I turned back to the observation hole. “Don’t make it too long, Mate,” I said to David. The zombies milled about – maybe thirty or so of them. David’s corpse was apparently of no interest to them. He was not fresh meat. He was not a ‘kill’. I’d had some time to observe the zombies. I recognised a few of them from around the campus – just regular guys, nothing special. They did a bit of moaning but never spoke – just like in the movies. But they weren’t stiff-legged and rotting. Well, not yet anyway. Perhaps in another week or so that would come. For the moment, at least, they still moved about fairly nimbly when they wanted to – but, for the most part, they just wandered around with no obvious aim – except, perhaps, waiting for us to emerge. And their eyes, yes, they were very different from living folks’ eyes. Living folks’ eyes constantly scan back and forth to take in as much as they can – I think it’s called a ‘saccade’ (or something similar). Zombies’ eyes don’t. They stare fixedly a lot of the time and only move in jerky- type movements every now and then. I had discussed this also with the medical students. They said this was because ‘the autonomic functions of the brain were down’. They said zombie vision must be relatively poor. Could be – but I didn’t see any of the medical students putting that theory to the test. I stood staring through the observation hole, I guess, for half an hour or more, just watching the zombies, before David gave his first twitch. Eureka! I’d seen that before – with the other guys who’d been bitten. It was only a matter of a few minutes now before David would start to reanimate. I needed to work fast. Nimbly, I climbed the barricade and slid down into the cramped space between barricade and the glass sliding doors. This was a fairly noisy manoeuvre and some of the smaller parts of the barricade clattered to the floor. “Hey, Pete! What the fuck do you think you are doing?” I’d been heard but there was no way I was backing out now.
Res yw dhymm godhvos lemmyn.langbot langbot