I'm B Smith and I'm a zombie.
I study my face in the small mirror in my cell, looking for a monster but only finding myself. I look much the same as I did before I was killed, hair shaved tight, pale skin, a few freckles, a mole on the far right of my jaw, light blue eyes, a nose that's a bit too wide for my face. But if I stare long enough I start to notice subtle differences.
Like those blue eyes I was always so pleased about. (I was never a girlie girl, but they were my best feature and, yeah, I used to admire them every so often if I was feeling gooey.) They're not as shiny as they were. They look like they've dried out. That's because they have.
I tilt my head back and pour several drops from a bottle into each eye, then shake my head gently from side to side to work the liquid about. Reilly gave me the bottle. He also taught me how to shake my head the right way.
"You can't blink anymore."
That was several days ago, not long after I was brought to my cell from the room of fire. I was bundled in here without anyone saying anything, no explanations, no sympathy, no warnings. After the horror show with the zombies and the gang in leather, a group of soldiers simply shuffled me along a series of corridors, stuck me here and left me alone.
For a few hours I paced around the small cell. There was nothing in it then, no mirror, no bed, no bucket. Just a sink that didn't have running water. I was wild with questions, theories, nightmarish speculations. I knew that I'd been killed and come back to life as a zombie. But why had my thoughts returned? Why could I remember my past? Why was I able to reason?
The zombies in Pallaskenry and my school were mindless, murdering wrecks. They killed because they couldn't control their unnatural hunger for brains. The zombies in the room were the same, single-minded killing machines on legs.
Except I thought that those teenagers with the weapons were zombies too. Rage had definitely been bitten by one of the undead - the moss growing around his cheek was proof of that. But they could talk and think and act the same way they could when they were alive.
What the hell was going on?
Reilly was the first person to enter my cell that day. A thickset soldier with brown hair and permanent stubble, he brought in a chair, closed the door behind him, put the chair in front of me and sat.
"You can't blink anymore," he said.
"Uh urh ooh?" I grunted, forgetting that I couldn't speak.
"You can't talk either," he noted drily. "We'll sort out your mouth soon but you should tend to your eyes first. Your vision will have suffered already, but the more they dry out, the worse it'll get."
He produced a plastic bottle of eye drops and passed it to me. As I stared at it suspiciously, he chuckled. "It's not a trick. If we wanted to harm you, we'd have fried you in the lab. Your eyelids don't work. Go on, try them, see for yourself."
I tried to close my eyes but nothing happened. If I furrowed my brow it forced them partly closed into a squint, but they wouldn't move by themselves. I reached for them to pull the lids down. Then I saw the bones sticking out of my fingers and stopped, afraid I might scratch my eyeballs.
"Good call," Reilly said. "Revitalizeds all come close to poking out an eye - a few actually did before we could warn them. Most reviveds instinctively know to keep their hands away from their eyes, but you guys..." He snorted, then told me how to administer the drops.
I stare at myself in the mirror again and wipe streaks from the drops away as they drip down my cheeks - the closest I'm ever going to get to tears now that I'm dead. My eyes look better, but still not as moist and sharp as they once did. I can see clearly, but my field of vision is narrower and the world's a bit darker than when I was alive, as if I'm staring through a thin gray veil.
I open my mouth and examine my teeth. Run a tongue over them, but carefully. I nicked it loads of times the first few days and I still catch myself occasionally.