But behind the head was her father, lying there quietly, speaking to her more eloquently than any member of the living dead ever could. She stepped closer to her father, holding the head out before her like a beacon.
“This is my father,” she said, not really caring whether the creature even listened. “He didn’t want much out of life. He just wanted to ride a double-decker bus someday, to see the Tower of London, to have a real beer in a real pub. He only wanted to see his daughters grow up to be happy…”
She grew silent. As she held the head by its hair, it rocked below her hand like a pendulum. She didn’t know what else to say, but she said it anyway.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Maybe…maybe I can make it up to you.”
She hadn’t been able to make her father happy while he was alive. But now that he was dead…now that he was dead, maybe she had a chance.
She placed the head in one of the empty cabinets, where it once more began its howling.
“Welcome to your new home,” she said. “I have to try to get back to mine.”
Then she shut the door on the past and left the room of death forever.
Who We Used to Be
By David Moody
David Moody’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies The Undead and 666: The Number of the Beast. His zombie novel Autumn and its sequels were originally self-published and released for free online; the books have been downloaded more than a half-million times and are currently being rereleased in print by Thomas Dunne Books. A film based on Autumn, starring Dexter Fletcher and David Carradine, was released in the U.S. earlier this year. Moody’s novel Hater is also currently being adapted for film, with Guillermo del Toro producing and The Orphanage’s J. A. Bayona directing. Moody’s other novels include Dog Blood (the sequel to Hater), Straight to You, and Trust.
Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins was recently asked if, since he did not believe in any sort of afterlife, he was afraid of death. He replied that he was not afraid of death—after all, the universe had existed just fine without him for billions of years before he was born, so why should it trouble him to imagine that it would go on existing without him for billions of years after he’s gone? Rather, he was afraid of dying, because current laws compel dying patients to endure a torturous gauntlet of pain and suffering rather than letting them decide for themselves when to let go.
“I think many people assume that if they really did find themselves facing-off against the living dead, they’d react like the people in the movies and books: they’d hunt out weapons and supplies and fight off wave after wave of the dead,” Moody says. “I think the reality would be very different. Many people would just implode. Others would deny the impossible events unfolding around them and try to continue with their day-to-day as usual.”
Our next story questions the logic of trying to survive for as long as possible when all you’re doing is wasting precious time and effort prolonging the inevitable. “It’s like keeping a dying patient alive by pumping them continually with drugs which make them feel worse,” Moody says, “but sometimes you just have to accept that letting go might just be the kindest and most sensible option.”
There was something beautifully ironic about the way mankind completely overlooked its own annihilation. Our society, for too long increasingly focused on the irrelevant, wasn’t even looking in the right direction when more than six billion lives were abruptly ended. Had anyone survived, they’d no doubt have been able to come up with a thousand and one half-baked, incorrect explanations: a mutated virus, terrorism, scattered debris from a comet tail, a crashed satellite leaking radiation…. Truth was, even if by some chance they had stumbled on the right reason, it wouldn’t have made any difference. And anyway, if anyone had been watching, then what happened next would have been even harder to comprehend than the sudden loss of billions of lives. Just minutes later, as if each person’s individual death had been nothing more than an inconvenient blip as trivial and unimportant as a momentary power-cut in the middle of a reality TV program, every last one of the dead got back up again and tried to carry on.