My hand fell off again.
I really must find someone other than Janice to try to sew it back on.
You would think being dead would mean her arthritis was no longer an issue, but she still complains that it makes it hard to do fine work.
“Arthur!”
Janice’s grating voice drifted through the ruined building, summoning me as it had done for the last fifty years. Till death do us part the vows had said, yet here we were, dead and still bumbling along together just like we had done all through our marriage.
I attempted to find my slippers, rolling over on the thin layer of cardboard we had used as a bed the night before.
Some of the fellows in the New Zombie Community insist the undead do not need to sleep, that it is a real boon, enabling them to get so much done. Personally, I still like to be in bed (or at least what constituted a bed) at eight to get in plenty of shut eye before the next orange post-apocalyptic dawn.
“Arthur! Are you coming?”
“Coming!” I yelled back, finally locating my slippers where I had left them the night before – next to the skull of the former occupant of this apartment.
Poor chap was one of those wiped out by the bomb that was supposed to nuke all the newly created zombies without hurting the living. The government’s solution to dealing with the virus that had turned a third of the population into the undead.
Only, someone made a miscalculation or, (according to one of my NZC friends) there was a zombie on the inside who rigged things, which resulted in the bombing wiping out nearly all living humans instead.
“Arthur!”
Janice’s shrill voice was rising to a dangerous pitch. I knew that tone.
“Coming! Give me a chance!”
“You lazy bum! You never could get out of bed!”
Fifty years of this marriage – hadn’t I earned a little peace by now?
How long did zombies ‘live’? I had a really worrying feeling that words such as ‘immortal’ and ‘forever’ could feature in my future.
Stumbling in my slippers on the rubble of the ruins of the Sunset Apartment complex, I headed out onto a balcony overlooking an internal courtyard. A set of concrete steps which would have given my knees some serious trouble just a month ago, now caused my zombified body no issue – though I did have to occasionally remind myself not to lurch, or to throw up my arms in front of me, classic zombie style.
It seemed an instinctive habit for the newly dead.
Janice was stood in the middle of the courtyard in her dressing gown and pink fluffy slippers. She had risen that morning saying she was going to find some water and try to make us coffee.
She had been attempting to do the same every day since we woke up after the bomb to find our home a crumbling shell all around us, the coffee machine crushed beneath the kitchen ceiling.
Back then, Janice had been worried about us being murdered in our bed by the living neighbours who were terrified of their zombified counterparts. As we discovered that first morning after the apocalypse, she didn’t need to worry.
The livings had dealt with themselves and, rather like cockroaches, zombies had been the survivors rising up out of the wreckage.
Actually, coffee was rather redundant in our new existence. Zombies do not need to eat, drink or sleep. The only downside with our new-found immortality is a tendency for bits of us to fall off and terrible boredom.
Janice refuses to accept this information. Too much of her mortal life had revolved around the preparation and consumption of food, and she was loathe to give that all up just for the sake of some stupid apocalypse.
Janice had been a fantastic cook before her arthritis crippled her hands. It was probably the main reason our marriage had lasted as long as it did, because I used to be a fantastic eater. By the time Janice had reached an age where she could no longer make the mouth-watering pastry for her famous pies, I was too old to consider looking around for someone new.
I suppose I could try now, but really I am rather fond of the old crone and couldn’t imagine being in the post-apocalypse without her.
Janice pulled a smile onto her grey, mouldering face as I finally emerged in the courtyard.
“Look what I found!”
Janice held up a coffee pot which had somehow survived the destruction which seemed to have shattered every other one we had come across.
When she smiled with unbridled joy like that, it reminded me of the girl I had fallen in love with. The one who had dimples in her cheeks and loved to drive her father’s truck, not always with his permission.
She was the girl I had lain beside in a field and gazed up at the stars, wondering if there was life out there in space and what that might mean for us. I always had a tendency to get frisky when we were stargazing, and Janice had once joked her father would cut my hands off if he knew.
Now look at me, unable to keep my hands on half the time. I wonder if old Mr Dorner is watching from heaven, amused by the irony?
He would have made a great zombie. He already had the mindlessness down to an art.
“I had to walk two miles to find it. There is an old diner down the road, looks virtually intact.”
“You walked all that way alone!” I fussed, coming up to Janice and adjusting her dressing gown where it had slipped open at the waist revealing a dark floral nightgown that couldn’t have been less sexy if you tried. “You don’t know who is out there and could have taken advantage of you.”
“Don’t be silly Arthur, there are no zombies around here.”
She was right, we had walked so far the last few days we had removed ourselves from the main hub of the post-apocalyptic zombie community.
“What about a living survivor?”
“You really think any of those are left?” Janice tutted at me.
Some of our fellow zombies really held a grudge against the living and had decided from the start that non-zombie survivors should be hunted down and purged as soon as possible. Janice and I agreed such behaviour was distasteful and brutal, but some of our comrades were too fixated on how they had had been treated by the living just before the bomb. They had decided that zombies should be the only ones to inherit this new world.
“Alright, so maybe no one is out there, but you know how I worry.”
Janice patted my shoulder.
“Let’s make you a nice cup of coffee. It always makes you feel better.”
We shuffled off to a room on the lower floor that must have been for maintenance staff before the downfall. It had a sink and, on a counter next to it, Janice had stacked her supply of coffee beans. She had been able to find coffee beans, filters and other bits and bobs along our journey, gathering them up like a grey, decaying squirrel. She even had a functioning percolator. But finding an intact glass pot to contain the special liquid she would brew from the coffee grains had been a problem I thought we would never resolve.
I was glad to be proven wrong.
Janice went about the process of making coffee. By some miracle I did not care to question, the building still had electricity. I had heard that a couple of zombies had taken over the nearby power station to ensure things kept running and I was grateful to them, but it still amazed me that a place like this, that was virtually a ruin, was still able to draw electricity.
Janice hummed as she worked. I sat down on a handy pile of rubble and thoughtfully examined the toe of my left slipper which was wearing through at an alarming rate.
Janice’s busyness lulled me into a pleasant stupor, one where I was not thinking about anything in particular and was glad for it. It reminded me of when I used to smoke. That pleasant period of time between the first puff and last when my body sank into a cosy peace, and nothing seemed to matter.
Janice made me give up smoking twenty years ago, saying it would be the death of me.
Hah!
Janice was so absorbed in making coffee, and I was so absorbed watching her, that neither of us heard the footsteps until they were nearly at the door of the room. I jerked alert at the sound, starting to rise as a man leaned around a door and pointed a semi-automatic rifle in my face.
Janice screamed in alarm, clasping her hands to her cheeks. The man pulled the trigger on the gun, and it jammed. If I could breath, I would have let out a sigh of relief.
The man stared in horror at his gun, then at us.
He was expecting us to launch ourselves at him. Zombies are ten times stronger than livings and we don’t react to damage. Only thing that can kill us (so I am told by those who appear to know more than me) is a bullet straight to the brain or our heads being cut off.
The man before us was a living, and he thought his time on this damned earth was at last at an end.
Janice took a good long look at him.
“Do you like coffee, love?”
The man’s Adams apple bobbed in his throat as he tried to grasp that we were not currently tearing his face off. From the dusty remains of his clothing, I saw that he had been in the military in the time before. Maybe he had been part of the units sent out to brutally shoot down any zombies they found.
Somehow he had survive both the virus that had changed approximately 30% of humanity into perceived monsters, as well as the bomb designed to eradicate us which had done the complete opposite.
“Janice makes a good cup of coffee,” I told him warmly. “I rather fancy it will be wasted on me. She would appreciate having someone alive to taste it and tell her it is smashing.”
The young man – for he was very young now I looked at him carefully – seemed to be expecting a trap. His eyes were wide from the trauma of the last month, when he had survived on his wits alone, dodging zombies who would kill him without a thought, all while trying to work out what to do now he found himself one of a handful of survivors in a world set against him.
He worked his mouth, but words failed him.
“Arthur, didn’t you say you spotted some sealed packets of cookies in that storage room the other day?” Janice said to me.
“I did,” I nodded my head. “If you remember you made me bring them in here and put them in that cupboard. In case we had company, you said.”
“A good hostess is always prepared,” Janice smiled at the young man.
Then she drifted to a cupboard near him which almost sent him into a fresh panic. When he saw she was not going to kill him, he started to realise we were quite harmless and slowly lowered his gun.
“Do you want to sit down?” I moved off my rubble pile and offered it to him.
The young man’s eyes looked as though they might pop out of his head. After a moment when he clearly thought he had gone insane, he finally accepted my gesture of friendship and sat down.
Turned out he was utterly exhausted and running on fumes. The way he sat down I could feel the heaviness that overcame him.
Janice produced the packet of sealed cookies and handed them to him.
“Still in date,” she smiled, before returning to making her coffee.
“I am Arthur, and this is my wife Janice,” I introduced us to the young man.
He was fumbling with the cookie packet, desperate to open it but somehow unable to make his fingers perform the necessary movements to rip through the packaging. I leaned over slowly, pausing when he looked at me in terror and giving him a reassuring smile, then took the packet and made a small rip which he could expand to reach the cookies.
“Th… thank you,” he stuttered, grabbing out a cookie and shoving it into his mouth.
“Not eaten in a while?”
He shook his head.
“Take it slow, or you will make yourself sick.”
He followed my advice and munched thoughtfully on his second cookie.
“My name’s Jake.”
“Nice to meet you Jake,” I replied.
Janice glanced over her shoulder and nodded her head at him warmly.
“You… you aren’t like the others,” Jake mumbled, lowering his eyes.
He felt guilty for trying to shoot us, poor thing.
“We don’t hold with their nonsense,” Janice said, turning around and leaning back on the counter. “We are attempting to remain civilised human beings.”
Jake found his eyes wandering to our slippers and night attire. I don’t suppose he had met any other zombies who dressed quite like us. Most did not bother with pyjamas and night gowns due to the whole ‘not sleeping’ thing.
“I smelt coffee,” Jake said. “I thought there must be another person… human… I mean…”
“We get it, love,” Janice told him gently. “You hoped there was another living here and all you found was us. Sorry to disappoint.”
Jake’s face looked so despondent it made him seem even more of a kid. I really felt sorry for him. This was not the world he should be living in. When I was his age I was riding around in Janice’s father’s truck and my only concerns were whether I could get her skirt off without her daddy finding out and shooting me in the crotch.
“Have you met any other… livings?” Jake asked, vainly hoping there were others out there he could unite with.
Janice shook her head.
“Sorry. You are the first.”
The coffee jug was looking nicely full. Janice had found some unchipped white mugs to fill. She gave the first cup to the kid and the second to me. The coffee smelled delicious. I tried to picture what it tasted like, knowing when it entered my mouth it would taste of nothing. The undead apparently lose their taste buds, which is perhaps just as well since we don’t need to eat.
Jake took a long sip of his coffee and the anxiety in his face eased a fraction.
“It’s really good, mam.”
Janice beamed with pride.
“I am glad to hear it and call me Janice.”
Jake wrapped his hands around his mug and sighed into his coffee. The next moment I realised he was falling asleep. I gently took the mug from his hands before it fell to the floor, and motioned for Janice to come with me outside, leaving the kid to doze. I suspected he had not slept properly in some time, too terrified to close his eyes and let go.
Back out in the courtyard, Janice and I stood where once a decorative tile pattern had been laid in the floor. Now it was fragmented and torn up, but there was a part of me that had a hankering to fix it. Until that moment, I had not really given it much thought, now a sudden part of me really wanted to set to work making this place more than a temporary stopping point, but a home.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Janice, dragging my eyes from the floor.
Janice glared at me as if I were speaking nonsense.
“What else can we do but look after him? He is lost and alone. He won’t survive out there for long, not with your zombie friends wanting to kill every living they find.”
“They aren’t my friends,” I grumbled at her. “I just got to talking with them.”
“Could have fooled me, in any case, I don’t hold with killing people, never did.”
Janice folded her arms over her chest and had that stern look on her face that I knew boded trouble.
“He stays and we protect him, right?”
I found myself smiling at her determination.
“Right,” I nodded my head. “I wonder if he is any good at sewing on hands? I need my fingers ready for action to turn this place around if we are going to stop here.”
Janice’s face lit up.
“He will need a room of his own, when he wakes up we will take him on a tour to pick one.”
I remembered right then why I loved this woman. Why we had stuck it out for fifty years, why we would stick it out for however long zombies lived too.
“Always wanted a son,” I rumbled gruffly.
Janice patted my arm.
“You silly old thing.”
“Did I ever tell you, you make an amazing cup of coffee?”
Janice’s eyes crinkled with pleasure.
“Did I ever tell you, you are the best husband a girl could have?”
She took my hand and for the first time since that damn virus swept the country I felt at peace with my new life and mighty glad to still be here.
Maybe this post-apocalypse retirement wouldn’t be so bad after all.
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2 comments
Absolutely loved this! Arthur and Janice’s post-apocalyptic love story is the zombie tale I didn’t know I needed. Well done!
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Thank you! Your comment made my day!
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