The Living Dead

She took the crow's path, cutting across lawns and parking lots and once over a chain-link fence despite a 'No Trespassing' sign. What was the point of following city ordinances when you weren't even obeying the laws of nature?

Flesh was falling off faster now. She'd been buried more than a week earlier, after all, and the temperatures had to be in the nineties. Flies clustered around her wound, each carrying off a small mouthful. She thought of them as lightening her load.

The tendons in her legs weren't working as well as they had, and her gait slowed to a weary shuffle, but since she didn't have to sleep or rest or eat (though she wouldn't have minded a glass of wine) she was able to travel all afternoon and through the night. She didn't mind.

By dawn she'd reached far enough up the hill that she could see pinkish light creep over the town. She carefully sat down, her back against the concrete support of a power line, and watched the sun rise.

Time ceased to have meaning. The sun rose and set, animals carried on their daily business, and the trees got older. Her flesh rotted away, her skin and eyes dried and shrunk, and her lips pulled back. Her hair stayed blonde, her teeth were still white and straight, and her breasts still defied gravity (those silicone implants would last forever) but she didn't care much about that any more.

She'd grown lazy and peaceful, now that she didn't have anyone to impress. Whatever magic animated her left her able to think and see, even without eyes and a brain. On the day her sister hiked up the hill, she was still able to wave.

Jessica was boyishly thin and dirty, hair hanging around her face in walnut-colored dreadlocks. She had loose cargo pants, a tiny tank top, and a haversack made of Guatemalan fabric with Peace Corp written on it. Her neck was hung with bone and shell beads strung on thongs, and she had lines on her face even though she was only in her mid-thirties. She was more beautiful than anything.

Jessica sat down next to her gracefully, not winded from the climb up the hill.

'Oh, my God,' Jess whispered. 'I am so, so sorry.'

'It's okay.'

'No, I mean it. When I came back for the funeral, I had no idea. I mean, it was such a shock for me that you died in the first place, what with you being so young, and I completely forgot about the shaman. I'm sorry.'

'Really, Jessica, it's okay.'

'You can yell, it's okay, I deserve it. You must be so mad at me.'

'No. I'm not mad. I'm happy.' Jess was the only one who had been nice to Melanie since she died. How could she yell at someone who apologized to a corpse? 'What happened?'

'It was this shaman, see, at least, he said he was a shaman, and he asked me if I wanted to live forever.' Jess sat cross-legged with her elbows on her knees, as though she were used to sitting on the ground. 'I said no, but my sister would, because you once said you were more afraid of getting old than anything else. It was kind of a joke.'

Melanie waited for the rest of the story, but Jess stopped and leaned back. Melanie belatedly realized she'd been too silent. 'Go on.'

'I thought he was kidding. He was kind of drunk, you know? And then as soon as I got home from the funeral, I got an email from you, and then from Brandon, saying that you'd been wandering around scaring people, and I realized I'd really screwed things up. It took a month or so before I could get my visa sorted out and come back to the States again, or I would have been here earlier.' Jess sighed. 'I'm so sorry. It must have been horrible for you.'

'No, not bad.' Melanie said. It was getting harder to talk now that she didn't have lips. 'Happens to everyone.'

Jess pulled one of the bead and bone necklaces off. She laid it on the ground beside Melanie's bony hand. 'I got him to give me this. This will let you die the second time, when you're ready.' She kissed Melanie on the skull.

'Thanks,' Melanie said. She didn't reach for the necklace yet, since she had all the time in the world. 'But I'm going to enjoy the view for a while.'

Dead Like Me

by Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro is the author of the novel Emissaries from the Dead—an interstellar murder mystery, not a zombie novel, despite the title. He's also written three Spider- Man novels and a pop culture book called My Ox is Broken! about the television show The Amazing Race. His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. His work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker.

'Dead Like Me' is a set of instructions, to a hapless protagonist, about how to survive the zombie plague by joining it. The question that prompted it was: Zombies don't breathe, so how do they track their victims? 'Certainly not by scent,' Castro says. 'If not by scent, how? If we know the method, can we fool them? And from there I got to: What will it cost?'

So. Let's summarize. You held out for longer than anybody would have ever dreamed possible. You fought with strength you never knew you had. But in the end it did you no damned good. There were just too many of the bastards. The civilization you believed in crumbled; the help you waited for never arrived; the hiding places you cowered in were all discovered; the fortresses you built were all overrun; the weapons you scrounged were all useless; the people you counted on were all either killed or corrupted; and what remained of your faith was torn raw and bleeding from the shell of the soft complacent man you once were. You lost. Period. End of story. No use whining about it. Now there's absolutely nothing left between you and the ravenous, hollow-eyed forms of the Living Dead.

Here's your Essay Question: How low are you willing to sink to survive?

Answer:

First, wake up in a dark, cramped space that smells of rotten meat. Don't wonder what time it is. It doesn't matter what time it is. There's no such thing as time anymore. It's enough that you've slept, and once again managed to avoid dreaming.

That's important. Dreaming is a form of thinking. And thinking is dangerous. Thinking is something the Living do, something the Dead can't abide. The Dead can sense where it's coming from, which is why they were always able to find you, back when you used to dream. Now that you've trained yourself to shuffle through the days and nights of your existence as dully and mindlessly as they do, there's no reason to hide from them anymore. Oh, they may curl up against you as you sleep (two in particular, a man and woman handcuffed together for some reason you'll never know, have crawled into this little alcove with you), but that's different: that's just heat tropism. As long as you don't actually think, they won't eat you.

Leave the alcove, which is an abandoned storage space in some kind of large office complex. Papers litter the floor of the larger room outside; furniture is piled up against some of the doors, meaning that sometime in the distant past Living must have made their last stands here. There are no bones. There are three other zombies, all men in the ragged remains of three-piece suits, lurching randomly from one wall to the other, changing direction only when they hit those walls, as if they're blind and deaf and this is the only way they know how to look for an exit.

If you reach the door quickly they won't be able to react in time to follow you.

Don't Remember.