Life After Undeath

Prologue

circa 1900 BCE

The last of the Harappans was destined to die.

Kumar stumbled on, the chill cutting him to the deep. A sharp wind took his smell to the pursuant undead, who shambled tirelessly behind him.

The shadowy crowd seemed to get closer with each step. Frost formed on Kumar's brows, as fresh snow cut his soles. One small misstep and it would be a fall into the crevasse beside, or worse, caught by the monsters behind.

As he neared the pass, he could see the bridge through the rapidly thickening fog. The Saraswati river, a raging torrent in the summer, had been reduced to a trickle as if in anticipation. The cleansing of an evil that had destroyed almost an entire civilization, and Kumar's own family. The last of the Harappan stumbled through the bleary landscape, with the crunching of fresh snow overlaid with undead moans.

As he came to the pass, he looked at the bridge spanning the crevasse. It was a rickety old structure that stood between salvation, and whatever remained of his fellow townsmen. The news had come of the plague, the plague which was sweeping across the Sapt Sindhu. It had come from the mysterious cities located between two rivers, in a distant country; come from there on trading vessels, and spread among his people. Capsulated in his tiny hilltop village, Kumar didn't believe in it, till his daughter rose from the dead.

It caused his only daughter to stop breathing, have seizures, and die. As his wife Ruma grieved on her chest, she raised her head and clamped down on his wife Ruma's neck. Kumar had stood there, petrified, while the blood of his wife stained the earthen floor dark brown. He stood there, as the light died out from his wife's eyes, as she got up shakily, a fist-sized hole in her neck, and a blood-drenched angavastram. His daughter Rumi, a mouth stained with the blood of her own dear mother, turned her eyes to fixate on Kumar. They were black. Black orbs of pure malice. Only then Kumar heard the shouts of the villagers outside. The village was infected from within. He ran, in his selfish instinct of self-preservation. He ran knowing he had left his wife and daughter to their ill fate. He had been running ever since that morning.

As he stood there catching his breath, he soon got the whiff of the decaying flesh of his pursuers. "This is the final hurdle", he thought as he gingerly stepped onto the bridge. It swayed under his feet, his sweat condensing in the cool air. On the moonlit bridge, he shuffled forward, one steady step after the other, focused on not falling to his doom.

Suddenly, the bridge shook violently. Slowly turning his head he saw the worst of his nightmares, the dead had amassed at the edge of the cliff. Their shambling gait made many of them lose their balance as they toppled off the cliff, but they advanced nonetheless. A manic fear enveloped Kumar as he tried to increase his pace. But the moving bridge and the slippery frost made a safe crossing treacherous. On his next step, he slipped and fell.

Grabbing on to the wooden beams by a hand, he flailed in the near dark. The moon, like his hopes of survival, had vanished. He heard the moans of the undead, both from the bridge and from down the valley. He smelt the water of the river and the metallic taste of dried blood. His arms protested against the abuse they were being subjected to, almost letting go. He felt cold clammy hands on his arms, hands which dragged him up. He felt the jaws close around his forearm, the teeth breaking into his flesh. But there was no pain. Instead, he felt a cold, implacable fury, for the unjust death sentence delivered. It was only a matter of time before he became one of them.

With a scream full of adrenaline, he pulled himself up and pushed the monster off him. He stood there as the undead man fell into the crevasse. He stood there, a sight to behold, glowing with the conviction of a man who had fight left in him. The moon appeared from behind the clouds, to reveal a writhing extent of walking corpses facing him. "What does a dead man have to lose?", Kumar thought as he shouted at them.

"Come on! Did you want to eat me? Come and get it! ", he screamed as he went back on the swaying bridge. "Down you go", smacking an undead across its face who was unlucky enough to get too near. A strange coldness filling him gave him all the more reason to keep on taking them down, as much as he could. Three, four ...he lost count after eleven. They kept coming.

The air of undead moans was broken by his shouts and the thud of bodies landing in the valley.

Kumar's hands felt like lead, the coldness was freezing his heart alive. His vision fogged with red and grey. Yet the dead kept coming, and coming, and coming. A legion of shambling corpses, versus one who was about to join them. A Horatius, before he was even born.

As he reached the other side of the bridge, his legs couldn't bear any more. He heard the creaking of the bridge, and the rope snapping. With the last lunge, he reached the end and scrambled to safety. The bridge fell away behind him. The smell of the dead, overpowering a few minutes ago became a faint odor. The stillness of the winter night soon reclaimed the land, the moans of the undead barely audible from the other side.

But Kumar could feel the evil inside his system, pulling him into the deep and dark unknown. A frozen vice clamped his chest, yet his skin burned with a fever. The wound on his arm had turned black and festered already. Blue-black veins of the encroached right up to his neck. He barely had a few minutes to live.

Stumbling away from the edge was a herculean effort. So was slowly finding a depression to lie in. With whatever was left of his dying strength, he dragged dirt around his feet. His eyes closed finally to the fervent prayer "God, please let me die in peace."

As the fresh snow covered the mountainside, Kumar's body lay twitching in the ground. After a few minutes, it became deathly still. The snow piled up on and around him. Years after years, the snow piled, froze, melted, and refroze. Old rivers disappeared, and new ones appeared. Glaciers mowed their path across the inhospitable mountainside. Kingdoms rose and fell, having no idea of the horrors right under them. The plague moved from history to legend, to obscurity.

Kumar, or what had become of him, lay dormant under the ice, waiting for a stimulus. In his icy coffin, he had no idea of his legacy.

The zombie lay there waiting till it would be discovered by scientists some 4000 years later.