I, Zombie (13 page)

“Fuck,” he remembered saying, realizing his situation. He
remembered the bark of a cuss, a war-born habit. And even though the shit of
the world had been up to his eyeballs in that closed-in alley, some part of him
had felt bad for dropping the F-bomb around the kid. As if the tyke were even
old enough to learn words. As if a word were any worse a thing to learn than
all the craziness beneath Jeffery’s knee and crowding past that wrecked van.
Words were hollow compared to this, and yet some of them still felt good to
say. Good and wrong, what with that kid strapped to his back.

There were six or seven of the air-chomping assholes in the
alley. They squeezed between the wrecked van’s rear bumper and the brick
apartment building, drawn in by the baby’s screams, no doubt. There was a loud
pop at Jeffery’s feet. He glanced up, thinking something had been dropped from
above, then felt a thing brush up against his boot. Flinching, he slapped his
hand at the trash to shoo off the rats and felt the mother’s hand grabbing for
him, instead.

Glancing down, Jeffery saw her arm snaking back around at
him, out of joint, muscles so desperate to get at him that they’d popped her
shoulder. He gagged at the sight, this misshapen animal face-down in open bags
of rotten garbage, an arm waving at him like some appendage, like a tentacle or
tail. What the fuck was he doing down there? And the baby’s screams were
deafening—it was fucking up his mojo. What they hell had he been thinking,
dropping into that alley? He’d been munching potato chips five minutes ago,
safe and sound, and now this.

The half dozen chompers reached the dangling fire escape.
Too many to dodge. Jeffery wasn’t sure if he could make the bottom rung in one
try, anyway, not with the baby on his back. While the chompers shuffled toward
him, he scanned the alley, his heart pounding, for sure they’d gotten him now.
Him and the baby. Fucking pointless, coming down there, trying to save anything
in that world.

Behind him, the opposite end of the alley ended abruptly in
a brick wall. A building had been planted between two other buildings, New
York’s empty alleys serving as vacant lots. The chompers were twenty paces
away, and Jeffery had to move. He had to release the pissed off mom beneath his
knee, needed to make a run for it. He cursed the developers who’d clogged the
alleys with their skinny-ass buildings, who’d bricked up so many windows, who’d
made running and surviving an absolute bitch.

There was a dumpster across the way. Jeffery made sure the
yuppie backpack thing was snug over his shoulders. He grabbed the aluminum pole
he’d dropped in the trash, looked for the trashcan lid, decided to leave it,
and dashed to the large green container. His knees banged on the metal as he
scampered up on the plastic lid. The thing rang hollow, its booming echoes
upsetting the child and setting off its wails once more.

The dumpster’s lid sagged under his weight. Jeffery glanced
up to see the kid from earlier hanging out his window, watching him. Fucking
spectator. Jeffery remembered watching his fair share of disasters the past
weeks, wondering when he’d be on the other side. And now here he was. He gazed
longingly over the heads of the scrambling groaners as they arrived at the
dumpster and clawed and banged against it. The black painted ladder of the fire
escape dangled from the sky, an apartment up there that he knew was clean, no
chompers hiding in the bathroom, some food and diet cokes in the pantry.

The mother with the fucked-up shoulder righted herself and
joined the others around the dumpster. A few were actually trying to climb up,
were miming with their legs like walking up steps, the stupid fucks. Jeffery
could smell them over his own weeks-old ripeness. A fucking mass grave, that’s
what they smelled like. He was standing over the lip of that one in Samawah,
the reek of rotting flesh swirling up out of the desert soil. Goddamn, nothing
smelled worse than the long dead. The mother waved one arm for her baby,
wanting to eat the damn thing and Jeffery both. Its other arm hung like a
flapping sleeve by its body, the shoulder not right. More of the chompers were
squeezing in between the van and the building. No fuckin’ way out. Goddamn. And
that mother really had her eyes set on him.

The lid to the dumpster popped and shifted beneath his feet.
Jeffery backed up toward the brick wall behind him. No windows low down on this
side of the alley. He pushed against the building to see if he could slide the
dumpster on its rusted wheels. No fuckin’ way. Like trying to shove a Hummer
uphill. The goddamn undead were rustling the thing, though. The dumpster was
shaking and jiving as they bumped mindlessly for the meat up on the lid.

Fucking meat. All those chompers wanted was a bite of his
flesh. At least, if he went like this, he’d be a pile of bones. Better that
than a nick and getting free. He’d seen both cases. Better to be bones.

The baby stopped screaming. It left the alley full of the
grunts and ahhs from the hungry dead. Their teeth clacked on the air, their
empty and unblinking eyes fixated on Jeffery. And oh, fuck, he had this idea.
Fuck. He glanced up the wall and saw the kid in the window still peepin’ at his
misadventures, leaning out over the sill. Black boy. Local, probably. In his
teens, younger than Jeffery had figured at first. Goddamn, it’d suck to have
anyone watch this. Like a fuckin’ conscience. Like God himself staring down
while you did something gravely wrong.

Jeffery thought of all the times he’d been too terrified to
masturbate when he was that boy’s age, worried God was watching. Now he worried
about this teenager seeing what he was about to do. He loosened the yuppie
pack. The chompers wanted meat. Jeffery had meat on him.

The baby resumed its wailing as soon as he got it free. It
wailed as he held it out, dangling it like a bag of takeout over the undead,
and this awful idea formed solid like a scab in Jeffery’s mind.

Starving eyes lifted to the baby. The dumpster jostled as
the damn thing was surrounded, arms waving, more chompers crowding in, nudging
the large metal box with their gyrations and hungry growls.

Jeffery felt the eyes from above, staring down. Goddamn, he
thought. Don’t watch this shit. He held the aluminum painter’s pole between his
knees and loosened the plastic rings that let the sections extend, let the
brush reach those high ceilings.
Please, God
, Jeffery thought.
Please
don’t watch this shit
—

26 • Jeffery Biggers

Days had passed since he’d dropped down into that alley, and
Jeffery had run the end of his life over and over in his mind. There was always
something he’d change, a knife to take down with him, lowering that damn
ladder, being just a bit faster, but never a regret about going in general.
Never a pang of regret for that child.

He headed south. There was no traffic—the noise of the city
had just stopped, those great and ceaseless rivers of mostly yellow falling
perfectly still. The last bit of flow had come days ago with that white pickup
that’d barreled through Harlem, an old man behind the wheel trying his
damnedest to get the fuck out. He had plowed through row after row of chompers
like high corn, tossing bodies aside and running them over.

When his front axle got stuck on a pile of crushed
chompers—mounds of them like deep mud—the man had tried rocking it back and
forth, the transmission growling as he threw it in and out of gear. Gathering
around him, the starving mob had banged on the glass while spinning rubber tore
through the bodies stuck beneath the cab. Arms had waved under there like thick
grass, the rest of the person crushed. And the smell, an odor horrible enough
to drown out all the other horrible smells, rubber and flesh both heating up to
burning.

Jeffery hadn’t been one of the lucky ones that got run over,
hadn’t been one of those too far away to miss out on the feed. He’d been
somewhere in the middle, that worst place possible.

That had been the last time he’d seen a moving vehicle, that
white man in that white truck plowing through the hordes of chompers. Now the
streets stood still, grotesque and disfigured men and women prowling among the
cars like bugs picking through rocks. High above, shapes moved behind
shimmering windows, no telling if the people inside were dead or undead, not
unless there was a jagged hole and the breeze blew just the right way.

This was what his city had become. Shattered glass, unmoving
traffic, hungry packs roaming aimlessly.

But not Jeffery. He was aimless no longer. He felt a pull
southward like the slope of a crater, felt drawn by more than the mere scent of
the living. Drawn by something else.

It occurred to him, as he strode toward the winter sun in
its low, noonday position, that this wasn’t the first time he had looked south
while all the traffic stopped. He had been fourteen when the planes hit. He
remembered the smell, that acrid odor of asbestos and melted steel and who knew
what else. Paper had fluttered on the breeze clear up to Harlem, little charred
pieces of the stuff like burning snow. That was how white-collar buildings
bled: They leaked paperwork, filing cabinets full of the shit, coughing it out
through broken glass to flap in the same wind that brought the smoke all the
way up to Harlem.

The wind had been out of the south that day, just like it
was right then. It was the world’s way of sharing its misery with the whole
island, the stench flowing through the glass caverns of uptown, over the park,
and infecting the colored streets with the ruin of a white man’s world.

At the time, of course, Jeffery hadn’t known what the smoke
was all about, hadn’t understood the sickness at the yoke of those planes, but
he knew a personal attack when he saw one. He knew when a man fronted you, you
didn’t back down. Men were like dogs. You give ‘em something to chase, and
they’ll chase it. You turn, and they’ll bite you.

And so his mother had cried when he’d enlisted. Jeffery
didn’t tell her beforehand. Shit, she still had the acceptance letter from
Medgar Evers on the fridge when he deployed, dreamed of him coming home and
getting a business degree, dreamed of him coming home at all.

Jeffery told everyone it was 9/11 that made him sign up.
Part of him believed it. The rest of him knew better. He had known since he was
born that he would go off and fight in a war, whether he wanted to or not. His
old man had fought. Back in his father’s day you were drafted by law rather
than circumstance. The world sent a man off to fight another man who had never
fronted at all, just wanted to be left alone. It weren’t like Pearl Harbor or
9/11, some slap in the face like that shit. His old man said it was just
confused men killing confused men so they might be the one to come home in one
piece. That was all.

Jeffery believed him. He knew his father. Not like
knew-who-he-was
,
but really knew him. That bullshit about black boys not knowing who their
daddies were drove him fucking crazy. Every kid he grew up with knew who his
daddy was. How could you not, when your momma spent most of her days cursing
his name over and over, telling her kids what a shit that man was. Most
everyone knew their father, sometimes got a letter or a guilty glance on the
street, but Jeffery was different. He
knew
his dad. They’d spent hours
and hours bullshitting after the war, drinking malts on the stoop while kids
screamed down the street and traffic drifted by, his father telling him the
shit he’d seen, Jeffery keeping mostly quiet.

The talks would last until nine o’clock, when his dad would
get up, knees making noises, and reach out a hand calloused from handling ropes
all day. The Liberty Landing Ferry made its first run at five in the morning.
Jeffery’s dad had to be on the boat by four-thirty. So they would shake hands
around nine, father and son, and his dad would glance up at the lit window a
few stories above but never ask how she was doing.

“No one told you that you
had
to do it,” his father
often said back then, referring to the fighting Jeffery had done.

And Jeffery had known right from the start what his old man
was trying to say. There was something different about volunteering, something
else about being
taken
. All the questions about who he was dating, was
he in love, what’s she like, any kids? Jeffery knew his old man. He had worried
that his son, this second chance at life, a life full of freedom and free of
mistakes, would mess up and lose the same wars he’d lost. The same wars
overseas and battles in those streets. Battles in one’s own mind.

But Jeffery couldn’t lose. That only happened when a man
fronted you, when you turned and ran. Wars were only lost when they breathed
down your neck. And so Jeffery headed south, drawn by more than the breeze,
freer in some ways than the unthinking monsters crushing and bumping all around
him, pulled down the slope of that distant crater, and not for the first time.

There was something else the same, he saw. It was the
crowds, just like all those years ago. People had staggering about, confused,
dazed, half-dead. Jeffery didn’t know what the smoke meant back then, but he
knew where his dad worked. Something bad had happened on the tip of the island.

He was cutting class that day, not because he did it often,
but the weather had been too nice for being inside. He could feel it that
morning when he left the apartment, the crispness in the air like a spring or
fall day that would warm up to something special. The sort of day where clouds
played hooky, and so should he.

At first, people said it was a bomb. Some said it was a fire
or a small plane, like a Cessna. All Jeffery knew was that it had happened at
the World Trade Center, and that’s where his father worked. That’s where he
said he worked, anyway. Jeffery had never been. All the weekends he’d been
invited out to ride the boat back and forth across the Hudson, and he’d never
been.