I, Zombie (17 page)

The three of them inside the break room argued for the
dozenth time about what to do. There had been five of them for a while. Louis
had made a run for it. The idiot tried crawling through the ceiling, white
flakes of Styrofoam or whatever the hell those panels were made of snowing down
in drifts while he crept noisily overhead. Carmen had been one of the small
pack to follow, sniffing after him. When the idiot broke through and crashed
into Margarite’s cubicle, she’d gotten a few bites in before the others crowded
her away. And then there’d been four of them left to argue about what to do.

The three who now remained argued over the food, over how to
get started. Anna said she wanted to start a fire. Sam called her a stupid
bitch. He was from accounting, where Carmen imagined the phrase
stupid bitch
was common. He reeked of fear. Bullied the others. Carmen was hungry for him.
She was hungry in general. Everyone was. But she had a baby inside her, taking
up space, and maybe that made her more famished than the rest.

There were footsteps in the break room, the smell of Jackie
approaching the door. She pounded on it with her fists. She yelled at those
outside, almost as if she knew their souls were still trapped in there, as if
she knew they would hear. But Carmen suspected she just needed to yell at
something.

“Goddamn you!” Jackie screamed. “Let us go, you fuckers!”

Anna tried to calm her down. Sam told her to shut the fuck
up. He said if they kept quiet, maybe the infected would leave. But Jackie knew
what Carmen and the rest of the undead office knew: They weren’t leaving. None
of them were. Maybe not ever.

The survivors returned to their discussion in the break
room. There were plastic forks and plastic knives. There had been five of them,
now there were three. Louis had gotten himself eaten when he fell through the
ceiling. Bits of him were all over Margarite’s desk, smears on a monitor. On
both sides of the break room door, there were groans from trapped and tortured
souls. Sam told the girls that the plastic knives were a lot sharper than they
looked. Anna wanted to build a fire. Sam told her she was a dumb bitch, that
they would suffocate.

And so the shambling monsters of
Della, Baigaint &
Padder
moved in agitated circles outside the break room. There was a smell
in the air, a maddening smell. On the other side of the door, a starving trio
continued to argue, even as they began to eat. There were five of them two days
before. Carmen and the others had gotten one. Now she listened as Sam showed
them just how sharp the plastic knives were, sharp enough to bite into flesh.
Anna made gagging sounds. She wanted to build a fire. Jackie sobbed and filled
the air with fear while Sam took the first bite.

There had been five of them, now three. Carmen shuffled in
circles, her stomach full of unborn baby and the meat of her coworkers. And she
wondered, listening to the survivors in the break room eat their gory meal, how
the barred door between them made them any different.

32 • Margie Sikes

There was a boy in the back seat, no more than fifteen or
sixteen, and not for the first time, Margie Sikes found herself feeding on the
young. She ripped the poor boy apart, him kicking and screaming and pleading
for her to stop, tears rolling down his unblemished cheeks, Margie trying her
best not to think of what she was doing.

The boy had been cornered car-hopping. Margie had seen it
before, had even seen it work a time or two. Survivors ran through the streets
and dove into intact cars while they waited for the wind to shift and lure the
infected away. She’d seen it work up close. A good seal on a car, and the smell
of its contents would eventually fade. It was maddening to be driven off by a
fickle breeze. In her mind, she knew a good meal lay cowering on the floorboard
of that SUV, but her brain would catch a whiff elsewhere, and try as she might
to urge herself to stay and wait the hopper out, her feet would carry her
inanely upwind toward some other struggling soul.

The smart hoppers stuck with the newer model vehicles.
Tempered glass. Better seals and gaskets around the doors. And if there was
space in the parked traffic and keys in the ignition, one might even roar to
life and go on a spree or just sit and run the heat for a while. The sprees
were something to watch. Besides the distant helicopters and the wildlife, the
streets were a dull and lifeless place. The only movement was that of a rotting
corpse shuffling behind storefront glass or in a restaurant full of tipped
chairs and tangled bones. To see an exhaust sputter in the crisp fall air, hear
an engine roar, watch a grille smack down a few of her own—it was exhilarating
to Margie. She was just happy to be whatever she was. Not-quite-dead. Senses
intact. Here, for however much longer.

The boy in the old gray sedan stopped screaming, but his
limbs continued to move as Margie tore into his abdomen. Arms that waved feebly
with the last of his young life. Groans and murmurs escaping his lips, but he
made them insensibly. These were the noises people made in deep comas,
tiptoeing along that narrowing ledge that everyone scooted across, a ledge that
eventually melded into flat stone high above a deep and shadowy ravine.

Glass from the sedan’s shattered window gouged into Margie’s
stomach as she bent over the door and worked on the boy. She had a grandson
this kid’s age. Nathan, her eldest daughter’s boy. Margie wondered if upstate
New York was similarly cursed. She tended to think it wasn’t. That part of New
York was a world apart. They shouldn’t even share a name, the city and the
state. Two completely different things. Like the difference between the living
and whatever Margie had become.

Others in her pack jostled behind her, fairly roaring in
frustration. They clawed at her and the air, which was heady with the scent of
a feed. It was a private snack for Margie, who was swifter than most. Always at
the front. Always first to dine. She stuffed herself with the soft and easy
meat in the boy’s stomach. She deserved it. It was she who had gotten him open.

The human body was a tricky thing to tear into without the
proper tools. It reminded Margie of her honeymoon in Puerto Rico nearly sixty
years ago, trying to get into that coconut. It wasn’t until a local showed her
husband how to strike it on a rock, peel back the husk, then crack the nut on
some sharp edge that they’d gotten the knack of it.

With a body, she’d found, the first bite was the hardest.
Trickier than you’d think. A flat abdomen could have teeth scraped across it to
no effect. Fat around the middle made it easier, but the easy kills were gone
or had wasted down to bone. A bite along the ribs usually gave purchase. Once a
hole was started, like digging that first finger into the skin of an orange,
the rest could be gradually peeled away. It was a pain, however, when the
orange was kicking you in the chest and clawing at your eyes. But the hunger
always found a way.

Margie stuffed herself with the choice bits before she was
crowded out. Glass from the old window broke off in her abdomen. The pack
roared forward. A fat old woman grabbed some of the intestine hanging from
Margie’s fist and chewed on that. A man caked in yesterday’s blood dove for
Margie’s face to lick around and inside her mouth, lapping at the blood Margie
was still trying to swallow. She recoiled in horror at this, and luckily her
body did as well, lurching away from the man, a maggot stuck in her gums that
must’ve come from him. The pack swelled in size and crowded close, and Margie
was lucky to be squeezed toward the perimeter. There was the loud crack of more
glass shattering. Someone began wasting their time going for the brains through
the other door, that frustrating and alluring coconut.

As she stumbled away, overly full, Margie shat herself.
There was no telling which feed it was, if it was the girl from yesterday or
the old man from two days ago that ran down her legs. No one to sponge her.
Staggering down the street, giddy and drunk from a feed, Margie thought of her
old nurse and how what had seemed miserable in the days of the before was now a
luxurious dream. Someone to bathe her, a feeding delivered on a plastic
tray—old humiliations she would now kill for.

She passed a Bank of America with an odd scene, a man
infected and stuck inside the glass ATM room, all alone. There were smears
across the glass where he’d bumped against it or banged with his fists, a
spread of gore from a long-ago feed. He gazed hungrily past Margie at the crowd
in the streets. He was trapped there by the sudden loss of electricity,
probably aware of what it would take to pry his fingers in the sliding doors
and pull them aside, but unable to communicate this to his limbs. Margie felt
bad for him. He was stuck in there forever. She thought again of that coconut.

Another faint scent pulled her past the ATM. It was
difficult to nose over the fresh blood dripping from her chin. Ironically, the
smell seemed to point toward the hospital, her old hospital. She thought of her
nurse and the nice doctors there, helping her through those last years, a
service that had become expected. Seven hundred dollars a day. More, when there
were procedures. Gobs more when the procedures had complications.

Margie thought of her eldest daughter upstate and her
grandson Nathan. Insurance covered much of it. Her savings and Carlos’s pension
helped with the rest. It was a nest egg, a pile of nuts squirreled away that
once tapped into was easy to keep chewing away at. Margie remembered watching
those savings dwindle as she lay in bed, a daily sponge bath, re-runs on the TV
in the corner, keeping her alive for another day. Another day just like the one
before. Every day precious and miserable.

Margie pictured Nathan as she had last seen him, standing
there beside her bed, fidgeting and glancing from the TV to the door. The boy
had wanted to be anywhere else but standing there, that close to death. His
nose had that wrinkle of someone scared to contract a disease. Margie wondered
how much more disgusted he would have been had he’d known his college education
was keeping her alive. Keeping her around to watch one more re-run, get one
more bath.

She thought of the boy in the gray sedan near to Nathan’s
age. Kicking. Screaming. Begging her to stop. As if she had any choice, any say
in the matter. It was the way things worked. And so Margie Sikes lumbered down
68th, a faint smell in the air, a boy in her belly, remembering the times she
had senselessly fed on the young.

33 • Carmen Ruiz

Forty-eight hours. A mere two days. That was the difference.
Two days before they would’ve induced labor, before they would’ve stopped
waiting. There was a time set—she’d written it down—her baby would be born, or
begin to be born, at two o’clock, right on the dot.

Dot. Dotty. Dorothy.

Carmen still hadn’t decided on a name. They kept coming to
her, every one imperfect. And now, it wouldn’t matter. Maddie. Madeline. She
liked that one.

Something in Carmen’s belly moved. At least, she thought it
did. It was impossible to tell. Her limbs were lifeless and yet full of some
other
life. Both dead and animated, her arms and legs stirred beyond her control. She
wanted dearly to rub her belly, to feel her baby kick. Other times, she wanted
it to be still.

Two days.

If she hadn’t been bitten by Rhonda, there would already be
a new person in the world. A little baby to demand a name. If Carmen hadn’t
been bitten, she probably would’ve given birth in the office building
somewhere, maybe locked up in the break room with Anna and the others.

A scene played out in her head: Sam delivering the baby,
Anna mopping her head with water from the cooler, Jackie holding her hand—

No, that wouldn’t work. The water from the cooler was almost
out. They wouldn’t waste what was left on her.

She imagined lying on the floor, knees spread before her
coworkers, the tile running red around her with amniotic fluid and blood and
who knew what else. It was easy to imagine such a scene. Blood ran down her
legs already from what she’d done to Alice. Two cubicles over for the last five
years, and now she was the stickiness beneath Carmen’s maternity dress. Now
Carmen’s belly bulged with more than one life.

The carpet beneath her feet was threadbare and stained.
Coffee, ink toner, blood, cigarette burns, all from the past weeks: the panic,
the fighting, the feeding. She roamed the same patches, the same winding
circuit as the others, shuffling across a carpet that told stories, some gory
impressionist painting.

Manet. What a beautiful name.

All around her, throughout the sea of neatly cubed personal
spaces with their shoulder-high walls, the scent of the barely living stirred
through lifeless vents and ducts. The odor caused Carmen and the others to gyre
like leaves and sticks in a stream’s eddy, trapped but always moving.

Always moving.

A mere two days.

If she hadn’t insisted on working right up to the last
moment, she might’ve been in Jersey with her mom right then. No bite. A doctor
delivering her baby instead of Sam in the break room, instead of whatever would
happen now. A hospital with food, water, the unimaginable glory of juice or any
meal but meat. She’d be able to brush her teeth whenever she wanted. Take a
shower. Talk. Say her baby’s name, hear what it sounded like in her ears rather
than her mind. She couldn’t even whisper a name.

But she had insisted on working—she’d bragged about working
right up to the last moment. She had fantasized about her water breaking at her
desk.
See? This was serious
. An ambulance would come. A procedure had
been scheduled. Maybe they would have to cut her open. It would require
surgery.