Baby Zombie

She was such a cutie pie.

Too bad iASK decided to kill her.

It was bound to happen, of course, at the administrative level of iASK, the institute for Abnormal Scientific Knowledge, and in the laboratories down some depths below second basement. Creating your own zombies from womb to birth, adolescence and adulthood instead of relying on Mother Nature to degenerate the dead into the Undead, or UNdie. Then the trials and tribulations of hunting down zombies across the country and around the globe become a thing of the past. No more zombie hunters and their peculiar characteristics that often clash with Administration objectives and guidelines and make trouble. No more searching for organs to harvest when the organ bank is low, and the demand is way high.

Moreover, nursing organs from homegrown UNdie organisms was a natural progression in scientific development and research. Organ harvesting becomes more dependable. It opened transplantation of different sizes and ages of liver, heart, bowel, kidney, eyeballs, teeth, limbs and other parts in demand. The cost over head becomes clear; the profits shoots right up. Everybody—well, almost everybody—at iASK agreed.

We, the UNdie hunters, disagreed. Reggie, Teddie and I would be losing lucrative employment and payment. We would miss the thrill of the hunt, the chase, the capture and the recognition of a job well done. But these things were out of our hands. Aaah, corporate administrators!

By the way, I am Corinthian Carruthers, call me “Ian”, not Corey. I work with a reformed zombie or UNdie named Deborah. She is the fourth member of our cliched 3 Musketeers crew. In a previous engagement, Reggie, Teddie and I just couldn’t take her down and let iASK dissect her for organs. She promised not to have us for breakfast, lunch, snack or supper anytime, and so far, she kept her word, even when there was ample opportunity for her to do all three of us in. On several occasions, if she had wanted.

The four of us were tasked to dispose of the baby UNdie. For all their cold-blooded personalities in carving up adult zombies for organs and transplants, in imprisoning these UNdies so they could regenerate their organs for another around of harvesting, these doctors and scientists still could not kill a baby zombie. Didn’t have the heart to do it. Maybe that was their sole redeeming virtue.

From what I learned, the program was a ten/twenty-year experiment in developing from embryo to young adulthood iASK zombies. There were supposed to be about 50 developed, alive ironically UNdies, to be examined and experimented on every five years. Then they got cold feet, somewhere along the corporate line.

Our last job, then, was to kill this UNdie baby girl. After all, we were the mercenaries, the paid killers. It was just a job. You’d think.

“Don’t give her a name. It’ll be just harder to do it,” one of the iASK scientists advised solemnly as she handled over this cutie pie UNdie. “She’s not really alive.”

That’s when the six-week-old baby gurgled, smiled, and stared at me intently. Deborah took to this cutie pie immediately, and I could sense her motherly instincts coming into play. Being undead doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings. It is submerged so down that it takes a very, very long time to resurface: for Deborah, it was materializing faster than she herself expected. She even tried to give the bubbly babe milk from her breast. The cutie pie didn’t take to her nipple as it didn’t have mother’s milk. Deborah bit into her index finger, drew blood and let the UNdie suck on that. She cooed contentedly.

Aren’t there art pieces from millennia depicting the bond between mother and child? Deborah found motherhood.

It was going to be difficult to separate her and this UNdie and kill it.

Deborah the Undead gave me a look that warned: “Don’t you dare, Ian!”

Reggie and Teddie were also drawn to this unnamed UNdie baby. Like me, these two were hardened killers of UNdies and even humans. I knew them way back in those days when mercenaries were hired to do village to village killings in small countries. We had slaughtered men, women, children, babies indiscriminately. Grenades, fire-bombs, machineguns, pistols. Even machetes.

Nobody should see us as nice people. We, the three musketeers, are heartless, paid killers.

Now there are only 49 left to do…in.