The third and fourth zombies to join our group happened a month later. The third guy was a tall man who looked like he was a lawyer or something of the sort in his pre-zombie days. The suit he wore was mostly in scraps now, but he still had all of the buttons done up the front of his shirt and jacket. Never mind that he didn't have sleeves any more.
He started following me last week when I began dropping packets of baking ingredients. He caught his first bag of flour, ripped into it and ate to his heart's content. A week later he found me again, flour still all over his head, face and chest. He looks a right clown, but there wasn't anything I could do for him until he became self-aware. I made a mental note to help him clean up when that happened.
I'm now feeding him and a younger guy, a high school student by the looks of him. He arrived after Flour Guy got distracted with all the good tasting flour and lost sight of my team and I. This younger guy, he looks like a sports jock, most likely played basketball from the type of shoes I found him in. Not leather, thank goodness, or Little Bean might have stolen them already and added them to his growing collection in my space.
The puppy dog often disappears for hours at a time and arrives back with a shoe or two in his mouth, and maybe a third dragging by the laces behind him. He's become quite proficient at shoe hunting, the little snot.
Basketball kid found a bottle of tomato sauce that had popped out of my space, but because it was made of glass, it broke as it landed on the street, but that didn't seem to stop the young kid. I realised that he'd get his mouth all cut up if I didn't take care of it, so I pulled out another glass bottle of tomato sauce, opened up the top and handed it to him. He began chugging that back, swallowing slowly and making a mess. I then used the old switcheroo trick on him, like I used to use on Little Blue to get my tinned cans back. Give them something easier to eat and take back what they can't eat while they aren't concentrating. It's become a regular thing now, with the zombies that follow me around.
Not with Little Blue or Little Bean, not them. Well, not anymore. These two are the ones that have picked up the unspoken group protocols and are helping me in the same switcheroo procedures. They then hand me back the stuff that wasn't supposed to pop out of my space in the first place.
Like this we moved through the city, collecting pet food, bodies of water and – surprisingly – carved and uncut jade to help with the expansion of my space. Little Blue just handed me a small shopping bag half-full of jade necklaces from the strip mall shopping area that we'd just passed. It went into my backpack that I'd started wearing, as I didn't want to throw something like that into my space just yet. Not until we made it to a more secure position so I could stay safe while my space upgraded and I blacked out.
The weather has been somewhat unpredictable lately. Not that we zombies can feel the cold and the rain, or the scorching hot sun. Being struck by lightning isn't on my life's bucket list. But now that I was responsible for half a dozen zombies in my little group – should I call it a horde now? How many zombies makes a horde anyway? I wish the internet was still around so I could answer questions like that. Back to the weather, yes. My group really should be treated like half-baked goods, or better yet, an expensive cashmere sweater. Too much agitation can leave the item shrinking (rotting off limbs) and the wrong temperature can affect the integrity of the fibres (create further rot), much like zombies, really.
So I made sure to lead my group out of the wind and rain, especially if thunderstorms were raging about the city. Then one day, we were caught unawares in a hailstorm. If it was a normal hailstorm then I'd have nothing to worry about. But when the water particles in the air had condensed into drops the size of tennis balls and froze, when they fell, yeah, even the living would have problems running around in a hailstorm like that. It got messy.
YOU ARE READING
Zaide the Zombie (A Short Story)
Short Story~~~ A Zombie Short Story ~~~ No one told Zaide that the body he was in had issues when he first arrived as a cannon fodder in a novel about the zombie apocalypse. The development of the novel's story came as no surprize, as Zaide's body has memori...
