I, Zombie (16 page)

Another squeak.

Again.

It was the big wheel bolted to the brick, the wire sliding
around. Jeffery couldn’t move, but he could gaze through the rusted bars of
that fire escape and watch the red fish dart through the air, contracting and spreading
its fins. He watched the child swing after, tiny hands clutching the empty air,
a good boy in a different window chewing something while he accepted the
impossible. Chewing something. Pulling wire. While a hunger of a different sort
took hold of the man formerly known as Jeffery Biggers.

Part IV • The Leftovers

Rhoda Shay •
Carmen Ruiz • Margie Sikes

30 • Rhoda Shay

The streets of New York glittered like those rare moments
after a sudden hailstorm. That slice of startled time when clouds part, the sun
returns, and its light catches in a field of summer ice before hot pavement
vanishes it into puddles. Rhoda had seen it happen a few times in the city,
frozen balls the size of her thumb falling from the sky on a hot and humid day,
a thing to puzzle over before it was gone and she was left wondering what had
happened, something to call a friend to verify, to turn to Google for answers.

But this wasn’t one of those long-ago days. It wasn’t hail,
this glittering field. It wasn’t warm enough in the city for ice to fall from
the sky. This was the weather of the apocalypse, the sign that the end times
had arrived. It was streets of broken glass. Broken glass everywhere, and no
one left to sweep it up.

Rhoda trudged through the glitter, unable to divert her
course, and the shards crunched beneath her bare feet. The pain was
intolerable, but that’s precisely what she had to do: tolerate it. There was no
choice, no motor function, not really. She couldn’t even roll her feet to the
outside to lessen the impact. The glass simply drove deep into her sensitive
soles with every new shimmering puddle of it she crept through. Just a plodding
shuffle, pure pain lancing up through her bones and into her knees, a constant
flame held to the tenderness of her poor feet, all for not being adequately
prepared.

She should’ve prepped differently. Rhoda kept berating
herself for not prepping differently. All around her were people in shoes, some
in boots, women in heels that had popped off their feet and clung to their
ankles, the dainty straps like thin and desperate arms. They dragged along
behind bare feet through pink-tinted glass.

There was a woman up ahead in trainers, glorious trainers. A
man in work boots, a blue-collar and burly man that Rhoda would never have
traded places with under any circumstances. But now. Oh, now. His steel-toed
Hummers crunched through the glass oblivious to the pain, and this was all
Rhoda could think about. Nerve endings burned throughout her body. The pain was
up to her elbows. She thought of that guy from
Moonlighting
who’d gone
bald and been in that movie, the one with the skyscraper. The scene of him
sitting down and pulling clear daggers out of his feet, she couldn’t stop
picturing that scene. Rhoda had daggers like that right up against the bone,
could feel her shredded flesh dragging across the pavement behind her in torn
ribbons. Another glittering puddle ahead, and the scent was gonna drag her
right through it. Shop glass: the worst. From a nearby storefront looted early
on. There were real jewels in the window, absolutely worthless.

Worthless.

Rhoda’s mind swung back and forth around what was valuable
and what wasn’t. She’d been through this once before, a breakdown just like
this. And now somewhere, someone was probably coming across her stash. She
feared they were finding what she’d hidden away, and at the same time: she
hoped someone was. She hoped it wouldn’t go to waste. She imagined them
breaking into her apartment and finding her closet full of prepper gear, all
the gear her friends had made fun of her for.

A closet full of supplies. Water, food, camping gear,
purification tablets, protection, even a small generator that she ran once a
week like the manual said. Exhaust hose shoved out the window, her tiny
apartment smelling faintly of gas. There was a pump for pulling moisture out of
the air that she could never quite get to work right, not the liter of potable
fluid a day that it promised. There were the flashlights and a radio that she
could wind up to power. Everything in her closet that her friends said she
didn’t need, not in New York City, that island of plenty.

They made fun of her for keeping her clothes in plastic
crates, shoved under the bed, the bed she’d raised on cinder blocks to make
more room. They’d made fun of her apartment, not quite 400 square feet, and a
good bit of that devoted to the end times. They told her to live in the
moment
,
the
now
. Rhoda had always smiled and kept her thoughts to herself. She
knew. She watched the History channel, which was as good as any university, and
she learned. She studied. She read all the books, the ones she had to order
because the library didn’t carry them.

And Rhoda got ready.

Her sister Charlotte had outed her at Thanksgiving two years
back. Charlotte claimed to be worried about her, said she saw the stuff Rhoda
was reading, or maybe she’d heard from her friends or spotted the pattern on
Facebook. Whatever. She had grown concerned. And so she outed her right there
in the kitchen in front of everyone. Rhoda’s mom had been confused.

“I think it’s fine that she dresses nice,” her mother had
said, peering into the oven to make sure she didn’t burn the turkey like the
year before.

“
Prepper
, mom,” Charlotte had said, exasperated. “Not
preppy.”

Rhoda had argued and felt betrayed as Charlotte explained
the differences. But their mother was impervious to either of their worries.
While Charlotte stressed about where her sister was putting her money, Rhoda
had much larger concerns. She tried to tell them all that could happen, explain
to her mother and sister about the Mayans and how their calendar could be read
so many different ways, that time could run out tomorrow or maybe ten years
later. And didn’t they know New York was due for the Next Big One? Or about the
bees and their collapsing colonies? Or how water was running out, and the
weather changing? Didn’t they watch the news? Tornados were popping up everywhere.
And look at what happened to the dinosaurs. Another impact like that, and every
human being alive—

A stab of pain reminded Rhoda of the
now
, of the
moment
.
It dragged her back from the past with an electrical shock shooting up her bare
feet. She wore glass slippers. Glass crunching on glass. Soles embedded with a
fine layer of what felt like razors drenched in alcohol. Needles into her
heels, the flesh between her toes ripped and burning, glass caught between them
and driving between the small bones there. Her feet were being mutilated. It
felt like she was hobbling along on bare bone, on the ends of her shins.

The sight of others in shoes drove her mad. How one was shod
when they got bit was important. Maybe this was the most important thing. It
wasn’t a detail that came up on the History channel, shaking her confidence in
that learning institution. Unless she missed that show. Maybe she had. Boots,
of course, she owned. Good ones. But she never wore them. They were stowed away
in her closet, balls of white paper huddled inside, perfectly safe and snug,
protected from the holocaust.

Her closet.

Rhoda imagined someone finding all her gear. The MREs and
the jugs of water. Guns she’d only fired the once at a range. Stupid stuff.
Before she’d started prepping, before she’d needed to put her bed on cinder
blocks to make room, the closet had been full of clothes. It’d been full of
shoes and belts and jewelry. Preppy stuff.

Her sister Charlotte had been no different, even back then.
Always making fun of how she spent her money. Laughing at her collection of
shoes, some of them too painful to even wear, some of them that didn’t go with
a thing she owned or a night out she could possibly imagine having. And
Charlotte had been right to make fun. Rhoda knew she had a problem. New York
was a difficult place for a woman. So many windows full of tempting footwear,
so dainty and perfect on their glass stands, beautiful just like that: Empty.
Waiting. Footless.

There were shoes that felt perfect off the feet, their
straps caught in the pads of her fingers while Rhoda strolled through the great
lawn in Central Park. Shoes that looked perfect lying on their sides at the
foot of the bed, ready to be donned and seen. Shoes that were wonderful simply
in pairs of pairs of pairs at the bottom of her closet, lined up like soldiers.
Perfect shoes, just knowing she
had
them.

But, instead of wearing them out to be seen, she stayed in
and watched her little TV. And the shoes ate at her soul. Money wasted.
Charlotte’s voice. The end was coming, and she would be caught flat-footed. She
wouldn’t be ready. She was wasting her money. Her time. She needed to prepare.

When it finally and truly dawned on her, she’d made a
drastic change. There had been a purge, and the purge had made Rhoda feel
alive
.
Her friends were more than happy to come over and paw through her collection,
seeing what fit, snagging designer heels at a fraction of the price. Rhoda
watched them behave like animals. She watched from the bed, seeing herself as
she had once been, digging through the aisles at Macy’s on Memorial Day. She
had been disgusted and relieved, seeing people she thought she knew behave like
that. They paid her a fraction, and she took it gladly, the proceeds going to
things that
mattered
. Rhoda would prepare for the worst. And when her
few and sporadic dates came over after dinner or back from a bar, she would
pray they wouldn’t look inside her closet at the things she had chosen to
accumulate.

More glass in the streets. Glass from smashed traffic and
from storefront windows, glass from overhead where people had tossed furniture
out of offices to make the only escape they knew how. Glass from bottles tossed
for fun and dropped by looters, all picked up a shard at a time by tender
flesh.

She should have known better, should have taken steps. But
how would she have guessed that her mind would make this journey intact, that
her flesh would rot, her nose wear away, while her every thought remained to
haunt her?

Charlotte had been right: Rhoda had been a blasted idiot.
She had wasted her money and time prepping to survive. Stomping heavily through
that shimmering hell-storm, that weather of the apocalypse, she dwelled on all
she’d done and the money she’d spent to prepare for her survival. When what she
should’ve been readying for was what came
after
.

31 • Carmen Ruiz

There were three of them still alive in the break room:
Jackie, Sam, and Anna. Carmen could hear them talking through the door. She
could smell them through the walls and through the vents. The two women cried
while Sam tried to comfort them, but Carmen could smell the fear on him the
worst. They talked and talked and filled the air with their ripe scents, no
clue that the rest of the office could hear what they were saying, could smell
what they were afraid of.

Carmen jostled among her coworkers outside the door, her
belly swollen with an overdue baby and yesterday’s grisly meal. She could flash
back to eating Kassie or being bitten by Rhonda, but where does the blame
start? Where does it stop? Each of them did what they were bound to do, and it
probably went right back to the very first person with the sickness. Bit by a
monkey in a lab somewhere, pricked by an experimental needle, a rip in a white
suit, any of the scenes from all the films Carmen had seen.

However it started, there was a chain of blame that linked
them all together. Carmen had been angry at the start, angry and scared, pissed
at Rhonda, but those feelings had grown stale as the days piled up. Gruesome
black bites marked the faces and arms of men and women she’d known for years,
and it was getting hard to remember who had bitten whom. Those frantic days
were long gone: the quarantine of the office, the handful who had tried to make
it home, the cell phones clogged from overuse and then batteries dead from
trying over and over anyway.

Now there were only three of them left, terrified and
starving in the break room, and Carmen could hear them conspiring. They didn’t
know she and the others could understand. How could they? How could they know
the monsters jostling outside the door were still aware of what was going on?
Look at Mr. Helm, their asshole boss. He stumbled around in the dim hallway
with the rest, eyes glazed over, shoulders hunched, a nasty wound on his chin
where white bone peeked out between flaps of gray flesh. He looked as dead as
the rest, but Carmen knew better. He was locked away just like her, trapped
with his own demons, brushing up against the rest and hungry as hell.