Love Me Deadly

 

Love Me Deadly

A zombie tale

 

The New York Times reported on May 20, 2011 that the Center for Disease Control has issued a set of instructions to Americans on how to prepare for emergencies such as hurricanes, earthquakes and various epidemics ---including zombies attacks.

 

One

 

So here I am, in a zombie outfit, looking at the two sleeping bodies. Who are they? The woman I love and her other boyfriend. I am standing at the window. The sun is throwing a steady stream of golden light beams into the room and brightens up the spot where the two naked bodies are lying. She is resting her head on his shoulders and he wraps his arms around her. A beautiful sight, I would say. But it's beautiful only if you are an outsider looking in. I am not an outsider. I am her lover, a betrayed lover, so the sight is not beautiful to me, but ugly, even disgusting. So this man is one of her other lovers. I don't know who he is and I don't care to know. What makes me sick is that woman. I died, and she didn't waste any time going to bed with another man. For a long time I have suspected that she never loved me sincerely. But every time I was with her, I forgot about the suspicion and instead devoted myself completely to her. People say love is blind. I was blind for sure. So skillful in playing the love game, she made me believe that I was her only lover all these years. Three and a half years, to be precise. Now look at this.

 

So, I am going to kill her. And eat her. But I will let the man live because he's innocent, he is her victim, perhaps a sucker like I am.

 

I am going to eat the woman. I can't help it. I am a zombie, and zombie eats people. But I am not going to eat just anyone, I only want to eat that woman. I love her so much that I must come back from the dead to see her and look what I find: she’s in the arms of another man. Am I angry? Of course I am. Even though I am dead, I am only a human with all the emotional shortcomings of a human: I love and never want to lose the object of my love, in this case, that woman. Like a child who cries when he loses his toy, I cry when I lose my lover. But my cry is infinitely mightier than a child's. I am a soul mortally wounded. That woman wounded me and I am not going to let her get away with it.

 

The woman turns on her side and has her back toward the man and he embraces her from behind. They are snoring gently. I look at the clock on the night table, it' almost ten in the morning. Most people are already up and going about doing business, except for these two. Perhaps they stayed up until 5 in the morning. I look at the woman's body. I know every square inch and every hair of that body. But apparently, I did not know anything about her heart and mind. I was deceived. I was fooled into believing that she loved me too, the way I loved her. I cannot tell how much of my being has been poured into nurturing this love. I was decimated inside and out, in everyway, because of my love for her.

 

What I will do to the woman's body is: cut her up in pieces and eat them slowly. I do it to satisfy the thirst for revenge, obviously, but I also want to make sure her body becomes one with me, never parts with me again. The murderous plan is forming in my head while I am standing there looking at her.

 

The man and the woman are still in their bliss, sleeping like babies, oblivious to the world. And here I am, about to kill to put an end to their happiness and they don't know what's coming at them. But I feel weak. I cannot kill with my bare hands. I need a weapon so I can dispatch the woman with as little force as possible. I have very little strength left in my body, in this decimated zombified body.

 

So I walk into the kitchen and find a knife. It is a long knife, single-edged blade, and I feel the sharpness: it is sharp enough. The tip of the knife is pointed so I would not have a problem plunging the whole length of the blade into her heart. With the knife in my hand, I come back into the bedroom and stand at the window again, looking at the two bodies. It’s not nice to end someone's life because of jealousy. Not. Not ever. That's what your reason tells you. But reason can never reason with the heart. The heart is hurt and it wants to kill, and you have no choice but to listen to its command. I thirst to kill and eat that woman. I am swallowing my saliva right now.

 

But how do I end up in this room on a beautiful morning like this with this murderous intent?

 

Two

 

I fell in love with this woman three and a half years ago. The exact date was October 14, 20XX. That was the date I first laid my eyes on her and was immediately struck by love. I didn't run after her and beg her to love me back or anything like that. She returned my love willingly and happily as if she was struck by love for me too, as if we both had been waiting and looking for each other since time immemorial. And we had a relationship. It wasn't the best relationship. I knew there is no such thing as a perfect relationship especially when emotion and intimacy are involved. But this love affair was a roller coaster ride; and loving her, I was living the most bizarre, intense, and schizophrenic period of my life. Up and down. Down and up. Up and down. Down and up. With incredible speed. She enjoyed it too. We butchered each other's hearts every chance we got. We spilled each other's blood, so to speak. It might have been sick obsession rather than love, perhaps, but I enjoyed the obsession, I enjoyed being kept under a spell. If I called it love, it was the most selfish and destructive love. Thinking back I don’t think it was true love. As I understand, true love is the most wonderful thing a person can experience, it takes you to heaven and keep you there. This thing between us was nothing like that. It was like two people trapped in the same room torturing each other for no good reason and both enjoyed every moment of it. Sick, but it was a sickness that kept me alive. I had never felt more alive in my life than when I was "in love" with her.

 

But to make a long story short, right after I died, she immediately invited another lover over as if she had been dying for me to die so she could do so without interference from me. From world of the dead, I saw all of that and I became so angry that I wrestled myself from the grip of death to come back to life--ah, half-dead-half-alive--so I could extract revenge. Yes, revenge. I am going to take her with me to the other world. And I will eat her to make her flesh my flesh, to make her one with me. That way she can never leave me again. Yeah, I am that selfish. Love makes you blind, selfish, savage, cruel, a beast--and that's what happens to me.

 

Then one day I was killed in a car accident on an isolated road in New Jersey. It was a dark winter day. The snow had been falling steadily since early morning and I was driving toward Philadelphia. I will not go into details of what I did that found me on a deserted country road in New Jersey, traveling to Philadelphia. I lived in the north section of Philadelphia where I met and fell in love with her. I will use a cliche to describe myself: I will die for love. You laugh? But that's how I felt, and I could not say anything different. So on that winter day I was driving to Philadelphia. She was waiting for me at her house in the city. The snow came down heavier and heavier as the day progressed; and near noon, the sight in front of me was white thick. Visibility was zero. I couldn't see the road. All was white around me. So I stopped the car and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. And I sat, with the engine running because I must keep warm. And I sat and sat while listening to the radio. The voice from the radio said the snow would not stop until the next morning and when it's done, it would be 2 feet or more. I felt scared. What the hell am I going to do? Sit here until tomorrow morning, for what? And I couldn't go forward either. I didn't see a thing outside the car window. The snow was beating against the windshield and the wind was howling. It felt like the end of the world. I thought about her. She was waiting for me. I must get to Philadelphia. She might be worrying about me. But I couldn't call her because my phone was dead. I didn't know what time it was. It's getting darker and darker. Tired of sitting inside the car, I stepped out. And bam! I was dead. It happened so fast that I didn't even have time to run a review of my life, like they said ... the story of your life flashes in front of you right before you draw the last breath. Nothing like that happened to me.

 

When I opened my eyes again, I knew I was dead. Because it felt very weird. I didn't have the sensation that I belonged to the physical world anymore. I remembered how it felt to be alive, I mean you are aware that your body is alive, all the senses are working and you know the body belongs to the earth, to the surrounding. But now I didn't feel that anymore. I had stepped over the threshold and crossed over into another realm. However, it felt nice in this other world. You were kind of floating in the air and you saw things more clearly. Your mind was as transparent as a cloudless sky. I was dead. So this was what death felt like, and I never wanted to go back to life. All my life I had suffered from all kinds of physical and mental hardships, like everyone else, but now in this other world I felt so good, I felt absolutely liberated from the burdens of being alive. For example, I didn't have to get up at 6 in the morning to go to work anymore and I didn't have to debate with myself what to have for dinner on the way home after an exhausting day at work. All worries vanished. I had no complaints being dead.

 

And I looked at the body I left behind--the bag of bones that I had carried with me all these years, 50, to be exact--lying on the snow-covered ground, all bloody. The body was stuck and twisted in an agonized position under another car. So that was how I was killed: a car from nowhere smashed into me when I was standing outside my car. I looked inside the other car and saw the body of the driver slump over the steering wheels. His head was cracked open and brain was oozing out of the skull. Hmm ... what was he doing going so fast on a snow-covered road in a blinding snow storm?

 

I was now free to travel to wherever I wanted with the speed of light because I was a ghost. My soul flew to Philadelphia and to my lover's house and what did I see? She's in bed with another man. I looked into her mind and found her thoughts: she was thinking that I was stuck in the snowstorm and would not make it to the city anytime soon. So she called over the guy, someone she has been dating in secrecy for a long time. They had been doing it whenever I wasn't around. So I was looking at a betrayer and the thought that came to my mind immediately was kill her and eat her. But I couldn't do it in this ethereal form. I must be in a physical form in order to lay my hands on her, to make her feel my presence.

 

So I returned to the body, or what had used to be my body, and raised it, using the power of my will. The body struggled to stand. It jerked back and forth, trying to balance itself. Then it stood up straight. The body had become a zombie. Go to Philadelphia, I told the body. And it walked the zombie walk. I don't have to describe the zombie's gait because it has been shown repeatedly in the movies and you know what it looks like. Kind of funny. But I think that no matter how funny a zombie walks, you can't bear looking into its eyes: they are all white with red veins and they hypnotize you.

 

So I used my will power to make the body walk--the way a hypnotist makes his subjects do things--and I was going to make it walk all the way to Philadelphia.

 

But I knew the body was hungry. It had not eaten for a day. I was afraid that it might not be able to make it to the destination because its energy was almost exhausted. Just like a car cannot run without fuel. But I must make it walk as far as it can, and when it couldn't walk anymore, I would think of something. So, the body walked while I was watching from above. Not too far above, just about 5 feet above. The wind was blowing ferociously. And the body swayed to and fro but it kept walking, although somewhat slow. I didn't care how long it took for the body to get to where I wanted it to, it must get there and do what I want it to do which was to kill the woman and eat her. Ohhhh, food. Human flesh, that's what a zombie wants, more than anything in the world.

 

I made the body walk along the road. I could guide it in the right direction because despite the blinding snow, I was at an advantage: I was watching from above and able to anticipate what was ahead. A car was coming slowly toward the body, I directed the body to leave the surface of the road and walked to the side and thus avoided the collision. The car slowly proceeded without perhaps the driver even aware that he had just missed hitting a body. It was like manipulating an object by remote control. That's what zombies are: they don't know what they do. They only listen to what is told them from whatever source they don't even know. You can say they are robots. But they are not mere robots, they are robots that crave human flesh and they are constantly hungry. Hunger is the drive, the only drive behind all of a zombie's actions. And this robot was going to have a delicious feast waiting for him in that room in Philadelphia. Of course, the body was my body, or you may say "used to" be my body. I was now in the other world but not in a hurry to settle in that world yet. I had this thing to do and I must do it before I could happily camp in the blissful land of the dead.

 

But I ask me: If you love her so much, why must you kill her? Why not let her live? Loving someone means you want the best for that person, right? Nope, I am the most selfish person on the face of the earth, and when I love I am even more so, 1,000,000 times more. I love and I want the object of my love to be mine and only mine. And if the object of my love leaves me, I will kill it and eat it. Simple as that. No ifs ands or buts about it. That's why love is the most serious mental illness--even more dangerous than schizophrenia--for which there is no remedy except to be cuddled in the arms of the beloved and secured in the belief that the beloved is yours forever. That's the only medication to keep this mental illness in check.

 

But my beloved had betrayed me. What was I going to do? Let her have her way? No, that’s not possible. That’s not me. That’s not my principle. From the vantage point of the world of the dead, I could see she was having a blast with her other lover. I was only one of her lovers. Now I knew so, thanks to being dead. And that knowledge was killing me. I would never accept the position of being a lover among lovers of hers. I wanted to be her only lover. Now I knew that wasn't the case. So what was I going to do? Leave her alone? Don't give me that crap. Respect her freedom and personal integrity as an individual? What’s that? In love, there are no such things. In love, one becomes a savage, the most savage of savages. One loses all reasons and the ability to think. In love, one loses one's head. One becomes a Neanderthal, a tree-dweller, a hunter who hunts then eats his fill then rests and digests until he becomes hungry again then goes out and hunts again. He may have a mind, but the mind is reptilian. I am talking about me. I am not talking about you or the guy over there. I am talking about me. That's why this woman must die and become my food.

 

So the body walked. After about twenty miles, all of a sudden, it collapsed. It just dropped like a log--thump! And was buried under two feet of snow. I came close and looked at it. Obviously, it had run out of gas. I mean, there was no energy left in the body. It was decimated, a ravaged and butchered body. First by the accident, then by this brutal walk through this savage snow storm without any food in the stomach. But I couldn't leave the body lying there. It must do what I wanted it to do. I knew it wanted food, and I must take care of that. But first, it had to continue the walk. I told the body to stand on its feet again, this time a hundred times harder but not impossible. After many awkward starts, the body managed to stand on its two legs and started walking again. How difficult it was this time. I must find it food fast before it died. It could die at any moment. I meant, die a second time. It was now half dead, half alive, but without food soon, it might die totally, no more half alive. And if that happened, how the hell was I going to kill the woman and eat her? This was an emergency.

 

So I did my best to make the body walk and while hovering above it I looked in all directions for signs of food. And far away in the thick of the darkness and the snow, I saw a point of light. That might be a house, something, and if there were people, there was food, that's obvious. So I told the body to soldier on in the direction of the light which was about two miles off the road and the body had to tread its way through bushes and shrubs and eventually it arrived at the front door of the house. It was a cottage in the middle of a field. The windows were lighted and I looked inside and saw an old man and an old woman sitting at a fireplace. It was a real fireplace with woods burning inside a hole. The sight was quite cozy. The woman was reading a book and the man was dozing in his rocking chair. I surveyed the house and noticed that they had meats in the refrigerator. So I willed the body to push the door open and walk straight to the kitchen. When the body entered the house, a strong gush of winds swept the room and the woman looked up with her eyes open wide. She stared at the body, frozen of fear. She didn't make any move or say anything--much less scream--when she saw the bloody body approaching her. But then, it looked as if the body was aiming for the woman's throat and was going to eat her. No, I didn't want that. That woman was not my enemy. So I stopped the body cold, just one foot from the woman, and re-directed it toward the kitchen. Once in the kitchen the body knew what to do, I didn't have to instruct him on this matter. It opened the refrigerator door and took the meats, cooked and uncooked, and stuffed them into his mouth in rapid successions. He was hungry. Looked like it was beef, pork and chicken and goat and rabbit and duck and quails and whatever. There were other things in the fridge like eggs and cheese and vegetables and other crap but zombies don't like those things. Meat is what they crave. My zombie was eating meat but he wasn't very happy because the meat was not bloody. Without blood, the meat is much less tasty. In less than five minutes, the body finished all the meats it found in the refrigerator. Its dull eyes brightened a little, but I could see that it wasn't satisfied. It wanted to eat more which to me only made senses because that's how a zombie is: it is never full no matter how much it eats. There are two dogs sitting at the corner of the kitchen looking at the body with curious eyes. I wondered why they didn't bark. The body snatched the dogs off the floor and gnaws them, fur and all. And this time I saw satisfaction in the eyes of the zombie: the dog meat was raw and warm and bloody. After the two dogs are comfortably settled in the zombie's stomach, I directed it out of the house. The woman was still sitting there, frozen stiff like a block of ice. Her eyes were all white, as if she had passed out. Couldn't blame her for that. Who wouldn’t be afraid of a zombie, even if it is a slow moving one? I wonder why zombies are so slow, they walk as if the air around them is thick like cheese and they have to cut their way through to advance.

 

Once out of the house, the body walked with renewed energy. This time I was sure it could walk straight to Philadelphia without stopping for food again. In fact, what the zombie consumed in that house was worth a week of food for a family of five. I wondered why the old man and woman had so much food while there were only two of them. Hmm ... Perhaps it was transportation problem: they were so far from the nearest supermarket, I guessed.

 

So I directed the body back to the road. Now, darkness was complete but the snow had not slowed down at all, it continued to fall like it had saved all the snow in the world for the last ten thousand years just for this one. But my zombie walked on. Philadelphia was only ten miles away, but in this kind of weather and with this kind of slow walk, it might take my zombie until tomorrow morning or even later to reach the destination which was the house where my lover lived. In her mind, she might be thinking that I was stuck somewhere in the snow storm and it would be days before I could make it to the city. So she took advantage of this opportunity to see this guy. She might even wish that I was killed in the storm. If that was what she wished for, then her wish had been granted. I was dead. But that was not the end of the story. The story ended when she was settled in the zombie's stomach.

 

When the body reached the outskirt of the city, the snow had ended and the sun was shinning brightly. The sky was deep blue. Slowly, the body walked across the Ben Franklin Bridge, staggering through mountains of snow. The city was dead silent because the storm had stopped all activities and kept people in their homes. There were no cars on the roads. After the bridge, the body walked the streets of the northern section of the city and finally arrived at the house of the woman.

 

 

Three

 

So the soul that hovered over the zombie across miles of snowed terrain has re-entered the body and is now standing at a corner of the room. The body is now me, the broken-hearted lover. The knife is in my hands. I am about to kill. I step toward the bed and look closely at the woman's face. She is now only a woman, not my lover, not my sweetheart, not my darling, not my sweetie, not my pussycat, she is just a woman. Or should I say, a female animal? Thinking that way makes it easier for me to deliver her. You may say that I dehumanize her. She has a satisfactory look on her face. Her mouth is half opened in a little smile. That face is so familiar to me. Too bad, in a short while, that face and the smile will be no more. I tap the woman on her shoulders and she opens her eyes. She looks at the face that's looking at her and I know she knows she's looking at me even though the face she's looking at is badly disfigured. In less than a fraction of a second, as terror flashes in her eyes, she knows why she must die. That’s the crime, the arrest, the indictment, the trial, the verdict all rolled into one nano-second of justice.

 

I swing my arm and with one swift move, her throat is slit open and blood gushes out in violent torrents.

 

The man is still in his blissful sleep. He's snoring gently. While the woman is dying, I step over to the other side of the bed and look at him. I don't want to wake him up. Like me, he just wants love, and like me, he was given fake love. He is a sucker like me. Fools for love. I have thought about dispatching him. Simply, I cannot eat her while he's alive and watching me eat. He may get violent, trying to defend his "lover" which is something he should not do. Should not, because she is not his lover, like I was never her lover. I feel sorry for him. You may think that by killing him I am merely trying to eliminate a witness to a crime. Ha, what do I care about that? I am a zombie, remember? I am dead. I don't belong to this world anymore. Nothing of this world concerns me anymore. So like me, he is only a fool who does not know what he’s doing. He's innocent. So I will let him live. I tap him on his shoulders and he opens his eyes and I whack him on his head with the handle of the knife. He becomes limp. I pull him off the bed and lay him in a corner of the room. Then I take the sheet from the bed and tear it into strips and I tie him up, hands and feet. He curls like a shrimp. I also stuff rags into his mouth and blindfold him. I don't want him to see the blood and gore that is going to take place.

 

Then I walk over to the woman again. The bed is soaked in blood and she is dark blue, almost purple. The woman I love is dead. No longer is she able to run around and act like a slut. Does she deserve this fate? I think so. No, I know so. I am absolutely sure she deserves to die. If I let her live, how many more hearts would she butcher? Hmm, sounds like I am doing others a favor by stopping the woman, right? Yeah, in a way, but the motivation behind this killing is pure, undiluted rage over a betrayal, and therefore it is totally selfish. The fact that other men will benefit by this act is only unintentional, a byproduct.

 

With the knife, I slice off her arms and legs, taking care to guide the knife smoothly through the joints. I don't chop. I slice. Then I separate the head from the body. More blood gushing out. The eyes are all white. She's now in the other world. I never want a love affair, my love affair, to end like this, in this bloody fashion. I want lovers to love and live happily ever after. But at the same time, I know, people are weak, they are victims of their own circumstances and emotions. She couldn't help being a slut, and I couldn't help being an angry lover, so angry that I had to kill.

 

After the limps are removed, I open her torso and take out the innards. Heart, liver, intestines, spleen, kidneys, lungs, everything. It is exhausting work. And I feel sad. This is the body I have loved so much. In fact, I worshipped this body. It was a beautiful body. Now look at it: a terrible, bloody and greasy mess. I cannot believe this pile of meat used to be my lover's body. But I am doing what I have to do: taking revenge. I am doing what a zombie must do: eat. I take comfort, however, in the knowledge that I am not eating you, but I am eating my lover, to make her flesh my flesh, to make her one with me. We will never separate again.

 

I heard movements at the corner of the room. The man is struggling to untie himself. But he cannot do so because I tied him up well, very well. Weird sounds come out of this mouth which is stuffed with rags. He doesn't know what hit him. He doesn't know what's happening to him. Which is good. What I am doing would be too much for him to bear if he knows, if he sees what I am doing. I ignore him and return to work. I go into the kitchen and fetch a couple of garbage bags and stuff the body parts into them. With that man alive in the room, I cannot comfortably consume the woman. Because? Because it would take a few days to finish eating her and I don't like to have anyone around when I am having the feast. It is a totally private party, just me and her.

 

After all the parts are in the bags, I walk over to the man and whack him again with the handle of the knife. He passes out again. I untie his hands and feet and remove the rags from his mouth. In an hour, when he comes to, I will be gone. He will say what the heck happened when he sees his lover missing and the bed is bloody. I don't know what he would do then. He will be traumatized. Perhaps he will call the police. Whatever.

 

I drag the bags to the window and toss them out and they land deep inside the snow. Then I climb out and jump onto the ground. The sky is still very blue. And it's cold. I feel very cold. But it doesn't matter because as a zombie, I can put up with all kinds of weather. I walk through the snow with the bags on my shoulders and after about an hour, I find an abandoned building. I go in and sit down on the floor. Debris is all around me and I even see rats running back and forth.

 

I open one bag and start to eat. Delicious. And when I am munching on her arm, a thought pops into my head: Love is a deadly business.

 

(End)

 

 

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 02.12.2020

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