Sweet Romance11 min read
I Only Bite Men Who Are 1.8 Meters Tall
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I become a zombie on a Tuesday and keep a rule.
"I only bite men who are one point eight meters tall or taller," I tell the cracked mirror in a ruined clothing shop and spit on my teeth.
Someone behind me snorts. "You're serious about that?"
"Do I look like I'm joking?" I pull a ruined white dress around my shoulders and smooth the stain where coffee used to be. My hair is a wreck. My teeth are sharp enough to frighten a child. Still, I have standards.
The city is gone. Glass hangs like broken teeth in the sky. The streets smell of smoke and old rot. I was there when the virus hit. I ate the last of my instant noodles, walked outside, and the world had closed its eyes and opened its jaws.
We were supposed to be mindless, but I kept thinking in full sentences. I kept noticing details. I kept bothering the others by humming old pop songs when we dragged a laundry basket down the avenue.
"Why are you allowed to hum?" a tall one asked once. He had no patience for melody.
"Because I have taste," I said, and left him a gap-toothed smile.
They kicked me out of the pack anyway. "You don't bleed right," their leader snarled. "You are not like us." They hurled me off a balcony like yesterday's trash.
I break. I mend. I walk a lot. The streetlights flicker like tired Morse code. I find a white dress in a shop and change right there, because shame and privacy were two things I left behind when the world became hungry.
"You look ridiculous," someone says, and I turn.
He is a long, clean line against the ruined window: tall, military green jacket, a shallow scar by his eye that makes him look like a man who survived the worst and still keeps his face for himself.
"Hey," I say. "You look like dinner."
He snorts and fends me off with one hand. "Get off me."
"I thought you'd like me," I grin, and lunge.
He throws me off like a rag doll. The world tilts. He pins me against the wall with a single movement—fast, controlled. He takes a strip of black cloth from his shirt and wraps my mouth so my teeth can't show.
"Call yourself something," he says. His voice is low, not unkind, but it carries orders.
"Delilah," I say muffled.
"Delilah what?"
"Delilah Colon."
"Delilah," he repeats, and that word fits him like a key. "I'm Logan Crawford. Don't try to bite me."
"I wouldn't," I say. "You're one point nine." I grin, and his jaw tightens.
He is a leader. He does not smile at much. He is stubborn in a way I find romantic.
Logan drags me to his base—an old apartment the survivors repaired into a kind of city inside a city. He tosses me into a bathroom and says, "Shower. Then we talk."
"You're spoiling me," I call, stripping.
"Shut up," he answers, and I laugh into the steam.
Later, wrapped in a towel and smelling like soap, I sit on his couch. He hands me a stale piece of bread.
"Eat," he says.
"I only bite men over one point eight," I tell him, mouth full.
He studies me. "You were one of the first infected, weren't you?"
"Most unlucky," I say. "I was a test subject at Enstar Labs. They gave me something green, then people started screaming, then everything turned wrong."
"You were in their lab?"
"Long story. I volunteered for money and fell asleep in a fluorescent room. I woke up and the world died."
"Why are you different?" Logan asks.
"Because I don't want to be a monster," I say, like a slogan. "Also, I have standards. Only tall men."
Logan looks at me like I'm an adorable, dangerous pet. "Fine. We'll take you to the lab. We need what's in your blood."
I blink in surprise. "Me?"
"You turned people and they stayed thinking. We call them the Converted. You might have the key."
"When did I become so useful?" I ask, and he shrugs like he knows the answer.
"Just sit still," he says, and his hand is warm on my shoulder. The warmth confuses me—it's like a memory of being normal.
We walk into the lab later with a team of pale-faced scientists and quiet soldiers. Inside, I meet five men who nod when I enter. They look like they'd been through a blender and came out more human than others.
"That's Minos," Logan says, pointing. "That's Heath, Remy, Drew, and Seth."
"You're one of the few that didn't lose your mind," Charlotte Rocha, the lead scientist, says. "We need your blood."
"You're going to use me like a cookie." I shrug. "Fine. Just five boxes of bread before the tests."
They puff out their cheeks, but they hand me bread anyway. Scientists are practical.
"Your bite makes them... different," Lucia—no, Charlotte corrects me with a calm expression—"They have an hour of rage. After that, they keep thought. If we can isolate your antibodies, we may make a cure."
"Or a weapon," I say.
"Or a cure," Logan counters, and his voice goes even lower. "We will cure the world."
Promises sound small in a world full of broken glass, but sometimes they are the only thing left.
Days go by in a rhythm: feed the base, test the blood, measure the spikes. Logan sits with me in the dim light. We talk. He listens.
"You like to bite," he says once.
"I need to," I answer. "I can't sleep otherwise."
"Only taller men, though," he muses. "Is that vanity?"
"Call it a filter," I answer, and he snorts.
"Do you miss being human?" he asks.
"Sometimes. I miss the warmth of coffee and the way my mother used to yell at me for leaving dishes. Mostly I miss being part of something that wasn't survival."
He leans forward. "You're part of something now."
"Yeah? What if I don't like the price?"
"Then we pay it together." He says it like a promise, and I let myself believe him.
The research stalls. The scientists need Enstar's equipment and vials that might still be stashed in the underground labs. Logan gathers a team; I insist on coming.
"You're dangerous," he says, worrying like an old friend.
"You're scared," I tease.
"Both," he admits, and when he admits it he looks human in a way that makes my ribs ache.
We go to Enstar. The building is a skeleton, full of the walking dead who live in loops of hunger. We move like ghosts between the rows. Minos and the others act as camouflage—zombies among zombies. They get attacked and heal like machines. They are both weapon and warning.
"Stay behind me," Logan tells me.
"I'll stay directly behind your back," I say.
He laughs once and that sound keeps me from shaking.
Down in the lab we find one green vial in a cracked cabinet. I hold it like a secret fortune. Charlotte takes it with trembling hands.
"This will need town resources and time," she says.
"We don't have either," Logan says. "We go back now."
A comm crackles. "Upstairs—basement breach." The voice panics.
Logan's face hardens. "We move."
We move fast, but the building is a mouth that eats time. The floor shakes with the approach of a terrible force: the so-called Zombie King, a monstrous fist of teeth and bone, leading the old pack that once crowned themselves with dead fingers.
"Run!" someone yells, and Logan pushes me ahead.
I stumble and a zombie sinks its teeth into my arm. For a moment, hunger is bright. I bite back. I taste iron and panic.
Logan turns and fights with a ferocity I've only seen once before. He drags his blade through a bank of teeth and presses forward until the thing screams and falls. He returns with a wound and a look I don't like.
"Why did you bite me?" he snarls between breaths later when we are shoved into a safe room.
"You said the plan," I answer. "You wanted to make me chew you if it came to it."
He looks at my mouth as if reading a ledger. "I didn't expect to lose myself," he admits.
"I didn't expect to love you," I tell him. The words slip out like a ribbon.
His eyes find mine. "You can't make me a monster."
"Maybe I did," I say, and press my mouth to his. I taste him—metal, sweat, salt.
Something warm and terrible passes through him. His pupils flare the color of hot coals. He grows violent as a storm. He pins me and starts smashing my head against concrete.
"I will make you pay for this later," I think as my skull keeps hitting stone. I am sure the world is ending. Then the door bursts and chaos floods the corridor and his rage snaps like a brittle twig.
After the fight, in the hush, Logan is quiet and shaken. He has been through an hour of madness that left him with pieces he is ashamed of. He stands in the smoke and the lab’s yellow fluorescence and he looks at me and says, "I remember."
"Good," I say. "Because I want you to remember who you are. I bite you because I want you whole."
He stands and grabs a rucksack. "We need to take these vials to the roof."
We do. We send the green liquid up in a small fog that climbs like a pale ghost over the city. Men kneel in the streets as their eyes go from white rage to wet, human horror. People wake up like a sun rising and cry into the air because the world had been dead for so long they thought sunrise was a myth.
The cure works. The sirens sing. The survivors cheer. That should be the end. But the end is never clean.
Charlotte and a team find the files in Enstar's vault. In a dusty folder, a name sits in a corner: Andreas Box. He is the old man who signed the papers. He is the man who bought silence and sold experiments with a smile.
"He hid it well," Charlotte says. "But not well enough."
We bring Andreas out into the sunlight by helicopter. He is small in real life, brittle and white as an old photograph. People gather on the central square outside the base: survivors, soldiers, the newly returned, and the families of those who died.
Logan stands beside me on a platform, Charlotte steps forward with a printed file in hand, and I stand with my mouth taped clean—no bite today. The crowd is heavy with anger and grief. Their faces are open books of blame.
"Look at him," a woman says near the front. "My husband was in his papers. He didn't deserve to die like that."
"And my son," a man shouts. "They experimented on our kids."
Andreas Box is pushed forward on the platform. He wears a suit that looks ridiculous against the burnt buildings. Someone throws a plastic cup at him. It breaks and water splashes his shoes. He winces like an old man who has been forgotten.
Charlotte reads aloud the list of names: hospitals, test subjects, dead volunteers. "They hid the experiments in basement rooms. They pumped Talmann into volunteers under the pretense of anti-influenza trials."
A nurse—one who survived Enstar's underground—steps up. She points her trembling finger at Andreas. "You told us it was humane. You told us it was safe."
"What did you expect?" Andreas croaks. "Science advances. We take risks."
"Your risks were godless!" someone screams.
They place him at the center of the square like a specimen. He tries to speak, tries to claim ignorance, tries to say the words of a man who signs papers but never holds the scalpel. The crowd is louder. People who lost everything do not want papers. They want accountability.
"Show them the footage," I say. Charlotte nods and signals the techs. A projector flickers to life and plays the old security tapes. The people watch their fathers and mothers in sterile rooms, their faces pale and naïve. There are recorded voices; there is a chart where Andreas' signature is clear.
He starts by being defiant. "You don't know what you're saying," he says. "These were volunteers."
"Some volunteers were prisoners," a woman shouts. "They said they'd free them afterward and they didn't."
Andreas tries to justify. He is a man who never touched the hungry, never smelled the dying. His excuses are thin.
The crowd moves from anger to ritual. They demand that he be forced to watch the things he ordered. They bring out a screen and play the raw footage of his briefings, of the day they released the gas in a controlled chamber. The room the footage shows tightens in my chest: nurses coughing, the faces of frightened people. The old man watches himself on the screen, watching others die.
At first he is stubborn. He shakes his head. He says, "I had funding to save thousands in the long run."
"Long run?" someone mocks. "You killed the long run!"
The crowd is a living thing now. They chant. They cry. They scream. They want blood, but we refuse to be monsters. We want his name known, his voice recorded, his signature exposed.
They force him to publicly sign the retraction, to relinquish every asset and to name every collaborator. He refuses, then he pleads, then his pride burns into humiliation. "Please," he begs. "I was trying to help science."
He begins with denial. "My research... it was for medicine." The crowd answers with the names of the dead. He shifts to shocked defense. "You are overlooking context!" He points at documents. "We had approval!"
A woman steps forward holding a battered binder. "Approval signed by you," she says, handing it to Charlotte. "Signed in blood, signed in ink."
He looks around. The survivors pull out photos: children, partners, lovers, names scrawled on paper. They show the signed consent forms—some forged, some coerced. The sharpness of his faceless numbers is undone by grief in front of him.
At the center of the square, they read a list of names of the people who died during the tests. The crowd sings each name. It takes an hour. At the end, Andreas is alone, his suit torn by people who need symbols to break.
Then comes the thing he fears: he is forced to stand on the stage and answer questions while the crowd records every word. The reporters—citizen reporters, survivors with phones—stream his confessions across frequencies. He is forced to name every contractor and every shipping manifest. He can't hide his signature or his ledger. We make him sign the renunciation of his patents. We take his name, his money, his future.
"Why did you do it?" a child asks, voice echoing.
He stutters. He cannot answer. The child repeats, "Why?"
His final change of face is the real punishment: his ego crumbles. He is stripped of the language of science; he must face people who lost everything. He tries to bargain, then apologizes, then sheepishly begs forgiveness.
No one gives it. Not yet.
When they haul him off to a secured cell—no show trial, no mercy parade—loggers stamp his company as asset to be redistributed as health cooperatives. Citizens vote. The man who built a private hell is left with nothing but his name on government records and the memory of a square that will never forget his face.
The crowd disperses with stories. They do not crucify him. They humiliate him with truth. They make him watch the city rebuild with his own hands tied. That is worse than death. That is the public unraveling of a man's legacy.
After that day, the world stitches itself. The fog of the green vial climbs the streets and people wake and remember. The survivors mourn and rebuild. And I, who bit with rules and who once spat at anyone under 1.8 meters, find that my life has a narrow, thrilling brightness when Logan stands beside me.
We live together in the base. We argue about stupid things. "You left the kettle on," he accuses.
"I thought you liked boiled regrets," I say.
He does not find that funny. He fixes the kettle. He watches me sleep. He sits in the dark and remembers the hours when he was not himself and knows he survived because someone bit him.
Sometimes, in the quiet, I take out the black strip he used to tape my mouth after I first met him. I keep it in a small box. It smells faintly of gun oil and old cloth. I press it to my lips and laugh.
"We are doctors now," Charlotte says one day, holding a tray of samples.
"And chefs," I add, pleased with the simplicity of feeding people without killing them.
Logan smiles. "And we are survivors."
"I only bite men of one point eight and above," I whisper into his shoulder, and he laughs.
We make the green cure into a better thing. We open the labs and share instructions. We take Enstar's machines and make vaccines, not experiments.
Andreas Box never walks free again. He watches from a prison window as the same streets he helped poison grow gardens on the rooftops. He hears people laugh and cries once, very privately, perhaps for the first time.
When the official news finally confirms, "There are no more active cases," we go outside. The city is scarred and soft around the edges. Children play near pieces of sculpture that used to be the skeletons of cars.
I stand on a broken roadway and take off the small dental guard Logan gave me the first time he let me loose to eat bread without fear. I put it in my pocket.
Logan takes my hand and squeezes it. "You're the strangest, most infuriating hero I have ever met," he says.
"I only bite tall men," I remind him.
"Good," he says, smiling. "Because I'm not going anywhere."
When the radio announces the day of silence for the dead, I put my hand on my chest and look up at the sky. The green mist is nothing now but a story people tell at night. I tuck the strip of black cloth into my pocket and feel the roughness of the world again.
"I tried to keep a rule," I murmur. "It saved them. It saved you."
Logan presses his forehead to mine. "You saved all of us," he says. "And I'm glad you kept your taste."
The city hums with small lives. I am not the same as before. I am a woman who bit and loved and built. I am also a woman who keeps small rules: bread before work, a clean dress when possible, and men must be at least one point eight meters tall to cross my lips.
And every time I pull the dental guard from my pocket, I remember the black strip, the green vial, and the day Andreas Box had to stand in the sun while the world named him for what he was.
The End
— Thank you for reading —