by Terrence Aym

Created on: March 18, 2010   Last Updated: December 18, 2011

All Us Zombies

Carl Wagner spotted the dead man tilling a soybean field eighteen miles west of Decatur, Illinois.

He had been driving down a dirt access road thinking it might be a shortcut to his destination.  With the price of a gallon of gasoline higher than that of a fifth of whiskey he had developed the habit of seeking the shortest route between two points.  Therefore, six miles west of Interstate 57 he turned off onto the rural roads that crisscrossed the southern Illinois farm communities seeking "the farm."

Now as he approached his destination he subconsciously slowed his vehicle. The air shimmered from the heat rising off a soybean field. He spotted shirtless men of various races carried hoes or scythes or nothing at all. Most of them seemed to wander aimlessly through endless rows of neatly cultivated beans.

A gentle breeze kicked up. It wafted through Wagner's open car window bringing with it a menagerie of farm smells: the acrid stink of chemical fertilizers, cow dung and the pungent odor of damp, loamy soil. The wind also carried with it the smell of death-the festering decay of things that should be dead but weren't.

Why he was drawn to this spot, this lonely rural outpost far from any major city he couldn't say. He felt compelled to seek it out, as if it were a flame and he the dancing moth drawn towards certain doom by the hypnotic light.

He continued on steadfastly, resolutely. Determination set his features into stone while he quelled the conflicts erupting inside him: the doubts, the worry, the confusion, the anger and the fear. More than anything else he felt fear. The fear was a living animal inside him gnawing at his guts, desperate to break free.

He contained his fear and drove onwards. Now the farmstead lay less than a quarter mile ahead of him. He saw the familiar silhouette of the broken silo half hidden by the farmhouse and a nearby barn. The rusted, shattered silo poked skyward like the stiffened, broken finger of a corpse pointing accusingly towards a heaven that would forever be denied it.

Zombies don't go to heaven, he thought, zombies don't die; they just survive in a living hell fashioned by their masters.

How he knew the lethargic men were zombies he couldn't say.

A large black crow soared overhead; it cawed loudly. Holding its wings out rigidly it rode the summer updrafts, circling the fields.

When he saw the crow an overpowering sense of foreboding welled up in him. As he turned the wheel and steered the car onto the twisting,

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