Post by deel on Jun 19, 2006 17:56:01 GMT -5
I opened the door to the cell carefully, quietly, but the second I was in sight the Captive went nuts, pounding himself against the bars to get at me. I looked the cage over; it was homemade, a cage in a cell, but transfering the Captive to an interrogation room/dining hall would have been too complicated. We didn't have those kinds of resources.
The cage was homemade, but it held. I stood just outside his reach, trying to find some trace of human intelligence in his now-lidless eyes. I failed.
I gave him the arm. Not my arm, obviously. It was the arm from Perry, poor guy, got his head bashed in while trying to steal supplies for his run for the border. We all thought about the fact that the revenants seemed calmer after they had eaten, even acting more sophisticated, and we thought about the fact that Perry wasn't going to be needing all that good meat on his bones, and when he didn't turn revenant, we decided to see how feeding would affect the Captive.
The Captive took the arm. For a second, he just held it in his hands, squeezing and shaking it with lunatic glee. Just like they do when they catch one of us live ones. Then he bit into it and began to eat.
He had cleaned most of the meat off the upper arm, almost down to the elbow, when the sounds he was making started to make a kind of sense. "Ohh, delicious, oh it's so good, so good, food, food, good food, oh it's so good..." Never bothered to thank me though.
I decided to try to engage him. "Good, is it?"
The Captive didn't stop eating, not for a moment, but his bites became smaller as his belly distended, and he became more articulate. He was actually talking to me. "You have no idea. You have food, and sex, and massage, and wind in your hair, and jokes, and tv, and showers, and faith and home and god and country and all kinds of pleasures, pleasures and more pleasure. Imagine all those pleasures rolled up in one experience." Then he glanced up at me as he chewed, and despite his eyes color, he looked almost sane. Almost. "That's what this is for me."
This was what we had been hoping for. A line into the revenants minds. "So why not eat it? I mean, your covered in it, for crying out loud. Why not chew on your own fingers?"
The Captive snorted a laugh around another bite. "Can't. Doesn't work. Zombie flesh is like grass. Or rock. Or dog. Just isn't interesting."
I must've frowned at that. "We've done chemical tests. Revenants - zombies - have human flesh. There's no difference."
The Captive was down the forearm now. "Oh, I"m sure. There's nothing in the chemistry. It's the energy. It feels different. Haven't you ever noticed that zom- that revenants, whatever, can tell the difference between a wounded live one and another zombie? It's not the smell. I can hardly smell anything, nasal membranes were the first to go. It's the feel. It feels different. Like when somebody comes back, the 'eat this' sign goes out. Once he starts moving again, you don't feel like taking another mouthful. No point. It's not chemistry. It's not even disease, although that's what it looks like. It's energy."
This was all new. I had to figure out if this guy was on the level. "Sounds like you know what your talking about."
The Captives words gabbled around the wristbones. "Oh yeah. I was a pretty smart guy when I was alive, and we zo- revenants have our moments of reprieve. When the belly is full, when the mouth is still wet with food, then we can remember, and think. We never feel anything very strong. I remember killing and eating my own mother, well part of her, before she came back, but we'd barely know each other now. We never feel anything very strong, except hunger, but if we were in the habit of thinking before, we can do it now. When we're not hungry."
He was shredding fingers now, tearing the hand apart even as he talked and talked - maybe he still had a bit of human feeling in there, or maybe he was like a professor, and had to tell someone about the things he thought, but I got the impression that he was deliberately pacing himself, trying to keep himself full long enough to tell me what was on his mind.
"I've been thinking about the fact that we don't do very well in water. We don't seem to remember swimming, and when we're in water we don't feel the presence of food. That's when live ones escape us easily, when we're in the water. Only time I ever lost someone on land was when he hosed me down. See, that's why I say it's energy. We sense the em signature of functioning human brain, and go for that. And the EM signature for our own brains, or whatever it is we're using to think with, is off limits. That's what the Pale Event did for us."
"You remember the Pale Event, right? When the sky went white in the daytime, and lightened a little at night. For just about sixteen minutes. For that sixteen minutes, anybody who died came back. See, I think that was the energy flowing over the Earth. Energy flowing into dying human brains, replacing the energy pattern of living people with a different pattern. That's why people have stopped rising, unless we bite them. We're the only sources of the pattern now."
The captive was down to the last fingers now, talking fast, munching on the bones. I could actually see his teeth splintering from his chewing. And talking. "One thing I can tell you for sure, your right about the chemistry. And that's the important clue. Zombie bodies dissolve the flesh we eat fast, so fast, it should be working with anything. It's almost nuclear. We should be able to eat our own flesh, or dog, or grass, but we can't. The one thing that would be unthinkable to us alive is all we can eat now."
"Do you see it? There is no accidental way we could be cannibles! Humans don't have that urge! No psychology would account for it! No culture countenances it! We are an army of zombies, being raised to wage war on the living! We are bioweapons, or maybe necroweapons! SOMEBODY MEANT FOR US TO BE THIS WAY!"
As he began to shout, I belatedly realized that he was no longer chewing. He was out of food. He had eaten it all, and I could actually see his belly beginning to shrink.
The Captive pressed himself against he bars. "Give me more. Please. More. I know you have more food for me. I can see it, right there! Your blood is pouring through it, your breath is making it go, you have so much food for me! Give it to me! Now!"
Thnking time was over. He slammed himself against the bar, his 'give me the food!' dissolving into inhumans screeches of renewed appetite. I backed out the door, closed it behind me. We, the other survivors and I, needed to talk about what we had learned. Then maybe we would give the Captive a slug in the head and be on about our business.
Or maybe Perry, hanging neatly in the meatlocker, could make another contribution in the name of science...
---------------------------------------------------
The previous vignette is my attempt to make sense of the various irrationalities inherent in the so-called Zombie movies. The fact that even the fast ones in the Dawn of the Dead remake can't seem to deal with an ordinary mall fountain could be put down to careless flimmakers playing the 'dead guy in two feet of water' thing for laughs, but there could also be an in-story explanation.
The big irrationality, of course, is the whole idea of the walking dead being interested in eating human flesh. See, before Mr. Romero did his thing, zombies were merely servants - and very faithful ones, right up to the point where they ate salt in their food. But Night of the Living Dead introduced the concept of obligate cannibalism into the mix, and no such movie, no matter how much technobabble they introduced, has come close to an explanation. (I am particularly annoyed by the Resident Evil line - 'the virus erases everything except the most basic of needs, the need to feed'. If that were the case, we would be expecting the reanimated dead to ambush every fruit tray in Raccoon City, but noooo...)
My Captive explains my thoughts on the matter, as far as they go. The walking dead would not be as they are without someone intending it. Would anyone else like to add their reflections on the subject?