Better Than This

By Max Bowen

There are some who believe the human body is a machine. A biological machine, but a machine nonetheless. Instead of gears, circuitry and oil, we have organs, a skeleton and blood. We take in food as our fuel and expel what we don’t need. We have brains capable of multiple functions at once, same as a computer.

Some of these functions continue even after we die. Our hair and fingernails grow long after we are planted six feet deep, for example, or the electrical charge that remains in our brain after the popular accepted theory of death.

And in some cases, the need for fuel continues, even after our hearts stop beating and our flesh falls off like a dog shedding its fur in the summer.

The five people sat around the fire, comforted neither by the peaceful crackling of the flames of the warmth ir provided. It wasn’t that the fire was too small, far from it, but this group had long since lost the ability to feel any of the comforts or torments nature provided. Whether it was 130 degrees in the shade or 40 below zero with snow covering the land, they never noticed. One might say they were dead to the world. One might be right.

For you see, the five were zombies, the newest evolutionary development topping the food chain. These creatures were an enigma of life itself. Though they were corpses, they still moved, and saw, and talked. And ate. Man alive did they eat. If the human body was a machine, then these five, along with the other 6 billion of their flatlined family, were firing on all cylinders. No one knew what drove these creatures to eat as much as they did. The fact was, they didn’t need it. Their stomachs, like the rest of their organs, were no longer functioning, yet they were constantly driven by an undefeatable need to devour the flesh of the living. No one knew what drove these creatures, and there were precious few left alive to care.

One of the five around the fire, a construction worker named Jack Hansen, threw down the arm he had been chewing on, an arm which until recently had belonged to a little girl around the age of 10. Those sitting nearest to him grabbed for the discarded limb and hungrily ripped the flesh from the bone like a pair of wild dogs. He got up and stormed angrily away.

“Jack, what’s the matter?” asked Leroy Thomas, a DJ at a local club which had been burned to the ground after the infestation began.

“I just can’t do this. How can any of you do this?” he shouted, his jaw popping loose. He quickly fitted the bone back into its socket. When he was first attacked by the undead, much of his face had been ripped off, and as a result, his lower jaw had a tendency to come loose when he shouted.

“Oh, God, not again,” said the impromptu leader of the five, a lawyer by the name of Cassie Richman. So consumed by the Hunger after she had turned, she had ripped off her own lips for sustenance. “Jack, are you going to get on your soapbox every time we eat?”

“This isn’t eating, its, I don’t know what it is,” Jack said, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears, even though that function of humanity stopped working several weeks ago. “It makes me sick.”

“And you think we’re enjoying it?” said 12-year-old Sarah, the sister of the girl who was serving as tonight’s dinner. She had been going to church with her family when the zombies struck, and was still clad in her Sunday best. “You know what happens if we don’t eat. The hunger drives you insane. You remember what happened to Willie? He stopped eating for a week, and now he’s sitting in a farmhouse, gibbering at the head of a chicken.”

“It’d be better than this. God, I wish we were just mindless zombies. Why do I have to remember all this? My mom, my brothers, my girlfriend. I ate them all,” he cried, falling to his knees and sobbing.

Leroy walked over and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, trying to comfort his friend. The DJ’s shirt was torn, and part of his ribcage showed through. After a couple weeks, a zombie’s body would begin to decay, and little by little, they would fall to pieces. There were some who believed this brave new race would be little more than dust and bones within a few months. Jack had found Leroy hiding in the burnt-out remains of his nightclub. Together, the two had tried to outrun the plague. Problem was, Leroy was already infected, but didn’t tell Jack for fear of being left alone. When he turned, Jack was his first meal.

The fifth member of the group, a former member of a biker gang named Rocky who was minus an arm thanks to the undead, looked up from his dinner, the child’s torso. “Little pansy. Like you’re the only one who’s ever eaten a friend. All my bros are gone, courtesy of me. It’s what we gotta do to survive. You either own up to it and eat, or you whine and cry and go nuts. Me, I’m eating,” he said, going back to his meal.

“He’s right man,” said Leroy. “C’mon, you’ll feel better after you eat something.”

Jack looked back at the group, tearing chunks off the little girl with no hesitation or remorse. He got up, shaking his head. “No. No more. I can’t do it,” and with that, he left the fire, running headlong into the darkness.

Cassie, Rocky and Sarah all sighed. This was the 10th time Jack had pulled this stunt. Every so often, he would put on a big show of how much he hated being a zombie and run off. A day or so later, he would return, shaking and convulsing from the Hunger. They didn’t expect this would be any different. Leroy picked up a few pieces of the child not yet claimed by the others. “I’ll hang onto these for him. He’ll probably be hungry when he comes back.”

“Just remember,” said Rocky through a loud belch. “He’s gone for more than a day, they’re up for grabs.”

Jack had no idea where he was going, and right now, he didn’t care. He just wanted to be as far away from the others as possible. He had always hated eating humans, but in the beginning, the Hunger was too new to him, so he didn’t think about it much. A month later, even the smell of human flesh made him nauseous. But as much as he hated the thought of eating other people, whenever the Hunger kicked in, he would eat, many times not knowing what he was doing until he was biting into someone’s arm or leg.

That was the power of the Hunger, the control it had over the undead. He had tried to eat what was known as “human food,” crackers, fruit, chocolate, the same things he had eaten when he was normal, but it all tasted like ashes, and he was never able to keep it down for more than a few minutes.

As he ran, he suddenly stopped, his stomach rumbling, saliva flooding his mouth. It was flesh, warm blood, a beating heart. He looked around wildly, and spotted the source.

The child stood huddled against the hull of a plane that had dropped from the sky after the pilot had turned. He was trying to hide from the zombies, but somehow, the undead always knew when a warm body was nearby. Was it the smell, or the sound of a heartbeat? No one, even the zombies, could answer that question. They just knew.

Jack advanced on the boy, who was clutching a small pistol, firing it again and again. Jack felt no pain, even as the bullets tore through his shoulder and neck, gore spouting from the wounds.

The boy sat there, quivering in terror, tears streaming down his face. He was too scared to even scream.

Jack suddenly stopped, and with a great force of will, fought the Hunger. He threw himself to the ground, bashing his head against the hard-packed earth again and again, until his skull cracked open.

When he got back up, the Hunger was still there, but it felt dimmed, diluted. He looked back at the boy, one of the last few humans on the planet, and was surprised to find that he no longer wanted to eat him. He smiled wide, but with his ghastly countenance, the expression chilled the child’s blood.

“I, I did it. I did it!” he shouted to the heavens. “I’m not controlled by the Hunger anymore! Do you know what this means, kid?”

The boy could only shake his head slightly, so terrified was he.

“If I can do it, so can the rest of us. We don’t have to be monsters.”

No reaction this time. The boy was catatonic.

Jack noticed, and forced the excitement within him to subside. “Sorry about that, kid. Look, you’re free to go, okay? You don’t have to worry about getting eaten anymore, I promise.”

Jack turned away from the child to look at the sunrise. Thought he felt no warmth from the rays, he couldn’t have been happier. “I’ve got to tell everyone,” he said. “If I can do this, then others can too. Maybe we can rebuild this world, make it a better place.”

Suddenly a shot rang out, and a bullet tore through Jack’s head, reducing his neural activity to a sputtering fuse box. As he sank to the ground, as the sweet abyss of oblivion closed in around him, his last thought was how good that kid would have tasted.