Flesh and Remorse

The first one came to me in the produce section of a Kroger at two in the morning.

I was squeezing avocados. You learn things about avocados when you've been alone as long as I have. You learn the exact pressure that means ripe, the way the skin gives under your thumb like it's holding its breath. I had six in my basket already. Six avocados for one man is a cry for help, but I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fluorescent buzz of the lights and how the store was empty except for me and a kid mopping floors near the dairy case and the security guard who was probably asleep in the back room.

Then the automatic doors hissed open and she walked in.

I noticed her shoes first. Red heels, the kind that click on tile. Not the kind of shoes you wear to Kroger at two in the morning. Not the kind of shoes that belong on someone whose hair hung in strings around her face, whose dress was torn at the shoulder, whose skin had a grayish cast that the fluorescent lights made almost blue.

She moved like she was learning how. Each step was deliberate, like she had to think about it. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Her head tilted at an angle that wasn't quite right, like a doll whose neck had been twisted too far.

I put down the avocado. My hand went to my pocket, to the knife I keep there. Not a big knife. A folding knife with a three-inch blade that I'd carried since I was fifteen years old and my father taught me that a man should always have a way to cut himself free.

She stopped at the end of the aisle. Twenty feet away. Close enough that I could see her eyes.

They were wrong. Not the color. The color was brown, a deep brown like old wood. But the whites around them were shot through with red, and the pupils were too big, swallowing the iris until there was almost nothing left. She looked at me the way a dog looks at a stranger. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just aware.

"Hey," I said.

My voice came out steady. That surprised me. I've never been brave. I've just been good at pretending.

She didn't answer. Her mouth opened, then closed. Her jaw worked like she was chewing on something that wasn't there.

"You okay?"

She took a step toward me. Then another. The clicking of her heels was the only sound in the store. The kid with the mop had stopped mopping. He was watching us, his mouth open, the mop handle clutched in both hands like a staff.

I should have run. I know that now. I knew it then, too, somewhere in the back of my brain where the animal instincts live. But I didn't run. I stood there with my hand on my knife and my basket of avocados and I waited.

She stopped three feet away. Close enough that I could smell her. Not the smell I expected. Not rot or decay or whatever you think a walking corpse would smell like. She smelled like rain. Like wet earth after a storm. Like the air right before lightning strikes.

"You're alive," she said.

Her voice was rough, like she'd been screaming for a long time. But the words were clear. Deliberate.

"So are you," I said. "Sort of."

Her head tilted the other way. The movement was too smooth, too fluid, like water pouring from one glass to another.

"Sort of," she repeated.

"Yeah. No offense, but you don't look so good."

She looked down at herself. At the torn dress, the gray skin, the bare feet that I now noticed were covered in mud and something darker. She looked at her hands, turning them over like she'd never seen them before.

"I died," she said. "Three days ago. In a car. On the highway."

I didn't say anything. What do you say to that?

"I woke up in the morgue," she continued. "On a table. With a tag on my toe. And I got up and I walked out and no one stopped me. No one even looked at me."

"The morgue attendant?"

"Sleeping. Or dead. I don't know. I didn't check."

She looked at me with those too-big eyes. "I'm hungry," she said. "But not for food."

The knife was in my hand now. I don't remember pulling it out. The blade caught the light, a small gleam in the sterile brightness of the store.

"I know what you are," I said.

"Do you?"

"You're a zombie."

She laughed. It was a terrible sound, like rocks grinding together. Like something that hadn't laughed in a long time trying to remember how.

"That's a word," she said. "For movies. For video games. I'm something else."

"What?"

"I don't know yet." She took another step toward me. "But I know I don't want to hurt you."

"Why not?"

"Because you're the first person who's looked at me since I woke up. The first person who's seen me. Everyone else just... looks through me. Like I'm not there. Like I'm a ghost."

"You're not a ghost."

"No. I'm not."

She reached out and touched my hand. The one holding the knife. Her fingers were cold, so cold they burned, but her touch was gentle. Deliberate. She pushed the blade down until it pointed at the floor.

"I don't want to hurt you," she said again. "I want to understand."

"Understand what?"

"Everything. Why I'm still here. What I'm supposed to do. Why the hunger feels like it's going to eat me alive from the inside out."

The kid with the mop had run away. I heard the slap of his sneakers on the tile, the bang of the back door. The security guard was probably still asleep. We were alone.

"My name is Marcus," I said.

"I'm Claire."

"Claire. That's a nice name."

"I don't remember if it's mine. It's the name on the tag. The one on my toe."

She let go of my hand. I put the knife back in my pocket. I don't know why. Maybe because she was right. Maybe because I'd been alone for so long that even the company of a dead woman was better than nothing.

Maybe because I'm an idiot.

"I have a place," I said. "Not far from here. You can come if you want. I can't promise it's safe. But it's somewhere to figure things out."

She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were wrong, but there was something in them. Something that might have been hope. Or hunger. Or both.

"Why would you help me?" she asked.

"Because I know what it's like to wake up and not recognize yourself."

She followed me out of the store. The automatic doors hissed shut behind us. The parking lot was empty except for my truck, a rusted-out Ford that had seen better decades. The night air was cold and smelled like rain. It always smells like rain in this part of the country. Like the sky is holding its breath, waiting for something.

She climbed into the passenger seat. Her dress rode up, showing more of that gray skin, and I saw the wound. A gash across her thigh, deep and dark, the kind of wound that should have killed her. It had killed her, I reminded myself. She was dead.

I started the truck. The engine coughed and sputtered and finally caught. The radio came on, some country song about losing everything, and I turned it off.

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"Old farmhouse. My grandfather left it to me. It's falling apart, but it's got four walls and a roof."

"Alone?"

"Always."

She nodded. Her head moved too smoothly again, like it was floating on water. "I was alone too," she said. "Before. I think. I don't remember much."

"What do you remember?"

"Headlights. Rain on the windshield. A song on the radio." She paused. "And then nothing. And then the cold. And then waking up."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

We drove in silence. The road was dark, no streetlights out this way, just the moon and the stars and the headlights cutting through the black. I kept glancing at her. She sat perfectly still, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. She didn't breathe. I noticed that. She didn't breathe, and she didn't blink, and she didn't move except when the truck hit a bump and her body shifted with the motion.

It should have terrified me. It did terrify me. But there was something else too. Something I didn't want to name.

The farmhouse appeared out of the darkness like a memory. Two stories, white paint peeling, a porch that sagged on one side. The kind of place that people drive past and think, someone should tear that down. But it was mine. It was the only thing I had.

I parked and killed the engine. The silence was immediate, pressing, like a physical weight.

"This is it," I said.

She got out of the truck. Stood in the driveway, looking up at the house. The moonlight made her skin even grayer, made her eyes glow like an animal's.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"It's a wreck."

"Everything's a wreck. Doesn't mean it's not beautiful."

I unlocked the door and led her inside. The living room was cluttered with books and empty bottles and clothes I hadn't bothered to put away. The kitchen was worse. But she didn't seem to notice. She walked through the rooms like a tourist, touching everything, the walls, the furniture, the curtains.

"You live here alone," she said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

"Why?"

I thought about it. The real answer was complicated. The real answer involved a wife who'd left, a job that had disappeared, a bottle that had become a friend. But I didn't want to say any of that.

"Nowhere else to go," I said.

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were dark pools, deep and still.

"I know that feeling," she said.

I made her tea. I don't know why. It seemed like the thing to do. She held the cup in both hands, not drinking, just holding it, letting the warmth seep into her fingers.

"You don't have to do that," I said. "The tea. It won't help."

"I know." She set the cup down. "I just wanted to feel something."

"Can you?"

"Feel things?"

"Yeah."

She considered the question. Her face was still, but something moved behind her eyes. Something thinking.

"I can feel cold," she said. "And hunger. And... something else. Something I don't have a word for."

"What's it like?"

"Like being full of bees. Like there's something inside me that wants out."

The hunger. I'd read about it. In books, in comics, in the stories people told around campfires. The hunger that drove the dead to eat the living. But she wasn't eating me. She was sitting in my kitchen, holding a cup of tea, talking about bees.

"Why me?" I asked. "Why didn't you..."

"Eat you?"

"Yeah."

She looked at the cup. At her hands. At the window, where the moon was hanging like a coin in the black sky.

"I don't know," she said. "I wanted to. When I saw you in the store, I wanted to. The hunger was screaming at me. But there was something else. Something louder."

"What?"

"You looked at me. Not through me. At me. Like I was a person."

"You are a person."

"Am I?"

I didn't have an answer for that. She was dead. She was a corpse that walked and talked and held tea. But she was also Claire. She had a name and a voice and a way of tilting her head that was almost endearing.

"I don't know," I said. "But you're something."

"That's not very reassuring."

"I'm not very good at reassuring."

She smiled. It was a strange smile, crooked, like her face wasn't used to making that shape. But it was a smile.

"You're honest," she said. "I like that."

We sat in silence for a while. The clock on the wall ticked. The wind rattled the windows. I thought about all the nights I'd spent in this house alone, drinking, staring at the walls, waiting for something to change. And now something had. A dead girl in my kitchen. A dead girl who didn't want to eat me.

"I should sleep," I said. "I've been up for... I don't know how long."

"I'll be here," she said.

"Will you?"

"I don't have anywhere else to go."

I gave her the bedroom. She didn't need to sleep, she said, but she wanted to lie down. Wanted to feel the mattress under her, the pillow under her head. Wanted to pretend.

I slept on the couch. It was lumpy and smelled like dust and old sweat. But I slept. Deep and dreamless, the kind of sleep that comes after a long time of not sleeping well.

When I woke up, the sun was streaming through the windows and there was a second girl in my kitchen.

She was sitting at the table, across from Claire. Smaller than Claire, with hair the color of straw and a face that might have been pretty once, before the gray came. She was eating a bowl of cereal. Dry, no milk. Just handfuls of cornflakes shoved into her mouth like she was afraid someone would take them away.

"Marcus," Claire said. "This is Rose."

Rose looked up. Her eyes were green, the same wrong green, shot through with red. She smiled at me, and there was blood on her teeth.

"Hi," she said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know where else to go."

I stood in the doorway, trying to process. Two of them. Two dead girls in my house.

"Where did you come from?" I asked.

"The woods," Rose said. "I woke up in the woods. I don't know how I got there. I just started walking. And then I smelled her." She nodded at Claire. "I smelled her and I followed the smell and I found this house."

"You can smell her?"

"Can't you?"

I couldn't. All I could smell was coffee and dust and the faint sweetness of decay that clung to both of them.

"She's like me," Rose said. "I could tell. We're the same."

"The same how?"

"Dead. But not gone."

She took another handful of cereal. Chewed with her mouth open. I should have been disgusted. I was disgusted. But I was also curious.

"How many of you are there?" I asked.

"I don't know," Rose said. "I haven't met any others. Just her."

"Just me," Claire said. "Until now."

They looked at each other. Something passed between them, some understanding I couldn't share. The sisterhood of the dead.

"You can stay," I said. "For now. Until we figure out what's going on."

Rose's smile widened. More blood on her teeth.

"Thank you," she said. "You're very kind."

"I'm not kind. I'm just..."

"Alone?" Claire offered.

"Yeah. That."

I made coffee. I drank it standing at the counter, watching them. They didn't talk much. They just sat there, two dead girls in my kitchen, and I realized that my life had changed. That nothing would ever be the same.

The third one came three days later.

Her name was Mira. She was older than the others, or had been. Maybe thirty, maybe forty. It was hard to tell with the gray skin and the hollow eyes. She walked up to the house in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight, like she didn't care who saw her. She knocked on the door with a hand that was missing two fingers.

Claire answered. They looked at each other for a long moment. Then Mira spoke.

"I'm looking for my daughter," she said. "She's dead. Like me. I need to find her."

"I don't know your daughter," Claire said.

"She's out there somewhere. I can feel her."

Mira looked past Claire, into the house. Her eyes found me, standing in the hallway, and something flickered in them. Recognition? Hunger? I couldn't tell.

"You're the one who takes them in," she said. "The one who helps."

"I don't know what I am," I said. "But you can come in."

She came in. She sat at the table. She didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't smile. She just sat there, staring at the wall, her hands folded in her lap.

"I was a nurse," she said. "Before. I worked in a hospital. I saw a lot of death."

"What happened to you?"

"Car accident. Same as Claire. Same as Rose. We all died on the road. The same road, I think. The one that runs past the old mill."

I knew the road. Everyone knew the road. It was where the accidents happened, where the teenagers drag-raced and the truckers fell asleep at the wheel. It was cursed, people said. Haunted.

"The road," I repeated.

"It's not cursed," Mira said. "It's something else. Something alive."

"Alive?"

"Not alive. Not dead. Something in between. Like us."

She looked at me then, really looked, and I felt something cold run down my spine.

"You should stay away from that road," she said. "It does things to people. It changes them."

"I've driven that road a thousand times."

"And look what it brought you."

She gestured at the room, at Claire and Rose, at the house that had become a shelter for the dead.

I didn't have an answer for that.

That night, I couldn't sleep. I lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house. The creaking of the walls. The whisper of the wind. The soft, almost imperceptible sounds of the girls moving through the rooms, not breathing, not sleeping, just existing.

I thought about Mira's words. The road that was alive. The thing in between. It didn't make sense. None of it made sense. But I was in it now. I was part of it.

I got up and walked to the window. The moon was full, casting silver light over the fields. And there, at the edge of the property, I saw something. A figure. Standing in the shadows of the trees, watching the house.

I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. Couldn't tell if it was alive or dead. But it was there. It was watching. And I knew, somehow, that it had been watching for a long time.

I turned away from the window. Claire was standing in the doorway, her eyes glowing in the dark.

"You saw it," she said.

"Yeah."

"It's been there since I arrived. It doesn't come closer. It just watches."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know. But I think it's waiting."

"For what?"

"For us. For all of us. For whatever we're becoming."

She walked to me, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor. She stood close, close enough that I could feel the cold radiating from her skin.

"I'm scared," she said.

"You're dead. What's there to be scared of?"

"Whatever comes next."

I didn't have an answer for that either. I just stood there, a living man surrounded by the dead, and I waited for whatever was coming.

The morning brought another surprise.

I woke to the smell of cooking. Bacon and eggs and coffee, the kind of breakfast I hadn't made for myself in years. I stumbled into the kitchen and found Rose at the stove, flipping eggs with a spatula.

"You can cook?" I asked.

"I remember how," she said. "It's like riding a bike. Your hands remember even when your brain doesn't."

She slid the eggs onto a plate and handed it to me. The bacon was crispy, the eggs were perfect, and I ate standing at the counter while she watched me with those wrong green eyes.

"You don't eat," I said.

"Can't. It all tastes like ash. But I like watching. It makes me feel human."

"Are you? Human?"

She tilted her head, the same gesture Claire made, like she was accessing some file in her brain that was corrupted.

"I don't know," she said. "I remember being human. I remember birthday parties and Christmas mornings and my mother's hands in my hair. But that was before. I'm something else now."

"What?"

"Something that remembers being human. Something that wants to be human again."

She turned back to the stove. I finished my breakfast. The sun was rising, golden and warm, and for a moment, just a moment, everything felt normal. Like I was just a man having breakfast with a girl who happened to be dead.

Then Mira walked in, and the moment shattered.

"There's a man coming," she said. "Up the road. On foot."

I went to the window. She was right. A figure was walking toward the house, a man in a dark coat, moving with purpose. He was still far away, but getting closer.

"Do you know him?" I asked.

"No," Mira said. "But he knows about us. He's been looking for us."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it. The same way I can feel my daughter. He's hunting."

"Hunting what?"

"Us. The dead. The ones who didn't stay dead."

I grabbed my knife. The girls gathered behind me, three of them, silent and still. We watched the man approach, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Not fear. Not anger. Something else. Something that might have been purpose.

"Let him come," I said. "We'll see what he wants."

The man reached the porch. He knocked on the door, three sharp raps. I opened it.

He was older than me, maybe fifty, with gray hair and a face that had seen too much. He looked at me, then at the girls behind me, and he smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.

"My name is Elias," he said. "I've been looking for you."

"For me?"

"For them." He nodded at the girls. "And for you. The man who takes them in. The man who helps them."

"How do you know about me?"

"I know a lot of things. I know about the road. I know about the hunger. I know about what happens when the dead don't stay dead."

"What happens?"

He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. He walked past me, past the girls, and stood in the middle of the living room, looking around like he owned the place.

"They change," he said. "They become something else. Something that's not human and not monster. Something in between."

"We know that," Claire said.

"Do you? Do you know what you're becoming? Do you know what happens when the hunger takes over?"

"We control it," Rose said.

"For now. But it grows. It always grows. And when it gets too strong, you'll do things you can't take back."

He turned to look at me. His eyes were cold, calculating.

"You think you can save them," he said. "You think you can keep them human. But you can't. You can't save the dead. The dead save themselves, or they don't."

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I'm here to offer you a choice. All of you. There's a place for the dead. A place where they can be safe. Where they can learn to control the hunger. Where they can become something more than monsters."

"What place?"

"A sanctuary. Run by people like me. People who understand."

"And if we don't want to go?"

He smiled again. The same cold smile.

"Then you stay here. And you wait. And you watch the hunger grow. And eventually, you'll hurt someone. Maybe each other. Maybe you." He looked at me. "And then you'll wish you'd taken my offer."

He pulled a card from his pocket and set it on the table.

"Think about it," he said. "I'll be in town for a few days."

He walked out. The door closed behind him. The girls stood in silence, looking at the card, looking at me.

"What do we do?" Claire asked.

I picked up the card. It had an address and a phone number. Nothing else.

"I don't know," I said. "But I don't trust him."

"Neither do I," Mira said. "He smells wrong. Like the road."

We stood there, the four of us, in the house that had become our shelter. Outside, the sun was shining. The birds were singing. It was a beautiful day.

But I knew, somehow, that the beautiful days were over. Something was coming. Something that would change everything.

And I was right.

The first attack came that night.

I was asleep on the couch when I heard the window break. I woke to the sound of glass shattering, to the smell of smoke, to the screaming of something that wasn't human.

I ran to the front door. The yard was full of them. Dead things, but not like Claire and Rose and Mira. These were different. These were wrong. Their eyes were red, not brown, and their mouths were open, and they were moving toward the house with a purpose that was purely hunger.

"Claire!" I shouted. "Rose! Mira!"

They appeared beside me, their faces pale, their eyes wide.

"What are they?" Rose whispered.

"Ferals," Mira said. "The ones who gave in. The ones who let the hunger take over."

They came at us. I swung my knife, cutting one across the face, but it didn't stop. It just kept coming, its hands reaching for me, its mouth open, its teeth ready.

Claire grabbed it. She was stronger than she looked. She threw it across the yard, into the darkness, and it didn't get up.

"We have to fight," she said. "We have to protect the house."

"Protect it from what?" I asked.

"From them. From the hunger. From everything."

We fought. All night, we fought. The ferals came in waves, and we pushed them back, and we didn't stop until the sun rose and they retreated into the shadows.

When it was over, we stood in the yard, covered in blood and dust and something darker. The house was a wreck. The windows were broken. The door was hanging from its hinges. But we were alive. We were together.

"They'll come back," Mira said.

"I know."

"What do we do?"

I looked at the card in my hand. Elias's card. The sanctuary. The offer.

"I don't know," I said. "But we can't stay here."

Claire took my hand. Her fingers were cold, but they were gentle. They were hers.

"Wherever we go," she said, "we go together."

Rose nodded. Mira nodded. And I nodded, because what else could I do?

We were four. A man and three dead girls. We were something new. Something the world had never seen.

And we were just getting started.