michael christopher
25-10-2009, 06:09 PM
This work protected by copyright. Copying material from here without my expressed written permission is against the law.
The electronic documents posted here are the intellectual property of Michael Christopher Thompson II. Copyright 2009.
Last of the Zombies
1
Oge was the first.
Oge wonders what has become of himself as he stares into the mirror at the rotting chunks of gray and brown flesh which hang from torn dead skin on his face. His eyes stare into the mirror and he notices the reflection inside of the reflection, even in spite of the glaze over them. The brown that once swirled around his pupils has darkened, and now it looks a murky red, almost burgundy. This is one improvement, he thinks, in comparison to the haggard ruin of his flesh which has become to him like a walking coffin.
On his head rests a maroon baseball cap. There is something that looks like blood staining the back, but we cannot say for sure since it blends in with the color of the hat. Dark brown stringy hair pokes out from underneath it.
He lifts a cigarette to his mouth and pretends to smoke it, although it is not lit. He doesn’t want to dry himself out anymore than necessary. Sometimes it is the ritual of the old habits that brings the most comfort when the habits themselves are unable to be completely satisfied. After a moment he drops it on the floor amidst a pile of other cigarettes which have also never been smoked.
He looks like shit. He also knows he smells like shit. And he can’t blame the fluorescent lighting for making him look bad this time. In fact, it’s probably doing him a few favors. He keeps the lights low for an obvious reason.
He lives his (increasingly sur)real life as little as possible, and prefers to spend his days here in the darkness lost in reflection. Often he contemplates why he has come to be in this situation. He has only been a zombie for a couple of weeks now - thirteen days, to be exact. At first the formaldehyde injections had slowed things, and later the formaldehyde baths. At this thought, he glances at the large bathtub in the corner which has been carted in and is now filled with green formaldehyde jelly. There is a certain longing in those dead eyes, but he knows he should postpone his bath until later. There is still work to do tonight, and he shouldn’t be high from the bath when he speaks to the others…
Oge was the first of the zombies, and in the end he intends to the last of them. But first there is work to be done. He could have been the only zombie had he so chosen (and if while he was still a man he had been a better one), but as so many in isolation and despair are wont to do, he had decided to drag as many other souls down into his destruction as he possibly could. Now he is but one of many zombies, the number of which is rapidly increasing. That’s good, he knows. All part of the plan. First he gets rid of the fresh meat - of which he will always have prime cut, he knows, as First Zombie - and then he offers to get rid of the rotten meat for an escape. A bargaining chip. His only chance at freedom is his power to get rid of his own mistake, but he knows his benefactors and he knows that they will be more than happy to oblige him if only for fear of their own safety.
As the “alpha-zombie” cliché tends to go, Oge was originally a government scientist, and his name before his brand-new decaying meat-suit became his new mode of transportation was Doctor Daniel Ogelfield. To call him a scientist would be to put him in a box that Doctor Ogelfield (or Oge as he now prefers) had never felt entirely comfortable being put inside of. “Researcher” and “experimenter” was something that he insisted on being referred to as in the stead of the ever-boring and eternally impaired label of “scientist,” although “explorer” might be his most appropriate title given his strange predilection to travel the confusing and oft-unimagined frontiers of human minds and emotions. Science is exponentially limited, Oge oftens reminds himself. A scientist can only go so far. But an explorer could go as far as he dares take himself.
And so Oge is really an explorer.
In essence, he was back then (and still thinks of himself as now) a scavenger of the human mind, of the human limit, of the “omega potential” as he likes to imagine it. What are human beings capable of achieving? What suffering can they endure and what ecstasy? Is there even a limit to emotion, or does it simply go on forever?
The limits of science were transcended long ago, generations before Oge was ever born (or Daniel Ogelfield for that matter) - a secret which Oge has long had reason to keep to himself. It was his pride that made him keep the secret that “modern-science” is primitive and outdated, even more so than the threats made against his life should he ever reveal it. There was and is no danger of such a revelation, however. This secret has been a badge of honor for his cancerous ego, albeit one that he knew he must keep hidden away and locked inside the box of his own dangerous mind if only as fuel for his own elitism. Oge’s ego has always been out of control, and before he was a zombie he was a zombie-maker - if not in a literal way then in a figurative one.
Thirty-two years ago, as a young man of twenty-three, Ogelfield was approached by a man in a black suit only one week after having received his PHD from Yale. It was the summer of 1977. Who that man was and what he said to Oge are of little importance - it is what came in the years following that initial meeting that Oge began to become something else, something he had never imagined. He started to become a god. At least he seemed to think so.
Being given the power of life and death over human subjects was something he had never considered before. The United States government - or rather, a “proxy” that clearly was an avatar of the government and which clearly operated within government allowance - paid him to kill people. They had been paying him to kill people for at least twenty-three of those long thirty-two years. It wasn’t as simple as stabbing or shooting them, however. He was an experimenter, he had always been an experimenter. His purpose was to find a way to control their minds perfectly, to perhaps even re-arrange their circuits and build a new mind inside the body of an already developed person. Up until recently, he has been entirely unsuccessful - and some might say that his currently rotting flesh would prove the badge of his ongoing failure, and that he has remained unsuccessful. Oge’s ego has different ideas however, as most egos do. An explorer never gives up. At least until his body no longer functions.
This is quite possible, Oge knows, because the formaldehyde treatments seem less and less effective. Exponentially less effective.
Better to think about these things later.
A secret hero of Oge’s throughout school had been Dr. Joseph Mengele, whom Oge had actually met once in 1984. That was just seven years after he started his research, and he knows now that it was a sign of his own future, an avatar of things to come - and perhaps it had been arranged merely to measure his own reaction. His benefactors often arranged things in just such a way. It was clever, at least until one thought about it.
With Mengele he had shared an imported German beer right in the middle of a bar in Washington D.C. Mengele did not hide his face, although he was going by a different name then - Samuel Meier. Oge thought it was funny that Mengele had adopted a Jewish identity for his incursion into the United States, which he had revealed to Oge was actually funded by the same proxy that was funding him.
Although the wink that Mengele - Meier - had tipped him after they finished drinking their beers and separating had confirmed to Oge that he was indeed working for the United States government, he had been almost positive long beforehand.
In the years following the incident he had been introduced into increasingly sadistic levels of experimentation. He showed his comfort with each and every death he witnessed, thus impressing his benefactors who increased his materials. He was interested in making money, yes, but not because money afforded him anything. He didn’t even have a house, and only a couple of apartments throughout the United States and Canada. He visited them quite infrequently and usually slept on whatever base he had been flown to for the week.
It was in 1986 that he killed his first human being. It was a child, and the child spoke English. She was a small black girl and she kept asking for her mother. Oge did not ask questions, he didn’t wonder where the girl came from or care. All he cared about was the fact that the experiment - injecting a certain mixture of highly radical compounds unknown to the world of “modern science” - had been a failure, and the girl had only lived two hours in extreme agony before expiring. Oge had been said. Not at the loss of the girl, but at his own failure. He vowed he would repeat the experiment and adjust the dosages as necessary until he could please both himself and his benefactors with a clear success. He found one. Recently. About thirteen days ago, in fact. And he had been the test subject.
He pushes the thought away again. Back into the past he decides to go, back into reflection of a time when his power had not been a cruel joke of the universe, when it didn’t have an impending expiration date. When he was not a leprous Lazarus, but the God that raised him from the dead. Hypothetically speaking, anyway.
Although these sorts of simple tests were a routine part of Oge’s job, his real passion was testing the human mind and human endurance. Oge had found in his studies that at some point, all emotions became the same. No matter how much torture or ecstatic stimulation a human subject undergoes, he or she always comes out a comatose, brain-dead husk. One might think that the depths of darkness and despair only would bring out the raving lunatic inside of the heart of man, but Oge discovered for himself - and many times over, as he was paid quite nicely by the United States government to verify the results of research - that pleasure and pain are quite the same thing in the end. Maximum pleasure - or at least, as “maximum” as Oge was able to achieve - brings about the same lunacy as maximum pain. And a curious result: pleasure leads to despair, and eventually, despair leads right back to pleasure.
It is a notion which makes his rotting lips open and form a crooked, strange smile.
He looks at himself in the mirror of the grimy and uncared for facility bathroom and solemnly frowns, staring at the reflection of a ghoulish crescent forming on his rotting face. It looks freakish and unnatural, but Oge looks that way as a rule these days. His flesh is hanging off of his face, peeling off like ancient wallpaper and hanging down, begging to be torn off. These occasionally flake off and float gracefully down to the dirty blue tile of the floor. Unlike it would have in his previous “life,” his skin isn’t growing fresh layers beneath these wounds - there is no bright red streak of viscera, no dripping blood trickling down his face. There is only more rotting meat beneath layers of already spoiled flesh.
Oge was always pale when he was amongst the “living” but now he has turned a sickly shade of gray. His flesh has only the same dead-looking monotone gray hue and seems to have lost all of it’s pigmentation entirely. It is strange and alien looking to him, and if he was capable of such vain emotions as disgust at this point in his existence, it would surely rise up in him now. But two days ago he stopped with the vanity. What’s the point? Now Oge is a dead man walking.
His jaw hangs low and strange, looking bent into an unusual position to the bottom right. Because his skin has lost it’s elasticity, his mouth will not return to it’s normal position and he long ago lost the ability to hold it in place himself. When he returns it to it’s normal position with his hands, it simply falls back out of place. His eyes are gaping wide open, and he no longer blinks. Only deep brown irises stare out through a thin white film on his eyeball, and those eyes look dead despite the living intelligence that exists behind them.
His body is dying. The formaldehyde isn’t working as well as it once did to preserve him - he knew it was coming. How long can formaldehyde preserve a corpse that gets up and walks around for most hours of the day? He eats and eats, but it’s not speeding him up anymore - he’s just slowing down, and breaking down. He has a sinking suspicion that he could pull one - or all - of his fingers off. If he really wanted to (of course he doesn’t). The hunger gets worse, and he would cry if he could. He’s stopped smelling himself rot, there is that much at least. But how much is that really, in the long run?
His vision are very blurry now. He can feel something in his head…
Something moving.
Better not to think about it.
But still… if he doesn’t think about it, it might eat through his brain. It might make sure he never thinks about anything again.
He pulls off the cap and we can see that the back of his head is bludgeoned out. Pink brains fleck the white skull around it, but the blood has been clotted for days now. He sees a large white worm squirming in and picks it out with his fingers. “You little shit,” Oge says, and he casts the thing on the floor and stomps on it. “Fuck you!” he cries and spits on it’s squashed remains.
There is a knock on the door behind him. He panics for only a moment and quickly returns the cap to his head, covering the obvious wound. The door opens just in time for him to return to his previous stature and a young female zombie walks in. Her state of decay looks extremely similar to Oge’s own. They stare at each other with a sadness that is impossible to register through their glazed dead eyes. Hers are a pale blue which would compliment her light gray face beautifully if not for the red flecks which were entering them and distending out from the black pupils.
“Maggie,” says Oge, and he nods at her. A chunk of flesh falls from his forehead and lands on the ground with a light plopping sound. He mutely stares at it with a detached sort of fascination and feels himself starting to zone out again. He does it more and more lately. The waking world is a dream he must drag himself into...
Maggie stares at the fallen flesh as well and looks like she would be crying, if that were possible. After about two minutes of blank silence, she finally looks up at him. “Oge,” she says softly. “We’ve found more live ones.” His eyes impossibly seem to open wider for a moment. Ah, he thinks, here is reality. For the last time? He doesn‘t know anymore… it gets harder and harder to even know how to know…
The world seems so slow, so slowly moving about him, he stares at Maggie for a moment and it feels like an eternity. He feels himself losing touch. He -
“Food,” she says suddenly, “live ones.” He snaps back to attention.
“Where!?” he demands, sounding alive once more. As he says this, a tiny white slug flies out of his mouth and lands on the floor. He doesn’t notice it, but Maggie watches it slowly wiggle away. She looks at him, pretending she did not see it. Her momentary glance had also lasted an eternity, however.
“They’re in Warehouse 32-B. Up in the attic.” Oge turns his head and looks back in the mirror. “How many?” “We think there are twenty-three up there,” she says. Twenty-three, he thinks, and a large smile slowly creeps it’s way onto his face. Pink cracks form at the edges of his mouth, and he knows they will never heal. “Twenty-three is an excellent number,” he says. “My lucky number in fact.” Maggie nods. “We can take them now,” she says. “Right now. Actually now is the best time.” “Are they armed?” Oge questions. She looks at him for a moment without answering and then finally responds. “No idea,” she says. “But I’m so hungry… and so cold… and their blood is so warm, and it makes the hunger go away…”
It is an emotion he is entirely in concert with.
“Tell them there are twenty-three unarmed humans up there,” he orders Maggie. “There are over a hundred of us. We can spare a few walking dead men. More meat for us anyway.”
The electronic documents posted here are the intellectual property of Michael Christopher Thompson II. Copyright 2009.
Last of the Zombies
1
Oge was the first.
Oge wonders what has become of himself as he stares into the mirror at the rotting chunks of gray and brown flesh which hang from torn dead skin on his face. His eyes stare into the mirror and he notices the reflection inside of the reflection, even in spite of the glaze over them. The brown that once swirled around his pupils has darkened, and now it looks a murky red, almost burgundy. This is one improvement, he thinks, in comparison to the haggard ruin of his flesh which has become to him like a walking coffin.
On his head rests a maroon baseball cap. There is something that looks like blood staining the back, but we cannot say for sure since it blends in with the color of the hat. Dark brown stringy hair pokes out from underneath it.
He lifts a cigarette to his mouth and pretends to smoke it, although it is not lit. He doesn’t want to dry himself out anymore than necessary. Sometimes it is the ritual of the old habits that brings the most comfort when the habits themselves are unable to be completely satisfied. After a moment he drops it on the floor amidst a pile of other cigarettes which have also never been smoked.
He looks like shit. He also knows he smells like shit. And he can’t blame the fluorescent lighting for making him look bad this time. In fact, it’s probably doing him a few favors. He keeps the lights low for an obvious reason.
He lives his (increasingly sur)real life as little as possible, and prefers to spend his days here in the darkness lost in reflection. Often he contemplates why he has come to be in this situation. He has only been a zombie for a couple of weeks now - thirteen days, to be exact. At first the formaldehyde injections had slowed things, and later the formaldehyde baths. At this thought, he glances at the large bathtub in the corner which has been carted in and is now filled with green formaldehyde jelly. There is a certain longing in those dead eyes, but he knows he should postpone his bath until later. There is still work to do tonight, and he shouldn’t be high from the bath when he speaks to the others…
Oge was the first of the zombies, and in the end he intends to the last of them. But first there is work to be done. He could have been the only zombie had he so chosen (and if while he was still a man he had been a better one), but as so many in isolation and despair are wont to do, he had decided to drag as many other souls down into his destruction as he possibly could. Now he is but one of many zombies, the number of which is rapidly increasing. That’s good, he knows. All part of the plan. First he gets rid of the fresh meat - of which he will always have prime cut, he knows, as First Zombie - and then he offers to get rid of the rotten meat for an escape. A bargaining chip. His only chance at freedom is his power to get rid of his own mistake, but he knows his benefactors and he knows that they will be more than happy to oblige him if only for fear of their own safety.
As the “alpha-zombie” cliché tends to go, Oge was originally a government scientist, and his name before his brand-new decaying meat-suit became his new mode of transportation was Doctor Daniel Ogelfield. To call him a scientist would be to put him in a box that Doctor Ogelfield (or Oge as he now prefers) had never felt entirely comfortable being put inside of. “Researcher” and “experimenter” was something that he insisted on being referred to as in the stead of the ever-boring and eternally impaired label of “scientist,” although “explorer” might be his most appropriate title given his strange predilection to travel the confusing and oft-unimagined frontiers of human minds and emotions. Science is exponentially limited, Oge oftens reminds himself. A scientist can only go so far. But an explorer could go as far as he dares take himself.
And so Oge is really an explorer.
In essence, he was back then (and still thinks of himself as now) a scavenger of the human mind, of the human limit, of the “omega potential” as he likes to imagine it. What are human beings capable of achieving? What suffering can they endure and what ecstasy? Is there even a limit to emotion, or does it simply go on forever?
The limits of science were transcended long ago, generations before Oge was ever born (or Daniel Ogelfield for that matter) - a secret which Oge has long had reason to keep to himself. It was his pride that made him keep the secret that “modern-science” is primitive and outdated, even more so than the threats made against his life should he ever reveal it. There was and is no danger of such a revelation, however. This secret has been a badge of honor for his cancerous ego, albeit one that he knew he must keep hidden away and locked inside the box of his own dangerous mind if only as fuel for his own elitism. Oge’s ego has always been out of control, and before he was a zombie he was a zombie-maker - if not in a literal way then in a figurative one.
Thirty-two years ago, as a young man of twenty-three, Ogelfield was approached by a man in a black suit only one week after having received his PHD from Yale. It was the summer of 1977. Who that man was and what he said to Oge are of little importance - it is what came in the years following that initial meeting that Oge began to become something else, something he had never imagined. He started to become a god. At least he seemed to think so.
Being given the power of life and death over human subjects was something he had never considered before. The United States government - or rather, a “proxy” that clearly was an avatar of the government and which clearly operated within government allowance - paid him to kill people. They had been paying him to kill people for at least twenty-three of those long thirty-two years. It wasn’t as simple as stabbing or shooting them, however. He was an experimenter, he had always been an experimenter. His purpose was to find a way to control their minds perfectly, to perhaps even re-arrange their circuits and build a new mind inside the body of an already developed person. Up until recently, he has been entirely unsuccessful - and some might say that his currently rotting flesh would prove the badge of his ongoing failure, and that he has remained unsuccessful. Oge’s ego has different ideas however, as most egos do. An explorer never gives up. At least until his body no longer functions.
This is quite possible, Oge knows, because the formaldehyde treatments seem less and less effective. Exponentially less effective.
Better to think about these things later.
A secret hero of Oge’s throughout school had been Dr. Joseph Mengele, whom Oge had actually met once in 1984. That was just seven years after he started his research, and he knows now that it was a sign of his own future, an avatar of things to come - and perhaps it had been arranged merely to measure his own reaction. His benefactors often arranged things in just such a way. It was clever, at least until one thought about it.
With Mengele he had shared an imported German beer right in the middle of a bar in Washington D.C. Mengele did not hide his face, although he was going by a different name then - Samuel Meier. Oge thought it was funny that Mengele had adopted a Jewish identity for his incursion into the United States, which he had revealed to Oge was actually funded by the same proxy that was funding him.
Although the wink that Mengele - Meier - had tipped him after they finished drinking their beers and separating had confirmed to Oge that he was indeed working for the United States government, he had been almost positive long beforehand.
In the years following the incident he had been introduced into increasingly sadistic levels of experimentation. He showed his comfort with each and every death he witnessed, thus impressing his benefactors who increased his materials. He was interested in making money, yes, but not because money afforded him anything. He didn’t even have a house, and only a couple of apartments throughout the United States and Canada. He visited them quite infrequently and usually slept on whatever base he had been flown to for the week.
It was in 1986 that he killed his first human being. It was a child, and the child spoke English. She was a small black girl and she kept asking for her mother. Oge did not ask questions, he didn’t wonder where the girl came from or care. All he cared about was the fact that the experiment - injecting a certain mixture of highly radical compounds unknown to the world of “modern science” - had been a failure, and the girl had only lived two hours in extreme agony before expiring. Oge had been said. Not at the loss of the girl, but at his own failure. He vowed he would repeat the experiment and adjust the dosages as necessary until he could please both himself and his benefactors with a clear success. He found one. Recently. About thirteen days ago, in fact. And he had been the test subject.
He pushes the thought away again. Back into the past he decides to go, back into reflection of a time when his power had not been a cruel joke of the universe, when it didn’t have an impending expiration date. When he was not a leprous Lazarus, but the God that raised him from the dead. Hypothetically speaking, anyway.
Although these sorts of simple tests were a routine part of Oge’s job, his real passion was testing the human mind and human endurance. Oge had found in his studies that at some point, all emotions became the same. No matter how much torture or ecstatic stimulation a human subject undergoes, he or she always comes out a comatose, brain-dead husk. One might think that the depths of darkness and despair only would bring out the raving lunatic inside of the heart of man, but Oge discovered for himself - and many times over, as he was paid quite nicely by the United States government to verify the results of research - that pleasure and pain are quite the same thing in the end. Maximum pleasure - or at least, as “maximum” as Oge was able to achieve - brings about the same lunacy as maximum pain. And a curious result: pleasure leads to despair, and eventually, despair leads right back to pleasure.
It is a notion which makes his rotting lips open and form a crooked, strange smile.
He looks at himself in the mirror of the grimy and uncared for facility bathroom and solemnly frowns, staring at the reflection of a ghoulish crescent forming on his rotting face. It looks freakish and unnatural, but Oge looks that way as a rule these days. His flesh is hanging off of his face, peeling off like ancient wallpaper and hanging down, begging to be torn off. These occasionally flake off and float gracefully down to the dirty blue tile of the floor. Unlike it would have in his previous “life,” his skin isn’t growing fresh layers beneath these wounds - there is no bright red streak of viscera, no dripping blood trickling down his face. There is only more rotting meat beneath layers of already spoiled flesh.
Oge was always pale when he was amongst the “living” but now he has turned a sickly shade of gray. His flesh has only the same dead-looking monotone gray hue and seems to have lost all of it’s pigmentation entirely. It is strange and alien looking to him, and if he was capable of such vain emotions as disgust at this point in his existence, it would surely rise up in him now. But two days ago he stopped with the vanity. What’s the point? Now Oge is a dead man walking.
His jaw hangs low and strange, looking bent into an unusual position to the bottom right. Because his skin has lost it’s elasticity, his mouth will not return to it’s normal position and he long ago lost the ability to hold it in place himself. When he returns it to it’s normal position with his hands, it simply falls back out of place. His eyes are gaping wide open, and he no longer blinks. Only deep brown irises stare out through a thin white film on his eyeball, and those eyes look dead despite the living intelligence that exists behind them.
His body is dying. The formaldehyde isn’t working as well as it once did to preserve him - he knew it was coming. How long can formaldehyde preserve a corpse that gets up and walks around for most hours of the day? He eats and eats, but it’s not speeding him up anymore - he’s just slowing down, and breaking down. He has a sinking suspicion that he could pull one - or all - of his fingers off. If he really wanted to (of course he doesn’t). The hunger gets worse, and he would cry if he could. He’s stopped smelling himself rot, there is that much at least. But how much is that really, in the long run?
His vision are very blurry now. He can feel something in his head…
Something moving.
Better not to think about it.
But still… if he doesn’t think about it, it might eat through his brain. It might make sure he never thinks about anything again.
He pulls off the cap and we can see that the back of his head is bludgeoned out. Pink brains fleck the white skull around it, but the blood has been clotted for days now. He sees a large white worm squirming in and picks it out with his fingers. “You little shit,” Oge says, and he casts the thing on the floor and stomps on it. “Fuck you!” he cries and spits on it’s squashed remains.
There is a knock on the door behind him. He panics for only a moment and quickly returns the cap to his head, covering the obvious wound. The door opens just in time for him to return to his previous stature and a young female zombie walks in. Her state of decay looks extremely similar to Oge’s own. They stare at each other with a sadness that is impossible to register through their glazed dead eyes. Hers are a pale blue which would compliment her light gray face beautifully if not for the red flecks which were entering them and distending out from the black pupils.
“Maggie,” says Oge, and he nods at her. A chunk of flesh falls from his forehead and lands on the ground with a light plopping sound. He mutely stares at it with a detached sort of fascination and feels himself starting to zone out again. He does it more and more lately. The waking world is a dream he must drag himself into...
Maggie stares at the fallen flesh as well and looks like she would be crying, if that were possible. After about two minutes of blank silence, she finally looks up at him. “Oge,” she says softly. “We’ve found more live ones.” His eyes impossibly seem to open wider for a moment. Ah, he thinks, here is reality. For the last time? He doesn‘t know anymore… it gets harder and harder to even know how to know…
The world seems so slow, so slowly moving about him, he stares at Maggie for a moment and it feels like an eternity. He feels himself losing touch. He -
“Food,” she says suddenly, “live ones.” He snaps back to attention.
“Where!?” he demands, sounding alive once more. As he says this, a tiny white slug flies out of his mouth and lands on the floor. He doesn’t notice it, but Maggie watches it slowly wiggle away. She looks at him, pretending she did not see it. Her momentary glance had also lasted an eternity, however.
“They’re in Warehouse 32-B. Up in the attic.” Oge turns his head and looks back in the mirror. “How many?” “We think there are twenty-three up there,” she says. Twenty-three, he thinks, and a large smile slowly creeps it’s way onto his face. Pink cracks form at the edges of his mouth, and he knows they will never heal. “Twenty-three is an excellent number,” he says. “My lucky number in fact.” Maggie nods. “We can take them now,” she says. “Right now. Actually now is the best time.” “Are they armed?” Oge questions. She looks at him for a moment without answering and then finally responds. “No idea,” she says. “But I’m so hungry… and so cold… and their blood is so warm, and it makes the hunger go away…”
It is an emotion he is entirely in concert with.
“Tell them there are twenty-three unarmed humans up there,” he orders Maggie. “There are over a hundred of us. We can spare a few walking dead men. More meat for us anyway.”