1 Six years of sleepwalking

A small urban settlement that one day was brimming with life, now turned into a town of the dead. Empty buildings looked onto the streets with dark pits of their shattered windows, and the roads were covered in junk and blocked with broken-down cars. Hideous, decomposed corpses walked the streets, shambling around in their endless search. They were the last of the disasters which brought humankind to the brink of extinction—zombies.

Amongst those, one woman stood out. Her movements were slow, but even and smooth, her skin was of a fresh cream colour, and her eyes were as clear as if she was still alive. Only her dirty, rugged looks and the vacant stare made her fit near zombies around, all of which were so old that their flesh had long ago dried up.

In slow, unhurried steps, the woman walked around the settlement, her mind empty. Then, a sudden flash of something in her head made her stumble for a moment before she kept walking.

'Where?..'

After a dozen more steps, something flashed in her empty mind again. Now the woman came to a complete stop. 'Where am I?..'

The woman blinked in surprise. As if it turned a switch on in her brain, she felt completely conscious and awake now. She looked around in shock, only to see unfamiliar, deserted streets around. 'How did I get there? What's going on?'

In the same moment as the woman awoke from her years-long sleep, the few zombies that were around turned towards her. When she turned her head, she noticed them walking towards her with slow, stiff steps. She could hear robotic voices coming from them despite their lips not moving. They all spoke the same thing.

"Data source located. Gathering in progress. Data source located..."

The disgusting sight of their rotten flesh and mutilated bodies made the woman's stomach churn. It was a good thing that they were too dry to smell, or she'd throw up for sure. It was now that she realised that something was horribly wrong.

'Are these... zombies? Like in games? How's that possible?'

With her heart beating hard and fast, the woman ran through the streets. It was then that she noticed that both of her shoes were gone, yet she had felt no pain when running over hard asphalt, small stones, or even pieces of broken glass. The thought came and went—with the zombies on her tail, the woman had no time to think about it.

They were way too slow compared to the woman, and their dead brains showed no signs of intelligence or long-term memory. It was easy for her to run away from them, as long as she didn't let them surround her. After several minutes of running in circles around houses and fences, the woman lost her tail, after which she hid inside of a broken kiosk.

Only there the woman at last had time to gather her thoughts. Her name was Eve Ziffer, and she was the head scientist working on a secret government project. The last thing that she could remember was an alarm blaring in her lab, after which armed men broke in and started to push everyone to the floor. The last thing Eve could remember was someone hitting her on the back of her head. But why was she there? Why were there zombies? And why were they talking like robots?

A blurry picture flashed in the depths of her memory as she asked herself that question. When she concentrated on it, Eve could remember herself walking through the forest. After that, other memories surfaced: she was drinking water from a stream, resting on the ground, walking over an unfamiliar highway, eating a raw snail, walking again, walking, walking, walking...

It was no wonder that she was shoeless. Her flats were ground into nothing with so much walking.

Eve blinked, coming out of her reminiscence. These memories felt like a dream. Some things, like eating insects raw, were disgusting to no end, yet in these memories, Eve felt nothing about it, or anything. If not for the glimpses of her familiar clothes, she wouldn't ever believe that they belonged to her at all.

It felt as if she was walking in her sleep all that time between being hit in the head and waking up now. But that didn't explain how she ended up there, nor did it explain zombies. The beginning of the twenty-second century was a horrible time economically, ecologically and socially... but not to that extent!

Even if she took these memories as real, there were still gaps in them, so Eve looked around to make sure that no zombies were approaching her hideout, closed her eyes and concentrated further.

Bit by bit, things became clearer and clearer...

The passage of time was unclear in her memories. The earliest thing she remembered was a few minutes after she was knocked out. She saw the men who attacked the lab and other scientists that were taken prisoner by them all holding their heads. She couldn't remember any sounds, but their faces were contorted in visible pain. Some fell on the ground and kept wriggling for a minute longer before stopping moving.

Then, those that stopped moving rose again, only to attack the others. They fought back, but the risen weren't afraid of pain and wounds. It was complete chaos. Only Eve kept lying down. Nobody had paid her any attention.

Soon enough, the risen, who, as Eve realised, were the zombies, overpowered the living people and killed them all. After that, they broke their skulls and dug into their brains. Instead of devouring them, as Eve was expecting, they took small crystals out of them and ate those. After that, the zombies walked outside.

Some time later, Eve stood up too. She remembered walking through the secret base halls only to see bloody corpses and zombies. For some reason, they ignored her. Since she didn't remember any sounds, Eve didn't know if they spoke then or not. Eventually, Eve wandered outside and since that, she kept travelling with no purpose that she could remember. On her way, she had met other zombies, but not a single living human. Even animals were all zombified. From time to time she would drink water or eat something, no matter what—food from stores, insects or grass made no difference for her then. To her relief, Eve didn't remember eating any human flesh, nor could she remember the taste of anything she ate.

If her memories were correct, then Eve had spent six whole years walking like that. How did it be that she was still even alive after living this way? Even if after global warming melted the ice cups temperatures didn't fall below zero degrees even in winter, how didn't she die from food poisoning?

There was only one possibility. It felt almost impossible, but the more Eve thought, the more she felt sure about this theory.

The secret project she was working on was related to nano-robotics. Eve was paid to create nano-machines that could enhance human fighting and survival capabilities. But in secret, Eve used the provided resources for different purposes. The nanites that she made would still make people stronger and tougher, but instead of applying to only people injected with them, they would spread through the air to everyone in the world.

It was her dream. If Eve successfully finished that project, then people could continue to live on the dying planet Earth. They won't need to wear masks to protect themselves from air pollution, fight for clean water, and be afraid of toxins that they ate with their food every day. In Eve's mind, that might even be the end of the Third World War.

The crystals in Eve's memories looked just like the controlling cores of these nanites. According to their design, after entering a human's body, nano-machines would form one of these in the brain and spread and control nanites in the rest of the body from there. When unknown attackers broke the defences of the base where Eve was working, the project was still a prototype. If someone released it, by accident or not, the consequences would be impossible to predict even for its creator.

Even in her wildest dream Eve'd not imagine the zombies.

She frowned. If this was what happened, then didn't it mean that Eve was responsible for a zombie-apocalypse? She shook her head. 'No, it wasn't my fault for releasing these buggy nanites! I was doing something great. A question is, why did these men attack in the first place? Unimportant. They are all dead anyway.'

Still, as the nanites' creator, Eve had a certain responsibility. She made this prototype, and it was her job to finish it and fix its problems. She was dying to know why the hell her nanites were working this way.

But right now she had no lab and no assistants and even no food. Eve also could feel the gnawing emptiness in her stomach, and she was not going to eat insects or chew on dead, mutated grass in her clear mind. She also wanted to drink and knew that at night she would need shelter. And Eve was desperate to shower. Her once long dark hair was so dirty, dusted and matted that it became almost a solid grey block on her head.

Eve could remember seeing glimpses of other people in some of her later memories, so she knew that there were other survivors. 'Maybe they had gathered together and built some bases. Maybe these bases have working showers... I won't even ask for hot water.'

But how far would she need to walk to find one of those?