Chapter 9: Newbie

You can't hold your breath forever.
The thought flashed through my head the second time that I went under. The time I don't come up.
The river flushed me along in an airless grip of green light. The dark water beneath me froze my feet, even as I could see the sunlight filtered down from above.
You can't hold your breath forever, even if you wanted to. There's a part of your brain, this automatic reflex part, that forces you to take a breath, forces you to drown. This is me, over thinking even as I am trying to save myself.
The muddy silt on the bottom felt soft and cold as it dragged past me, like a conveyor belt going the wrong way.
I tried to remember how to swim, but fear blanked my mind, tightened its grip on my limbs.
Lungs burned.
I tried to flail my arms. I tried to...
Hot pain exploded in my back.
A scream turned into a cough and for a second, three frantic heartbeats, I'm breathing water.
Hit something.
A algae-slick log.
I have time to realize that I'm stuck in sharp branches before my mind decides its time to start breathing.
The water tasted like dirt, smelled like dead leaves.
Elise.

The sky was dark when I surfaced. Stars so bright and numerous that they looked fake.
I floated fast, swirling, first facing upstream, then down. The lights in the sky twirl so fast that they looked like the print of Van Gogh's Starry Night that used to hang on the wall of Elise's dorm room.
I was stuck. I remembered. A log. I can't swim. One thought snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder with one cold, skeleton hand.
Corpses float.
Mud beneath my hands and I was laying on the shore. I thought about CPR for a long time, laying there, staring up at the Van Gogh sky. I didn't cough up any water. My heart was not beating wildly in my chest. I felt my neck, searching for the pulse that was not there and my skin was cold.
My arms dropped to my sides.
I pulled in a deep breath, but I could hear the gurgle of a lungful of river water that told me it wasn't going to work.
I could smell, though. Dead leaves and river water and summer and and something else. Barbecue. Somewhere somebody was grilling out. Hot dogs and hamburgers. The smell was smoky and fat on the air. I imagined a hot dog, blackened from the charcoal, the bun soft as a cloud. A cold Pepsi out of a cooler full of ice. I'm dead and somebody was having a picnic.
I couldn't move.
Sleep dropped on me distant and dreamless as a log at the bottom of a river.

I was on my feet and moving before I was even awake, confused as having changed channels to a movie already in progress. My legs were stiff. Sleepwalking. That was new.
I was walking down a street lined with charming brick houses flanked by enormous trees, sighing in the summer wind. Just this side of noon, the was already hot, though I did not feel it. My hands ached from the cold.
I stood in the middle of the empty street staring at my hands. They were white, the nails bluish.
“Fuck,” I tried to say, but a gallon or so of water came out instead. Leaning forward, I released a deluge. I'm a little teapot, I thought, tip me over and pour me out.
After a few minutes, I gave up.
Standing up straight, I could smell the barbeque again. People. Maybe they can help me. I followed the smell, hurrying the best that I could on stiff legs.
The street opened up a block later, revealing a large park several blocks long. I stopped at the end of the street unable to believe what I was seeing. A brown and white horse raced down the street, mane blowing in the wind, hooves rumbling like thunder, rumbling like a Biblical prophecy. It crossed the park, tearing up grass and earth in its wake.
Several more horses joined him and suddenly there was a stampede, dozens of horses, eyes wide, nostrils flared. Shear terror in such a beautiful animal that it broke my unbeating heart.
That's when I saw the zombies. A hoard of them coming from the same direction the horses had come. The zombies fastest was barely a stagger and the horses easily keep ahead of their undead pursuers. The horses circled in the grass, though, their group getting small, tighter.
I didn't even see the trap until it was closed.
At the treeline, the zombies appeared, filtering out from their hiding places.
“Oh, shit,” I tried to say, but only a fetid belch escaped me.
The zombies close in.
To their credit, the horses fought. They reared up. They kicked. But for each horse there were ten zombies clawing at them.
I couldn't watch. I continued down the street away from the park heading towards what I thought was west, though I wasn't sure. The smell of barbecue returned. I'm not sure if I am more excited about the prospect of food or the prospect of people.
My eye itched and I scratched at it, thinking that I must have gotten something in it when I was in the water. My stomach growled loud enough to hear if you were standing close enough to me.
The barbecue smell drove me crazy. I scrambled after it, my stiff legs stumbling over the curb. I pushed my way through a gate into a small back yard and froze, smelling hot dogs and hamburgers and...
The dead woman lay in the grass just outside her back door, her insides ripped open, a quick and dirty anatomy lesson. Her gas grill sat unlit.
I could still smell the barbecue.
I couldn't do this.
I was so hungry.
I couldn't.
I'm...so...sorry.
I fell on her clawing with my hands, burying my face in her guts. She tasted like hot dogs and hamburgers and filet mignon. She was apple pie, blueberry pancakes and crispy bacon. She was my first kiss, first lay and first love. I loved her flesh more than I'd love anything. Elise. My mother. My father. My grandmother. Anyone. My face was so deep in her insides that I couldn't see anything, so far that I couldn't breathe even if I had needed to.
I ate her corpse like Thanksgiving dinner and then collapsed once again on the grass. My eyes were slick with blood and I rubbed at it, dig at it, until I could feel it burst in my skull.
I got to my feet and went inside her house. The bathroom was just inside the backdoor off the kitchen. I find a mirror.
My skin was pale, blue at the lips and eyes, one missing, its dark socket torn by something underwater. My face was awash with old blood. I turned on the faucet and after a second cold water came out. I washed my face with antimicrobial soap that smelled like lavender. Drying my face, I realize I must be using the good towels, the ones for company. I don't imagine that I was the company that they were thinking of. A dinner guest.
Outside, the woman was till laying where I ate her.
“She was dead when I got here,” I try to say, an eruption of blood and dirty water instead.
I left the house and walked three blocks before I found a street that I recognized. I followed it west toward the late afternoon sun, until something in the street caught my eye. I stopped.
A samurai sword lay in the street.
My laugh splattered on the pavement as I scooped up the sword and headed for the bridge that crossed the west branch of the Hoosier.
The bridge was not the only thing that was missing. The world was gone. I stood at the edge of the river and saw nothing at all. Empty space, perfectly nothing, a bottomless pit between here and there.
This was why zombies don't cross water.
I closed my eye and I could still smell the water. I could still hear it. I opened my eye. The hole in the world reaches on forever. My head swam with terror and vertigo. I couldn't cross the space. It would be easier to step off the top of a building. I had to, even though I've proven that river-crossing is not my specialty.
I hurried back towards the houses and found two cinder blocks in a garage. I grabbed an orange extension cord on the way out.
I lashed the cinder blocks together with the extension cord. I tested the weight. Heavy enough. A proper anchor. Dragging the cinder block anchor behind me, I stumbled down to the edge of the great, deep nothing and closed my eye.
I could smell the water. I could hear it. I took a step forward, eye still closed.
The shallower water was warm in the afternoon, soaking my shoe. I pushed out into the water, the bricks sinking into the silt of the river bottom.
I was fine until the water reached my face, warm against my lips.
I panicked.
I could keenly remember the last moments of my life, my real life. The water in my nose and mouth. The water in my lungs. I shivered.
Even as I stepped forward, even as the water began to cover my face, I still lifted my head uselessly as if to keep my face above water to breathe.
I kept my eye clamped shut.
I moved across the river bottom, dragging cinder blocks behind me. The makeshift anchor kept my corpse from drifting away in the currents. My second attempt at crossing a river actually worked. The learning curve, though, was a bitch.
On the other side of the river, I left the bricks in the shallows and lumbered out of the water like the Creature from The Black Lagoon. I kept my eye closed until I was safely on the shore.
I know that the water is there, but the chasm of nothingness is too much for me. It made my head swim. As zombies go, I was kind of a pussy.
Standing in the middle of the highway, I stared west toward Blakefield, toward Elise. I checked my pocket to make sure I still had the pass key card. It was still in my pocket. I had lost my gun, my backpack, my eye and my life, but I still had the cheap piece of plastic. Oh, and my samurai sword.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I staggered west.
I'm coming, Elise.