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The Zombie Of George Romero
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 1

The Zombie of George Romero clambered out of its coffin and stood peering blearily around.

"Can't see a damned thing without my glasses," it mumbled to itself. "Where are my damned glasses?" Bending, it began hunting around with its hands, but it didn't find the glasses, and no wonder, because they'd been purloined by a crazed souvenir hunter who'd long since auctioned it on eBay. At that moment the spectacles were somewhere in the depths of Darkest Australia, in the possession of a crocodile wrangler who used them to frighten the animals into submission.

"This is a pretty mess," the Zombie of George Romero mumbled, as well as a corpsecan mumble. "How the hell am I supposed to go through undeath without seeing where I'm going?"

Still muttering balefully, it wandered out of the mortician's parlour. It was midnight, so there wasn't anyone on the premises, but the downside was that the door was locked. But the Zombie of George Romero wasn't a zombie for nothing, so it broke its way out at the cost of only a few broken bones in one arm.

"Now," it wondered, as it stumbled down the pavement, staggering a little because its dead muscle fibres didn't contract so well anymore, "just what on earth am I supposed to do? Where am I going anyway?"

This was a serious problem, which took a lot of cogitation. The zombie's brain had suffered the effects of dying, of course, and hadn't come intact back from the dead. Huge chunks of memory were missing.

"I'll just go along like this for the moment," the Zombie thought, finally, "and see what happens."

It was a cold night, and rain began falling. Since the Zombie of George Romero no longer had a functioning heart or flowing blood, it began to get chilled. "Must get warm," it thought, and at that moment saw a supermarket which was still open.

"Bright lights," it mumbled to itself. "Maybe it will be warm in there." By now its legs were so cold that it couldn't move them even as well as it was earlier, and was in danger of falling on its face. So it held its arms stiffly forward to try and balance, and staggered towards the blur of red, white and blue light.



The supermarket was almost empty at this time of night, and the clerk at the check-out desk was surfing porn on his mobile phone when a shadow fell across his counter. Annoyed at the interruption, and also worried in case it was some family-values type who had caught a glimpse of the screen, he put the phone into his pocket before he looked up.

"What can I do for -" he began, trying to stretch his lips into a smile - of course, only the minimum, standard smile the store management demanded of its employees. "For you," he finished foolishly, the smile freezing in place, well short of the standard minimum.

Across the counter stood an apparition, slack-jawed, bleary-eyed, dressed in a corpse's burial suit. Its jaw hung open, and it moaned as it staggered. With its stretched out arms, it pawed across the counter at the clerk.

The clerk screamed. Desperately, pushing his chair back from the desk, he tried to get up, but the space was so small that in his panic he couldn't. Goggle-eyed, he glared up at the thing across the counter, gasping for breath.

The Zombie of George Romero was astonished. It had merely meant to ask the clerk if it was OK for it to rest a while and warm itself. When it had tried to talk, however, it had found that its dead diaphragm couldn't move well enough to push air out of its lungs to speak. So it could only moan helplessly.

"Are you all right?" it tried to ask, but it just came out as another moan. The clerk didn'tlook all right. In fact, he looked pretty damned bad, even to the Zombie's myopic eyes. The Zombie tried to move closer to the counter, and its legs almost collapsed under it with the effort. Only with a quick grab at the edge of the desk did it manage to stop itself from falling.

"Sorry," the Zombie apologised. "I'm still getting used to -"

The clerk interrupted with a hoarse scream. He began screaming louder and louder, until it began to get on the Zombie's dead nerves. Turning away, it began wandering towards the back of the supermarket, wandering through the aisles of produce looking for someone else to ask. But the bright lights and the shiny surfaces were confusing to its myopic eyes, and it couldn't really see a thing.

[ Continue to page 2 ]

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Genre:Living Dead
Type:Short story
Rating:4.6 / 10
Rated By:27 users
Comments: 2 users
Total Hits:27970

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