Waking Up Dead

for a moment, her brow scrunched. “Except for maybe a bunch of survivalist types. Preppers and rednecks.”

He snorted. “Yeah they’re probably fine. Hiding out in the mountains and shooting anything that comes up their path.”

“Most likely…so are you saying you think that the infection was spread purely from the zombies biting people?” Jackson asked. “Not from a virus transmitted through the water or the air or something?”

“If it was a virus, then why didn’t everyone get it?”

“I don’t know. But someone had to get it in the start, right? The first zombie?” She shuddered slightly saying those words. The first zombie had become almost a bogeyman in her mind, and yes, she got that that was weird. There were enough horrors already, no need to add more. But when she dreamed, which was not often, sometimes it was the first zombie that woke her up shaking.

It’s never made sense to me,” Jackson added. “How many people were there in the US before the zombies?”

“More than three hundred million or so, I think,” Luke said.

“And most of them just disappeared in the first few months didn’t they? Dead? Zombiefied? I don’t know. All I know is that one day the world was full of people and then they were gone or they were zombies. It never really stacked up,” she said softly. “How it could have happened so quickly if it was all about being bitten.”

“I never really thought about it like that. People were dying so quickly, zombies roaming the fucking streets.” He shook his head. “I always just thought that the odds were not in favor of survival and just worked off that.”

“But we survived.”

“Yeah. But out of a country of millions, I bet there’s only a few tens of thousands of people who are still human.”

“And that’s exactly my point. There are fewer every day.”

“Fewer every day,” he repeated.

Silence reigned for a moment and Jackson wondered if Luke was thinking about her suspicions that all was not as simple in the zombie world as it seemed, or maybe he was just thinking about all the people he’d lost. Indistinct faces started to form in her mind, and she spoke quickly in an effort to push them back where they belonged.

“So tell me where did this come from? It doesn’t look like a bite mark.”

“It’s not. I guess I need to tell you the whole story. Come on.” He motioned for them to sit down on the couch. Jackson hesitated. She needed to get moving, to go find Tye, but on the other hand if Luke had information that was important…well it would benefit them all for her to hear it.

She eyed the couch with a frown. It looked devastatingly comfortable and she knew it wouldn’t take much to sink into it and close her eyes. The shower had banished some of the exhaustion, mainly because she’d gone over the one-minute mark and had been hit with a bolt of freezing cold water, but still she was feeling it. Yes, it would be so easy to just lie back, but there was Tye, and Luke who had knowledge for her. So she straightened her shoulders, gave herself a mental shake, and joined him on the couch.

“Let’s hear it then.”

“I’ve been fairly lucky so far,” Luke began. “Well, lucky so far as other survivors go, I guess. It’s all about the perspective. I didn’t die or get eaten or turn into a zombie.”

“Amen to that.”

“But you’re right, Jackson, something has changed. You remember when the first of the zombies started coming?”

Jackson nodded, even though the question was so obviously rhetorical. “I remember my first dead face-off like it was yesterday,” she said, despite the fact it was held back by one of her refuse-to-think-about-it barriers. Though the barrier was a little shaky now, and she clenched her fists as her brain tried to replay it, speaking before she could keep it silent. “It was the woman I told you about. The one whose legs didn’t work.”

“You got away from her though,” Luke said.

“Just about. I didn’t stop running for hours.”

And that woman had been a mere taster, Jackson thought, though she did not say as much. There was no need. No doubt Luke had seen his fair share of zombies running through the streets. They had come out of nowhere, were everywhere, and because no one had been expecting them, and the zombies had been able to fucking sprint, everything had been chaos.

“What did you do in those early days?” Luke asked and Jackson shook her head automatically. She so did not want to talk about the days she’d holed up in her apartment, waiting for her brothers. Or the fact that only one of her brothers had turned up… Jackson clenched her fists tighter, swallowed unsteadily, and dragged the mental barrier back into place. Stamping your first zombie brain, your brother’s no less, was something best not replayed…

Silence held between them for a moment and then Luke started to speak, clearly, and thankfully, getting the hint. “They were stupid in those early days,” he said and Jackson made an effort to unclench her fists.

“Yeah, they were.” Though it was an undisputable fact that her brother had found his way to her apartment—something that still broke her heart if she let herself think about it—so even back then, in truth, they hadn’t been that dumb.

“Fast yeah, but stupid,” Luke continued, then paused. “No, not stupid, that’s the wrong word. But it was like all they wanted to do was bite and eat and that consumed them. I think they were acting on their predatory drive more than anything else.”

The drive to find a sibling, a family member…Jackson shivered, and before she could stop herself she started to think about how many people had been eaten by their loved ones. It was an old thought, one that refused to go away, despite all her barriers.

Luke settled back on the couch and scowled. “They smelled food, they attacked. Like a shark or something, they didn’t seem to think about anything else. I remember once, I watched one almost lose an entire hand bashing through brick to get to the people on the other side, but the door was right there and he could easily have got through the wood—it didn’t make any sense.”

“I saw plenty of that too.”

“Only things are different now.” He pointed to the wound on his stomach. “I had one motherfucker chasing me and God, he was fast. Like really fast. I had zero weapons left, a pounding headache, and I was beyond tired, so the only thing I could think to do was find somewhere to hide. Somewhere with a locked door. It was stupid of me really. I should have just turned and fought.”

Luke paused and Jackson could tell the memory still haunted him. She didn’t blame him. She had more than the one mental barrier keeping things shut away in her head. Geez, in her old life she’d go bankrupt from the hours of therapy she’d need to get anywhere close to normal again. But then normal was relative now wasn’t it?

“But anyway,” Luke continued. “I found a building and locked myself in. I figured I’d have five, maybe ten minutes at most before he broke the door down and my plan was to get out the other side. Before I even had a chance though, it broke the lock and turned the mechanism! I couldn’t fucking believe it.”

“It turned a lock?” Jackson was shocked and it took her a moment to get her head around Luke’s words. She’d never heard of a zombie displaying such intelligence. “Maybe it was an accident?” she suggested. “It didn’t know what it was doing and the mechanism just happened to turn?”

Luke shook his head. “No. It had this gleam in its eye, like it knew exactly what it had done. It was calculated. And it was so fast! It had pinned me down before I could even move.”

“Christ…”

“Stuck one of its rancid fingers in my stomach. Honestly, Jackson, it was like it was playing with me.”

“How did you get away?”

“A paperweight, would you believe? The desk in there had some sort of quartz thing and I used it, literally with the last of my strength, to smash its head in.”

Jackson scowled at the picture Luke’s words created and tried to get her head around the idea. “So, they really are becoming smarter? And more of them are—not just random ones.”

“I’d put money on it, if that still existed.”

“What does that mean for us?”