The First Zombie Page 3

the living earth as a dead man for so long. Night work was lonelier. And that might be how he managed to go for so long without realising that he had passed away. So Dave works nights. And sleeps days. That establishes when he works. And also when he sleeps. But not what he does.

  Dave works in a warehouse for a large supermarket chain. He fills shelves sometimes. He stacks pallets. He operates a forklift and accepts the odd very late delivery. He might not have chosen to operate the forklift had he known he was dead. There is a large sticker on it that says “do not operate heavy machinery when under the influence of certain medications, alcohol and/or drugs”. It goes on to say that you should not “operate when tired or feeling ill” and has some other warning notes on it that suggest you keep limbs inside the carriage and not to cross your arms while using the wheel. A sticker below that sticker says that if you do any of the preceding, it would invalidate the business’ insurance and any damage caused the operator would be liable for. You can imagine the kind of non-committal sticker. The kind that shoves the blame onto someone else to avoid liability. It didn’t say “do not operate when dead”. So if we needed to argue technicality, we could, but we won’t. It might have been implied though. “Do not operate when ill” might include the most extreme form, or end result, of the worst kind of illness. Death. But he still didn’t know that he was dead. Or at least he had not come to terms with it yet. And if he did know that he was dead, his priorities might change from caring about forklift related injury, personal damage and the like, to something more important. So that’s what Dave does.

  So, how does he do it? This won’t be a checklist or an instruction manual. Merely a few observations. It won’t be a paragraph about how to stack pallets atop one another, or how important it is to rotate dates on a supermarket shelf. Dave doesn’t consider date rotation important. It’s a western thing. If it’s edible, it’s edible. If not, don’t eat it. Dave has, or perhaps more that he had when we consider he has little memory left to recall, a similar distaste for health and safety on the shop floor. If you fall over in a supermarket, you are not entitled to compensation. It’s just because you aren’t watching where you are going. It’s your own damn fault. That’s what he thought. One of the last independent thoughts he can still grasp at. He does his job in silence mostly. With his headphones on. Listening to songs that he knows the words to. Over and over again. There isn’t much else to say about how he does it. That’s not a pivotal part of the story and has no bearing on finding out how he realised he had died.

  He finally made it to work that night. That’s right isn’t it? Yes, he must have slept in the day. He arrived at work in the evening. He felt less rested then usual and more afraid. The dead may not be able to think, but on some level, they must still be able to feel. So the dead do still feel. He was starting to sense that something was wrong. And that his war was drawing to a close. More so that something had always been wrong. Or at least that things had not been right for some time. It made him afraid. It made him afraid when he took a shovel to his own mind, to start digging, but found nothing beyond the haze and mist. He had felt like this before. Groggy in the mornings or in the evenings. Tired as the mind shuts down under excessive pressure. But not to this extent before. Knowing that he could stop, try to think, but not think. Try to challenge his thoughts only to feel them unravel under scrutiny. He still hadn’t realised that it was because he was dead. But he was starting to wonder. He couldn’t question his memory. It was no longer there in detail to defend itself. But he was, it seemed, still able to question his station. He could inquire about vagueness in the vaguest sense. Where detail escaped him. How detail escaped and why detail wanted to be free of him.

  He lifted his aching arm, bound in the peeling and old leather of the same jacket he always wore, and considered pressing the tantalising grey button that would alert the manager inside his place of work to his presence outside of his place of work. The metal shutter was down. Like the one over his glazed eyes. His arm felt wrong. Decayed. Not just tired but dead. Imagine you work out in the gym, or you climb, or you play football or rugby. Imagine you work out too much and it hurts the next day. Maybe you didn’t warm up enough and you pull something. Add the strain of the exertion onto the pain of the torn muscle and you might realise a small amount of how much Dave’s arm felt wrong. He thought, in whatever capacity remained inside of him to think, about pressing the button. About going to work and just trying to forget, try to get on with things, to continue spectating. But the medical walk in centre beside his work, the large green illuminated sign that was piercing his glazed eyes, was somehow tonight more tantalising than the throws of stacking pallets that night.

  He wanted to go to the doctor. He wanted to feel better. He would turn off the auto pilot just this once and break the routine. He couldn’t remember when he started to feel ill. Not knowing, as we know and he does not, that he is not ill but in fact dead. He let his arm fall and remembers feeling the pain the weight of the arm caused on the supporting tendon as it dropped. Was it extreme fatigue? Was it because he does not remember his last day of rest? That was what he thought when he questioned only his immediate memory as nothing beyond it would meet the blade of his shovel as he dug for it. It was because his arm, like the rest of him, was dead. It was because the pulley tendon that supported his arm was dead too and could barely hold the weight. The Doctor would answer his questions. She would put him right. Support him with crutches or splints and restore life to the lifeless. He trudged on, past his place of work in the darkness; they would have to manage without him this night, and made his direction and purpose the tantalising green cross above the door of the walk in centre.

  He didn’t like Doctors. But he didn’t even know any. He just didn’t like them. He didn’t like going to the Doctors. Not that he could remember. It was just how he felt as he took up an empty seat in the empty waiting room. Imagine your local doctor’s surgery. They all have pictures and posters up don’t they? All warning you of various diseases that you must avoid, various cancers that you must live a certain way in order to prevent. It was the same at Dave’s local walk in centre. A walk in centre for the dead. That, when worded differently or the emphasis placed upon a different part of the sentence, sounds almost like an invitation. Walk in dead. Here is where Dave realised he was dead. And thus lost his war. And thus signed his peace.

  Finally the tip of the spade hit a deeply entrenched memory. One that withstood the event of death and persevered thereafter. It bubbled up as hate spilled out of the newly broken and formerly buried box of memories. The blade of the spade sunk deep into the casket of foul memories and Dave remembered. He didn’t like his boss. That may seem a generic memory. It may seem shared by many, voiced by few, and expressed by fewer still. But it was true for Dave as much as it were likely true for others like him. He did not like his boss. But the frank realisation, though spurred him and made him proud that he could remember at all, did not help him to realise that he was dead. Though memories were few, feelings were plentiful. He was scared. And hungry too.

  The posters. Those ones the Doctors always have up on their surgery walls. The first one he saw, and he had no idea why his eyes were drawn to that particular one first, was about blood in stool samples. It could be a sign of cancer. Now, again, it might have been that he worked every day on his auto pilot system, or it might just be that his memory was fading fast for some unknown reason, and no matter how hard he dug with his spade that nothing would come back, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had been to the toilet. Even for a quick release. The thought panicked him as he sat down on that empty plastic chair in that empty white room. The panic that settled in should have made him sweat. It should have made his heart beat faster and faster. That was the usual panic response. He was used to that. He could remember that. He was always fraught with worry of this or that. Panic used to be his friend too. And it worried him more that this friend, more so than the one in his head, had been absent for just as long.
He ran his tired hand, his brittle and dryly broken skin, across his cheek to check for beads of sweat but found none. He could feel the panic but there was no physical response to accompany it. With that slight brush of the hand, he only just realised the hollowness of his cheekbones, the protruding bone along the fractured dry skin. He must have lost a lot of weight. He had walked too long in the shoes he bought from Denial. He had fought too long with thoughts of death. He was starting to think he might be dead.

  Dave looked at the next poster. Blood pressure and an irregular heart beat. His old friend, Panic, told him that his heart should be pounding out of his chest right now. But it wasn’t. He couldn’t feel it beat at all. Through the mire of his failing concentration, he thought and listened hard to hear no drum and feel no pulse. He raised the same hand and placed the same brittle fingers upon his thinning neck to check for that elusive pounding of blood through his veins. And found nothing. His old friend, Panic, present but distant, told him to worry. He asked of his