Dead Awakening by Whitney R. Holp

Outside it seemed the entire world had gone mad. Panic was rampant, insanity a plague; the television was filled with reports of riots, random carnage, murder and mayhem… and something about an abandoned zoo. They were saying the dead have risen from their graves and now walk the streets. Scientists are baffled by the outbreaks, particularly this “reanimation syndrome.” Police continue to deal with the outrageous phenomena, but for now chaos prevails. Citizens are advised to seek shelter immediately, if they have not done so already.

Susie yawned and clicked off the TV. She was glad she could stay at home. She hadn’t gone out in days, nor did she intend to. She was going to wait out the storm, wait for the dust to clear, and then she could reunite with Barry and they would both move on together. She had not seen or heard from him in days; he said it was best they stay away from each other for a while, just so nobody got suspicious. And then the world seemed to turn itself upside down.

Finally he called a couple hours ago, around noon, to see if she was okay. She didn’t know why he bothered, it was obvious he was drunk. It was like he was harassing her now, as if trying to remind her of what a terrible thing they did, rubbing her face in it instead of affirming the solidarity of their love. Eventually she just hung up on him and cried on the floor beside the phone. On the radio they were saying an unreported asteroid crashed into Earth last week, landing in one of the planet’s many deserts, and a mysterious contagion began issuing from its fractured shell. Like any virulent bacterium, it spread quickly, infecting everyone, everywhere… stay tuned for more details.

Susie decided to get drunk then, her daily routine now. She took the bottle into the bedroom where she sat on the floor and started methodically carving up her entire wardrobe while she drank. She had a curved needle and some thread with which she would reassemble it all afterward in random and totally bizarre configurations.

This was all his fault, Barry’s. It was his idea in the first place, to kill Ryan and collect the insurance money and run off together, someplace far away, where no one knew who they were, and no one would bother them. The sort of scheme one found in a penny dreadful potboiler, but that didn’t make it any less feasible, and rather daring too. With over forty grand they could live for a long time somewhere down south like Mexico or Colombia. She was still young yet, she still wanted to have fun and be wild and crazy too.

It was just their luck that after learning of the affair Ryan decided to kill himself, thus saving them the trouble. Susie might have expected this, for she knew he had loved her with a quiet but fierce devotion. However, as a Catholic, she now worried he was damned to eternal Hell because committing suicide is a sin against the sanctity of his soul. But she was glad they didn’t have to murder him, for she certainly didn’t want to go to Hell. Murder is the utmost blasphemy upon God’s creation, ten times worse than shitting on money.

Susie thought perhaps it was time they took a break. Things between her and Barry got rather heated and out of control very quickly. He came along at just the right time in her life when she was feeling uncertain and questioning herself. Barry swept Susie off her feet, making her feel beautiful and desired, and they fell into a kind of delirious passion, trysting away the early mornings, late summer afternoons, and in the evening during their walk, whenever, like teenagers. They did things together she never could have done with Ryan.

She really did have the best of both worlds with those two, while it lasted. Ryan knew nothing about her liaisons with Barry and that was good, because it would have broken his heart. But it was the only way. She had needs, needs which he was incapable of satisfying. He was too intellectual, always trying to be a gentleman. It seemed he preferred discourse to intercourse, and though their conversations were doubtless among the most fascinating she ever had, they proved to be all so essentially hollow and meaningless, a glittering mosaic shell concealing the abysm behind their relationship.

Sometimes she missed him though, strange as he was. If he were still alive she would leave Barry, having learned from what she did. But it was too late to lament the past, too late for regrets, what’s done is done. Ryan was dead – deceased, departed, perished, passed away, in the ground, feeding the worms, her late fiancée killed by a self-induced automobile rollover. Relinquish the memory, for what once ate shall now be eaten. Let the dead sleep and the living bleed.

The days and hours passed and Susie stayed at home. Caught in a dull orbit like that of a tide, her thoughts waxed and waned as she cycled in and out of consciousness, drinking and dreaming, waiting for the phone to ring – either Barry again, or the police – the television, the radio, and some red (wine and pills) keeping her company all the while. Everything would calm down and return to normal, then she and Barry would reunite and escape from here. Everything would be all right. That’s what he told her. On the phone, the last thing he said: “Be cool, babe. Everything will be all right.”

Sometime during her intermittent slumber, Susie surfaced enough to hear a scratching at her window, but gave it no further attention, rolling over and closing her eyes again. Just a tree branch, she thought, forgetting that there were no branches near the window in this room. Then there was a tapping upon the pane: gentle, insublimous. Susie lay there perfectly still, wide-awake now, listening in the dark. Sometime later there was a stirring at the front door, the creaking of hinges as it opened. Panic swept through her like a cold wind. Before turning in she had forgotten to lock it! Oh curses! Of all the things to forget…

And then she heard footsteps, creeping down the calm. She squeezed her eyes shut and told herself, This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this is just a nightmare. But she heard the floorboards creak, and the sound of rotted fabric dragging along the hardwood, and the squishing of feet, it was getting closer. Frantically she begged herself, Wake up, wake up! But it was too late now: there was someone in the doorway. Susie could feel the presence standing there, motionless; she could feel it watching her. She heard the voice first, a hoarse, seething baritone emanating from the dredges of a throat clotted with gravel and wet leaves –

“…I’ve come home… my sweetest…”

And then she opened her eyes to behold what had come for her: it was Ryan, weeks dead, now risen. By some deviant miracle he walked. The trauma of his death and subsequent deterioration evidently had no effect upon him. His whole skeleton was crooked and out of joint, autopsy stitches Y-ed their way across his chest, she could see maggots bulging under his skin, blisters bubbling, breaking and peeling off. The air filled with the stink of corruption as he crossed the threshold, entering the room, one leg dragging slightly as he shambled toward her, a vacant look of mindless hunger in his sunken eyes as he stretched out his arms for one final embrace.

“…I’ve come back for you…”

Susie skittered across the mattress to the dresser on the other side and reached into the drawer for her sewing scissors. Then she turned to face him as he came, her arm raised to block the bared teeth that sank into her tender tasty white flesh as he fell upon her. She screamed and swung the scissors, stabbing into his eye and shoved him off, the twin blades sticking out of his face. He cried out horribly and staggered backwards away from her, hands clutched to the wound seeping translucent fluid. Half-blind he stumbled over the settee behind him and crashed into the full-length mirror hanging on the wall nearby; it shattered beneath him as they fell.

Susie looked down at her bitten arm. The teethmarks seeped blood, and from it came an itch – like poison ivy or rabies, like an aphrodisiac – she could feel it, something that swept through her veins, rapidly suffusing her until she felt it through her whole being, even in her teeth – especially the teeth – and suddenly she had the desire to bite something as well. And she looked over to Ryan – poor, fallen Ryan – thrashing around amid the shards and splinters moaning yarbled gibberish and suddenly he seemed to her as potentially delicious and she pounced on him, biting into his neck – with teeth she once had cosmetically sharpened – and then ripped it wide open.

Blood sprayed everywhere – but weakly because he was dead and his heart no longer beat – and he bit her back, bit her arms, shoulders, and ribcage, he showered her with bites and she did the same, using her teeth as well as her nails to tear at his skin viciously, tearing ragged trenches, and in the midst of it something sharp and hard pressed against her belly and she looked down – a rotted slick lasciviously tonguing her ear – and she saw the twisted shrap of iron embedded in his thigh – metal from the car crash – this piece of steel in place of his member, which was ruined in the accident – she opened her legs to its probings, drawing up her knees, ankles around his back, and pulled him down as he thrust into her, penetrating at last – the metal slid in razor clean, every inch deep, and she pressed herself onto it, embracing him feverishly.

They were overcome by the frenzy of a fire feeding itself, consumed in the delirium of desire awakening such that they might never have experienced otherwise – they were wet and slipping with the bodies that gushed from multiple wounds – teeth tearing off chunks of flesh, they devoured each other as they fucked with a necrophagous fervor, and by the end of the night they were little more than ragged skeletons, still gnawing each other’s bones, and the world continued to end around them, indifferent to their frenzy.

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