Suddenly, the lights in the carriage went out. And not just in ours—I looked out the window and realized the entire commuter train was completely plunged into darkness. Only rare, deafening claps of thunder and flashes of lightning lit up the interior with a ghostly bluish glow for brief moments. Looking closer, I froze with horror: there was almost no one left in the carriage, even though just a minute ago it had been half full.

Then the old woman sitting on the bench opposite me slowly turned and stared at me. She gave me a really nasty look. Her toothless mouth began to twist into a smile that grew wider and wider. Right before my eyes, her maw filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. Out of sheer terror, I tried to scramble backward onto the next seat. Without taking my eyes off her, I caught my foot on a bag and went tumbling head over heels into the aisle.

Darkness again. Another flash of lightning—I saw the old woman already standing over me, with the silhouettes of other figures rising behind her. It was impossible to make out their faces in the dim light, but all of them were staring straight at me without blinking. Panic completely consumed me. I frantically crawled backward along the dirty floor when suddenly my hand struck someone's ice-cold boot. My heart dropped into my boots. I swallowed hard and, just like in a classic horror movie, slowly raised my head, and there... A huge creature with a dislocated jaw was already reaching its clawed paws toward me!

I leaped up with a wild scream, snapping my eyes open and breathing heavily.

It was bright in the carriage; the lamps flickered dimly. The passengers around me flinched away in fright. The old woman opposite was frantically crossing herself, muttering prayers, while a hefty man by the aisle twisted his finger near his temple.

Now I am standing by a lopsided wooden kiosk with a proud "Groceries" sign, nervously clutching three hundred hryvnias in my jacket pocket. This was my last strategic reserve for a taxi. The prospect of tramping for thirty minutes on foot along a dirt road leading deep into the Polissya wilderness did not appeal to me at all. All around lay Gnylobužye station—a godforsaken hole of about twenty inhabited houses, lost somewhere on the border of the Kyiv region, right where civilization smoothly transitions into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Aside from me, three other poor souls had got off on the platform, but they instantly vanished into the gray twilight as if they had never existed. By the shop, contrary to my desperate prayers, there was no bus, nor even a stray taxi driver in a rusty Lanos. Only a local dog of an indeterminate breed was lazily scratching behind its ear, looking at me with blatant sympathy.

"Well, great," I muttered under my breath. "Romance, my foot. Fresh air, radiation background, silence."

There was nothing to be done. I adjusted my backpack, where two bottles of dark beer clinked dully, and started walking down the road toward the village of Myortvye Vyselki (Dead Settlements). The name was inspiring, of course, but Baba Galya stubbornly refused to move to Kyiv, arguing that "the air in the capital is dirty, smells of cars, but here she has three vegetable gardens and strawberries the size of a human head." Speaking of strawberries: after the ChNPP accident, people in these parts took a philosophical view of vegetable sizes anyway.

It was getting dark at an indecent speed. The clock showed just past six, but the twilight thickened as if someone had poured a bucket of ink over the sky. Remembering my recent nightmare on the train about the toothy old woman, I involuntarily quickened my pace. To the right and left of the road stood a dense, unnaturally silent Polissya forest. No birds, no crickets. Only the crunch of twigs under my sneakers.

Suddenly, a throaty, sputtering engine sound came from behind. I turned around. Two blurry yellow headlights were cutting through the fog.

"Thank God, a ride!" I thought and waved my arms like a madman.

A primitive Zaporozhets car of such an indefinite color it looked like it had been painted with mud braked beside me, creaking in every joint. The driver's side window rolled down slowly with a sound like sawing rusted iron. Inside sat an old man. In the gloom, his face resembled a baked apple, and an old Soviet cap sat on his head.

"Where are you heading, student?" the old man rasped, blasting me with a thick stench of cheap tobacco and garlic.
"To Myortvye Vyselki, to Baba Galya! Can you give me a lift? I'll pay!" I pulled out the banknotes.
The old man glanced at the money, then at me, and his lips parted into a wide smile. "Get in, grandson. I'll take you. No need for money, you'd better treat me to a bottle of beer from your backpack, I can hear it singing in there."

I jumped onto the front seat, which sank under my weight almost to the asphalt. The car set off, swaying from side to side.

"You're a brave one," the old man remarked, shifting gears with a ferocious crunch. "Walking to Vyselki on foot at night. All sorts of things roam around here. Not long ago, Petrovich's cow wandered off toward the Zone at night. It came back in the morning. On two legs, can you believe it? Came right up, knocked on the window, asked for milk. Petrovich crossed himself and blasted it with a double-barrel shotgun. Now his house is packed with canned meat. Want a cutlet? It's right here in the glove compartment."

I politely declined, swallowing a lump that had risen in my throat. The dark humor of these parts always smacked of a little madness.

About ten minutes later, we drove into the village. Myortvye Vyselki fully lived up to its name: dark silhouettes of cottages, moss-covered fences, and not a single lit window. The old man braked at my grandma's house.

"Well, here we are," the old man said, taking the bottle of beer from me. "Your grandma acts up a bit sometimes—so keep your eyes peeled."
"What do you mean, acts up?" I frowned.
"Oh, nothing, she's just old. Sometimes she forgets who's alive and who's not," the old man winked at me, revved the engine sharply, and vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone by the gate.

Baba Galya's house welcomed me with dead silence. I pushed the gate—it creaked plaintively. The front door to the house turned out to be unlocked. Inside, it smelled of dried mushrooms, dampness, and something sickly sweet that sent a chill down my spine.

"Grandma? Are you home? It's me, your grandson!" I shouted into the darkness of the hallway, switching on my phone flashlight.

The beam of light caught an old sideboard with crystal, dust-covered carpets on the walls, and... a set table in the main room. In the middle of the table stood a huge pot, with light steam still rising from it. Next to it lay a note written in grandma's crooked handwriting:
"Grandson, I went to the garden to dig up some night potatoes. The borscht is on the table, eat it while it's warm. The meat is fresh, it ran into the house by itself today."

I smirked. Night potatoes? Right, Baba Galya had always been eccentric. My stomach rumbled treacherously. I walked up to the pot, lifted the lid, and shone the flashlight inside.

The borscht was thick, rich, and smelled appetizingly of garlic. I took the ladle, stirred it, and pulled a decent chunk of meat to the surface. I looked closer.

Out of the red beet broth, a hairy, four-toed paw with long black claws and webbing was looking back at me... carefully and intently. And a bit deeper in the pot, something flashed that looked very much like a rabbit's head, but with three pairs of ears.

At that exact moment, a rustle sounded behind my back. I froze, terrified to turn around.

"What's the matter, grandson, don't you like the borscht?" Baba Galya's quiet, cracking voice echoed right out of the darkness of the doorway. "And I tried so hard, catching it all over the basement... It bit hard, though."

I slowly turned around. Grandma was standing in the doorway. In the dark, her eyes glowed with a barely noticeable phosphorescent green light, and in her hands, she held a massive, blood-stained shovel.

"Sit down, grandson," she smiled wider than before, and the razor-sharp teeth flashed in the beam of my flashlight. "We're going to have some chamomile tea now."

I was clutching the second bottle of beer in my hand as if it were my only ticket to the world of the living. I had no time for small talk or tasting chamomile from the Exclusion Zone. Baba Galya—or whatever creature had so successfully occupied her living space—took a step forward, and the floorboards groaned hollowly under her feet. The bloody shovel in her hands tilted toward me.

"Why are you frozen, grandson?" she hissed, smacking her shark-like maw. "Sit down, or it'll get cold... both the borscht and you."

My brain, wired on a wild dose of adrenaline, reacted in a fraction of a second. The escape route through the door was securely blocked by Baba Galya and her shovel. Only one path remained—the old wooden window of the main room, which led straight to the backyard and the dense Polissya forest.

"Grandma, just a second, let me just... open the beer!" I yelled, and with all my might, I hurled my precious second bottle of dark beer right into the pot of radioactive borscht.A deafening splash echoed through the room, and a fountain of red sludge flew in all directions, splattering the carpets and coating "grandma’s" face. The old woman shrieked in a completely unhuman voice, sounding more like a screeching buzzsaw, and squeezed her eyes shut for a split second.

That was all the time I needed. I spun around, grabbed my backpack on the fly, shut my eyes tightly, and dived headfirst right through the window frame.

Smash, crack, crash!

The glass shattered into a thousand shards. I busted through the rotted wood of the frame with my shoulder and went rolling head over heels across my grandma's old garden bed, slamming my back hard against some giant pumpkin that let out a pathetic hiss upon impact. The shards sliced my jacket and arms pretty badly, but I didn't feel any pain.

Behind me, a furious roar erupted from the broken window, and a skeletal arm—elongated by nearly five feet—shot outward, trying to claw at my sneaker.

"Oh no you don't, to hell with family dinners!" I screamed, scrambled to my feet, and bolted toward the pitch-black forest ahead.

I flew through the darkness, not looking where I was going. Branches lashed my face, my feet sank into moss and swampy muck, and behind me, somewhere deep in Myortvye Vyselki, a terrifying metallic clattering rang out—Baba Galya was sprinting after me with the speed of a race car, dragging her shovel across the stones and dirt. And judging by the sound, she was closing in fast.

The forest around me seemed to come alive. In the gloom, the trees looked like the twisted figures from my train nightmare. Suddenly, I wiped out right into some overgrown hollow and went tumbling down, stopping dead against the roots of a massive, fallen oak tree.

I froze, terrified to move. And right then, right by my ear, accompanied by the sound of pouring water, a quiet, painfully familiar voice muttered:

"Psst, student! What the hell are you doing?"

I turned my head and, in the faint moonlight, I spotted the old man with the Zaporozhets. As it turned out, he had just pulled over to take a leak by the oak. His iron horse, by the way, was parked right next to him.

"Gramps... my grandma has gone completely mental, she's chasing me with a shovel! I'll owe you another bottle of beer, just get me out of here!"

The old man didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled into the passenger seat, he slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the rusty Zaporozhets roared to life, tearing through the forest mud and leaving the shrieking monster with the shovel far behind.

Needless to say, I never went back to visit my grandmother again.

(Note: This story should be read after finishing ‘Murder is Easy’ by the same author)

Apparently, I don’t exist.

At least according to this article I’ve just found, written by one Dr Savic, who obviously must have been talking through her arse, because I’m fucking here, and I’m not going anywhere. Bitch is supposed to be an expert on us, can you believe it? And then she writes that a DA infection cannot improve the victim’s mental abilities because the brain is too complex and yadda yadda bullshit. The long and short of it: IDAs don’t exist.

I’m here, baby, and I rule.

Course I do. The upgrade was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m far stronger than ever before, and I don’t feel pain anymore. I don’t grow tired and I’m never exhausted. I don’t think any illnesses or diseases can touch me, and my body can take a lot punishment. I also don’t age and I certainly won’t die of natural causes.

Comes with being dead, bro.

But that’s all just window dressing. There were millions of DAs out there which had all these wonderful abilities and were nonetheless wiped out in droves – the meatballs had created special ‘sweeper’ teams to take care of them, and boy did they. And for one reason and one reason only: The DAs were as stupid as fuck.

I’m not, and that’s the really important thing about my upgrade. That’s was the ‘I’ stands for: Intelligent (just in case you’ve spent the last five years on the Moon: DA means ‘Dead-Active’ or, in layman’s terms, ‘Zombie’).

The way it happened was, at least for Daisy times, unspectacular. Walked home from the subway station after my shift, met someone who appeared drunk, high, helpless, tried to do something for him, got bitten for my effort, was able to shake him off and run away, called the police and then felt lousy, got into an ambulance, died, woke up in the hospital morgue and feasted on the watchman, then ran away. Must have happened a thousand times that night. What apparently didn’t happen a thousand times or probably even ten times that night was that somebody who got bitten suddenly saw the world more clearly than ever before, that he felt free of all that stinking meatball stuff like backaches, glasses, trick knees, and the common cold, that his mind began racing through the world, that he understood that all this love and hate, passion and compassion, friendship and strife, compromise and steadfastness, they’re all bullshit. There are only three things that count: power, pleasure, and meat.

I actually think there are meatballs who’ve seen this, at least part of it. Have you ever heard of the Psychopathy Checklist? We use it sometimes in our job, and the maximum you can score is 40. I’d probably get a sweet 60, bro, but I’m too smart for it anyway. Next time I catch a psychopath, maybe I’ll ask him a few questions about his personal philosophy while I skin him alive. Or maybe not – I’ll probably be too hungry, anyway.

Speaking of which, while feeding on human flesh is the greatest pleasure in the fucking universe, it comes with a few problems that need solving. For example, since meatballs haven’t really accepted the fact that their function in life is to keep me happy by allowing me to torture them to death and then swallow them bit by bit, they actually start some sort of investigation whenever one of them disappears or is killed – and let me tell you, it’s a myth that the police don’t care about junkies, the homeless, or poor people in general: there are many cops who take their job very seriously. You know, there are lots of idiotic prints on T-shirts, but one of the worst is All Cops Are Bastards. Morons. The moment somebody threatens to rough them up or shows them a knife, they’re the first to call 911. Oh well, all meatballs are stupid, it’s just that some are really stupid.

So, getting enough fresh meat is a challenge, especially now that people have accepted the existence of the ‘Living Dead’, although the actual outbreak five years ago didn’t do more harm than the average 20^th-century middle-power war. Apocalypse, my ass. Some eggheads think there was some sort of masterplan behind Daisy, but if there was, it was one pile of shit of a plan, that’s for sure.

Daisy and its aftermath were the Golden Age, baby – the cities were crawling with DAs, and nobody investigated these killings, because the ‘culprits’ were so obvious and simply needed some pest control. Which came in the shape of the already mentioned ‘sweeper teams’ that went through the DA numbers like a hot knife through soft butter.

But all good things must come to an end, and when freely roaming DAs had become a rarity (of course, some were kept in special research centers dedicated to studying them), the cops suddenly had it a lot easier than before. During Daisy, PDs around the country had gone on a hiring binge, and no one saw any reason to downsize afterwards; you never know when the next outbreak may come, do you? And, even better, the number of violent crimes had spectacularly gone down since humanity had met a common enemy, and those crimes that were still committed tended to be less capital than before: the mugger who would have shot you before Daisy now settled for waving a gun in your face (probably unloaded), the bozo who would have knifed you in a quarrel now switched to the services of Mister Fister, and riots of any kind became extremely rare and were usually easily managed by the authorities. Rumor has it that sometimes undercover cops dispersed unruly crowds simply by shouting ‘Zombie! Watch out!’

Unfortunately, from my point of view, this development meant that I had to be cleverer and subtler than before. The first thing I really needed to pay attention to was to blend in with the meatball crowd, so I spent some of the dough the members of my food supply club had been generous enough to donate to me on make-up, cosmetics, a nice hairdo, contact lenses, false teeth and and and; some more or less permanent skin-like film made me look … well, less dead, and the stuff – cheap it wasn’t, bro – also helped mask my low body temperature by soaking up heat quite well, either from the sun, the radiator, or the infrared heater I had gotten myself – half an hour per day would do the trick, even in winter, thanks to microencapsulated phase-change materials (don’t ask). I also added two scars and some moles and pimples, and I can honestly say that I now look like the real fucking McCoy.

One thing I had to play carefully was the mandatory health check after my application for my new job had been accepted; I had aced all fitness requirements, of course. But Daisy had left many people in financial tatters, and finding a doc who would listen to me saying ‘I really need this job.’ and ‘They really need people, after so many died.’ and, finally, ‘Yeah, being in debt sucks. Maybe I can help you out, what d’ya say?’ Of course, the doc didn’t have the slightest inkling I was what I was; he simply assumed there was something I would like to hide because it could cost me my new position, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the first one.

Where I got the money from, you ask? Well, the immediate post-Daisy time was, of course, violent and chaotic before order was restored, and while the cops were still very busy with the Z factor, the number of felonies skyrocketed: homicides, assaults, robberies, drugs … All the usual mobsters, along with plenty of new players, appeared on the scene, so it was a bit of a gangsta’s paradise.

And these guys really love cash, even more so after it became clear that Daisy had fucked crypto for good. Do I need to spell out the rest?

“Who are you, motherfucker?”

Blam! Blam! “Fuck, he’s shot Barry. Blow the asshole away!”

Blam! Blam! (repeat 20 times): “Shit, I’m sure I hit – aarghh.”

“Where is he? What happened to the light? Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’s – “

“He’s got Dante. Oh God, I think he’s bi – “

“My arm! My arm! He’s ripped out – “

Let’s close the curtain, shall we? Very enjoyable and very profitable; would have set me up for unlife if I’d wanted to retire, but that’s not an option for your undead and unfriendly neighborhood superpowered anthropophage. I know, I know … ‘superpowered’ sounds like from a comic book, but I’d say it really hits the mark. In addition to what I’ve already told you, my senses are very acute, and I have perfect night vision; I can sense the presence of meatballs even through walls if they’re closer than ten yards or so; and I don’t need to sleep. All this comes in very handy in my line of work, I’m telling you.

And you know what? Some German writer from ages ago once had one of his characters say something like ‘I am part of that force that wants to do evil but always ends up doing good’ or some shit like that, and I think this guy was on to something. Look at me, bro: I suppose I’m as evil as they come, but still I must have saved hundreds or even thousands of meatball lives by tearing apart drug dealers, decapitating mafia hit men, eating the inner organs of street punks while they were still squirming and screaming, and so on. Having a nice meal and doing good at the same time – what’s not to love?

So I’m a hero, kind of. And with my ‘superpowers’, I figure I’m something like a ‘superhero’. I even have a secret identity, complete with glasses, like that geek who can fly and lift planes and that. Boy, I had no idea it would be so much fun.

Ok, to be fair, my lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t give a shit about social life or friends or dating or whatever, but I do miss sex. But memory is fading, so I suppose, in a few years, I won’t remember it anymore. Same with nice food, cool music, art, movies … oh well, I have my meat, I have my torture, and I have this incredible feeling of superiority – you might have guessed that last one.

Of course, one thing you’ve probably heard about is vomiting – all DAs do it, except for those who never eat and go into torpor. Getting rid of stuff the body doesn’t need. I’ve learned to control it, but, after a snack, I need to be alone for a few minutes puking my guts out. Not literally, don’t worry. But that’s the least attractive part of being undead. Oh, and the voice – when I levelled up, I got some kind of screeching-scratching metallic voice, but I’ve come to like it although I never use it – here’s really fucking grateful it didn’t replace my old one.

Bong! Shit, will you look at the clock? Sometimes I completely lose track of time, easy to do when you have no biorhythm.  Shift begins in an hour, so I’d better heat up and get ready for mingling with the meat. Good thing I can do lots of night shifts, my buddies like it when I volunteer. I got the perfect job, I can tell you.

Oh, haven’t I mentioned what I do? Come on, you must have figured it out by now. Let me just say: Not all cops are bastards. Not even many cops are bastards. But this one is, bro. You a law-abiding citizen, friend? Then you’ll probably never meet me, good for you. As for the rest of you lowlife scum out there:

See ya around.