Free Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion Page A

black space, trying to swipe them up like fireflies. Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn’t been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. Maybe this is why I only sleep a few hours a month. I don’t want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it’s mine: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to disappear. I want to stay.
     

    I awake to the sound of screaming.
    My eyes snap open and I spit a few bugs out of my mouth. I lurch upright. The sound is far away but it’s not from the School. It lacks the plaintive panic of the School’s still-breathing cadavers. I recognise the defiant spark in these screams, the relentless hope in the face of undeniable hopelessness. I leap to my feet and run faster than any zombie has ever run.
    Following the screams, I find Julie at the Departures gate. She is backed into a corner, surrounded by six drooling Dead. They close in on her, rearing back a little each time she swings her smoke-belching hedge trimmer, but advancing steadily. I rush at them from behind and crash into their tight circle, scattering them like bowling pins. The one closest to Julie I punch so hard the bones of my hand shatter into seashell crumbs. His face cracks inward and he drops. The next closest I ram into the wall, then grab his head and smash it into the concrete until his brain pops and he goes down. One of them grabs me from behind and takes a bite out of my rib meat. I reach back, tear off his rotten arm, and swing it at him like Babe Ruth. His head spins a full three-sixty on his neck, then tilts, tears and falls off. I stand there in front of Julie, brandishing the muscle-bound limb, and the Dead stop advancing.
    ‘Julie!’ I snarl at them while pointing at her. ‘Julie!’
    They stare at me. They sway back and forth.
    ‘Julie!’ I say again, not sure how else to put it. I walk up to her and press my hand against her heart. I drop the arm-club and put my other hand on my own heart. ‘Julie.’
    The room is silent except for the low grumble of her hedge trimmer. The air is thick with the rancid-apricot smell of stabilised gasoline, and I notice several decapitated corpses I had nothing to do with lying at her feet. Well done, Julie , I think with a faint smile. You are a lady and a scholar .
    ‘What . . . the fuck !’ growls a deep voice behind me.
    A tall, bulky form is picking itself up off the floor. It’s the first one I attacked, the one I punched in the face. It’s M. I didn’t even recognise him in the heat of the moment. Now, with his cheekbone crushed into his head, he’s even harder to identify. He glares at me and rubs his face. ‘What are . . . doing, you . . .’ He trails off, at a loss for even simple words.
    ‘Julie,’ I say yet again, as if this is an irrefutable argument. And in a way, it is. That one word, a fully fleshed name . It’s having the effect of a glowing, talking cellphone raised before a mob of primitives. All the remaining Dead stare at Julie in hushed silence, except M. He is baffled and enraged.
    ‘Living!’ he sputters. ‘Eat!’
    I shake my head. ‘No.’
    ‘Eat!’
    ‘No!’
    ‘ Eat , fucking—’
    ‘ Hey! ’
    M and I both turn. Julie has stepped out from behind me. She glares at M and revs the trimmer. ‘Fuck off,’ she says. She links an arm into my elbow, and I feel a tingle of warmth spreading out from her touch.
    M looks at her, then at me, back to her, then back to me. His permanent grimace is tight. We appear to be in a stand-off, but before it can escalate any further the stillness is pierced by a reverberating roar, like an eerie, airless horn blast.
    We all turn to the escalators. Yellowed, sinewy skeletons are rising up one