do us any good. But I couldn’t drag her all the way back to zone A on my own. Even with Trevor’s help it would be difficult.
Trevor. I had forgotten all about him. I hoped he was okay. We were supposed to meet at the bus station again once we were safe. That was the only thing to do. I’d bring her back with me and then I and Trevor could figure out what to do with her, if he was still undead. Maybe we could bring her back to zone A together.
I waited a few more minutes, holding the trembling human closely, listening. The commotion of growling and trampling Stiffs had faded and only the chirping of crickets could be heard in the darkness, the occasional scampering of a forest animal accompanying it.
“The horde’s gone,” I said quietly. “I think it’s safe now. Come on.”
I took her wrist in my hand and turned toward the dirt wall. I pulled myself up and out with my free hand, holding firmly to the human as I did. I sat up on my feet and pulled the girl out of the creek bed and stood. She collapsed on the ground before me, letting her head hang down and the short strands of blonde, dirty hair fall around her face. She was filthy and weak. She couldn’t survive in this world. She should be dead or a zombie. I could feel her pulse against my fingers through her wrist as I held her. It was thumping quickly, over and over, pounding at my empty fingertips, echoing inside me, and it was all I could do to stop myself from tearing into her head and devouring her brain. But that’s one of the reasons I was in school, to curb my cravings. So I let her recover. We needed her alive in Revenant. But I couldn’t help feel that she would be better off if I ended it all and ate her brain right then. I gazed at her sorrowfully. I felt bad for humans. They were fragile, useless things. It made me suddenly very proud to be a zombie, and not to be one of them. It made me glad that we were able to do good, by putting these human things out of their misery, and help the world evolve. Thank goodness for the zombie awakening. Who knows what these impotent mortals would have done to themselves if we hadn’t come along?
I gave her a few minutes, then I pulled her up to her feet. “Let’s go,” I said.
She stumbled after me, stepping drearily along behind me as I paced through the forest, trying to retrace my steps. She barely resisted. She didn’t have any choice. Once in a while she would test me by trying to pull her hand away, but my grip was always firm. Otherwise, she allowed herself to be dragged along. She didn’t scream. She didn’t complain. She didn’t beg. I thought it was kind of brave, until I realized that she had all but given up, then she seemed weak again.
I fumbled around in the darkness of the forest for a while, lost. I didn’t have the best sense of direction. Trevor was better at that. I tried to make my way back the way I had come, but it was hard to figure out which way that was, being that I was had been chased by a horde of Stiffs and hadn’t really had the chance to observe my surroundings. Eventually, though, I made my way out of the forest and into the clearing. I had managed to avoid any encounters with straggling Stiffs that hadn’t been awakened. Most of them had herded off deeper into the forest, anyway.
It was easier to find my way back now. Soon I came to the field where the Stiffs first came upon us. They were gone now. So was most of the Stiff’s body that the Advanced kids had disposed of. Only pieces of rotted, torn flesh and bones remained. Its skull was shattered. There wasn’t a morsel of brain left inside. There never was. Stiffs scrape it clean like a hungry beggar given a bowl of soup to eat for the first time in weeks. The stringy, spongy bits of flesh, scattered about the ground, only remained because they were too stupid to know they were there. They are dumb. If it doesn’t move, or it doesn’t smell of recently spilled blood, they don’t know there’s still something left to eat. The chunks that were torn away from the body in the frenzy got left for the forest creatures. Pieces of skeleton, lined with muscle fragments that couldn’t be gnawed away, lay in a pile on a stretch of bloody dirt and crimson-stained grass. There was almost nothing left of the Stiff.
The girl vomited. I forgot that humans aren’t used to this. She fell to her knees and tried to catch her breath. I shook my head. She was dead weight. If the Stiffs returned, I would have to abandon her to them. She would drag me down with her. I kicked aside a piece of splintered bone as I waited for her to recollect herself. She sobbed inside her throat, half-choking on her own regurgitation. She was disgusting.
“Are you done yet?” I asked impatiently.
She gurgled something back at me that no intelligent creature, human or zombie, could feign to understand.
“It’s dead,” I said. “There’s no reason to be scared of it.”
She shot me a nasty look, like she was trying to bore a bullet into my head with the barrel of her eye sockets. Her eyes were dry, and green, vomity drool trickled down her chin. She hadn’t been crying. She had been doing something else. I hadn’t learned a word for it yet, if there was one in the human language. She wiped the drool form her mouth with the sleeve of her free arm and swallowed loudly.
“This is what they did to my brother,” she whispered hoarsely.
She hadn’t been alone.
“It’s what they always do,” I replied evenly. “Come on. Before they come back for seconds.”
I drew her to her feet and pulled her with me. She held herself close with her free arm, her head hanging. She was alone. The person she had come out into the forest with, her brother, was dead. This world was no longer a place for humans. Honestly, humanity just didn’t make sense anymore. I was doing her a favor by bringing her to Revenant.
We traveled in silence the rest of the way. She no longer tried to pull away. It was sad. But it was for the best. She had nothing to go back to. None of them did. The world belonged to Wakes now. Humans were the food source. We were the livelihood. Ironic, considering we were technically dead.
The air was cold and heavy. I could tell because my skin was tingling in a way it didn’t when it was warm. It didn’t feel bad. It just felt kind of weird. I didn’t really feel pain anymore. The human girl was shuddering, moving slowly and with labored steps. She seemed exhausted. I wouldn’t be able to take her very far into town without letting her rest. I didn’t have time for that, though. I would have to carry her. Why did humans have to get tired? It was so annoying.
I stopped walking. The human hadn’t seen it, but it was obvious to me. A few yards ahead, outlined against the shadows of the night was a pack of Stiffs, moving with feet dragging in aimless circles. They were in an infinite cycle. One Stiff randomly followed another Stiff’s sluggish movements, which followed another’s, which followed the first’s. They would mindlessly follow each other until something drew one’s attention, or they went comatose from not feeding. Being a Stiff did not lend itself to a very meaningful existence.
I put my hand in front of the human’s face to stop her. I lowered my head a few inches to whisper into her ear. “Three Stiffs dead ahead. If we walk slowly we can go around them and they won’t even notice us. Just stay to the side of the road and don’t make any sudden movements or noise.”
She nodded numbly.
I drew her behind me, stepping along the edge of the road where the mound rose. I kept my eyes glued to the Stiffs. They didn’t even utter a grunt in our direction as we passed. They were completely oblivious to anything outside of their game of follow-the-leader. They really weren’t even worth the trouble of killing, even though it was really the humane thing to do if they weren’t going to be educated - absolute death was better than a meaningless one. But for now it was safer to let them be.
“Hey, dum-dums! Over here!”
My eyes swelled. I snapped my head to gaze back at the girl. She flung her free arm forward, unleashing a hail of stones from her hand. They rained on the Stiff pack and one turned in our direction and began to move laboriously toward us. It had a wide chest and shoulders, and was missing half an arm.
“What are you doing?” I demanded in a harsh whisper.
The girl flailed her free hand wildly in the air. “Over
here!” she called.
“Hey!” I shook her wrist. “Knock it off!”
She grinned insidiously at me. “Here come your friends.”
I stared awestruck at her. Then I spun away and faced the Stiffs as they began racing toward us. “Holy hell,” I muttered. I tossed the human aside as the Stiffs fell on me.
15. BAD BLOOD
I grabbed the first Stiff by the arm as it threw itself at me, and putting my other hand to the back of its head, I tossed it as hard as I could away from me and toward the ground. It pitched forward straight into the dirt, sprawling out awkwardly just a few feet from the girl, who was lying on her back, propped up on her elbows. The Stiff raised its head off the ground and its dark, filmy eyes met the girl’s. Don’t scream, I thought.
“Aaaaaaahhhh!” The girl’s cry was ear piercing. I sighed roughly as the Stiff began crawling toward her.
I broke forward, slipping past the other two advancing Stiffs, and grabbed the Stiff that kneeled on the ground by the shoulders, lifting it up and tossing it back. “Idiot!” I hissed at her. “It wouldn’t have known you were there if you had kept quiet!”
Her face was sallow and she blinked over and over, unspeaking.
I turned away from her as the three Stiffs converged on me. The one that I had thrown