Zombified: A Love Story

There is a certain atmosphere when a person dies, the finality of it. When death comes, it comes once and forevermore and the only thing that you have to deal with are your feelings for the person and learning how to get along without them. This was a problem for me, because this wasn’t what was going to happen. You see, my boyfriend was dying, he was in bed and looked rather bad, laying there, the malady taking away his strength and causing him to change colors. The problem was that when he died, he was going to come back, for you see several hours ago, my husband was bitten by a zombie.

We had been walking in the woods when a man had come wandering through, he was a hunter by trade, which we recognized by the shotgun he had in his hands. He stumbled along towards us, his face looking rather white and there was something wrong with his eyes.

“Are you okay?” Calvin has asked him.

The man had dropped his gun and then came towards us, I noticed that he had a bite mark on his right hand. Then he began to groan low in his throat, the kind of sound you make when you’re sick. Actually I had heard the sound before in a horror movie but didn’t want Calvin to laugh at me when I admitted it. I was beginning to get scared.

"Are you okay?” Calvin asked again.

The man had gotten close enough and he reached out for Calvin, grabbing him by the throat. I began beating on the man ineffectively and he smacked me away. Then he reached down and bit into Calvin’s shoulder. Calvin had yelled and shoved the man backwards, breaking his grip on him and the man lost some teeth that stuck out of Calvin’s shoulder. He ran and grabbed the gun, thankfully he had been taught by his father as a child to shoot a gun like it, though later he had become a vegetarian and refused to hunt ever again, his father had lost interest as well. He shot the man through the chest with the first barrel, which he would later tell me was filled with birdshot. It had ripped the man open in a way that no one should have been able to survive, yet like the beach getting hit by a wave, it took it and remained standing. Ten seconds passed as it stood hunkered over and then it came after us again.

“Shit!” Calvin had said and pointed the gun at the man’s head and fired.

The head exploded into pieces and the body fell soon after. Calvin, knowing that he didn’t have any more ammunition in the weapon held it like a club ready to slam it into the man. I had done little more than cower in fear and covered my head. When I stood up and went to look at the decapitated body of the hunter.

“Is it dead?” I asked him.

“Yeah, they always die when you shoot the head,” he said.

“They?”

He didn’t answer but began rooting through the man’s pockets.

“Calvin! Stop! He might be sick!” I told him.
“Sorry, Laurie,” he said and found two more shells for the shotgun.
“What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t know… but I think I do.”
“What do you mean?”
“C’mon, we have to go back to the cabin.”
“Yeah, you’re bleeding.”
He took off his shirt and ripped it into shreds to make bandages for himself. I helped him tie them as best I could and he thanked me for it. As we walked back to the cabin, I noticed that he was having trouble walking. I tried to support him but he refused, I didn’t know what else to do for him and when we got back to the cabin, he couldn’t get the keys to go into the keyhole. He must have been really sick, but town was still three or four hours away, we had chosen the spot for its isolation and now we were suffering for it. Still, if he could hold out for that long…

“Honey, let’s get in the car and go to town,” I told him.
“No! We’re not going to town,” he said angrily. “I can’t go to town.”
“Why not?”
“Because I might infect someone else.”
“There are doctors there, they’ll have disinfectants, it’s just a bite or something.”
He turned to me and he was beginning to sweat.
“Didn’t something seem wrong to you about all that?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I replied.
“I shot that man in the heart. He should have died instantly, he should have fallen right then and there. But he kept coming after me and even if he had rabies or something else like that… he should have died.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Honey, I think that man was a zombie.”
All of a sudden my horror movie idea wasn’t that ridiculous. I still laughed anyway, I think it mostly had to do with nerves.

“That’s stupid! A zombie? Zombies aren’t real!” I said.

“Then explain it to me! Explain what that thing was and I’ll believe you! But...”

He pulled the dressing up and we both looked at it. The skin had become instantly darker, his veins and arteries were outlined with black. I noticed that his skin had become slightly whiter.

“I’m turning…” he said.

“What”

“I’m turning into one… soon… I think...”

“No, no you’re not.”

“There’s aspirin in the cabinets… I want you to bring it to me in the bedroom. Here take this.”
He handed me the gun which I really didn’t want.
“Be careful there’s no safety on it, hold it tight against your shoulder or else when you shoot the kick will break it,” he explained. “There are two triggers you can pull them both to unload both barrels at me.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re going to have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll come after you! I don’t want to know that I killed you… I couldn’t stand it...”
I started to cry, I wanted him to see reason so badly but he seemed intent that this was the end of all things. He went into the bedroom and got two of his leather belts. He took his bad arm and used the belt to tie himself to the bed post. He called me in and I stumbled into the room, holding the weapon. I noticed that he had left a trail of blood on the ground leading to the bed, which he was now staining.

“Take that belt and tie it around my other arm,” he said.
“I’ll hurt you,” I said.
“I know, but it has to be done.”
“I can’t do this… there’s no way.”
“I can feel it.”
“What?”
“I’m staring at you and all I can think about is putting my teeth into your neck. The same way I think about a steak or a hamburger. I’m going to kill you, Laurie, if you let this continue, I’ll kill you.”
“But.”
“Look, we can’t discuss this anymore.”
“Can I kiss you one last time?”
“NO! You can not! I don’t know how this virus or condition or whatever the fuck it is transferred so no.”
I tearfully tied his remaining arm to the bedpost. He struggled for a few moments to make sure that they were secured. Then I pulled up a chair and like the good wife that I was, I sat next to him, crying. He looked at me and then began to repeat the words ‘I love you’.

Now here we are, my husband slowly turning into a zombie and myself, sitting here waiting to blow his brains out.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“About what?” I asked.
“Forcing you to wait, to kill me, it’s just that… I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want you to die either.”
“I just kind of figured that if you saw what I was, it would be easier for you to pull the triggers.”
“It won’t be.”
“Then I’m sorry about that too. You know that this isn’t just about protecting you, right? Imagine what would happen if I got to town and bit someone else? Do you think anyone would be able to stop it? It’d be like an epidemic. Be the hero that stops this, Laurie.”
I started crying again and he fell silent. It would be about ten minutes before he would start talking again.
“Scarlett, Natalie, Jessica, Christina, Britney,” he intoned.
“What’re you doing?” I asked him.
“Naming people that don’t hold a candle to you.”
I smiled slightly.
“I wouldn’t trade any of it,” he said. “I love you more than anyone else in the world and even if there are hot alien babes somewhere else, I’d still love you more”
“I love you too,” I said.
I meant it so much that my entire body hurt to say it. Seeing my husband dying on our bed, the one that we had shared for only two nights before this. I realized as I sat there that I couldn’t think of what to do after this. I knew that perhaps they would take his body once I told them what had happened and they would look at it and find the new disease that caused this and I would be exonerated. But what about after that? I had a life back at home, with friends and my family and all but what did any of that matter?

When I told my husband that I loved him it was the truest thing I had ever said in my entire life. I had never known love of any other before him, my parents had thought I was gay until I started dating him. There had been men before him that I had been interested in but he was the first that I wanted to date, he was my first on all fronts in relationships, kiss, date, lover. Even though I knew that I was an oddity in my day and age, I couldn’t really think of that time as being wasted because every moment with him seemed to make up for the loneliness.

I thought about the hunter in the woods that we had killed. I realized that human beings are fragile creatures, that it doesn’t take a lot to destroy everything about us. I figured that I could use a single shell to kill him and then turn the gun on myself. It seemed to be the only reasonable thing to do. ‘Til death do us part.

“Laurie…” he gasped.

I looked at him, his skin had moved from a pale white to an ashen gray. His beautiful blue eyes, were becoming pure white, the iris was still holding out slightly. His legs began to work.
“It’s happening, Laurie,” he said.
“Calvin...”
“I love you, don’t forget that, do it, Laurie.”
I pointed the gun at him the tears in my eyes blinding my vision. He was writhing in pain as he struggled against his bonds. I believed that the zombie part of his brain that was slowly gaining control of him, saw me as a tasty meal and was dying to sink Calvin’s teeth into me.

“Laurie! There’s not much time!” he yelled.
“Calvin… I can’t.”
“Laurie! No!”
I ran from the room and pulled the door closed behind me. I fell to the ground and started sobbing. I couldn’t kill him, I knew that I couldn’t. I sat there for a long time and heard him begin to groan, knowing that my life was in danger now. I wondered if he had gotten the restraints off yet. He was going to attack me if I went back in there.

That’s when I saw it, sitting on the floor, the last of it that hadn’t dried. His blood. I crawled towards it and then shoved my hand into it. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever done and the last thing I ever would do. I sucked it off my fingers and put my hand in for more. I drank every last drop. I hope the transformation comes quickly.
It does, I notice that I feel like I’m about to vomit almost instantly. My insides curl up and begin to throb in a bass line that I’ve never heard before. My head starts to shriek in agony. I look at my hands as they start to change color. I fall to the ground and curl into the fetal position, ready to die in the same way that I came into the world. I look at the door, still opened and wonder if we’ll make our way out of it. Then my sense of smell amps up and I believe we will because I can smell, better than the bloodhounds. I catch a whiff of Calvin in the other room through the door and he does not entice the appetite that is exponentially growing inside of me. I smell the world though, alive and ready to be devoured my mouth salivates as I smell what the remnants of my human mind thinks is the town that my husband warned me he would be attracted to.

I felt my life slipping away from me, the end of it all. Here I think only of this: until the end of life, the beginning of undeath, I am his faithful wife.