The Living Dead 2 Part 6

In the middle of the living room, near a wooden couch that had been turned over and smashed, lay a zombie. It had been staked down with a metal spike through the ribs. Impressive. Whoever had done it must have used a sledgehammer. The zombie kept trying to get itself free, but couldn't do so without ripping itself in half. Even so, it was still trying, scrabbling feebly at the cement floor.

It took me at least a minute to recognize Roger. His face had bloated up and slid sideways in the heat. His guts had burst out onto the floor. He had to have been dead for most of the past two weeks. The soiled t-s.h.i.+rt gave him away. We'd been in training together and he was still wearing the s.h.i.+rt our group had designed, along with the usual Peace Corps uniform of jeans and hiking boots that we were wearing for the job. A lot of volunteers eventually went native in their clothing styles, switching to cooler tailored cotton pajamas and flip-flops. Not Roger.

"Sweet Mary Mother of G.o.d," Josie said, recognizing him at the same moment. She looked ready to puke. I wasn't surprised. She and Roger had dated for about a week in training before she found out he was an a.s.shole. Training relations.h.i.+ps usually burned fast and furious, then guttered out just as fast.

"That's one way to put it." I could see her having a few issues walking in on a zombified person she'd once fooled around with.

As our voices echoed, I realized that the house seemed awfully quiet, as if someone was hiding further in, holding his or her breath. If Cyndi had been zombified, why would she be hiding from us? Why not attack? Where the h.e.l.l was she?

I sidled up to Josie. Sound really carried off gloss-painted walls and polished floors. I leaned close and whispered, "I think Cyndi's still in here."

She nodded and whispered back, "You think we should check before we clear the house and start burning?" Cyndi had never liked Josie, being a tad jealous about the training fling, but Josie was a pro. She wasn't going to let that stop her from finis.h.i.+ng the job.

"Well...yeah." At the very least, we'd need to make sure we'd located every zombie in the place or we might not get paid. Somebody had staked Roger to the living room floor, somebody who seriously didn't want to die or get zombified. It was probably Cyndi, but that didn't mean she was still human.

We catfooted down the hallway toward the bedrooms, covering each other. Machetes can be pretty effective, especially considering how much practice we'd gotten in with them. But they were close-up weapons, which meant we could get infected by body fluids or a bite if we didn't watch it. No way in h.e.l.l did I want to get infected and end up like Roger. Or that gendarme gendarme on the road from Ngaoundere. on the road from Ngaoundere.

Josie came behind me, watching my back. One of the fun parts of being a guy was getting to be on point. As I snuck down the hallway, I thought I heard a noise. I stopped dead, Josie ramming into my back.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?" I whispered. Josie was practically clinging to my shoulders. Then I heard it again. It was a whimper. It came from down the hall.

We edged into the room. The noise was coming from the closet. Somebody was hiding in there.

We eased up to either side, machetes raised high. Then, at a signal from Josie, I yanked open the door.

Good thing we didn't stand right in front of it. Whoever it was came right out of the closet, flailing around with a big spear. We almost hacked her to pieces right there, even as I recognized Cyndi. But then she started screaming at us. Actual words, mostly curses.

"Hey!" I yelled, backing up fast from the spear. "Hey, Cyndi! Calm down! It's Bruce and Josie!"

Cyndi didn't seem to notice. Josie and I had to dodge and hop around the room until I managed to hack the spear in half with my machete. Josie clomped Cyndi over the head with the b.u.t.t of hers. That dazed Cyndi long enough that we were able to get her down and tie her up. I guess she finally realized then that we weren't zombies-they don't tie you up, just eat you raw. She started to cry, so we stopped trying to tie her up. We chivvied her out of there, checking the backyard to make sure it was clear and burning everything flammable as we went. We managed to save a photo alb.u.m and some letters, though we weren't sure if they belonged to Cyndi or Roger.

Last, we torched Roger. Or I did, that is. On the front porch, Josie sat on top of Cyndi to squash her ongoing hysterics and to keep her from watching while I went back into the living room to take care of the thing that used to be her boyfriend.

"Sorry about this, Roger," I said. Just because he'd been an a.s.shole when he was alive didn't mean he deserved this. n.o.body did. I doused him with kerosene, coughing at the smoke oozing through the house while he grunted and snapped at my hands. Then I lit a match. It took five or six, but he went up. The grunting didn't get any more intense as the flames took him. If anything, it died down. He moved aimlessly around while he burned. Finally, something popped or broiled or I-don't-know-what inside what was left of his brain and he settled down on the floor to smolder, mostly in silence, aside from the odd pop and crackle. And that was the end of Roger. The second end. The final one, I hoped. I backed away with a shudder and went out onto the porch, leaving the doors open to get better circulation for the fire. That sure as h.e.l.l wasn't how I wanted to close out my my Peace Corps service. Peace Corps service.

We took Cyndi back to the taxi park after an alcohol bath, got our money from the sousprefet sousprefet and caught a car taxi back with no other pa.s.sengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she'd survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. d.a.m.n. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger. and caught a car taxi back with no other pa.s.sengers. It cost a little extra to get the whole car, but it was worth it. We were covered with dried sweat already, the heat of late morning wringing out more, and Cyndi was acting pretty claustrophobic. About halfway home, Cyndi started to get semi-coherent and more than thankful. That was actually worse because then she had to tell us all about how Roger had been bitten by a zombie rat out of nowhere and turned a few days later. How she'd survived the past two weeks being chased around the house by her zombie boyfriend, afraid to go out in case she was attacked by more zombies. d.a.m.n. That was almost as bad as ending up like Roger.

On the way back, the driver took a detour to pick something up from his house, so we ended up coming in on the same road we'd taken the day before from the train station in Ngaoundere. The remains of the dead gendarme gendarme our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly. our taxi had hit lay all over the road. The limbs still moved feebly.

Suddenly, I needed a really stiff drink, but we'd used up all my gin for disinfectant purposes. I'd have to go dry until we got back to the house.

"Arretez!" I shouted to the driver. "Stop! Stop the car!"

The driver thought I was nuts, but he pulled over. We hadn't paid him the full fare yet. He wouldn't leave.

"What're you doing?" Josie said, getting out with me. Cyndi just huddled in the back seat of taxi.

"I'm not leaving that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the road." I started getting the kerosene and matches out.

"Ahhh," she said, following my line of sight to the twitching arms and legs.

We didn't even bother to gather the body parts together, too much risk of infection. We just went up and down the road in the noon heat, pouring kerosene on the pieces and setting them on fire. I hoped that somehow it gave that gendarme gendarme some peace. I hoped I'd never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would give me the same mercy. some peace. I hoped I'd never have to do the same thing to Josie. And I hoped that if I got unlucky, too, someone would give me the same mercy.

The Anteroom By Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro's work has been nominated for several awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Stoker. His novels include Emissaries from the Dead Emissaries from the Dead and and The Third Claw of G.o.d The Third Claw of G.o.d, and two collaborations with artist Johnny Atomic: Z Is for Zombie, Z Is for Zombie, and and V Is for Vampire V Is for Vampire, which comes out in October. Castro's short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age Science Fiction Age, a.n.a.log a.n.a.log, Cemetery Dance Cemetery Dance, and in a number of anthologies. I previously included his work in The Living Dead The Living Dead and in and in Lightspeed Magazine Lightspeed Magazine. His story collections include A Desperate, Decaying Darkness A Desperate, Decaying Darkness and and Tangled Strings Tangled Strings.

People throughout history have had many different conceptions of what an afterlife might look like. The Greeks imagined the sunny fields of Elysium and the unending drudgery of Hades. The Vikings imagined that great warriors would go to an endless kegger in Valhalla. Dante imagined h.e.l.l as a ma.s.sive multi-tiered pit. (The image of the underworld as a place of fire may have been inspired by the volcanic island of Crete, and the word Gehenna, a.s.sociated with h.e.l.l, is named after a fiery garbage pit outside Jerusalem.) But what sort of an afterlife might await those who have been transformed into zombies?

"The most bone-chilling horror of the zombie sub-genre has always been that the plague turns us into things we don't want to be, things capable of committing depraved acts that would have appalled the people we used to be," Castro says. "We laugh when the hero of a zombie story blows away the shambling rotter in his path...but we tend to forget that the rotter used to be a person, and might have even been a human paragon. Stephen King wrote about his rabid St. Bernard Cujo, from the novel of the same name. You can't hate the dog. The dog always tried to be a good dog. But something got into him, something that eliminated free will from the equation. How would Cujo feel if somebody returned to him the capacity to understand what he'd done? How would a human being?"

Your mercy killer, who knew you well in life and weeps for you even as he does what he must, presses the rifle barrel against your forehead with a gentleness that renders the gesture more a goodbye kiss than a murder. He even apologizes to you, calling you by name and telling you how sorry he is. You do not understand the apology or recognize your name or even appreciate that you are being put out of your misery. You only know that you have been prevented from shuffling forward, the atavistic impulses that drive your rotting limbs still urging you toward the very man who is about to end you. You don't attempt to evade the bullet, because that kind of problem-solving is beyond you. You simply moan in protest. And then he pulls the trigger and the world fills with fire and your head comes apart in an explosion of bone and blood and brains. The wall behind you drips with everything good you were in life and everything obscene you became in death.

Your best friend will tell himself that you're in a better place now. And here we leave him, wis.h.i.+ng him well, whether he manages to survive or at least dies without becoming infected. Because his story is unremarkable. There have been many thousands just like it, in the world plagued by the living dead.

But your own story is not yet done.

In fact, your story might never be done. And this is why.

You wake an infinite distance away, blinking on your back beneath a sky that is neither dark nor light, but rather a shade of gray that reminds you of sheets that have gone unwashed. You are naked, to the kind of air that raises goose b.u.mps on your skin and a.s.sures you that you're once again alive. You are hungry, but it is not the hunger that you have been feeling in the days since the contagion turned you into a thing neither alive nor dead; it is the hunger a human being feels, the hunger of skipped meals, the hunger of a body beginning to tremble from need but not yet forced to desperation. It is not pleasant, but it is better than what you felt as a corpse: a gnawing, painful emptiness powerful enough to drive ambulatory meat.

It's cold. The air has the kind of chill only possible in caves. The dirt against your back feels dry, and so solid that it might as well be concrete, but there is no warmth in it, no sense that it has ever known sun or sprouted so much as a weed.

But that's not the force that makes your face contort in pain. A flood of unwanted memories has reminded you of the man you were, in the world before everything turned to s.h.i.+t, and taken you through every shambling step of the journey you began when you rose as one of the living dead. You recall facing people you'd once known, and seeing only meat; hearing the screams of somebody who had been wounded and left behind, and feeling only hunger; digging with your bare hands through the steaming belly wound of a victim who begged you to finish her off, and knowing only the compulsion to shovel more of her sweetmeats into your idiot maw. You remember exactly the long minutes she lasted, and you remember failing to see her as a living thing, even when she called you Daddy. You remember losing interest in her after her heart stopped, staying near her only out of indecision, walking away after she sat up a thing hollowed out both body and soul, noticing but not caring that she tried to follow you but fell behind with every step.

As a mindless walking corpse, preying on the warm, you were spared these memories. As whatever you are now, something capable of knowing what they mean, you will never be able to escape them. You will never be able to forget what it had been like, before, to watch that bulge in your wife's belly grow until it became a great big promise of imminent life; to hold the squirming little miracle in your hands, unprepared for the sheer intensity of the love that seized you as you looked into the baby's indignant face; to feel that wonderment again the first time she smiled at you; to live for the moments when she laughed; to watch her run around you in circles, her laughter like music; to hold her in your arms as the world turned to s.h.i.+t and the skies filled with soot and everything you saw became an atrocity, clutching for you both. You will never be able to forget the way she'd fallen into a lasting silence well into the plague after your wife died from a simple fever, one that killed without forcing her to rise. You will never be able to forget watching your daughter's exhausted sleep while foul things moaned on the other side of a flimsy wall. You will never be able to forget telling her, without waking her, that you would never let the bad things get her, that you would never become one of them, that you would never let her become one of them either. You will never be able to forget the long weeks of bitter struggle that followed. You will never be able to forget the moment when your own chances ran out, or the way she regained her powers of speech and called you Daddy just before you put an end to her.

You weep until you have to stop from sheer emotional exhaustion.

Only when you fall silent, for a moment, do you register the many other wails in the wind.

Standing hurts. The ground is covered with a thin layer of concentrated grit that irritates your skin where it adheres to the soles of your feet. You wipe the particles away with a brush of your hand, but more accrues with your next step, which makes a nasty crunch as you sink a millimeter or so into the surface. Your body's going to have a hard time generating enough warmth to replace what the dirt leeches from your flesh; and while you should be better off standing than you were lying flat on your back, the air is no real improvement. It's thin, frigid, and tasteless. Your lungs derive no nourishment from it.

The surrounding landscape is just as barren. The gray plain extends to a gray horizon that feels farther away than any you would have found in any desert on Earth; there seems no obvious dividing line between dirt and sky, no border drawn that mitigates this emptiness by establis.h.i.+ng any kind of limit. There are no distant hills, no sense that any one direction is preferable than any other. If you had to guess you would say that there might, might, be a dull glow somewhere off to what you arbitrarily decide to be east. But that might be imaginary, too. It might just be your eyes, imposing detail on a landscape that otherwise offers none.

This is not the same thing as calling this flat purgatory uninhabited. Because it happens to imprison many thousands of other people, crouching or sitting or lying down, as far as your eyes can see. Wherever they come from-and you can only a.s.sume that it must be the same place you have come from-they have been plopped down at equal distances, hundreds of paces apart, and they all remain alone, unwilling to expend the energy it would cost to get up and form groups. There are many weeping and many screaming, but most are just stewing in their own silence, finding enough torment within the confines of their own skulls.

Another memory comes to you: a man who had been shot in the knee. The round had turned his leg to a broken twig, trailing along at a sickening angle as he used a rifle b.u.t.t to lever himself across a city street strewn with corpses and garbage and broken gla.s.s. For some reason you had been the only one of your kind still ambulatory, and this promised great things for you as you shambled toward him, announcing your approach and your intent with a low moan that made the doomed figure try to crawl faster. By the time you were within twenty paces of catching up with him, he was looking back over his shoulder once for every yard he managed to crawl. By the time you'd halved that distance he was shouting empty obscenities, calling you a stinking b.a.s.t.a.r.d. When you halved the distance again he was swinging his ruined rifle like a club, offering a threat that deterred you not at all. Once you came within reach of him he clubbed you in the belly, knocking you on your back; and he cried out with the savage glee of a Neanderthal who had just managed to spear the attacking tiger.

He spent the time it took you to get up dragging himself another five yards, but then collapsed, gasping. Another sweep from that rifle put you down a second time, but this time he only managed to retreat half the distance before you were on him again. Too late he decided to do what he should have done the first time, which was club you in the skull and hope he could do enough damage to your brain to smash the terrible miracle that kept you moving. But by now his strength was fading. He only succeeded in flattening your nose, adding your own clotted blood to the gore already painting your lips. You fell down again and got up again. This time he had only crawled a foot. He swung the rifle again and this time did not knock you down, but only drove you back a step or two, which was not far enough at all.

No longer able to summon voice, he whispered one last defiant "f.u.c.k You," before giving up on the rifle he could no longer lift and trying to fend you off with his bare hands.

That slowed you down for longer than you can now believe: maybe an hour, as the magnificent doomed b.a.s.t.a.r.d continued to refuse to submit. The best you can say about him is that there was a little less left of you by the time he was done. The worst is that it didn't help him, and that he really should have saved a bullet for himself.

Afterward, you took your time, starting with his face while he made the few sounds he still could.

Reliving that now, just one returning horror out of many-and wis.h.i.+ng for something solid in your stomach, so you could vomit something other than air-you finally understand why none of the other people you see would stir themselves to approach any of the others. All of these people are haunted by the people they killed, the flesh that they ate, and the loved ones who lived to see them become something reeking of the grave that wanted to drag them into the same bottomless darkness.

Who would want to see another human face, with that on their conscience?

Like them, you want to just sit alone and stew in your misery.

But then something drives you forward anyway. You select one of your closest fellow prisoners, a pale fat mound sitting on the ground about a hundred paces away. She looks up long enough to see you coming, but then turns her attention back to the dirt and doesn't move at all as you cross the gulf between you. As you draw near, you see that her skin is just as colorless as the sky, except for the places where particles of grit now cling, like parasites. She's not obese, not really, but she has enough excess flesh to form a donut around her waist. There is a tattoo on her arm, but it's an old one and has become a faded purple smudge that no longer conveys whatever it had once been meant to signify.

When you stop before her, she glances at you, her weariness heavy enough to fill up a world. "What do you want?"

"What is this place?"

She barks a bitter laugh. "Did you just arrive?"

"Is it h.e.l.l?"

She s.h.i.+fts her weight just enough to set the excess flesh jiggling, a sad little dance that gives the impression of life for all of two seconds before inertia rea.s.serts herself and the rolls of flesh once again take on the character of stacked corpses. For long minutes you imagine her intent on waiting you out, but there's little point in that, not here in this place where every direction is exactly like every other. And then she murmurs, "I was a nurse."

"What?"

"I was a ward nurse at an old age home, the floor where they kept all the patients with dementia. It was the last stop. They'd already been through the forgetful stage, the confused stage, even the dangerous stage most people don't know about, when their frustration with a world they no longer understood turned them unreasonable and violent. They didn't come to me until they'd forgotten who they were, and what they'd lost. Most of them were bedridden, and some were so weak with age that they didn't have enough energy to move much...but always, always, there were some who'd gotten it in their sixties, or fifties, when they were still ambulatory, with energy to burn. I even had some in their forties, from time to time: one a college professor with a beautiful little wife twenty years younger than him, an ex-student who had to watch as her robust middle-aged husband suddenly started turning into an old man only two years into their marriage. He could run a marathon every day, that one. And we let him walk up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, nodding a kind h.e.l.lo to us on every pa.s.s, never remembering that he'd ever seen us before. Understand: we knew that he was in a terrible situation. We knew that he didn't deserve what had happened to him. But, for a long time, it was almost pleasant, getting that smile from him every few minutes. He wasn't unhappy, not at all. He didn't know it was a care facility. He just thought it was a hotel, and figured that he'd be able to return to his life if he could just...if he could just find his room. He just needed to find his room. I always thought, if I ever come down with it, let me be like him. It wouldn't be too bad, if all I cared about was...finding my room."

You don't understand why she's telling you this. It seems random, not the answer to your question at all. As she winds down, you come within a breath of interrupting. But then she continues.

"After a while, he got worse. The smile went away. He forgot everything else but the shuffling walk up and down the corridor, and the skin of his face went slack, like a blanket draped on a chair. He was no longer looking for anything. There was nothing behind his eyes but the next step, and the step after that. He was transferred to another facility, so I never found out what happened to him. But when the dead rose...when they started coming after us...the look on their faces was nothing new to me. They looked like everybody in my ward. Some of the people I ended up with called them names like 'those things,' and 'those sons of b.i.t.c.hes,' but I always remembered the old people on the ward, the ones who'd also forgotten everything, and had also never asked to become what they were. I never forgot that it wasn't their fault wasn't their fault, that they were just looking for something they couldn't have anymore." Her tired gaze, long fixed on the dirt, manages to move upward, long enough to meet yours. "Some of us may have been evil b.a.s.t.a.r.ds before. But what we did after the infection took us was just the infection. It wasn't our fault. Unless G.o.d's a total maniac...it wouldn't condemn us to h.e.l.l. And it hasn't. I believed in h.e.l.l. I still believe in h.e.l.l. It may have taken me a long time to figure out, but this place isn't even remotely terrible enough to be h.e.l.l."

"Then...I'm sorry. I don't get it."

She stabs the dirt with her thumb, and draws an angry circle, one that fails to connect back to itself as the curve comes around to its starting point. She rubs it out and draws it again, once again breaking the curve at the point where it should become perfect. You get the impression that she has spent much of her time here, however long that's been, trying and failing to make this one simple shape. And then she says, "After what we've done...why would anybody already in Heaven want us there?"

The size of it almost knocks you over. You spin in place, taking in hundreds, thousands of immobile figures with all that horror behind them and nothing that offers comfort in front of them. There must be millions, all told, maybe hundreds of millions or even billions: the poor, abused world getting pretty d.a.m.n unpopulated by attrition by the time your own life was ripped out. You might be looking at much of the Earth's population, but for those lucky few fortunate enough to suffer so much damage when they died that the terrible phenomenon was unable to affect them: the lucky few who had not been tainted.

You say, "But that's so f.u.c.king unfair."

She nods without sympathy before returning to her hopeless drawing. "The whole thing's unfair. Isn't it?"

You stumble away, so blinded by despair and horror that you don't even thank her for the information. You are still stumbling as you pa.s.s the next hopeless figure, and the next figure after that; the ones who look up at you and the ones who don't, the ones who seem half-mad and the ones who act that way because it's the only rational response to an irrational eternity. You want to scream at them, raise an army of them, and march together toward that light in the east, the one you now know to be the Eden that will never let you in. You know that you will never get another to stand with you, let alone walk with you. They all know they carry the taint. They all know that while they're not quite d.a.m.ned they're as close to d.a.m.ned as human beings can be without actual consignment to the pit.

And then the rage rises out of nowhere and you throw your head back and you howl at the empty sky. You know exactly who you're yelling at, but you don't care. You only know that what happened wasn't anybody's fault. Or even if it was somebody's, if the plague was some exotic bug escaped from a government lab or something, n.o.body who caught it had ever been given a choice. You were no more responsible than loving family dogs gone rabid, or sane men turned violent by tumors in their brains. You don't deserve this emptiness, this punishment that amounts to no more than the stubborn refusal to judge you.

You scream until you run out of breath and stand there panting as you wait for an answer. But n.o.body answers. n.o.body answers. You scream again and this time you face the gray sky and try to bring forth a pattern in the miniscule differences in shade between one patch of emptiness and another: the face of a kind and benevolent, or even stern and maniacal creator, looking down on you, taking note of what you say, and either changing his mind or smiting you for your temerity in daring to criticize him. But again, though you scream for a timeless time, maybe longer than you existed as one of the living dead, maybe longer than you existed as one of the warm, no face emerges. You are alone.

And again you wind down and sink to your knees and face the prospect of doing what all these other lost people have done, which is sit your a.s.s on some forsaken patch of dirt and let the years, the centuries, the millennia accrue like dust.

You want to. That's the terrible thing. You want to.

But the b.a.s.t.a.r.d has left you with one thing worth doing.

And so you lurch back to your feet and begin to trudge forward, stopping in front of every immobile before moving on to the next, aware that there may be millions or even billions left to go, but not caring at all, because you have nothing but time.

She was just a little girl. Your Your little girl. little girl.

It may take about as much time as it takes some mountain ranges to crumble to dust...but sooner or later, you'll find her.

When the Zombies Win By Karina Sumner-Smith

Karina Sumner-Smith is the author of several stories, including "An End to All Things," which was a finalist for the Nebula Award. Her work has appeared in the magazines Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Flytrap, Challenging Destiny, Fantasy Magazine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Flytrap, Challenging Destiny, Fantasy Magazine, and and Strange Horizons Strange Horizons. Anthology appearances include Children of Magic Children of Magic, Mythspring Mythspring, Jabberwocky 3 Jabberwocky 3, Summoned to Destiny Summoned to Destiny, Ages of Wonder Ages of Wonder, and Why I Hate Aliens Why I Hate Aliens. Sumner-Smith is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and works part-time as a bookseller at Bakka-Phoenix Books, Toronto's science fiction and fantasy bookstore.She says she is currently battling a novel.

The ending of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead Night of the Living Dead is pessimistic about human nature but seems optimistic about the chances of human survival in the face of a zombie pandemic. After all, come morning, we see squads of militiamen rounding up zombies and consigning them to bonfires. However, in the sequel, is pessimistic about human nature but seems optimistic about the chances of human survival in the face of a zombie pandemic. After all, come morning, we see squads of militiamen rounding up zombies and consigning them to bonfires. However, in the sequel, Dawn of the Dead Dawn of the Dead, we are presented with the reality that the zombie plague cannot be contained and will continue to expand exponentially and irreversibly, and by the time Day of the Dead Day of the Dead rolls around the world is completely dominated by zombies and only a few cl.u.s.ters of survivors remain. rolls around the world is completely dominated by zombies and only a few cl.u.s.ters of survivors remain.

The final outcome seems inevitable. Sumner-Smith writes, "In a discussion about the apocalypse, I joked that someone should write a story set after everyone has been eaten or turned into zombies. What would the zombies eat? What would they do when there's no one left to infect? Once I'd considered the consequences, a total zombie apocalypse seemed not horrific, nor comedic, but tragic. It's not just that everyone has died, but that we have died and yet continue to stumble through the ruins of our world with no way to understand or acknowledge what's happened, or mourn the loss of everything we once were."

When the zombies win, they will be slow to realize their success. Word travels slowly on shambling feet.

It will take years to be sure that there aren't still humans hiding in high mountain camps or deep within labyrinthine caverns; that the desert bunkers are empty, the forest retreats fallen; that the s.h.i.+ps still afloat bear no breathing pa.s.sengers.

And then: victory. Yet the zombies will not call out to each other, or cry in relief, or raise their rotting hands in triumph. They will walk unseeing beneath telephone wires and over cell phones, computers, radios. They will pa.s.s smoldering rubble without thinking of smoke signals, trip on tattered bed sheets and not consider making flags.

They are zombies; they will only walk and walk and walk, the word spreading step by step across continents and oceans and islands, year by year. And the word, to them, will feel like hunger.

When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a screaming buffet on the run.

Yet there will be only silence and vacant rooms where once there was food, and the zombies, in their slow and stumbling way, will be surprised. Stomachs once perpetually distended will feel empty and curve inward towards their spines, the strength of even animated corpses beginning to fail without fuel. They will look about, cloudy eyes staring, and they will groan, unbreathing lungs wheezing as they try to push out enough air to ask slowly, hungrily, "Brains?"

But there will be no one left to find. Only each other.

Zombies, they will learn, do not taste good.