“Easy,” Peter warns.
I give the catchpole a push and the zombie backs away from the cage door. I remove the bolt, lift the handle, and let the door swing open.
It’s just me and the deady.
The zombie looks at me with faded eyes. I used to think that once I was close enough to them, I would look into their eyes and see the small flicker that was a remainder of a soul; like a lone candle burning in an empty house.
I got over that idea rather quickly.
Zombies have eyes like dead fish: They’re there, and they clearly work, but there’s no life in them.
It’s true that the zombies see everything and process nothing. Peter and I have seen shufflers scan the room, studying everything while turning a circle in their cage. They would invariably make several full rotations, giving everything the same level of concentration each time, despite the fact that they were looking at the same items over and over. Peter had suggested that zombies do little more than constantly scan for food. As soon as either of us would enter the main floor of the mill, all a zombie had to do was smell us and it would lock in on blood. Nothing else seemed to matter. To the undead, the meal was all that held value. Zombies with a lot of life left would smash the walls of their cyclone prison and rage against the barrier. The older ones, weaker and more sluggish, would walk into the fencing over and over, bouncing off the chain-link and murmuring pathetically. This and every degree of activity in-between was witnessed each time we approached a caged dead-head.
“The meal,” Peter had said, “is all that matters. It’s the perfect loving relationship,” he chuckled. “They will literally only have eyes for you.”
I lead the zombie by the neck to a harness rig nearby. Now the tricky part. I hold the critter in place while Peter wheels around me and fastens the chains on its wrists and ankles. There is a lot of room for error and the chances of a bite are at their highest while we are pinning one down. If I let up even a little or if Peter inadvertently gets too close to the head, one of us will spend the afternoon destroying the other. “An’ frankly,” Peter likes to joke, “killin’ you from a chair would be a pain in the ass.”
Peter had told me that he used to just fasten them by the elbows. Back when everyone was still at the mill and Peter could walk, he and two others found that elbow control was all you really needed to keep a zombie in place. They didn’t seem to realize their feet were good for anything except walking. They would scratch at the air with impotent fingers and bite at nothing like a crazy person. That was until they caged and strapped one that was freshly dead.
“That som’bitch jumped and flipped and twirled like a gah damn ballerina every time one of us opened the door.” Every time he would share the story Peter would sweat and shake a little at the memory. “More than once I was certain I was going to come downstairs and find the rotting asshole runnin’ free. In the end I only tried one thing with him.”
“What was that?” I had asked, clearly taking the bait he was leaving.
“I put Dave on him,” the man replied simply.
Dave was probably the most affected person I had met post-outbreak or any time in my life. Driven to silence by the horrors he had witnessed, Dave was known for the violence he would exhibit by murdering zombies.
“Dave suited up, only because we made him do it, and he clubbed that damn zombie to his heart’s content. Ah hell,” Peter remembers with an unsteady sigh, “There was blood, and filth, and viscera all over the place when he was done. The arms were still strapped in. Just the arms, mind you. Ol’ Dave had bashed the body clean off them, and pummeled the head to the point I swore he was going to smash it into the torso. In a way,” Peter laughs darkly, “he did. There wasn’t much left above the chest after he was through. Just a messy smear and some very battered shoulders. If you looked, you could find some pieces of skull, but not many and no large parts. I remember Wood asking afterwards, ‘Where the hell are all the teeth?’ and sure as shit they were nowhere. Never did find them. How does a man bash something ‘til the gah damn teeth disappear? Well,” he would say in a resolved tone, “that was Dave. When we told him to stop, Dave just kept swingin’ that club of his. We yelled, but he either couldn’t hear us or didn’t care. I got the feelin’ that if anyone stepped between Dave and his prey, they were going to see the flash of his club. In the end, he either got bored, too winded, or felt that enough damage had been done. Wordlessly, Dave spit at the corpse and walked away.
“After focusing mostly on the head and torso, the results were hard to look at, but kind of funny at the same time. The legs were left totally alone you see, so it looked like some guy had swallowed a stick of dynamite. Arms and head blown off, and stomach blasted out. Since the deady’s head and guts where flung all around the walls and floor in a radius of a dozen feet or more, the visual was just about perfect. Then the fuggin’ thing’s legs started moving.” The laugh comes like a coughing fit as he tries to remember the incident without remembering how it made him feel at the time. “We all jumped at that one! It started kicking like crazy and we kind of wished Dave was still in the room to finish the thing off. In the
