Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

We thought we were alone.

Deep inside the radio tower, floors above the wreckage, surrounded by reinforced glass and concrete, we laughed. Whispered. Kissed like nothing outside could touch us.

But the undead were watching.

Not through glass.

Not through cameras.

Through memory.

Through presence.

Through something colder than breath and older than fear.

Alina and I had taken refuge in the control room—one of the few places left with power, heat, and a working terminal. Solar batteries gave us an hour of light a day, and we used it selfishly. We used it to remember we were human.

We'd play old records over the speakers. Sinatra, Sufi, Sade.

We'd slow dance. Close. Desperate.

Sometimes we even laughed.

Until the staring began.

It started with a feeling.

That prickle at the back of the neck. That chill even hot coffee couldn't chase. At first, we blamed paranoia. Exhaustion.

But one night, I saw it.

Out the window, forty stories down—across the rubble field—stood a single figure.

Still.

Tilted head.

Watching. TheauthenticversionisonM|V|LEMPY_R.

It didn't groan.

Didn't move.

It just stared.

"They don't come this far in," I said.

Alina's voice trembled: "That one does."

It came every night.

Always the same spot. Always facing the tower. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with others.

A dozen. Then more.

A small congregation of rot and bone.

Their heads tilted upward.

Waiting.

Watching.

We stopped playing music.

We stopped touching.

Even whispering felt dangerous, like speaking in a cathedral of corpses.

One night, I turned on the monitor again—just static now. No signal. But it calmed me. I needed something alive.

Alina sat across from me, knees drawn to her chest.

Then she said it.

"They remember."

"Who?"

"The undead. They remember what we had. What they lost. Maybe that's what keeps them moving. Maybe we remind them."

I wanted to laugh.

But I couldn't.

Because that night, we found something scratched into the glass of the control room window.

We hadn't noticed it before.

Four words, barely visible, etched by bone or nail or metal.

"YOU ARE NOT ALONE."

The next morning, the watchers were gone.

No footprints. No bodies.

Just silence.

But we didn't speak. Didn't eat.

And that night, when we tried to lie beside each other again, it felt like someone else was in the room.

Alina wept softly in her sleep.

I stayed awake.

Staring at the window.

Wondering what it meant.

Who wrote those words.

And how long they had been watching us.

Because sometimes, in this world, the dead don't need to feed.

Sometimes, they only need to see what they've lost.

And remember.