Necrocide

Chapter 24

Aaron did what he liked to do most when he returned home from a terrible day: take a long, warm shower. He stood still as the water crashed down against his bare body, washing away the dry blood from his previous wounds. Normally he would've been disgusted by how red his bathroom floor was, but the comforting warmth of the water combined with the fact that he survived an encounter with one of the most dangerous Abnormals in the Dead Zone made his worries vanish for a moment. Watching the crimson flow down the drain nearly made him feel like his mistakes were finally disappearing from the memories of his fellow inhabitants. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Twenty minutes later, he stepped out of the shower and turned the water off, immediately grabbing a towel. He put on a new pair of jeans and remained shirtless for a few extra minutes as he waited for his top half to dry. He sat down on his bed, turned on the radio, and started doodling in his journal to pass time.

He skipped past the drawings of Bloodletter he'd sketched the night before and stopped at the next blank page he found. He quickly sketched the top halves of Harry, Jade, and Kyle, adding detail to their hair and clothes. He drew Harry with his messy brown hair and his torn shirt with the sleeve dangling off. He didn't add shading to his eyes to make them look lifeless, but he drew Harry with a friendly smile, completely contradicting from any other drawing of Deadmen. He loved how each element of Harry's face compared to his nature, portraying him as the animalistic yet affable individual he'd known him to be so far.

He then moved on to drawing Jade. Now that he thought about it, she looked very similar to Harry. Not only did they both have messy yet surprisingly pretty brown hair, they both had tears in their left sleeves. Even their ragged shirt and jeans were almost the same color. The only difference was that Jade had a bite mark on her neck whereas Harry didn't seem to have one anywhere. Just like his drawing of Harry, he gave Jade an amiable smile and drew her hair as if wind were blowing against it.

He finished off the page with an illustration of Kyle. Of the three, he looked the most different. Unlike Harry and Jade, he had a clean buzz cut instead of a bush of hair, almost as if getting a haircut was the last thing he did before he turned. He wore a hoodie that hardly had a single drop of blood on it, and the only sight of blood on him was in his teeth. And unlike Harry and Jade, he was black, his skin conspicuously darker than his friends' but still pale enough to ensure his undead status. He finished off the drawing by giving Kyle a more taciturn expression since he'd never seen him smile, doing his best to emphasize his more sophisticated nature in comparison to the more relaxed attitudes of his closest friends.

He sat up and admired his work for a moment before moving on to another clean page. He quickly sketched up a quick image of Edgar staring at a gravestone. Even though it was a simple drawing of a short-lived moment, the sight of a Deadman child looking down at the resting place of a peaceful corpse sent a thousand thoughts racing through Aaron's head. In this new world infested by the undead, true death almost seemed like a blessing. There'd be no more suffering and, if it was true, there might actually be a better place for the soul to go. But what if the Deadmen felt the same way? What if they also wanted to complete their death? Was it as agonizing to be a Deadman as it was to be trapped in a country full of them?

Could a Deadman be suicidal or depressed? Can they feel positive emotions or even emote at all? Do they feel like they need a purpose? Do all of them have some kind of postmortem mission like Bloodletter suggested?

Aaron's train of thought was derailed by the sound of a booming knock at his door. "O'Connor!" bellowed Schaefer. "Open the door!"

Aaron quickly ripped out the pages containing his new drawings and stuffed them into his pocket, quickly tossing the journal back into his desk before putting on his shirt. He stuffed the gun and hunting knife into his mattress, hoping he would never have to use them, not that he'd even get away with it.