ZOMBIE BOOKS by Gnarly Bart

Author:Gnarly, Bart [Gnarly, Bart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

What it cost

“If their blood gets on you kid, you’re dead.”

Peter shifts uncomfortably in his wheelchair as I snare the dead man in the cage, who moans horridly and bangs his head on the cyclone fencing. A flick of the wrist, a pull of the handle, and I have him under my control.

“Easy,” Peter warns.

I give the catchpole a push and the zombie backs away from the cage door. I remove the bolt, lift the handle, and let the door swing open.

It’s just me and the deady.

The zombie looks at me with faded eyes. I used to think that once I was close enough to them, I would look into their eyes and see the small flicker that was a remainder of a soul; like a lone candle burning in an empty house.

I got over that idea rather quickly.

Zombies have eyes like dead fish: They’re there, and they clearly work, but there’s no life in them.

It’s true that the zombies see everything and process nothing. Peter and I have seen shufflers scan the room, studying everything while turning a circle in their cage. They would invariably make several full rotations, giving everything the same level of concentration each time, despite the fact that they were looking at the same items over and over. Peter had suggested that zombies do little more than constantly scan for food. As soon as either of us would enter the main floor of the mill, all a zombie had to do was smell us and it would lock in on blood. Nothing else seemed to matter. To the undead, the meal was all that held value. Zombies with a lot of life left would smash the walls of their cyclone prison and rage against the barrier. The older ones, weaker and more sluggish, would walk into the fencing over and over, bouncing off the chain-link and murmuring pathetically. This and every degree of activity in-between was witnessed each time we approached a caged dead-head.

“The meal,” Peter had said, “is all that matters. It’s the perfect loving relationship,” he chuckled. “They will literally only have eyes for you.”

I lead the zombie by the neck to a harness rig nearby. Now the tricky part. I hold the critter in place while Peter wheels around me and fastens the chains on its wrists and ankles. There is a lot of room for error and the chances of a bite are at their highest while we are pinning one down. If I let up even a little or if Peter inadvertently gets too close to the head, one of us will spend the afternoon destroying the other. “An’ frankly,” Peter likes to joke, “killin’ you from a chair would be a pain in the ass.”

Peter had told me that he used to just fasten them by the elbows. Back when everyone was still at the mill and Peter could walk, he and two others found that elbow control was all you really needed to keep a zombie in place.

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