What are Little Zombies Made of?
By William Young



Published at Smashwords by William Young
Copyright 2011 by William Young




Enterprise, Alabama - Day 596
Trace Brewer squinted at the three runners as they skip-hopped toward him, a weird gallop he’d never quite gotten used to. Why they just didn’t outright run made no sense to him, but, then, neither did the fact that they were living corpses. These wretches had been alive humans at some point, capable of actual running, but death had transformed that aspect of them, too. He took a few steps back, spat out some tobacco juice in a nice, looping arc, and felt the reassurance of the stock of his Mossberg 500 shotgun against his shoulder.
Trace retreated a few more steps as the undead closed on him. He brought his shotgun up, sighted down it and picked off the middle-aged black lunch-lady-looking woman with a blast to the skull from fifteen yards, her head shattering into a thousand pieces of flesh and bone. He dropped to a knee, swiveled to the other side of the zombie group and pumped a round into the chamber. He raised the shotgun and put the sight on the teen-age skate-rat’s mid-section and blew a hole through him, collapsing him in a heap. And then he chambered another round and watched down the length of the barrel at the fifty-ish fat dude still hop-skipping toward him. Trace waited for the zombie to take three more steps and fall through the camouflaged net that hid the tiger pit, spat out a dollop of tobacco juice and stood up.
A moment later, the weights-and-pulleys attached to the ropes connected to the net yanked the undead man out of the pit and up into the air, where he bobbed and moaned beneath a street lamp pole while Trace turned circles nearby, waiting for stragglers. There were always straggler zombies with the runners, and a moment later two thirty-something brunettes covered in blood and mucus pushed through some hedges and stared at him. He popped each in the head without giving it much thought, sucked hard on the tobacco in his mouth, and spit onto the ground.
“Fucking zombies are so stupid.”
The fat man in the net above him moaned what almost sounded like “brains,” and Trace shook his head: zombies didn’t have any, so maybe that’s why they always sounded like they were moaning about them. He drove his red Ford F-150 pick-up from its hidey-hole nearby, positioned the bed under the net, and lowered the fat man into the truck, banging the undead man’s head on the metal floor and causing it - him? - to snarl for a few moments.
There was a groan from beside the tiger pit, and Trace walked over and looked down on the teenage skateboarder, a hole blown through his stomach, his backbone broken. His body was little more than a sack of undead flesh, now, but he wasn’t dead in any normal sense of the word. He scraped at the ground with his arms, trying to drag himself somewhere, his legs useless behind him. Trace spat a bullet of tobacco juice onto the zombie’s face: it would live like this for weeks, slowly drying out on the inside and mummifying. Trace had no idea if that killed it or just put the zombie in some sort of suspended animation.
He drove through downtown Enterprise, zig-zagging around the car crashes and ignoring the destroyed business district. The buildings on the west side of Main Street between College and Adams were burnt to their foundations, an attempt the previous year to burn the zombies to death en masse. The zombies had largely left downtown after that incident, but there were still plenty around, and Trace made it his job to find them. He turned onto Highway 27 and headed north out of the town and pulled off into a driveway near Lake Charles. He got out of the truck, opened the gate to pull the truck through, then closed the gate behind him. He had raided a fence supply company several months ago and hauled away a couple thousand feet chain link fence - he had been truly surprised to find the store completely stocked and untouched: every other place of business he’d seen had been looted to the shelving. But, then, you couldn’t eat fence.
Holly and Charles were idling on the front porch to the house and watched with dispassionate interest as he closed in on them. They had been part of the group harvesting the year’s peanut crops from the surrounding farms, and the yard was full of sacks of green peanuts, ready to be roasted or boiled. The farmers wouldn’t mind as they were either dead, fled or zombified.
“What’d jaget?” Charles said after Trace had popped out of the truck.
“Fat white dude. Probably a banker or a teacher before,” Trace said. “Dag still around?”
“Naw, he’n Mark went out a coupla hours ago to look for salt,” Charles said.
The fat white zombie in the bed of the truck began rustling in the net. Charles walked over to the side of the truck and looked at the living corpse. It stank of death.
“Whatcha gonna do with this one?”
Trace smiled. “Gonna bleed it out and see what happens. C’mon, help me get it out to the barn.”
The barn wasn’t a real barn, but a large garage that was painted red and had a black shingle roof. Someone’s idea of an aesthetic joke; probably the rich couple that had lived in the house alongside the over-sized pond called Lake Charles. Molly and Wallace Cheever had fled or died last year like everyone else in the Wiregrass region of Alabama, leaving behind a richly-appointed McMansion that Trace and Dag had turned into a squatters hellhole before saving Holly and Charles from a group of zombies in the spring. Those two had taken to keeping the home in decent order, which would’ve struck Trace as odd for teenager behavior had he ever bothered to think about it. He hadn’t noticed that the house had been falling into squalor nor that it had become neat and tidy on a daily basis since their arrival.
“Alright, now, le’s be careful when I open the net, this one’s a fastie, so he might spring up right quick and try to bite you,” Trace said as he tilted the wheelbarrow onto the concrete floor and the zombie rolled onto it with a thud. It snarled and wriggled inside the net.
Trace grabbed the noose pole from a hook on the wall and readied it for action while Charles slipped his hands into some thick canvas gloves that came well up his forearms to just short of his elbows. Holly hefted the shotgun and made sure a round was chambered and the three of them all quickly looked between each other to ensure they were ready. Charles undid the fastening at the top of the net, pulling it down quickly and creating a large opening, exposing the fat zombie’s head and shoulders. The creature writhed more quickly sensing its freedom was at hand, but it came to naught as Trace quickly slipped the noose down around its neck and tightened it, maneuvering the pole while Charles continued to undo the net.
“Now get the other pole on it right quick afore it gets all stood up,” Trace said.
A moment later, the man and teenager had the fat zombie double-noosed and were fighting him back toward a barbershop chair Trace and Dag had removed from Atkins Barber Shop three days earlier and bolted to the floor of the garage. The zombie was strong and struggled against them. That was the only advantage Trace had yet figured zombies had - they were incredibly strong. And durable. If you didn’t take the head off in some manner, they were also more-or-less indestructible.
They were almost to the chair when the zombie stopped fighting against both of them and inexplicably set all its weight and momentum against Charles, pulling Trace off-balance and adding his weight to the maneuver, as if the zombie remembered some Judo training from its life of being alive. Charles had been a skinny kid before the zombie apocalypse, and his diet since then had only made him leaner and weaker, a disadvantage the zombie was now exploiting. Trace could see the fright in Charles’ grimace as he watched the zombie claw the air between them.
“Hold calm, Charles, he can’t get at you even if he pushes you up against the wall. You’ve got five feet of stiff ash pole between you and him, so jes keep ahold of yer end and ya’ll be jes fine,” Trace said.
Trace yanked back on his pole and the zombie stumbled, and within a few moments, the two had pushed the zombie into the chair and were pushing him against the seat back. Trace nodded to Holly and she rushed up behind the zombie and whipped a nylon tie-down strap around its chest and biceps, ratcheting the  strap tighter until the zombie was cinched to the chair. She then strapped a rubber ball gag into its mouth while it was looking at the strap across its chest. Within a minute, the trio had the zombie completely immobilized.
Trace hauled out a white five-gallon plastic bucket and a length of rubber tubing with a needle attached to one end. He slipped a folding knife from a sheath on his belt and cut open the zombie’s left pant leg, ripping a long cut in it and pulling the sides apart to expose the thigh. The zombie wriggled in the chair.
“Sit tight, you’re about to become a famous part of zombie lore,” Trace said, checking the rubber tubing’s attachment to the bucket was secure. “Today we find out if your kind can live without blood in your body.”
Holly walked over and tapped the bucket with her toe. “Whatcha gonna do to it?”
“Drain the blood out.”
“How long will that take?”
“I dunno, but there’s only a gallon or so of blood in a man, maybe more in this fatso, so it shouldn’t take long.”
Trace shoved the needle into the femoral artery and the zombie twitched, but otherwise made no notice of the event. Blood began slowly pumping out into the bucket, a reddish ooze with the faintest of yellow hues. Holly gave Trace a curious look.
“What’s the yella? I ain’t never seen any yella in blood before.”
“Beats me. Maybe it’s what makes ‘em zombies.”
Charles walked over and peered down into the bucket. “That’s a glow, not a tint.”
Holly and Trace looked at him.
“The blood in there. It’s glowing yellow, not tinted yellow. You mix yellow and red you get some kind of orange. That’s red with a yellow glow, and I’ve never seen a red that glowed yellow.”
Trace looked into the bucket and shrugged. “Fucking zombies are just fucking amazing, ain’t they? I wonder if their shit smells like lemons? That’d be a yellow glowing turd, wouldn’t it?”
Trace looked at the two with a big grin. Holly and Charles both gave him weak smiles and walked out of the garage, Charles telling Trace to let them know how the experiment worked out. Trace closed in on the zombie and stared at it for a long moment.
“Come to think of it, do you fuckers even take shits?”
Trace grabbed the recliner lever on the side of the chair and shifted it, straightening out the zombie in the chair and causing it to gurgle against the rubber ball in its mouth. A trickle of blood and mucus slicked over the black ball. Trace looked at the former man and watched as his eyes fluttered and closed. He pulled the wad of tobacco out of his mouth and dropped it into the bucket with the blood, swished spit around his mouth to move the tiny flakes into a ball, and drooled that into the bucket.
In the backyard by the lake, Trace passed by the cage with the skinny blue-eyed blonde video store clerk in it. She had been in the cage for nearly two months, stripped naked and exposed to the sun from dusk to dawn in an attempt to determine what extreme sunburn did to a zombie. He paused and looked in at her: once upon a time, she’d have been considered pretty, albeit small-chested with pencil-thin legs, but some guys dug that look. Now, she was covered with bodily fluids, her skin the same shade of dull gray it had been when he had locked her in there. He looked in the bottom of the cage and then back up at the undead woman.
“Come to think on it, you ain’t ate nothin’, so why would you?” He walked away, listening to her shuffle to the front of the cage and bump into the bars.
The last few months had been strange months for Trace. Strange not in the sense that he’d had to learn to live with zombies, that had taken some time to get used to, but strange in the sense that he had realized he had an overwhelming fascination to see what made them tick. Or, more accurately, die. Initially, he had taken to figuring out how to shoot them to death, quickly concluding that only headshots actually finished them off. Anything else left something that could still move.
But he and Dag had also realized that ammunition might get difficult to come by, so shooting was limited to actual necessity, and they had taken to capturing the undead and finding other ways to kill them. Zombies could be burned, drowned, and decapitated. Poison didn’t kill them, although it did fundamentally alter the undead’s ability to function, usually by blinding them. Injecting them with various chemicals produced similar results, but only acids seemed to incapacitate them.
He stopped briefly at the burn pit, a twenty-by-twenty square hole that was ten feet deep. Inside it were the burnt remains of a dozen of the walking dead, maybe a few more, that had been put through some experiment or another by Trace. Several of the undead hadn’t actually been dead-dead when put in the pit, and Trace had found their screams... of pain? ... to be curious and disturbing. Clearly, the undead didn’t want to die, and they felt some sense of pain, at least when lit afire. When you shot them or chopped something off, they seemed to barely notice the wound and just kept coming at you: it was the damnedest thing.
Trace heard whine of Dag’s 2005 Honda CRF250X dirt bike and turned to watch him ride in over the hill on the other side of the lake. There should have been two whines, as Mike rode a 2004 XR400R, but Trace just watched as Dag rode up to him and killed the engine, slipped off the side and steadied the bike on its stand.
“Some fucking Army sergeant zombie got Mike while we were poking around Rucker,” Dag said, fishing a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one quickly. “Fuckin’ thing came outta nowhere and fucking bit a hole in his head. I heard him scream, turned around, and shot the fucker.”
Dag brushed the hair out of his eyes and tucked some loose strands behind each ear. “Then I put a round through Mike’s skull and just got the fuck outta there.”
Dag took furious puffs on his cigarette. “On the way out, I noticed the whole fucking army was hanging out at Cairns field, just moaning and shuffling and whatever. When the hell did they come back?”
“How many?” Trace asked.
Dag shrugged. “I dunno, a thousand or two.  They were just there, where they haven’t been in weeks.”
Trace scratched his forehead. “We’re gonna have to see if we can make these things talk.”
“Talk? You’re lucky if you can listen hard enough to figure out if they’re saying ‘brains,’” Dag said.
“Yeah. But one of the things I’ve learned is that they know what they’re doing even if I haven’t figure out exactly what it is they’re trying to do. They know to come at us, not dogs nor cattle nor horses nor nothin’ else,” Trace said. “They know we’re what they’re looking for, and we know it ‘cause they’s lookin’ fer us.”
Dag shrugged, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and spoke a cloud of words. “Trace, I don’t think we’re ever going to find out why there are fucking zombies or what they want. The world’s gone and I don’t think it’s ever coming back.”
Trace looked down into the burn pit and thought for a moment about the 40ish housewife zombie that he had burned alive just to see what zombies did when on fire. He had doused her in charcoal lighter fluid and then lit her clothes on fire before pushing her into the pit, which he had already lined with dead branches and scraps of wood. The ropes around her hands and ankles had burned off and she had gotten to her feet and thrashed about in the pit as the branches caught fire, but she eventually fell onto her side and burned to ashes as he tossed in more firewood. She had been the first in the pit, and he had wondered what her life had been before she had been turned, what her kids had been like and if she had been happy.
“Dag, it jes can’t be possible that the entire world is now zombies, that the entire fuckin’ planet is now filled with walking dead people who want to turn the rest of us who are living into zombies. I mean, what the fuck happens when everyone on the planet is a zombie? What do they eat? How do they live? What’s their purpose? Shit, we’re alive and we’re killing them, so you know we’re not the only ones.”
“Yeah, but there’s now four of us and a couple thousand of them out there at Rucker. It’s probably like that everywhere. There’s not really much we can do.”
Trace shrugged. They had only known Mark about six months, but still it hurt to lose a friend, and plain old living people were hard to come by anymore. 
“Sooner or later, Dag, we’re gonna to figger out what the pattern with these things is, because there has to be one,” Trace said. “Until then, we keep capturing them and putting them through whatever tests we can think of. Eventually, we’ll find a way to kill them all in one big swoop, jes like how they all got made in one big fashion. We know we can kill them, it’s only a matter of time until we figure out the easiest way to kill them on a large scale.”
“Trace, we’re just a few guys living in the middle of Alabama. We’re not the government or some huge corporation: we don’t have any assets. Even if we figure out that diesel fuel mixed with arsenic kills zombies when they breathe the smoke from it when it’s burning, well, hell, we don’t have diesel fuel or arsenic or any way to get anything we might come up with to spread it on a large scale. We’re fucked, Trace.
“We’re fucked, and we’re going to have to live in hiding the rest of our lives.”
“That might be true right now, Dag, but you can’t know what tomorrow holds, because it wasn’t too long ago that the world didn’t have zombies,” Trace said. “If that can change that quickly, you better sure as hell believe it can change again. And I don’t see any reason not to keep killing them before they kill us. I’ll kill a hundred, a thousand, a million, all of them. Or they’ll kill me. But I’m never going to stop killing them or trying to figure how to best kill them.
“Dag, man, we used to change oil every day and rotate tires. We used to want something meaningful to do with our lives other than go to work, pay bills, and fucking hate on chicks who wouldn’t give us the time of day. Now we don’t have any of that shit. No work. No bills. No fucking chicks thinking they’re too good for us. We’ve got a calling. We’ve got something to live to do. For the first time in our lives, there’s meaning. “
Dag sucked the last smoke out of his cigarette and dropped it to the ground.
“Our lives have ‘meaning?’ Shit, Trace, I can’t even fuck Marcia Brewer on the weekends anymore after we been drinking for a couple of hours at the bar. I can’t eat hamburgers and French fries for lunch. I can’t go to the movies. I can’t do anything, anymore. I never really hated my life, Trace, I just wanted a little more than I had.
“Now, I got nothin’.”
Trace smiled slightly. “And when we kill the zombies, Dag, and you get back all that; you’ll feel like a king. Trust me: zombies ain’t the future, we are. And we’ll be some of the people who fought back, who won the war. Shit, we might even end up heroes.”
Dag cocked his head and rolled his eyes. “Trace, I ain’t never cared to be a hero. I just wanted to live a normal life.”
And then Trace laughed boomingly, suddenly realizing his friend had been holding out on him about something important to him. “And, shit, Dag, Marcia Brewer’s living in Daleville with her brother on the second floor of some shit-hole apartment flight students used to rent. And she’s skinny, now. I thought you always thought she was just a good fat fuck, I didn’t realize you liked her.”
Trace laughed again and slapped Dag on the back. “Hell, we can drive down there tomorra mornin’ and see if she remembers you.
“Now, let’s go see if this fat-fucker I’m drainin’ has bled out yet. I’m kinda curious how much blood they need to stay alive.”


Get the entire collection of 20 stories - Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse



About the Author
William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.


Also by William Young
The Signal
The Divine World (Smashwords.)
Monster (Smashwords.)