The End

At nighttime, in an alley, two weeks after the Zombie Apocalypse began, a zombie
clutched a woman by the shoulders and sank his teeth into the flesh of her face in the unremitting
quest to end his emptiness. Had there been any witnesses, they would have said there was a
strange air of intimacy in the act: he seemed to know her, and she closed her eyes as if she were
surrendering to his will, making the brutal act seem almost like a kiss, as all-consuming and
passionate a kiss as there could ever be. Her last sigh sounded oddly like pleasure, even mixed as
it was with pain – like the sound made, perhaps, by lovers denied each other, or who are facing a
long separation; a sound of longing and regret and desperation.
But of course the only hunger there was for brains.

He shuffled down the road, looking for victims. Rather, listening for them; the sense of
hearing was always the last to go. He had some vestige of sensation in his body, but only so much
as to recognize that something was in his way. He saw shapes vaguely through a mist covering his
eyes. The only scents he recognized were blood and fear, and then only when he was eating; the
new flesh, closer to life than his own, still remembered what it last experienced. He didn't digest
it - there was nothing working under his skin, beyond his decaying muscles - merely assimilated
it into the hollows of his self, and when the process was complete he remained as undead as ever.
Occasionally he managed to consume someone's brains, and then with the stolen memories he
could actually, for a time, think. It was not a pleasant experience to think about what had
happened to him, but luckily such was not necessary. He could turn his thoughts towards his
body, the way it felt with new life coursing through it - how complete, how alive it was - and ride
the experience out to the full. The sensation was like a drug, or what a drug was to a living
person, and deep in whatever subconsciousness he possessed after the brain's effects had
dissipated the desire to regain that high remained. It registered mostly as hunger. A gnawing,
absolutely compelling hunger.
There was movement down the street: someone had hit a trash can, and was running
away from it. He shuffled faster towards the sound, obeying the call of his hunger. He stretched
out his arms, trying to reach his unseen prey.

Hungry. He was hungry. He had no concept of time, not any more; he knew only that it
had been too long since he had eaten, and he was hungry.
He took one step, and another; countless and meaningless, fading into the feeling of
uncomprehending hunger. To either side of him, deserted grocery stores, bakeries, and cafes lined
the streets, but he paid them no heed. None of them contained food for him. He kept on walking
until he was past the line of buildings, standing on one of the roads at an empty intersection. The
sudden change of scenery was abrupt enough to penetrate the fog of his semi-awareness. He
turned his head slowly, trying to locate another noise to tell him where his prey might be.
There was a crash, and one of the nearby window-displays shattered. A woman half
jumped, half fell out of it, her limbs cut and bloodied by the jagged glass shards. He smelled her
before he saw her, and she didn’t see him at all: she was looking behind her at the shop she had
just exited, where several zombies were vacillating uncertainly, unable to figure out how to
navigate around or over the half-tall display platform. He lurched towards her, arms outstretched;
she fell against him. For a moment they looked at each other, unmoving.
There was fear in her eyes, but maybe something else – a recognition he was different? –
as she looked at him. Something throbbed, painfully, in the region that had once been his chest.
Perhaps she felt it. She pushed away from him as he staggered in confusion. When he looked up
again, she was gone.

He stood behind a dumpster, listening to a group of living humans talking. She was there;
he recognized her voice. He was hungry, but the hunger wasn’t as strong. There was a different
sort of pain, of longing, that he couldn’t quite grasp, that stayed curled in his chest. Hearing her
voice soothed that pain, but it always came back worse than before. He had taken, therefore, to
following her around. There wasn’t much that he could really understand, but he knew one thing:
when he was around her, he wasn’t as hungry.
He shuffled closer to the edge of the dumpster and craned his neck to look at the humans.
He could recognize her now, the way she walked and stood, even though everything fuzzed
around the edges. There was a sharp gasp from one of the humans and they started running away,
but for her. She stayed a moment longer, staring at the dumpster as if she could see right through
it, could see him crouching there with his heart thudding in his ears. He took a deep, rapid breath.
Did she know it was him?

Her name was Marie.

He knew it now. The humans still stuck to the notion of names. Marie. It wasn't a name
that he would easily forget.

He wasn’t often hungry now. Not for brains. Every now and then, if he hadn’t eaten for a
few days, or if he smelled fresh blood, he got the urge to slaughter and mangle. But otherwise he
was in control of himself.
He could think, and he spent a lot of his time doing so. He tried to think of what he could
do. Was there a cure for being undead? Even if there was, he’d been undead for some time. Would
it work on him? Turn him fully human? Or would he always remain part zombie?
He’d been human once, he remembered.
His name was Arthur.
And he wanted to be human again, to be with her. Marie.

He waited until she was alone to approach her. She eyed him warily, but made no move
to run away. She recognized him, and though she wasn’t sure – nobody ever really knew with
zombies – she felt that he wouldn’t hurt her. He seemed to know who she was, in any case.
“Marie,” he said.
She almost didn’t catch it. The sound was so hoarse, yet so glottal, so moist that it didn’t
seem like a voice at all, let alone her name. She wasn’t sure how to react. A part of her crawled
with disgust at the sight of the partially-decaying creature and his sprayed syllables. Another part
of her told her that this was a zombie, a predator, something to be feared. Yet another part of her
said that this particular zombie had never done anything to her, and he was trying so hard to speak
to her that he seemed almost pitiful. She smiled hesitantly. “Y-yes?”
“Aaaarthurrr.”
Again another sound that could have been an incoherent roar. But Marie was certain that
he had just said his name. “Ar…thur?” She repeated. “You still know your name?”
He nodded. She understood.
“Howww are you?”
That was fairly clear, she thought. “I’m… fine, I guess.”
“Fine?”
She nodded firmly. “Yes, Arthur, I’m fine.”
 “Not… scared?”
“Yes. No. I’m not scared of you.”

He continued to meet with her, and she wasn’t frightened of him. Why would she be? For
a zombie, he looked almost human. He did look dead – there was no getting around it – but he
wasn’t dropping gobbets of flesh as he walked, and he wasn’t trying to eat the brains of the
nearest living object. He merely looked… cold. Stiff. And sometimes he had difficulty wrapping
his tongue or his brain around fiddly concepts. That didn’t mean they couldn’t do things together.
He helped her gather food and clothing from various empty establishments, found her shelter
from the elements, and kept watch over her as she slept. He had no needs of his own, save to be
with her.
All things considered, he was happy with the way things were.

They were looting a shop when the zombies came. He was at the back, trying to pry a
freezer door open when he heard her voice shriek his name.
“ARTHUR!!!”
He ran as fast as he could towards her. She was standing with her back against a
revolving rack of candies, a broken giant candy cane held in front of her like a weapon. In front
of her were several zombies, gnashing their teeth and getting in each other’s way as they all
struggled to grab at her living flesh. With a cry, Arthur launched himself at the zombie nearest
Marie, barreling it out of the way with his shoulder as he snatched Marie to him and fled with her
out of the shop.
They ran, panting, hardly daring to look back until they were fit to drop.
“You’re bleeding,” Marie said suddenly. Arthur looked at his shoulder, not quite
comprehending that he had been bitten, as Marie took out a pilfered handkerchief and bound up
the wound.

When night fell, Arthur and Marie had dinner at an empty house. They watched the
zombies chase after unwise humans. Life was so difficult nowadays.
But they had each other.
“We’ll be okay,” Marie whispered. “As long as we’re together.”
Arthur nodded in silent assent, drawing her closer to him. “I love you,” he said.
She smiled, and he smiled, and it seemed just then that everything was perfectly alright as
they pressed themselves together for a kiss. Their story was just beginning.

‘Til Death

Author’s Notes: This is a palindromic zombie love story. I hope, with this most recent rewrite, it’s obvious. I just keep
getting echoes of Warm Bodies (which I have neither seen nor read) and Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (which I *have*
read, repeatedly) claiming love to be nothing more than an extreme hunger and desire to subsume another into oneself.

Disclaimer: The premise of this story was originally my little brother's, one of the ideas he pitched to his professor for
his Creative Writing class. He wondered how he could bring a twist in, and when he figured he couldn't, took the bunny
to me for input. I thought awhile, gave him a solution and went to bed. But the next day I woke up on fire with this full-
blown image - I knew EXACTLY how to write this - and he was not so enthused. I decided to go ahead and write my
version. It would be interesting to see how our different personalities and styles shape our versions of what is
essentially the same story.
The idea of having “The End” as a “title” and clue as to the palindromic nature of this story belongs to Benj
Tanchuco, one of my betas. I’d had trouble with the clues and this solution best appealed to me.