The last thing Carl remembered was staring down the barrel of some kinda gun, he didn’t know what, so when he opened his eyes and saw light again, he was awfully relieved. The way things had been going he was pretty sure he was going to end up in the Bad Place, but clearly the Lord or whoever it was that ran things up in the big beyond had decided he was worth it after all. Then, slowly, the details of his surroundings became more clear.
He was still in the same burned out wreck of a city he’d been in before that roving biker gang went and shot him. He could see the abandoned building he’d slept in the night before not two feet away. “Huh,” he said. “I didn’t know buildings made it into heaven.”
Carl might have gone into a whole theological reverie on the subject but his thoughts were interrupted by a sudden guttural moan. He looked down and saw his own body lying on the ground. It lay there twitching and moaning, and then with a sudden jerk it heaved itself up off the ground and staggered away.
“Well, shoot,” Carl said. “I’m a zombie. Damn. Uh- hey, hey come back!”
To Carl’s annoyance, his now zombified form was heading off directly into the heart of the ruined city , completely ignoring Carl. It was only then that the really important question occurred to him. “If that’s my body, what the heck am I?”
Carl looked down. He saw a pale outline of his usual work jeans and boots. He tried waving his hand in front of his face; sure enough, that was transparent, too. He had just concluded that he was some kinda ghost when he heard a thud. Carl looked up to see that his zombified body had just tripped over a pothole in the road and fallen into a crack in the asphalt. Worse yet, the poor thing had gotten its leg jammed up in said crack and, being a zombie, didn’t have the intelligence anymore to work its leg free. Instead it just sort of lay there, writhing and moaning in futile frustration.
“Look,” Carl said, “All you gotta do is push back just a bit and then pull, okay? No, no, don’t just pull, you’re gonna- well, knew that was gonna happen.”
The zombie, in pulling, had tugged so hard that the undead flesh of the leg had given way under the street, effectively amputating it. Carl’s body lurched forwards, free, and it gurgled for a moment in what almost sounded like happiness. Then it tried to stand.
It had not, somehow, realized that, in terms of legs, it only had the one now. Carl watched, helpless to intervene, as his body heaved itself up onto its remaining leg, wobbled for a moment like the world’s most gruesome flamingo, and then toppled over again. It lay there for a while, moaning.
“Told you,” Carl said. He was beginning to realize that his body couldn’t hear him. He felt a sudden wave of depression. Was this his lot now, to float around behind his zombified self for the rest of its undead existence until some living human put it out of its misery with two swift shots, double-tap to the head?
Carl sighed. “Well,” he said, “Least it can’t get worse.”
For a moment he thought his corpse had finally heard him. Then he realized the new moan he heard wasn’t from his own zombie. Further down the road, a small pack had just come into view. They raised a howling sort of chorus when they spotted Carl’s trapped body. For a moment he thought the sound was joy, perhaps even delight at the prospect of being able to assist an injured comrade.
As the pack drew nearer Carl realized he was only half right.
Note: this story was inspired by Scoot ‘s Flash Fiction Friday post and also E.B. Howard ‘s discussion about a zombie’s soul looking on horrified from the afterlife.
This is perfect, by the way. I only feel a little bad about laughing.
Now that you mention the consideration of what happens to the soul/mind of a zombie, I am wondering why I'd never thought of it before.
I love this kind of humour horror. Superb.