Thought I would give you a little taster of 'Sleep, Think, Die,' maybe whet your appetite for a little zombie action...
"Don’t Look Up
Carson allowed himself only short, stunted breaths, his body stiff and alert. He ignored the protestations of pain his cramped knees were making, willing his very heartbeat to slow to crawling pace.
Though corrupt, the creature in the room below warranted a better description than zombie. Zombies have the trademark vacant, stupid stare, the slow, grotesque shuffle that defines the word. Even when they close in on fresh meat their expressions never change, their moronic moans never raise in pitch or fervour. No animation whatsoever passes over their lifeless, pallid faces.
To Carson, this was the real abomination, here in the centre of this ransacked room.
He had seen others like it before, the first months back, watching from yet another hiding place and waiting for the moment when he could make an escape. Watching as it hunted down and then made its kill. A kill so appallingly violent that even Carson, a survivor of over a year in this hell on earth, felt his stomach churn, his blood run cold at the sight of it. He had to turn his head away and close his eyes for a moment; he supposed that if nothing else then the depth of his revulsion was a sign that he at least was still human.
The memory of that kill, amongst all the others he had witnessed, still woke him from whatever sleep he could snatch, finding his hands clamped tight over his mouth as if acting independently of his brain, to stifle the screams.
Hunted.
Zombies don’t hunt. They close in, lemming-like, driven by the lust for flesh and blood to tear you limb from limb. They stumble upon their prey, some ancient instinct taking over their otherwise dumb minds and telling them to kill, to devour, to ravage. Then they move on, heedless of the gore and ripped shreds of skin, the slivers of bone in their drooling mouths.
This creature was different. Oh, it was zombie- like in appearance; its clothes torn, filthy, hanging from it in tatters. The face was pale, shaded grey with corruption and bruising, the cheek bones high, pronounced, so close to the surface of the skin that it was easy to imagine them slicing through and protruding like jagged spikes. That was where the similarity ended.
The eyes were alive and knowing; glinting, gleaming with evil intelligence. Those eyes did not simply look around; they saw, they understood, they calculated. He had seen more than a dozen of these creatures since his first. Their frame might be that of what was once a man or a woman; might be tall or short, dark or fair or any of a thousand variations the human form can take, but they all shared that look in the eye. That, their greater speed than the average zombie together with the habit they had of pausing in their shuffling gait and cocking their heads as if listening, thinking, was what set them apart. Was what led Carson to christen them Thinkers.
The Thinker in the room below had once been a man; tall, muscular with a head so closely cropped it was almost bald. It had stopped dead centre of the room and cocked its head to the left as if listening intently. Carson drew in an involuntary breath and held it, praying silently to a God he no longer believed in that it didn’t know he was there, stuffed into the crawl space between roof and ceiling, too afraid to shift position and take the pressure off his agonised knees.
Broken cupboards lined the wall to one side of the room. They stood like a row of slowly collapsing skeletons, the bones misshapen, dry and splintering, the doors long since ripped off and piled in a heap. A double-door cupboard on the end of the row was in slightly better repair; the top-most hinges of the doors were missing, the bottom ones merely loosened, causing the doors to hang in a semi-open ‘v’ position. Carson had considered it as an option for a hiding place, dismissing the notion almost immediately; it was far too exposed, left no room for escape and worst of all was at ground level. He had used it as a step up to the steel framed crawl space above instead. A lot of the ceiling tiles were missing or broken, leaving parts of the crawl space exposed, but it was by far the better option. Carson knew from bitter experience that zombies rarely look up.
The Thinker looked up, right at his hiding place. Carson froze; any movement now would be enough to alert it to his presence and he really didn’t want that. More than anything, he didn’t want that.
It stared upwards for a long time, the greenish tinge in its eyes giving off a dull glow. Then it appeared to reconsider and instead turned its’ attentions to the v-shaped doors of the cupboard.
Carson didn’t relax by even a fraction.
He had struggled to find a word to describe the gait of a Thinker. It wasn’t the lumbering shuffle of a zombie, nor was it a full, healthy stride. It was something in between, akin to a hurried limp or a dragging amble. Whatever it might best be called, this Thinker did it now, lurching toward the cupboard with an obvious intent that made Carson grateful that he hadn’t chosen to hide in there.
The Thinker stopped at the doors, directly below him. It cocked its head again and then, almost comically, peered down into the darkness of the cupboard. Then it threw back its head, gave out a low, wet groan and with one hand ripped both doors off at once and with such force that the cupboard rocked wildly, threatening to tip forwards and bury the Thinker beneath it.
The Thinker seemed to understand this possibility and stepped clumsily back. The rocking slowed, then stopped completely, what was left of the cupboard coming to rest against the wall behind. The Thinker approached it again, inspected the innards of the cupboards and upon finding it empty, directed its gaze upward once more.
Carson had been right not to relax.
He had nothing in the form of weaponry on him. He had spent the last of his bullets a week ago, then lost his useless gun whilst climbing a fence in a hurry. He had meant to keep his eyes open for a knife or something else sharp and useful, but he had been forced to spend most of his time since then in hiding. There seemed to be more of this breed of undead around lately. He would have to find out why that was; if he wasn’t ripped apart in the next few minutes, that is.
The Thinker was evidently taking stock. Carson tried to focus on what he would do if their roles were reversed. He would probably take one of the splintered lengths of wood that had made the cupboard door and use it as a prod, pushing up the remaining ceiling tiles to see what might be hiding up there. He grimaced; no good trying to get inside the Thinker’s brain, that thing was no longer capable of thinking anything remotely human.
The Thinker stooped to select a jagged length of wood and shoved it suddenly and viciously into one of the ceiling panels.
Carson felt sick. He had been in a few tight spots before, but none as tight as this. The Thinker moved on, heaving the plank effortlessly upwards to smash through another tile, not even flinching as a cloud of dust and debris fell to cover its upturned face.
Think Carson; think fast."
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