Author's Note: ...yeah.
Genre: Horror/Angst
Rating: T for death and gore
Character(s): Sherry
Summary: Zombies are animated corpses. It's what Sherry is used to, but that isn't normal. In the real world, when people die, they stay dead.
Dead Body
By: Mazzie May
Sherry has never seen a dead body that wasn't a zombie.
She's seen lots of gnawed on limbs, gutted bellies, ripped out throats, bullet-caved heads… it was that way with a lot of zombies, and she was used to that, but she's never seen a dead dead body.
Which is why today is so different.
She was walking home from school because Leon worked. A car rocketed past her and t-boned another. Back in Raccoon, she saw the after-math of a lot of crashes, heard them too, early on, but she never saw one. It was so much louder than she remembered.
There were no screeching tires, which leads Sherry to believe that the lady who slammed into the other car never tried to stop. Or didn't get a chance to. The impact was intense; the lady's car actually came off the ground, the back wheels up at least a foot. The force was something amazing, the sound coming a moment later and Sherry could almost see it coming at her, like a shockwave.
She's heard breaking glass before she broke a bit herself, (back in the day), but she broke it away from her. Seeing the shards fly out is sort of startling. It's bright out, snow-blind bright and every grain of sand that makes up the tinted-glass can be seen, shimmering in the air. The heavy noise the cars make as they slam back onto the ground and into each other is like a thick thunk, a sound so hard, she can feel it against her ears.
Someone might be hurt, she thinks. It's just something for her conscience to teeth on as morbid curiosity gentle urges closer to the wreck. Shards of glass random metal sinks into the soft rubber of her sneakers. Her eyes drop to the asphalt and now that the bits of window have settled onto the asphalt, the road appear to glimmer like a black and rough red carpet that someone just kicked down the street.
As she rounds the side of the lady's car, her mind can't process what she's looking at and all she can think is she look wrong. She's hanging out of the windshield and somewhere in the back of Sherry's head she registers that the woman had not been wearing a seatbelt, nor was there an airbag installed in her car.
It's only her head, left shoulder and arm that are outside of the car. Sherry can see that the right arm is wedged in between what is left of the windshield and the dashboard. It's broken at the elbow, and twists back, broken again somewhere in the forearm and twists again. It reminds her of a defective pretzel. The steering wheel is jammed up into her ribcage, broken ribs fighting against the pressure. Sherry tilts her head just a little. The woman's body is too long, like she was stretched to reach as far as she was.
She must be torn somewhere Sherry's head snaps back as though she's been slapped. Her thought process just stops. Torn somewhere. Her mind hit those words like a car hit a brick wall, wheels still spinning. It's too much. She shifts her gaze to the left, to the member and cranium protruding from the not-so-safe glass.
The hand's strange and Sherry has to lean forward a bit to recognize that it's broken and split, nubs of flesh looking like nailless thumbs. The bones that are showing are white, but they don't look white, covered in reddish-brown stuff. Blood? Dried blood? Marrow? Who knows? Not Sherry. Her eyes trail up the splintered arm, following the steady incision until it disappears behind mattered hair.
The face isn't as mangled as Sherry thought it might be. The chin is a purple-black-brown bruise colour. Only, it's not a bruise, and Sherry knows that for sure. When someone dies, all the blood pools to the point of gravity, making blotching dark marks beneath the skin. She used to see that all the time. The upper lip is cut deep, like a cleft, only the cleft goes all the way up beneath the left eye. Forcing it out. There are tiny cuts everywhere, and pieces of nameless thing pushing into the pale skin, but what draws Sherry's attention is the bulging eye.
The right eyes is swollen near shut, staring past her, the left showing way too much white, looking directly at her. And blinks.
She gasps. It didn't really blink. Maybe the lady twitched and Sherry blinked and it made her look like she blinked. But what if she was alive? Watching some school girl gawk at the interesting horror of it all…
Sherry places both hands on the hood, and leans closer. When she thinks she's close enough to not extend her hand fully, she reaches out, pushing her hand into the hair. Her fingers pressed against something slimy and solid, but still spongy. The brain? Maybe. Probably. She moves south and find the neck.
She counts in her head. Surprise, surprise; no pulse.
She withdraws her hand, and leans away from the car, the sirens wailing close by. She begins stepping back and pushes her hair from her face and her hands grow cold. She looks down as she reaches the curb. They're covered in blood. Her whole front side is bloody. It must have happened when she was leaning against the hood. She just touched her hair, so it'll be on her head, too. She looks in the direction that the sirens are coming from. Someone might think she's hurt.
She makes no effort to remove it or wipe it off, though. The last time she worried about blood, she was scared of it. That blood had something in it, something bad in it. If she didn't get it off her right away, wherever it was, it might turn her into a zombie. She saw a man get infected blood on his hands, cover is mouth to sneeze and changed not twenty-minutes later.
But this wasn't that blood. This wasn't T or G or any other letter-virus blood. It was just regular, plain old, run of the mill blood. Sherry didn't know what to do with it, so she just let it be. It's not like she had anything to get ride of it with, anyway.
When the fire trucks and ambulances arrive, the first thing she notices them do is help the man in the other car. Sherry had never thought to check on him. Oops. She hopes he's alright. He seems to be, he walks with a little help to a stretcher.
A paramedic and an officer approach her as the firemen begin prying open the doors to the woman's car. They block her view either on purpose or accident as they ask her questions. She answers them all and the nice officer leads her to somewhere away from the crash. She does manage to look over her shoulder and behind his back at the wreckage. She was right; the woman is torn at her lower torso. The shin bone is a lot smaller than Sherry ever imagined it to be as it sticks it's splintered self out of the skin.
As they remove the woman, Sherry feels the sudden urge to warn them. Stay back! she wants to say. If you're too close when she turns, she'll get you! But those are silly thoughts. This lady won't turn into a zombie. This isn't Raccoon where 'dead' doesn't mean dead at all. She nervously bites her lip anyway and tastes copper. She touches her mouth with the back of her hand and it comes back red. Oh. There's more blood on her face than she thought.
The white sheet they drape over her isn't white for long, and they end up placing her in a body bag because so much is falling out of her. As the officer ushers her around the corner and out of sight, she continues looking back, knowing that the bag won't move, that the body inside won't fit against the thick plastic, but waits for it anyway.
--
Sherry sleeps in Leon's room for almost a week, and Leon promises to make sure she has a ride to and from school so she never has to see something like that again.
She appreciates it, but doesn't really care. She's baffled; she witnessed genocide at age twelve and it's only six years later that she sees her first dead body.
Author's Note: I witnessed a car accident today. It was bad. People died. That's all I have to say.
R&R please, any and all commentary appreciated.