It seemed like a good idea at the time.
For some reason, the zombie horde couldn’t climb trees. But now they were circling the base of the trunk, moaning and stretching out their arms at the last remaining brain container on the planet.
Deborah looked down at them, then let her eyes wander, examining the crowd of undead, so many of them, disappearing in all directions over the surrounding horizon. There were millions of them, and she could see the whites of their eyes.
Well, their whole eyes were white.
And that groaning. It was annoying enough when a dozen of them were doing it, but when several million of them were doing it, it was deafening, and dizzying, and it made her want to throw up.
Deb didn’t know where this was going, or how it was going to end.
Either she was going to die, alone, up a tree, or she was going to become one of them.
Neither option was appealing, but she couldn’t think of a third.
It was a mystery how it had come to this. Deborah had seen the comet burning up in the atmosphere. The whole planet had. It didn’t survive, and never crashed, but something that burned had got into the air, and well, now she was up a tree surrounded by a billion or more dead people, hell bent on snacking on her hypothalamus.
And they stank.
Maybe it was the smell of rotting flesh, and bad dental hygiene that was making her bilious, and not that cacophony of moaning.
They’d long since shaken all the leaves from the tree.
At least they hadn’t thought to throw rocks up at her. Unlikely they ever would either. For people who fed solely on brains, they were distinctly lacking in thought. Turns out, you aren’t what you eat after all.
And now the bark was chafing at her bottom.
Truth be told, it had been chafing at her bottom for a few days now, keeping her wide awake, even through the waking dreams (none of which were more disturbing than the billions of zombies wanting to eat her and tear her limb from limb). It’s just that she’d managed to ignore the chafing until now.
A thought occurred to her.
She snapped out her arms and pointed, bellowing at the top of her voice.
“Look. Over there.”
None of them looked.
If anything, it just seemed to make them more hungry. It was like they could smell cerebral activity or something.
Deborah gave up, and let herself fall from the tree and into their outstretched arms. It was such sweet relief. What had she been running from? Their warm (well, cold) embrace? They hugged her, passing her from one to the other.
Then ate her.
