The Passenger (Surviving the Dead) by James Cook, Joshua Guess
Authors: James Cook, Joshua Guess
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could feel the wet bodies of the other ghouls rubbing up against mine, and though I could see the moisture and hear the wind dancing through the trees, I didn't get cold. I couldn't even feel the wind, which told me just how desensitized my body was.
D eath was still a new ordeal for me, a gem with so many facets that it took time to even count them all much less examine each one. For example, it took me until that wet shamble up the other side of the creek to realize I no longer felt pain of any kind. While doing barrel rolls down the stony incline, I felt the pressure of the fall and the impacts all across my body, but it didn’t hurt in the slightest. I would have chalked it up to luck had my hand not risen in front of my face after we left the creek, blindly feeling out for obstacles in the dense woods.
My right pinky was broken, and n ot in an 'oh, we're just going to set this and splint it' kind of way. Think industrial accident and you're getting warmer. Maybe my mind was just acclimating to the new way of things, but seeing my mangled finger flopping from my hand like a clown shoe didn't bother me at all. I found it rather fascinating, to tell the truth. I only wished I could fiddle with it, or at least move it closer.
I was caught completely of f guard when the hand did move closer to my face. Not all the way in, but perhaps a few inches more toward my eyes.
Had I done that? I bent my will to the task of try ing to move the hand closer, focusing everything I had on the image of my right hand arcing toward my face. If I could have controlled the necessary muscles, my face would have screwed up in concentration, teeth clenched, eyes narrowed.
Fucking hand didn't go anywhere , though. Probably just a coincidence. My body was prone to doing odd things, after all. Like dying and then going for a stroll. Mom always said my priorities were wrong.
My body stumbled onward, weighed down and off b alance thanks to a gallon or two of creek water in its stomach and chest cavity. Though our tumble had been chaotic, I remembered the water going down my throat and into my lungs. Maybe a minnow or something went with it. The idea of a little life swimming around in there amused me until a few seconds later when I realized it would be certain death for the poor little fishy.
The wet slog that followed w as boring but not terribly long. Soon enough, a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. It didn't have the steady burn of an electric bulb. It danced, flickering dim to bright in a wavering cycle. A campfire, maybe, if it was far away. A candle if it was closer. A single point of brightness in the night.
One part of me yearned for it, to be sitting near a warm fire. Another recognized the hard truth in front of me: a single fire or candle probably meant a single person or a small family. Undoubtedly not enough to stop even the few dozen ghouls I could see as my body stared straight ahead, much less the seventy or so others out of my line of sight. Interestingly, as w e walked, I got the feeling my body, as well as the other ghouls’, didn’t care so much about the fire ahead of us as they did about the faint, distant sounds coming from the people around it. Sounds that, until a short time ago, would have been far below my range of hearing from this far away.
Another interesting fact about victims of whatever plague reanimated me: our bodies have enough remnant human instinct to take the path of least resistance. There was a wide path, maybe six or seven feet across, going straight through the woods. Most of us were on it, the packed dirt offering little in the way of brush or twigs. The trees surrounding us were old growth, tall and widel y spaced. Not much debris from those ancient fellows.
We weren't moving silently, but close enough to it that the people around the fire were in for a bad night.
*****
The walking dead, as it happens, can breathe, they just don't need to.
The day before, w hen I first woke
D eath was still a new ordeal for me, a gem with so many facets that it took time to even count them all much less examine each one. For example, it took me until that wet shamble up the other side of the creek to realize I no longer felt pain of any kind. While doing barrel rolls down the stony incline, I felt the pressure of the fall and the impacts all across my body, but it didn’t hurt in the slightest. I would have chalked it up to luck had my hand not risen in front of my face after we left the creek, blindly feeling out for obstacles in the dense woods.
My right pinky was broken, and n ot in an 'oh, we're just going to set this and splint it' kind of way. Think industrial accident and you're getting warmer. Maybe my mind was just acclimating to the new way of things, but seeing my mangled finger flopping from my hand like a clown shoe didn't bother me at all. I found it rather fascinating, to tell the truth. I only wished I could fiddle with it, or at least move it closer.
I was caught completely of f guard when the hand did move closer to my face. Not all the way in, but perhaps a few inches more toward my eyes.
Had I done that? I bent my will to the task of try ing to move the hand closer, focusing everything I had on the image of my right hand arcing toward my face. If I could have controlled the necessary muscles, my face would have screwed up in concentration, teeth clenched, eyes narrowed.
Fucking hand didn't go anywhere , though. Probably just a coincidence. My body was prone to doing odd things, after all. Like dying and then going for a stroll. Mom always said my priorities were wrong.
My body stumbled onward, weighed down and off b alance thanks to a gallon or two of creek water in its stomach and chest cavity. Though our tumble had been chaotic, I remembered the water going down my throat and into my lungs. Maybe a minnow or something went with it. The idea of a little life swimming around in there amused me until a few seconds later when I realized it would be certain death for the poor little fishy.
The wet slog that followed w as boring but not terribly long. Soon enough, a pinprick of light appeared in the distance. It didn't have the steady burn of an electric bulb. It danced, flickering dim to bright in a wavering cycle. A campfire, maybe, if it was far away. A candle if it was closer. A single point of brightness in the night.
One part of me yearned for it, to be sitting near a warm fire. Another recognized the hard truth in front of me: a single fire or candle probably meant a single person or a small family. Undoubtedly not enough to stop even the few dozen ghouls I could see as my body stared straight ahead, much less the seventy or so others out of my line of sight. Interestingly, as w e walked, I got the feeling my body, as well as the other ghouls’, didn’t care so much about the fire ahead of us as they did about the faint, distant sounds coming from the people around it. Sounds that, until a short time ago, would have been far below my range of hearing from this far away.
Another interesting fact about victims of whatever plague reanimated me: our bodies have enough remnant human instinct to take the path of least resistance. There was a wide path, maybe six or seven feet across, going straight through the woods. Most of us were on it, the packed dirt offering little in the way of brush or twigs. The trees surrounding us were old growth, tall and widel y spaced. Not much debris from those ancient fellows.
We weren't moving silently, but close enough to it that the people around the fire were in for a bad night.
*****
The walking dead, as it happens, can breathe, they just don't need to.
The day before, w hen I first woke
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