He Saw The Apocalypse by Gabriel Ascencio Morales

I don’t remember much about the worst of it. The first memory I have of them was at about five years old. My dad locked the front door and had his rifle hanging from his shoulder. I was scared, but he told me that everything was going to be okay. “It’s just like a storm; they’ll come to pass,” he said.

            The next memory that I had of them was when I was in the woods next to the house, playing with my little brother. We saw one of them, tall, half-eaten, looking blankly at the ground. We hadn’t alerted it, thank God, so we went back to tell dad. My dad took his rifle and told us to go with him back to the woods.

            “It’s time you learned how to shoot one of them,” he said. So I took aim, and my dad held my arm and shoulder to help me keep the rifle straight. My brother looked at us attentively. A loud sound took over the forest. The birds went flying, and a large cloud of red smoke was expelled from its body.

            Of course, it wasn’t dead. They could never die, after all. We threw its body in the river so that it would be taken away before it woke up.

            These days, I’m a merchant. I move everything, from food supplies to auto parts to ammunition to entertainment. Many old towns have revitalized, and more yet have spawned out of thin air. Things should be going well.

            On the road, I met up with one of my scrap suppliers. I agreed to buy some of his stuff, but before grabbing my goods and leaving, he took me to a small room in his shack. “Check this out!” he said, and turned on the lights. There was one of them tied to the table, completely dismembered except for the head.

            I asked him why he had it in his house. “I want it to wake up! Cut off all its limbs so there’s no chance it can hurt me.”

            “What do you plan to do with it?” I asked.

            “Beat it senseless. Until it dies again.”

            I didn’t really know what to say.

            “They took my whole family,” he said, with his voice cracking, trying to justify himself.

            I paid for my stuff and left. I wonder what the one tied to the table would’ve thought of all this. Well, not it, but the person that it used to be. How would they feel about being reduced to that?

            I arrived at another stop. Armed men. For a moment, I thought it was an ambush, but they told me they were the guards of a neighboring town. They wanted to inspect my cargo before letting me through.

            The men did their inspection and told me that I was okay. I asked them why they did it. “We’ve been hearing that people from other towns are bringing them here on purpose. Some of our folks have been bitten by them too, unfortunately.”

            This was the first time that I had seen armed men dressed specifically in uniform.

            I’ve been hearing more of this kind of paranoid talk recently. These towns are becoming larger, stranger. At another town there was this clever orator, standing in the middle of a crowd of adoring men, women and children: “We’ll eradicate the threat of the undead, whatever the cost!”

            As I listened to his speech, I started to notice other things. The two large, red banners that flanked the orator had the word “YES” written on them, repeating over and over. The adoring crowds had…smiles? Not quite. It was almost as if their mouths had been deformed into the shape of one. More than happiness, there was only this depraved pleasure: the ecstasy of enacting vengeance.

            I sometimes feel like these men—these orators, these petty princes—are immortal. Their ideas will outlive the undead and the world itself. They can’t afford to fully rid themselves of the walking corpses; without them they can’t titillate the smiling crowds.

            I came to my last stop for the day. I was at a workshop, talking with its owner about the prices of some auto parts. In came one of the undead. I suspected it must have arrived from the woods, since one of its legs had been pierced by a thick branch. It was staring at us patiently, much like a lion examining its prey. Yet it did not move.

            CLANK-chank-pank! Something fell. Despite its injury, the walking corpse lunged towards us.

            BANG! The workshop owner had reached for his gun, and the precise pull of the bullet expelled the red dust from its body. It fell to the ground.

            Like a lion…like a lion?

            My mind drifted back to that evening long ago, when we found the wolf. I remember it so clearly. I was in the woods with my dad. It was sunset, so we were heading back home when we saw it, lying on the grass with one of its legs injured. It stared at us patiently, but it did not stand up, nor did it try to attack us. It seemed like it had given up: its stare was not intimidating, but rather resigned.

            Then my dad took some dried meat from his pocket and extended his hand. At first the wolf growled and pulled back, yet my dad continued to offer the food. Seeing that we were not a threat, it eventually took the meat. Once it finished eating it placed its head on the grass and closed its eyes.

            “Why did you feed it?” I asked my dad when we returned home.

            “It was just a poor creature,” he answered. “It was the least that I could do.”

            That wolf probably died shortly after. I felt a strange sadness when I realized that the corpse at this workshop, however, could never die.

            It all finally clicked, much too late.

            I assumed the workshop owner would carry it—him—to a faraway location. “No need,” he said, “I know how to deal with these things.” In a nearby section of the workshop, there was a large industrial press, capable of flattening an entire car into a sheet of paper. He placed the body on its base. It was clearly not the first time he had done this. The surface of the press’ base was covered in a red and green substance. It was pulsating. It was still moving. It was alive.

            The owner turned on the mechanism. The first thing to crack was the nose, then came the rest of the face. His disfigured body made a sound like the crumpling of paper. His chest began to recede into his back, and yellow liquid started to burst all over his body. His toes started to crack, and his feet bent outwards and made a horrible breaking sound. The smell was unbearable.

            “Better safe than sorry,” the owner said. A mild smirk appeared on his face.

            I thought back to that guy we threw into the river all those years ago. I felt a void in my stomach so immense, so dark that if I had lifted my shirt, I would have been able to see it, piercing through my body and stretching into the black center of the Earth.

            And then, I saw the vision: the vision of the undead and the fear of them. I saw the messianic orators and petty princes. I saw the sprawl of humanity eating itself, I saw the men in uniform and their warheads, and soon there was no longer a sky, and there was no longer a sea, and there were no longer people, only their mindless silhouettes killing and dying. And soon the Earth turned red, and the soil of this new Earth was nothing but flattened paste, shouting, alive, and in pain.

            There was a mirror on the wall to the right of the press. The owner looked at it briefly and saw himself, not realizing he was the apocalypse.

Gabriel Ascencio Morales is a writer in Mexico City. He has published in outlets such as Strange Horizons and Letralia. He won an IGNYTE award for poetry in 2021.