The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(27)
No longer able to summon voice, he whispered one last defiant “Fuck You,” before giving up on the rifle he could no longer lift and trying to fend you off with his bare hands.
That slowed you down for longer than you can now believe: maybe an hour, as the magnificent doomed bastard continued to refuse to submit. The best you can say about him is that there was a little less left of you by the time he was done. The worst is that it didn’t help him, and that he really should have saved a bullet for himself.
Afterward, you took your time, starting with his face while he made the few sounds he still could.
Reliving that now, just one returning horror out of many—and wishing for something solid in your stomach, so you could vomit something other than air—you finally understand why none of the other people you see would stir themselves to approach any of the others. All of these people are haunted by the people they killed, the flesh that they ate, and the loved ones who lived to see them become something reeking of the grave that wanted to drag them into the same bottomless darkness.
Who would want to see another human face, with that on their conscience?
Like them, you want to just sit alone and stew in your misery.
But then something drives you forward anyway. You select one of your closest fellow prisoners, a pale fat mound sitting on the ground about a hundred paces away. She looks up long enough to see you coming, but then turns her attention back to the dirt and doesn’t move at all as you cross the gulf between you. As you draw near, you see that her skin is just as colorless as the sky, except for the places where particles of grit now cling, like parasites. She’s not obese, not really, but she has enough excess flesh to form a donut around her waist. There is a tattoo on her arm, but it’s an old one and has become a faded purple smudge that no longer conveys whatever it had once been meant to signify.
When you stop before her, she glances at you, her weariness heavy enough to fill up a world. “What do you want?”
“What is this place?”
She barks a bitter laugh. “Did you just arrive?”
“Is it Hell?”
She shifts her weight just enough to set the excess flesh jiggling, a sad little dance that gives the impression of life for all of two seconds before inertia reasserts herself and the rolls of flesh once again take on the character of stacked corpses. For long minutes you imagine her intent on waiting you out, but there’s little point in that, not here in this place where every direction is exactly like every other. And then she murmurs, “I was a nurse.”
“What?”
“I was a ward nurse at an old age home, the floor where they kept all the patients with dementia. It was the last stop. They’d already been through the forgetful stage, the confused stage, even the dangerous stage most people don’t know about, when their frustration with a world they no longer understood turned them unreasonable and violent. They didn’t come to me until they’d forgotten who they were, and what they’d lost. Most of them were bedridden, and some were so weak with age that they didn’t have enough energy to move much…but always, always, there were some who’d gotten it in their sixties, or fifties, when they were still ambulatory, with energy to burn. I even had some in their forties, from time to time: one a college professor with a beautiful little wife twenty years younger than him, an ex-student who had to watch as her robust middle-aged husband suddenly started turning into an old man only two years into their marriage. He could run a marathon every day, that one. And we let him walk up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, up the hallway and back, nodding a kind hello to us on every pass, never remembering that he’d ever seen us before. Understand: we knew that he was in a terrible situation. We knew that he didn’t deserve what had happened to him. But, for a long time, it was almost pleasant, getting that smile from him every few minutes. He wasn’t unhappy, not at all. He didn’t know it was a care facility. He just thought it was a hotel, and figured that he’d be able to return to his life if he could just…if he could just find his room. He just needed to find his room. I always thought, if I ever come down with it, let me be like him. It wouldn’t be too bad, if all I cared about was…finding my room.”
You don’t understand why she’s telling you this. It seems random, not the answer to your question at all. As she winds down, you come within a breath of interrupting. But then she continues.
“After a while, he got worse. The smile went away. He forgot everything else but the shuffling walk up and down the corridor, and the skin of his face went slack, like a blanket draped on a chair. He was no longer looking for anything. There was nothing behind his eyes but the next step, and the step after that. He was transferred to another facility, so I never found out what happened to him. But when the dead rose…when they started coming after us…the look on their faces was nothing new to me. They looked like everybody in my ward. Some of the people I ended up with called them names like ‘those things,’ and ‘those sons of bitches,’ but I always remembered the old people on the ward, the ones who’d also forgotten everything, and had also never asked to become what they were. I never forgot that it wasn’t their fault, that they were just looking for something they couldn’t have anymore.” Her tired gaze, long fixed on the dirt, manages to move upward, long enough to meet yours. “Some of us may have been evil bastards before. But what we did after the infection took us was just the infection. It wasn’t our fault. Unless God’s a total maniac…it wouldn’t condemn us to Hell. And it hasn’t. I believed in Hell. I still believe in Hell. It may have taken me a long time to figure out, but this place isn’t even remotely terrible enough to be Hell.”