The Living Dead 2

The Human Race by Scott Edelman

Scott Edelman is a five-time Bram Stoker Award finalist whose fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, such as The Dead That Walk, The Best of All Flesh, Crossroads, and Postscripts. When not writing, Edelman co-edits SCI FI Wire and in the past edited the fiction magazine Science Fiction Age.

In the intro to Edelman’s story in the first The Living Dead anthology, I said that he was something of a zombie genius, but it bears repeating. In the intervening period, the smart folks at PS Publishing reached the same conclusion and gathered together all of his zombie fiction into one volume called What Will Come After.

Though we all live on the same planet, in a sense we each inhabit a separate reality. After all, my reality consists, to a substantial degree, of the specific building I live in, the specific location I work at, the specific stores I shop at, and the places I hang out. Yet out of the six-billion-plus people alive right now, virtually all of them have never (or barely) set foot in any of those places, let alone all of them, and by the same token I will scarcely set foot in any of the places or meet any of the people that make up, as far as they’re concerned, the world. And while other people’s parents are just strangers or possibly acquaintances to us, our own parents occupy a massively defining place in our own personal reality. So when a parent dies, it can seem like the end of the world.

Author Scott Westerfeld recently took his personal experience with the loss of a parent and used it as inspiration to write his novel Leviathan, about a fantastical alternate history of World War I, in which a parent’s death-in this case, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand-actually does cause the world to come apart at the seams. Our next story is another in which the death of a parent coincides with the end of the world itself.

A zombie apocalypse seems to promise, in some sense, the end of death. For some people, that prospect might be very complicated and challenging indeed.

Paula Gaines felt herself quite ready to die.

Or perhaps it was instead that ever since the phone call that brought her to this distant place to look into her father’s dead eyes and have to tell a stranger, “Yes… that’s him,” she was no longer ready to live.

As she sat in the bathtub, stroking her forearm with the flat of a knife she had lifted from the hostel’s communal dining area, that fine a distinction no longer mattered to her. Whether she was racing toward her death, or racing away from her life, all that mattered now was the speed with which that race could be consummated.

The reflection of her face in the still water, water turned lukewarm so long had she been sitting in it, was unfamiliar to her. Her years on this earth had been full of unfortunate life lessons, and thanks to this added insult from the universe, there seemed little point in going on. Before the call that startled her in the middle of another sleepless night, before her sudden trip to London, she saw herself as a person able to at least keep up a pretense of happiness, even though happiness itself was beyond her. But this day, she no longer had the energy for false smiles, and her expression was far grimmer than she had ever known it.

Grimmer, and almost lifeless already.

As she switched the knife from her right hand to her left, her slight movement gently rippled the water, and as her reflection distorted, she could almost see her sister’s face. And when the ripples were at their greatest, even her mother’s. She slapped the water angrily, so that the faces went away. She just couldn’t bear it. Her mother’s face, her sister’s face… they were both gone. The explosion that had taken the two of them had been so great that there had been no faces remaining after death, no body parts that the officials at the morgue felt it necessary for her to identify.

While the terrorist attack had left her father’s body bloodied but intact, if she was ever going to see the rest of her family again, it would have to be after death.

After her death.

She turned the blade so that the edge pressed against her wrist. At the instant that she was about to cut deeply lengthwise-as she had learned was necessary for a successful suicide one time when she’d investigated it on the Web-there was a rap at the bathroom door. She startled, and as her hand jerked, the blade sliced shallowly into her flesh. A few drops of blood ran down her arm into the water.

“Who’s there?” she asked, with a voice that sounded surprised it had the chance to speak again.

“You’re not the only one who needs to use the bath, you know,” called out a woman.

“Just a moment,” Paula said.

She looked into the water as her red blood dissipated into pink and then was gone, almost as if the thoughts of suicide were a dream. But they weren’t, and never would be again. She tried to identify exactly whose voice had called out to her, to remember which of the women with whom she had shared a bustling breakfast it could have possibly been-Lillian, who squeezed her hand briefly after passing the marmalade, Jennifer, who found it hard to meet her eyes, or perhaps one of the others-and though she could not put a face to the voice, she remembered them all as friendly, and sympathetic once they realized the purpose of her journey. And so she thought…no, not here. Don’t do it here. Paula didn’t want to make friends, however new, clean up the mess she’d leave behind. Whatever she was going to do, it had to be done in front of people whom she had never looked in the eye, who would not then be forced to mourn their own failures to save her. The women she’d just met here, even though just passing acquaintances, deserved better. Her mother had raised her that way.

Her mother…

Paula slipped slowly into the water until her head submerged beneath its surface and her knees popped up to cool in the chill air of the room. She held her breath, embracing the silence, and wished that she could just keep holding that breath until all breath was gone, taking with it this room, this city, everything. She held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, but then the air exploded from between her lips and she sat up quickly, shivering in a strange room in a strange country.

She dressed quickly and rushed back to her cramped room, which was all that she could afford, and only barely afford at that. She grabbed her backpack, stuffed it with her possessions, told no one she was checking out-almost laughing, but not quite, at the double meaning of that phrase-and fled the hostel.

If she was going to die that day, she was going to do it in front of strangers.

Paula gulped down a mouthful of coffee the moment the waitress brought it over, burning her tongue, which reminded her yet again that life meant pain. At least for her it did. She blew on what liquid remained in the cup, cursing her impatience. She had no idea how others managed to maintain pleasant lives, but hers was one filled with impatience, and blossoming with pain.

She had hoped that the despair which had settled over her, initially back home and now deepening here, would do her a favor for once and demonstrate its own patience, so that she could stave off her suicide long enough to return to die in her home country. But her latest worries made that unlikely. The intricacies of getting her family’s remains released, negotiating with a local funeral home for proper caskets, dealing with the airlines to transport the bodies (or what remained of them)…it was all too much for her, and those details buzzed in her head, blotting out both sleep and reason. She found it hard to contemplate the enormity of suddenly being the responsible one in the family. No one could have ever mistaken her for the one in that role before, and now…

Identifying her father’s body had been difficult enough. She just didn’t have the energy to do all of the other things that remained.

And she didn’t have the energy to remain alive either.

She had walked all morning through the streets of a country she had never before thought to visit, stumbled on until her aching feet insisted that she drop into a chair at a corner cafe. She’d sat in the sunshine for hours, unable to summon up the energy to move, shamed by the determination of the passersby rushing on with their lives. Picking at the remains of her plate of squidgy lemon pudding, an odd dessert with an odd name, she wondered why her father had always wanted to visit this odd country.

He had always talked about it, studying maps, poring over guidebooks, and had finally done it, and look what good chasing his dreams had done him. She never understood his dreams anyway. That had always been part of their problem, she figured; she should have been able to understand him better. But then, he never seemed to spend much energy understanding her, either. Still, he had reached out to both Paula and her sister Jane, neither of whom had ever married, offering to pay their ways to London to experience it with him. Perhaps she should have taken her father up on it as her sister had. If she’d done so, she would have been on that bus with the three of them, and all of her worrying and despair would now be over.

Instead, she had to sit in an unfamiliar place and contemplate how and when she would…do it. If she’d been home, she would have known exactly what to do. She had been thinking about it long enough, planning for its inevitability. It would have been easy. There was that lake, and the sunset that came with it, and those pills that since Mark had left she had been spending far too many long nights studying, even before every living relative of hers had been erased. She cursed her decision to remain home instead of taking her dad up on his invitation. The matter could have been taken out of her hands. She could have died with them, without thought, instead of just sitting there thinking about dying.

Now, sitting at the cafe, eating her pastry, drinking her coffee, pondering both her loneliness and the short time she had left in which to be lonely…she had to find another way.

Maybe she could climb up Big Ben, which her father had always talked of visiting. She could climb it and instead of admiring the intricacy of the clockwork and the view, just…jump off, giving herself over to the breeze. She wouldn’t have minded that feeling of flight to be real for once, but somehow, it didn’t seem right to mingle her father’s goal with her own shortcomings. And besides… she knew nothing of Big Ben. She had no idea whether that tourist magnet even contained an accessible window or ledge from which she could jump.

Or perhaps she should fill her pockets with rocks, and swim out into the Thames until she could swim no more. A famous writer had done just that. She had even seen a movie about it. She liked the idea of floating off until consciousness faded, but the preparations-finding a river secluded enough so that no one would try to save her, finding a grouping of stones sufficient to her task-it seemed like too much work for her, regardless of how romantic it might sound. She needed a way that was almost effortless. If it could be instantaneous as well, so much the better.

As the traffic blared around her, she took another bite of her pastry and looked at the cars and trucks rushing by, and to the roadway, where she could see painted in large white letters a warning to walkers to look to their right. So many tourists visited London each year that there needed to be constant reminders that the world was not the same all over.

Reading the warning, she realized that she had finally found her answer. She could step blindly into traffic. No one would even have to know that she had done it deliberately. Americans were known for stepping off the curb while looking in the wrong direction. If anyone bothered to research her reasons for coming to London in the first place, they would simply assume that she had been distracted by grief. Unlike the case with the women back at the hostel, no one would have to feel personal responsibility, carrying the weight that it was something she could have been talked out of. There would be no guilt. They would just think it was the unfortunate, accidental passing of another sad American.

In fact, Paula could see one of those quaint double-decker busses approaching right then.

She pushed back from her table and walked away from the cafe. Her waitress stepped toward her from amid the outdoor cluster of tables, calling after her that she had forgotten to pay, which only caused her to walk more quickly. As the bright red bus neared, Paula looked the other way, feigning confusion just in case there was a witness, and began to put her right foot forward to step into the street.

Before she could set it down in the path of the bus, she heard a man scream. She hesitated, hanging there between life and death. When Paula turned, she saw that man pointing, not at her, but past her into the street. The bus went by, her opportunity gone. By then, additional people were pointing, and she followed their outstretched arms to what was revealed after the bus had moved on.

It was a dead man walking.

With his shredded clothes, bloodied body, and gray pallor, another might have thought him merely a man in make-up, costumed for a party or on his way to a movie set, but unfortunately, Paula knew what death looked like. As the creature grew nearer, she could see into its eyes. They were like those of her father; there was no there there.

Unlike her father, however, this corpse walked.

It shambled amidst the traffic in her direction, the cars honking for him to move and then swerving when he did not. A few drivers slowed to a crawl so they could look more closely at the impossibility. One man got out of his car and ran over to the thing, placing his hand on its shoulder. Paula could see from the driver’s face, no more than ten yards away, that this was only a gesture of concern; perhaps he’d thought the bloodied walker an escapee from a hospital. As a reward for the man’s good Samaritanship, the shambler slapped out with a bloodied fist and knocked him dead.

Pedestrians screamed and scattered around her, but Paula simply stood there. She wondered if she was frozen in shock, but no, she was only waiting, though she wasn’t sure for what. She watched as the walking corpse punched a second man to the pavement, then lunged to bring down a third, biting deeply into a woman’s neck with crooked teeth.

Then the thing saw her.

With everyone else fleeing, she was the only still target in a sea of flesh. Its lips parted, and she could hear a low, dull growl. She looked away from its bloody lips into its eyes, and thought she now saw an empty hunger there, one that was not unfamiliar to her. She began to ask what force had animated him, what had brought him back to the land of the living, but before she could utter her question, a shot rang out. A police officer had fired on the thing from behind the shelter of a car, hitting the creature in its back. It staggered slightly under the affront, but did not close its dull eyes.

“Wait,” she said, holding out one hand toward the officer and the other armed men who joined him. “You can’t do this. Not yet.”

She took a step forward, the step toward death that she’d been interrupted from taking mere moments before, and further shots rang out. The thing’s head exploded, splashing brain matter across her. It crumpled, its knees slamming into the pavement first. Then it sank forward, what remained of its head hitting the roadway at her feet, blood splattering her shoes. Only then did she sag, sitting down hard on the curb. A policeman dashed over, skirting the broken body at their feet.

“Miss?” he asked her. “Are you all right, Miss?”

She didn’t know how to even begin to answer. She looked up into the policeman’s face and for a moment was unable to tell whether he was alive or dead, or even remember whether she herself was alive or dead. Someone thrust a cup of water into her hands and draped a blanket over her shoulders. Someone else attempted to wipe the blood from her face.

As she sat there limp, hearing the sound of sirens and smelling the scent of death, voices reached her through her fog of shock. The police were saying that this tableaux hadn’t just happened on this one street. It was playing itself out all over London. All over the world.

The dead were coming back to life.

And they didn’t seem to like us.

She let herself be helped back to her feet, and then she let herself be tugged along, as she had allowed for most of her life, but when she realized that the destination she was being shepherded to was the back of an ambulance, she broke free from those who thought they were helping her. She ran as swiftly as she could, ran away, into the cafe, out a back entrance, and down an alleyway. This was no time to live meekly, to be swept along by the tide.

If the dead were coming back to life, her place wasn’t in a hospital, with the living and those who hoped to rejoin the living. It was in the morgue, with the dead.

Her dead.

Paula stared down the barrel of a gun held in the shaking hands of a guard standing in the doorway to the London morgue, and was surprised to realize that all she felt was a calm disinterest.

She felt no alarm. She only thought…how ironic.

Hours before, she would have acted as provocatively as possible in the hopes of setting off the trigger finger of the jittery young man in a uniform at least one size too large for him. She would have made a lunge in his direction, walked with the staggered gait of the living corpses she had seen wandering the streets of London as she’d zigzagged her way to the building in which she’d identified her father’s body…anything to provoke that bullet. But now everything had changed, for suddenly she had hope, and so she put her hands out slowly beside her, palms up, and then chose her words carefully.

“I’m not dead,” she said, hoping that her calm words would distract from the bits of brain matter that had spotted the front of her blouse when that first corpse had been shot, and from the blood stain that remained on her face, impervious to washing. The guard lowered his gun slightly, but it did not appear to Paula that he had loosened his grip.

“Why did you come here?” he asked. One of his shirt sleeves was missing, and the other was dripping with blood. “This is the last place you should want to be.”

“My father’s here. Do you remember me? I remember you. You were standing by the elevators when I came in, I think. He died last week and I had to come here yesterday to identify him. What happened to your arm?”

He shook his head, unready to talk about it. He looked like the sort of person who might never be ready to talk about it, holding things in for a lifetime, as she had.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” he said. “You should leave.”

“I need to be here,” she said, taking a careful step forward. “I need to see him. Please.”

“No one needs to be here,” he said, standing aside and letting her pass through the door to stand beside him in the entrance hall. “And I’ve been here long enough. They’ve been coming to life all day. I hope never to see this place again.”

Then he was where she had been, outside looking in.

“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for,” he said. “But you’re welcome to try. The place is all yours.”

He tossed her the keys.

“Just remember-some doors you’re not going to want to unlock.”

And then he was gone, leaving her alone in a lobby that looked even less welcoming than it had been the day before. The floor was slick with blood and littered with body parts. As she picked her way through the building, that no longer fazed her, because that’s what the city had looked like as she’d made her way here. Only luck had let her get this far. She retraced her steps to the room in which she had been asked to identify her father…but it was empty. She feared that she was too late, that her father, animated by the plague that had infected the planet, had already gotten up and staggered away. It could have been his blood on the guard’s sleeves. It could have been his body parts on the floor, shredded as the guard had defended himself. But as she looked around the bland room, she realized that no single body ever stayed there for long. This was just a place where people like her came face to face with death. The bodies were shuttled here from somewhere else.

Paula returned to the hallway to find that somewhere else. The floor had become so slippery that she had to steady herself against a wall to stand upright. She’d watched enough television to know what she was looking for, but it wasn’t her eyes that first found her goal, that by-now clichéd room with columns and rows of refrigerated cubicles.

It was her ears. She heard her destination before she saw it.

With her hand on the doorknob and the sounds of violence raging inside, she was afraid for the first time that day. The thought that her father was inside, and that she might be stopped from reaching him, stirred up that fear. But she was more afraid of what she would learn about her father than of what would happen to her, and so forced herself into the room.

She had to lean against the door to open it, and only when she had it fully open did she see that her way had been blocked by body parts. A coroner, his internal organs chewed, was split into four pieces. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped into the room, which still echoed with noise. Nothing moved to stop her, so she moved slowly to the center of the large room lined with small doors with handles.

She could hear muffled howling, and the dull thuds of bare feet beating against metal doors. People were trapped inside many of the refrigerated cubicles, struggling to get out.

No, not people, she reminded herself. What used to be people.

And behind one of those doors was her father.

She moved respectfully through the room, pausing before each column of doors. She noticed that some of the compartments emitted no sound, presumably because they contained no body. She walked by someone’s mother, someone’s father, someone’s child, and wondered if others like her were coming to try to collect them. Slots in the doors held cards on which names had been scrawled. She had almost circled the room and returned to where she’d started before she stopped, at last, in front of a door which bore a name she shared.

She placed her hand on the cool metal handle. There was silence within, a silence that sickened her. For it could mean that he was already gone. She rested her head against the door, and was surprised to find herself praying, something she had not done since she was a small child.

She pulled the handle. Once the door opened, she tugged at the tray inside and slid it out from its compartment. It rolled out so effortlessly that she was surprised to see that her father’s body was still there, unchanged since the day before.

“Oh, Daddy,” she moaned.

He appeared the same as he had been when she had come to identify him. Though they had washed the blood from him as best as they could, the evidence of death was unmistakable. Whatever had brought the other dead back to this new sort of life had not yet touched him. No force had come to animate him again, to wake him so that he could say the things as yet unsaid, so that she could retract the things said that shouldn’t have been said.

She dragged a chair over beside his pallet so that she could watch him, and then she sat down to await his transformation.

She jerked awake, startled to realize that she had been asleep. All she remembered was studying her father’s face, just as she was doing now. There was no change. Her father still slept.

“He won’t be coming back, you know.”

She leapt up at the sound of the voice, tumbling her chair on its side. The guard who had earlier abandoned her knelt to pick it up.

“I’m sorry that I frightened you,” he said. “But I couldn’t leave you alone to face this.”

Paula backed away, keeping the righted chair between them. She had not known men to act kindly to her in the past, and she doubted that it was about to start under these circumstances.

“What did you mean when you said that he wasn’t coming back?” she asked warily.

“Only that it’s too late for him. I’ve been listening to the news, what news is still broadcasting. All the others, the ones we’ve seen, the ones we’ve had to fight…they died today, and yesterday. But your father…he died last week. No one knows why, or what happened, but it’s only the newly dead who return.”

She sank into the chair and began to cry.

“He wouldn’t have been the same anyway, Miss,” he said, trying to comfort her. “He wouldn’t have recognized you.”

The guard didn’t understand. That wasn’t why she was crying this time, not because her father couldn’t join her in life. She was in tears now because it was too late for her to join him in death. She was even worse off than she’d been before. Suicide had been rendered useless. There could be no end to life now. If she were to kill herself, she would just come back for another chapter. And she wanted no further chapters. She wanted her book of life to be closed.

She wanted to die, but the time for death was past. She no longer had a goal. All purpose had been stolen from her.

She dried her tears, but did not get up. She simply sat there, continuing to stare at her father.

“You should go home, Miss. If you can.”

“But what about my father? What about him?”

“There is no him anymore.”

“I was supposed to bring him home.”

“I don’t know that there’s any home anymore either. From what I hear, the States are just as bad. And at a time like this, I doubt they would let you return with a dead body. I’m sorry. But it’s best to just say goodbye.”

The former guard backed away from her, giving her space she did not need, inviting her with his body language to leave with him.

But he didn’t get it. She was dead inside. She may have looked alive, but inside, she was just like her father.

She belonged here.

By day, she wandered the wounded city, sure that her wounds were even greater, studying those who still dared to walk the streets in an attempt to get on with their lives in the midst of chaos, and being studied in return. At night, she slept by her father’s side, surprised that she even could sleep, for the noise in that room, the moaning, the pounding of creatures that could not escape, was unceasing.

As she moved through the city, it was as if she were leading a charmed life, though she was not sure that what she still had was life. She would come upon scenes of great carnage, small battles between the living and the dead, and walk through them unscathed. It was as if the undead took her for one of their own, so dead was she inside. The fugue state in which she existed had seemed to make her invulnerable, though she didn’t entirely think of herself as so, because she no longer had the level of consciousness to be self-aware. She existed without conscious choice. She just continued her walking through the city, eating when hungry, returning to sleep when tired.

Around her, some people seemed to be going about their business, but many had abandoned their routines, fleeing the city in search of sanctuary in the countryside. London had become depopulated. It was as if a great city had become a small village in a matter of days. There was no longer a problem getting a seat on the tube, though people now looked at each other with suspicion for new reasons that were just as deadly as the old.

One day after walking, she aimlessly rode the tube for hours, letting it take her where it would. It seemed as useful as anything else she could have been doing. She no longer had anywhere to go. She no longer had anywhere to be. And besides, this is how she felt closest to her family. Riding the public transportation of the city, she felt closer to her father than when she slept next to him at night, propped up in a chair waiting for a metamorphosis she now doubted would ever come. This was the sort of place in which he’d died, after all. This was the sort of place in which her entire family had died, taking her along with them.

She watched others come and go. Most were afraid, eying each other passenger and wondering whether this one or that one was a reanimated corpse. She knew no fear, for she no longer cared. No force, living or dead, had any answers for her.

But at the next station, she felt fear again, as the doors opened to reveal another who was also fearless, though for different reasons.

The man who entered the car wore a hooded sweatshirt, even though the weather had been warm that day, and on his back he carried an olive backpack. Paula tried to read his expression, but there was no expression there to read, and that told her everything she needed to know.

“Don’t do it!” she shouted, no longer desiring what came after.

Then came the explosion, brighter than the sun, and then the darkness, as black as death.

Paula heard no screaming as she came to, and she thought at first that the explosion had deafened her by shattering her eardrums. But as she lifted her head, she could see that the reason there was no screaming was because she was the only one on the train left alive. She was on her back, and as she moved her hands about her to rise, her fingers swept against glass that had been blown from the windows.

She sat up in the unmoving train, and through the smoke could see the bodies of the few other occupants of the car that had been brave enough to ride the tube. She had been furthest from the bomber and had only been knocked out, but the half-dozen others had been lifted and thrown against the walls of the train.

She felt an odd sense of cognitive dissonance; it was as if she was visiting the past. This is what her father’s last home had looked like, filled with smoke and dust and blood. But somehow she had escaped her family’s fate. She leaned against the buckled walls as she moved along the car. She walked gingerly past the dead, the blood streaming from their ears, and threw herself against the door, which would not budge. She looked nervously at the dead, knowing what would happen next.

She had to get out.

Then she saw him, the cause of all this. Or what was left of him. A head, its hair matted with blood, was on the floor, facing away from her. The body that had supported it was nowhere to be seen. She approached the head slowly, circling it and then pushing at it with her toes so she could stare into its face. Yes, it was him. He had thought that he would be in heaven soon, but there was no heaven waiting for him in this new world.

She removed her jacket and kicked the head into the center of the cloth, hands shaking. She tied the corners together so that she could carry her burden along without having to touch it. She had to hurry, for not only would the others soon come back to life, filled with hunger, but she could hear the sounds of rescuers approaching as well, and both living and dead would only be obstacles to her now. She tucked the package under one arm, crawled through a shattered window, and ran down the tracks as quickly as she could in the opposite direction of the voices.

Back at the morgue, Paula unwrapped her parcel and put the head upright on a plate, balanced on its ragged neck. She knew that she might need to move it again, but she never wanted to have to touch it. She placed it on one of the operating tables, turning it carefully away from her, away from her father, so that all she could see was the back of its head. But then she turned it back again, so that she could watch it as she sat by her father. She needed to see the transformation when it came.

The sounds in the room had lessened since the dead first began to wake, but only by degree. The dead feet that had been pounding ceaselessly on the metal doors for hours had splintered, and the throats that roared their anger were wearing away. She imagined that if she could survive here long enough that she would see their bodies break down entirely, just like the systems that kept civilization humming seemed about to do. She wasn’t sure that she could get home again even if she wanted to. And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

She stared at what remained of a man who was willing to die for an ideology. Or, as it turned out, someone who was willing to do something even worse than that, not to die, but to choose a living, mindless death. He and others like him had hoped to bring down the workings of the modern world, but they did no such thing. The zombie plague did what they could not. Yet they still continued, not realizing that their bombs were pointless.

Night fell and morning came again, and there was no change, but then as night fell for the second day, the closed eyes of the terrorist’s head snapped open. In that instant, the sounds from within the refrigerated compartments stopped, as if the dead who were locked away sensed a brother outside who might help them. But no help would be forthcoming, for all the manless head could do was rage.

She looked at her father. He had not responded to the resurrection. She guessed she didn’t really expect him to. That wasn’t what this was about, answers. She dragged her chair forward to sit facing her attacker, who could do nothing but look at her with mindless anger.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How can you keep on doing something like this, knowing what you had to have known?”

It growled at her, grinding its teeth loudly.

“Killing yourself so that you can go to heaven is barbaric enough. But once you knew that all you’d be getting is this, how could you go ahead and do it anyway? The world changed, and you paid it no attention. To choose zombiehood? To make others into zombies? You’re dead forever now. I’m not sure that you were ever really alive to begin with.”

The head howled, pinning her with unblinking eyes.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me why you did this.”

She stood up, and took a step closer. As she did, the thing’s nostrils flared. It snapped its teeth, trying to reach her, but the gap between them was infinite.

“You’re not taking a bite out of me. You won’t ever be taking a bite out of anyone. Your death is as over as your life. There’s nothing left for you. So you might as well tell me.”

It rocked back and forth on its severed neck, but could gain no momentum.

“Tell me!” she shouted, and swatted at the head, which flew from the table and bounced several times on the floor, leaving several red splotches. The creatures behind the doors roared. She grabbed the head by its hair and lifted it up to eye level.

“I’ll never know, will I?” she said. “Never.”

Its answers remained the same as before. It was all senseless. She didn’t know whether she could live with that. There seemed little reason to change her earlier plans. She lifted her other hand near to the thing’s mouth. It snapped and snarled so ferociously that a tooth flew from between its lips and bounced off her chest. She could do it. She could do it quickly. One bite, and it would be over. She could no longer have death, but she could have something like it, and in a senseless universe, that would have to do.

But behind the head was her father, lying there quietly, speaking to her more eloquently than any member of the living dead ever could. She stepped closer to her father, holding the head out before her like a beacon.

“This is my father,” she said, not really caring whether the creature even listened. “He didn’t want much out of life. He just wanted to ride a double-decker bus someday, to see the Tower of London, to have a real beer in a real pub. He only wanted to see his daughters grow up to be happy…”

She grew silent. As she held the head by its hair, it rocked below her hand like a pendulum. She didn’t know what else to say, but she said it anyway.

“I’m sorry, Dad. Maybe…maybe I can make it up to you.”

She hadn’t been able to make her father happy while he was alive. But now that he was dead…now that he was dead, maybe she had a chance.

She placed the head in one of the empty cabinets, where it once more began its howling.

“Welcome to your new home,” she said. “I have to try to get back to mine.”

Then she shut the door on the past and left the room of death forever.