I, Zombie (18 page)

So much to prove. So much guilt about being a mom, the
maternity leave, the imagined whispers and the words she placed behind every
glance at her belly. All Carmen could think of was the incredible amount of
work the baby would mean for her, but what she imagined was everyone else
thinking:
Vacation. Leave time. Unfair. More work for us.

So much guilt. For what? For bringing life into the world?

Carmen fumed as her powerless meandering took her into Mr.
Helm’s office. There was a vent in there that still oozed the smallest hint of
life, probably from the break room, maybe from Louis’s antics in the ceiling.
Bumping around the wide desk, arms wavering in front of her, she made a circuit
past the tall windows, an executive’s reward for years of service, for never
moving on to something better.

Through the expanse of glass, she spotted Jersey. Across the
Hudson, where no boats stirred, no barges or ferries, the sun twinkling on
ripples that gave her a sense of the forgotten and inaccessible wind. The
buildings across the water stood like silent observers, like tourists huddled
against a railing, their windows peeping eyeballs that scanned unblinking this
new disaster across the way.

Carmen looked hard for signs of life while she had the
chance. She scanned the shore, looking for little blips of people with
binoculars, men talking into radios with a plan for saving them all, but it was
perfectly still.

Perfectly still.

Hudson was a good name for a boy. Knowing the sex would be
nice. It would narrow it down. But Carmen wanted to be surprised. She told
everyone the child was a surprise.

Lumbering around the desk, she lost the view and stared at a
wall, a calendar of appointments, a clock that still ticked on its little
batteries. What did that glimpse of the far shore tell her? No movement. And
what still moved anymore? Only the dead.

So Jersey must be alive, Carmen decided. Or was that simply
what she wanted to believe? It was counterintuitive, this idea that stillness
meant life and that movement across the water would just signify more shuffling
and unthinking souls. This could be her wishful thinking, but she truly
believed Jersey was alive for being able to remain quiet, able to hold its breath,
to fall still. Jersey, and perhaps the rest of the country. Carmen thought it
was just Manhattan that had succumbed. This is what she had pieced together
with that occasional view. The rest were pulling back, keeping their distance,
still able to choose where to go and choosing to go away.

Two days.

That’s how long, and she would’ve been there pulling back
with them, clutching her precious baby, reading the headlines, wondering what
horrible things her friends were going through, feeling guilty perhaps for
leaving work, for leaving them behind to have a baby she always said she never
wanted.

But no. She was here. And her legs were sticky with the guts
of a friend. Her dress was a bib of gore. The flesh on her one hand was rotting
away, charred black where Rhonda had gotten her through the door and the others
had left her to become something else. And in her belly, in her belly,
something stirred. A nameless baby moved.

It moved, she was sure of that now. And what still moved?
What moved anymore in that wretched place?

It was counterintuitive, she knew. Or maybe it was just her
fears. Carmen asked herself this question over and over as she lumbered around
the island of cubicles once more, bumping into her coworkers, all of them dead
just like her. Dead, and still moving. The only things that moved anymore.

34 • Rhoda Shay

clack. clack. thwump.

Central Park was covered in frost. Overgrown and unruly
grass let off steam as the ground warmed, the sun slanting through trees
oblivious to the ruin of the city all around this green patch. The trees stood
as motionless sentinels in the calm air of daybreak, dark shapes flitting
between their boughs, birds calling to one another, still thinking about sex
and territory and food while monsters roamed below.

clack. thump.

Fallen and crisp leaves rustled with squirrels. Inured as
ever to the presence of people, they sat on their haunches, cheeks twitching,
and watched Rhoda stumble by. Desperately hungry, she occasionally lurched
toward them when they ranged too close, but the squirrels could bolt out of
reach in an instant. Her body felt as mindless and ineffectual as a dog, always
thinking the next try would nab the impossible. Around a thick tree, two
squirrels chased one another in furry spirals of clicking and scratching claws,
a much more even match. Too even. They would never catch each other or truly
get away.

clack. clack.

The joggers were the only thing missing. The joggers and
those early risers who found the time to sit on park benches with coffees and
newspapers and bagels, their suits and dresses lending them the air of the
gainfully employed. Rhoda guessed it was between six and eight. The sun
normally rose while she was slapping the snooze button or waking up in the
shower. Of all the many and new powerless things, not knowing the time was just
another. No cell phone to glance at. No one to ask. In ancient times, she
imagined people just knew how far along the day was. One glance at the spinning
constellations, and it was time to plant or harvest or head south.

Rhoda’s constellations had vanished. She didn’t even know
they were there until they were gone. There were the joggers in the morning
that let her know she would be early to work, kids being walked to school by
their parents or older siblings, trucks squeaking to a stop by curbs so burly
men could unload boxes of food and cases of beer. There were the subways full
of people hurrying for trains, the express packed so full that the last ones in
had to laugh, their skirts flapping between the rubber seals as the
conductor—after four or five tries to get the doors together—finally zipped
them away from the station.

thump.

There were the nighttime stars that gave her the hour as
well. The crush that spread from Times Square when the shows let out. The boys
and girls in tight jeans flowing to and from Brooklyn in the wee hours, looking
for somewhere hip to hang out. The city changed by the hour. It changed by the
day. The flower district seemed to explode more lushly on Tuesdays and
Thursdays. The streets fell quiet on the weekends, the cabs thinning to a
yellow trickle for much of the morning. Time. Taken for granted. Everything
changing until it didn’t, until the sameness stirred memories of the way things
used to be.

clackclack. clack. thwump.

Rhoda enjoyed the walk through the park. The glass in her
feet didn’t press so hard, and there was less of it to pick up. She watched a
young girl chase a squirrel through the woods. The girl moved fast for one of
the dead, was either recently turned or mad with hunger. Rhoda wanted to call
out that it was no use, to leave the poor things alone, but she probably
wouldn’t even if she could. It wasn’t as if the girl had a choice.

The sun rose while she walked aimlessly. That distant star
no longer lit the undersides of the tall trees, but began to dribble light down
through them. Rhoda passed the wide streets where cars were not allowed, the
separate paths for bikes and anything on wheels. The joggers were the only
thing missing from the hour. There was just one man, a pathetic man on
rollerblades, sitting on his ass with a haunting and bewildered look on his
ashen face. One of his arms was broken and flopped with an extra elbow as he
tried to push himself up. There would be something comical about his plight if
Rhoda didn’t know that a man was still inside there. Still trapped. Locked in
the hour. He was like a broken clock that only felt right once a day as the
rising sun came to him.

She watched him struggle and felt like weeping, imagining
what it must be like to be locked in that head, strapped to those skates,
pushing down with an arm that gave way where arms shouldn’t.

A young girl chased a squirrel and ran face-first into a
tree, and nothing about that was funny to Rhoda.

The man in skates tried once more to get up, but the hour
for skating had passed him by. What remained was sad and pathetic, an awful
drumbeat beneath the singing birds, a sound that faded as Rhoda chased a scent
of the living world she once knew and was starting to forget.

clack. clack.

thump.

35 • Margie Sikes

Margie chased the living down the street, her old bones
moving better than they had in decades. The survivors had squeezed through a
gap between two buildings, another group of undead flushing them out. She moved
as quickly as she could, her legs rotting and yet not falling apart as they
once had. This was something different. Now, she could practically totter. It
felt so fast. Dozens of others shuffled along behind, a few keeping up. The running
meat, five survivors, were hurrying through an alley a block and a half away.

Margie could picture them, even though they weren’t yet in
sight. She’d seen enough survivors clutching their belongings and glancing over
their shoulders with wide eyes. They were invariably thin and gaunt, looking
like how Margie felt. Hunger drove them out. It stirred the living much as it
moved the dead. For weeks, these survivors had taken to scurrying like roaches
through the impressive towers of glass and steel, scrounging for crumbs,
avoiding the slow horrors in the hallways and cubicles until the primal need
for food or water forced them out into the streets.

Margie remembered. She remembered her own time hiding out,
scrounging, getting up from a bed she had long fibbed about not being able to
leave.

This group of five made a now familiar dash. They ran from
one island tower to the next, the streets between like shark infested waters.
Margie could smell each one of them like a distinct meal. Her hunger noted
their hunger, this trotting meat marinating in a hormonal blend of fear and
panic that she longed to taste.

Another pack emerged from an alley; they stopped and turned
what was left of their soft noses into the breeze, half circles of bone visible
beneath their haunted eyes. Holes where noses once lay groped for the scent,
for the smells that had become something like flavored ropes in the air. These
holes in rotting heads grasped for scented threads that led back to their
source, to the meat running and clutching their belongings.

The world looked different and strange to Margie. She could
see the odors in the air. This was how prey saw the world, she thought. This
was how deer made scarce when man intruded. They
knew
long before they
could see.

A small pack of undead lumbered after the survivors. Larger
and slower armies converged from all over. There was no escape. Just a matter
of time. Who ate and who didn’t. Who went hungry and who got a nick and managed
to get away to become something worse than starvation.

The others, the slow, they were converging. The meal would
be hemmed in.

Margie went as fast as her body could, passing a few less
fortunate, the longer-since dead, those with clumsy wounds. Her body was
degrading as well. Only a matter of time. She caught sight of her arms and
hands as she hurried along, the holes in the flesh only half the story. The
soft parts of her were going to waste on the inside as well. Bone rubbed on
bone where tendons and cartilage used to lie. At times, Margie squeaked. Her
curse had taken hold a week ago, give or take. The senseless nights made it
difficult to be sure. Others in her pack fared better or worse, rotted more
swiftly or slowly. It was a puzzle, everything a puzzle. Something to keep her
mind occupied.

The group of five was going to emerge from the alley ahead.
Margie could smell them coming. They had chosen to make their break in the
predawn hours. Smart. The wind was at its most calm during the break of day.
Scents were relatively feeble. But then, the living had no idea the traces they
left, the odors they put out, how the molecules swam through the air. For them,
it was all guessing. She remembered guessing like this, back before she knew.

Two females and three males. Even out of sight, she could
nose them. She followed. Not followed, moved to intercept. They were coming
toward her, half a block away. There was a surge of panic and disappointment in
the air as one of their number tried a door and couldn’t get in. The living
made it hard on their fellow man—their barricades were everywhere. It was only
the desperate starvation that drove them to this. The last of the candy from
smashed vending machines, another water cooler bled dry, that secret stash in a
nurse’s bottom drawer of Cheetos and diet cola, the cramps and headaches from
meals of sugar and little else.

Margie remembered. The hospital had descended into chaos.
Food lying around everywhere, but not for the living. Food lying in beds,
watching TVs.

Her small pack broke out of the alley and across 6th, the
Avenue of the Americas
. Street signs seemed pointless with all the unmoving
cars. No one was going anywhere. She moved to intercept five students of this
lesson, five who were about to learn. The end of them was inevitable. She had
seen it play out too often the past weeks and from both sides. Sometimes she
rooted for the living when they made a break for it—but pity turned to
contentment as the meat was corralled. The living made mistakes, simple ones
from her vantage, the same mistakes she’d made and that the man in the ragged
overcoat beside her must’ve made, that
all
of them in her pack had made.
Dire mistakes that now made sense. Hidden secrets, which seemed suddenly clear.
Give her a second chance with what she now knew, give back her youth and this
knowledge, and Margie thought she’d make it. She’d be one of those she heard
about in rumors who swam the Hudson or East River to safety. She’d be one of
those.