I, Zombie

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

When the girl from the asylum drowned in the lake that night, she thought it was the end of her life, but she was wrong. With robots at fifty thousand dollars a unit, it was far more economical to use corpse labour - all it took was a two-thousand dollar animating pack in the brain, and a zombie worker, under the direction of a helmeted controller, could do just about anything except think. Or so everyone said. But in the zombie dorms at night, with only the walking dead or roommates, things were not as they should have been. The girl from the asylum seemed to have more mental ability, not less, and someone was trying to kill her. Kill a dead girl? Maybe there was more to heaven than an afterlife of manual labour in the company of a bunch of stiffs!

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 131

Sample

I remember how the bottom of the lake looked as I was drowning. The thought of being buried in the mud frightened me more than the sensation of suffocating. My throat was jammed shut so that no water could go down but I wasn’t thinking about air. I could feel my heart slow where at first it had thundered and leaped against my ribs as if it were trying to escape what was happening to it. It couldn’t and neither could I. After a while I relaxed and drifted with the cold current while silence came to put me to sleep.

Funny how that nightmare was with me when I woke up in the cargo bound for Land’s End. I apologized to Frye for being on top of the pile, not that I could help the way they stacked us in the crate, but she was in a snit and wouldn’t respond to me.

Thoughts of death and life were in my mind, disturbing me, so I concentrated on the creaking and swaying cargo. My head felt strange, as if one piece of my brain were in a kind of trance while the other, smaller portion bellowed in terror and tried to attract attention. I didn’t know which piece was me. Maybe both, maybe neither.

The packs were implanted in our brains on Earth so that all the driver had to do was think what he wanted us to do. Quidler got us moving as soon as the ship landed in the cradle. The compound was short of workers and had been waiting for the four of us for … I don’t know, a long time, I guess.

Frye began squirming beneath me so I told her to take it easy and wait a minute until I rolled over and opened the lid. Inside of me the little piece of brain was doing a lot of yelling, as if it were scared and not sure of what was happening.

I shoved the lid too hard and broke the hinges. Frye came out behind me and I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi.” I knew the difference between someone it was okay to talk to and someone it wasn’t. Frye, LeMay and Zottinger were big dumb bunnies without much personality and not enough looks to make me feel self-conscious, so I felt right at ease with them, even when they ignored my greeting and didn’t say anything back to me.

Land’s End was a world of ice and snow, oases, aliens, factories, people who made me nervous and Peterkin.

“Move it, dum-dums!” said Quidler in a tone that said he was bored out of his mind. He gave me a particularly unfriendly stare as I walked down the ramp from the ship and I knew right away I wasn’t going to get along with him. He was one of those insecure people who took an instant dislike to me because I was so big. About five-ten, he was contemptuous of tall women, especially tall and muscular women. Back on earth at the institution for hopeless cases, an acquaintance told me men liked muscles on women so I took up body building. I found out later she was no friend. Men didn’t like muscled women, big women, or freak women. They liked cute little icebergs like Bates.

We were taken to the ground in an elevator, then for a couple of hours we stood on a motorized sled that slid over miles of gray ice until finally we arrived at the compound.

No sooner did we march into our quarters, which was a room fifteen by fifteen, than Zottinger climbed on a chair, slung his belt up over a ceiling beam, buckled it around his neck and did a jig in midair.

Frye selected one of the lower bunks while LeMay chose the other lower, at about the time I was sitting down on it. I threw her out so she climbed onto the bed above me. There were just bare springs and naked mattresses. Lying down, I looked up at the rusty metal and knew I could never endure such a view for very long. “Get out,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind. I want that bunk you’re on.”

LeMay’s head appeared over the side and she gave me a steady stare with her coaly eyes.

“No lip,” I said. “I want us to be friends but I’ll never take lip from anybody ever again. I have to have the top bunk.”

We traded places and by and by the place settled down. The only noise was the creaking of Zott’s belt as he hung swaying from the rafter.

“They want to freeze me to death,” I said. “Are you cold?” LeMay didn’t answer so I kicked the wall until she did. No, she wasn’t cold.

Quidler and Peterkin came down the hall, looked in and saw Zott, came in cursing and got him down from the rafter.

“When the stiffs go nuts then the whole place is nuts,” said Quidler. “How do you account for this?”

“How should I know? This whole business is unnatural so why should any particular part of it seem weird?”

Quidler cut Zott’s belt with a knife and allowed the body to drop to the floor. “Maybe he isn’t really dead.”

“You’re always saying that! He’s dead!”

“Sure, now that he’s hanged himself. He’s probably been up there for hours. I wonder why his pack didn’t shut down?”

“I suppose the belt wasn’t that tight around his neck and he was getting some air.”

Hauling Frye onto the floor, Quidler laid Zott on her bunk.

“Why did you do that?” said Peterkin. “Do you think maybe he feels bad and should be made a little comfortable?”

“I’m messed up, okay? I admit it. I can’t bear the thought that one of these days they’re going to send us a live one.”

I lay on my bunk while something inside me screamed, “Me, me, me, me, me!”

“I want to know why he did such a thing,” said Quidler. “You seem to be able to take everything in your stride. Maybe you can explain it to me. Why should he try to commit suicide?”

“It’s the pack in his brain. Sometimes the stimuli hit the wrong chords or they liven up memory cells. One time I had one come up to me and ask me for a light.”

“What if he’s a maverick and keeps giving us trouble?”

“He’d better not,” said Peterkin. “It’s freezing in here. Let’s get out.”

The door shut behind them and again the place quieted down. Zott lay softly sniveling because his wife had run off; Frye brooded because her mother hated her; LeMay kept hanging her head over the side of the bunk to stare down at me with her sunken eyes. I think they made a mistake with her. She stank like a corpse.

In my opinion, the work atmosphere was not conducive to optimum output. Too much heat, too much noise, no rest periods and no sense to what I did. Bates stood up there in the glass booth with the metal driver’s hat on her head and drove us all day. It must have been boring but she was never sadistic or vindictive and was even considerate.

Do this, do that, went the urgings in my head and sometimes I obeyed, sometimes not. There was a big, open vat of molten metal in the middle of the room and looking at it scared me, “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” I said to Zott. For a change he wasn’t thinking about his wife, but he still didn’t answer.

“You hot?” I said to LeMay. She was holding a smoking pipe in one gloved hand and flattened a knot on it with a steel hammer. Looking up at me with eyes sunken in black caves, she swung away at the pipe, missed and hit her hand.

“Ouch!” I said.

She didn’t seem to think anything of it, kept whaling away at the pipe until it slipped from her crippled grasp and rolled away on the floor.

“You hot?” I said to Frye who operated a machine that fitted metal rings onto the edges of the ingots.

She wasn’t hot. Do this, do that, said the unspoken signals in my head, running through my brain like my own thoughts but I could tell the difference. For a while I sat at my machine and made the rings Frye needed but then I got bored and tried walking toward the open vat. At about the time my eyeballs began to feel as if they were cooking, I backed off.

Plainly they didn’t care about our feelings. The vat made the room too hot, about a hundred and thirty degrees in the corners, and I speculated as to how long it would take me to roast like a wedge of beef in an oven.

“You hot?” I said to Zott.

“Shut up. You make me sick with your whining and nagging. I work hard all day, I give you my pay and you spend it on your boyfriend.”

I guess he had me mixed up with somebody else. “It’s me,” I said. “Don’t you remember? I’m your roommate. Take a good look. You were never married to a woman like me. I’ll bet I’m two feet taller than your wife and a couple of hundred pounds heavier.”

He took a wicked looking rasp from a tool box and came at me as if he planned to stick it in me. Up in the booth, Bates yelled at him to go back to his machine. He liked me better, raised his weapon and lunged at me. I caught his wrist and held it while I tried reasoning with him.

“If there was some way I could provide you with a corpse I’d do it,” I said to him. “If you could kill her maybe she’d be out of your system. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you poke me with that. Now knock it off!”

Later I wondered where he had come from. Where had they dug Zott up? Not literally, of course, since no one in Land’s End had ever been buried. The very idea was incongruous. Still, it was interesting to think about. Maybe his bad temper had earned him a ticket to an execution chamber.

“You killed someone,” I said to him after he calmed down. “Mind telling me who it was?”

Sitting at his machine with a sweet smile on his face, he looked up at me and appeared satisfied. “Your boyfriend.”

Oh, well. Bates had a flunky come into the work area all decked out in an asbestos suit so that he wouldn’t singe his precious hide. All that protection wasn’t really necessary but the young ones seemed to prefer it. I think it made them feel more isolated from us workers. The first thing this one did was check the stitched hole in Zott’s skull to make sure no wires were sticking out. Then he looked up at the booth and spread his hands to indicate that the world was indeed a bewildering place to be in. Bates pointed at me so he tried checking me out but I was too high up for him to reach my head.

“Sit down, dummy,” he said.

I didn’t feel like accommodating him and naturally I would never speak to him. He was one of those who were off limits to me. I knew the kind of person he was. He would make fun of me, spout insults, pinch my muscles to see if they were real, cast aspersions upon my identity.

“Sit down, dummy.” Bates was telling me to do the same.

Frye forsook her machine and wandered over to see what was going on. At the same time Zott picked up his file and moved to stand beside me. He harbored no hostile thoughts but simply loved that tool. LeMay walked over and showed the flunky her hand. With his mouth open, he looked at it for a while and then seemed to realize for the first time that he was more or less surrounded by us.

“Yow,” he said. No emotion or emphasis. Just, “Yow.” He was too young for the job, in my opinion. Looking up at Bates in the booth, he said in a loud voice, “I don’t care how much you offer me I’m not coming back in here! My job is in hydroponics!” He stepped away from the four of us and I guess the distance between us made him feel more secure. “Dummies,” he said. “Brainless hulks.”

“Get out of there if you can’t control your emotions,” Bates said over the intercom.

“Morons,” the kid said to us. “How I loathe the sight of you. Why aren’t you in the lousy ground where you belong?”

“Get out of there right now!”

“Somebody stinks real bad,” he said. About then his voice broke or rose or did something emotional. Maybe he was feeling the heat inside his clothes. “No girls, no recreation, no entertainment, no human life,” he said in a desperate tone. “Surrounded by a bunch of stiffs.”

Bates was bellowing for him to get lost.

He opened his mouth and yelped like a dog abandoned in the middle of a prairie. “This place drives me nuts!” he said. “Who’s dead? Sometimes I can’t remember. Which of us? You or me?”

LeMay’s hand was a mess of broken bones, a flattened thumb and a tear in the flesh where a glistening shard showed through. Wondering if she would heal like a normal person, I pulled and hauled on her fingers until all the parts looked as if they were where they ought to be, after which I wound a rag around the whole thing.

“Leave it bandaged and it’ll be better sometime.”

“Where did you learn how to give first aid?” she said.

“I used to be a nurse. Well, not really a nurse, since I was too dumb for the work. Actually I was a nurse’s aide.”

“You’re lying.”

“Well, yeah, in fact I just hung around a doctor’s office and saw how it was done.”

Frye had a smoking hole in her back. After prying with a pin for a while, I dug out a buried hunk of metal that must have flown from one of the machines in the factory, or maybe a spark from the vat of molten metal caught her. Plainly nobody cared about us.

I couldn’t tolerate the cold of our room after the intense heat of the factory so I went outside and down the hall and looked in all the closets. Finally I found some linen that wasn’t for our use but for the flunkies quartered farther down the corridor. Who cared? Helping myself, I went back home and bullied my roomies into making their beds.

The temperature in the room was about forty, just enough to keep the walls from warping. What kind of treatment was that? I lay on my bunk staring at the cracks in the ceiling and was grateful for the blankets. My head felt funny, not like my old head but like something weird. Somehow I felt more intelligent. My belly growled and I thought about dinner.

“My mother never did like me,” said Frye out of the blue.

“Not that again,” said Zott. He lay on the other top bunk, not under the covers but upon them, like the strange one he was. I wouldn’t have called him an idiot but he was odd.

Frye nodded as if her own voice and ideas were all that existed in the world. “She had what you call change-of-life skitz. For certain she wasn’t playing with a full deck. I’m never going to grow out of that period in my life. Not ever. I’ll never get rid of the scars.”

“You know, that reminds me of my own past,” said LeMay. “I was just thinking—”

“I was talking. Why are you interrupting?”

“I was just thinking about the fuzz that shot me. He only did it because I was black. They’re all nigger haters, all those pigs, even the black ones, but you’ll never get them to admit it. They get in the witness chair and talk about carrying out their duty but it’s all bull. There’s something wrong with fuzz, you know. I mean in their heads.”

“I was talking,” said Frye.

“I remember like it was yesterday. That slug hit me in the belly and the next thing I knew I was impor. . .