Chapter 1

Munch, munch, munch.

What am I eating?

The sound filled my world, reverberating through my fogged up skull, the creak of my jaw beating a staccato rhythm. Throat muscles worked, swallowing a chunk of whatever I was so diligently masticating. The muscles of my esophagus pushed it down, down, until I felt it hit my stomach.

            Thoughts filtered through the murky slush of my brain. One by one, my senses came online, the process long, filled with static, like a dial up modem. With a moist pop my hearing kicked on. The first sound, the only sound, I could hear was chewing.

            My sight clicked on next. Plunging through a dark tunnel, emerging into light, bright, too bright, everything fuzzy, slowly coming into focus. Oh, oh, this, this was not cool.

            My eyes adjusted, blurring in and out of focus. I took in the tall weeds and cracked pavement beneath my feet. Twenty feet from me was a Denny's, its windows smashed in, the interior trashed, the building covered in ivy. I eyeballed the rest of the street, seeing the same degree of decay, plants encroaching on every building, swallowing them up.

            Oh, and there was a dead guy at my feet.

            "Guy" was a generous term. I stared at him, trying to process what I was seeing. The charcoal gray skin was a big tip off something was amiss. My gaze wandered to the long, multi jointed arms sprawled at his sides. Did he have two sets of elbows? Then there were the legs, nothing real special about them, maybe a little thinner than normal except, well, there were three of them, stuck out at awkward angles. Dead guy was probably not human.

            My gaze focused on his head. Definitely not human. His features were covered by a mask, the eye sockets bulbous, tennis ball size, the lower half of the mask a grid of layered slats. The rest of the head was exposed, far larger than a human skull, its gray skin a thin membrane with thick dark veins. A hole revealed a mass of glistening brain matter, colored neon grape kool-aid, spilling out at my feet.

            My feet...

            Uh...

            I wasn't wearing shoes, which was why I could see most of my toes were missing skin. Strips of shredded denim hung from my waist, not sufficient to cover the bone and rotted skin of my legs. The remains of a shirt clung to my torso. I could see veins, pieces of viscera jutting from gaps in my lower abdomen, festering holes in my rib cage. My arms were in the same rotting condition, and my hands were coated with purple slime.

            Dismay bubbled up my throat. "Bleeeeegh!" I couldn't talk. Feeling the muscles of my mouth, I only had half a tongue. What the hell! My eyes swept over my body again.

            Holy shit, I'm a corpse!

            When did that happen? How did that happen? Who was I? Between the purple slime dripping from my bony fingertips and the gaping hole in the dead guy's skull, I came to a singularly unpleasant conclusion. A tingle rose from my belly, a belly full of brains, I ate the dead guy's brains, I was a brain eating corpse.

            Just say it. Zombie.

            The tingling spread into my guts, quickly escalating to a burning sensation that swept down my legs and up to my scalp. Wrapping my bony arms around my waist, I moaned. The fire flooded my mouth, wrapping around the remains of my tongue. I couldn't scream, couldn't move. I stood there, hugging myself as the wave of pain tapered off to a feeling of ants crawling across my flesh. I chanced a glance down.

            My skin writhed, pulling, stretching. I hadn't gotten a grip on being a zombie yet so I had no idea how to react to this. Was I dying all over again? No, not dying, not again anyway. I watched a hole in my abdomen close, my entrails folding back inside as muscle grew back in place, leaving smooth, paper white skin. The process took place all over my body, muscles knitting back together, organs shifting, skin growing over bone, the advanced decay reversing. My tongue grew back.

            "Gack!" I sputtered; my voice was a rusted shriek, my vocal cords hadn't been used in who knew how long. I thought the crazy process over when it felt like a million snakes burst from my scalp. I yelped, straightening my spine as my head got heavier. The reason fell along my back and shoulders, nearly down to my waist, black hair, clean and glossy in the light.

            I patted myself down, taking inventory, leaving a few snail trails of purple slime. I was definitely a woman; a small set of breasts had reformed on my ribcage, mercifully intact. My body hadn't completely re-formed. There were still a couple of unsettling spots of exposed bone, a few toes, most of the fingers of my left hand, a patch over my ribs, right under my boobs, where I could see straight through to the what I think was my lung, except it was gray, slimy and covered with black veins. Yeah, unsettling put it mildly.

            I should hyperventilate or something, except I wasn't exactly breathing. I inhaled a few times out of habit but the dire need for air didn't register. Whatever just happened to me, I was still very much a corpse. What did happen to me? Dead guy didn't have any answers. The inside of his head was starting to smoke in the sun. My sense of smell worked just fine as a whiff of rotten eggs made me back up a step.

            The smoke was a catalyst. The dead guy began to rapidly dissolve into a foaming, vile puddle of ick. Sticking around to watch the process, considering I just reverted from an oozy corpse myself, was not at the top of my priorities. I took off; stumbling a bit, on legs not used to walking. I made for the Denny's, one because it was close and easy to get inside, and two, I knew what it was. Finding something familiar felt vital.

            The front door wasn't locked, opening with little resistance. The rusted hinges released a screech that echoed through the empty street. The sound made me flinch and look over my shoulder before I caught myself. What was I looking for? It was a wasteland. Pushing into the decrepit Denny's I immediately halted.

            A couple of the booths were occupied, the bodies closer to skeletons than simple corpses, laid out in death poses. One slumped over a table, a plate in front of him, the food long gone, rotted away to a crusty brown stain. A couple huddled together against the far wall, embracing each other, their bones melded into each other. It was hard to tell whose ribcage was whose. Behind the counter, laid out on the floor, was another pile of bones in the tattered shreds of a waitress uniform. All the bodies had one thing in common; each had a hole in their heads. Looking closer, I could see visible scrape marks inside the skulls, scooped clean.

            "Oh, that's lovely." Dead people or not, I needed to sit and figure shit out. I made my way to the counter, ignoring them; they were long dead. Not like they were real conversationalists. Hopping onto a stool, I seized a bowl of sugar packets, the outer paper weathered and faded but still intact. Plucking one from the bunch, I flapped it back and forth over my fingers, the raspy sound of the sugar somehow comforting.

            This was a familiar habit; I must have done this all the time when I was alive. That thought felt like a punch in the gut. I was a thinking corpse. Sitting there, shaking the packet, I tried to remember what happened to me, or who I was, and hit a wall.

            My memory wasn't a blank slate. There were tidbits of information, just nothing useful. I knew the cast of 'Friends", the ingredients for a Long Island Ice Tea, the lyrics from 'Rocky Horror Picture Show', and how to flip the perfect pancake, but hell if I knew my own name. I tried to visualize it in front of me, tracing letters with my bony left pointer, waiting for something to click. Went through the alphabet over and over but only two letters really stood out, L, I. Initials? Part of my first name? Was I a Lisa, or a Lizzy? Nope, just Li, Zombie Li.

            This wasn't getting me anywhere. Okay, so I couldn't remember my former life, I still needed a game plan. For one thing, freaky dissolving dead guy was not something I could remember from the pop culture flashes of life. The dude looked like a reject from a sci-fi convention....

            That bright purple brain matter, my snack at the moment of "waking", that was not of this earth. My hands still had a faint grape tinge to them. Maybe he- no don't say it! I shoved away from the counter, wondering if the water was on in this place. I wanted this purple gunk off my hands and I had a sneaking suspicion I looked like I gave a B.J. to Barney the dinosaur.

            The ladies room, blissfully free of moldering corpses, had a line of cracked mirrors, most of the sinks stained brown from the rusted facets. A tree had punched through the roof, and judging from the puddles of murky water on the floor, it must have recently rained. I braced myself, peeking into a chunk of intact mirror.

            I have a face straight out of a Japanese Horror Flick.

            My skin was white, not a natural white, paper white, my veins stood out as black squiggles all over the place. Freaky. At least there were no creepy holes on my face, I was grateful for the little things. Pretty certain my features were the only Asian thing about me; nothing really sticks out in my pop-centric memory as culturally significant other than flashes of Anime and Pocky.

Getting a good look at my reflection, my clothes were a true disaster, nothing but scraps of cloth hanging off my frame, stained with- I'm pretty sure I don't even want to know.

"Alright...Li," I talked to myself, bracing my arms on the sink. "First thing is first, you need some new threads because this is not acceptable." My voice cracked, but the more I used it the easiest it got to speak. The downside was it echoed in that decrepit, empty Denny's bathroom and my solitary status loomed up in my thoughts.

"Second thing, find other-," Other what? People, zombies? Am I a zombie? I was definitely dead. If the missing patches of skin didn't convince me, the lack of pulse sure did. Were there others like me? Or was I the only one?

That thought was royally depressing. I shoved off, exiting the Denny's, trying not to think of the poor bastards within. There was another pressing question, how long have I been dead? I could not ignore how thoroughly decomposed those bodies were, the growth of weeds everywhere. It hinted at years.

The street appeared deserted; the only sign of my lunch was a smoking stain I gave a wide berth. Did I try to figure out his deal? Nope, nope, and nope, that would be the block to topple my Jenga tower. I tried to get my bearings, at least pinpoint my geological location. Judging from the cluster of diners, businesses and hotels, I was on a strip, probably off a highway.

Rusted out cars dotted the four lane road, doors hanging wide open, interiors rotted away. Weeds pushed through cracks all over the place, nature slowly reclaiming the land. There were tons of dandelions; their yellow heads were an odd splash of color against the gray pavement.

Empty, it was so empty. There were no skeletons in the cars I could see, though I didn't look that hard. I didn't see any other lively dead people either. Where the hell did I come from? Walking was awkward, the sound of my toe bones clicking on the road made me cringe. I took up singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall", it was the longest song I could remember and it beat walking in silence.