Diary of a Zombie

It was the colour. Vivid orange after the greyness of dreaming. Or waking. Do I dream now? Can I still dream or will this unexplained, effortless skill of humanity be lost to me too? My arm has stopped hurting. Not in the almost healed way, but in the ‘you’ll soon be dead and crawling’ way that I‘ve observed and pitied and looked away from in considered defeat and humanity-driven distance. That word.
Humanity.
Unconsidered so many times, a part of us you’d say, a part that can be ignored because it exists and how could we not own it when it clings to us? But it slips. Desensitisation. Disbelief. Self-preservation. They can make it slip. I feel humanity now, that’s the cruelty. I feel it, looking at this shot of orange, staring at it, begging it to save me. Nothing can, can it? Can it delay, at least, this slow creeping greyness taking my limbs and sucking my mind and.
Hunger. That’s what I am due. The hunger I’ve seen in other things, other shapes left there to remind me of friends and strangers and my own form. Hunger. I feel it, you know, even now, even as the pain of my broken body clings to my sinew, blood, tissue, bowels, hair. I’m hungry. And tired. I may rest, just for a moment. The orange, its in my hand, as you can tell. I’m clutching it and pushing it deep into the paper. Humanity in this little stick. An object known and owned by most but known and seen by none, as with all our human legacies. So easy, scrape the pen across the paper and make everyone understand. Can you read this? I can. But then I thought that I could stand up. I have got many things wrong in these last few hours. I like the orange ones. There are clear ones too, thicker, same name printed erratically on the side. So cheap, so owned by us, this little orange pen. Can it slow this down? If I keep sliding it over the paper can it preserve me? I am human. I am Human. I am tired. I’ll rest, as I lie here, I won’t put the pen down, I’ll start again when I wake. My eyes are shut, does this make sense? The dreams. They’ll come again won’t they? If I keep writing, will they stop? The grey, we’re grey. But I was grey before. And hungry. And crawling. Tired.
I should be cold. My clothes are ripped and useless. The floor, I know it’s cold, it looks it, lying there beneath my cheek, telling me reality is here, that it still exists, but that its not for me, because I can’t feel it. ‘I’m cold you know, I’m concrete in the cold summer, I’m slightly moist from the growing night and rough, oh I’m rough, the senses I would burn in you, the nerves that would groan under the scraping and bruising I have left in your flesh. But you can’t feel me, can you? Because you are dead. Puff out that last breath, reach out that last, pathetic entreaty, let your hand try to grasp, let your fingers try to edge…’ the floor isn’t really talking to me, I can’t hear it talking, its not that kind of crazy, I know its dead. No, it’s not, it’s never been alive so how can it be dead? Rambling, that’s what I’m doing. I have no time and yet I ramble. As in our lives, so finite, timed, a buzzer ready to go off and tell us to lie down and rot and give this flesh back to the earth, its only borrowed, after all, passed on through dirt to each knew timed thing. I have always rambled. When I proposed to my wife, when I fought the divorce, when I gave in and gave the house, when I spoke at her funeral. When I should have run my palm along the coffin, felt it, known it, the finite wood, the grain. A body inside, rotting and preserved. She is dead, two years before all this. She forced me out here, continue my life, move on, take on challenges. You have to wonder, when it will all end with decay, what other point is there to life other than to decay? And what point is decay when all it does is feed new life which is also only for decay. Decay is our god, it seems. So lucid now, strange. I’m drifting again. I can feel when I drift, that strange, heavy floating your body does, your head lightened and anchored by limbs. But it stings, a dead, senseless sting. I make no sense, do I? I know that even now, and yet, so pretty, this orange moving around and around, different patterns in the air leave different patterns on the paper. Letters to words to sentences to
I’m walking, slopping, legs dragged, soles left on the concrete, head down and arms outstretched. No thought, so peaceful, so simple, just hunger. It makes sense. It feels right. We’ve had it all so wrong. Hunger is our god. Feed the decay. I’m not tired, I’m not energised, I’m moving. Moving. Tasting it. Catching it. Sinking near rotten teeth into it as it flails and struggles and fails to run. The only warmth, this trickle from my mouth, then a gush, I lap and slurp and bite to release it. Rip. Walk. Rip. Walk. Rip
I was dreaming, I was dreaming, such a small child, screaming, I can hear it now I’m awake, a wail, I didn’t, I’m still lying here with this pen and this paper and I have not tasted, I have not moved, the child.
But I will, this body, the thing that drags, it will.
I’m twisting. My mind’s cloudy and my fingers numbing. I must get this down, but why? I don’t know why, I never have. Do you? Whoever finds this, if anyone finds this, as long as I don’t chew you and change you, do you know why you’re reading this?
It bit me.
That simple, as it always is.
I was pitying, feeling for it, this mangled shape edging its clumsy way around the abandoned street. A thing. But we are quick, we are relentless. See the word we? Am I accepting, or just adapting? It was quick. A woman, once, possibly a beauty, possibly one I would have wanted, lusted for, fucked before regretting, as I so often did. I prided my gentlemanly side, but it slides too, sometimes, when faced with beauty writhing. It writhed then too, shattering its body down along the building’s wall, knocking into uncared for boxes and anxiously dropped suitcases and bodies lying, changing, rotting to become. It slid, bucked, shuffled. I pitied, the poor creature, this thing so unlike me, so pathetic and pointless. Do you see the point? Do you see me now, lying still on the feel-less concrete, mocking me still with my memories of touch, becoming a thing? Shall I name her? She must have had a name, before. Would you like to know my name? So would I. I must have had one. My memories cling, sucker themselves cruelty to my withering soul, but they are incomplete, and shrinking. Anna. That was my once wife’s name. That will be the thing’s name. Anna, the undead, the walking dead, the zombie, my mother now. How morbid. How we embrace it, revel, even in the face of horrors, the language of fiction, enjoy the unrealistic romance. My mother. I’m a corpse in the making, even pain has rejected me now, there is nothing left of being corporeal, except this fucking pen. I can’t feel my grasp on it now, but I can see it move, and shapes appear, but I can no longer say if the shapes match the words that still insist still to form around my mind.
A story, I think, we need a story
I am lucid, aren’t I?
I was a doctor, I was called to ‘help’ to ‘research’ to stop the government looking like fuck ups. It was their fault, of course. How could it be anyone else’s? Who else but the powerful, the strong, to make such an impact? Why be surprised when no one else could have done this. An epidemic. A weapon. No. A cure, strangely, they were trying to help, for once they wanted to make right. For votes or their souls or an ailing mother, whatever their reason it was to be a cure. I can’t remember. But it didn’t cure, and a thing was created, and got out. Carelessness, our downfall as always
Sleep again, excuse me, so polite am I, excuse me as I lie here no longer bleeding, broken bones twisting on their muscles, nerves deadened, bowels emptied over once cleaned and pressed jeans. I pressed my jeans, what a waste. My sense of smell has gone, thank whatever goodness was responsible for that. They beat me, those with their humanity left intact, they beat me and left me and who can blame them? I’m a thing now. But I’m still here.
A cure. That was the hope. And they pulled me in, to fix it. A room full of official looking people with official looking briefcases and official looking papers coming out of them that meant nothing. Hours of nothing was talked to me, hours of explanations and platitudes and threats. Oh yes, the truth, masked in many long winded words, must never get out. But the thing had, hadn’t it, a patient once worker turned stuttering corpse, bound on a track chasing its hunger like a speeding train with no breaks and a world of steam. I am an old fashioned man. I had steam trains chasing each other in my garden, a guilty, silly pleasure.
I have crawled, by the way, much in the manner my body will accept, once I have left it (oh my god, will I? Will I leave this broken mound of flesh and bone? WILL I BE AT PEACE? Or will I stay and watch through bloody eyes? Oh dear lord I had not thought of that.) no, don’t think, ignore as we all can, ignore.
I have crawled to a corner, where a building meets the giggling concrete, and I am wedged, one arm dragging, the other moving numbed fingers over this notebook. My notebook, you will find medical scribbles at the front, ignore them, it is useless. I was no help.
I said yes. Anna dead, me as useless as the skeleton under her perfect skin. She hadn’t wanted to marry me, she had made a mistake; she’d slept with me, and hadn’t wanted to be rude.
I said yes to them, so I could at last make a difference.
The medical notes, now they blew me away. The creator had been a genius, of course, a pure mind encased in flesh for the mere purpose of moving this magnificent thought. I think she has killed us all. Doctor Hector, that was her name, she is dead, run over by a drunk fifteen year old who will never comprehend.
Sleep
Sleep
SLEEEP
I’m failing.
I’m sorry.
But still the orange swirls, I will do this
The dream? No more visions, no more shared memories, as I want to believe, of past animated corpses. My imagination, surely, taunting me with what I know I will do
Shit
Fuck
I’m going
No
No dream this time, just hunger and blankness
I saw a trail, a red trail of dust or steam and I followed it, I knew, that’s all I knew, this trail is life, it is existence, it is reason, it is a person, running, crying, I know this now I am awake, running from the corpse I’ll leave (oh please, let it be that I die, don’t make me stay to stare from freshly dead eyes on what I once was and the pity I gave them too)
I tried, I could decipher her notes, not entirely, she was too much for me. And the ‘specimen’ had begun to feed.
So much, so much chasing to find first one then more then all of the, spreading, a virus in themselves, these vile, putrid creatures. I’m laughing. Cackling, is that the word? I have never cackled before. I’ve rarely laughed before. It’s liberating, yet I find it in this, jammed against a dank, moulding wall in the moist darkness turning into a thing I have chased for almost a year. It’s a long time, I did say that we failed, I failed. They multiply so quickly, if they leave you half eaten you’ll rise and join them. I’ve seen torso’s dragged by stubby arms, head lolling to one side, scull split and dug at, entrails slapping along behind.
A mother, of two I think, an office worker part time, took painting lessons at night and secretly slept with her tutor. Her body had been so broken that it could not work out how to move properly any more. They found her banging into a wall, trying to go around, through a doorway, beyond which she could smell a freshly maimed child. But her legs were twisted and her arms all but yanked from their sockets, they dangled, shaking violently in an attempt to swing her body in the direction it needed to go.
We thought we’d fixed it, contained it, locked it up in our diseased memories. But it got out. We did not know how. One day the World was better, the next, infinitely, disastrously putrefied.
She’d cut herself.
A blazon of raised flesh, puckering at the air around it. A poor office girl, rushing out to paint her life swipes too close to a metal cabinet and brushes her skin. She came back the next day, and it was out. Loosing all of us.
Will you read this? Will you have time? Whoever you are if your mind still thinks will you pick this up, this book smeared with blackening blood and stand in this street reading, learning, knowing you are lost.
Will it be over when you find this? Will it have spread to all or will all be saved?
I can no longer hold this pen. I can no longer see with my own eyes.
Will I leave this broken body? Please don’t lock me in it, please let it be a true death for the mind and animate only the flesh.
The pen slips now, my letters fail, my words are drifting.
Will you read this in the street or have you moved to safety to read it?
If you stand in the street am I at your feet?
Or am I shuffling up behind you?