I, Zombie (5 page)

And so she shuffled along, moving toward another feed, a fat
man’s face hanging open in front of her near enough to worry the flap of flesh
might touch her nose, close enough to smell the awful breath leaking out of his
clenched but gaping jaw. There was the buzz from one of the flies circling his
head, the tickle of it crawling in her ear, another one at the corner of her
mouth, and she was unable to swat them away or dig her finger after them.

Laying eggs, Jennifer thought, horrified. Soon, their brood
would wiggle within her. They would hatch and grow and feed on her flesh. They
would writhe within her, like the man with the hinged cheek and flopping ear.

The itch in Jennifer’s ear grew to a great pressure, a
pounding agony, an amazing torture to be stomped by such tiny feet. Her body
groaned, her voice a wheezing whisper, as the buzzing grew and the flies burrowed
themselves deeper.

She screamed in her head for it to stop and prayed for
death, but Jennifer shuffled silently onward, no control over where she went,
the same as she ever was.

10 • Michael Lane

Michael tumbled down the fire escape. His legs moved on
their own, numbly, like the unfeeling stagger of a good high. He was three
stories above the pavement when his feet tangled and he crashed into the
railing. Bending at the waist, his head flopped forward, and there was a moment
of panic and a last desperate attempt to control his limbs before he tumbled
over, his heels flying up above his head.

The fall lasted a brief forever. There was the sensation of
dropping, wind on his face, body contorting out of control, windows flashing
by, and then, finally, interminably, the thud of impact.

The landing was catastrophic. He couldn’t twist to soften
the blow or pull his feet beneath himself. Both knees struck first, and then
his face. Michael felt a tug on his thigh, a deep wound. His body writhed out
of control, trying to right itself. Arms flailed like a petulant child told it
couldn’t have some cherished thing. He could feel powdered bone grind and grit
inside his knees as he rolled over.

Putting weight on one leg caused it to buckle, bone hinging
where it shouldn’t. Michael tried to lie still, but his body made another
attempt, less weight this time, balancing on a flopping leg, cracked bone
spearing his flesh, his face on fire from the pavement, lips stinging, the
taste of his own blood mixing with that of his mother’s.

Both knees were crushed. One leg was shattered, his
thighbone bending like a second knee, but the pain didn’t do shit. Muscles
still worked. Tendons were connected to bones, even if bones weren’t connected
to each other. With spasming jerks, his body worked it out, throwing a leg
forward like one of those hinged prosthetics, balancing on a clean break,
throwing another leg forward on a crushed knee, balancing, arms out, groans of
agony leaking through split lips, the smell in the air of living flesh driving
his body forward.

Michael watched through the lens of his soul, a victim of
every lanced nerve, the agony horrific. Needles shot through his legs and face.
Something was wrong with his abdomen, his stomach cramping and full. At the end
of the alley, he saw shapes—people—moving through the parked cars spread across
the wide avenue beyond. Moving gracelessly, these other people threw their
bodies forward, arms out, shoulders stooped, many of them injured as well, a
macabre dance of wounded limbs, a strut of shattered bone.

The pain. It meant nothing. It wasn’t a signal to lie still,
to stop. It just
was
. A thing. Something to endure. No purpose, except .
. .

Michael noticed something through the burn.

As his body was consumed with this fiery hell and his mother
sagged in his guts, he realized the old craving was gone. The withdrawals. They
were over. Passed by. Cauterized. Melted through. Ground to ash.

The only pain left was the physical. Nails were driven
through him with each hammering lurch. And his other hurts, the ones he always
thought debilitating, the ones that kept him on the sofa for days, they cowered
in some hidden recess, terrified of this new, sudden, and
real
misery
that had wrapped itself around him, squeezing him so tightly that his bones
crunched into smaller and smaller pieces, bits of glass slicing him from the
inside, needles, the sting of angry nectarless bees.

Out of the alley, Michael emerged broken, dizzy, and aware.
He was dead in some ways and alive in others. The sun was high, the rays
warming a city that still held the chill from a clear fall evening. Monsters
lurched everywhere, following a scent to the next feed, dragging their wounds
along with them, oblivious, enduring, or both.

Hesitating a moment, his balance unsure, Michael felt a
twinge of control, a sliver of time when desire and deed overlapped, when he
found his body doing what he perfectly wished. Just a moment, like a broken
clock that twice a day tells the proper time, and then Michael Lane threw a leg
ahead of himself. He limped forward, despite his wishes. He merged, blending,
joining the others.

11 • Gloria

There were good moments. Somehow, there were moments less
miserable than others. The group Gloria had fallen in with might splinter in
the swirling breeze, and a small troop would find itself rambling through a
park beneath the twittering birds, the air midday warm and the taste of human
flesh mostly gone from her mouth.

Even there, in the end of times, when God had taken the
righteous from the earth and had left her behind, there were moments less
miserable than others.

Central Park brought one such respite. It stood like an
oasis, a perfectly rectangular eruption of nature in the center of that mad
island with its spikes and spines of concrete and steel. The greenery beckoned.
It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors, this weak smell of fear
among the earthy tang of mulch and the mint and spice of untamed plants.

Gloria’s small group of bloodstained stragglers splintered
among the benches and bushes. Deeper within, a large rock wall confounded a
few, the trees dividing the pack like fingers running through tangled hair. The
city disappeared, just as the park’s designers must’ve intended. Gloria thought
of all those who came here to escape the bustle and noise. Now they came to be
surrounded by things alive, to take leave of all the death in the streets,
perhaps to find wild mushrooms, trap wildlife, scrounge for food.

Through the mulch and tall weeds, through the last grasses
of fall, Gloria trudged deeper. She came to one of the park’s many bodies of
water, a pond scattered with unmanned boats steered only by the breeze. Gloria
watched, mesmerized, while one of the monsters ahead of her steered into the
water. The young man sank to his knees, his arms flailing, before tipping
forward. He made a splash, writhed for a moment, then disappeared. A duck
coasted on the swell he made, its tail twitching in brief annoyance.

Gloria never stopped moving. She continued along the pond’s
edge, wondering what would happen to that man. Would he remain there beneath
the water, the shadows of ducks blotting the sun? For how long? Forever? Or
would he float to the surface? Or would his flailing arms learn to swim?

The ripples he’d made faded as Gloria’s feet carried her
along the rocky shoreline. Trees denuded of most of their leaves reflected in
the mirrored surface, tall buildings rising up beyond, one of the buildings on
fire and belching dark smoke, the nostrils of a fierce beast. Gloria imagined
the man walking along the bottom of the lake, no bubbles leaking out, the
depths down there freezing and dark as ink.

Would he die? Was that still possible? Was it possible for
her?

She felt afraid for her feet. Concentrating on the breeze,
on the smells, Gloria felt fear anew. If the scents wavered, she could be the
one splashing in, the one throwing up concentric swells. The thought of the
dark and deep, the bitingly cold, it was worse than her fear of a feed. But
there was also something like hope there on that shoreline. Maybe there was an
end, a completion to what God had begun.

The breeze stirred. It swam like a nearly visible serpent
through the trees. Gloria spotted a woman walking through the woods, dragging
her leg. The dead were everywhere, fanning out, sniffing and listening, and
Gloria prayed:

Dear God, please forgive me. Whatever I’ve done, please
forgive me. Take me, God, with the others. Please don’t leave me here.

She tried to think of some forgotten offense, some reason to
have been left behind. God knew everything about her. What could she add? How
could she feel more sorry?

Please don’t leave me here, Lord.

Her shoes crunched through the gravel by the edge of the
pond. She imagined herself veering to the side and walking out across the
waters, ripples spreading out from her footsteps, and then her soul rising up
through the clouds as a grand mistake was corrected. There would be apologies
and explanations. Maybe she would discover that this was her penance. She
thought of her mother’s rosary beads, the quiet prayer she was always
whispering, and maybe Gloria had been damned by her father’s church, by being
raised a Protestant. Maybe it was that Carl’s sins in prison were great enough
to damn them both.

She shook such thoughts from her head. How many extra days
would she suffer in her damnable state for thinking such things? And how many
more days for feeling this fear rather than true guilt? And more days heaped on
for worrying about that? And that? And so on and forever—

A smell distracted her. It came from the woods, the drift of
meat. Gloria’s feet chose to put distance between the rest of her and the
water’s edge. She bumped into a low wrought-iron fence once, twice, before
finding the gap that led into the deeper woods. There, through the crunching
leaves and scattering of squirrels, a group of her kind had formed, a cluster
of the damned. They milled about the base of a tree, arms in the air, rotting
noses lifted high.

Gloria looked. She saw the dangling shoes. And then the
swinging legs. There was a scabbed knee with a dried trickle of delicious red
running down a shin. There were arms wrapped around a mother, who was wedged
between the great divide of the tree’s largest boughs, fifteen or more feet off
the ground. And over the grunts and struggles of the tottering dead rained the
whispers of a parent who did not seem to know that those below could still
hear, still understand:

“Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

Lies, Gloria thought, joining the others. She stared
heavenward. The woman smoothed the young girl’s hair, consoling her. She looked
ten or eleven, but starvation took years as well as pounds. The mother peered
down, cheeks gaunt, and watched the new arrivals. Gloria felt horrible for
these two. Gloria was starving.

The child sobbed. Her feet kicked out of agitation. Or maybe
those frail legs had grown so used to running the past weeks that they couldn’t
stop moving. While they wheeled the air, Gloria circled the tree, her eyes
locked on that limb, the smell of the living intoxicatingly near and impossibly
far. Here was the manna of her desire, craving it even as she feared it,
causing her to wonder, with the hellishness of all that she’d seen and the
ungodly predicament of mother and child, not how the two of them had gotten up
on that limb and what would become of them, but what Gloria had done to deserve
to be there, to be left wandering in circles on that lowly, cursed, and unholy
ground.

12 • Michael Lane

Michael balanced on a flopping leg, a limb like a
prosthetic, kicking his unfeeling foot forward as split bone bore down on split
bone. He moved slowly in this teetering fashion toward the end of the garbage
strewn alley behind his apartment building. A handful of undead just like him
shuffled past. There was a smell of the living, the smell of meat, new smells
instantly understood. Unless these odors had always been there, and now his
locked-in state made him newly sensitive to them. Or perhaps not sensitive to
them—maybe he had simply become dead to everything else.

Wavering in the street on his busted legs, the air swirling
around him, Michael saw that all of New York now resembled his apartment. There
was trash everywhere. Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing
with them before losing interest, before becoming distracted. Several were
wrecked, hoods bent, glass everywhere. It was close to noon, and the buildings
stood tall without shadow. The pavement held that mild warmness in the middle
of a fall day, that brief respite before the chill set back in with the night.

How long since Michael had been bitten? How long since he’d
used? It felt like a week ago that there’d been a banging on the door. It had
to be the Chinese food, about two goddamn hours too late. Or maybe the bitch
down the hall with the rock she owed him.

It’d been neither. A grotesque monster, some kind of a
prank, but a bite on his wrist anyway.

Michael could still hear the slammed door, the slobbering
noises and the bangs on the walls.

That thing could smell him. It was after him the way he’d
gone after the cat, the way he’d gone after his mother.

Michael’s stomach was at a boil. He felt clammy and cool.
There was a stench in the air, a new reek across a city rife with them, and he
suspected he contributed to the foulness.

How long since he’d been bitten?

Michael felt his insides shiver from something like
withdrawals, but different. Another itch he couldn’t scratch, a new urge
wafting on the air along with the smoke from various fires. Several blocks away
he could see more monsters like him, like that fucked-up asshole at the door
who bit him. They were staggering after one smell, but there was some other
scent closer by—