I remember Peter telling me this story for the first time. He had rubbed his eyes thoroughly before looking back up at me and breathing the words, “Nine days. How the hell does something twitch for nine days? And you didn’t see this, kid. The thing was destroyed from the waist up. How the hell did it… I don’t know. But nine days passed before whatever was in its system had either run out or quit. No head. No spine. No organs. Nine gah damn days.”
The incident had left its mark on Peter. He had helped capture and contain a dozen zombies before that one, and never had feared their escape. This one, though it never broke its bonds, made Peter painfully aware that he had grossly underestimated the power of a single zombie. Before the Dave experiment, Peter was sure his methods were sufficient. That one encounter left him riddled with doubt that would cast a shadow over every subsequent meeting with the undead. Nothing was safe enough. Before, he tied them with straps, now chains. The idea was that the less leverage they could manage, the less likely they were to pull themselves free of their bonds, so we would stretch the arms and legs out as far as we could. Joints would strain and pop as we cinched them to the rack. Peter says that he had considered running pipe between the connection points. “Crammin’ a pipe between their feet and attached to the chain would restrict them even more, and one runnin’ behind the shoulders to connect the hands would jus’ about do them completely.” In the end though, chaining them to an iron gate that Wood had mounted to the wall seemed like more than enough for one zombie. “Bastards still freak me out, though.”
That would be the reason he never kept them alive for long. He’d say it was because every moment he wasn’t killing them was a moment wasted, but we all knew the truth. Even now, when it’s just Peter and me in the mill, he can’t sleep if there’s a living, moving, moaning zombie in the cage. Some nights we stay up until dawn, cutting, pulling, burning, stabbing, shooting, and disassembling the bodies of the undead.
I thought the practice would freak me out.
I thought I might shrink back from the sight of violence against a human, even if it was zombified now.
I thought I would never be able to cram a blade into the flesh of one, with its eyes on me, just to see how it dies.
I thought my inner humanity would shine through.
Apparently that died while I wasn’t paying attention.
At some moments I would catch Peter looking at me on the mill floor, in the office, at the kitchen table, and I would see something in his eyes that was difficult to read. His countenance was a mix of curiosity, wonder, and unease. It was as though my eager willingness to assist him in finding the most effect method of killing zombies yielded a combination of relief and concern. He hated that I felt nothing for the creatures, but was relieved that I showed capability and control. I was able to separate myself from the task, and perform horrid deeds on the once-humans without losing composure or nerve. For Peter, I don’t think he really got over the idea that the creatures were once human.
Maybe if the shufflers looked more like Hollywood zombies, and less like people who have the flu, Peter would have felt better about destroying them.
He would watch silently as I marked off targets on the naked chest of a zombie. Male, female, it didn’t matter to me. They were less than cattle. You could eat cattle. There was nothing appealing, endearing, or attractive about them. My actions matched my feelings in both coolness and sterility. Peter would write notes as I inserted a spike into each mark one at a time, gauging the effectiveness of the strike.
They never died.
Then I would flay them.
I would cut open a struggling zombie like plunging a straw in a juice box, only feeling less satisfied with the zombie. And all the while, Peter would look on, silent more often than not.
Ever since he was confined to the wheelchair, I had to go and gather zombies on my own. Never more than one at a time, I would try to isolate and snare a zombie close to the mill then drag it back and cage it up while we prepared. Peter was clearly uncomfortable with the practice, but saw no other option. Since the last big wave of zombies had flowed through the town we had not seen another living person in Cheney.
There was no help.
No one was coming.
As far as we knew we were alone. The work had to continue.
One night, during what was probably my fourth or fifth zombie capture, something happened that changed Peter forever. In his mind had always been a question of the level of consciousness of the creatures. Did they have memories? Did they feel? You could shoot and stab them all day, and they just kept coming, but did they experience pain in any capacity?
Peter’s fear was that zombies were humans, confined and aware within an autonomous shell. In their minds, they could feel and hurt and long and suffer, but the virus controlled their actions and made them killing machines. They were prisoners in their own bodies, and victims to a will that is not their own. When he killed them, he would do it kindly, almost affectionately, and the process never took long.
I felt no such responsibility to the creatures.
After he was confined to his chair, his preoccupation became almost religious. Before, he merely entertained the thought of healthy mind trapped in a broken and distorted frame. Now the hope
