Soulless (A Zombie Erotic Romance)

Soulless

by Cerys du Lys

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Cerys du Lys, All Rights
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This is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.

This story is intended for an adult
audience(18+). It contains mature themes, language, and content
unsuitable for young people. All characters in this story are 18+
years of age.

I am dead.

This is how I feel, this is what I
know, but a small part of me refuses to believe it. Wasn't I alive
just yesterday? I have a doctor's appointment to go to next week
and I need to leave a reminder for my office manager. He's
forgetful and even though I told him about this a month ago, he
won't remember.

But, no, I don't have a doctor's
appointment next week. That's already past. It's been four months,
two weeks, and three days since the day I should've gone to the
doctor. It was only a routine check up, anyways. Not absolutely
necessary, but it would have provided peace of mind.

My mind is anything but peaceful now.
I don't know if I still have one.

...

Five months ago I was sitting on my
couch eating take-out Chinese and watching the news. I never knew
why I enjoyed watching the news, but it seemed like the adult thing
to do, you know? Granted, wearing my pajama pants with cartoon
versions of cats and a grey athletic t-shirt didn't help my
illusion of adulthood. Nor did eating directly out of the lo mein
carton with a pair of wooden chopsticks, but still. Sometimes it's
good to feel more adult, even if the rest of your life isn't
exactly there.

There was a breakthrough announcement
on the news that night, too. I remember them hyping it up at the
beginning, saying it could change the face of humanity as we knew
it. Dutifully, I watched through dull segments involving a local
bake sale and a church's outrage at a movie theatre refusing to
remove a supposedly risque poster from their front lobby. Maybe I
should've switched the channel, though.

What did this breakthrough
announcement have to do with me? Was it another cell phone? I loved
my cell phone as much as the next person, but the way they came out
with new ones every year(and they always have new features that
seem suspiciously like the old ones), I would never understand why
people got so excited about those things. I wanted mine to work, I
wanted to call people on it, and I'd like to be able to
occasionally text someone and maybe check my email.

The announcement wasn't about a phone,
though. I stabbed a potsticker with my chopsticks and nibbled on
the edges while some NASA scientist explained their newest
discovery.

Hibernation, hypothermia, an isolated
virus that could mimic these conditions at a safe level. Once they
finished with more rounds of experimentation, they could use this
knowledge for extended space travel. The goal was to induce a type
of suspended animation in astronauts so they could travel to
distant planets with minimal necessities.

It sounded like a bunch of Star Trek
mumbo jumbo to me. I'm not stupid, I graduated college with a
marketing degree, but this had nothing to do with me. In a hundred
years when people finally colonized Mars and someone built a
restaurant chain up there, they could call me in to help figure out
their branding, but none of this affected me right now.

This was what I thought then. In four
days, everything changed.

...

I wander through the city, confused. I
am cold beyond belief and nothing I can do will warm me up. I try
holding my hands tight against my chest and huddling on the ground,
but it doesn't help. I've tried putting on more clothes, but this
doesn't work, either. I've tried taking off my clothes, too. I go
inside and outside, but no.

My skin is a pale blue like the color
of pure water. I feel sick and I know I should go see a doctor, but
there are no doctors anymore; not for me or anyone like me. I am
one of them and I am hated. I understand this, but I don't want
it.

It's hard to walk sometimes, but other
times I manage it fine. I feel clumsy, as if I've had too much to
drink at the bar, but I don't think I've had alcohol for months. I
can't remember.

And then it happens.

As much as I feel it, I'm not alone. A
majority of the people surrounding me are like me, but different.
They give in to their urges or they think differently, or there's
something that separates me from them. I think it's the fact that I
can't give in no matter what. I have a doctor's appointment to go
to next week, afterall.

The others around me stand up and
stumble forwards after the intruders. Men and women, regular, just
like us except with peach-colored skin(or tanned, or darker, it
makes no difference) rush through the city streets. They bash
through a storefront window with a baseball bat. The crashing sound
of glass makes me shudder.

The others chase them with a speed
none of us knew we had. I watch them run, legs creaking, frantic to
catch the people breaking into the convenience store. The people in
the store yell at each other, screaming.

"Hurry! Grab what you can and go! We
don't have much time!"

I don't know what they're grabbing,
but I know why they don't have much time.

Most of them make it out fine. A
younger man drags behind, though. When he went to jump out of the
front window, he cut his leg on the broken glass and fell onto the
concrete sidewalk. One of his group stopped for a second and looked
at him, trying to decide what to do, but when the rest of his
people run off to safety, he abandons the young man.

The young man is stuck, limping. He
won't escape.

I can't watch and I turn away. It
hurts; it's painful. I know why they do it and I'm tempted to do it
myself. The feeling of warmth and closeness like a lover's embrace.
Heat and intimacy.

Except nothing they do is loving. They
are ruthless and vicious and in their obsession for warmth they'll
destroy the man.

I hear him scream and I want to cry
but I run away as fast as I can. My feet slip on the sidewalk and I
stumble, hitting against the side of a building, but I keep
going.

Why is it like this? Why?

...

After I ate a can of warmed beans, I
felt better. It wasn't hard to get the can of beans, but it was
difficult to heat them. Fortunately, I knew of a place on the
outskirts of the city in a wooded area where there was a house with
a gas generator and a microwave. I knew it wouldn't last forever,
but it suited me for now. If I used the generator sparingly and
made trips to get gas in the middle of the night, I could sustain
myself for awhile.

That's how I imagined it going, but it
didn't always work like that. The problem was that, while the warm
beans slipped down my throat easily and warmed me up, filling my
stomach with a soothing heat, it never lasted. While eating them, I
felt wonderful, though. I felt human and alive, like myself once
more. If I flipped on the TV--if there was anything actually on
TV--and sat on the couch, propping my feet up on the coffee table,
maybe I could forget about all of this for awhile.

The beans kept me feeling warmer for
half an hour or so, but then the chill crept in. I didn't have
enough energy or beans to keep eating forever, though. It also
didn't help that I felt like I'd eaten a Thanksgiving dinner after
only half a can of the things. I could only eat once a day at most
without feeling wretched and sick. Most of the time I ended up
going two days in between meals.

For now, for a little while, I felt
nicer, though. I walked through the hallway to the master bedroom
and grabbed a bathrobe off the back of the door, slipping my arms
into the sleeves and tying it into place. Finding a book by
Nicholas Sparks on the bedside table, I snatched it up and fell
into bed. I slid beneath the thick blankets, hoping to keep warm
for a little while longer, then opened to the dogeared page in the
book and began reading.

I read for a few minutes before the
chill started. My feet grew colder and I started breathing slower,
more shallowly. I felt tired, so tired, but I wanted to read a
little more. I needed to know what happened to Ally and Noah. Did
everything turn out fine? It was darker outside than I remembered,
but I could still read. I needed to, desperately desired it, and
yet...

I folded the corner of the page I was
on and carefully placed the book on the bedside table once more.
Curling my knees up to my chest and closing my eyes, I lay in
bed.

...

No one knew what exactly happened, and
least of all Evan. He wished he knew, because maybe that would put
some sense into all of this, but even if he did there wasn't
anything he could do about it.

News stations reported an accident and
a breakout. Contamination or something, but no one needed to act
concerned. It was best if people remained in their homes and closed
the doors.

Of course, no one did that. Why should
they? Well, Evan did it, because apparently he was an idiot. That's
what his roommate told him at the time before he rushed out of
their apartment and into the streets.

It didn't matter if you left or
stayed, though. It was something else entirely. He couldn't say why
it didn't affect him or who it did affect, but it caused people to
change. The virus released from the labs made people slow and
stumbling. They could still talk, but in his experience they
usually didn't want to. Sick and pale, shambling around the city,
looking like...

Zombies.

He laughed thinking about it. Zombies,
really? That was some serious movie shit right there. People rising
up from their graves, eating brains, hordes upon hordes of the
living dead.

This wasn't exactly that, though.
These people weren't dead; they were sick. He tried to tell
everyone that, but no one listened to him.

"You're not a doctor, Evan," Alex
said. "Just stick to hunting like you're good at. We need someone
like you. It's safer if we stay away from the city unless we need
supplies."

The city
. That's what everyone called it now. No names, no
recognition. They didn't want to acknowledge that the buildings in
the city had names and history. There was no past; it didn't exist.
Maybe it was easier that way. Maybe it helped people cope with
their losses and figure out how to live in this screwed up
place.

Evan didn't like it, though. He didn't
want to live in a fake city in the middle of the woods made out of
tents. He didn't want to act like none of his past life existed,
and he didn't want to treat anyone like a zombie.

It didn't matter what he wanted,
though, it mattered what they did. And they--the zombies--killed
people. There was some reason, some gut instinct told him so, but
what? Why would they do it? What was their purpose?

He wasn't anyone important. He was
just Evan, a man who'd grown up hunting, played football in high
school and college, and worked a respectable job as an EMT while
trying to save up money to continue on with medical
school.

Yeah, like Alex said, he wasn't a
doctor, but he would've been. And while higher learning had kind of
gone out the window with the mass viral outbreak, if he had any say
in things he'd still be a doctor some day. Maybe he couldn't get an
official degree, but he could study. He refused to let anyone stop
him.