Zombies! Read online

the lawyers, thus he did not wish this conversation to run its course. With Zombies around, a man could certainly have too many people after his flesh, and he did not want to add ‘Live Human Engineer’ to the list of people who wanted to kill him.

  Besides, the Zombie had instilled a sense of disquiet into George. Although she looked human, if a tad ashen, her posture and stance were jerky and unnatural. She looked ill-at-ease inhabiting her body, and George felt repulsed by her … oddness … There was something about her that told every fibre of his being that she was different to him. It was for this reason that he wanted her out of here, as soon as possible, and that meant making sure that this parley was over as soon as possible.

  The engineer grudgingly signalled his assent to continued negotiations with a grunt.

  “Well,” continued Hanna, “the advantages are that those who willingly convert aren’t actually killed, simply lose a small body part in exchange for immortality. Of course, if you hold out, then some Zombie, somewhere, will find you eventually, and eat you all up. You will then be dead. With our offer, you will become undesirable as food and thus … you … will … become ...” she paused dramatically.

  “Come now Matlock, out with it!” said the junior executive.

  Looking slightly bemused at having her moment of drama trashed, she ended, “You will become …. UNDEAD!”

  “Am I the only one, or does that kinda suck?” the young HR intern had recovered from her fear and panic attacks. Besides, because of the actual danger to everyone, she wasn’t getting the attention she had hoped for from playing the damsel-in-distress and had thus far caught herself a good thump on the head after fainting into the arms of someone who was legging it away from Hanna walking in the door.

  Hanna took a deep breath, and then felt a bit foolish about doing that. Zombies didn’t need to breathe. She exhaled and then tried to address the group and felt even more foolish. While Zombies don’t need to breathe to live, they do need to breathe air out while talking in order to make sounds with the mouths. All that happened when she spoke without exhaling was that she gasped silently at the group. She took another deep breath, remembered about her last deep breath, and then tried to talk while still breathing in, got thoroughly confused and started trying to breathe out while still breathing in, leaving her choking on air. The group watched in fascination.

  “Guys, shouldn’t we like, give her the kiss of like, life, or something?” the intern asked.

  The group continued to watch in fascination. After a short while George replied, “And how would that help? She’s already dead.”

  “No,” said another member of the group, “She explained it all, didn’t she? She’s not dead, she’s UNDEAD!”

  “That makes her alive again, that does.” said the junior executive.

  “Bullshit!” another member of the group said, “She’s not alive, she said so herself.”

  “So, she’s like unalive, then?” the intern said, making George think he had wondered onto the set of a badly written Twilight Zone episode. He sighed in frustration.

  “Right!” he asked the still confused Zombie, “We want answers. How come Legal succumbed so willingly to become Zombies? Why didn’t they just eat you like the rest of the company? Why offer you a deal to turn you into Zombies?”

  “Everyone knows Zombies eat brains,” said another HR member, “Perhaps there weren’t enough brains in Legal to go around?”

  “Ha Ha Ha,” the engineer responded sarcastically, “If that was a reason then HR would have been the first to get offered a deal. I vote we say good riddance to Legal and just smash this Zombie’s skull in.”

  “I sense some hostility here, how about a temporary truce?” George offered, “Listen, there’s drinks here for the office party. How about we all have a drink to steady our nerves? I’m sure we could all do with some steadied nerves, after what we’ve been through.”

  There was overwhelmingly enthusiastic support for this motion, and after the Zombie was shooed out into the elevator, glasses and bottles were brought forward with not even the slightest argument from anybody. The group were soon steadying their nerves with all of the alcohol on the third floor.

  In no time at all, some of them were so steady that they were holding on to pillars to stop the pillars from falling down. Others were steadily weaving their way down the hall. George had steadied his nerves with the booze till he could barely stand. Looking for a place to sit and enjoy his now very-steadied nerves, he found himself in the ladies, where the intern was smoking what appeared to be a joint. Collapsing on the floor next to her, he regarded her more closely than he had before. She was (to his steadied nerves) very pretty. While he shared her joint (you could never have nerves too steady, after all!) he thought back to his ex-wife. He briefly wondered what she was up to right now, and how she had fared against the Zombie attack...

  Today …

  … George and the tall man were parked outside George’s ex-wife’s house, which also happened to be George’s former home. The tall man’s name turned out to be Bennie, and his occupation, until recently, was Pest and Rodent Control engineer. He’d had a small van with a whole lot of pest control equipment, and after sneaking four blocks George and Bennie had parked outside George’s former home.

  “I don’t think she is home,” said George, “The curtains are all drawn. We should take a look in the garage.”

  “Is this necessary? This is just going to get us decapitated, you know.” Bennie replied, “For all we know, she is sitting inside there with a shotgun aimed at the front door.” He was very very nervous, and George had to stop himself from reaching out and simply thumping him. His memory of yesterday reminded him of the extreme intelligence of these creatures. If his ex-wife was one of these, then she would be even more blood-thirsty than usual.

  “We need the generator, okay?” George replied rather irritably, “And this is the only place I know of that will certainly have one. No doubt the shops have all been looted by now”. George was surprised at his own crankiness. He put it down to the mother of all hangovers that was definitely getting worse with each passing minute. His fingers felt numb and he was sure he could not even feel half his face. He remembered what he had been drinking yesterday, and blanched at the memory. “If I survive this,” he promised himself, “I’ll never be mixing vodka with odd-looking things from the first-aid kit again.”

  “Say, why’d you give her the generator in the first place?” Bennie asked.

  “It was easier to give her my stuff than to continue living with her,” George replied distractedly. He was still scanning the house and surrounds for signs of danger. As far as he could see, the place was quiet. Too quiet. Deathly quiet even. George figured that it wouldn’t really be a problem to quickly dash into the garage and dash right back out with the generator, even in his weakened state. Only, he had the disquieting feeling that something wasn’t right. He beckoned to Bennie, opened the car door and stepped out into the street.

  Yesterday …

  … The Zombies were making a determined effort to get into the third floor. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the alcohol had had a detrimental effect on the defenders ability to defend. The only sober person on the floor, the engineer, had constructed bombs out of the brandy available and had thus far managed to toast three Zombie accountants who had attempted to rappel in through the windows.

  The smoke alarms sensed the flaming accountants and swung into action, first setting off all the sirens in the building and then sending urgent email and SMS to the first aid officer asking him to attend to possible injuries at the assembly point. Since the first aid officer was already knuckle-deep in the skull of an executive on the tenth floor at the time, he ignored the beeps from his cellphone and focused on getting more head (BRAAAIIINSSS!!!).

  George, on the other hand, was in a blissful world of his own, wandering down passages and giggling at potted-plants. He’d eventually followed the instructions from the funny voices in his head w
hich told him to explore the ventilation ducts for fairies. That was a fortuitous hallucination indeed, for it meant that when the third floor fortress finally fell he was crawling through the darkness and thinking deep and profound thoughts, like “DUST! WOW! ROACH! WOW! DUST! WOW!”

  By the time George reached the exit for the ducts in the basement parkade three hours later, the effects of the weed had almost totally vanished, leaving him very drunk but still conscious enough to kick out the steel grate that covered the duct. He surveyed the cars in front of him for a few seconds. “No problem,” George thought, “in the movies there’s always a car with the key artfully hidden in the sunvisor. Out of the hundreds of cars here, someone MUST have done that too.” George hunted around for a suitable object to use on the car windows and finally found a crowbar in the deserted security office at the entrance to the parkade.

  Going up to the nearest car, George broke the window (on the second try only - the movie windows shattered much more easily than a real one, it seemed) and checked the sunvisor. Nothing. “Nevermind,” he thought, “the next one would have the key, and if not then the one after.” With the car alarm echoing in the underground parkade, George grasped the crowbar in what he hoped was a movie-star-hero manner and