What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Zombier Read Online Free

died shortly after. Without a reason.
    Humanity became infertile.
    The authorities initially tried to deny the news, to cover them; no one wanted to talk about it. But then the information leaked, and soon everyone knew. Everyone was aware that we would be the last generation on earth.
    No one was born, and the dead continued to wake up.
    Then came the religions, bringing their theories of divine punishment and Judgment Day, which was near and everybody had to repent and prepare for the inevitable.
    Then it happened that someone started to hide the dead. Who had a sick relative at home, who lost someone suddenly, by accident, even those who paid the mortuary staff to take their loved ones, to get them back home where they would wake up, even if they wouldn’t be the same persons, but they would still be there, present and able to move.
    Therefore, they kept them locked in a room, still trying to take care of them and feed them, even if they did not respond and merely stared into space with their blind eyes and wandered those four walls, speechless, sleepless, barely breathing from their more and more rotten lungs.
    Suicides started. Solitary or in groups. Without a tomorrow, without a future, without a legacy, what was left? In the end, the idea of becoming unaware zombies until the total disintegration seemed tempting, or worse, almost natural. Some were just hopeless who blew their head off in their basement, others were real executions organized by religious groups or fanatics.
    The fact that the military did not shoot the dead is not to say that among the people there weren’t those who, hyped by too many horror movies, improvised themselves gunslingers and went hunting for zombies. It’s easy to be a hero when your enemy is a harmless and dumb being that moves slowly and doesn’t run away because it’s blind and deaf. Better than a videogame.
    Many bodies were found with a hole in their forehead or various wounds from firearms and knives. The strange thing, if in all this madness still the word “strange” makes sense, is that it was not like in the movies. Destroying the brain didn’t work, or maybe just one bullet wasn’t enough, since even after being hit they continued moving and...
creeping
. This is the term that the media used to describe the way they never stopped going, albeit slow and crawling.
    However, the situation seemed under control, at the beginning. The number of deaths was still contained, before the outbreak of collective madness, and so it was still possible to keep them in the appropriate structures. But then things worsened and people started to die more than ever, especially among the elderly population. It was as if the whole world had lost the will to live.
    Maybe because there were no more children.
    For the first few years you didn’t notice, but then time passes and you realize that you are missing something, and the whole world loses its color, it becomes just a dead gray stone bouncing in the universe and you’re nothing but a parasite, a flu virus to which someone has finally found a cure.
    You’re alive and healthy, but you know you’re dying, because you have nothing to leave behind and the finish line is approaching inexorably, day after day.
    I was eighteen when it all began.
    Now I’m thirty and I tried to do a calculation. Fifteen years have passed. I live in a city of forty thousand people, which is an average of four hundred deaths per year. It would be around six thousand people, if the data were correct. But actually, as I said before, people started to die much more than usual. Since the last census – now it’s done every year – we were twenty thousand. Half the number. Because nobody is born and we just die. And now the dead are so many that we do not know how and where to keep them, and they roam the streets. Creeping.
    For five years I’ve been a member of the Volunteer Committee for Public Order. The
dead catchers
, we were called. It’s not a dangerous