I, Zombie (10 page)

Lisa was reaching for something, telling him to come over.
Dennis’s arms found her arm. The touch was electric—skin meeting skin on a
first date, the feel of one’s own deadened limb in the morning as numbness wore
away into tingles. Dennis’s fear for Lisa melted in a flare of endorphins. His
worry disintegrated at this discovery, this touch of
meat
, of real food
among pre-packaged and processed shit.

Lisa shrieked. Dennis was on his belly like a snake,
lurching side to side, sending more cans to their dented fates as he tunneled
from aisle eighteen to aisle seventeen.

His girlfriend’s screams grew louder and more panicked. It
reminded him of all the times he’d hid behind a door before leaping out.
Reminded him of the insane pranks of the past week, the humor only boys found
funny, the madness wrought of dark survival and fading adrenaline. He would
pinch Lisa’s calf with the claw of a hand when she wasn’t looking, making her
think she’d been bit. He’d watch Matt do the same or similar to Sarah, the boys
laughing with tears in their eyes while trembling hands slapped at their
shoulders, girlfriends calling them assholes, thinking for a moment that the
end had come for them.

He didn’t know why they did it, why there was this
compulsion to strike terror in the hearts of those they loved. More cans
scattered as Lisa fought his grip. She was yelling at him now. Her fear had
flipped to anger. This was how it worked. Frightened for a moment until she
realized it was him, and then just pissed. She tried to pull away, but Dennis
wasn’t playing this time. He held her arm with a starving grasp, his brain
dripping sick thoughts and remnants of guilt.

Why did he ever scare her for fun? He tried to make caveman
sense of it. For Dennis, every human drive had to make caveman sense. Where had
it come from, this universal oddity? Why did humans do the shit they did? Where
did it originate?

Lisa smacked his head as he emerged through the shelves. She
begged him to let go. Dennis made zombie noises, grunts and groans of lungs
compressed by metal shelving, the air just leaking past his vocal cords. Why
did they do it? Did they scare their women as some sort of training? Was it to
teach them to never trust any man, even their own? Or was the fear some
subconscious attempt to cow them, keep their women feeling helpless and reliant
on the protective brawn they provided, like the mafia feigning worry for some
shopkeeper who had only
them
to fear.

Dennis didn’t know.

He didn’t know why they did it any more than he knew why he
was doing it for real this time.

Urges.

Caveman shit.

Like eating raw meat. Dennis had never eaten raw meat
before, not even sushi. This was his last pre-monster thought as he wrestled
his girlfriend’s arm to his lips, jaws parting, teeth bared, the anger in her
shouts sliding to full-on panic.

She shrieked piercing wails, and Lisa
knew
. She had
to know as he bit down on her forearm, a patch of skin he used to kiss, that
creamy white with a single mar of a mole that she insisted was a freckle. When
his tongue hit her flesh, there was a familiar taste, the salt from weeks of
running and not bathing, the hot skin like a day on the beach, the same flavors
that tinted their lovemaking. His girlfriend tasted the exact same on the
surface.

It was the unfamiliar that lay beneath.

Dennis felt an eruption in his brain like an orgasm. Better.
Better than an orgasm. This was what he was wired for. His teeth came together,
and Lisa’s arm jerked. Desperation. There was desperation in both of them.
Panic and starvation were at odds with each other. The desire to eat and to not
be eaten. Dennis thought of make-up sex they’d had once, the rough sex. He
thought of that first time, when she’d said she didn’t want to, but he had
convinced her. They were both drunk. He was too far along to turn back. Both
naked and willing to do so much, but then him wanted more. More than she did.
The drive in him to eat was like that drive to fuck. He would’ve insisted it
was something containable until he’d actually felt it, until he’d gone that
far. That far, and you were going all the way. He couldn’t stop. Too weak.

Dennis also thought, as he bit down, that teeth were
meant
for this, just not his. He never would’ve guessed that they could rip flesh.
Not
his
teeth. Maybe those of another monster but not his. The flesh of
Lisa’s arm gave way, his jaw clenching on the softness, and then her skin
stopped moving, became tight, could stretch no more, and with a pop, with a
sudden orgasmic burst of power, his bottom teeth met his top teeth, a chunk of
her arm in his mouth, him chewing.

There wasn’t a product on the supermarket shelves as
delicious as this. Lisa’s safety receded from his mind. What he was doing
faded; what he had become made the rest of him cower in fear. Lisa gurgled in
pain and staggered backwards, and Dennis latched onto her like a rabid dog. He
slid forward, cans bouncing, and emerged from the shelves a different thing
than what had entered. He and Lisa were on the ground, rolling around like they
used to wrestle, Dennis pulling his way up her body even as he chewed this
first glorious taste and swallowed it down.

He wanted her neck. She was yelling for him to stop,
begging. The sample in his mouth drove him forward, craving more. This was why
he shied away from anything he knew he’d like. One try, and it was over for
him. There was nothing for Dennis in moderation.

Lisa cried out for help. She prayed to a god he knew she
didn’t believe in. Panting for air, yelling for Matt and Sarah, Dennis felt
just a hint of guilt. The old him was still in there, sad that shit had gone
bad like this. He remembered, even drunk that one night, knowing that he was
doing something wrong, that he should stop. But he had driven forward until
screams and moans couldn’t be told apart, until cries and gasps were the same,
until he could convince himself that she was enjoying it too, that she would
forgive him, that they would never talk about it, try not to think about it,
forget that she had ever begged him to stop.

That was the old him in there, feeling sorry. The rest of
him wanted a second hit of this new drug. The rest of him wanted Lisa to shut
the fuck up. And as he pulled himself up her chest, he found a way to do both,
to get a taste and to silence her. And it amazed him, again, that teeth were
meant for this. It was some caveman shit, he thought, as his jaw opened a
gushing and hissing hole in his girlfriend’s throat. It was some caveman shit
as her cries for help were silenced, as her body fell into reluctant
submission, he on top of her, getting his way.

21 • Chiang Xian

Chiang was in the back of the meat shop, cornering a rat in
her slow and clumsy steps, when the strangers broke in. It was the fifth day of
her terrible hunger, the countless day of her imprisonment, and the third time
she’d chased after the same rat. It cowered under the old radiator in the back
room while someone shattered the glass door at the front of the shop.

Chiang could smell the tiny animal under there. The last two
times she’d seen this morsel of brown meat scurry across the floor, her
starving body and senseless mind had charged directly after the thing. She had
been forced to watch, mad with hunger, as it disappeared into its home behind
the cupboard.

This time, Chiang had a better idea. And somehow, her body
listened. Like an exhausted arm and trembling brush finally obeying her
concentration and producing the perfect stroke, if she thought hard enough on a
thing, a direction, her feet seemed to shuffle according to her will. But just
barely. And it wasn’t easy.

I can do this
, she told herself. It was no different
than stretching her tiny hands around the neck of a violin. It was just like
origami, biting her lip and making sure the edges of the paper lined up just
right, to within a hair, that with the drag of a fingernail the folds were
crisp and sharp, her miniature paper cranes nearly as good as her mother’s.
Chiang felt she had studied all her life for this, to corner this one little
rat.

She banged into the radiator, and the frightened animal shot
off toward her father’s back office. Good, good. Chiang shuffled after. Her
limbs were too slow to catch the thing by hand. That was true even before she’d
lost the fingers on one hand. But there were swifter limbs in her father’s
office. And so she lurched sideways, frightening the little guy through the
open door before following after.

Following after. Chiang thought about an old worry of hers
as the rat scrambled beneath her father’s cluttered desk. She had this feeling,
this nagging sensation even back when her parents were still alive, that her
thoughts followed
after
the things she did. They were the echoes of her
actions, not the causes of them.

There was something Confucius had once said:
The superior
man acts before he speaks
. She didn’t think Confucius meant it the way she
read it, though. Her fear, as she had struggled to be the perfect girl her
parents desired, was that there wasn’t any control at all. All men act first
and speak after. She felt it herself. She would do a thing and then take credit
or make excuses. In truth, she did the thing because she was born to. Because,
in that moment, how could she not?

She banged into the desk, just like she had the radiator. On
purpose, she thought. She hoped. Almost there. Swifter arms than hers. She
could smell the fear leaking out of the rat and figured it was doing much the
same as she. Reacting and then feeling something. Some mix of chemicals.
Happiness or sadness, fear or desire, these chemicals causing limbs to move
toward or away from the good or bad.

Chiang tried to scare the rat from the bad to the worse. She
nudged the desk again. The last project her father had been working on—ledgers
full of meticulous script, purchase orders for half a dozen vendors—was spread
out across the surface just the way he had left it so many days ago. There was
an agitated squeak by the wall, the scratch of tiny claws, and then the clack
and slam of a metallic arm and the snapping of a tiny neck as a trap long
picked clean did its swift work.

Chiang fell to the floor and lumbered beneath the desk. The
darkness was no concern; she could smell the crushed flesh like a piece of
cracked ginger. Her hands groped for the trap and found it. She pulled the
contraption out, the animal’s tiny arms still twitching with something that
resembled life.

Fists smaller than any intricate crane her mother had ever
made unfolded into pink and perfect palms. Chiang only studied them a moment
before bringing the trap to her lips. She bit the rat in the belly, still warm
and heaving, and her mouth was filled with the hot and sticky scraps picked
over and digested by the foul beast, this little survivor. The trap itself was
something to chew around. The rest was for her. She peeled slivers of flesh off
its body and chewed through bones like chopsticks while someone rummaged
noisily in the meat shop.

Chiang stopped chewing and listened. Beyond the moist steam
rising from the rat’s insides, there was another smell cutting through. Living
meat. Something not rancid and spoiled. She could smell them like spices, at
least a few of them out there, the odor getting stronger.

Voices.

A whispered hush. The sound of canned goods being scraped
off of shelves. There were people in her parents’ shop, scrounging for food.
Chiang dropped what remained of the rat and shuffled toward the door. She was
still hungry. So very hungry. And her limbs seemed to move of their own accord,
her mind making excuses, telling herself a story of reasons, as she went along
like a puppet.

A family of three. They didn’t hear her coming out of the
back room, sliding through the red curtains with the green dragons. Chiang saw
that they had pressed one of the shelving units against the door. These people
had broken in, and her first thought wasn’t anger; her first thought was that
maybe she could get
out
.

Chiang saw a baseball bat by the cash register, the wide end
of it painted and spattered red. It hadn’t been there before. She passed behind
the counter where her father folded meat into sheets of brown paper, her head
just barely poking above. Around the counter and into the store, she nearly
bumped into the woman. Chiang saw how the lady’s body trembled and froze. The
scream came a full breath later, but Chiang was already sinking her teeth into
the woman’s hip, a mouthful of sweaty-salty shirt and the tender flesh beneath.

Canned goods spilled everywhere. The screaming was hurting
Chiang’s ears. It stopped as she bit again, the woman going limp and collapsing
to the ground, passing out.

A large man shouted. A cry of anguish. He skipped and slid
through the piles of canned Chinese ingredients, around the tables and chairs,
dashing for the cash register.

The bat. Chiang lumbered to intercept the man. The woman
writhed and groaned on the floor like she was having bad dreams. There was a
third shape moving in the dimness of the shop. More screaming.

Chiang felt afraid of these people. Maybe they had brought
food to her, their untainted flesh. Maybe they had brought escape by shattering
what she could not. But they had also brought a lasting death with them, the desire
to end her. The man reached the counter and grabbed the bat. Chiang could smell
his intentions, his rage and fear. She hurried through the spilled cans, her
teeth clacking anxiously on the empty air, arms out in front of her as he
reared the bat to the side.

It was a can of asparagus. One of Chiang’s senseless feet
slipped on the can, shooting her legs out from underneath her, and the stained
bat whistled through the air above her head. With a ferocious crack, the bat
met the old cash register with its brass buttons and little tombstone prices.
Chiang flailed to right herself. Inhuman screams came from the large man. His
knees were wobbling like Chiang’s. The smell of rage on him grew to a stench.
There were sobs behind her from a third person, a shadow. The bat screamed
through the air again as Chiang stumbled toward her feet.