Call Me Human: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

  Call Me Human

  A Zombie Apocalypse Novel

  By Sergei Marysh

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2012 Sergei Marysh

  Cover Art: Yana Dmitruk

  Translated from Russian by Irene W. Galaktionova and Neil P. Woodhead

  "He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other."

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

  Translated by Constance Garnett

  I

  My name is Igor Bernik, I'm forty-two. A few days ago, I was bitten by a zombie, but so far I'm still alive and, hopefully, sane.

  This is my second diary — the first one, in all likelihood, has been lost for good. It grieves me: after all the daily effort that I've put into it, a whole month's worth of entries is now gone. I have to admit though that the prospect of a horrendous death looming over me grieves me a hundredfold more. No, not quite so: for the second time in my life, I find myself in the darkest of desperations that grieving can't even start to describe.

  The first time I experienced it was when I'd lost all of my family at the very start of the outbreak. We lived in Moscow — I'm Russian, by the way, — and I still shudder when I remember that day. This has to be what a believer feels as he dies without confession, assured that he's now heading for Hell. All my life, I've managed to pass for an agnostic pretending to be an atheist, but the events of the last year have bred faith in me — a conviction, even. Now, if I'm convinced of anything at all, it's of the fact that Hell does exist and that it has now ascended on Earth in the flesh, tangibly real, more real than anything before it.

  In my first diary, I described the events of the past year in every detail. Restoring it — reliving it — is out of the question. I don't have enough strength nor ambition. Neither time. Especially not time. This second diary will probably be the shortest in history, as I have only a few weeks, if not days, left to live.

  To recapitulate it — doing so for my own sake as I attempt to convince myself that the job of keeping it was not completely futile — here's a brief summary of the events as they unfolded.

  ***

  When the catastrophe struck and the sudden pandemic swept the world in a few short weeks, I had other things to do rather than keep diaries. The readers of these pages do not need the details, their horror all too memorable to the few who have survived. The Apocalypse that the media kept warning us against had arrived: as absurd, implausible and palpable as its movie industry predecessors.

  At first, no one believed it: the events offered themselves to be misinterpreted as one giant spoof, very much like the 1938 War of the Worlds radio panic. This time the opposite was true: millions of people believed a real epidemic to be nothing more than a street happening, a cleverly organized flash mob. I've seen the infected monsters tear petrified people apart, howling, while their next victims were taking the zombies to task for their improper conduct and attire, refusing to understand what was going on until it was too late for them. Then they would beg to call the police and die without realizing what happened.

  Those who died on the spot were the lucky ones. Those who didn't, joined the ranks of the living dead whose numbers grew progressively, having filled cities with millions of their kind in just under two weeks.

  ***

  It first started with Internet video clips and panicky messages coming from every corner of the globe. I can't remember now where they originated — I have a funny feeling it was San Diego, California. At least I can't forget their TV footage. The anchorman exercised his sarcasm as he commented on the story of a cop apparently badly bitten by some street bums, saying that Halloween had started early that year. The whole report looked like a sick joke.

  Then similar stories started to run more often; they came from Europe, South Asia, Australia, Japan, and finally, South America. They changed in tone as breaking news reported of urgent quarantines, cancelled flights, closed borders, curfews, anarchy, horror and pogroms. One had to agree it now looked serious.

  They spoke of an unknown infection; of an epidemic rapidly turning into a pandemic. The experts didn't even have time to come up with a cool acronym for the virus — if indeed it was a virus. I don't even think they had time to identify it, so quickly had the situation expanded. The media had their pick of conspiracies: terrorist groups, God's wrath, nanotechnologies gone awry, biological warfare unleashed by ostracized regimes.

  By the end of the second week, the TV first used the word, zombie. The living dead. By then, it had already been used freely in the streets and on the Internet. In the afternoon of the same day, the word was anathemized as unscientific, absurd and politically incorrect. No one had a chance to watch the end of the discussion, as the next day all media in my own city were gone. The Internet, television, mobile networks, even the radio vanished as if they'd never existed. The next to go were the electricity and running water, followed by entire infrastructures until the world submerged into darkness lit only by the glow of cities burning.

  Society had collapsed. We had no discipline, no authority and no help from anywhere. Looting started: now it was every man for himself. This was when I lost my family. My son, wife and mother.

  I'll never forgive myself for not staying with them that day. Why on earth did I have to go to town, hoping to save the sole source of our livelihood, the little shop trading in Japanese watches! Until very recently, one of those watches — one of the best ones I'd had exhibited in the window — still sat on my wrist saving my life as it warned me about the exact time of sunset. By the same token, it always reminded me of that day.

  The watch was all that was left of my shop, the rest looted and burned. The mall where I rented the premises had been razed to the ground, my little business included.

  Desperate, I tried to get back home. I had to leave the car and walk as traffic gridlocked: amid screaming and shouting people, cars jammed into each other, ramming houses and lampposts. Public transportation was paralyzed. Nobody helped anyone. You could hear the police shooting at someone, the shots drowned by screams and howling.

  It took me the rest of the day and all night to walk back to my house, armed with a steel rod I'd picked up in the street.

  That day, I saw a zombie for the first time, and the sight stunned me. A stout middle-aged man wore a business suit with a vest. His pasty face had a grayish tint to it, bloodless like that of a corpse. He showed his teeth in a grin that stretched his rubbery bloodied mouth, but the worst thing about him were his meaningless bloodshot eyes that glowed like two of the devil's carbuncles. He ambled towards me from
across the street, his arms stretched in front of him, the crooked white fingers covered in blood, and made sounds I'd never heard anywhere before: a sort of bellowing howl. Those inhuman sounds, his bloodied fingers and inane expression horrendously mismatched his decent suit and especially his expensive watch that I, much to my surprise, had time to notice, despite all the tragedy of the situation. By then, I knew what I was dealing with: I had to defend my life and had no qualms whatsoever as I smashed his head with my iron rod. Thus, I entered the new world.

  Since then, I've seen thousands of zombies, men, women, even children, but this one had left his stamp on my soul. The sick indelible memory, he keeps coming to me in my nightmares, as if embodying all the living dead in the world.

  To cut a long story short, after a few more close shaves I finally made it home. The apartment was empty; signs of hurried packing everywhere; I saw a note on the kitchen table. It said that my family had made it out of town: they'd packed a few necessities, food and clothes, and headed for our country cottage in my wife's car. She was the one who'd written it, begging me to immediately join them.

  Now that I had some idea of the situation, I felt an immense relief. Although the cottage was a good ten miles outside the city limits, I left the apartment and headed there on foot, unable to think of anything other than my family. I joined a column of fugitives and saw many an ugly confrontation on the way — I'll spare you the details because every one of my readers must have had experiences identical to mine, differing only in setting.

  Having finally made it to the cottage though, I found it empty. I was freaking out, cursing myself for not staying with them that day. But I couldn't change a thing. For all the insane months that followed, all my actions and my whole life were devoted to finding them, at any cost. My life without them had no meaning, so this motivation — to find them whatever it took — fuelled me in my search. I lived with that hope only, and only because of that search I remained alive and sane: I simply couldn't afford to die. Correction: I stayed alive, that little is true, but all of the survivors, in my opinion, had sacrificed some of their sanity in the process as no mentally healthy person would last more than a day in the new world.

  ***

  Hard as I tried, I didn't find them. I looked everywhere, praying for a miracle, hoping beyond hope that one day I'd come back to the cottage and they'd be there, alive and safe.

  In the meantime, life had become a risky business indeed, so my last chances to find them soon vanished. I kept going back to the cottage, now looted, until the day someone burned it down. I'd no idea what had happened and knew only that after a few days spent searching, I came back to a heap of smoking debris.

  In those days, abandoned houses burned a lot, but this time it was my home that died, and with it, so did hope. It had been three months since I'd first arrived there, there were almost no living humans left at all in the area, so the fire forced me to stop searching. It gave me a sign, so to say, that my past life was now over. No need to rake the past up. I still have no idea what had happened to them, but have every reason to suppose the worst. But my whole being refused to accept the outcome; and I refused to believe they were dead. A human soul is a funny thing. When it can't process the pain, it shoves it deep down on the very bottom so you can go on with your life.

  After several months of lethargy I finally discovered I actually stopped thinking about my loss. It's not that I accepted it, but I pushed it aside to the very edge of my consciousness in order to cope. Now you could ask, why, in the very depths of grief and frustration, I didn't even attempt to take my own life? This is something I can't tell you. It had to be a combination of several factors. Naturally, self-preservation must have played its part, but it didn't really determine my decision.

  My idea of life and death did. While I've never had faith in clerical dogma, deep in my heart I was adamant that my life was not mine to take. I didn't base this conclusion on logic or learned knowledge; on the contrary, I've never met anyone with quite the same philosophy. It was rather a feeling, some indelible part of my mental constitution: without any evidence to the contrary, I knew that my life was not mine to give or take; you could say I had it on loan, or rented it, if you could put it this way. By killing myself I would have broken some principal law of nature and challenged the entire order of existence. If you assumed that God did exist, it would equate to my throwing his gift of life back into his face. This sentiment made a conscious suicide impossible.

  There was another factor at work here, also linked to some inbred instinct or other. It may even sound funny, considering the circumstances: the epidemic, the invasion of the living dead and the death of our civilization that followed, had coincided for me with what they call a midlife crisis. Outer monstrosities had stopped me from immersing myself into the painful depths of soul-searching. Evidently, it didn't help me find purpose, nor did it help me come to grips with my personality and performance; I hadn't taken on a new career or improved my relationship with my recently neglected wife. But again I had this hunch, totally ungrounded but powerful nevertheless: I felt that as it was, my life did have purpose and I was heading for an objective as yet unknown. In a sense, some future mission I had to complete. Now as I write this, I have no doubt what exactly it is, and that's the reason I'm writing this to begin with. But I'll tell you about it in due time.

  Later, as I looked back at those days, I started to realize how reckless I'd been, challenging the dangers of the new order. Furious and helpless at once, I rumbled around the area in a state of nervous agitation; you could no more stop me than a rabid dog. I searched for survivors hoping to ask them questions about my loved ones; I fought off zombies and looters without a thought for my own safety. Subconsciously, I must have been seeking death, but, of all things, it avoided me then. The order of things must have been saving me for some purposes of its own.

  Thus I fought through the admittedly severe winter without noticing much of it. The stress wound up my body so much that for the first time in years, I didn't even catch a cold. I'd been hurt, beaten and even shot at, but by some blind stroke of luck I'd avoided the worst that could happen: the bites. Actually, I couldn't have cared less at the time. I was not afraid of either death or zombies, happily ignoring any safety measures.

  By springtime, my desperation started to heal to a degree, or shall I say I got used to it? My body must have reached its grieving limits and, to some point, gone on the mend.

  So started the new stage of my existence. Self-preservation raised its voice and gave me a push in a new direction: unexpectedly for myself, I started taking precautions for my safety. The changes to the world had finally dawned on me and filled me with fright. The good old me was back, a sensible and prudent middle-class bourgeois, moderately nerdish but hardly valiant by any stretch of the imagination. Not the best traits if you need to survive; desperate derring-do would be much more in keeping with events, but I wasn't the one to choose my mental state at the time: like waves that collapse on a shore and recede, my moods came and went on their own accord.

  For me, those were hard times. As every survivor knows, one's only chance to save his life was by leaving the city and staying away from it. In towns, the amount of zombies exceeded human imagination. I'm only judging by my native city, but I wouldn't be wrong in suggesting that in other parts of the world, events didn't differ much. Before the start of the epidemic, Moscow's population counted roughly ten million; it's more like a few thousand now. Dozens, if not hundreds of thousands, had perished in fires and stampedes; others were torn to pieces, cannibalized and killed by looting gangs. All the rest had been infected and transformed, adding to the ranks of the undead.

  As I'd immediately headed for the countryside and stayed there, I'd managed to survive as long as I had. Naturally, you could meet infected victims everywhere you went, but outside of the cities, their numbers were dramatically fewer; also, in the country survivors had a decent chance of either escaping or even striking back at the
ir assailants. As we know, a zombie doesn't boast a conscious mind: for the most part of the day they either stand swaying in one place, or forage. In this respect they don't differ much from Brownian molecules: this is how, by moving chaotically in all directions, they gradually took over vast areas around cities. Tiny surviving communities and loners like myself had little to offer against the growing hordes of the living dead: often we had to abandon our makeshift dwellings and move on even further from the city limits. Like so many others, I started my months-long race against death.

  Now I need to briefly explain how an emergency of this kind can affect you. Like any survivor, I lost not just my family, but also all of my friends and neighbors — in fact, everyone I'd known, however remotely, from my past life. Ever since this new life of madness had begun, I hadn't seen a single familiar face. Without all these gadgets we used to take for granted, like cell phones and email, the fall of our civilization had forced us at immense distances from each other. Many a story I'd heard in my travels, told by people often frustrated, brutal, frenetic or plain mad, and they all had the same common denominator: just like myself, once the catastrophe had struck, none of those storytellers had met anyone from their past life. Our new world is the habitat of alienated strangers where each of them feels lost and alone. Although if the truth were known, it's not even ours any more, this new world: from now on, it's the domain of the living dead where people have outstayed their welcome, their sole role being that of the main course at zombies' dinners.

  With the loss of communications, society disintegrated further and faster until man had once again become what he must have originally been: a helpless loner in an alien environment. I can't say degradation, for it implies gradual changes over a period of time, but here, society collapsed just as you watched. No more authority; no more police, no more rules: everyone was another's enemy. The common emotional denominator was fear of the knee-jerk kind, unconscious and primal. People stopped helping each other: they sacrificed the weak, abandoning children, women, the elderly and the wounded. To a degree, you can understand them: if your own family hadn't made it, what was the point of risking your own life in order to save strangers?