Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: The Cranberries – Zombie

As days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, the world fell beneath waves of the undead. If the zombies could feel anything but hunger, which of course they couldn’t, would it be happiness or boredom or sorrow?

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The dead man woke up with fists pounding against his chest. Someone was screaming above him. His own blood clotted in his beard, soaking into his hair and his shirt. Spreading, still hot, across the white linoleum beneath him. A ragged bite marred the side of his throat, the ruptured artery pumping a weakening stream. When his eyes fluttered open there was no life in them. Glassy, filled with nothing but a dumb, savage, bottomless hunger.

The zombie’s hands were like the hands of a baby, waiting to be discovered for the first time. He found them quickly though. Sitting up, he turned them on the human, the woman, hitting him on the chest. She recoiled, her face contorted with horror. Her wrist slipped free from his clumsy grasp. Screaming negatives, she wriggled backward on her hands and knees.

All around them, the hospital was in chaos. Screaming, running, filled the corridors. Blood streaked the walls and floors. A corpse occupied the nearest bed with a zombie bent over it, chewing on its throat. The body of another zombie crumpled in the corner of the room, an IV stand driven through its eye socket and into its brain.

The human backed into another corner, screaming. She was a short, plumpish woman with dark hair, about the same age as the newly awakened zombie’s body. Blood covered her hands and knees. The zombie rolled to its feet, blood running down its back. The corpse in the bed convulsed and the undead man feeding on its neck drew away. After a few moments, the corpse’s eyes opened with the same dead, hungry stare as the others. All three of them turned their attention on the room’s only living inhabitant, the woman. Clumsy, robotic, hungry movements, they tumbled toward her and sunk their clawed fingers and bloodied teeth into her flesh. She begged him to recognise her, to remember, to stop, until her last breath. If the zombie could be said to feel anything, there might have been disgust, horror, but it could only feel that driving hunger.

When they were finished, the woman’s white clothing was torn and stained red. Her eyes opened and the same glassy stare met his own. No longer meat, no longer of any interest. The zombie turned away and stood. More noise, screams, living sounds, drew its attention to the hallway.

Another zombie staggered down the corridor. Grey skinned, it was gaunt and old and naked. A Y-shaped incision on its chest, an autopsy scar, split open at the bottom where its surgical staples had given way. Ropes of spoiled intestines dragged between its feet, picking up bits of debris from the linoleum. The bearded zombie fell in behind it.

Room by room, floor by floor, they scoured the hospital free of living flesh. The zombie thought of nothing more, reacting to sound and movement and letting the hunger steer its every action. Sometimes the female zombie in the ruined white outfit was there, sometimes not. Eventually, the power guttered out and left them in the darkness. The only illumination came from emergency exit signs and dials on the various bits of equipment with battery life.

By the time the zombie found an exit and spilled onto the street, others had already been doing so for hours. Chaos strangled the city. Fires burned in several surrounding buildings. Gunfire echoed the length of streets. Abandoned cars and other vehicles choked the roads and intersections, swarmed by piles of the living dead. If the zombie could be said to feel anything it might have been excitement. A kind of surge of victory.

A helicopter with news station livery thundered overhead. Drawn by the noise, the zombie yowled and gave chase. It wasn’t the only one of its kind with the same idea. A mass of them swarmed through the streets, gathering strength like a tidal wave. Shoulder to shoulder, pouring down sidewalks and shoving through gaps between abandoned vehicles.

Smoke wafted from the helicopter’s engines. It flew low, dipping in jolts that would have been alarming to a human observer. The zombie only sensed movement and noise and gave chase, not caring about the danger. Above one intersection, it wheeled and plunged the last of the distance to the ground.

A gas station occupied one of the four corners of the intersection, a couple dozen zombies swarming its concrete apron. The chopper tumbled into the mass of them. Sawing blades smashed through undead bodies, shattering and scattering limbs, imploding heads, bisecting torsos and spraying their contents the length of the block. The blades splintered as they hit concrete, spearing the surrounding horde. More pieces ripped free. The helicopter flipped and plowed into the gas pumps like a bowling ball. Geysers of amber liquid filled the air right before a spark consumed the chopper and turned it inside out.

Cataclysm. A white-hot column of fire ripped its way out of the ground and tore apart the gas station along with half the surrounding road. The shockwave tossed dozens of zombies. Shrapnel burned in all directions, cutting through the air like bullets. The zombie from the hospital raced into the face of the explosion. One shard cut through the face of a zombie next to it, blowing its head backward. Another, even larger piece smashed against the zombie’s left shoulder. Its arm was shorn away, spiralling to the ground behind it. The zombie staggered, off balance, but failed to really react. Its only emotion, if it could be said to be feeling anything at all, would have been confusion as it wondered where the noise it had been chasing had gone. If it could wonder.

The sun rose the next morning on a city reeling from an infection of the undead. Hordes of zombies filled the streets like rivers of pus. Broken spars of bone jutting from its left shoulder, the one-armed zombie was carried along on the seemingly random currents that dictated the hordes. The sound of gunfire, a moving car, the flash of a living face in a window, all of them drew the horde’s full attention but then were quickly forgotten.

The zombie failed to notice in any real sense that its left arm was gone. Staggering through the streets, it veered constantly to the right and had to be shoved back into place. Gobbets of flesh were stuck in the zombie’s teeth. Its stomach distended above its waistband, heavy with human meat. But it wanted more, and it always would. If it could be said to feel something beside the unremitting hunger, however, it might have been happy. A kind of joy at fitting in, at being a part of something bigger than itself.

Barricades lined with armed men and women, National Guard units, demarcated parts of the city. Boxed in by pairs of heavily armoured vehicles with hulking machine guns on top. The horde surged, individual zombies breaking into janky, stumbling half-runs. Rifles pressed to their shoulders, soldiers opened fire. Bullets sawed into the chests and faces of the first ranks of zombies but they kept coming.

The one-armed zombie picked up speed. Veering to the right, it was jostled back into place. Up ahead, the heavy machine guns atop the humvees erupted and the noise of them drowned out everything else. Anti-aircraft rounds as long as soda cans mowed through the horde. Heads and upper bodies turned instantly into paint, splashing those following. Tunnels bored through the mass of zombies, scattering bodies backward. But they didn’t stop, stampeding over the corpses in front of them, slipping and staggering in gore, yanking themselves back to their feet and lurching forward.

The zombie reached the front of the horde right as they pounded into the barricades and overran them. Desperate soldiers struggled to reload before zombies fell on top of them. The one-armed zombie slammed into a soldier with its shattered shoulder. Its remaining hand grabbed them by the side of the head. Tumbling to the ground, it drove their skull into the asphalt. With their helmet, they stayed conscious in spite of repeated blows. All the worse for them, however, as the one-armed zombie and half a dozen others ripped through their uniform and body armour with their teeth.

The city was theirs. The country, the world, fell under waves of hungry dead. As days turned into weeks, food, living humans, became harder and harder to find. The one-armed zombie wandered from horde to horde according to whims of its despoiled brain. Its skin turned sallow and soft. Its wounds festered. Its clothing, particularly where blood had soaked through the material and dried into stiff sheets, rotted.

On the outskirts of the city, a growing horde gathered outside a mall where a group of survivors had taken shelter. Entrances and storefronts were reinforced with makeshift armour. The constant moan of the horde sounded like wind through high tension wires, drawing the zombie and hundreds of others from miles around.

Starting at the edge of the parking lot, the one-armed zombie jostled forward. Most of the day and night, the horde milled listlessly. Every so often, humans appeared at the edges of the mall rooftop and thinned the horde with hunting rifles. Craniums exploded, showering brains as the bodies dropped. Standing next to the one-armed zombie, another ghoul’s head folded in on itself in a single violent motion. Gore sprayed the side of the zombie’s face. But their efforts were like throwing rocks in a pond to try to empty it. If anything, it had the opposite effect. Zombies surged and attacked the mall’s doors and walls to get at the living humans.

The one-armed zombie ended up near the front of the horde, attacking the main entrance. In spite of the reinforcements on the inside, the glass panels began to crack and crumble. The metal frames bowed. The zombies’ attention was relentless even as some were mashed against the glass and their hands broke down into stumps.

Suddenly, before the main entrance could collapse, a side entrance opened seemingly of its own accord. Human voices called from within. If the one-armed zombie could feel anything, it would have been a surge of elation. It and the rest of the horde flooded the entrance, crushing the slowest among them in the rush.

Inside, the zombies found themselves funnelled through a series of corridors. Human voices coaxed them deeper. Sudden bends and temporary walls spread them out throughout the mall. The zombie and a dozen of its kind found themselves beneath an open balcony. Strange liquid showered them from above. Moments later, a glass bottle attached to a flaming rag spiralled out of the air. The molotov exploded as it hit the ground and hungry flames climbed zombie bodies. As others burned, the zombie staggered free and continued deeper.

Another voice drew the zombie’s attention from the mouth of a small clothing store. Without hesitation, the zombie and several others who had avoided burning raced into the store. A human figure stood in the exact centre of the dark room. The one-armed zombie lunged. As its single remaining hand crashed into the figure’s neck, their head popped straight off. They tumbled backward and one of their arms fell free then they came apart at the waist as well. A mannequin with a child’s walkie talkie clipped to the collar of its sweater. As the other zombies crashed into the one-armed one from behind, groping and clawing, the mannequin’s parts were further scattered.

Behind them, the metal roller door at the front of the store rumbled into place. None of the creatures noticed until the clang of it echoed through the store. The one-armed zombie turned back along with several others. Moaning, they drove their faces against the door and battered it with their hands.

The battle for the mall went on. Gunfire echoed in the halls for a while then retreated into silence. The zombies inside the store failed to free themselves. There was no way of knowing what had happened to the humans, if they’d been killed or they’d escaped. In the aftermath, more packs of zombies roamed the mall at random. Eventually, the one-armed zombie abandoned the roller door and started milling around the store.

Time had no meaning for the zombies inside the clothing store. The only light that ever reached them was the reflected glow from a distant skylight somewhere out in the main corridor but none of them counted how often that light appeared or noticed it in any conscious way. With no stimuli, some settled and went as still as corpses while others wandered in patternless loops around the store. The only excitement would come about when one of those wandering zombies knocked a piece of clothing off a rack or a mannequin off its stand. The noise and movement would animate the others until they realised there was nothing for them to eat. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. Months turned into years, uncelebrated and ignored. The infection slowed the zombies’ rot but not completely. They became slower, stiffer, more desiccated, more grotesque. If the one-armed zombie could be said to feel anything, it would be boredom.

Human voices echoed in the corridor outside. After a long period of inactivity, the one-armed zombie immediately came alive. Others, who’d fallen and seemingly given up, or had walked circles until both their shoes and feet fell apart, gathered themselves up and turned on the long-ignored gate across the front of the store.

A group of human survivors passed the store, making their way down the main hallway. They used spears and blades instead of guns but their flashlights drew the zombies’ attention. The one-armed zombie mashed its face against the door, teeth scraping on the metal. The others also added their weight.

The humans moved on. The zombies continued to thrust against the gate, driven by a savage bloodthirst that hadn’t died even after years without feeding. The gate’s mounting groaned. With a clatter, it gave way and smashed against the linoleum.

Driven by unnamable instincts, the zombie staggered back into the body of the mall. Old burn scars and bullet holes provided evidence of a battle long in the mall’s past. Its companions of several years also staggered out of the store and scattered in different directions, forgotten as soon as they were out of sight.

The one-armed zombie followed sunlight back to the main entrance of the mall. Engines rumbled in the parking lot. It emerged just in time to see a pair of trucks wheeling out of the lot. A pack of zombies, stiff legged, shambling, gave chase. The zombie did the same. The trucks skirted around abandoned vehicles and disappeared. If the zombie could feel, it would be feeling frustration.

Long after the trucks had disappeared from view, the one-armed zombie gave chase. Its joints had locked up and its skin gone pale after years stuck in the clothing store but it, along with several others, continued in the direction they’d seen the survivors travelling as the day changed and the sun shrank out of the sky. One by one the pack peeled off and it found itself alone on an empty highway, staggering under a bright moon and buoyed by a crisp breeze.

For days, the zombie pursued ghosts through a shifting landscape. As the sun rose and set and the moon rolled across the sky it carried itself forward even as bits of its body collapsed and scraps were left behind on the road. Most of its clothing had rotted away and rags of flesh sloughed from its bones. Along the way, it passed others of its kind but none of them had the impetus to start a pack.

Another engine roared and a strange melody chimed on the highway behind the zombie. Both its senses and its movements were slow, and the sounds gained faster than it could turn. At the very last moment, it glimpsed an ice cream truck covered in makeshift armour, its once bright colours faded, a battered fibreglass ice cream cone rattling on its roof. A figure in dark clothing leaned out of the truck’s side door wielding a bladed staff. If the zombie had its human powers of comprehension, it would have recognised them as a nun by their black dress and wimple.

The blade, its shaft braced against the side of the truck’s doorway, met the zombie’s neck. The honed edge tore through wasted flesh. With a reverberating crunch, it hit the zombie’s vertebrae and snapped its spine in two. The zombie’s head spiralled clear of its bloodless stump of a neck. Its body toppled while the ice cream truck moved on.

Mouth working silently, the head rocked to a stop. Its body crumpled beside it. Its eyes turned to the open sky.

Again and again, the sun passed through the sky and the moon ran through its cycles. The head never quite stopped moving although decay caught up with the rest of its corpse. Even so, its eyes boiled slowly in their sockets until they were milky and blind. Insects crawled inside its ear canals and muted all sound.

Trapped within its own decomposing brain, the zombie had no real thoughts. But if it did, it might have remembered the woman in white who’d been there when it first awakened. It might have remembered her face. It might have tried to remember the name she was screaming when it ate her.

Days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years. The head was little more than an infected brain encased in an exposed skull when its remaining hearing picked up the sound of horses and scraping feet. Its mouth worked, shifting the skull ever so slightly. A grey scrap of meat that used to be its tongue poked from between its teeth.

A convoy of survivors walked by on foot. Close to a hundred humans carrying their lives on their backs. Horses and carriages held those who couldn’t make the journey by themselves. Guards circling the main mob of humanity wore thick cloaks with padded sleeves and wielded wooden staves, tips sharpened into spears. Two of them paused over the rotten but still-living skull.

“That’s an old one,” one said.

Dispassionately, one of the two turned a spear around in their hands. With no further discussion, they drove the tip through one of the zombie’s spoiled eyeballs and into its brain.

If the zombie could feel anything, which of course it couldn’t, in its final moments it might have felt something like relief.

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Sean: Throwback to Do They Know It’s Christmas?, which was one of my last stories of 2022! Also kind of an unofficial Mixtape entry given I gave it a song for a title. It’s another zombie story, considerably longer than this one I guess, with only a single line of dialogue toward the end.

I must have an inclination toward that sort of thing, because my first book was Wave of Mutilation, another zombie story which, of course, you will recognise is titled after a song by the Pixies. Man, I should pick another Pixies song to inspire a short story for Mixtape, they’ve got so many good titles. Debaser maybe, or Gouge Away, or Monkey Gone to Heaven, I mean that just writes itself. I’m getting carried away now. If you’re in the mood for more zombies, and some zombie polar bears, I’ve got an excerpt from Wave of Mutilation right here. There’s a couple of sections that are full of vignettes that I loved, I should really have done more short story writing back then too.

What’s coming up next? Ah, the next couple of stories are some lunatic shit. Pretty bizarre stuff, check out the Mixtape mixtape for a taste of what’s coming and for other updates you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

Next Track: Foreigner – Cold As Ice