Michele Lee

I wasn’t planning to do this for a while, but how could I pass up tie-in chance like this? In honor of National Zombie Awareness Day here’s an exclusive excerpt of my upcoming novella, Rot.*

*Excerpt is from a galley, not the final version.

* * *

When I met Amy she’d been back from the dead for four days. She’d been at the facility for three of those days. At that point I’d only been there two. Not that anyone needed more than a few moments to get the gist of the place. She was more bitter about being at the facility than about the being dead part, and honestly I didn’t blame her.

She had a scowl on her face as I walked into the office at the Silver Springs Care Community. She was pretty, pale skin graced with freckles, chin length soft-looking brown hair and the palest hazel eyes I had ever seen that made the attractive, mildly chubby early twenty-something year old woman into something extraordinary.

“You’re dead.” I couldn’t stop it once I’d thought it. The words fell out of my mouth like something rotten. Her scowl deepened and I felt bad immediately.

“You know, I hadn’t noticed. Thanks for telling me.”

“I didn’t mean…Look, all of the zombies I’ve seen so far have been…”

“Like them?” She pointed out the window to the grounds, to where I could see a keeper leading a train of dessicated corpses on their daily walk.

The facility employed people with enough skill at raising the dead to keep the zombies’ urge to chew on people at bay. Me, I didn’t have a talent for commanding the dead. What I had was twenty plus years of military and security experience and the ability to look someone’s ninety-year-old grandmother in the eyes and shoot her.

The job called for all sorts of skills.

“Some of us still retain our own thoughts and personalities. I’m Amy, by the way.” She didn’t offer a hand. She held her arms across her stomach and leaned forward slightly, those eye boring into me. She was at once defensive and furious. And absolutely lovely.

I nodded. “I’m Dean.”

“Which would you prefer, Dean? Being one of those things out there, rotted to mindlessness? Or being locked in a body that’s already dead and knowing that’s the future you’ll face? Knowing that someone loved you enough to not let you go, but didn’t love you enough to care for you themselves? Instead they locked you in here, where they didn’t have to see you or smell you, but could take comfort in the idea that you weren’t exactly dead any more.”<

Personally, I thought both options sucked.

* * *
It used to be that death, maybe even a long or violent death, would be the worst thing you’d ever have to face. In the few skirmishes I’d served in, other soldiers had taken some comfort in knowing that. But then, that was before they started raising people from the dead.

My nephew, not that long ago, used to play a video game where the point was to wander around shooting zombies. There was only a little more to it than that, a bit of mystery, a touch of evil corporation or government conspiracy. The games said that zombies were the result of a disease.

When they started showing up in real life, people assumed the same thing. Government experimentation, biological terrorism, some sort of corporation poisoning the public–the fear and the outrage from the living humans caused more damage in those days than the few confirmed zombies did. I was privy to a few case reports of home grown terrorists plots against global corporations who had nothing to do with the occasional walking dead. They were just good targets.

And there was Black Wednesday, too. Forty-five civilians dead. They never did confirm how many employees of that soda company burned, barricaded inside the building, by an outraged mob.

Then the truth came out, and I still wonder how many people harbor the secret memories of doing violence that day in the name of protecting themselves or their families. Creating zombies, it turned out, was just a matter of will. The first few we caught in public had likely raised themselves. A few assholes too stubborn to die.

The problem came when people started to make zombies for fun and profit. About two percent of the general public had the will to force people back from death. It was a very lucrative, completely unregulated business.

Places like Silver Springs came in at the end of the line. A loved one coming into our facility was a brutal lesson for those involved. Too many people fell into the category of potential customers, but not enough people ever saw what happened once a zombie entered the gates. I don’t doubt that having a place to tuck away your loved one, who turned out to be just a bit too much for you to handle, was useful. But if more people saw the end result of never having to say goodbye, they’d damn well learn to say goodbye.

Amy, yeah.

“So,” she said after I failed to answer her out loud, “if you don’t mind my stench, I’m here to help out.”

I declined to add any more fuel to her little fire. “What can you help with?”

“I’m good with computers, and organization. I’ve been an office worker and a nurse before.”

“Good, because I’m not good at any of those things.”

“Why are you here, then,” she asked.

I shrugged. It was a job. “I guess I’m mostly just for when things go wrong.”

She snorted. I hadn’t killed her the first time. But chances were high that when she finally lost control I’d be the one to put her down. It was a shame, but we both knew it. In another time, I might fancy that my old ass might have a chance to enjoy the pleasure of her company, if only for dinner and conversation.

We were the only ones in the office. It wasn’t the office outsiders saw. It was more functional than the maroon and white show room out front. For one thing there were bars on the windows, as pretty as they were, and the heavy steel doors were magnetically seal, verified for at least 1800 pounds of force. The front room was not safe, should the facility go all Jurassic Park. But the rest of the building was.

I leaned back in the chair, propping my feet on the desk and keeping an eye on the security grids on the computer screen in front of me. Amy sorted through stacks of paper mechanically. Sometimes she filed things away, sometimes she tapped madly at the keyboard, recording files or transferring them to home office in the city. Of course, that place did nothing but record what happened here. It was our black box, not our calvary.

“How did it happen?” I asked the silence. I wasn’t comfortable with Amy at my back, but I was even less comfortable treating her like she wasn’t really there, like many of the other employees did. I turned toward her, still keeping the monitors in my peripheral vision. “Is that too personal?”

“Probably, but believe it or not no one ever asked. Not here any way. It’s probably in my file.”

“Don’t take it personally. It’s easier to keep a distance than to sympathize with a terminal patient. It’s human nature to avoid pain.”

“Stroke,” Amy said. She still wasn’t looking at me. It bothered me. I guess I thought that since she didn’t look dead something in her eyes might betray her. Not being able to see them kept me from reassuring myself.

“A stroke? But you’re so young.”

Amy shrugged. I had the feeling she was hiding a lot of how she felt. “I don’t remember dying. I just know what it says on my death certificate.”

“Morbid fascination?”

“No. My husband threw it in my face before he had them bring me here.” She paused and looked off into the grassy expanse out the barred window. “He had me raised because he couldn’t let me go. But he couldn’t find it in himself to touch me. ‘You’re not my Amy anymore,’ he told me. Then he called his new girlfriend over to console him when they took me away.”

“And you didn’t fight it at all?” The thought of just passively leaving the person I loved seemed alien to me.

“Are you kidding me? If I’d showed any kind of emotion other than obedience they would have napalmed me right there on the street.”

I stayed quiet. No, it didn’t seem fair. But I’d seen bodies in the morgue that had been savaged by angry or mindless zombies. That wasn’t exactly fair either.

“What about you? What brings you to our fine zombie herding establishment?”

I thought about lying to make her feel better, but she’d given me the truth. “Money. This field is so specialized it pays real well.”

Amy finally looked at me and smiled, viciously. “At least my husband is paying for one of us.”