Zombie story

I strolled casually through the spoils of my herd's latest hunt, surveying our kills and some potential new recruits. They came across a small group of hikers, about a dozen or so at a campsite late at night. I had them probe the campsite's defenses with a couple of our newer members, "Shamblers" I like to call them. I watched them stumble like drunks into the tents, illuminated by the single campfire, searching for the living. First came the shouts of confusion. Then came the screams and cries. When the screams were joined by nothing more than the confident swings of hatchets crushing skulls and the occasional twang of a bowstring punctuated by an arrow impacting grey matter, I sent in the rest of the herd.

It's a common belief that we zombies are nothing more than the walking dead: mindless feeding machines trudging along until we happen across our next meal. While that does describe a good ninety percent of us, it doesn't take into account the other terrifying ten percent. As the rest of the herd stumbled closer and the living prepared for our wall of bodies marching toward them, nothing could prepare them for our Stalkers. We constantly feed to maintain our constantly decaying bodies. The dead aren't meant to walk this land, and thus we need to go to some extraordinary lengths to keep our bodies from falling apart. So we feed and feed and feed. However, when we've fed more than what we need to replace what's been lost, it turns the excess to strengthening our current forms. Eating excess muscle will make a body stronger. Eating excess lungs will provide more stamina. Eating excess hearts will give a body more energy. These were our Stalkers.

From the herd our Stalkers burst forth, surprising the campers and tearing through their line. Without a brain to limit the capabilities of their bodies, they were basically superhuman. I had six within my herd and within a heartbeat, there were six hikers dead before they even had a chance to raise their weapons. Distracted, the surviving hikers panicked and my oncoming herd took them to the ground easily.

I spotted a body twitching, its owner still clinging to life, mouth gaping, unclear if he was trying to gasp for air or scream. It made no difference to me. Several zombies were already on him, pulling at limbs and tearing into his midsection, the soft, easy spots. I shoved two aside and made my way to the skull. I grabbed a rock and delivered glancing blows to the head, attempting to break open the skull while still leaving the brain intact and its owner marginally alive. Finally, I was rewarded with a small fracture. I used my fingers to crack the skull open further and then the rock again as a lever to finish prying it open.

The first time I ate a brain, it was from a corpse dead for a couple minutes but not yet turned into one of the herd. I felt a jolt to my system, like a single neuron firing in an otherwise dead machine. The next time we descended upon our screaming, struggling prey, I made sure to go after the head first before the screaming stopped. It went against all of my instincts. After all, the belly is so much softer and easier and juicier to get into. I did it though, and I was not disappointed. Eating the brain seemed to awaken more of who I used to be. At first I was horrified by the things I'd done. After a time, I accepted my new reality. After several more brains, I began to formulate a plan for my survival.

After finishing a brain or two at the campsite to maintain my intelligence, I found the biggest body of all the campers. I called over my lieutenants, two others I've entrusted with my brain-eating secret. We gathered around it along with the Stalkers, already feasting. Around us, the Shamblers munched on the other corpses. "Any issues?" I asked as I always do after a kill.

"No problems at all. We lost just over a dozen Shamblers, but nothing we won't be able to replace within the next two or three hunts, depending upon how many more campers are left in these woods," replied Curtis before biting into an arm. I could see that there was more on his mind so I stared at him until he started talking again. "I say it every time, but we can overrun the Breathers. We are stronger, faster, smarter. It will be easy."

"Delusions of grandeur," I mumbled, cracking a femur in half and sucking out the marrow. Curtis growled at me. Several heads turned to face us for a second before going back to feeding. The rest of the heads never even looked up from their meal. "Your entire grandiose plan of overthrowing the living is a pipe dream." I looked to my other lieutenant and the Stalkers around our corpse. "I propose instead that Curtis get all the brains from the next kill just so he can see how stupid his plan really is."

Curtis shoved me and I went tumbling backwards. I stood up and dusted myself off, a useless habit as I was perpetually covered in filth not to mention the constantly rotting flesh. I was regretting my choice of making Curtis one of my lieutenants, a problem I would need to deal with sooner rather than later. "Taking out The Breathers by force won't work, not yet. We don't have the numbers yet to overrun them. We need to keep them in fear of the Shamblers and not let them know about us or the Stalkers until it is too late for them to do anything about it. If they discover us and start killing us en masse, we'll need to start rationing the brains. After all, eating one ensures one less body to join the herd."

Curtis abandoned the corpse and moved toward me. I could feel the tension grow as this might ultimately come down to a fight for control of the herd. Before either of us could make a move though, gunfire erupted from the trees, muzzle flashes bursting like supernovas in the midnight darkness. I watched the herd drop to the dirt, heads exploding and chest cavities erupting. Rifles clicked empty when Curtis ran into the darkness toward the rifles. First came one scream, then another. Curtis was not as fast or strong as our other Stalkers but he was still faster and stronger than a living body. I heard empty magazines release and new magazines lock-in before the empty ones hit the ground. Gunfire started again, but they would be lucky to hit him, having only returned the rest of my herd to the ground with the element of surprise.

Unlike Curtis though, I was a survivor. I didn't have the same kind of pride that he did when it came to being one of the herd, one of the undead. I didn't care about surviving a battle only to die in the next. I wanted to live. I sprinted into the trees to find Curtis tearing into a soldier with his bare hands. I pounced. He turned in time to see me in the air and raised his arms to catch me. Curtis probably feasted on more muscle in his time as one of the undead than I had, but I definitely ate more of the brains. I raised the two halves of the femur and pierced them through his palms, driving his arms away from his body and pinning them to the ground. I pulled another sharpened bone from my belt and stabbed him through the eye and up into his brain. I just shook my head. Always doing things with his bare hands, I thought, when even monkeys are known to use tools.

I stood up and raised my empty hands. Slowly I turned, smiling, which was probably a bad idea considering the rotting flesh and the blood, both wet and dry, staining myself and my tattered clothing. Not to mention the smell coming off of me.

"Sir, should we shoot it?" said one of the soldiers.

"I don't know," another responded, "I'm not even sure what it is."

"I wouldn't," I said, adding my own voice to the discussion. "My name is Frank and I'm sure you've got superiors that would be very interested to talk to someone like me."

It's been a really, really long time since I've written published anything here. I did fall off for awhile, but I haven't fully stopped writing as evidenced by the dozens or so draft posts and half finished stories littering my notebooks. Recently a couple of my friends starting putting up creative things they've been working on, so that inspired me to quit procrastinating and start working with this thing again. I'll probably do another rambling useless post later about what it's like to start writing again after a such a long time. For this story, I got the prompt from Reddit, "Zombies are real, but they aren't what people usually think..." (I don't feel like typing it all out). Zombie stories... I feel like I'm supposed to say something about zombie stories. There's so many, and so many types. I was just reading Monster Hunter International (reminding me, I should really do those reading list posts again) and they covered a whole bunch of undead-type monsters. I tried to clean it up a bit from what I originally posted on Reddit. I still couldn't really figure out an ending I'm happy with, besides those guys shooting him dead. There's been a bunch of these horror-type prompts recently, so hopefully in the theme of Halloween I can write a couple more of them.