Dead Woman Walking

Fair warning: I wrote this story during the height of the pandemic, after I had a horrible night dream. Please forgive the macabre.

A woman’s body was bopping in the water, among many others floating in the city streets. The flood brought by a hurricane followed a big epidemic and was absolutely catastrophic. A lot of people died, trapped in their homes where they stayed in lockdown. When the flood water subsided, many bodies were washed out into the city streets.

Rescue teams of two to three volunteers were patrolling the streets in make-shift boats, clearing their way through debris, trash and floating household items. Dressed in full-on hazard suits, rescuers were pulling the dead bodies and checking the houses in the hope of finding someone who was still alive, although their hope was quickly vanishing.

This woman’s body definitely looked dead. It was bopping face up, even though most dead bodies floated face down. Her legs seemed to have been stuck on something, which explained why she was face up. She looked like she was in her late 20s or early 30s. Her long red hair was freely flowing in the water, and her face was peaceful and incredibly beautiful. “Like a mermaid… What a waste of beauty,” one of the rescuers thought, as he stretched out a long pole with a three-prong hook to pull her into the boat by the shoulder or waist. He overshot and the hook’s prongs sank into her beautiful face, ripping the skin down all the way to the neck and upper chest. The rescuer stopped in horror at the sight of her blood spilling into the water.

“Do dead bodies bleed?” he asked his partner, who noticed how pale his face has become behind the plastic shield of the hazard suit helmet.

“Not that I know of,” the second rescuer responded.

Probably from the pain, the woman came to. “What the f*uck!” she yelled. “Don’t you see what you are doing? I still have to live with this face!” Trying to stop her blood from gushing into the water with one hand, she freed herself from the hook with the other and stood up, ripping her pant off from a beam of a detached house wall it was stuck on. The water was reaching up to her waist. She turned around, cursing, and started to walk in the direction opposite of the boat.

“Maaaam, where are you going?” the second rescuer yelled, while the first one was still in shock. His voice was muffled by the hazard suit shield, but she could still hear him.

“To the hospital, where else? I need to have this looked at! And stop the blood. You f*cking imbeciles!”

The first rescuer finally recovered from the shock and asked the second one, “Do you think we should give her a ride? It doesn’t look like she is walking in the right direction.”

“Well, she is clearly local, so she probably knows where to go,” the second rescuer said. “Besides, we don’t know if she is not infected. And we have to take all these bodies to the morgue before they start falling apart.”

The rescuers continued their gruesome work of pulling the dead bodies into the boat as the woman slowly moved away in the water, pressing her hand tightly to her mauled face. Soon, the boat turned the street corner. “Out of sight, out of mind,” the first rescuer thought and shivered, as if trying to shake off the experience.

Another team of rescuers would pull the woman’s body out of the water next day. She almost made it to the hospital, but was swallowed by a wave that broke through from the hospital’s building when its big glass doors couldn’t hold the flood water anymore. No one had been alive at the hospital for at least three days…