The Wanderers by Permuted Press Page A

bony fingers. When he came into sight, all of their gazes concentrated on him. If he got close enough, he caused a great deal of commotion among their ranks: their brows furrowed, the teeth appeared, and their whitish eyes seemed capable of boring into him. However if he began to move away enough to be far from their field of view, they lost interest in him and began to wander. It was as if the zombies functioned with a very basic program, manipulating just a few variables. Something could be there or not, but it did not seem like they were capable of considering that he was “there but in hiding”, for example.
    An unexpected voice from his right startled him and broke his train of thought.
    “ How’s it going, young man?” asked Dozer.
    “ Fuck... I didn’t hear your coming,” said Aranda, excusing himself.
    “ I can see that,” Dozer replied, somewhat amused. Although it was cold, he was dressed in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, a couple of sizes too small.
    Dozer followed Aranda’s gaze.
    “ They still give me the shivers,” Aranda said, looking out at the zombies. “A while ago, I saw one dressed with a SAMUR[2] uniform. It had a stethoscope around its neck and a hole the size of a golf ball in the clavicle area. Well, I asked myself what had been its story, how it ended up like that. Maybe the same person he had been trying to help had infected him. Maybe he never had a chance.”
    “ I know what you’re saying. Sometimes we forget that they were once people, like you or me.”
    “ Anyway,” he said, moving his hand in the air. “That was a long time ago.”
    “ That’s the right thought, you know?” said Dozer.
    “ What do you mean?”
    “ I mean... that if you go around putting those ideas in the others’ heads, especially the ones in my group, well... it’s them or us, Aranda. If you have a rotted thing in front of you and you hesitate, even if it’s just for a second, you’ll end up on the other side of the fence with your eyes whitened and your ass full of worms. We can’t be fussy about it.”
    “ I didn’t mean to-”
    “ I know, believe me, I do,” interrupted Dozer. “But getting over just that was an essential part of training. It took a lot to walk and run among them shooting at them as if they were Pepsi cans on a fence.” He lowered his head, staring at his hands. “Sometimes you encounter things that are hard to forget once you go home and lay down to bed. They simply don’t go away, you can’t sleep and forget about them, and they don’t disappear when you wash your body to take off all of the blood after a row with the zombies. Not all of those things look like monsters. Sometimes you find a face looking straight at yours, and for a second you glimpse the humanity they lost. They’re almost pitiful. And you hesitate. But those are their fucking weapons. That’s why they destroyed everything. We simply can’t allow ourselves to even remember that all of those dead bodies were men and women, friends, spouses, regular people with mortgages and plans for the summer.”
    Aranda had turned around to look at Dozer. He seemed disheartened and smaller than usual. His eyes held a trace of sadness, and for an instant, Aranda beheld unknown horizons of the big man’s personality, wells of darkness that he locked up inside, that he did not share with anyone else. However, in his head he drew an image so vivid that it seemed to shine with its rich variety of chromatic tones. Dozer appeared in it, after one of his missions outside, sitting in a corner of his room; his absent eyes fixed on his bloodstained boots, and shedding tears for all of those specters.
    “ Do you understand?” Dozer said, with a serious countenance.
    “ I do understand, Dozer. I’m sorry.”
    “ Oh come on, it’s not your fault.” He turned his head towards the rows of specters that surrounded the sports center. “But while we keep on giving them nick-names like ‘corrupted ones’, zombies,