The Hermit

“Yes, it’s a real childhood fantasy,” the ragged stranger said cheerfully.
“I’ve always wanted to live off the land, in the wilderness, just me and the trees.”

He grunted slightly as he tugged at the makeshift spear, which had previously been a particularly straight and sturdy branch, and was now sharpened at both ends, though one side was noticeably more pointy and bloody.

“I guess I didn’t imagine these buggers, but it adds a little spice to life when hermitting gets old. Hermitting. Is that even a word? I guess my language is slipping after spending three years talking to myself. No matter. It serves it purpose.”

He carefully wiped his spear clean and strapped it to his back with a thong of braided deer hide. Stooping, he picked up his discarded club. Carefully, almost lovingly, he wiped the gore off of this tool, which appeared to be a dense length of wood, split at one end and wrapped in leather at both ends. At the split end, an egg shaped river rock was bound snugly into the crotch. This he hung at his belt before grunting again as he bent down and grabbed the carrion by the legs and began dragging it.

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you. It doesn’t happen very often that I run across somethin’ on two legs that isn’t one of them.”

At the word “them”, his body tightened and turned, and he hurled the corpse with surprising strength into a shallow ditch. “They” had been men once, but the blood-borne disease had killed them. The infected always got back up again, walking jerkily, the virus continuing to fire neurons in a grotesque and highly ordered twitch. The common pathways and well worn tracks in the brain were most frequently activated, resulting in the walking and sometimes running of the animated corpses. Other common activities could be seen as well. In my flight from the city, I saw a dead man playing an acoustic guitar. I caught a riff of actual music over the wheezing of the corpses. I saw another corpse attempting to masturbate, despite the fact that its bottom half had been hewn roughly away at the hips.

"Everything these things do, they do simply because they had done it frequently before. There is nothing human left. No thought or reason. These things are dead."

The twice dead corpse finished rolling into the ditch which, after a closer look, turned out to be filled with bodies in various states of gore and decay. Some had bulging bellies from gorging on human flesh. Nobody's sure why they hunger for the living. I suspect that common, everyday hatred translates a little more violently in the form of pure nerve impulse.

Many were missing lips, either chewed off by another zombie or lost in biting through things that aught not be bitten through, leaving the faces locked in a gruesome smile.

“I burn them when I start smelling them back home. I don’t get many wandering through here, but they stink something awful. Their bellies swell up and burst open in the sun, and if you thought rotting dead people were odious, you should get a whiff of rotten dead eaten people.”

I noticed that every corpse in the ditch had died in a similar fashion. It seemed the stranger had developed a technique. I guess he caught me looking because he grinned and said, “I found a good way to kill ‘em. I think you might have noticed that they’re rather stupid, and if they’re anything more than stupid, they’re hungry. Shit!”

A sudden rustle to the right interrupted him. From behind a skinny tree, a considerably well decayed woman dragged her body toward us. The club leapt into the stranger’s hand and his body snapped around to face her.

“Oh good," he said, relaxing. "It’s a rotten walker. If it had been a fresh one, we would have been fucked. I haven’t spoken to a soul in ages, so I’ve been jabbering too much and listening too little.”

He returned his club to his belt. She shambled closer.

“No more of that. From now on, we’ll talk when we’re safe.”

She shambled closer.

“But this is convenient, because this means I don’t have to drag another body for a quarter mile. I was saying, I found a good way to kill them. They’re stupid, right? And second to stupid is hungry.”

I could here the wheezes. All the corpses perform this charade of life to varying extents.

“So what I do is take this pole here.”

He whipped the heavy bough from his back with remarkable speed and jammed the blunter side into the ground.

“I sink one end into the ground, and then I point that end at them and stand here.”

She was close enough that I could smell her fetid breath. I could see she had been a white woman of around forty, probably a middle class mother. She had brown, shoulder length hair, though a few patches had been torn out violently, and bloodily. On her left hand ring finger was a gold band. Her right hand ring finger was missing.

“I point this at their chest, at about shoulder level.”

The point jabbed the flesh, and the stink of stagnant blood filled the air as a near-black ooze escaped the wound. She continued walking forward, her light blue eyes locked on the bearded stranger.

“They have to push a little to get it in past the rib cage. This can take a little while.”

The woman jerked her body on the well worn spike, but the lethargy caused by her level of entropy seemed to disallow penetration.

“Sometimes they’re too rotten. You have to remind them they’re hungry. I like to talk to them. That seems to work well. Isn’t that right, you filthy cunt? Bitch whore horse-fucker shit fuck bitch cunt shit.”

The woman seemed to react slightly, almost animally, her wheeze becoming a grunt, her arms flailing forward, her eyes bulging and her broken teeth grinding. She thrust herself forward, and with a pop and crunch, the well worn spike slid cleanly into her chest. More of the black ooze spurted into the air. She was only four feet away from us at this point.

"The ladies seem to react to those words. I have a different set for men. Something about the way we're wired. Rage seems to be one of our more basic emotions. "

Then the grisly inward progress jerked suddenly to a stop.

“That’s the spine. I used to miss it a lot when I started doing this, but I don’t miss anymore. I do this whole thing as a precaution. These buggers can do some nasty surprising things, and I don’t want to get bitten.”

The woman struggled toward the man, eyes glaring now, teeth gnashing, rotten gore dripping down her lipless face.

“The angle of the pole reaches the spine just above the nerve branch leading to the arms, leaving her… WHORE!!! Paralyzed from the neck down.”

The woman gave one last jerk forward at the word, and a wet crunch filled the air and turned my stomach. I swallowed bile as the woman collapsed at the feet of the man, who drew the club once more, and took one stride forward, letting the heavy club trail behind his body slightly, as though winding up.

I never noticed how the grimace of these dead people can look like terror. The woman gnashed her teeth again, eyes wide, bulging, staring as the heavy stone head slammed into the right side of her head, shattering her skull, liquefying her decrepit brain, and sending almost the entire head (not the parts that splattered) spinning into the ditch. He tossed the club aside and placed both hands on the spike.

He grunted slightly as he tugged at the makeshift spear, and it slid wet and sticky from the woman’s chest. Carefully, he wiped the thick black blood from the spear, then stooped to retrieve his club.

“Yes, it’s a real childhood fantasy.”