A Dead Awkward Age

The sweltering summer is especially unbearable for me, not to mention the endless rain, which is slowly driving me insane.

Savage pains torment my body. Everything inside me swells and bursts, so violently that sometimes I simply pass out.

Every step I take feels like a thousand nails being driven into my flesh. My calves explode, oozing meat and fat, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it.

But physical suffering can be endured. You can switch yourself off for a while.

Far more terrifying is having to go out in public.

Especially in summer.

I look ridiculous in my fur coat, sweater, warm fleece-lined trousers, and the scarf wrapped around my neck, not to mention my ushanka. When people ask questions, I give them the same concise answer: I have cancer, and this is a side effect of chemotherapy. I'm simply cold.

Even though I'm unbearably hot. But I don't want to become a laboratory rat in the eyes of everyone around me. I'd rather have my insides melt from the heat and slip out of my shell. I want to be empty, so nothing will hurt anymore.

The sun blinds me. Children draw with chalk, outlining a sleeping cat as though it were a corpse. Birds sing. Everything seems wonderful, doesn't it?

Mikhail Fyodorovich emerges from his little room far too slowly. He irritates me, even though I'm just as sluggish as he is. He places his wrinkled hand against my forehead, pulls down my scarf, examines me, then nods and lets me pass.

I don't see the point in any of this. Checking whether the person entering this place is really one of *ours*. Who else would come here? Who else smells as strongly as we do? Well, apart from the ones who've started suppurating. They smell so horribly heavy, almost like mercury, that it makes you nauseous, and yet there's nothing left in you to throw up.

Inside, as always, it's terribly dry and terribly cold. Ideal conditions. Nothing hurts, nothing rots, nobody feeds.

They sit on the hard floor, as close to the cold as possible, watching the news on television without turning their heads. They know it's me. I'm always late. Always the last to arrive.

The floor is clean, but thankfully, it doesn't smell of bleach. Familiar scents of earth and lilac linger in the air. Almost all of them spend their time far away from here. Someday I'll become the same kind of *ghoul* as they are. My bony hands will stick out of the ground, the stone slabs and tombstones will be torn away, and I'll finally have a wild, free existence.

But I'm still human, even if only in the moral sense.

I'm tied to my pointless job, to pointless bus rides, to my stinking apartment, to the noise of cars outside my window, to the people around me, alive and real. This is probably the denial stage. But the longer I put off moving, putting on my new shell, the more the realization of this unimaginable loss makes me suffer.

When I was dying, I craved emptiness. A vacuum. Not an existence inside a carcass eaten away from within.

If I were fifteen or thereabouts, I'd probably be thrilled at the opportunity to become a proper zombie. I'd join my brotherhood without a second thought. But now I've lost that youthful extremism, that madness I used to have.

The leader, whose name had worn away on his gravestone and who had long since forgotten it himself, ceremoniously hauled himself upright on what remained of his legs. He shuffled out of the room and returned with a young man, perhaps twenty years old, bound and struggling.

Alive.

We always need someone alive. It slows down the decay, keeps the brain stimulated, prevents us from sinking into melancholy.

Everyone takes their own piece. The young man's shrill screams don't bother anyone, of course. Besides, after a little more than five minutes, he loses consciousness. From fear, perhaps. Or from the shock of pain.

I get a thigh.

A good part. Always meaty, even when we get one of those skinny bastards. The taste is pungent, ordinary ground meat, really. It's only the realization that this is fucking human flesh that turns my stomach and makes me want to throw up. Unfortunately, I'm physically incapable of vomiting, so I keep chewing.

One of the zombies splits open the belly of the young man, who is barely breathing by now, and begins pulling out his intestines, as though drawing a string of sausages from a package.

The stench of shit fills the room.

Unlike my fellow undead, my body is still practically fresh. Only three weeks old. My senses haven't completely died out yet, so I can still perceive and feel what's happening around me.

And that opened belly is just revolting.

I'm not interested in the internal organs. There's nothing to eat in the lungs, the heart belongs to the leader, the liver is always tough, and everything else is simply disgusting.

Of course, being squeamish is hardly appropriate in my situation, but I'm satisfied with what I get. The limbs that come my way are filling enough.

When the feast is over, the leader drags the little carcass back outside the room's territory, and I realize that he hasn't opened the skull. He hasn't taken out the brain or crushed the victim's head.

Does that mean he wants to leave the boy somewhere on the road between final death and our kind of existence?

How much pain that split-open belly must cause...

But it shouldn't concern me.

The only thing that concerns me is my own body.

They watch me, waiting.

I'm the only one who still possesses his voice, who still owns and controls his vocal cords, unlike my mute brethren. I'm supposed to announce my decision. I'm supposed to join them already.

But I'm afraid.

"Not yet... I still have to close my bank accounts and stuff..."

Their glassy eyes and complete lack of facial expression make me uneasy. I never understand what they're thinking, how they think, what they feel, if they feel anything at all.

They're real corpses with living brains, trapped inside dead bodies, incapable of communicating with the world around them through those bodies, incapable of using them to convey anything to anyone.

And someday, I'll be like that, too.

I'll do nothing but devour living people and lie beneath the earth.

"I think I'll be going... Goodbye."

I start to get up, but чужие hands sink into my calves and drag me down. My body collapses. I stare upward at the faces surrounding me, gaunt and half-rotted, some burned, others torn apart, and I have no idea whether the fear in my eyes is visible to them.

They peel my skin away with a scalpel. Surprisingly, they do it carefully, almost tenderly.

My stomach, eaten through by worms and microorganisms, is pulled out. Everything is pulled out.

Now *that* is an experience.

First the flesh, the layer of fat, the hair, the lips, the nose.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

Not the eyes.

Please, not the eyes.

They leave my eyes intact.

To my misfortune.

Because the moment I look down, I want to scream, but I can't.

Bones covered in sinewy strands of muscle. Nothing but a skeleton, stripped of the protective shell I used to have.

Now nothing rots. Nothing hurts. Nobody feasts on my insides.