The Old Man's Diary
Points Held: 1230P
“Kieeeek!”
Thwack!
“Whew.”
You have defeated a zombie!
+10P acquired
Points Held: 1240P
Only after the bat had finished its arc and the old woman zombie dropped did I finally let myself breathe.
Set the Retired Doctor Couple's Mansion you currently own as your primary residence?
Y / N
Only after every zombie in the house was dead did the place seem to acknowledge me as its owner. A window popped up, asking whether I wanted to designate it my primary residence.
“Huh? What is this?”
I was about to press Yes without a second thought when I noticed a notebook lying on the desk.
“A diary? Might as well read it.”
The power hadn’t gone out yet, but this was a world where the television and the computer were useless. Something to read counted as a pleasant little hobby.
My wife came home from what was supposed to be a walk with blood running down her shoulder. I lurched up from my chair and asked what had happened. She said some lunatic had rushed her and bitten her there.
I called 119 at once for an ambulance, but for some reason no one answered. In this house the only one who could drive was my wife. I had been too busy with my practice to earn a license, and she had handled every trip behind the wheel, so we had no way to go by car.
The bleeding itself was slight, but the shock of being bitten by another person seemed to have dulled her mind. She was in no condition to drive. I put her to bed to settle her and kept dialing 119. Still no one picked up.
The wound was not grave enough to drag our son into it—he would be at work in Seoul—so I decided to wait until the emergency line finally connected.
Last night was hell.
That damned 119 never answered, not even after dark. Not long after I laid my wife down, she went into convulsions, and I gave her a sedative.
Only then did I grasp how serious this was. I tried our sons, hoping for help. Neither of them picked up.
The sedative did nothing to slow her seizures, so I bound her hands and feet to keep her from hurting herself.
All through the night I kept dosing her at nearly lethal levels, wrestling her through one fit after another, and still she did not improve.
Only when morning came did I understand that I had done something terribly wrong. She was no longer seizing. She was no longer human. She had become something else.
Her eyes were bloodshot. Saliva spilled from her mouth, and she shrieked at me in some awful, inhuman cry. After a long life as a physician, I knew the look she turned on me. It was appetite.
The word that rose in my mind was zombie.
Medically it was absurd, and I shook my head—until I saw what was happening outside, and denial became impossible.
Drawn by the screams, I looked out from the second-floor veranda, and the street below was a painting of hell. Women, men, children, all of them lacquered in blood, ran screaming while the things hunted them like prey, ran them down, and tore them apart.
Only after that hellscape could I admit that my wife had become a zombie.
Even so, I could not simply abandon her, and so I began to study them. This house has no proper equipment. I cannot research a virus here. I decided to study their habits instead.
Knowing a disease’s symptoms is a great help in studying the virus that causes it. If this diary should ever reach a research team, I hope it will be of some use.
Starting today, I mean to observe how they behave. Watching my wife where she lies bound will teach me little, so I took the telescope a former student gave me when I retired and went out to the second-floor veranda to study the zombies beyond the house.
He came to me near the end of my tenure, so I never had long to teach him, and yet he was the most gifted physician I have ever known. If that boy were with a research team, he would be an enormous help. In a world like this, is that too much to hope for?
In any case, from what I saw outside, a person who is bitten convulses and turns within one to two hours.
The sedatives seem to have delayed my wife’s change. They lower blood pressure and heart rate and slow the circulation, which suggests the virus travels through the blood.
Zombies show an extreme hostility toward human beings. The instant they bite someone and make another zombie, that hostility vanishes. I cannot tell how they distinguish a living person from one of their own.
Body temperature? No. It is unlikely that temperature would plunge or spike so sharply within an hour or two, and in any case a human being has no sense capable of reading another person’s heat.
Scent? That is not it either. When I smelled my wife, I could find no great difference from a living person.
This will require further study.
Their hostility is not reserved for humans alone.
They hate dogs as well, and a dog that is bitten becomes a zombie too. Cats, pigeons, sparrows—they ignore those. So it is not animals as such that draw their rage, but the creatures through which they can effectively infect human beings. Predators, like dogs. That is my guess.
The weakness, it seems, is the head.
Today a survivor drove a knife into a zombie’s heart, and the thing paid it no mind. It simply charged him. Even after it had bitten him, blood poured from the wound and it went on walking as if nothing were wrong. Another survivor smashed a zombie’s skull, and that one stopped.
And I have begun to see certain strange specimens.
One has an arm swollen into something grotesque, shaped almost like a shield. Others have bodies bloated to an enormous size. They appear to surpass the limits of a human frame. I watched the shield-armed one charge a survivor and crush the man’s body to death. A strength far beyond anything human. I have named these specimens variants.
Seeing them, I have begun to doubt whether this is a virus at all.
A Regular Zombie is active by day. The variants keep their own hours.
Regular Zombies move vigorously in daylight and grow uniformly sluggish once night falls. The variants are inconsistent. Some are lively by day, others by night.
They do not eat ordinary food.
I tried. The moment anything entered my wife’s mouth, she spat it out, drooled, and thrashed her whole body at me as if I were the meal. Outside, the zombies tear the flesh from people who have not yet turned, so they seem to eat human meat. But infection is extremely fast, and the instant it is complete they stop eating. Simply moving does not appear to cost them much energy. How a creature like this can exist at all frightens me.
Still, in case she needed the nourishment, I forced food into her mouth with chopsticks.
Damn it all. While I was forcing her to eat, I cut my finger. I rushed a sedative into myself and amputated the bitten finger, but I do not know whether that will be enough to stop the infection.
I beat my head against the wall, sick with regret that I could have made so foolish a mistake. It did no good.
Through the small hours I kept dosing myself with sedative, but the convulsions never ceased, and the saliva would not stop. My temperature is plainly normal, and yet my whole body burns as if it were on fire. I treated the wound after my wife bit me. It seems I was infected all the same.
I will not live on as a zombie. So I came up to the room where she is, to meet the end beside her.
After that, the diary went on repeating I want to eat humans until the writing simply stopped.
“Hm. Reading it like this leaves me unsettled.”
It wasn’t a novel. It was something that had really happened to the old zombie I’d just killed, and the knowledge sat badly with me.
“Huh. There’s more on the last page.”
I had thought the diary ended on I want to eat humans. On the final page, more of the old man’s writing still remained.