Zombie

Screeech.... 

BANG. 

The world disappears in a hot white flash — 

fade to black. 

... 

pain... pain... white hot pain... my face is on fire and my body is molten... make it stop... please...  

... 

I open my eyes.  

Nothing but black dark.  

The pain has waned to a dull throb — a knocking behind my skull, a vice around my chest, a needle lodged at the base of my neck. I reach up to touch my face and find a stickiness graven deep in my forehead. My fingers feel stretched and warped as I extend them and reach them towards the wrecked skin of my face.  

I touch my chest; a rib protrudes. Others have sunken — I feel them crushing my lungs.  

I screw my eyes shut tight. My body is a wreck. But where has the pain gone? They must have me on something strong. But when I touch my fingertips to my wrists, and inside the nooks of my elbows, I find no canula. I open my eyes again, uselessly in the pitch dark.  

Where am I? 

Something is wrong. 

I reach out in front of me, with both palms, and find a hard, smooth surface just above me. 

No. 

A quick sweep of my hands reveals that I am completely trapped.  

A box. 

...a coffin. 

I’d had nightmares like this. 

Panic — raw and unfiltered, like a living, flailing thing trapped in there with me. 

I start to wriggle, to writhe, to pound on the coffin’s lid. I open my jaws to scream for help, but only a muffled, strangled groan claws its way out between my lips. I try again, focusing on the word, on my tongue to form it and my voice box to push it out.  

—help— 

Nothing but a dreadful, wet gurgle. 

What is wrong with me... 

I force myself to lie still, willing my frenzied thoughts to slow.  

Think. 

I know I need to get out. Need oxygen. Oxygen? No, that’s not it. I need... something.  

I need. 

So I close my eyes, sinking into the silent stillness of the dark — think. 

I find myself back there. 

I remember the stink of burning rubber, hot and thick on the air. The seatbelt had pinned me to the seatback, slicing into my chest as gravity tried to rip me from the vehicle. That was all I had time to notice before the car, the road, and everything else vanished in a blaze of light. I didn’t even have time to glance over at Jenna. 

Jenna... 

Jenna had been driving.  

Is she okay?  

I need to find her. I picture her in my mind — her pink-flushed cheeks, the freckles like a constellation across her nose — and let her image spur me on, strength rushing now through the damaged sinew of my shoulders and arms. I brace, tense, and slam my broken fists into the wood of the coffin lid. And slam. And slam. And slam.  

Soon it is in splinters around my supine body, and musty soil is falling on my face and in my mouth. 

I’m unbothered by its rank taste. 

There is nothing in my mind now but iron determination. I need to find Jenn— need to find...  

What did I need to find? 

I need to find something.  

I need...  

I claw at the dirt above me. 

I dig and dig, like a mole beneath the earth, fingernails raking through soil and clay, pulling with an inexplicable supernatural strength, hoisting my body’s weight up through the thick black sea.  

Somewhere between my coffin and the sky, I forget my name.  

... 

Unbeknownst to me, up above ground in the gentle quiet of the graveyard’s gathering dusk, sits Jenna at the foot of the mound beneath which I had been laid.  

Her dappled cheeks are streaked with the tracks of hours and hours of tears. Her skirt is smeared with mud. She’s all in black, down to the stiff, glossy heels abandoned in the dirt beside her, long since peeled from her blistered feet. 

She is not superstitious; she does not flee at the sound of hollow knocking beneath the earth.  

It must be a crow tapping at the old chapel roof down the hill. Or a possum in the rafters. 

Ignoring the sound, she places the palms of her filthy hands against the dirt and continues to sob — an outpouring of sorrow and guilt in equal parts.  

... 

The closer I drag myself towards the surface, the easier the digging becomes. I feel my mangled legs beneath me, inching upwards with each powerful stroke of my arms. I can’t see. I can’t think — can’t remember — I just know that I need... I need...  

... 

It must be a trick of the fading light, thinks Jenna when she sees the top of the dirt pile shift. Then it happens again — the whole mound seems to shake, and loose soil visibly trickles down the sides. She stiffens.  

... 

I anticipate the wind at last on my skin as first my arms and then my head burst through the surface of the dirt mound atop my grave — but I feel nothing. 

My neck is loose and there’s a wobble to my head as my body lurches a limping shuffle away from my open grave. 

I know now what I need; 

to taste flesh. 

And there it is, standing rigid, as if frozen in the sunset breeze. I lumber towards her, picking up speed as my crooked calves learn to bear the weight of my twisted body. Just as my foul, soiled fingers reach out to grab her, she lets out a sky-splitting scream and finally turns on her heels to run.  

So strong is my newfound flesh-lust that a wave of despair crashes over me as my fingertips rake the still-warm air where she had stood but a fraction of a second ago. I stagger as she slips out of reach, and urge my fractured body on, one great, lumbering stride after another, in pursuit of fresh, living meat to quench my insatiable hunger. 

The distance between us closes.