To Live and Die the Zombie Way

Fiction | Horror

I woke up this morning in a fresh, new body. Nothing feels better than that, let me tell you. It’s the rotting that sucks.

That probably puts you off a bit; the whole zombie thing. But it’s not like you see in the movies, at least not really. We don’t crave brains, shamble around like idiots, or act like slightly apathetic killing machines. Most people don’t even know we exist. John Q Public would shit a solid gold brick if they knew the government had folks like us in their back pocket, even if we do work in the interest of national security. Can you imagine how all those upstanding Christians would feel if they found out the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave stayed safe based partly on the activities of necromancy, or death magic? Stem cell research still gets people all hot and bothered. Raising the dead to act as spies, assassins, and covert operatives would cause everyone’s sturdy foundation of belief to implode like a bad peach in a microwave.

I used to love peaches. Can’t taste them most of the time. Taste buds are so fragile, and go almost immediately.

You’re probably wondering how all this works. Assuming you haven’t run screaming from the room. Again, it’s not like in the movies, where some kind of vague toxic spill, virus, or cosmic phenomenon randomly rewrites human genetics turning everyone into highly contagious undead droolers. We aren’t contagious at all. Not much you can catch from a deadman. Maggots, maybe, but that’s a stretch.

The body itself is just a plain dead body. The consciousness is the trick. Call it what you want; spirit, mind, soul, whatever. The part of a living being that puts the spring in your step and a song in your heart. Normally, when someone dies, that part just goes away. I have no idea where. Maybe Heaven. Maybe Akron, Ohio. What some bright boys in lab coats discovered was that you could interrupt that process and redirect that spark of life. This was a little bit “out of the box” at the time, but it wasn’t until someone really thought out of the box did they find a use for it. A little well applied magic, necromancy at its darkest, and you could put that spark inside a body that no longer had one.

The modern knowledge of magic probably started with Hitler and those wily Nazis. Hitler loved magic, dark magic in particular. The reason he couldn’t get anywhere with it was because the man was a sucker for a good line, and bought into every crazy magic act that was out there. As with most things, 99 percent of it was crap. He missed that 1 percent that could have changed the tide of the war.

But the Americans didn’t. They catalogued and documented and put it away for safe keeping for a time when they might get some mileage out of it. And during the end of the 20th Century, that time arrived. While everyone was arguing over whether or not we should be blowing up shit in the Middle East, the National Security Administration started the Zombie Corps. A small group of elite dead men and women, placing them in harm’s way where harm didn’t matter.

I just wish I knew what I was getting into when I signed up. When I hired on as a Special Agent for the NSA, I was so excited about the opportunity that I didn’t really pay any attention to the paperwork I signed. I just wanted to serve my country. I didn’t know the NSA had the right to reassign me as they saw fit, even to an experimental program. I didn’t know that once a man’s body dies, he has no more rights than a bag of hammers, and without legal definition of what that spark of life was, or what it could do, getting killed in the line of duty was far less permanent than I had been led to believe.

A word to the wise; always read the fine print. Always.

My second week as a field agent, investigating a plausible terrorist threat, my cover was blown during a meet-and-greet at a terror cell. I took a bullet to the side of the head and was dead before I hit the ground.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up in the basement of NSA headquarters in the body of a single, white, female who had died from a brain embolism a week before.

“You with us, Ken?” asked a white coat dude, peering into my face. He had the outline of a skull painted on his face in something red.

“Whab…whatb theb duck..?” I mumbled through lips that had no feeling. I tried to raise my arm, and felt the distant pull of restraints.

“Welcome back, Ken,” said white coat. “I know this must be pretty strange for you.”

“Damb wight it is,” I said as the guy flashed a pen light in my face.

“Let’s let you out of your restraints, Ken. Special Agent Sparrow will explain everything to you.” He unstrapped my hands and took a step back. He couldn’t help but look proud, the sick bastard.

When I first sat up, I must have looked like one of those zombies from the movies. You get better with practice assimilating to the new equipment, so to speak, but this was my first jump into a body other than my own, and it was a foot shorter and almost a hundred pounds lighter.

I just looked at my hands for a long time. They were pale and small and the fingernails were just a touch blue. When I flexed the fingers I could feel them move, but not in the same way my own fingers felt. It was distant, cold, and, well, odd. Wrong. But they worked, and I supposed it beat bleeding on the floor of some warehouse as the rats picked at me.

Marginally.

“I’m Special Agent Robin Sparrow,” said a woman in a standard issue business suit standing at the back of the room. She kept her arms crossed as she walked closer.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, why?”

“Nothing.” Robin Sparrow. Of course. “I don’t want to sound stupid, or ungrateful, but what the hell happened?”

“You died. Near as we can figure, someone ratted you out. We’re looking into that. But the end result was you were murdered.”

“Ok. I hope there’s more.”

“Do you remember when you were transferred to the Covert Necrology Project?” Agent Sparrow asked.

“Yeah. Well, sort of. Someone’s pet science project, I gathered. A bunch of tests and that sort of thing. Nothing really came of it, and I was reassigned to the field.”

“You were assigned to the field, but you were never UN-assigned from the project. When you died, your consciousness was transferred to the body you’re in now, where you will stay until it can no longer hold you. At which time you will transfer to another dead body.”

Agent Sparrow walked slowly around the table I was sitting on. “Part of the project was to attune your consciousness with our equipment here, allowing us to point you into whatever corpse we need. Which is a good thing for you, as otherwise you would probably just float around.”

“Actually,” interrupted the white coat with the painted face, “He would probably end up in the nearest dead body. We don’t know for sure if it would have to be a human body or not, but we’re pretty sure it would.”

Agent Sparrow glared at him, clearly annoyed at being interrupted. “Either way, it wouldn’t be a good thing.”

“What if I don’t like this new job?” I asked, looking at my lap and feeling the hot thud of anger. A plain white sheet had been draped over me and had fallen to the floor when I sat up. I wasn’t sure I was terribly comfortable looking at my own vagina.

“I don’t think you understand the situation properly. You’re dead. You can either be dead and helping your country, or dead and nowhere.”

“Wouldn’t I just go to, I don’t know, Heaven or something if you turned off your equipment? People don’t normally jump into dead bodies when they die, do they?”

“Doctor Grant, can you explain to Agent Hall what we know about Heaven?”

The white coat, who I suppose was Doctor Grant, cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. It was strange to see such a bookish little man look awkward with a skull painted on his face. “Well, I guess everything we know about Heaven can be summed up in the expression, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ We’ve never been able to find any scientific evidence of Heaven, or of where consciousness goes when a person dies. We haven’t completely ruled out it’s existence, since if there’s a Hell there could be a Heaven, and we’ve sent probes to Hell…”

“What?”

Doctor Grant continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “…but as far as you zombies are concerned, once your consciousness, or soul, is diverted, it seems to lose its way. It can only jump into a corpse or other place we direct it, and since we don’t know where Heaven is, well, there’s no train leaving for that station. Sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re fucking sorry?” I said as I grabbed the good doctor by the lapels. I lifted him off his feet and looked into his eyes, where awkwardness was replaced by fear. “Where do you think your ‘soul’ will go?”

“Calm down, Agent Hall,” said Agent Sparrow. I saw her out of the corner of my milky left eye point her gun at my head.

“What are you going to do, Sparrow? Kill me?” I tossed Doctor Grant aside and turn to stand in front of her, the barrel of her Glock aimed between my eyes.

That’s when I learned a lesson almost as important as “Read the Fine Print.” I learned how to kill a zombie. Agent Sparrow fired twice. One in the head, one in the heart. That’s how you drop a zombie.

#

The next time I woke up in a dead body, they weren’t quite so quick to remove my restraints. But they could have. They made their point. Getting killed twice is an eye opener. I could be dead and useful, or I could just be dead. Maybe my new body didn’t have enough healthy neural pathways left for me to be pissed off, or maybe it was something I just had to get used to. Either way, after a few days I was cleared to be released, and was officially made a member of the Zombie Corps.

The trouble with being a zombie, aside from the obvious, is the bodies don’t last that long. Our spark can keep the bodies moving and functioning, but we’re still dead, and no one slows old man rot. As our host bodies decompose, the clock ticks on how long we have before we’re forced to jump to a fresh corpse. Granted, we can keep a body moving after it’s pretty far gone, and the more fresh the body the longer we get, but eventually the meat falls off the bone and we have to move on to the next party. The plan is to finish what we have to do before the body craps out on us.

I know, it’s disgusting as hell. But we get the job done.

Which brings us full circle to where we came in, with me waking up in a new, fresh body. Nerve endings still relatively functional, and even the ability to smell some of the stronger scents. It was almost like being alive.

Agent Sparrow was my “handler,” so to speak, and she was always there when I woke up. This time was no exception, and she handed me a folder while I pulled on the clothes that had been put out for me.

“This mission is pretty straight forward,” she said. “You’re going in to kill Mussab al-Jamir. He’s the leader of a terrorist cell in New York, and we have intel that he’s looking to purchase some sort of WMD to release in the city. He’s a smart one, and well guarded. His cell is considered expendable; used for suicide missions. So if we take him out, the cell will be effectively without any leadership and we should be able to round them up or keep them under observation.” Agent Sparrow tossed me a small metal object. “This is your comm. Jab the sharp part into the skin behind your ear so that it can’t be seen. Normally we use a different model, but these were modified for zombies. The old type tended to fall out as the ear rotted.”

I shoved the comm into the soft skin behind my ear, and pushed it as far as I could with my thumb. It felt like a dull pressure as it went through meat. I wiped away some blackish goo that seeped out, and was good to go.

“Grab your gear,” said Sparrow. “Everything else you need is in the mission brief. Your military flight leaves in one hour.”

I loaded up on standard Zombie Corp wetwork gear; a black Desert Eagle .40 caliber pistol, a Benelli M1014 shotgun, a Mk 17 Mod 0 assault rifle, and an evil looking machete type thing. I added body armor consisting of a thick chestplate and a helmet, and I was ready to deal destruction as only the undead can.

On the trip to New York I memorized the mission briefing. It seems al-Jamir tended towards paranoia, and kept himself well guarded inside his penthouse apartment. To ensure against area attacks or bombings, the building he lived in was adjacent to St Catherine’s Memorial Hospital. He felt it was less likely that the Jews would blow up his New York residence if they had a building full of injured women and children to worry about. The Jews were the least of his problems right now, but he would find that out soon enough.

No one gave me a second glance on the flight, and I was hustled away from the airport in a large black SUV and dropped off behind al-Jamir’s apartment about ten minutes before sundown. Not the greatest timing, as a corpse’s night vision isn’t all that keen, but I would make up for it in persistence.

The apartment was a gray brick thing, built in 1913 and converted into condos in the late nineties. Al-Jamir’s penthouse was about five thousand square feet with its own elevator and stairs. “Entering through the back,” I said into the comm. Agent Sparrow confirmed.

I met initial resistance just inside. A bored looking guy sitting on a barstool reading a Muscle and Fitness magazine. He had a shotgun leaning against the wall, and as he looked up in surprise I shot him with the Benelli. I knew the sound would give away my location, so I hurried to the stairs.

I was almost to the penthouse when some joker lobbed a grenade into the stairwell. The explosion threw me over the railing and down to the first floor. Depending on how many of those he had, it could take me all night to get to the top, so I just lay there in a heap.

As the smoke cleared I saw a head peer around the corner, then duck back. I stayed where I was, my dead eyes staring up at nothing. The head appeared again, watching me longer. I looked pretty dead, so he came down the stairs to make sure, or find out who the hell I was. As he leaned over me, I saw him relax, confident I was way past pushing up daisies. It was then that I pulled the Dessert Eagle around and blew his face off.

I almost felt bad about that. I’m sure he would have thought it unfair.

I was missing a chunk from my right calf about the size of a baseball, and most of my right buttocks, so my run up the stairs was more of a lumber. I had lost the Benelli in the fall, so I kept the .40 caliber out, and emptied the clip into various minions as I made my way to the apartment’s foyer. There seemed to be a lot of guards, even for a paranoid terrorist. Maybe he was having the weekly “Come to Muhammad” staff meeting.

I tossed the empty Dessert Eagle aside and unslung the Mk 17. As I took more and more damage, I gained an edge from their fear. It was inconceivable that someone as torn up as I was could keep walking, much less killing. Bone showed clearly through both legs, and my face and left arm was a churned mess of hamburger. “Target has run to the living room,” I told Agent Sparrow in between shots. I sprayed the hall, clearing it of two more thugs and followed the fleeing shape of al-Jamir around a corner.

When I turned the corner I stopped short. Al-Jamir was at a table near the kitchen fiddling with metal object the size of a suitcase. “Shit,” I muttered as two more guards fired into me.

I stumbled back around the corner. “Sparrow, the target is at the WMD. It looks like a pocket nuke.”

Agent Sparrow cursed in the comm. “Are you sure? Our intel said he hadn’t made a purchase yet.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. I fired blind around the corner to gain time and keep everyone’s head down. Voices shouted in Arabic. “I paid attention in class. Looks like an old Russian model, probably cobbled together. I’ve got him harried right now, but he’s putting the final parts together.”

“I’ve got a team getting airborne right now. They should be there in about twenty-five minutes.”

I leaned around, firing as I did. There were now four terrorists with assault rifles stitching me and the wall in a continuing cloud of plaster and flesh. I was running out of meat. I took out one guard and ducked back around the corner.

“Negative. He’ll have that thing ready to go in less than five minutes. And I’m on my last clip.”

I fingered the hilt of the machete with my left hand, and two of my fingers fell off. I could have been finished by now if the intel had been correct. But, no…there were extra guards and a god damn nuclear bomb. We can raise the dead but we can’t buy reliable data.

“Sparrow, turn off the zombie beacon,” I said, getting an idea.

“What? Are you crazy? No telling where you’d end up when they finish with you. There’s no way you’d be able to get back there in time to do any good.”

“Sparrow, this place is full of dead bodies. I should just jump into them when this one drops, which is any second now.” I felt something thumping against my back, which was most likely rounds from the AK-47s. “Either way, what have we got to lose? In three minutes about fifty blocks are going to become vapor if I don’t do something.”

I turned and started walking into the rain of bullets. Al-Jamir was staring with horror at me as I shambled toward him, looking like a horror show with my Mk 17 blazing. My comm squealed as a bullet tore into the side of my head. I dropped to one knee and emptied my last clip.

The remaining two guards had good cover, one behind a load bearing pillar and the other firing over the kitchen bar. I dropped the Mk 17 and pulled the machete with my right hand as several rounds tore through the remains of my chest armor. I felt something inside me burst and what I used for vision started to spin and twist. I tried to stand, to focus on the metal suitcase. My legs were grinding against bone to respond, then everything blacked out as bullets hit my head.

And my spark of life jumped.

One of the dead guards sat upright, my spark now inside him. One of the guards spoke my name, or at least something that sounded like a name, as he lowered his gun and started for me. He looked concerned as he came closer. There was a gun next to my hand and I reached for it.

The guard stopped, confused. I shot him twice in the chest and stood up.

Al-Jamir began to scream.

The other guard was a little better. He had at least started to put things together, and he shot me in the head. The body had already taken a lot of damage to the heart, and as the corpse fell over backwards, my spark jumped again.

The last guard looked frantically around the room, from body to body, not sure what the hell was happening, but scared enough to shoot anything, and doing his best to make sure everything dead stayed dead. I sat up in a new body, this one definitely more of a meat puppet, and the guard blew me apart. He was shouting something to al-Jamir, which almost certainly was Arabic for “stop crying like a bitch and activate the fucking bomb, already!”

I took it slower this time, as I had a limited supply of corpses. I watched the guard waving his gun from my position on the floor. He was so worked up he didn’t see me roll behind the sofa, and as he started ranting at al-Jamir again, I put a round in the back of his head.

The body I was using was, like most of them, pretty shot up. So far I’d been lucky that they were able to hold my spark. Getting killed with a stream of high powered bullets tends to make a body unreliable. I pointed the gun at al-Jamir and fired, and the gun came up empty. It was just one of those days.

Al-Jamir had forgotten he had a nuclear bomb next to him. Instead he tried to do some kind of backward run, which thumped him right up against the wall, hard enough for him to see stars. It gave me time to close the distance, as well as decide what I was going to do. I thought this might be a good time to show some independent thinking.

I suppose I could just have snapped his neck and be done with it. But the whole gory situation, combined with how flat-out terrified al-Jamir was, had presented me with an opportunity.

Killing a leader is good, but sometimes leaving a leader put is better. Al-Jamir had seen something truly horrible. He had seen an American soldier who could not be stopped, who continued to fight after being blown apart, and who could come after him in bodies that were not his own. Most people wouldn’t believe shit like that. But when they saw the terror in his eyes and heard the fear in his voice, they would believe something happened. They would believe.

Terrorism can work both ways.

So I kicked both his kneecaps out. Sparrow would have a containment crew here pretty soon, and they could take al-Jamir. As he writhed on the floor I leaned in close to him, so he could see the death in my face and smell it rolling off my body.

“We are everywhere,” I said through torn lips. “Wherever you hide, wherever you try to hurt us, we will come for you. Will your virgins want you when we have eaten you?”

I couldn’t think of anything else spooky, so I grabbed the bomb and took it to the other side of the room. If this body crapped out, which I felt it might, I didn’t want al-Jamir to be able to set the thing off. Crawling on broken knees would take his mind off that idea.

I sat down on the floor next to the nuke. It was more of a controlled collapse, really, and as I sat I left a red streak along the wall behind me. Reinforcements should be along soon, I thought. I just needed to hold onto the meat a little bit longer. Then Sparrow could turn the beacon back on, and I’d be back at the NSA headquarters in DC before you could say “death by ensanguination.”

But, like I said earlier, it was just one of those days. Even a zombie can have a bad day.

The reinforcements, whoever they were, came in from all directions. Just like you see on television, they were dressed in black combat gear. But unlike television, they didn’t have some innate ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys in a room full of blood. I started to stand, carrying the bomb, and they shot me. I suppose I would have done the same thing, in their position. After all, what they saw was a middle-eastern dude covered in blood and holding a nuclear bomb in a room they were told had a terrorist about to set off a nuclear bomb.

Yeah, I would have shot me, too.

Shots from about four different guns — might have been just three — hit me in the head and stomach. It was the head shot that did it, and my spark left.

Normally jumping hosts is pretty quick, at least from my perspective. But that’s with the beacon on and a suitable body ready. This time, my spark went a-hunting. It went from corpse to corpse, looking for one intact enough to hold it, and coming up short. Like I said, you kill someone with an assault rifle or a shotgun, especially when you hit them repeatedly, and they’re not much use for anything other than soup.

Just when I thought I’d end up in a dead rat in the Hudson, my spark found a host. Off in the distance I thought I heard a voice say something about “calling it” and “brain dead.”

I opened my eyes to bright light and people in white and green hovering over me with frantic looks. Opening my eyes must have been some kind of signal, because they began scurrying around with renewed energy, moving machines on wheels and talking a mile a minute. Every muscle in my body was screaming for attention, and that confused me. Every other time it was less a scream and more a mumble. Exactly how fresh was this corpse? And where was I? This sure as hell wasn’t the NSA zombie room.

I tried to talk, but something was in my mouth. A ventilator of some kind. What the hell?

“Jennifer? Can you hear me Jennifer? Blink if you can hear me,” said a doctor.

He was looking at me, so I blinked. Someone in the room started to cry.

“You gave us quite a scare, Jennifer,” said the doctor. “But you’re going to be okay now. You’re going to be fine.”

I’m not the smartest zombie, but this is where I managed to figure it out. And if you have too, I’d like you to please keep it to yourself. It seems I found a way out of the Zombie Corps that no one had planned on. I jumped into the body of a brain dead eight year old girl, who doctors were valiantly trying to revive in the hospital next door. She had fallen into a partially filled pool and drowned. By the time her babysitter had found her she was cold and blue, but no one gave up on her. They applied CPR from the accident site all the way to the hospital. They kept her heart beating and her blood flowing. They just refused to accept that she was dead.

But I knew she was. My spark wouldn’t have been able to find a home if hers hadn’t already left. I don’t know where hers went, and I really wish I did, but it left me an opening. Much longer and they would have given up and her body would have been just like every other lifeless husk I’ve used. Not a pretty sight for the poor parents.

I’ve decided not to say anything. The parents have their daughter back, and I can learn to live with being a girl. The active word is “live.” Being dead is a lousy job; I’ll take alive any time. As far as the NSA and the Zombie Corps are concerned, I’m MIA. Let their friggin’ voodoo scientists figure it out.

Me, I’m ok right where I am.

Call me “Jennifer.”