A Gift of Dirt
At the end of his gaze, a zombie was smiling bright and easy, radiant platinum hair let loose and dirt plastered thick around her mouth.
"You dull thing."
"Spit it out. Spit it out!"
"You do not even know how to eat dirt?"
Chesian thumped her on the back, but she only shrugged and rolled her head from side to side.
"Then I shall teach you myself. Come, sit. There—ah."
"Will you put that away?!"
She held the dirt out to him instead.
Chesian shook his head and jerked his face back, but he was already smeared with soil.
"Are you insane?! Ack—don't put it in my mouth, you idiot!"
He screamed, stunned, at his own face, ruined in an instant. As if that were her chance, the zombie shoved the dirt straight into his mouth.
"Offered to you, and still you cannot eat."
"Ptoo—ptoo! Have you actually lost your mind?!"
Frustrated with her, Chesian shouted it low.
"For heaven's sake. You hopeless thing!"
"Hopeless, is it."
Of course, unable to understand a word between them, neither had the faintest idea that each thought the other the deficient one.
I'm the human. I'm the one who has to endure.
Chesian clicked his tongue and wiped the dirt-caked corner of her mouth with the back of his hand, then picked the fallen coat up off the ground and draped it over her shoulders.
"Wear your clothes properly, at least......"
Before the words were even finished, she slammed the coat he had put on her roughly to the earth. It hit with a flat, heavy slap.
"......"
"......"
For an instant, silence fell between her and Chesian.
"You... this......"
Her animal senses seemed perfectly intact. She appeared to realize she had done something wrong.
I am human. I am human.
Chesian was forcing the words over the boil of his temper, trying to go on, when—
"Kya!"
The zombie spun and bolted. Without a single glance back, she began to hop and frolic across the field, and he watched her retreating back in blank despair.
"This goddamn......"
Chesian clenched his teeth.
The first day he met this zombie, he had wondered whether to lock her in the basement, in case she was a mutant. She was so very like a person, though, that his conscience stung him, and he put it off—and before he knew it, they had spent quite a long while together. Being with her, he thought, made all sense of time disappear.
"Again—again! Eating dirt again!"
Because she caused disasters without a breath in between.
She smeared wet mud across his face once more.
"Try it. The taste is good."
"Mmph—mmph. Will you stop?!"
Just look at her now. In the brief moment he took his eyes off her, she had sat in that corner shoveling dirt into her mouth, and not content with that, was trying to force it on him as well. He clutched his own face as if horrified.
"Why am I even playing nursemaid like this...... No. No. This is all for the experiment. For the experiment......"
Chesian shook his head, as if denying reality by force, and soothed himself again and again: the only reason he was playing nursemaid to that zombie was the experiment.
"Nom...... nom......"
But even the time to sink into thought was a luxury. At the suspicious sound by his ear, he had no choice but to spring up and run.
"Nom, nom......"
"......Nom nom? What are you eating now?!"
"Nomnomnomnom."
Realizing he had caught on, the zombie only chewed harder and more furiously. He ran at the ominous sound, caught her jaw in one grab, and held out his hand.
"Spit it out. Spit it out, I said."
She shook her head, unwilling. Against his stubbornness, though, she finally heaved a deep sigh and spat what she had been gnawing into his palm.
"And what is this, that you were eating it so happily?"
Chesian narrowed his eyes at the green lump resting in his hand.
"......Grass? This is a poisonous weed."
Dumbfounded, he stared at the clump, teeth marks vivid across it. Stop her from eating dirt, and now she was eating poison herbs.
"What even are you."
He looked at her in disbelief, but the zombie only smiled back, innocent as anything. All at once he remembered the antibody experiment he had run the night before with this strange zombie's blood.
"She really is nothing if not strange."
His own blood, which carried antibodies against zombies, would not mix with the blood of other zombies. But when this Mutant Zombie's blood was mixed with theirs, it clung and pulled apart, clung and pulled apart, as if the blood itself were alive.
It mixes, and yet it doesn't. Does that mean the antibodies are there, or aren't they?
Even Chesian, who had studied zombies for so long, could not find his footing. With no clear conclusion he could draw at once, he decided to keep her beside him and watch.
Someday... will I have to use this zombie as a test subject too?
For him, research—experiment—was as natural as breathing. This time, he did not want to.
Strange. Why am I like this......
A zombie who liked eating grass and dirt, whose will was clear unlike the others—this strange platinum-haired zombie. Without his noticing, the way a drizzle soaks a coat, she had made a place for herself beside Chesian, who had lived for nothing but his research.
Why is it so hard to imagine her not beside me?
He had reached the point where he could no longer picture the days without her.
But a zombie is a test subject.
Sooner or later, he would have to shut this one in the laboratory too. She, meanwhile, seemed not to know a thing of his tangled thoughts, and only chewed the grass in her mouth in a vacant daze. Gnaw, gnaw.
Staring blankly at her, Chesian soon came back to himself.
No. I'll think about this later.
He shook his head as if it ached, casting the thoughts off, then reached out and took the grass from that artfully innocent face.
"I told you not to eat that. Why do you keep eating it? Are you hungry?"
Why did she keep chewing grass? He tilted his head at her.
"Then... should I give her meat?"
As a rule, he threw the carcasses of beasts he found wandering the forest to the zombies locked in the basement. But for this zombie alone, strangely, he did not want to toss a corpse at her that way.
"I don't like it."
Picturing her burying her face in rotten meat put him in a foul mood.
Meanwhile, still mumbling on the grass, she spotted a butterfly on the wing and slowly began to open her mouth.
"Hey."
At the sight, Chesian shot to his feet. She had just managed to catch the butterfly out of the sky, and was moving to put it in her mouth.
"Wait."
He ran.
"Don't eat that! No! No!"
He ran again. Barely wrenching the butterfly from her hand, he sent it back into the air, then hung his head.
A zombie's greatest urge was hunger. So this one, too, seemed to be eating dirt, eating grass, and now reaching for a butterfly, all out of appetite.
"Let's go to the market."
A short carriage ride from here, there was a village. He would buy some meat. Leave her like this and she looked ready to start stripping the trees.
"Take a carriage and we'll be there in no time......"
The carriage itself was no trouble. He could do as he always had—press a few coins into a passing driver's hand and climb aboard. The problem was the zombie. Still talking, Chesian looked at her grimy figure and let out a heavy sigh.
"First, let's get you clean."
He made up his mind to wash her, still staring at him round-eyed and blank, in the lake nearby.
"Hup."
"Kyah—."
He scooped her up in his arms before she could fight him. Finding it delightful, she swung her hands through the air and cried out in glee.
What's this?
He had noticed something strange, and his eyes narrowed.
A scar on the top of her foot?
There was a scar on the sole, and its shape was peculiar—like the mark of a bite, a half-moon.
Did she just get this? No... I don't think so.
He tilted his head for a closer look and tried to catch her ankle, but she thrashed, and he dropped her.
"How is she this strong?"
Dumbfounded, Chesian watched her toddle about all over again. She, of course, could not have cared less.
"Just try a little dirt. The taste is good."
Once more she crammed a great handful of it toward his mouth.
"Put it away while I'm still asking nicely."
He said it with a bright smile, but his teeth were clenched so tight they looked almost resolute, as if he would never allow that dirt past them. Finding him strange, the zombie only held it closer.
Damn it. At this rate I'm actually going to eat dirt.
Soft clumps pattered to the ground. Watching them fall, Chesian's face went pale.
"I shed—puddit away."
Put it away, he had said.
"Ball of fur. Eat plenty, and you will grow healthy."
Chesian shook his head hard.
"Why will he not eat?"
She blinked her large golden eyes and stared straight at him, then turned and pattered away.
Hah. Saved.
Just as he sighed in relief, thinking that she fortunately seemed to understand the concept of giving up, something was thrust out in front of him again.
He twitched an eyebrow and looked at what lay in her hand.
Dirt?
But it was different from before. There was a butterfly in it, and grass, and something squirming, wriggling—
"This one's not allowed. Hey, this one's not allowed. This is a no-no. A no-no. You eat this and you're giving up on being human, you hear me? I'd rather you just ate the dirt."
He rattled it out in horror, shaking his head.
I'll grant the butterfly. I'll even grant the grass. But a worm—where did she find a worm!
"Throw all of it away. Come on, let's go wash."
There was no chance she would understand a word. She was a zombie. He pulled the butterfly from her fist and let it fly, shook the dirt and the grass and the worm off onto the ground, and took her hand.
She went sulky, glaring at him with a strangely wounded look.
Was that supposed to be a gift?
Come to think of it, there were stories of cats bringing mice to the people who had saved them, or helped them.
"What am I supposed to do with you, innocent like that? Hardly zombie-like at all."
Chesian looked at her, worried. Even then she seemed sulky, and feeling needlessly sorry, he kept glancing at her mood. In truth, though, the two of them were thinking along utterly different lines.
"Given to him, and still he cannot eat."
She gazed at his back with a wistful ache, then trotted after him in quick little steps.
"The ball of fur is a severely deficient specimen. Later, I myself shall chew it and feed him."
She was thinking a thought that would have sent Chesian into hysterics, had he known.