Confessions of A Zombie Flesh Eater

Confessions of A Zombie Flesh Eater

by Jem11

I'm not sure what happened. I guess I must have died in my sleep. I'd had heart problems. The docs told me to lay off the booze and fast food but I wouldn't listen. I wasn't obviously overweight but my insides were terrible. Cardiac arrest in my sleep? Yes I'm dead. But then I woke up. I woke up. My wife was lying next to me in bed. It was still dark in our bedroom. Next minute I heard screaming. I felt someone hitting me. Very strong and hard and then very weak. And then I was covered in blood. Blood was in my mouth. Filling my mouth. I looked over and my wife was obviously dead. A large chunk of flesh ripped from her throat. Her left cheek bitten away. The blood was still dripping out of the hole in her neck. "This was my wife?" I thought. What did that mean? Wife? What is ... w-wife? And then I remembered. For a split second I was sad. Grief stricken! And then I forgot. And that happens often now. Like now I remember but then I'll forget.

I want to die. Like really really die. Just stop. All the time. I want to die. But I can't. And always always hungry, hungry for living flesh and blood. It's like the worst hell imaginable. Funny I used to love all the zombie shows. Like I'd watched all those George A. Romero movies multiple times: Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead etc. And then there was the Walking Dead series. Well the first five seasons anyway. And lot's of other related stuff like 28 Days Later etc. I know they're not dead but they are zombies. And that's the point. In all these movies and series the zombies are mindless. That's kinda the definition of a zombie. But we're not. At least I'M not. I don't know about the others. The other undead. We can't communicate with one another so I don't know. Oh we can see each other but we just ignore each other. We're motivated only to notice the living which is when we come "alive". Then I see the veins running under the skin and flesh glowing and all thought disappears because I just have this overpowering urge to tear flesh and drink blood. From the behaviour of the others. The other undead. I have to assume they have same overwhelming motivation that totally blots out everything else. So I have to assume that they can also think and reflect just as I can even if to outward appearance they look as if they are just mindless zombies. Just as I must look.

Some of the corpses look terrible. Corpses of the walking undead I mean. How can they even be "alive"? With half of their face gone. Or no stomach or with intestines literally hanging out. Or multiple third and fourth degree burns to the face and body. I mean they look like shit. It's medically impossible to have these injuries and still be moving. But so is a virgin birth I suppose. That's what supernatural means. Defying the laws of nature. At least I'm "in tact". In fact I almost look kind of normal which makes it a lot easier for me to approach the living. I'm still wearing the track suit I was wearing in bed just like many of the living who were forced to flee in just what they were wearing. They often realise too late that I'm one of "them". I have a hole in one shoulder from a bullet aimed at me by someone I was trying to attack before they ran off. But it's not easy to see.

Do I ever even pause for a second as I'm killing people? No. I'm driven by a frenzy. I don't notice emotions or facial expressions. I just see skin glowing and veins pulsating. Except ... except maybe one time. After I killed my wife I ripped open her stomach and began feasting on her intestines. Greedily. As I do with most kills when I get the chance. For some reason we must .. we need to feast on the innards. And then I stopped in mid feeding frenzy as I remembered something. I jumped up from my dead wife. There were other people in the dark house. I suddenly knew. Something held me back from seeking them out at first but a more powerful urge drove me forward to find them. URGENTLY. VIOLENTLY. ELEMENTALLY. I went quickly upstairs to the bedrooms of my two young children. My blood lust was high as I flung open seven year old Peter's door. It was dark. I rushed straight for the bed and ripped back the covers. I lusted to tear my son, my own flesh, limb from limb! To bite open his throat and fill my dead mouth with his living blood. To rip out his stomach! And feast un-nutritiously on his innards. It was all I could think of! But wait ! No, not all! Something at the back of my consciousness, my diseased mind, was SCREAMING! NO! NO! PLEASE GOD NO! PETER RUN! HIDE PETER! MY SON! MY SON! OH PLEASE PLEASE GOD, PETER, RUN! RUN! RUN! RUN! SAVE YOURSELF!

Yes I ripped away the covers! Preparing to kill! To horribly murder my own sweet seven year old son. The blood of my blood and seed of my seed.

"AAAAAAHHHGGG!" I groaned and roared. The first time I'd made a sound like that. Like no human ever made. And not quite like any earthly animal either. Where could it have come from except the depths of hell itself?

I ripped away the covers but ....there was nothing!

NOTHING!

The bed was empty! I dropped to the floor and looked under the bed. He wasn't there. I thought I could smell Peter around here somewhere.

I felt a tremendous frustration. Even rage. I stared wildly around the room.

THE WARDROBE!

The door was ajar a little. My son had heard the noise, no doubt, of my wife struggling and screaming as I killed her and then me rushing upstairs to the children's bedrooms and had sought to conceal himself in the cupboard. Sorry buddy, it isn't going to work!!!

I yanked the door wide open almost pulling it off its hinges.in my frenzy. I riffled through the clothes on the hangers. In white hot rage I pulled the clothes out and flung them in a pile violently on the floor. The wardrobe was completely empty!

"AAAAAGGGGGGGHHHH!" I screamed again, a blood chilling cry at the ceiling.

Cheated of my expectant prey. Of my feast of flesh and blood. I instantly rushed from the room to the bedroom of Jane, my six year old cute as a button daughter next door. I burst through the doorway even more violently than I had into Peter's room. And practically fell onto the bed. This time the voice urging me to stop had been quieted. Silenced. I was completely ravenous.

BUT SHE WASN'T THERE ALSO!

I checked under the bed, in the wardrobe. Nothing. NOTHING!

I couldn't call for my children. I found I no longer had the power of speech. Speech, that most human of faculties. I could only roar and scream like a savage wild brute.

I raced through the house looking for them. For my children. Not to love and protect them as a father should but to mindlessly prey upon them. To horribly murder them. I barged out into the back yard. Still no one.

And then as the blood lust died I remembered something about the holidays and staying with grandparents. And then I had a strange feeling of relief that my precious babies had been saved from being destroyed by the inhuman brutal Monster that their father had now become. They were thankfully beyond my reach.

I returned downstairs to the main bedroom. The bed was stained with blood and gore but Christine, my wife, had gone. She too was now one of the undead and had gone to seek out living flesh and warm blood. Had she still been there we would have ignored each other in any case. The undead have neither companions nor associates nor friends, not even amongst their own kind. Especially amongst their own kind. Christine meant nothing to me now. My wife of fifteen years. The murdered mother of my precious babies, that I'd also tried to kill horribly, now meant nothing to me. I recall memories but feel nothing. Our former lives, even if we can at times recall them as I do, are meaningless. Only the constant blood lust has any meaning now. That is our sole passion.

We can be killed by a headshot directly to the brain. Or by crushing our skulls. Or by decapitation. I've seen it. I've been in a crowd of undead shuffling along a highway and someone has taken head shots out of a passing car. And undead have dropped to the ground dead like flies. Really dead. Properly dead. When this happens I don't get frightened. I feel nothing. I have no fear. Deep down I probably want to die. When someone's shooting at us we just keep going forward, driven by fleshlust. We don't stop. And perhaps deep down these other undead, like me, also want to get that head shot that will finally free them from this hell of walking undeath. Of this never-to-be-satisfied ceaseless desire.

After killing my wife that first day of my undeath I went out onto the street. I saw Ed Meers, my next door neighbour, watering his roses. He nodded in my direction. Making no sound I strode over to him. He had a slight smile on his face. He either hadn't looked into my eyes or he had looked and chose to ignore what he was seeing. As I've said I don't look from a distance like your typical zombie. I'm still largely intact and these were early days in the apocalypse before the living who'd survived became experienced at detecting the tell tale signs of undeath: the awkward lope, the unfixed stare, the lack of normal non-verbal communication. Now all the living have learnt tell the signs. I expect the ones who didn't or couldn't have now joined the undead. Either that or they're actually dead.

I walked directly up to Meers and grabbing him quickly bit his nose off. He screamed in shock and tried to push me away. Whatever drives us gives us three or four times the strength we had in life. He couldn't overpower me as I ripped out his throat. My mouth was full of blood. I couldn't taste it. The only time I ever had any senses while in this condition was when I killed my wife. I still had a sense of taste so I could taste her blood in my mouth. When I went looking for my two children I could detect my son's smell making me think he was still in his bedroom when I was only picking up a past trace of his presence from the previous day when he and his sister had gone to stay with my wife's parents for two weeks.

Now, fully enrolled in undeath, I could taste and smell nothing.

Ed Meers and I had been neighbors for a few years. Some time ago we'd had a dispute over some overhanging tree branches. It had gone to an arbitrator. Meers had won. Afterwards he came over and asked me and Christine to join him and his wife for dinner at a classy restaurant. On them. It was a nice gesture to let bygones be bygones. We'd accepted. But I'd always harbored an underlying resentment which I could never quite shake. It didn't help that I also found Meers a bit of a blow hard. A wind bag. Always tooting his own trumpet. We didn't socialize with them again but things were cordial.

As I savagely bit his face off and ripped out his throat, was there some lingering resentment from when I'd still been human only a few hours earlier? Probably not. I don't think so. Even if he'd been the nicest guy possible and we'd never had any dispute and we'd been the best buddies ever I'd still have killed him just the same. I don't feel human emotions; neither love nor vengefulness animates me any more. Only the constant desire to kill.

While I was ripping out Meers' bleeding throat his wife came out screaming wielding a base ball bat. She must have seen from the window. She swung the bat at me. Hitting me continuously. Driving me off. I lingered for a while across the street. My hunger momentarily abated. The street was deserted. I watched as Meer's wife bent over her husband weeping trying to call on her cell. The cops and an ambulance I guess. I watched for about five minutes until Meer's corpse with its mangled face and throat came to "life" and brutally killed her as I'd brutally killed him. After that I lost interest. The undead have no need of the dead.

So far I've probably had hundreds of kills. Men, women, children, infants, babies. I feel nothing. Sometimes I can go days and days without a kill. It doesn't affect me. It doesn't affect any of us. We don't rely on kills for nutrition. Whatever is animating us doesn't need prey to survive but it still drives us to seek out prey.

The undead. We often congregate. It's strange because we don't communicate. We just stand around together. It's part of the same urge to kill that drives us every day and every night. In George A. Romero's 1978 movie "Dawn of The Dead" there's a quote that when hell fills up the dead will walk the earth. Eventually the whole world will be the sole realm of the undead as all the living are killed off or die and become undead themselves. Then the earth truly will be a relentless living hell of unrequited and unrequitable torment, unless before that happens the surviving living can find a way to reverse the trend and find a cure for undeath itself.

The End