Zaria pulled her arm free of the tight grip around it, taking advantage of the shock Gu Cheng felt to get away.
"Dammit, Gu Cheng! Why did you do that!"
Gu Cheng winced as her scream pierced his skull, but his own obvious anger propelled him past it and up onto his knees. "What were you thinking? You were going to stay behind, weren't you?"
"Of course I was! I want you to get home, not be drug around the rest of your life while I try to find my universe! Mine is connected to so many others, yours you could have been home in just a few hops!" Zaria wanted to embrace her anger, but she could feel her anger trying to come out of her eyes in the form of tears. She turned away from him, taking deep breaths to steady herself.
"Did you even -" Gu Cheng cut off his words, twisting around and pulling his gun from its holster. The cramped living room they were in was attached to a tiny kitchenette, but halfway along the wall, there was an opening to rooms beyond, and a scraping, shuffling sound was coming from the shadows within. Zaria slowly stood up, her hands innocently in front of her to placate whomever owned the home she had just crashed into. Her hands slowly fell to her sides when a slow, slumped shape emerged from the bathroom visible just past the tiny hall.
She was a young woman, or maybe she was once. Cut off shorts hung from her emaciated form below a t-shirt that was probably plain white in the past, but was now covered in dark reddish-brown smears, as though she poured a big mug of hot chocolate straight down the front. It was not hot chocolate, and Zaria felt her stomach lurch at the missing lower half of the girl's jaw. "No no no no," she whispered, fumbling with the sword at her side.
Milky white eyes latched onto the frightened woman, and the movement began again, a little faster as it threw itself forward toward the noise. A loud report, then another, and the corpse's head was knocked to the side. Gu Cheng stood up slowly, his gun trained on the still figure while his eyes darted from it to the now quiet rooms that he could not see. "What is that?" He asked Zaria. "Is it human?"
"Zombie," she whispered. "This universe has zombies."
Zaria could not pull her eyes away from the fallen figure. Besides the missing jaw and new bullet holes, the front of the neck was missing, spine and muscles barely intact enough to support the head. The analytical part of her brain wondered if that was why there was no stereotypical moaning sound. No vocal cords.
The rest of the limbs showed signs of decomposition, but no obvious trauma that couldn't be explained by just being a walking corpse. Wood splintered next to her, and she tore her eyes away, finally getting the sword slid free of its scabbard.
One more crunch and Gu Cheng's boots were free of the mess they made of the little table. Both hands steadied the grip of his pistol, and he carefully made his way toward the hall opening. Zaria kept her sword pointed at the corpse, just in case. Flies were already coming down from the walls and landing on the flesh. "This is just so very nasty," she mouthed silently. The flies were what were doing her in. The corpse that screamed 'zombie' was bad enough, but she could pretend it was not real. The flies feasting on the matter...nope.
"There is just a bathroom and a bedroom through there," Gu Cheng stated as he slid his weapon back into its holster. "I checked cabinets and under the bed just in case,but there is nothing else here."
Zaria looked up at him, but his attention was on the girl he had just shot. He reached out to touch her but stopped when Zaria hissed at him not to. He crouched down an arm's length away and raised his brow quizzically.
"Don't touch it," she said, her voice trembling. "There are so many different versions of this universe told, I don't know if this is one of the ones where the blood can turn you if it gets in even the tiniest of wounds."
"Turn you? Into what?"
"A zombie." He continued to look at her blankly. "Walking dead? Reanimated corpse? Does your universe not have any stories about the dead coming back to life?"
"Nothing like this."
Zaria swore. "So this is definitely one of the world's connected to mine. Dammit Gu Cheng, your brains are going to be eaten, and it's all my fault."
"They eat brains? Why?" Gu Cheng pushed up from the ground and walked over to the cabinets to see if there was anything salvageable.
"Not all the stories say brains,but one of the basest instincts humans have is to feed. The higher brain function is gone in the stories, but the lizard brain is still functioning, so all they do is eat. This one's eyes no longer work even if the brain could interpret what was being seen, so I bet it heard me talking, and that was why it came in." Zaria kept the sword in hand as she walked around the corpse. She had no experience in sword fighting beyond the little that Gu Cheng taught her back at the campsite, but the sword made her feel safer, so she kept it in hand.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
"So then, if you destroy the brain, it stops. That's why the first shot didn't faze it. And how it could keep moving despite the pain a living person would have been feeling in that condition." He pulled several unopened packages of food out of a cabinet and lined them up on the counter. A large cloud of flies lifted from a bowl and then settled back down. "What else can you tell me?"
Zaria peeked out of the peephole on the main door. "I can't tell you almost anything for sure. There are so many different stories about zombies in my world. They are a huge money maker for horror movie creators. Some are fast, some are slow, some can solve simple problems, and some are just walking appetites. There are dozens of different reasons for them, but it can be anything from magic to genetic engineering to aliens, I mean, I have no idea."
She moved her eye away from the little lookie window. "This door is closed and locked from the inside. But that just tells us that she turned after she was home alone, not if she was scratched or bitten outside the home. So we can't let them touch us. We can't eat or drink anything. Hell, some stories have it spreading by spores! It could be in the freaking air!" Panic made her voice rise higher at the end of her sentence, and she took a deep breath to calm down.
"If it is something that we have breathed in, then there is nothing that we can do." Gu Cheng moved to the cabinets under the counter, placing anything he found that might be useful out where they could see it easily. Zaria slid the sword back in its home and continued her zen breathing.
"Obviously," she said once she felt she could speak and still keep her voice steady. "But it would be a good idea to not eat or drink anything until we can get more information and touch as little as possible. I will check in the bathroom to see if there is any strong disinfectant."
Gu Cheng moved quickly to intercept, placing himself between her and the bathroom. "I can do that in a moment." At her confused look, he added, "It's pretty bad in there."
Zaria sighed and pushed him aside. "Worse than a half decomposed corpse trying to eat me?" Gu Cheng had no answer to that, so she continued on.
The smell of decay was stronger in the bathroom. Zaria slid her phone out of the bag, still slung across her body, and turned on the flashlight. Old blood was smeared down the door to the shower stall. A lump on the floor in front of it was soon identified as the missing jaw. She narrowed her eyes and stared at it. A steady drip sound came from the stall. The dead girl must have been attracted by the sound and, unable to get to it, tore herself up on the pointy pull handle when falling against the door.
"That's just so, so very nasty," she murmured aloud. Doubting anything would be inside the mold speckled shower stall, she opened up the cabinet beneath the sink. A spray bottle of bleach based cleaner came out, but there was nothing else that she would trust touching. The same for the medicine cabinet above. Except for one toothbrush in a clear plastic, unopened wrapper, everything was partially used and therefore suspect. Until she could determine if it was safe to use, she wouldn't give it to Gu Cheng. It went into one of the large pockets on the leg of her pants.
The room was barely large enough to spread her arms out to her sides without touching anything. Five minutes after entering, she was done and moving on to the bedroom. Posters covered the walls, all of the same attractive man in various poses and outfits. Zaria admired and applauded his propensity for unbuttoned shirts. She was staring at the perfect abs on display when Gu Cheng walked into the room.
"Did you find anything?" He asked,his voice cold and a chill following him into the room.
Zaria took one more look at the idol and then began to pull drawers open. "I found some bleach stuff in the bathroom, but I wouldn't advise any of the medications because 1, we don't know how the malady spread, and 2, we don't know if our bodies will even be able to take them." In case he had forgotten,"Remember, this is a whole other universe. This is not the Earth that you know. These people might have two spleens and grow a horn from their forehead when they hit 50. Everything we put in our bodies is a risk."
Several sturdy pairs of jeans went onto the bed. "You found duct tape? If we can cut up these jeans, we can put some extra layers between us and anything trying to eat us. Maybe."
Against the wall under the small window sat a white desk. Snapshots of a girl that might have been the former resident were taped to the front of a shelf above it, a bit of normalcy that was quite jarring. Textbooks and lined paper covered the desk surface, a fuzzy ended pen open and laying across a page. Zaria could not read anything written on the page, nor on the books. She scrunched her nose and flipped through a few pages before putting it down with a sigh.
"What's wrong?" Gu Cheng rounded the bed and stood next to her, looking down at the books.
"I can't read any of these." She squeezed out a small smile. A metal can decorated with stickers and ribbon caught her attention. The handle of a pair of scissors stuck out of it, and she added those to her pile on the bed.
"They are math books. She was in school, university by the looks. It is written in Chinese."
"No,it's not," she said with a smile. "Not that I can read Chinese, but I recognize the alphabet because I read way too many mangas when I was in secondary. It's Japanese."
"No, it's clearly Chinese."
Zaria closed her eyes. If she wasn't looking at the remains of a young woman's life, then she could almost imagine that she was standing in Gu Cheng's office having a perfectly normal argument. "It's the pendant, CEO Gu. It translates everything for you. I am speaking English. Whatever you think you are speaking, it is being translated for those around you in whatever language they will understand. It's all very grand and mystical and blah blah blah. But when you look at the books, the pendant is twisting it so that you can understand it. We are in Japan, somewhere."
"I can speak Japanese. You take the pendant back." He started to lift the pendant over his head, but she stuck her hand out to stop him, one finger rising up to cover her lips in a classic Shush. Gu Cheng stilled, his ears straining to hear what had worried her. A thud, no, more than a thud but muffled and from outside of the apartment. Then another. The sound grew louder, and Zaria carefully climbed onto the desk to see outside the window. Gu Cheng pulled the chair over and pulled himself up as well, hand hovering over the butt of his pistol. Soon, with each thud, the glass in the window shook, and the blinds rattled against the hands that were separating parts to see. Something large moved along the street in front of them, it's head at level with the second story window they were peering out. Zaria pulled away abruptly, nearly falling off of the desk. "Zombies..." she whispered. "And dinosaurs?"