cans of food, drinking water? Because you wanted to die?”
Her head dropped and her shadowed face stared menacingly at me. “I’d rather die than be at your mercy.”
“Fine. Then I hope you enjoy being a brain-dead Stiff.”
She jerked her head back with surprise. “What are you talking about?”
I edged up across from her and pointed at her leg. “You’ve been infected. If you die you’ll become a zombie.”
Her eyes widened.
“They’ll throw you in the Stockade with all the other Stiffs. To rot. Forever.”
She swiveled her head back and forth.
“Still want to die?” I asked.
“But you’ll eat my brain. All the zombies do. Then I’ll be dead. Just do it and get it over with.”
“No. You’re infected. Infected brains are as useless as Stiff’s brains, or inactive brains to us. They can’t be preserved and only have any effect if eaten while you’re still alive. There would be no point to eating your brain unless we didn’t have any preserves left in the community.”
“Then what do you want from me? If you don’t want my brain, then why do you want me? Why have you been following me? Why did you come after me?”
I shrugged. I didn’t have an answer for her. Not one that would satisfy her. I crept slowly toward her, being careful to keep my balance as the van bounced along unsteadily. I sat down across from her and she slunk against the opposite wall.
“Let me see your leg,” I instructed.
She recoiled.
“Do you want to be a Stiff or do you want to stay alive? Those are your only two options now.”
She looked sideways at me, then slowly extended her leg. I began rolling up the leg of her jeans.
She gazed perplexedly at me for a few moments in silence, her eyes questioning me without words. “What are you?” she asked as I began examining the wound on her leg. The wound wasn’t as deep as I had thought, and she hadn’t lost any sizable amounts of flesh.
“I’m a zombie,” I replied. “You’re lucky. The Stiff that bit you was out of it. It had just reanimated. It didn’t have all its strength. If we stop the bleeding, we’ll be able to clean and patch you up. I don’t think you’ve lost too much blood. It looked a lot worse than it is.”
She shook her head. “You’re not like the others. You can talk. That’s impossible. I thought all zombies were dumb. How can you talk?”
“I learned,” I said. “We all did. Don’t you know anything about zombies?”
“We thought you were just a myth,” she replied. “A story a couple of the scavengers made up to try to scare us, or that maybe they had gone crazy. Talkers. We didn’t think you could be real.”
“Now you know better,” I replied.
“Why don’t you try to kill me?” she asked. “Like the other zombies. It’s all they do. They try to kill us. They eat us.”
“We aren’t like the Stiffs,” I replied vaguely.
“Then what do you want from me? Why did you follow me?”
“I couldn’t leave you there,” I answered as I unwound the gauze.
“Why not?”
I put my hands to her leg to wrap the bandage around it. She withdrew it instantly, like a reflex action. “Your hands are so cold.”
I examined my hands, the backs then the palms. Pale, tight blue skin masked the bones underneath, giving them the appearance of ice. I reached for her leg and drew it back toward me. “They always are.”
“What did you mean when you said infected brains are useless?” she asked as I spread out the gauze and began winding it around her leg, the soft fabric absorbing the blood coating it, gripping to her skin like a magnet.
“Only living human brains work,” I answered carelessly.
“What do you mean work?”
“Only living human brains keep us undead,” I replied. “If we don’t eat them regularly we die. We don’t hate humans or have anything against them. It’s biology.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“We do what needs to be done to survive,” I said. “That’s all. Humans have killed to survive throughout history. Animals daily. Other humans in war. It’s no different than what we do. It’s out of necessity. Not malice.” I lifted my head to gaze at her. “Look, I’m just a zombie looking to get by. I like being alive, or undead, whatever you want to call it. I have a good life. If I die right now, it’s over. Everything. There’s nothing after this. Just emptiness.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been dead. I’ve been a Stiff. If there was life after death, aside from zombies, then zombies wouldn’t exist. They couldn’t exist. If you think death is going to bring you to some big cloudy sanctuary in the sky, I feel bad for you. Because there’s nothing. Death is emptiness. So you’d better hold onto life in whatever form you have it for as long as you can.”
“That’s kind of cynical.”
“It’s reality. Don’t tell me you believe in God after all you’ve seen in this world.”
She dropped her head. “I don’t know. I used to. I guess I don’t anymore. My father used to tell my brother and I to keep faith and not give up. He always believed even after the Outbreak. Even after the zombies killed my mother. He kept us going. Now he’s gone. And my brother. I’m all alone. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“Keep living. It’s better than the alternative. And who knows? Maybe they’ll decide to make you a Wake.”
“A what?”
“A talker,” I explained.
“I’d rather die.”
“You will. But you’ll be undead. Look, I admit that being a Stiff is almost worse than death. It’s not being alive. It’s just ... walking death. But being one of us, that’s living death. It’s awesome. It’s a second chance.”
“But you have to kill people,” she replied. “Eat their brains. It’s horrible.”
“It’s life,” I said simply. I bound the gauze taut around her leg and secured it, making the human wince. I had wrapped it a few times around for extra cushion. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding, but it would serve its purpose until we reached Mrs. Kushner’s farm. She would take care of everything from there. I finished dressing the bandage and pulled away from her. “That should be okay for now.”
“What about your family?” she asked, pulling her torn shirt closed as she crossed her arms and sat against the front wall of the van.
“I don’t have one.”
“I mean before you died. Your mother and father. What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about my human life.”
She cocked her head to the side. “That’s terrible.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“It should be.”
“I’m doing fine without them.”
“Maybe if you remembered you’d feel differently.”
“About what?”
“About yourself. About being a zombie. Maybe if you remembered what it was like to be human, you would see how horrifying your existence is.”
“Maybe if you tried being a zombie, you’d see how cool it is,” I rejoined.
“I’ll pass,” she replied.
“So you’d rather just die?”
“Everyone dies.”
“We don’t. The part of us that matters doesn’t. Our brain doesn’t. We live forever.”
“Forever is a long time.”
I shrugged indifferently. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know what I would do with myself if I knew I was going to live that long. I think I’d want to die.”
“Not if you knew what death was.”
She dropped her head and remained silent for a few moments. Then she looked up to me and asked: “Do you really remember it? Being dead?”
“It’s like an old memory from a long time ago. I can’t really remember it, but I feel it sometimes, like déjà vu, when something familiar hits you, but you can’t really remember where it came from
or what it was, but you just know that it was something that your mind held onto from long ago. A memory that it wanted to forget, but couldn’t, and every now and then it creeps back on you.”
“What’s it like?” she asked seriously.
“I don’t know. I can’t describe it. It’s ... empty. It’s lonelier than you’ve ever felt. It’s like being the last person alive in the whole world, except the world doesn’t exist. It’s like being in a coffin, buried under the weight of nothing. It’s like wanting to speak but you have no tongue, or wanting to touch but you have no hands, or wanting to think but there’s nothing to think. It’s like you’re gone and you don’t even know it. It’s ignorance. That’s how I would describe it. Death is ignorance. That’s why becoming a zombie is a miracle. It saves us from death, from ignorance. It lets us think and be again. It’s a miracle.”
The human dropped her head back against the wall of the van. “It sounds like hell.”
I nodded. Death was hell. Cognizance was the only salvation.
She went silent for a few minutes, her eyes closed and head dropped back. For a moment I thought she had fallen asleep or passed out from exhaustion. Then she started to laugh. The sound echoed through the interior of the van, attacking me. She threw her head forward and giggled more, until she finally restrained herself, breathing in deeply to stifle her outburst of laughter. She gazed up at me, a peculiar smile pursing on her face.
“This is so weird,” she spoke in a whisper. “I’m talking to a zombie! My brother would be in hysterics right now. We used to joke about talkers, what we would say to them. Like, Hey, how are you? Then my brother, being a talker, would reply, Well, aside from the fact that I desperately would like to eat your brains, I’m fine. Mind if I have a