The Boy Who Talked to Zombies

There was graffiti in the Hide.  Song lyrics bastardized into wry, apocalyptic ghosts of themselves.  One wall was dominated by a great spray of yellow paint; ZOMBIES ARE POISONED, and a bloated, angry-looking puffer fish in spray paint.  Snide remarks, prayers, and messages were scrawled in innumerable hands, on the walls themselves and on paper and cardboard and fabric tacked up in between the larger images.  He'd found some here; probably before the city ever thought it would truly evacuate, when the shock made everything amusing… the rest he had rescued from ruins across the city.  Somehow… it was almost like there were people here.

John liked cats.  He always had, though his mother had been allergic.  When he was younger, he had planned to get a new cat from a shelter every Christmas as soon as he had his own house.  People called him a crazy cat lady.  Now he had more cats than anyone in the city.  They came to him, some for food, some for water… most, for no reason.  Perhaps, they only wanted to see a live human, and know that not everything was lost.

Jacko wasn't sure whether, or for how long, he'd been asleep.  He pressed the button to make his watch glow a faint greenish-blue.  It was very early.  Why was he awake?

He loved noise.  He loved the moans and wails.  He loved hearing the sudden fights break out between the zombies.  The Hide was rigged with trip wires and anything that jangled.  He wanted to hear them.  He wanted to know they were there.  If it was quiet, it might mean there were no zombies.

But more accurately, it meant there were no reds.  And reds didn't worry Jacko these days.  It took a red ages to navigate into the Hide- more than enough time to knock it off.  

Noise meant there were zombies.  Quiet meant there might not be zombies.  Or there might be the specialized zombies, the kind that hunted and scented like beasts.    

Jacko ran a hand through the dirt-caked snarls of his hair.  He could make out the shape of his rifle in the moonlight, lying with the safety off pointed away from him.  In a halo around him there were other tools- shovels, iron-headed rakes, steel baseball bats, machetes, etc.  He could have hung them all up in a nice and orderly manner, but he felt safer with them all lying out.  Should a zombie make it into his room, no matter where he ran- he could arm himself.

He stroked Petra, one of the cats that kept to the Hide almost all the time.  She was a rusty Abyssinian, a luxurious breed he had coveted for ages, who was swift, spunky, and more than suited to the abandoned wasteland of the human world these days.  Jacko saw new cats come by almost every day in their pilgrimages to meet, or so he liked to tell himself, the last functioning cat lover in the city, now all their doting owners were gone or undead. He heard yowling territorial battles even more often than the call of zombies.  But for whatever reason, Petra was always at home.  

Maybe that was why he always made it back.  He had to take care of his cat.

Abyssinians were not known for being cuddly, but he stroked Petra and she woke and purred, rolling for him to feel her engorged, gravid belly.  He wondered, again, how many kittens there would be, and who the father was, and the thought calmed him.  He closed his eyes.

There was the zombie with the blue tattoos.  She spent a lot of time grinding her teeth.  Sometimes it was even louder than her music box.  She didn't scare Jacko as much as reds.  She unsettled him more, though.  On more than one occasion he'd found himself face to face with her and she'd just mumbled and watched him run.

There was the zombie with the tattered, red cloak.  He spent a lot of time… watching. At least when he wasn't leading a group of reds about on a hunt.  He scared Jacko to death.  The last time they'd met he had put his fingers around Jacko's throat.  He still wasn't sure why it hadn't killed him.

Zombies, he thought idly, through the haze of insomnia and dry-mouth, were rather like coin tosses.  If one could deliberate two states for the undead- that is, present and absent- then indeed; there was a fifty-fifty chance, always, of zombies.

At first he had tried to deliberate a pattern; a time when the corpses were most active and when they dwindled.  After much study on a level akin to birdwatching, he had found his proposed behaviors debunked over and over, and finally decided that the zombies' activities were a matter of chance.  At any time and any place, he had a fifty/fifty chance of meeting a zombie.  This did not mean he met a zombie every other time, any more than flipping a coin yielded heads every other time, but that while he may seem to hit upon lucky streaks and run out of luck at times, it was all just as likely as not.

And oddly enough, after so much time alone in hiding and, ultimately, staying alive, Jacko found that the zombie apocalypse was not an all-encompassing, constant end of the world, but that over the ambient tension and fear there was ample room for thought and, naturally, boredom.

He had read books in a past life, or played video games.  When he felt safe, he scrounged for water, supplies, letters, and kittens in the surrounding area.  He shot pigeons when bland food was driving him nuts, and ate their bland meat without spices.  He had long since finished tending to the 'decoration' of his room, and checked his booby traps daily , which took about ten minutes.  And when all his duties, all his survival activities were complete, he would have little to do but stretch out on his mattress, cuddle Petra, and think.

So he watched zombies.

Most of them, most were, to be brutally honest, a bit dull.  From his vantage point, he would spy on them shuffling around the empty shell of the city, in packs or alone, calling, clawing, bleeding and drooling.  It wasn't that the zombies were not interesting, just that, for the most part, they all behaved the same.

Sometimes he saw people- the living sort- foraging about.  They were less conspicuous than the zombies by necessity.  He watched them with great worry, willing them to get out alright.  Sometimes they did.  Sometimes they got eaten.

Then there were the good number of zombies who seemed to have carried something over from their past lives.  These ones were more animal-like; they paid more attention to their surroundings, seemed to be- well, if not thinking, at least attempting to.  He watched these through field glasses, as absorbed in their small scuffles and behaviors as one watching nature programs.

And then there were the special zombies, the ones that weren't pretending to think- they were thinking, and calculating, and strategizing.  The ones that covered themselves in costumes or carried weapons and tools.  Some of them were spacey; willing to follow orders and stand about.  Others were more ambitious.

Jacko kept a journal.  As something to do.  But also as a record, a sort of duty he felt to leave some information for the generation that would, inevitably, dig out all of this and shelve it in neat little labeled storage units and study it for the textbooks and historical fictions after the zombies had been put under control, decades if not centuries into the future.  He talked about himself, how he kept sane, why he hadn't joined the Rush.  He kept track of his cats, and organized his supplies and recorded what sort of things the zombies got up to whenever he witnessed something new.  He tried to leave out the poetic, flowery saying and quotes at first, but eventually caved.  It was, after all, his journal.

I am still here, he had written the other day, after an encounter had left him almost in shock, because of the elk and the wolves.  If I am an elk, and zombies are wolves, than there should be some truth to the old infamous Yellowstone example.  The more humans, the more zombies.  The more zombies, the fewer humans.  The fewer humans, the fewer zombies.  The fewer zombies, the more humans, and the more humans the more zombies.  He doubted it would ever cycle back to being a place populated by humans- in his lifetime at least.  But these days, only the Rush and scattered drifters ever entered the city- heavily armed and made to survive, for they had made it this long.  If there was nothing to eat, he assured himself, the zombies would, eventually, move on, or all starve to death.  And then he really would have the whole city to himself, until the country pulled together, cleaned all this up, got him out, and set things to the way they had been.

The thought frightened him.

John O'Brien had always suffered from mild agoraphobia, though he'd never tacked the name on.  He got nervous in crowds; he loved the safety of his room.  Perhaps that was why he held suck an affinity for animals.  The animals didn't talk to him.  They didn't ask why he hoarded water and collected cats left and right when his food supply was dwindling.  They didn't ask him what he was so afraid of, or why he avoided the Rush like the zombies they killed.  

Jacko rolled over under his sheet.  The Rush.

He knew a little about them… he'd heard from die-hard members what a fantastic thing it was, he'd heard from compassionate, concerned members how he really should accept their help.  But he just couldn't.

It was the water.

Before the breakouts, John had loved water.  He had sipped it like wine and glutted himself on it like sugar.  There was no finer beverage; there were infinite tastes.  He used to keep a great jug with a spout on his desk and a clean glass cup, and every week he would refill it at the health food stores.  Now water was as precious as gold.  He was skeptical of the skies; rainwater collected in clean containers set out the day-of collection did not satisfy his anxieties, though he drank it in his canteen and at breakfast each day.  He suspected it was rife with impurities; pollutants and heavy metals and disease and, somehow, particles of all the people who died under these skies.  

So he gathered it, religiously, and stored it, and he could relax somewhat and indulge in an extra sip or two after each rain.  He also collected any old jugs he could fine around wrecks.  But his greatest treasure was salvaged bottles.  Sealed, see-through plastic bottles that he would find once in a while under a house or in the back of a car, reading Arrowhead or Aquafina, or sometimes, blessed day, Fiji.  The water was Jacko's blood.  He felt it ooze out of him when he sweated, could almost taste it escaped when he breathed.  There was not enough water. He was going to run out.  He carried a canteen at his side, the classic round ones with a heavy leather strap, and filled it each day before going on a hunt for supplies.  He never returned with less than half-full.  The water was finite.  He needed it, and it was running out.  No amount was too small.  It all went into his stores.

And somehow, he knew, the Rush wanted, and needed, that water.

He sat on, he was fairly sure, the largest single cache of the stuff in the whole city.  He knew they would like that resource.  He knew they could use it.  He knew he should share.

He knew he never could.

Once before he had teamed up with a small band of survivors, and had hoarded the water ration, sometimes stealing extra.  He refused to put such a burden on the Rush.  He wasn't going to need their help, and they weren't going to take his water.  

This new life, this new lifestyle, it was a relief somehow.

He had a cat who appreciated his returning safely home, and he had a number of daily chores and weekly tasks that kept him alive.  He was lonely, and scared, and he had put down more humans- already dead, but still human to him- than he liked to think about.  He had no responsibilities to anyone but himself.

Tomorrow had come yesterday for Jacko.  The events in his life were variations of events in his past.  There were no school assignments pressing on the horizon, there were no appointments to make, there was, in essence, not a single due date in his life.  He could work as much or as little as he wished on a day to day basis.  He had suffered severe anxiety all his life, and that was still there- in every creak, every whisper of the wind, every loose bit of debris falling to the ground, every rat darting between fallen beams- but it was the anxiety that he might be in a dangerous, adrenaline-saturated but ultimately short-lived situation, ending in his death, or the end of several people who died some time ago.  It was simple.  There was no responsibility.

These days, his greatest fear wasn't the zombie threat at all.  It was the other survivors.  The ones who would inflict their company on him, tell him things, make judgments, and try to use his stores.  Zombies were deadly.  But people were awkward.

Jacko knew he had problems.