Imboz's tale of woes (his point of view)
Why is it that in my head I can speak perfectly and with impeccable diction, but when I need to speak out loud I am just a stammering mess. It probably has something to do with the fact that I am a living dead.
The throat doesn't serve me as well as it used to when I was alive. And yes, I prefer the term 'living dead', the word 'zombie' sounds so wrong. It is a horrible name for what I am, I despise it.
I would say that it is more politically correct to call us, the living dead. It is also more polite.
As much as I want to apologize to the human for what she had the misfortune of seeing, because I can imagine how horrible it looks to her, it is difficult for me to form the words.
After all, I still remember bits and pieces of my human life and I want to help her feel better.
I remember what I thought about the zombies while I was alive. In my head, they were brainless, unthinking monsters. Only when I turned did I realize that it wasn't as simple as that. I wanted her to understand that.
We do think and feel, it's just different. It feels like I am in a fog trying to figure out where I should go, what I should do.
In the past, hunger would usually take over of both my mind and body and every time after eating, I would be overwhelmed by regret.
Nevertheless, I don't stop, no living dead does. Eating humans is a necessity, and we keep doing it no matter how we feel after it.
As I was mumbling some barely comprehensible apologizes, with a lot of growling and indistinct sounds, I wished that I could speak to her the way I speak in my own mind. Maybe if I could explain our lives comprehensively she would be able to better understand, and in a way, accept that it was not something we chose to do, it was something we had to do.
I wish I could tell her my life story, and what happened after I died, but I fear my throat wouldn't be able to convey that in a way that would make them understand. We, zombies, have developed the language of grunts and a few words, and we understand each other very well.
Still, sometimes I wish I could just speak like I used to. I guess nothing is the same, but the worst of it all is the fact that my story will stay untold.
Even if I did have the physical ability to convey my story to these people, I am not sure that any of them would have the necessary patience to listen to my chopped speech and slurred words. Not even Gala, who seems to be the most accepting of the bunch.
I am not sure if Gala truly understood my predicament, but she didn't try to bash my head in, so I thought that was a good sign.
After she left, I couldn't help but contemplate my past, all the things I would have said if there was anyone to listen.
Even before I became a living dead, I had a hard life. Nothing came easily to me. I had to fight for everything in my life and the fight never seemed to end.
However, before the zombie apocalypse began in my homeworld, I had already accomplished some of my biggest dreams. I had become the youngest doctor ever and having no one to be proud of me I was proud of myself.
When the first signs that something was wrong started being obvious all over the world, I was working in the emergency room. They warned me that the virus was highly contagious, and I was even advised to avoid any contact with the patients since they were extremely violent sometimes.
I didn't listen.
I was a doctor, it was my job to help out. It was impossible for me to just walk out, and leave the people to die all alone. The problem was, that I wasn't prepared for what happened next.
We never thought that the virus would mutate so quickly and start bringing people back, as walking corpses.
At first, I refused to acknowledge the fact, I thought that we just made a mistake. We pronounced them dead when they were not. I tried to help.
There was a little girl sitting in a corner with her back turned to me. She couldn't have been more than eight years old and I thought that she was probably terrified by all the screaming and bleeding people that kept pouring in.
Slowly, I approached the girl, not wanting to scare her.
I wasn't prepared for what happened next.
The girl with long blond hair turned around and that was when I saw something I had never seen before. Her face was covered in blood and as I approached to check her injuries, I realized that it wasn't her blood.
At that moment, I noticed that she was chomping on a human hand.
I didn't have time to think or do anything. In a blink of an eye, she jumped at me and clung tightly with her small legs and hands as she bit into my neck and started tearing my flesh.
The sound of my own flesh being ripped apart was horrifying. I could feel the warm blood flowing down my neck, and I was unable to do anything about it.
The strangest thing was that I didn't even try. I just stood there, frozen in pure horror, as the girl devoured my flash with eyes empty of any emotion or life.
The pain was like nothing I felt before, and I was terrified, and sad at the same time because I knew that was it. It was the day I die, and I was definitely not ready.
All I wanted to do was live, to avoid that terrible void of not exciting, of being nothing.
As the tears started slowly running down my face, I tumbled to the ground, the girl still attached to my neck like a leech that would never let go.
A few moments later, as I was losing grip of reality, there was a loud bang and a huge hole appeared in the little girl's head. Through it, I could see the guy who shot her.
It was clear that he was about to shoot me as well, so I tried to beg for my life. All that came out was low growling that sounded extremely threatening. I was me, but not me at the same time.
Before he had a chance to kill me, he was ripped apart and eaten while his screams filled the room.
Soon enough, I lost all feeling of self as I got lost in a bloody spree kill. Even now, I don't remember it clearly.
It's like watching a TV with bad reception, but I know that killed my colleagues. I murdered them one by one and fed on their flesh with fervor.
After killing at least ten humans in the most vicious way possible, my hunger was satiated. With it out of the way, some parts of my consciousness, of who I was, started coming back.
I felt horrible for all I had done and I just ran, as far away from the slaughter I had committed as possible.
From that day on, my very existence became even more challenging than it was before.
Humans started killing zombies on sight in the most brutal ways possible, so I had to be very careful when getting food. Humans were both food and danger and although I NEEDED to eat, I didn't want to be completely dead.
I wasn't alive, but being the living dead was better than not existing at all.
When humans killed zombies, they did it so viciously and with such a glee that it was frightening, even for a zombie, to see.
Also, they were crying out all sorts of filth, as they bashed in the heads of the living dead that were once their neighbors and friends. In my homeworld, the humans didn't only kill to defend themselves, they mostly killed for the pleasure of the kill.
The excitement of the hunt, and then the brutal kill made them feel alive, in control. Sometimes they would hunt zombies down for days, miles away from where the people they were protecting were. Under the guise of safety, they made their own sick murder game.
We, zombies, do kill, but we only kill for food. If we don't eat human flesh or even better human brains, we die. I accept and understand when they kill us to defend their loved ones, but why follow us when we run? Far away from their shelters, we posed no threat to their group.
We were all just trying to survive. Why couldn't they just leave us be!?
While I was hiding from humans, I witnessed an uncountable number of human brutalities that I dare not describe. One of those sick and perverted things was cutting off zombie body parts as trophies, souvenirs.
As time went on, my body changed. My skin started to rot, and my nails started falling off. I was always covered in blood and brain matter.
Most of the time, I was just a mindless, clumsy corpse that ate human flesh, but there were parts of me that understood, that even felt. They were buried deep down, unable to fully come out in that world.
One day, I was slowly walking in search of food when I felt a strange sensation in my dead body, and suddenly I was in a completely new place. I felt like myself more than I had since I died.
It turns out that this supernatural island gives us the limited ability to speak and think. For me, it has developed beyond what was normal, and I like that.
It is good to be more myself than I was for years. I am in control of my actions, not my hunger.
Not only do I want to respect the Law, but I CAN respect it and I do.
However, when I go to gather some food in another world, my heightened abilities last for a short time, so I have to be quick when I hunt for food.
Luckily I know how to open my own portal, and I can do it before I lose my ability to think. Of course, when I go to get the provisions, I only take as much as we need to survive.
We don't waste food as humans do.
We don't kill for pleasure as they do, and yet we are seen as monsters.
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