Isaac Marion - Warm Bodies: A Novel

ISAAC MARION

Warm Bodies

For the foster-kids Ive met.

WARM BODIES

Isaac Marion was born in north-western Washington in 1981 and has lived in and around Seattle his whole life, working a variety of strange jobs like delivering deathbeds to hospice patients and supervising parental visits for foster-kids. He is not married, has no children, and did not go to college or win any prizes. Warm Bodies is his first novel.

You have known, O Gilgamesh,

What interests me,

To drink from the Well of Immortality.

Which means to make the dead

Rise from their graves

And the prisoners from their cells

The sinners from their sins.

I think loves kiss kills our heart of flesh.

It is the only way to eternal life,

Which should be unbearable if lived

Among the dying flowers

And the shrieking farewells

Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.

Herbert Mason,

Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative

. . .

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet II,

lines 147, 153, 154, 278, 279

step one

wanting

I am dead, but its not so bad. Ive learned to live with it. Im sorry I cant properly introduce myself, but I dont have a name any more. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries. Mine might have started with an R, but thats all I have now. Its funny because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other peoples names. My friend M says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you cant smile, because your lips have rotted off.

None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. Im still in the early stages of decay. Just the grey skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation. Before I became a zombie I must have been a businessman, a banker or broker or some young temp learning the ropes, because Im wearing fairly nice clothes. Black slacks, grey shirt, red tie. M makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my tie and tries to laugh, a choked, gurgling rumble deep in his gut. His clothes are holey jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The shirt is looking pretty macabre by now. He should have picked a darker colour.

We like to joke and speculate about our clothes, since these final fashion choices are the only indication of who we were before we became no one. Some are less obvious than mine: shorts and a sweater, skirt and a blouse. So we make random guesses.

You were a waitress. You were a student. Ring any bells?

It never does.

No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognise civilisation buildings, cars, a general overview but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like Ive said, its not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we arent. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. Its not that different from before.

But it does make me sad that weve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone elses, because Id like to love them, but I dont know who they are.

There are hundreds of us living in an abandoned airport outside some large city. We dont need shelter or warmth, obviously, but we like having the walls and roofs over our heads. Otherwise wed just be wandering in an open field of dust somewhere, and that would be strangely horrific. To have nothing at all around us, nothing to touch or look at, no hard lines whatsoever, just us and the gaping maw of the sky. I imagine thats what being full-dead is like. An emptiness vast and absolute.

I think weve been here a long time. I still have all my flesh, but there are elders who are little more than skeletons with clinging bits of muscle, dry as jerky. Somehow it still extends and contracts, and they keep moving. I have never seen any of us die of old age. Maybe we live for ever, I dont know. The future is as blurry to me as the past. I cant seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present, and the present isnt exactly urgent. You might say death has relaxed me.

I am riding the escalators when M finds me. I ride the escalators several times a day, whenever they move. Its become a ritual. The airport is derelict, but the power still flickers on sometimes, maybe flowing from emergency generators stuttering deep underground. Lights flash and screens blink, machines jolt into motion. I cherish these moments. The feeling of things coming to life. I stand on the steps and ascend like a soul into Heaven, that sugary dream of our childhoods, now a tasteless joke.

After maybe thirty repetitions, I rise to find M waiting for me at the top. He is hundreds of pounds of muscle and fat draped on a six-foot-five frame. Bearded, bald, bruised and rotten, his grisly visage slides into view as I crest the staircase summit. Is he the angel that greets me at the gates? His ragged mouth is oozing black drool.

He points in a vague direction and grunts, City.

I nod and follow him.

We are going out to find food. A hunting party forms around us as we shuffle towards town. Its not hard to find recruits for these expeditions, even if no one is hungry. Focused thought is a rare occurrence here, and we all follow it when it manifests. Otherwise wed just be standing around and groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones and we stand here, waiting for it to go. I often wonder how old I am.

The city where we do our hunting is conveniently close. We arrive around noon the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We dont feel it in our stomachs some of us dont even have those. We feel it everywhere equally, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating. Last winter, when so many Living joined the Dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friends become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realised they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but its against etiquette to notice when one of us dies. I distracted myself with some groaning.

I think the world has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered, and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I dont know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess its not so important. Once youve arrived at the the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.

We start to smell the Living as we approach a dilapidated apartment building. The smell is not the musk of sweat and skin, but the effervescence of life energy, like the ionised tang of lightning and lavender. We dont smell it in our noses. It hits us deeper inside, near our brains, like wasabi. We converge on the building and crash our way inside.

We find them huddled in a small studio unit with the windows boarded up. They are dressed worse than we are, wrapped in filthy tatters and rags, all of them badly in need of a shave. M will be saddled with a short blond beard for the rest of his Fleshy existence, but everyone else in our party is clean-shaven. Its one of the perks of being Dead, another thing we dont have to worry about any more. Beards, hair, toenails . . . no more fighting biology. Our wild bodies have finally been tamed.