Chapter Two – Finally, Something Interesting
The humans have all kept themselves separated from us across the river, behind the huge concrete wall they built, as safe as it's possible to be from all of us. But occasionally they have to leave the safety of what they have simply called the City, I'm guessing for supplies. That's when we get to eat.
I don't really miss real food. I suppose when I was alive I wasn't much of a food lover. To be honest, if I could I wouldn't eat at all. Not just because killing people and eating their flesh is extremely depressing, but because I just don't really want to. But sometimes the hunger is just too much to ignore.
Finally – after what felt like several years of excruciatingly slow walking – we all made it to the other side of the river. We followed the smell of living flesh, the indescribable scent that only something with a beating heart gave off, until we came to a building that used to be a pharmacy. The place seemed deserted at first sight, but I could hear voices coming from the back room. We all quietly shuffled towards the sound, and I could hear what was being said on the other side of the door.
"Find anything?" said a man's voice.
"A few things," said a slightly muffled female voice. "Headache tablets, antiseptic wipes, bandages..."
A second female voice said "Ooh, I found some Valium!"
"What would we need that for?" said the first woman's voice.
"I dunno," the second woman said with a chuckle. "Lord knows we could do with a bit of cheering up."
There was the sound of quiet laughter from what sounded like some other men, but the first woman spoke again, sounding stern and impatient.
"Stop messing around. We have our orders. Find as many useful medical supplies as we can carry, shoot anything that moves and get the hell out of here."
The first man's voice scoffed. "God, Sarah, you sound just like Lestrade."
"Thank you," said the woman called Sarah.
"Yeah, that wasn't a compliment," said the man.
The second woman suddenly shushed them. "Do you guys hear something? I think something's moving outside..."
There was a murmur of other voices. There were definitely more than just three people inside. The other corpses were clearly hungrier than me and growing impatient at just listening at the door. Led by the largest of our group – a lumbering gorilla of a corpse who must have been a nightclub bouncer with a tendency towards violence when he was alive – we all burst into the room, teeth bared and fingers ready to claw at flesh, with me reluctantly bringing up the rear.
It was pandemonium. There were yells and gunshots, bodies falling as corpses were shot in the head and humans were overpowered, screaming in pain as they were eaten alive. M had a young man underneath her, breathing his last as she bit out chucks of his neck. It would probably repulse me if I was alive, but gruesome sights like that were all too common now. I was about to join M and the other corpses who has joined her to feast on the young man's lower intestines, when I was stopped in my tracks by something... interesting.
A man with closely cropped blonde hair and bright blue eyes, short but with clearly a very toned body under his jeans and jumper, had just shot a corpse right between the eyes with a handgun from the other side of the room... and he was beautiful. I could have sworn I actually felt my heart beat, just once, and I hadn't felt it beating in a very long time. I walked towards him instead, but was mildly distracted by someone shooting me in the shoulder.
It didn't hurt – nothing ever hurts anymore – but it was enough to piss me off. I looked up at who had shot me and found a woman with a brunette ponytail and a very intense glint in her eye, standing up on a counter and pointing a shotgun at me.
"Don't even think about it, you zombie scum!" she cried, and I realised it was the stern sounding woman I had heard through the door. She fired a shot at me again and missed – she was rubbish at this – and that got me really mad.
Now I'm not proud of what happened next. If I thought it would do any good, I'd ask you to skip the next paragraph so your opinion of me isn't tarnished by what you're about to read. But who am I kidding? You know what I am by now, you know what us corpses are capable of, and I'm sure you've already assumed what happened next. Okay, here goes.
This woman's amateurish attempts to kill me had made me so angry that I attacked. I grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her off the counter so fast that her head banged off it before she hit the floor. I took a huge bite out of her arm, making her scream and drop her gun, and I noticed as she did that she was wearing a really nice silver charm bracelet around her wrist. If I had just eaten her flesh and left her brain intact, she would have come back as a corpse like me. But, as I said before, I don't really like to eat. The only appeal that a living human body has to me is the brains.
I know, disgusting. Forgive me. But it's the best part. Not the taste or anything; I don't even know what brains taste like since my tastes buds don't seem to work anymore. It's not about how they taste, but what they do to me. You see, when a corpse eats a human's brains we see all their thoughts and memories, we feel all their emotions. It's the closest a corpse can get to dreaming, since we don't sleep. So I bashed this poor woman's head in and scooped out as much of her brain as I could (sorry for that mental image, I hope you're not trying to eat lunch right now), stashing most of it in my coat pockets before stuffing a handful of it in my mouth.
What I saw really surprised me. I was this woman, I was Sarah, sitting in the backseat of a car with none other than the beautiful blonde man who I'd just seen shoot that other corpse between the eyes. She felt so happy, so very in love with man in front of her – John – who had just given her a lovely silver charm bracelet and had told her how much he cared about her.
A yell brought me back in the room. The only living human left was the blonde haired man – John, his name was John. He was cowering in the corner of the room, fumbling with his handgun that had apparently run out of bullets, as that big gorilla of a corpse advanced on him, groaning menacingly. I don't know why, perhaps it was left over feelings from his girlfriend's brains that I just been eating, or maybe it was that single heartbeat I'm sure I felt the first time I looked at him, but I couldn't bear to see this man die. I had to protect him. I had to keep him safe. I picked up the heaviest thing I could find, which turned out to be a fire extinguisher, and cracked the gorilla of a corpse right across the head with all the strength I had. The blow was enough to crack his skull, killing him properly.
"J-John..." I groaned in what I hoped was a comforting way, as I looked down at the blonde man still cowering on the floor.
He looked up at me, his bright blue eyes full of mingled terror and confusion. He probably thought I'd killed that other corpse because I was so desperate to eat him myself. I wanted to explain to him that I meant him no harm, and that he didn't have to be afraid because I had no desire to hurt him. But as I knelt down to face him, the only word I managed to get out was "John..."
"Get away from me!" he said, his voice shaking as he continued to fumble with his unloaded gun.
This wasn't going so well. I could hear the surviving corpses getting up to leave, and I had to think fast. I dipped my fingertips into the horrible, black congealed blood currently oozing slowly out of the bullet hole in my shoulder, and smeared it onto the side of John's face. He understandably recoiled from my touch, still staring at me with a kind of confused fear, but my plan worked; he smelt a lot less human now.
I attempted to smile and managed to groan out a whispered "S-safe... now... c-come... with... m-me..."
"What?" he said incredulously.
I pressed my finger to my lips to show that he should be quiet, before offering my hand to him.
"C-come... with... me... k-keep... you... s-safe..."
He narrowed his eyes at me, like he couldn't believe what he was seeing, and whispered "What are you?"
I wasn't sure how to answer that, but eventually he let me help him to his feet. I could have sworn I felt my heart beat once again as I held onto his arm.
Oh God, why was I doing this? There was no way this could not all go horribly wrong. Why did I need to keep this particular human safe, why did I need him with me? It's not like there was anything particularly special about this human... other than the fact that he was beautiful. Ugh, what is wrong with me?
John seemed too scared to do anything other than let me lead him out of the room, right behind the remainder of the corpses. I glanced down as we left, and spotted a girl with John's blonde hair and bright blue eyes, crouching under a table and looking even more baffled and terrified than he did as she watched me leading John away.
Seriously, why was I doing this? Collecting interesting knick-knacks and vinyl records to keep in 221B was one thing, but now I was collecting a human. Why couldn't I just be normal?