More Dead than Alive (A Victuuri fic)

Home

Yuuri's POV

I watched the grey light filter in through the filthy and broken window. The streak landed in a small ray directly in front of my left foot. I watched the dust fly through the air in the sunlight with a determined fixation. It was utterly boring.

Everything was boring.

There's nothing much to do if you're dead. Or at least, whatever I was. You see, the problem was that I wasn't sure I was dead.

I definitely wasn't human. The rotting infected wounds on my face and the festering and poignant odor of decay emitting off me made that obvious enough to any onlookers. I was very obviously a zombie. I wasn't trying to dispute that- I've eaten my fair share of human remains. But still, I wasn't certain for sure. I could think, I could laugh, I could talk, I could feel emotions. I could do so many things no other zombie around me could do. All they did was stumble around, fighting, driven insane by their never-ending quest to conquer their unquenchable bloodlust.

I wasn't like them. I didn't know how. I didn't know why. I just knew I wasn't. Which brings up the question, was I dead? Were being a zombie and being dead mutually exclusive events?

Whereas other zombies hungered for flesh, I craved something more profound, something less easily obtained. I craved knowledge. My unquenchable thirst wasn't for the flesh of others, but was instead for the knowledge of why I was like this.

It kind of sucked to not be like the others though. I didn't know if they made "friends" like humans did, but there appeared to be cliques among them. Over the years I'd noticed the same zombies hanging around the same places. They always stayed at our base though, never leaving, never exploring. Perfectly content to sit in one place whilst they rotted. So I knew for sure they had a basic understanding of what home was.

Home and hunger, that's all they knew. That's all they would ever know.

I'd always wished there would be someone like me, someone to understand, but I'd long since given up hope for that. Whenever I tried to communicate with any of them, it just seemed like there was a wall between us. An invisible but impenetrable wall. I was too different from them, yet we were the same.

I just didn't belong. I didn't belong with humans, I didn't belong with zombies. I'd resigned myself to never knowing, to never belonging.

My curiosity about my death had made me very keen to learning everything I could. During the start of the apocalypse I spent hours and hours of the day (I had to sleep- I was the only zombie that did) exploring my surroundings and figuring out where I was. Very quickly I had figured out I was in a very small hospital. It was a broken, filthy two story building, now overrun with the dead. I figured the fact that I was at a hospital had something to do with my death.

Our home was surrounded my many houses and buildings, and there was a grocery store across the street. A hospital and grocery store were very appealing in an apocalypse, hundreds of humans have fallen prey to us at our doors, trying to get medicine and food.

That's what he was doing the day I met him.

...

I was sitting on the ground in my second floor hospital room, staring at the filtering sunlight. It was a colder day than most and I could feel the wind blow against my bare back where the hospital gown didn't cover.

I watched the dust dancing through the air, swirling and interweaving with other particles. I heard the telltale moans and shuffling feet of the other zombies outside my locked door. I didn't like to open my door, the others attacked me.

Well, sometimes. It's not like I was constantly being berated by antagonizing attackers, but every now and then, a confused zombie (normally a newer one) would attack. So I stayed in my room. It seemed like a simple enough solution. I didn't leave if I didn't have to, and they never came in.