I remember the day I heard the news.
“A cure! Hope returns!” It was the headline plastered around the world.
I swore when I came back from Europe after the Second World War I’d never kill another man again. Even if it meant my own death. I’d let them kill me.
I had no family. No children. So there was no one worth protecting.
Then on December 26th 1947 the first of the dead started to rise. It was in New York City.
I was there. Trying to get to Madison Square Garden to see a young man named Jack Kramer play his first professional tennis match. He was up against Bobby Riggs.
That day Mother Nature dropped the largest snowfall in the history of the City. 27 inches. Transportation was paralyzed. The City had never been so quiet.
I got the idea from a kid. He was skiing down the street.
I’ve seen a lot—death, war, the dead rising—yet that image of a vacant 6th Avenue, blanketed white as more snow cascaded down, and the Empire State Building towering in the distance—that calm in a space that was typically chaos—settles my heart.
Anyway, I bought the kid’s skis, made my way to the garden, and found the place at capacity. The world outside was hibernating, but somehow every ticket holder was in attendance.
The match never finished. The screams started. I don’t know if the first one _turned_ inside the Garden or came in from the subway—but I do know I wasn’t fast enough to kill him.
The lights flickered twice, casting weird shadows on the corridors, but stayed on for the moment, as if deciding whether to abandon us.
The stench of sweat, snowmelt, and popcorn mixed with something fouler—decay—made my stomach turn. Then an unholy moan came, reverberating off the concrete walls, and the hairs on my back stood up.
Panic crackled in the air like bursts of electricity, and I heard bodies collide with folded chairs as they struggled for the exits.
My pulse hammered, and though I vowed never to harm a soul again, my hand went for my boot—concealed within was a six-inch Nazi blade I took off some kraut I killed in an abandoned French bakery back in ’44.
The Wyrd Interlude:
A hush born of ash and snowfall. Here, in the winter of 1947, destiny unravels anew—resurrection in the streets and a world unprepared for death’s return. A war-weary veteran’s vow collides with an impossible outbreak, and the line between duty and regret blurs beneath the ice-leaden winter sky. This—is wyrd fiction.
I remember clearly. In the dark there was a stampede to get outside and a gangly man that I almost mistook for a skeleton had tackled some dame and took a bite out of her chest. The blood spraying and screaming were all horrors that felt familiar, and I felt my senses sharpen from fear—it had kept me alive before, and it was awake again.
There was no time to remember my oath. For real men, instinct to help will always win the day—the woman flailing and a man ripping at her like a wolf I once saw take out a deer.
I cut his throat and tossed him aside and pulled the dame to her feet.
“Get her to a hospital!” I handed her off to people that were headed toward the door.
I felt the skeleton man grab my ankle. The little bastard went to take a bite out of me.
I gave him a taste of my heel.
I heard another scream. Turned to look. The dame I saved had turned savage. She was atop a man and gnawing on his neck. Others yelled in horror and left the man to die.
I felt a hand reach to my ankle again.
It was by accident I was the first to learn how they die.
I plunged the Nazi blade in his skull, he went limp, and kicked his husk aside.
The dame scurried out and the one she had taken as a light snack rose like something from the house of horrors and followed her.
Some folks started shouting about blocking the exits, stacking chairs, screaming for help. I almost believed we could hold them off—maybe ten seconds of frantic hope.
Then the lights cut out and any semblance of order died with them. All I could hear were footsteps tripping over one another, bodies slamming into railings, and moans of the hungry dead.
New York was quarantined. Left to survive and govern itself, while the outside suits worked on a cure.
I’m told in ’47 there were around 14 million people in the City. Over the five years we were locked in I lost count of how many I killed.
I still picture one girl, must’ve been eleven or twelve. Stumbled out of a building, eyes pale as moonlight, lips parted in a silent moan. I didn’t realize she was turned until her jaws snapped at my arm. I defended myself—my damned blade did its job. Later, when the cure was confirmed, I started dreaming about her every night, alive, laughing, like a daughter I’d never have. But in each dream, her eyes are still pale as moonlight.
Fucking science. Nobody imagined it could be reversed.
Each time I drove that blade through a skull, I told myself it was a mercy, not a murder. I’d grip the hilt so hard my knuckles ached, chanting in my head—they’re already gone—and I kept silent the part of me that still saw them as human.
Word of a cure existed, but it was rumor—just talk on stolen radio frequencies. By the time the first official broadcast confirmed it, I’d already taken more lives than I cared to count.
I remember hearing the static-ridden announcement on a battered radio some street survivor had rigged. I stood, transfixed, knife in hand, as the voice declared: “A medical breakthrough—an end to the plague.”
For a split second, hope dazzled me like a sunrise you didn’t plan on seeing.
Then my stomach flipped as I realized they had all been savable. A new wave of guilt heavier than any I’d carried in the war hit me like a punch to the gut.
The fucking cure was real. Fat lot of good it did for the ones I’d cut down.
The tragedy of my life. I never wanted to kill. And now I’m the greatest mass murderer in history.
Nobody blames me. They never did. There are some I saved during those five years that still send me Christmas cards of their children. “We wouldn’t have this if not for you.” They all say.
One of them, a single mother named Pearl, had been pinned beneath a toppled streetcar while the monsters converged. I nearly ignored her screams, too focused on clearing an alley of the shambling dead.
But something in her voice drew me back. She still writes me regularly, sending pictures of her daughter—born just weeks after the quarantine was lifted.
The girl’s name is Dawn. She’s grown now. And every time I see her smile in the photos my heart tightens.
But decades later I still dream about the ones I killed. The ones that never got to be brought back because of me. How many lives and children would never be brought into this world because I failed to find another way.
I got married in ’64, had some kids, got divorced, and eventually wrote a book, confessing to being a mass murder during the ’47 outbreak.
My children, now grown, tell me it wasn’t my fault.
My ex-wife tells me it was.
I still get noticed in public. People think I’m some hero. I use the same line on all these pansies that glorify killing the-momentarily-dead that I used to end my book.
“It was easy to kill—harder to save. Now leave me the fuck alone.”
The dreams went away for a while, and then got worse in ’88.
In the end I was what I always imagined I’d be. An old man, waking and screaming in the night.
My children tell me about therapy. Tell me to go and talk. That it will help.
“You kids talk too much,” I always tell them. “A man lives horror. Learns to drink. Learns to write. Be like Hemingway. That’s how you digest war. What is some thirty year old bookworm going to tell me I don’t already know?”
They always protest, and I let them talk. I listen. They sound smart. I guess that’s a good thing. My son can’t fight but he can talk, I tell myself. Which seems to be more important in the modern world.
I don’t know why I still keep the Nazi blade on me at all times. Even if the dead start to walk, I’d let them kill me.
I had a dream where all the dead whose future I stole—their souls were locked in this blade—and the only way I could free them was using the blade to kill myself.
Nonsense, I tell myself, and pour a drink.
I used to think my only redemption lay in telling the world my story—help them see I was forced, that we all were. But the nightmares remind me it was never that simple. Some we saved, some we killed, and the cure came too late to matter. Life moved on while my guilt stayed put.
I think about death—my death. I want no fuss or frills. Bury me with the blade, I tell my kids. I don’t deserve to be parted from it.
Sometimes, late at night, my thoughts drift to an alternate life—if I’d refused to kill even one more time, and just let myself be killed. How many souls would have endured by me not existing?
Sure, I’d be the one rotting in the streets—small price to pay.
There’s no winning in these questions, just a slow ache that lingers with the stench of rotted memories.
And so late at night I slip my hand over the hilt of that Nazi blade. The grooves are worn and deep. I recall how effortlessly it sliced through the living and the dead—through hope and final chances. More than once, I’ve considered plunging it into my own chest. But I haven’t yet, and I’m not sure if that makes me a coward or a survivor.
And so I wait.
And so I remember.
And if I’m lucky, when I join the dead—they’ll have me.
The Wyrd Curtain:
Where once the living and the dead divided cleanly, now the past’s secrets gnaw at a tired conscience. A cure came too late, leaving the life taker haunted by what might have been saved. Heroes of war find their burdens heavier than any rifle or bayonet, and memory clings to them like snowdrifts over unquiet graves—and Wyrd Worlds yet await.