Zombies that are not zombies

I am living in a big, fortified building with all of my family and friends. We've holed up there because there are people outside with some kind of cannibalism-inducing illness. We're referring to them as zombies, but they're not. They just have a major compulsion to eat other people, dead or alive.

Whatever the illness is, it causes a reduction in the ability to process tactile sensory input, and a loss of ability to feel complex emotions, especially guilt or compassion. The infected have reduced senses of hot, cold, pain, and even touch. This makes it tough to use physical force to stop them without killing them, but it also makes it difficult for them to maintain a grip on anything with their hands.

They can feel various levels of happiness and anger ranging from contentment to ecstasy, and from annoyance to blind rage, but that is mostly the extent of their apparent emotional experience. They know that emotions like aversion, guilt, fear, sadness, and horror exist, and can vaguely remember experiencing them, but are no longer susceptible to them. They are aware of others' experiences, but unconcerned, so while they do not experience negative emotional feedback from anything they do, they have no aversion to causing it in others and therefore do not have any moral compunctions about eating us alive.

They can talk, and even have enough cognitive reasoning capability to try to trick people. They are not dead, or even dying. Rigor mortis is not setting in. There is no physical decay. It's hard to tell them from regular people from a distance.

Up close, you can see the change in a few different ways. The infected don't care about their looks, and become increasingly disheveled and dirty. They will also have abandoned all other self-care, so when they show their teeth, if you haven't figured out something is wrong, you will. Some of them have even taken to filing them into points. There are changes in the blood that cause their skin to take on a bluish tint around the lips. It looks like they have a severe case of pink-eye. In later stages, they develop some signs of jaundice, but it doesn't seem related to a dysfunction which is life-threatening to them. The yellowing can be seen in the eyes, and on and around the fingernails. It's hard to tell with the rest of the skin because by that time they are usually filthy.

I was one of the first to encounter one of the infected. I was at work when the first few of them began to attack . I am describing the experience to a group of people gathered around me in a room full of makeshift armor and various kinds of weapons. Some weapons, we had before the infection hit (the divider between before and after, we refer to as "the change.") A lot of these were things the nerds among us, myself included, had once purchased for decoration purposes, like the swords we have hung up on the walls. A few people have shotguns. Shotguns are preferable to pistols because we've found it easier to make more ammunition for them. We also have some things we've made that fire other projectiles, and we have made explosive devices, though I am still leery of having anyone use them, as prior to The Change, none of us had made anything like what is sitting in the room. For some reason, others have listened to my objections, and we've reserved those for emergencies until we have a chance to safely (or at least mostly safely) test them.

I describe to the group how one day at work, a guy came in who was acting suspicious. My boss thought he was a shoplifter, and was keeping a close eye on him. He also seemed to be watching her, but he wasn't acting like a normal shoplifter. He wasn't hovering around stuff, and he didn't look like he was waiting for an opportunity to hide something. He did have kind of a sneaky expression on his face, but he wasn't doing anything. He just wandered around the store, watching my boss out of the corner of his eye. I didn't get the same vibe she did, but couldn't tell her because he'd hear me. Instead, I handed her a note, saying that I'd found it on the floor by the prep table, and it had the regional manager's name on it (so she'd look at it right away instead of setting it aside.) I'd written that the guy looked like a nut, not a thief, and I thought he might be planning to attack someone. She looked at me like I was stupid, shook her head, and motioned for me to get back to work .

Still worried, I kept an eye on the situation, creating a pretense to clean up around the tea when she followed the guy into the beer cave and began putting up cans. Sure enough, he waited until her guard was down, and attacked her from behind, grabbing at her ineffectively, then bashing at her with his feet. Without thinking, I grabbed the nearly empty sweet tea urn, rushed into the beer cave, and slammed it into the guy's face. He fell over backward, and I grabbed my boss's arm and pulled her out of the room. I shut the door and put my weight onto the handle as the guy got up and tried to open it. When he couldn't push hard enough on his side, he rushed the glass, hit it with his body, bounced off, and fell on his butt.

My boss yelled for co-workers to call the cops, and I watched as the crazy guy looked around the door trying to decide how to get out. He hit it with a 40 ounce beer bottle. The bottle exploded, but the glass door only cracked. Shards of the bottle hit him in the face and arms, drawing blood. He seemed totally unconcerned about it, and began beating the door with his fists hard enough to make the glass come out of his skin as his frustration with the situation quickly became anger and then rage. My boss yelled at me to let him out, and I yelled back that I couldn't, or he'd attack someone. It was obvious that hurting someone was what he came here to do. She had to agree.

I explain to my listeners that at that point, I'd noticed a number of things about him that convinced me that he was high. His eyes looked horribly bloodshot. He wasn't clumsy, but he didn't seem very aware of what was touching him. He couldn't maintain a good grip on anything that took effort. When the bottle blew up, he didn't even flinch. He hit the door with glass embedded in his fists, driving some pieces further into his skin, and didn't seem to notice. It was like he didn't feel pain. Also, though he was sparsely dressed and had just spent more than ten minutes in a room where the temperature was barely above freezing, he wasn't shivering.

A few people ask questions about my actions, including whether or not I was scared. I remember being terrified over a number of things, the first one being that if he was on something like PCP, he was going to come out of there and beat me to a quivering pulp on the floor because nothing I could do would make him hurt enough to not want to continue hurting me. I was also worried that, being an apparent drug user, he might be carrying a bloodborne pathogen, and since he was bleeding, he might share that with anyone he touched. Aside from that, I was afraid he'd get past me and hurt one of the single moms I work with, all three of whom have very young kids and no one to help at home if they were hurt. I couldn't abandon the fight because I needed to protect them. In the background I could hear the younger one yelling into the phone, "Hurry! He's breaking the door and he's crazy!" I could also see one of my older co-workers coming around the side of the shelves with a broom.

When the glass broke, it didn't make a big opening. The guy began kicking out broken pieces, not caring that huge, still-attached shards of glass were slicing up his leg. I tell the group, that is when I thought I knew for sure that they guy was on PCP, and nothing I was going to do would stop him. Terrified, I looked behind me to see that my boss had grabbed a fire extinguisher. I let go of the door and stepped back . The guy crashed through it and rushed at her. She slammed the butt of the extinguisher into his face and my other co-worker whacked him in the back of the head with the broom handle, all just as police came into the building. As he turned with the force of the impact from the fire extinguisher, I kicked the crazy guy in the back of the knee, causing his leg to fold under him. He went down like a sack of sand. Bleeding heavily and sporting two head wounds, he seemed a bit disoriented as the cops pounced and tazed him. After that, it was all over. He passed out, and the accompanying EMTs were able to get him out of there.

I use the experience to explain to my team that while the infected aren't susceptible to pain, they aren't invulnerable. They can be brought down in many of the same ways as a healthy person; by interrupting the body's "scaffolding" (causing a joint to temporarily collapse,) by knockout, or by blood loss. They will die the same as anyone from the same injuries. They just won't alter their movement to cater to pain the way a healthy person would, because they don't feel it. I advise my team that if needed, they must fight back with deadly force. It would be cruel to disable and leave, because these people will eat each other, and trapping them would simply ensure death by starvation, the only pain they do still seem able to experience. The hope that a cure will be found is not sufficient reason to extend mercy beyond the bounds of sensible caution and risk one's life and one's charges to save a zombie who is trying to eat you.

I explain that the contagion is a bloodborne pathogen, that we don't even know yet whether it is a virus, bacteria, or some new, unknown infectious agent. It does not seem to survive contact with the air, but it's better to not take chances. It can also apparently be passed through saliva, because people who are bitten do become infected if the bite draws blood. The incubation period seems to range between five days and two weeks, so we're isolating anyone bitten for up to three weeks.

So far we've been lucky. There have been no infections in our compound, which (being nerds) we are referring to as our "keep."

We're headed out for three things. We need medicine, medical supplies, and first aid supplies. We are going to raid a pharmacy that seems to be untouched. We've scoped it out using a remote-controlled car with a device created by one of the guys. It's a webcam hooked up to a smart phone, and it uses the phone's web capabilities to send video to a computer we've got hooked up to a landline in the keep. Society has totally broken down, and no one is running anything, but there are engineers, programmers, mechanics, and chemists among our residents.  On previous raids we've shored up the source of area land phone lines, and two cell phone towers. They're now powered by a combination of windmills and solar panels. If one fails, the other will keep them going.

Our keep also has power, including a direct hook-up to a room full of freezers where we have stored meat salvaged from local groceries before it could go bad. We've created a water system which filters rain water and draws from a local reservoir. We're working on a plan to increase our access to clean water, but today the priority is getting those supplies. We intend to ride out the wave of infection until the zombies whittle down their numbers through infighting, and we're able to either cure or take out those remaining in our area.

We finish discussing the methods we're going to use, and head out. Most of us have bladed weapons, with only those who are good at hitting moving targets carrying guns. One of my family members is using a modern crossbow. Others are concerned that his ammunition might not stop the infected, but he is a deadly marksman, and I remind the doubters that the heart is vulnerable regardless of pain.

We pile into my husband's and my 1989 Ford Econoline, which we have armored using parts from other cars and adapted to running on just about any flammable liquid. Right now, it's running on a formula mixed by some of our residents. It's not as efficient as gas, but it's something we can make when we can't get gas. However, if there are zombies within a few hundred yards of us, they'll smell us coming. They won't be able to get into the van, but we'll be vulnerable once we exit it. We're wearing makeshift armor of various types. All of us have all skin except for the face covered with at least some padding, protecting us from stray bites, but allowing pretty normal freedom of movement. We're too warm, but we don't care.

We check our security system and find that there is nothing moving or out of the ordinary in the vicinity of the exit. We've built a tall wall around the keep, and there's a motorized garage door which we have to open to get out. The person operating the door is inside the keep, but we still don't want any zombies in our yard. We don't want to kill anyone if we don't have to.

The door is raised, and we drive out. As soon as we exit, the door drops like a stone. The engineers designed it so that it could be raised and dropped at controlled speeds, but if the operator chooses, the door can be shut quickly to keep out intruders.

I  drive through the neighborhood kind of slowly because cars have been abandoned in the street. I am able to push them out of the way with the front end of the van, but while the armor will withstand the impact, the people inside will still feel a jolt if I'm moving too fast when I do it. There aren't seat belts for all of us, so I have to be careful.

The third time I have to push a car out of the way, a man comes running out of the bushes, screaming obscenities at us. His long, dirt-caked hair sticks out all over like a lion's mane, and his clothing is so shredded that it's no longer functional. He bull-rushes the back of the van, runs into it, and slams his fists into the bars across the back window. His hands are terribly bruised, and there is blood around his fingernails. He is missing several teeth, and there is a huge gash along the side of his face. Blood is smeared all around his mouth. It looks like he's been in a fight with a wild animal, but my guess is that he wrestled and subdued a weaker zombie and probably has been surviving by eating that person's flesh.

I hit the gas a little as we come to an area with no cars in the street, and we are able to pull away from the zombie. He runs after us, screaming. His screams draw other infected, and we leave behind us a grizzly parody of a barroom brawl.

We drive for about a mile, maybe two. The odometer in the van is broken, but the fuel gauge works, so I'm guessing based on a combination of memory and fuel usage. We approach the strip mall where the pharmacy is housed, and stop in the parking lot. There are a few cars left in the lot. We drive around and look into them, making sure there is no one hiding inside. We don't see anyone. That's pretty consistent with what the remotes found. This place is pretty deserted. The camera didn't encounter a single zombie. It is possible that some are hiding inside, though, and we didn't get the camera in there, so we're going to have to be careful entering. After much debate, we had decided prior to leaving that we were going to shine light into the building to see if anyone was in there, because it wouldn't be worth taking them by surprise if we risked being taken by surprise as a result. Getting a good look would limit the areas from which they could attack without us seeing them first, and we could be ready for that.

We drive up in front of the store, and we follow the plan. Our fears turn out to be misplaced, because we are able to raid the store without incident. It goes so well that in addition to the needed medications and first aid supplies, we manage to secure toiletries, cleaning supplies, birth control devices, snack items, and a lot of candy. Upon returning to the vehicle, we dump our packs inside and decide to go for a second trip into the store, returning with cooking utensils, tools, more snack items and candy, and other items which aren't totally necessary, but which will make life easier for us.

Big mistake. We shouldn't have been greedy.

As we near the store's exit for the second time, we spot several zombies investigating our van. It's sealed up tight, and they can't get in. We are able to remotely lock and unlock it, but we can't remotely get inside. We're now stuck with limited options. We could wait them out and see if they leave, but they're pretty persistent right now, and we have no idea how long they'll stay. There is also the risk that if we do that, they could discover us hiding inside the building and attack .

We can fight, but we're outnumbered. There are about ten of us, and judging by what we can see, there are at least thirty of them. They all appear to have recently fed, because there is blood on their faces, and they aren't attacking each other. Instead, they're operating with the curiosity of a bunch of monkeys investigating a foreign object.

The van isn't equipped with a lot of weapons, but it has a few surprises. One is what I have nicknamed the zap factor. It's hooked up with more than one battery, so that we can power a system that turns the outside of it into a giant taser that will electrocute whoever is touching it. It works best on fewer bodies, but even a large group will be momentarily stunned, and afterward will have difficulty moving at will.

We back into a darker portion of the store and quietly plan our attack . We can activate a chirping noise to go off just once. It is audible for several yards, but not incredibly far away. My archer suggests that we do that, to further attract the zombies we can see, and maximize the number of them touching the van. Then, we can activate the electric charge and zap all of them, after which those with projectile weapons can open fire and take out the ones in front and maybe the second wave. That will reduce the number we have to fight up close. Another of my cohorts has located a few breaks in the front window where those with guns can stand and shoot right after the zap. The only problem is that the shooters have to be on the other side of the front counter.

We decide to go with that plan, so we crawl up to the window. I peek over the edge and see that the zombies are still trying to find a way into the van. I activate the chirp, and they all momentarily perk up. Then, they start pounding on it. I activate the zap. They all jump and shake when the electricity hits them. Immediately after, they throw a huge temper tantrum, shouting and jumping around, attacking each other as if their fellow zombies were responsible for the momentary paralysis. Though they are not as clumsy and disoriented as we had hoped, this is still good for us, as the shooters are able to at first act without being noticed. They take out fully half of the zombies as those of us with hand weapons rush to the door. The remaining zombies rush the building, and for a moment there is a pause in the fighting as they shove it closed while trying to get in. We back away and prepare to let them come at us down the short, narrow hall between the outer and inner doors. The shooters take aim, and when the first zombie breaks through the glass, they take out that one and the next three before the remaining dozen or so push through their bodies to the front.

There is a short fight between us and them. I find myself attacked by two burly looking men, one pounding on me with closed fists, the other trying and failing to grab me with both hands. Using the tactics I've taught my team, I stab the grabby one in the chest with the really long knife I'm carrying, and slam my foot into the other's left knee hard enough that I hear it break . The knee guy goes mostly down, but keeps pounding on my leg with his fists. The knife gets momentarily stuck in the other guy's chest, until he backs up a bit to look down at the wound. From somewhere off to my right, a bullet hits the knee guy in the head. He growls at me like an animal before falling face down in front of me as the other guy, bleeding heavily, lurches at me. He's disoriented enough that I can just step out of the way, grab his arm, and throw him to the ground. As I do, another zombie tries to grab me from behind and ends up under my attacker, who immediately bites her in the throat. Not sure how well I've disabled the one on top, I stick the knife up through the back of his head. It's an awful feeling, both halfway familiar and really alien. It feels and sounds like I've stuck the knife into a baked squash, but I have the full knowledge that I've just ended someone's life.

I feel sick, but there is still a lot of danger. There are still some zombies outside, and some of my team are still fighting. I hear the gun go off again, and another zombie drops. I turn and slash the muscles and tendons on the back of another zombie's knees. She falls, and I recognize her as a regular customer at my store. She always comes in and gets a large coffee cup, fills it halfway with regular coffee, then adds a little each of all of the flavors in the cappuccino machine, and tops it off with a handful of ice cubes. She always pays with change, but she saves her quarters for the vending machines at work, so she leaves the cashier with a handful of dimes, nickles, and much needed pennies. I remember that she's always tidy and polite when she's shopping.

Now, she's on her back on the floor, growling obscenities and grabbing at my ankles with bloody, dirty hands. Her once professional looking outfit is hanging on her in filthy rags. Her face, always wearing a pleasant smile when she shopped in my store, is contorted with fury. She accuses me of stealing her kill. My teammate shoots her, grabs my arm, and drags me toward the door, telling me that we have to get to the van before others hear the fighting and come to investigate. The rest of the team are all ready running.

I unlock the doors as we run the short distance to the vehicle. We throw them open and start piling inside. As I climb in, I glance to the side and see a whole hoard of them running across the other end of the lot toward us. They will reach us in a matter of seconds. I climb in behind the wheel as the guys slam shut the door. The engine is all ready started. I throw the van into gear and turn it away from the building to see that we are surrounded. With us as a common target, the zombies will act as a mob, all of them focusing their attacks on us. If we make it through and escape, they'll attack each other and fight to the death, until the dead outnumber the living. Those left will gorge themselves on the corpses of the fallen, and there's nothing we can do to stop this from happening.

There is no way to go without running over infected people to get out of here. My heart sinks. I look at the front seat passenger. He has opened the glove box and is accessing the controls for the few guns we've put onto the vehicle. We are going to have to shoot and bludgeon our way out. Gritting my teeth, I face the mob. As he fires the first shots, I floor the pedal, and the van lurches forward harder than expected, momentarily throwing my head back against the seat.

The feeling of the van lurching forward was enough to wake me. That's something that happens all the time. While sensory input that doesn't make sense or is really uncomfortable doesn't seem to affect me, strong vivid sensations felt in the head seem to force me into consciousness. In fact, when in the course of a nightmare I figure out that I'm dreaming, I use the act of shaking my head really hard to wake myself up.

On waking, I felt a combination of relief and urgency to get back to the dream. Though waking brought an awareness that the experience was not real, I still felt responsible for getting the supplies back to the friends and family waiting for us at the compound we'd built and fortified. For a few moments, I could still hear the tires squealing, and I felt like if I was awake, the van must be moving forward with no driver, and of all things, my mind went through the process of realizing that the guy sitting on the floor between myself and the other front passenger would likely jump into my seat under the circumstances and take over.

I think the sound of tires squealing may have actually been real, floating in from the somewhat busy street that intersects with the street outside my apartment. It sounded so real, and didn't disappear, but faded like the driver was moving away from my vantage point before coming to a stop.

Rules that make this dream different from zombie movies and many of my zombie nightmares:
1) The "zombies" are living, not undead, and can be killed the same as any other person.
2) The infection does not animate dead bodies
3) The infection is not a totally mentally disabling disease, nor is it terminal. They can talk and appear to be able to reason. However, emotions seem to trump logic in their thought processes.
4) The "zombies" get full just like they would have prior to infection. When that happens, they're still violent, but they stop eating until they get hungry again.
5) The "zombies" will eat any human flesh, not just the flesh of healthy people, so they are as willing to attack each other as they are to attack us.