Zombies that talk

Over the years, my nightmare zombies have kind of evolved. Unlike movie zombies, they have no problem eating each other, but they'll go after the weakest first, and since the living are more vulnerable to pain and injury, we're preferable. Sometimes the zombies move like athletes. Sometimes they have magical powers. Sometimes they are slow to lose their intelligence, and sometimes they talk. Last night, I had talkers and smart zombies. I think those are the scariest, because they can really take you by surprise.

I'm in a house that is not mine. The room I am in has bunk beds. I have run into this room to get away from five zombies who are chasing me. They are pounding on the door and screaming obscenities.

I turn around to see if I can get out a window, and am shocked by the rest of the contents of the room. Lined up along the walls are a bunch of makeshift weapons, various knives and other sharp objects fastened to long sticks, broom handles, and the like. Then, I see the window. It's too small for me to fit through. There is no way out of this room.

I grab an armload of the makeshift weapons, and climb up to the top bunk. The ceiling in this room is really high. I don't have room to stand, but I do have room to get up on my knees.

The zombies break through the door. One points at the bed and slurs "Zzhere ssshee izzzz!" Some of the others talk better, but this one is missing part of the flesh on his jaw, and a few teeth. He kind of sounds like Sid the Sloth from the movie Ice Age, but with a deeper voice.

I am rushed by the group, all of them grabbing for me at once. They don't see the weapons on the bed. Kicking and stabbing at them, I fight like crazy to keep from being bitten. Normally in a situation like this, I would be screaming, but I'm actually trying to avoid attracting more of them, so I'm not. The zombies have no such goal. They are all snarling at me and shoving at each other. I keep hearing the word "mine" and "hungry."

The first one I kick falls over, and has a hard time getting back up. The second one isn't phased by my foot at all. Instead, he grabs my leg with both hands and tries to bite through my boot. I shove a knife on the end of a broom handle in through his eye, all the way through until I feel the blade hit bone. Then, I shove harder, flipping his head back. I kick his jaw, and he lets go of my leg as I pull the blade back out. His eye comes with it. He shouts obscenities at me and claws at the knife, grabbing the eye as if he can put it back and still use it. As he does, his elbow hits the arm of a third zombie reaching for me. At the same time, I can see a fourth and fifth moving around the other side of the bed.

I stab the eye guy in the throat and kick the one next to him so that he stumbles backward. The ones behind me are trying to climb up. I hit one in the chest with the handle of the weapon I'm holding, and knock him into the other one. They both fall. I know one will get up fast, because he looks relatively undamaged. The other is so decayed that he stinks badly. He's down for a few minutes, so my immediate threats have been reduced to three, and one is half blind.

I take a second weapon in my left hand, and begin slashing and stabbing at the zombies. The eye guy seems to be having some difficulty, and his buddy has fallen backward over the first one I knocked down. I focus on the one behind me, and catch him climbing back up the bed. I hit him in the head with both sticks, then give him a hard kick to the chest. I hear bone break, and he lets go of the bed with his hands. He falls on the other climber, knocking him down. I turn back toward the others just in time to see the eye guy fall over with some kind of black goo coming out of the wounds I've left behind in his eye and throat.

The other two zombies immediately start eating him. I take the opportunity to run for the door, jumping down from the bed and bolting. The two zombies feeding on the eye guy ignore me, but the ones on the other side of the bed come scrambling around the corner of it. Beside the door is a metal baseball bat. I grab that, and whack the nearest one in the head as hard as I can. I hear the crunch of bone breaking. The zombie falls, and the one behind him pounces on his back and begins tearing into him.

I run from the house. Outside, I see kids toys, a bicycle, and an odd shaped mechanical device. Upon closer inspection, I recognize it and realize it's meant for personal flying. It straps onto the back, with controls on the front. I put it on and hope it works. When I operate the controls, hot air shoots out of the bottom of it and I fly up into the air. I get just about ten feet off of the ground when the zombies come running out of the house. They are yelling at me to come back, that they aren't done with me yet, and so on. I push another button and air comes out of the side of the pack, moving me away from the yard.

* * * * * *

I'm leading a woman and two small kids to the safe house that my friends and family have set up. We've fortified the place so that it's nearly impossible to enter unless you are let in from the inside. I'm pretty sure the woman is not the kids' mother. She doesn't look anything like them.

The kids are fully aware of the danger, but the woman has convinced herself that it's not as bad as it seems. We're going through a residential neighborhood that has been pretty torn up. Wrecked cars are all over the place. There is visible damage to most of the houses. Bones lay in plain sight on the ground where zombies have eaten every scrap off of them. We're being as quiet as we can. We only have to get past about a block of this before we reach the guarded area around the safe house. Once we get there, I have a flag that I'm supposed to wave, so they don't shoot us.

We're nearly through when we hear a man's voice behind us. "Hey... hey you guys! Wait up!"
I can tell from the sound of the voice that there's something wrong with the speaker's mouth. That isn't always a guarantee that it's a zombie speaking, but it's a warning of probability. I look back, and size up the guy behind us, as well as his buddy. Both are much the worse for wear; clothing hanging in rags, blood on their arms, and no shoes. Their hair is matted. I can't see the details of their faces from this distance, but they're not walking very well. I quietly tell the woman with me, "Those are zombies. Don't respond."

She doesn't believe me. She thinks they might need our help, and she wants a closer look. I argue, but I can't stop her. We're in trouble if she gets something started here. We've lost our weapons, and the kids are both really small. There's no way I can protect all three people if these two draw a crowd. I know what's going to happen, and there's nothing I can do about it. She gives me a dirty look, turns, and takes several steps back toward the zombies, asking if they're ok . As soon as she's a few feet away from us, the zombies start running toward her. Instead of figuring it out and running away from them, she just stands there waiting for an answer.

I grab the kids and activate the jet pack from before. It's hard to control while I'm holding them, but I get it to move us in the direction we were going. The only thing I can do is cover their ears so they don't have to hear her screaming. I turn their faces toward each other, so that each has one ear against my chest, and cover the two exposed ears with the palms of my hands. It means I can't cover my own ears, though, and that is how I hear her telling them, "You idiots! I was almost in!"

I look back, and see her berating the zombies like she's one of them, and thin it hits me... she is one of them. I take my hands off of the kids' ears and look at them. They are not zombies. Their skin is warm and they're crying. I ask how long they were with the woman, and they tell me that she found them only a few seconds before I did. I get chills, and as they look where we're going, I look over their necks and arms for bite marks. I see none.

We land, and I wave the flag. A guard comes out to talk to me, and I tell him we need a doctor to examine these kids before bringing them in. I explain about the woman. The doctor comes out and examines the kids. There are no marks on them, and they're able to remember everything from when the zombies broke into their school until when I found them. The woman had told them she was a teacher from another school, where she was the only survivor. The doctor decides we should keep the kids isolated for a day before integrating them in with everyone else, but he's pretty sure they're not infected. I leave the kids with the doctor, and go in to report to the others what I have found out. From now on, we're going to have to be really careful who we rescue.


There are other parts of this dream, but a lot of it is fuzzy. I do remember being in a building with a lot of stairs, and as I looked down from the floor I was on, I could see that someone had destroyed the lower sets of stairs to the basement. There was a kid down there, and she kept telling me how hungry she was. She just wanted a finger or toe, and if I would just throw one down to her, she promised to be quiet. She sounded so normal and so pitiful that I honestly started thinking, why do I need all ten toes?  In another part, I was arguing with a guy in a jail. He was in a cell, and I was outside of it. He was telling me that he was uninfected and I should let him out, even though I could see him and it was obvious that he was a zombie. He didn't realize that he was missing some flesh, so he thought he could fool me.


That was the creepiest part of this nightmare, that the zombies could talk, and think . It was really hard to sleep after that dream. This morning before my alarm went off, I spent quite a bit of time in a cycle of dreaming that something was grabbing my feet, being jolted awake by that, and then dozing back off only to be "grabbed" again. It happened so much that when I finally woke all the way up, the blanket was pushed up to my waist.