Sweet Romance16 min read
I Became a Zombie, But I Wanted to Go to Tsinghua
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I wake to the smell of rot and the taste of iron and then remember I am supposed to be dead.
"I told you, stop staring," someone near me mutters, voice gravelly as if rubbed with sand.
"I'm not staring," I answer, though my mouth barely moves. My voice comes out thin, surprised at how much of my old self still lives in this body. "I'm studying."
"Studying?" the voice scoffs. "You really are one of a kind."
I hold the battered mathematics compendium against my chest like it's a treasure map. The pages are damp and crinkled, ink running in places, but I know every problem in it. Ten years from now, Tsinghua will be standing again. Ten years from now, that university will have the medicines that turn the mindless back into people. Ten years from now, whoever gets into Tsinghua gets first pick of the labs, the formulas, the solutions that make miracles. Ten years from now — I promised myself — I would be human again.
"You're shambling slower than the others," the voice says. "Eat, won't you? The moon's feeding us tonight."
"I'll pass," I say. "I'm trying to solve a problem."
A laugh that is almost a sob. "You want to go to Tsinghua? In this state?"
"Yes."
The speaker turns. In the weak light, I can see his face is going the same way the rest of mine has — the skin is pale, eyes white, but there is still a professor's posture about him. He speaks with the cadence of someone who used to teach with theorems on the board.
"You're a fool," he whispers. "Do you even know what you are?"
"Christoph," I say before I can stop myself. "Christoph, I'm not a fool. Ten years later — you'll see."
He starts. "What did you call me?"
"Christoph Lorenz," I correct myself, because his name sticks in me like a notation. He used to be a famed professor before the cities fell. He taught before he was bitten and the bite is crawling through him now.
Christoph protests with a sound that is half-plea, half-growl. "Aurora, I can't — I won't —"
"You're still walking," I say, and I press the compendium into his numb hands. "How do you simplify that integral? It's been three days."
He stumbles back as if I struck him. The rot spreads quicker now, dark lines running down his jaw. His voice stammers. "I — I can't help. I can't remember—"
"Then tell me who can," I say with more urgency than the weakness in my jaw should allow. "Who can help me? I need someone who knows advanced topology, someone who can push me to be ready for the exam when Tsinghua reopens."
He looks at me with the old spark of reason flickering for a second like a dying lamp. "Aurora... your progress — it's been astonishing. If not me... there is a student — a prodigy. Fleming Nakamura. If you meet him, he can guide you."
Fleming Nakamura. The name lands like a vital term. I bite down the groan that wants to form. Ten years from now, Fleming is the man who rebuilds labs, the man who will make sure the first lines of research go to those who can pass Tsinghua's tests. If I can find Fleming now, if I can learn from him, maybe the promise isn't foolish.
Christoph's last rational breath is a whisper: "Find Fleming."
Then the rot takes him in full. He staggers away and melts into the small, howling crowd of the newly changed. The world keeps moving. I keep studying.
We are nothing but a seething long ribbon of bodies. The city is a map of broken glass and hung wires. The moon is a plate high and cruel above us. I slide between the crawling shapes, feeling the old instincts I no longer have to hide — my new body's numbness means I can stand in the middle of a street and not smell the panic like others, but my mind remembers every alley and every long-forgotten back door I used to run.
We hit a warehouse that smells of canned meat and old blood. People inside are scrambling; a family of three jump from the second-story window and are caught by waiting hands. A handful of messy, new-awakened fighters repel the attack. One man with frost in his veins moves like glass, his motions narrow, precise. The way he carves through the crowd leaves a line of clean, terrible work. He is beautiful in the way wound-up machines can be beautiful.
"Everyone, back to the car!" he barks.
He moves like a leader. The man shields a pair of parents and a girl. He is calm until he is not — until the line of creatures swarms and he is shoved from the car and the vehicle drives away with their backs turned.
"I am so sorry," the girl's voice sobs from the car's window. "Fleming—" The caller's phrasing tears open some old ache. Fleming.
Fleming Nakamura. I push, push through the crowd until my hands wrap around a stranger's collar and pull him free: a young man with frost on his fingers and pain in his eyes. The moment he is pulled into the night, he hisses and forms ice in his hands, but the motion is clumsy and he cannot finish.
"Who is your teacher?" I ask him, my voice a snarl that surprises me with how human it still sounds.
He glances at me in disgust, then interest. "Aurora," he says. "You can talk."
"Don't be cute. Speak. Who taught you?"
He spits a name. "Christoph DeMing."
My throat tightens. DeMing — Christoph Lorenz. It clicks. "Fleming, I need your help with a problem."
He bares his teeth. "You were the one at the window. Don't you understand? People are dying. I will not be your prisoner."
"Then help and I'll keep you alive," I say, and for a beat he stares — I think he is considering the algebraic possibilities of my threat. He chooses paper over death and begins to write.
His hands shake. He is patched with wounds; his body is a map of sores, his mouth spattered with carmine where the warehouse doors bit. He gives the answer between coughs and the crunch of bone. "If you kill me, no one will ever solve that again," he whispers.
I have reasons of my own not to trust anything except numbers and the future I remember. I press my finger — rotted and cold — against the paper until I have the solution. He collapses before I can finish the last stroke.
"Here," I tell him. "This is for you."
I place a translucent crystal inside his mouth. It was a piece I took from the first king I ever killed: I attacked a nascent "zombie king," broke his skull, and swallowed the gleaming core. That core did not turn me into a mindless animal; it left my body in ruin but my mind inside, coherent and loud. The core's siblings slid into my pockets. One I hand to Fleming now.
He gulps it down like a sun to his life. His chest works, then he sleeps. When he wakes, his face is less pale, his eyes less haunted.
"Give it back when I need it," he says through a mouth that tastes like copper. He turns back to the math.
Watching Fleming work is strangely delicious. He thinks like someone trained by rows of blackboards. He writes in careful strokes, spit and blood dripping, bones protesting. In his impatience, he flags at his wound and bites down on a piece of meat. The slow drip of ink on paper, the slow drip of blood, the night around us — the world continues to tear.
"Don't forget this," Fleming says when he hands me the finished problem. "Study on, Aurora."
I stuff his pages into my pocket, proud and irritated and furious that he survived. I am hungry for knowledge, not for flesh. I leave the place like any other creature of habit and continue onward with the horde.
At first I'm careful. One-person wandering zombies look like soft targets to human scavengers. A family of three sees me and tries to pull a knife.
"You'll die," the father says. He lifts the rusted blade in hand, hands trembling.
I tap the blade. It cracks like old wood.
"Please," the mother sobs, "we're only trying to survive."
I put on a show. I scoop the child up and open my mouth wide to snap, and the child whimpers — then I put him down. The parents are bewildered, then bowed. "Go west," I tell them. "There will be a safe place soon."
They nod, as if scripture had been spoken. They leave like pilgrims.
A hunger from something larger than all of us pulses in the moon. It is the moon itself. We stop near a surviving military compound, its walls high and covered in black tarpaulins — a sealed fortress in the middle of doom. The last of the sleeping hubs murmur as the moon is full: the first wave of awakening happens in the night.
I sit against a wall and open Fleming's paper. I do my math. And the moon hears. It makes my core hum, the crystal inside me drinking up light. My vision explodes like a lens opening. I can see the farmlands twenty miles away; I can hear the drip of a faucet in a bunker three streets over. When the wave subsides, my core has swelled — the tiny bead now a fist-sized glow. I am stronger. I am a second-tier zombie king.
Power smells like metal and thunder. I flex and the ground answers. Near me the other undead move away as if I were a furnace.
I test my strength: a tree explodes into shards. I laugh — a sound bright and guilty and delighted.
Later, the compound's inhabitants chatter under the fortified ceiling. Voices break through the wall like waves. "What are we going to do? The zombies won't leave!"
"They haven't attacked the compound directly," a man says. "We should be safe."
"Your daughter thinks we can harvest their cores," says another voice with greed in it. "We can take the cores and get stronger. Cut them open. Feed them to our people."
I look at the small group inside. One of them, a stout man and his daughter with delicate hands, talk like they are playing a game. The daughter's face is flat with hunger for power, not for the lives she might break.
I skim the compound with my new sight. Among the people are faces from my past like ghosts in a thrown photograph: Salvador Gibson and his daughter Candace Briggs. Salvador used to be a man who stole from me when I was small; his betrayal led to my mother's illness. He took the house, the family heirlooms, left me to bleed. Candace — his new daughter's name — was born into their luck.
Candace points out at me and shrieks, "That's her! That's Aurora!"
"She's a zombie," Salvador says with a breath that is a curse. "She's worthless."
Candace's grin stab me. I taste the old ache. I wanted revenge before, but not this. Now I am a thing both lover and monster.
A plan threads through me like a chess move. Later, when the moon dips and the morning is thin, the compound's residents start to open the sealed window to test an attack. They dangle scent into the night — blood, meat, a tempting trail.
Candace smashes a brick and hurls it at me. It whistles past my ear. I tilt my head. Her arrogance is a physical thing. She says loud enough for her father, for the others: "Kill it. Get its core. Think of the power."
Lucidity is cold; I let it sit. I do not move. I watch their faces as greed plays on them. Salvador speaks, confident with tired bravado: "Don't be fools. If we take this one's core, we could be stronger than anyone here."
"Do it," Candace says, voice sweet as poison.
The others want it. One man cracks a nut of a joke, the rest laugh, gathering courage. The window opens.
Then the horde charges.
Panic is a collapsing house. The zombies don't need order; they smell the burst of human fear and the scent of one rotten core and everything moves. Someone gives an order — the compound's fighters start to cut through them with strange, new powers, and it's messy and violent and cleans the air for a second. Then a hulking thing moves through the center of the zombie mass. It's a larger zombie king — one that arrived with its own will.
The compound's defenders rally. They fight like they are at a banquet — proud and cruel and terrible. The big zombie king tears at the gate.
"You block the gate!" someone shouts. "We must stop them!"
Sword and flame meet bone and hunger. Inside, the compound shakes with noise. The little group who wanted the cores — Salvador, Candace and their allies — start to realize the plan was a trap.
They are cornered near the window now. The big king slams its fist through the wall, and the wall shudders like a dying drum. Salvador tries to burn it — tiny fireballs burst from his hands — and the thing reaches for him.
"Save me!" Salvador screams suddenly, and it is a real voice. "Save me, Aurora! I'm your father!" He collapses to his knees, eyes widened with a terror that is real, not because some grand irony is supposed to be punctuated properly on my life, but because he sees now the consequences of his greed.
Around him, the crowd scrambles. People are shouting, cameras flash — there are scavengers perched on distant towers recording everything, reputations being forged by the second. Some cheer the heroes; others are too busy to bother.
Candace is the first to beg. "Please! Please! We didn't mean—"
The thing that used to be her father tries to crawl away. "I'm sorry," Salvador wails. "Aurora, don't let them eat me. I'm your father."
I look at him. My chest is steady. My hands are still. The craving to see him fall — to watch the scales of fate balance — is something the world taught me to keep. This is public. There are witnesses. I do not take him apart in secret.
The big zombie king seizes Salvador like a puppet. He is lifted, his legs kicking, his hands clawing air. The compound's people freeze, then recoil.
"No!" Candace screams. She reaches toward him. "Father!"
"Don't let them—" someone cries.
If this were some tidy justice, someone might have found a way to spare him. But the thing that took him pays no heed to narrative. Salvador's face goes slack as the big king's teeth sink into his shoulder. He screams, then chokes, and the sound changes into an ugly wet silence as his life pours out. Blood sprays, and it's a bright, obscene banner across the ruined place. For a second there is stillness: the cameras hover; the men who once wanted cores turn their faces away.
People around the compound emit a string of reactions — a gasp, a shout, the snap of a hand over a mouth, a camera click. Some of them clap in wild hysteria, others vomit.
Candace tries to scramble forward but she is held back by hands she thought were friends. "Do something," she screeches. "Do anything!"
A man with ash on his cheeks turns to her. "You wanted this," he says. "You asked for it." His voice is the tiniest sliver of retribution.
Salvador's eyes roll back and his final pleading turns into a bubble that bursts in the air. "Aurora," he whispers as he is tossed aside. For him there is no redemption, only an ending that he can no longer control.
The big king throws him like a rag into the mass of the horde; they tear him apart with horrible, efficient hunger. The crowd watches with something raw and animal that is not pity: relief, schadenfreude, a confirmation that destiny sometimes bites.
Candace collapses, clawing at the floor, hysterical and alone. People step away. No one offers her a hand. Cameras have already captured her face as the daughter of the man who stole from the narrator. She watches her father become food and cannot believe the world has answered.
Someone takes a step forward and records the whole thing with a shaky drone. Another whistles. "Poetic," he says. "Karma served spicy."
Candace has no reaction at first that fits the pattern of humiliation: she screams, she begs, she tries to bargain with those who still stand. Her face goes through a cycle — first wide-eyed denial, then a scream of fury, then bargaining, then a cracked, hollow sort of acceptance. She begins to laugh — hysterical and bitter and wet with snot — as someone with more curiosity than compassion whispers, "Looks like they've turned on each other."
The rest of the compound's people disperse. Rumors will go out: the greedy man who stole a girl's childhood was eaten by the horde. The daughter who mocked the wrong person will be ridiculed. The footage will be replayed. Their reputations will be shredded in public, and that is a slow, precise punishment in a world where every alliance is currency.
When the dust settles, people who once called them family will not look them in the eye. Candace, who had always lived in the shield of her father's power, now lives in a hole of shame. She wanders the ruins talking to herself — at night, someone sees her holding splattered, empty jars as if they were trophies, her fingers stained with a film of grease and blood, and no one comes near.
Her punishment is not instantaneous. It is a slow public erasure: friends avoid her, traders refuse small deals, and the face on the broadcast becomes a meme, a cautionary tale for the small, savage networks that have grown up around the ruins.
Salvador's punishment was death by a thousand teeth — public, messy, with witnesses who could not help but gawk — and Candace's was worse in a way that claws: ostracization and humiliation, watched by an audience that records every miserable minute. They each experience a different arc: one ends in literal consumption, the other in social starvation. Both punishments are public and complete.
I watch them burn through their final acts and feel something like cold relief. The cameras shutter. Voices drop into whispers. The city continues, brusque and indifferent.
Fleming looks at me and says, "You did the right thing. There are worse men than the dead."
I study him, drink in the small cadence that is his voice, the way his shoulders slope when he thinks the world might finally turn to a better light. When he offers to show me the early layout of the base he'll build and the road that leads to Tsinghua, my heart — something that feels incredibly human and staggeringly naïve for a creature like me — stammers.
"I will go to Tsinghua," I say. "I will become human again."
Fleming studies the survivor in me and the zombie on my skin. "You speak like a scholar," he says. "Then we'll do this the right way. We'll build a route. We'll get you into the exam."
Over the months, Fleming becomes both my tutor and my anchor. He feeds me from his pot, keeps books safe in his bag, and signs my copies like a guardian who has decided to care for the strangest scholar he has ever seen. I return the favor — I clear the path on nights he needs to forage, I lift him out when he is wounded, I bite into lines of wood and break them if he cannot.
We bicker like a pair of old thieves. One night he slaps my hand when I try to steal the last pot of stew.
"Stop," he says, face quiet and oddly tender. "We share."
"You drive hard bargains for someone who eats ice and soup," I flinch.
He works to build a safe path — a route that will become, in time, the backbone of the base he found. He speaks in small, certain plans and I listen, memorize, correct the math at the margins. Slowly, he becomes a leader. He rallies people. He leads raids. He takes strategies I could only have seen in dry papers and makes them breathe real life.
Once, in the lull after a skirmish, he cups my face and presses his forehead to mine.
"Do you remember the problems you promised to solve?" he asks.
"All of them," I say, and it's not a lie. "Every last one."
His smile is a blade of sun. "Then hurry. Tsinghua won't wait."
Time becomes a strange currency. The days are counted in sunrises and raids, in formulas solved, in small kindnesses he hands me like spare bread. When a coalition of bases begins to covet my core — the big, clear crystal I keep under my skin — they make a play for me. Bombs sing through the air and blades flash.
The world has not yet learned mercy, but it has learned to bargain. A group of bases, terrified of the power I might represent, conspire to take me — not kill, not yet, but to break me like an instrument and claim the core inside. Their arsenal is dense, and they bring war.
Fleming stands between me and the hatch they drop, and there is a moment where I see him as the man I have loved across broken years. He calls names, empties resources, and makes promises that cost him. He does what leaders do — he sacrifices.
"You go," he says, voice a rifle shot. "I'll hold them off."
I do not leave him. But he insists. I run. He twists the map in his hands, and I do not look back until I am far away, nestled against a ravine that smells like early pine. When the engines stop I read the tape he left under a stone — a paper with the next problem set and the mapping of the route to the base he promised to build.
Years fold. The small base Fleming dreams of grows into something that tastes like hope — collects banded survivors, recruits doctors, builds solar panels, and hoards knowledge. They call their nascent learned camp "Quint" as a nickname for the place that will one day house Tsinghua's reemergence in this new world. They gather people, they train, they raise children who will study instead of hunt. Time moves differently when it's given the task of rebuilding.
We meet again years later, at the edge of the largest compound I have seen since my first dawn of rot. Fleming, now in a rough-cut jacket, still wears his patience like a shield. He is more handsome in the way someone who has chosen the hard road becomes refined: edges softer, eyes harder.
"You got taller," I say.
"You got more terrifying," he answers.
When he sees the necklace at my throat — the jade pendant my mother left me that Salvador stole in a sleight of hand and left me to fight for — he pauses. Then he folds me in, sudden as a tide.
"You didn't die," he whispers, tears making tracks down his face. "You didn't die and you didn't forget."
"Of course not," I say. "I have homework."
He leads me inside the compound. Cameras angle and people hush, and they watch as he carries me like a sovereign carries a relic. The press will spread the clips: the zombie who studies, the leader who refuses to turn his back on a thing the world writes off.
"To be human," he says, "is less about the body and more about deciding to be human. Today, we decide it for you."
He guides me into a lab and into a sleepless night of experiments and slow medicine. People queue in the hallways, holding items that used to be meaningful — books, photos, fragile toys. They ask to be seen. They bring their own stories. Fleming lines them up and tests them, refusing to let anyone be judged by rumor. He applies the formulas we have worked on and waits.
At last, the day comes when a syringe meets my arm and a warm, vivid light uncoils in my chest. For a moment I see everything as a lattice of numbers, then as a soft ribbon, then as colors I remember from a childhood I had but faintly. My skin tightens. The rot lifts like fog. I pull off the old, dead clothing. I look at Fleming, and I see his face — the one who stood between me and a dozen bandits, who poured stew into my bowl and taught me integrals.
He steps forward, breath hitched. "How do you feel?"
I laugh, a real human laugh that bubbles from the lungs. "Hungry."
He grins in relief. "There's food in the kitchen."
That night, in a cleared room, we do not talk about the many bodies that fell between us and the future. We talk about theorems and the next exam. He dips his finger into the soup and offers me the first spoonful. I take it, and for the first time in a long time, the soup tastes like something other than moonlight.
When Tsinghua reopens in time — earlier than in the timeline I remembered because Fleming's base grew faster under the right leadership and correct distribution of resources — I walk into the exam hall in clean clothes with my book at my hip. The place is a patchwork of tents and old pillars and new screens. I sit with my head high, and when the proctors ask my name, I give it.
"Aurora Feng," I say. "I want to take the exam."
A murmur runs through the room. Some people scoff. Others whisper that a creature like me should not be allowed. Fleming stands in the back with his hand clenching and unclenching. Some students find courage in his gaze and sit straighter.
The exam begins. I solve problem after problem. The years of practice, the nights of frost and flame, all compress into the calculation in my fingers. Fleming watches me through the window like a man who has tied himself to a ship to make sure it doesn't run ashore.
When the results come, my name is one of the first called. The hall erupts in applause and in anger. People shout about fairness; others cry; the cameras catch it all. I am ushered up and given an acceptance due more to proof than hope. Tsinghua will be mine to enter or die trying.
Later, in the courtyard, when the public whooped at what they see as an impossible joining of two worlds — the dead and the living — a woman from the crowd said, "I cannot believe she passed."
Fleming just smiled, a small, private curve. "She always could."
"You were always terrible at being modest," I tell him.
"I will take modests if you will take the lab."
He squeezes my hand. "We'll build it together."
We walk past the new gates. My pendant swings against my chest, warm now. It vibrates softly like a metronome. I press my hand against the jade and remember the nights I was a thing with a crystal inside my skull, and the nights I was alive and furious. I remember Salvador's face as it was torn and then forgotten by the world; I remember Candace's collapse, the cameras, and the way reputation can be a slow knife.
In the end, the world we live in is quick to judge and slower to forgive. But I keep my compendium close, my papers safe, and Fleming's hand warm.
"Promise me something," he whispers as we cross the courtyard.
"No promises," I say, because I won't fall into the cliché of promises. Instead, I slide my hand into his shirt and trace the scar by his collarbone. "Keep cooking. Make me a terrible breakfast every morning."
He laughs, and the sound is a bell in a ruined city.
"Deal," he says.
I tighten my grip on the pendant and the little crystal in my chest, then slip them both into the pocket where my paper rests. They are a map of what I was and what I will be.
We reach the exam hall doors. I pause, turn, and look at Fleming. "You ever think the world's cruel enough to offer a second chance? I almost didn't."
He steps close, lips near my ear. "You almost didn't, but you did. And that's the part I'll never let go of."
I smile. The math inside me isn't finished: there will be new problems ahead, and new proofs to write. I step forward into the room that used to be impossible, feeling the press of history at my back and the warmth of a single human hand holding mine.
The page turns. The pen moves. The clock tilts its head toward us — and I think, for the first time since the rot, the future might actually be something I can solve.
The End
— Thank you for reading —