“Dead Like Me” is a set of instructions, to a hapless protagonist, about how to survive the zombie plague by joining it. The question that prompted it was: Zombies don’t breathe, so how do they track their victims? “Certainly not by scent,” Castro says. “If not by scent, how? If we know the method, can we fool them? And from there I got to: What will it cost?”
So. Let’s summarize. You held out for longer than anybody would have ever dreamed possible. You fought with strength you never knew you had. But in the end it did you no damned good. There were just too many of the bastards. The civilization you believed in crumbled; the help you waited for never arrived; the hiding places you cowered in were all discovered; the fortresses you built were all overrun; the weapons you scrounged were all useless; the people you counted on were all either killed or corrupted; and what remained of your faith was torn raw and bleeding from the shell of the soft complacent man you once were. You lost. Period. End of story. No use whining about it. Now there’s absolutely nothing left between you and the ravenous, hollow-eyed forms of the Living Dead.
Here’s your Essay Question: How low are you willing to sink to survive?
Answer:
First, wake up in a dark, cramped space that smells of rotten meat. Don’t wonder what time it is. It doesn’t matter what time it is. There’s no such thing as time anymore. It’s enough that you’ve slept, and once again managed to avoid dreaming.
That’s important. Dreaming is a form of thinking. And thinking is dangerous. Thinking is something the Living do, something the Dead can’t abide. The Dead can sense where it’s coming from, which is why they were always able to find you, back when you used to dream. Now that you’ve trained yourself to shuffle through the days and nights of your existence as dully and mindlessly as they do, there’s no reason to hide from them anymore. Oh, they may curl up against you as you sleep (two in particular, a man and woman handcuffed together for some reason you’ll never know, have crawled into this little alcove with you), but that’s different: that’s just heat tropism. As long as you don’t actually think, they won’t eat you.
Leave the alcove, which is an abandoned storage space in some kind of large office complex. Papers litter the floor of the larger room outside; furniture is piled up against some of the doors, meaning that sometime in the distant past Living must have made their last stands here. There are no bones. There are three other zombies, all men in the ragged remains of three-piece suits, lurching randomly from one wall to the other, changing direction only when they hit those walls, as if they’re blind and deaf and this is the only way they know how to look for an exit.
If you reach the door quickly they won’t be able to react in time to follow you.
Don’t Remember.
Don’t Remember your name. Only the Living have names.
Don’t Remember you had a wife named Nina, and two children named Mark and Kathy, who didn’t survive your flight from the slaughterhouse Manhattan had become. Don’t Remember them; any of them. Only the Living have families.
Don’t Remember that as events herded you south you wasted precious weeks combing the increasing chaos of rural Pennsylvania for your big brother Ben, who lived in Pittsburgh and had always been so much stronger and braver than you. Don’t Remember your childish, shellshocked hope that Ben would be able to make everything all right, the way he had when you were both growing up with nothing. Don’t Remember gradually losing even that hope, as the enclaves of Living grew harder and harder to find.
The memories are part of you, and as long as you’re still breathing, they’ll always be there if you ever decide you need them. It will always be easy to call them up in all their gory detail. But you shouldn’t want to. As long as you remember enough to eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and find warm places when you’re cold, you know all you need to know, or ever will need to know. It’s much simpler that way.
Anything else is just an open invitation to the Dead.
Walk the way they walk: dragging your right foot, to simulate tendons that have rotted away; hanging your head, to give the impression of a neck no longer strong enough to hold it erect; recognizing obstructions only when you’re in imminent danger of colliding with them. And though the sights before you comprise an entire catalogue of horrors, don’t ever react.
Only the Living react.
This was the hardest rule for you to get down pat, because part of you, buried deep in the places that still belong to you and you alone, has been screaming continuously since the night you first saw a walking corpse rip the entrails from the flesh of the Living. That part wants to make itself heard. But that’s the part which will get you killed. Don’t let it have its voice.
Don’t be surprised if you turn a corner, and almost trip over a limbless zombie inching its way up the street on its belly. Don’t be horrified if you see a Living person trapped by a mob of them, about to be torn to pieces by them. Don’t gag if one of the Dead brushes up against you, pressing its maggot-infested face up close against your own.
Remember: Zombies don’t react to things like that. Zombies are things like that.
Now find a supermarket that still has stuff on the shelves. You can if you look hard enough; the Dead arrived too quickly for the Living to loot everything there was. Pick three or four cans off the shelves, cut them open, and eat whatever you find inside. Don’t care whether they’re soup, meat, vegetables, or dog food. Eat robotically, tasting nothing, registering nothing but the moment when you’re full. Someday, picking a can at random, you may drink some drain cleaner or eat some rat poison. Chance alone will decide when that happens. But it won’t matter when it does. Your existence won’t change a bit. You’ll just convulse, fall over, lie still a while, and then get up, magically transformed into one of the zombies you’ve pretended to be for so long. No fuss, no muss. You won’t even have any reason to notice it when it happens. Maybe it’s already happened.
After lunch, spot one of the town’s few other Living people shuffling listlessly down the center of the street.
You know this one well. When you were still thinking in words you called her Suzie. She’s dressed in clothes so old they’re rotting off her back. Her hair is the color of dirty straw, and hideously matted from weeks, maybe months of neglect. Her most striking features are her sunken cheekbones and the dark circles under her gray unseeing eyes. Even so, you’ve always been able to tell that she must have been remarkably pretty, once.
Back when you were still trying to fight The Bastards—they were never “zombies” to you, back then; to you they were always The Bastards—you came very close to shooting Suzie’s brains out before you realized that she was warm, and breathing, and alive. You saw that though she was just barely aware enough to scrounge the food and shelter that kept her warm and breathing, she was otherwise almost completely catatonic.
She taught you it was possible to pass for Dead.