Here’s a zombie horror short story about a man who wakes up to a world he no longer recognises. Hope you enjoy it.
Zombie Horror Short Story
The first thing Arjun noticed was the ceiling.
Its yellowing paint had cracked into a map of imaginary rivers. He followed one from the fan to the wall, where it vanished beneath a patch of dampness. The fan was motionless. Somewhere outside the room, a clock ticked.
When he tried to rise, a dull ache bloomed beneath the bandage around his head. His right leg was imprisoned in plaster.
“Arjun?” His sister stood at the door, a steel cup trembling in her hand. “You’re awake.”
She told him he had been in an accident. A coma. Months lost. A head injury and a fractured leg. He must rest, must not walk, must trust her.
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere safe.”
He was too tired to ask what that meant.
The Counting
The days were distinguishable only by the light. On certain mornings, a narrow stripe of sunshine crept beneath the curtains and advanced towards the bed. Arjun counted the minutes it took to reach the leg of a chair. On cloudy days he counted the cracks overhead instead. Seven, if the faint one by the window counted.
Weeks passed. Then months.
Meera brought meals, washed his clothes, changed the bandage around his head. Her husband Vikram occasionally appeared with a newspaper too old to be useful, or a question about whether he needed water. Neither would open the curtains. His phone was gone. The television remained silent.
He listened for traffic, for children playing, for vendors calling in the street. Nothing. Sometimes, in the night, something seemed to scrape along the outer wall. When he asked, Meera said it was the wind.
“I want to go outside,” he said one afternoon.
“When you’re better.”
“Every day you say that.”
“Please, Arjun.”
He began to despise the word please. It ended every conversation without answering anything.
He tried exercises beneath the blanket, flexing his uninjured leg, lifting his arms, testing the limits of the plaster. His body seemed stronger than Meera believed. But when he asked to stand, her face tightened with such fear that he surrendered.
The room became his whole world. He knew the exact hour the gray light appeared beneath the door, or how long a drop of water took to fall from the bathroom tap. He knew the particular creak of Vikram’s shoes and the quieter, hurried steps of his sister.
And he knew they whispered about him after dark.
“He’s asking again,” Meera said one night.
“He won’t stop,” Vikram replied.
“What if he finds out?”
“Then he finds out.”
Arjun lay awake until dawn, staring at the seven cracks.
The Mirror
One morning he asked Meera to help him to the toilet. She slipped an arm beneath his shoulder and guided him down the short corridor. He noticed, as he had begun to notice often, that his supposedly ruined leg bore more weight than it should.
Inside the bathroom, he closed the door.
His reflection irritated him: the pale face, the ridiculous white wrapping around his head, the helpless man he had become. Anger rose without warning. He struck the mirror. A crack raced across it, and a small shard dropped into the basin.
“What happened?” Meera called.
“Nothing! Something fell.”
He stared at the shard in the basin. In the fractured mirror above it, his reflection looked unfamiliar, almost like a stranger’s. His eyes drifted to the white bandage around his head. What was beneath it? After all these months, he had never once seen the injury for himself.
He picked up the shard and set it beside the basin. The bathroom was shared; Meera or Vikram could come knocking at any moment. But he could not bear another day of wondering.
There, with the broken mirror still hanging above him, he began unwinding the head bandage.
One turn. Another. He expected to find a scar, perhaps an ugly reminder of the accident. Instead he found ordinary skin. He searched his scalp carefully, first with his eyes, then with his fingertips.
Nothing.
His gaze fell to the cast.
He reached for the glass shard he had just picked up and worked at the binding around the plaster until it loosened. It took time, and several times he stopped to listen for footsteps. At last the cast slipped free.
His leg looked thin and pale. But there was no sign of the injury he had been warned about for months.
He moved his ankle. Bent his knee.
He stood.
The room seemed to tilt, not from pain but from the shock of being upright. He held the basin until his balance steadied, then walked from one end of the bathroom to the other.
He was not helpless.
Someone had wanted him to believe he was.
The Door of Dhundh: Zombie Horror Short Story
Meera saw him in the corridor and dropped the plate she was carrying.
“Arjun, what have you done?”
“What have you done?”
She looked at his bare head, then at the plaster in his hand.
“Tell me why you lied.”
“Come back inside.”
“No. I want to see what’s outside.”
She caught his arm. “You can’t.”
“Why? What are you hiding?”
“Things are different now.”
“Then show me.”
“There are demons out there,” she whispered.
He stared at her. “Demons?”
“They look like people. But they aren’t people anymore.”
He pulled away. “You expect me to believe that after all these months?”
Meera began to cry. She pleaded, argued, held him by both hands. Vikram stood near the door, silent.
“Say something!” she begged her husband.
Vikram looked at Arjun for a long moment.
“Let him go.”
“No!”
“He has to see for himself.”
Arjun drew back the bolt. Meera was still crying when he crossed the threshold.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Beyond the Fog – A Zombie Horror Short Story
Outside, the world was unrecognizable. A thick blanket of fog had swallowed everything, smothering the landscape beneath a vast, ghostly whiteness. It was the hour between night and morning, when the sky gave off a faint, colorless light but nothing had yet taken shape. He could barely see beyond a few steps.
He moved forward cautiously. Gravel crunched underfoot, then gave way to a firmer surface. A road, he thought. It felt like a road, though he could not see either side of it.
“Hello?”
The word vanished into the mist.
He walked on, enjoying the simple freedom of choosing his own direction. But there was no traffic, no birdsong, no sound of anyone beginning the day.
Then he saw a figure.
It lingered at the edge of visibility, darker than the surrounding fog.
“Hey! You there!”
The figure shifted.
“Can you hear me?”
It began approaching, slowly at first, with an uneven, wobbling walk. Arjun thought the stranger might be injured. One shoulder jerked oddly. The head tilted, then righted itself.
“Are you all right?”
The man came close enough for Arjun to see his face. Something was wrong with it. The eyes seemed empty of recognition, and the mouth moved as though struggling to form a word. A strange rasping sound escaped his throat.
Arjun took a step backwards.
“Listen, I just need—”
The stranger lunged.
Arjun fell hard onto the road. The man crashed against him, snapping at his shoulder and making horrible, broken noises. Arjun pushed against his chest, but the stranger was unnaturally strong.
“Get off!”
He twisted and shoved. For an instant, he thought he had escaped, but the figure came at him again. Arjun struggled to keep the figure’s face from his own. He shouted for help. The fog gave no answer.
His free hand searched the asphalt behind him: grit, loose stones, a scrap of cloth—and cold metal.
A pistol.
He grabbed it in desperation. The gun went off with a deafening crack.
The attacker fell still.
For several seconds Arjun lay there, breathing hard, unable to understand what had happened. The ringing in his ears faded into a silence even deeper than before.
He got to his feet.
Then came a noise from the mist. The same low, unnatural rasp.
Another answered it.
Shapes began emerging from the fog, first a few, then dozens. They stumbled forward, gathering speed. One broke into a run. The others followed.
The gunshot had brought them.
Arjun turned and ran.
He had no idea where the road led. The house was far behind him, invisible now, and the pale twilight offered no landmark. He ran until his breath hurt, while the strange cries multiplied behind him.
Still, he continued running, as the voices followed.
If you like this short zombie horror story, you will also enjoy this unique creation: River of Charon.
