel each other out.’ She shrugs one shoulder, whatever, and disappears into the bedroom.

I wait a few minutes. Then, with great uncertainty, I get up and follow her in. She is already in the bed, curled into the foetal position with the blankets pulled tight around her. I slowly ease myself onto the far opposite edge. The blankets are all on her side, but I certainly don’t need to stay warm. I am perpetually room- temperature.

Despite the pile of luxurious down comforters wrapped around her, Julie is still shivering. ‘These clothes are…’ she mutters, and sits up in bed. ‘Fuck.’ She glances over at me. ‘I’m going to lay my clothes out to dry. Just… relax, okay?’ With her back to me, she wriggles out of her wet jeans and peels her shirt over her head. The skin of her back is blue-white from the cold. Almost the same hue as mine. In her polka-dot bra and plaid panties, she gets out of bed and drapes her clothes over the dresser, then quickly crawls back under the covers and curls up. ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

I lie back on my folded arms, staring up at the ceiling. We are both on the very edges of the mattress, about four feet of space between us. I get the feeling that it’s not just my ghoulish nature that makes her so wary. Living or Dead, virile or impotent, I still appear to be a man, and maybe she thinks I’ll act the same as any other man would, lying so close to a beautiful woman. Maybe she thinks I’ll try to take things from her. That I’ll slither over and try to consume her. But then why am I even in this bed? Is it a test? For me, or for her? What strange hopes are compelling her to take this chance?

I listen to her breathing slow as she falls asleep. After a few hours, with her fear safely tucked away in dreams, she rolls over, removing most of the gap between us. She’s facing me now. Her faint breath tickles my ear. If she were to wake up right now, would she scream? Could I ever make her understand how safe she really is? I won’t deny that this proximity ignites more urges in me than the instinct to kill and eat. But although these new urges are there, some of them startling in their intensity, all I really want to do is lie next to her. In this moment, the most I’d ever hope for would be for her to lay her head on my chest, let out a warm, contented breath, and sleep.

Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and colour? Since I became Dead I’ve recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I’ve lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I’ll remember this one for the rest of my life.

* * *

Sometime in the pre-dawn, as I lie there on my back with no real need to rest, a dream flickers on like a film reel behind my eyes. Except it’s not a dream, it’s a vision, far too crisp and bright for my lifeless brain to have rendered. Usually these second-hand memories are preceded by the taste of blood and neurons, but not tonight. Tonight I close my eyes and it just happens, a surprise midnight showing.

We open on a dinner scene. A long metal table laid out with a minimalist spread. Bowl of rice. Bowl of beans. Rectangle of flax bread.

‘Thank you, Lord, for this food,’ says the man at the head of the table, hands folded in front of him but eyes wide open. ‘Bless it to our bodies. Amen.’

Julie nudges the boy sitting next to her. He squeezes her thigh under the table. The boy is Perry Kelvin. I’m in Perry’s mind again. His brain is gone, his life evaporated and inhaled… yet he’s still here. Is this a chemical flashback? A trace of his brain still dissolving somewhere in my body? Or is it actually him? Still holding on somewhere, somehow, somewhy?

‘So, Perry,’ Julie’s dad says to him — to me. ‘Julie tells me you’re working for Agriculture now.’

I swallow my rice. ‘Yes, sir, General Grigio, I’m a—’

‘This isn’t the mess hall, Perry, this is dinner. Mr Grigio will be fine.’

‘Okay. Yes, sir.’

There are four chairs at the table. Julie’s father sits at the head, and she and I sit next to each other on his right. The chair at the other end of the table is empty. What Julie tells me about her mother is this: ‘She left when I was twelve.’ And though I’ve gently probed, she has never offered me more, not even while we’re lying naked in my twin bed, exhausted and happy and as vulnerable as any two people can be.

‘I’m a planter right now,’ I tell her father, ‘but I think I’m on track for a promotion. I’m shooting for harvest supervisor.’

‘I see,’ he says, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That isn’t a bad job… but I wonder why you don’t join your father in Construction. I’m sure he could use more young men working on that all-important corridor.’

‘He’s asked me to, but ah… I don’t know, I just don’t think Construction is the place for me right now. I like working with plants.’

‘Plants,’ he repeats.

‘I just think in times like these there’s something meaningful about growing things. The soil’s so depleted it’s hard to get much out of it, but it’s pretty satisfying when you finally do see some green