NEW Zombie horror short 'The Return of Dale Corby' By JONATHAN WOOD

The Return of Dale Corby

By Jonathan Wood

I never really believed in zombies, I mean, real zombies. You know; human beings who have died and then come back from the dead. Bad complexions; bad smelling and an appetite for human flesh, you get the picture I’m sure. I saw the movies, but I can’t say I thought about zombies much until recently, until the doctors said my friend Dale might actually be one.

Hold on, let me start over. Dale Corby was my friend, well, sort of. Not a close friend, but he did hang out with me and my friends. Dale was one of those guys nobody really knew very well, he was painfully quiet and a bit awkward to start a conversation with, he didn’t have much to say, but he liked being a part of our gang. For years through school, he had hung around with me and a few others, especially during the summer holidays. We skateboarded, played football, went to the movies, the beach, enjoying the long summer days and sunshine that I wished could last all year around. Dale was often seen as just a follower, he would tag along on all our little excursions without any protest. My best friend Gavin even knick-named him ‘Ba-Ba’, you know, like the sheep from the nursery rhyme, I guess because Dale would always follow us like a sheep wherever we went or whatever we did. He always picked up his phone straight away whenever you called him, almost like he was sitting with his mobile phone in his hand waiting for the damn thing to go off. If you forwarded him a text message, he would reply within two minutes to say he was coming along, whatever we suggested to him. Dale didn’t have much of a life outside our group. He did okay at school, he wasn’t dumb or anything, he was just Mr Average who nobody noticed, in every sense of the term. But last year, all that changed.

After the holidays finished, we all went back to school. The day of the accident is etched permanently on all of our minds and will be forever I reckon. Although it’s something me and the rest of my friends don’t really speak about so much now, I still see it on their faces, they think about it a lot, just like I do. On the first morning of school we were all stood waiting for the bus to take us into town at the bottom of my street. Screeching car tyres is not uncommon around our town, lots of boy racers in their souped up GTI’s whizz up and down the road by my house because it’s straight and probably the only road in town that doesn’t yet have speed humps. So when we first heard the screech of tyre rubber none of us really batted an eyelid, even when it got louder and nearer. In the distance a shape appeared and as it hurtled towards us, it was a blue transit van with the shape of two black silhouettes in the front, dance music blaring from the cheap factory fitted stereo with that awful tinny sound spilling out of the open side windows.

I remember my friend Gavin smiling and mouthing the word ‘fuckwits’ as the van got nearer, his voice overpowered by the din, but what happened next happened so fast my brain still has processing it, even now. As the van approached it just seemed to lose grip on the road and seemed to be leaning forever as it hammered towards us, the left side tyres squealing for grip under the pedal of the merciless driver who refused to slow down for the slight curvature in the road. At that point, Gavin, Rory and I instinctively took a few steps back from the curb. But not Dale, he was the slowest to react and just stood there; his eyes wide as the hurtling van suddenly lost grip entirely and wiped out. It flipped onto its left side and I heard the side wing mirror and arm disintegrate as the vans side made contact with the tarmac. In an instant, the van was upon us and the few steps back that the rest of us had taken; saved our lives. But Dale was not so lucky. In a flash, the blue streak engulfed him and I didn’t even hear him make a sound to the dull thud of him being hit head on. But I do remember his expression and that image I will never forget as long as I live. His face contorted in a mixture of fear, disbelief and reflex, his teeth exposed like he was chewing on something tough. Then Dale was gone, just gone.

I cannot really explain what happened immediately after that, I just remember thunderous noise and the scraping of the van along the road until it mounted the pavement, flipped up into the air and smashed into a wall almost a hundred metres further down the road.

In the minutes and hours after the accident, I remember sirens, police and ambulances, being wrapped in a blanket and put into the back of an ambulance along with the others. I remember the bright lights of the hospital as doctors shone torches into our eyes and checked us over, the shock of watching Dale being wiped out embedded in my head and chilling my bones no matter how many blankets I was wrapped up in. We were all questioned by the police and asked to recount the events of the accident and relive the moment Dale was swept away by the van. It turned out the van had been stolen earlier that day by two joy riders. The passenger in the front seat, some bum from the other side of town, had also been killed from the impact. But the driver, a guy called Neal Robbins and well known to the police, he survived. He was touch and go for a while and spent some time in a coma, but he went on to make a full recovery from his injuries. I bet he sometimes wished he hadn’t, given he went down for ten years for causing death by dangerous driving.

The week after Dale’s death was just a blur; that is until the day came that I was standing at his funeral with my parents, Gavin and Rory, some other school classmates, teachers and Dale’s poor mum Theresa. Theresa was a single mum and Dale was her only child, his father having died when Dale was a baby I was told. I looked at Theresa as she cried at the service in the arms of someone I didn’t know, her face saturated in anger, shock and grief of losing her only son. There was still a sense of disbelief about it a week after the accident; like it wasn’t really happening and I could see the same thoughts crossing the minds of Gavin and Rory. How can you be standing at a bus stop with a guy one minute, then he’s dead and gone in the blink of an eye? Even as they lowered Dale into the ground in the cemetery in a shiny black coffin, into the plot next to where his father lay, the whole event had a sense of surrealism, dream like; almost as if time were moving in slow motion. Gavin, Rory and I stayed a little longer at the cemetery after everyone else had gone home, just staring at the hole in the earth where Dale now lay. When Rory cried, I did too and eventually tears appeared in the corners of Gavin’s eyes and I watched him trying to fight them back. We didn’t know Dale too well, but we needed to grieve for him and the terrible way he died.

Two days after the funeral, Dale Corby came back from the dead. Dale Corby, the same Dale Corby I and two other friends had seen with our own eyes crushed to a pulp by a transit van and lowered into a grave at the cemetery, returned back from the dead. The story goes his mother Theresa had been at home late at night preparing for bed and thought she noticed a shadow moving around outside in the front garden. Her suspicions were confirmed when she went out there with a baseball bat to investigate only to find her own dead son shuffling around on the front lawn. She went into a state of shock and who would blame her, maybe she thought she was going crazy, but there he was, dressed in the burial clothes she had selected for him and black tie, his skin milky and pale, his brown hair lightly styled and his body smelling of the chemicals the undertaker firm had used to clean him up for his funeral. He was not a pretty sight, you see, Dale had suffered terrible injuries as a result of the accident, his legs had been broken, along with his skull hopelessly fractured and his body almost skinned from being dragged along the road wedged under the front axel of the van. His skin had been shredded right down the left side of his body to his feet, virtually to the bone. The physical being who was now just shuffling around aimlessly on the front lawn of the house he used to live at certainly looked like Dale, but was it really him? His mother in amongst her tears and shock tried to talk to him, but Dale couldn’t communicate. He couldn’t even make eye contact or make a sound, his eyes rolling around randomly in their sockets as he wandered up and down the garden. I heard that neighbours on hearing the commotion came out to see what was going on, only to find Theresa passed out from shock on the front driveway and Dale shambling across the grass like a drunken sailor.

Next day, Dale’s return caused shockwaves in the town and media. I heard about what happened the next day at school as journalists, tv press, doctors and even government and military scientists turned up to investigate. Dale had been taken to hospital, when the ambulance the neighbours had called managed to get him to stand still that is and strapped onto a stretcher to stop him wandering off. When the doctors examined him and ran a few tests, they said he was definitely the same Dale Corby that had died a few days earlier. I guess it didn’t take Einstein to figure this out on account that when police investigators went up to the cemetery he had been buried at not two days earlier, they discovered the coffin open and empty with a pile of fresh earth next to it. Somehow, following Dale’s re-animation, he had managed to open his own coffin lid and claw his way out.

The doctors confirmed Dale was breathing oxygen, albeit shallowly, but his heart did not beat nor pump blood around his body. His internal organs did not work and his brain showed virtually no activity. He could walk, but did not respond to stimulus and did not want to eat human flesh, nor anything else come to that. He was ‘a walking contradiction to the laws of biology and science’ said our local paper. One of the specialist doctors who examined him said there was no logical or medical reason to suggest how Dale could exist in any sense of the word. But there he was, breathing and moving a week after his death and two days after his burial. Nobody could explain how Dale ended up in his own front garden either, somehow shuffling through town in the middle of the night to reach his own home. Maybe some lost distant memory or instinct just guided him back there. He was eventually given the title of the first ever genuine zombie.

In the days and weeks that followed, I heard Dale was subjected to all kinds of tests, even the army came to the hospital where he was being held and took Dale away for a while, doctors in white radiation suits and masks. The town was rife with speculation as to why, people talked of crackpot experiments to see if Dale could tolerate pain beyond human limits, I guess to see if he was of any use to them. It would not have surprised me or my friends if Dale had been put in a rocket and fired into outer space without a pressure suit, just to see what would happen. But, after a while, the military returned him back to our town and to the hospital. People came from far and wide to try and see Dale, and the whole world seemed to go zombie crazy. There was a surge in people buying zombie fiction books and movies, there was even a gift shop started in town by some idiot who was cashing in on the whole thing and selling souvenirs, even selling little cheap little doll effigies of Dale, dressed in his funeral suit, pale rotten skin and dots for eyes, that rolled in their tiny plastic holder sockets. Eventually Dale’s mum got the store closed down; the whole thing was sick really.

The media whipped up a storm and I watched tv debate programs, groups arguing about whether there was a chance what happened to Dale could occur again and if this really was the beginning of a real type apocalypse, the rise of the un-dead, just like the movies, and if so, what should we do about it? But the government and their doctors said there was no evidence to suggest that and they were clear that whilst Dale’s rise from the dead and current condition could not be explained, he was a one off, an anomaly and a mystery. Neal Robbins, the guy driving the van even appealed his conviction, arguing he should have his sentenced reduced because Dale was not legally dead. But, the Judge turned it down, and said Robbins should serve the full term. I hope he rots in jail quite honestly, for what he did to Dale and his mum.

After a couple of months had passed and a lot of wrangling; Dale was returned home to his mother. I guess when you think about it practically, what do you do with a dead person who is alive and moves around? Dale had all the characteristics of a zombie from a movie but he didn’t crave human flesh or brains, he was docile and didn’t eat at all. The hospital didn’t want to keep him there and how exactly do you care for a dead person? I’d heard at first that Dales Mum Theresa, had rejected the idea of him coming home, she had in fact rejected the idea of Dale completely as a live entity and for the first few months, didn’t see him at all nor wanted to. I guess it had to be hard on the poor woman; after all her son had died and now had come back from death as some kind of weird catatonic, somewhere half way between life and death. The newspapers had even reported that there were calls from some to have Dale destroyed, I suppose they meant burnt or something, arguing he was a freak of nature and may bring disease.

Nobody really seemed to know what to do with Dale, nothing like this had ever happened before. I mean, does a zombie just hang around forever? Would Dale now just shuffle about until the end of time? But, in the end, Theresa did visit Dale at hospital and some motherly maternal instinct must have kicked in and she decided to take him home rather than have him destroyed. Maybe in some corner of her mind, she was clinging to the hope he might actually get better and one day open his mouth and speak.

When the furore had died down, the time came when Theresa called me and asked if I would like to come and see Dale. She said the doctors had told her that as most of the principles of human biology and science had gone out the window here, maybe Dale’s brain might react to people to he knew and it was worth trying stimulus. I talked with Gavin and Rory about it and although it felt weird, we agreed to go see him. The day we did, Theresa had Dale out in her back yard, which was fenced because he shuffled around endlessly, only stopping when he bumped into something or walked into a wall. Eventually, he would pivot and begin moving again, his broken body twitching but incredibly somehow able to shift and walk. We when we arrived; Theresa called to him but Dale didn’t react from the bottom of the yard, so we went to him. As I got nearer the initial fear I had turned to sadness. He looked worse than the photos in the newspapers, still wearing the same black trousers from his burial suit and white shirt, stained with little marks where he had been bumping into things. We all tried to talk to him and once, for a split second we thought we saw Dale almost look as though he recognised us, as if some deep memory in his brain had registered something, somewhere, fleeting, like déjà vu. As his eyes moved over us, I felt like I had at least made some kind of distant connection with Dale before his eyes rolled back again and he shuffled off around for yet another lap of the yard.

As the months rolled on, people began to forget about Dale and just move on. Sometimes, young kids would come to fence at the back of his house and stare at him, but it was all the same to Dale, I doubt he noticed nor cared. There was one time Dale got out of the yard and was found wandering the streets a few hundred metres from his house. At first, his mother got excited because she thought he had used his brain to open the gate which indicated Dale could think and reason, but it turned out some kid had picked the lock on the gate and let him out for a joke. Kids can be cruel I guess.

I didn’t see Dale much after the first visit, maybe one or two times more, just really to be respectful to Theresa’s requests. I heard later Theresa became a shut in, fiercely protective of Dale and paranoid about people coming to the house to see him. My father said people were worried about her mental state, and questioned if she had done the right thing bringing Dale back home. Could she ever come to terms with her loss if her dead son was shuffling about in her own back yard and knocking the trash bins over three times a day?

I figured the best way to deal with the whole subject of Dale to try and make some sense of what had happened was to have a memorial set up at school, which we did. We managed to get a photo of Dale taken before he died and placed it on the wall in the foyer with a plaque. I found it was the best way to remember Dale, not as he was now, a circus act that people wanted to stare at; a non entity, somewhere lost between life and death and with no real place for him in the world. Dale would never have a normal life; never have friends or a wife or a family. He would never drive a car, go on holiday or have a job and play sports. So even though he existed, the memorial somehow drew a line under the whole affair and we treated it as though Dale was in fact dead and gone. Strangely, we had all become a better friend to Dale after his death than we were to him during his life and unlike before the accident, I can truly say that everyone across the globe now knew the name of Dale Corby.

Epilogue....

As he bumped the garden gate it opened, so he shuffled forwards out into the darkness. Step after step he took through the deserted streets. He didn’t know why he was going there, but he just knew to be there and where it was. So he shuffled onwards until he reached the large iron gates. He knew this was the place. There was something happening inside the gates, a commotion; movement from below the earth. He felt it and felt them rising from the soil, just as he had. Soon on the other side of the gates there were others; lots of them shuffling and moving just as he did and they came close to the iron gates, bumping them, close to him. They were like him, he just knew it. He was home.

THE END