I, Zombie (19 page)

The small group of survivors spotted her pack as they
emerged from the alley. Margie scurried after them. The living twitched in a
way that made them stand out from their surroundings. Everything else swayed
and lurched, lurched and swayed, the dragging of limbs, the pendulum swing of
darkened stoplights, the dance of debris caught up in the wind. But meat alive
had a raw panic in its joints. Heads turned this way and that, noses blind,
eyes scanning the littered streets, wary of danger.

Two of the men in the group wrestled with a door while a
pair of women supported a third man, who seemed to be the one filling the air
with blood smells. There were plenty of buildings wide open, plenty of gaping
maws bashed in with glittering and ragged teeth. But these were both ransacked
and infested. Margie remembered. A group of five didn’t last this long without
learning a few things. She found herself rooting for them a little more as her
pack closed in.

They were smart, this group, but time was running out.
Others were out sniffing for a meal. Margie spotted the rhythmic lumbering of
their approach from a block north, a pack twice the size of her own. They would
converge, she saw. The two men rattled the door, desperate to get inside. They
knew better than to bash it down with a trashcan, to destroy the walls they
would soon need. The smell of the bleeding one was intoxicating. Margie was
near the front of her pack, joints squeaking, angling through the frozen
traffic, piles of clean bones scattered across front seats, just half a block
away.

Margie could see the wide eyes on the girls, the whispering
and urgent lips. Too skinny, these survivors. She wondered if these women had
been too skinny to begin with. The men wrestled with the door and watched both
packs grow nearer, the dead closing like a vise. They were being stupid, now.
It was time to run. Time to grab one of those steel trashcans and bash a hole
through perfect teeth. The time for smart was petering out.

A hundred feet away. The bleeding man hopped on one foot,
scanning the doom lumbering at his group from all sides. A third pack tumbled
around the corner from 22nd. This would be a big feed, an ugly one. Five bodies
and five hundred mouths. Margie felt a rush of dread even as she quickened her
squealing and squeaking pace. Two of her fingers had disappeared in a feed like
this, back in those first days. She still wasn’t sure if she’d done it herself
or if it’d been a neighbor. Her brain had wandered into some kind of orgasmic
state, the feed witnessed through a straw of awareness, pure pleasure squeezing
down around her. She moved now as fast as she could, wishing she could turn and
run the other way, confused by the stupidity of the men wrestling with that
unyielding door.

Paces away, now. Packs converging. The roar of pure hunger,
of intense starvation, like waves crashing on a beach. Margie marveled for the
millionth time at this city that could not feed itself, these towering islands
reliant on daily deliveries, reefers idling along the curb, men with carts
pushing boxes of food from open farmland over the rivers and a distant world
away. No more than two or three days of food stockpiled on the island, isn’t
that what someone had told her? And it had been run through quickly. And now
these poor and ragged things were being swarmed by sharks as they hunted for a
scrap or two.

Margie nosed ahead of the others. A man wearing the remnants
of a business suit at the head of the opposite pack would beat her to them, but
there was enough meat for them all. Here was where rooting for the survivors
ended, where her own needs took over. The world around her narrowed as she anticipated
the orgasmic feast. The five survivors were surrounded, walking corpses
staggering between all the parked and wrecked cars, every avenue of escape
writhing with the undead, closing on the wide-eyed and the stupid, stupid meat.

Movement inside the glass building was mistaken for a
reflection at first. But it was the hurry and twitch of the living. One of the
men by the door shouted to the heavens, a curse or a blessing or a command.

Margie was near enough to taste them when the wires went
taut. The bleeding man straightened, the women stepped away, angry fire
replacing the fear in their eyes. Margie groped ahead of herself, pawing the
air, as the group floated up, sneakers squeaking on a wall of glass, the shouts
from concerted others a few stories up, their smells drifting down as the
overpowering scent of the bleeding man faded.

Three packs converged. Margie was hungry enough to eat the
man in the tattered business suit, whose flesh had not been rotting for long,
might still taste alive. They bumped and jostled while wires sang and sneakers
squeaked. There was movement inside the building.

Margie watched. She saw her own reflection, the hideous
condition of herself, half naked and dilapidating, a hole in her skull where
her nose had been, what flesh remained already old and wrinkled and revolting
from a life much too long in the living. And beyond her reflection, a man with
fire. A twinkling fuse, a rag like a candle. Legs that could still run, fading
deep into her reflection, disappearing into the building’s hallway guts.

The merging packs formed a crush of rot, the heady scent of
blood and flesh replaced by the stench of the unburied dead, the blood and shit
and half-digested flesh in their pants and under their skirts, the groans
vibrating through the mass as they all pushed in toward an empty and confusing
feed.

Margie was pinned against the glass, the living scampering
above to safety, a drop or two of sacrificial blood plummeting down from the
heavens.

The fuse shortened. The candle burned down to the red jug
stenciled with the word “gas.” Margie tried to scream, her loose flesh coming
off as she was smeared against the window, remembering how stupid she’d been.
Remembering.

Until, in a flash, she could remember no more.

36 • Carmen Ruiz

There was a stabbing pain in Carmen’s gut like the twist of
a knife. She felt her knees wobble and very nearly buckle as the thing in
control of her responded to a hurt for once. Her body seemed startled by the
sensation. A few steps more, and the jolt came again. Her chin dipped toward
the source, eyes falling to her swollen belly protruding naked and taut between
her sagging skirt and bunched-up blouse. It was dim on the back side of the
cubicles near the copier room, but she could see her protruding bellybutton
like a small thumb sticking from her belly.

Another lance, a lightning bolt, and Carmen’s shoulder
bumped into the wall and knocked a motivational poster loose, the cheap frame
bouncing to the floor. Donald from the sales department lumbered past, sniffing
at the air, jostling against her. His face was a mess of parallel gashes from
where a colleague had put up a fight. His head turned to follow Carmen as she
staggered past. Her pain was intolerable.

Carmen regretted the lies. She thought Donald and the others
could smell it on her, the lie of this pregnancy. She worried that her mother
knew, that everyone knew this thing inside her was no accident, but rather a
planned and pathetic secret.

The pain in her belly sent Carmen back to a game she used to
play, a soothing game. Alone in the sandbox or at the beach, she remembered the
calming scoops of sand, the way its cool heft conformed to her hand. Carmen
used to love spilling that sand from palm to palm, marveling at the dwindling supply
no matter how carefully she tried to catch it all. A mound would become a
trickle, a pinch, and then a mere row of tiny grains caught in the two lines of
her young hands.

She banged into the water cooler stand, the empty bottle
long since knocked free, as pure agony dragged her from past to present like a
dog shaking a toy with its teeth.

The game. The loose fist. Sand running out through the curl
of her pinky to fall and pile up in her other palm. So careful and exacting,
but it all disappeared. Forty passes, maybe fifty, the wind snatching it away
invisibly.

A lurch in Carmen’s belly. A kick. The game had gone from
soothing to sad as she grew older. She began to see it everywhere, could feel
life mimic this obsession of hers. Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and
love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It
could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It
disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and
love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around,
trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two
palms, stolen by the breeze.

Carmen was punched in the gut. She saw the thumb-like button
of flesh protruding from her belly. A malformed hand was going to come out
right where that button was, a tiny claw ripping her open from the inside.
Carmen could feel her baby gnawing on her organs. At least, that’s what she
thought this was. The pain was her little monster chewing through her, a
grotesqueness that would emerge from her skin like some horror movie.

She silently wept.

She imagined her precious baby eating its way through her
flesh and falling to the ground, helpless. She pictured it dragging behind her
on its slimy cord, wailing and ignored, until it caught on the edge of a
cubicle as she turned a corner.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

She was scared enough being alone, having this baby by
herself, her and some anonymous donor. She was terrified and tired from keeping
the lies straight, the stories of one-night stands and ex-boyfriends, of not
wanting anything to do with the father. The truth was pathetic: she just needed
someone in her life, a person who couldn’t choose to go away.

Oh fuck. That someone was coming. A rage formed in her
powerless limbs, a shuddering violence beneath her skin. It was that feeling
she got in her legs sometimes, the need to shake them, to move them, but no
amount of activity made the sensation go away. So she would try and hold still,
to ride it out, but the pain would grow and grow until she was forced into
paroxysms of jitteriness that still didn’t touch the need, that still left her
feeling cramped with something worse than broken bones.

Carmen wanted to shout. She wanted to plunge from some great
height. The torture in her abdomen grew worse. Her baby was alive. Both alive
and undead. And she would not be giving birth to it so much as watching it
emerge unbidden from a tear in her flesh.

A wave of blackness, pain so intolerable that Carmen came to
on the carpet. Her body struggled to right itself. She moved to her knees,
began to stand. And then a sudden release, another surprise urination, warm and
sticky running down her legs.

Donald circled back and stood over her. Harris was there,
kicking through spilled paperwork. The smell of blood, not urine, was in the
air.

Her knees gave out once more, her shoulder striking the
ground. She flopped onto her back. In the dim space between the cubicles and
the copier room, Carmen lay gazing up at the ceiling, at the hole Louis had
fallen through. There was the smell of blood in the air, the ripe smell of a
thing alive in a space long devoid of such a scent. Pressure between her legs,
the throb of something like a pulse, but Carmen had no pulse. She couldn’t see.
Oh fuck, what was happening to her? She couldn’t see, but could feel a thing, a
solid thing, press between her thighs. And she thought she heard, maybe, just
barely, the cry of her unnamed child as its lungs filled with air for the first
time, born into utter hell, not undead at all.

She thought she heard the cry. It was impossible to tell.
All was drowned out by the hungry gurgles and shuffling feet as her coworkers
converged on their prize, on this thing they had secretly hated her for and now
desired to have for their own.

37 • Rhoda Shay

The eating wasn’t too bad. It was better than the walking.
It meant kneeling down and taking the weight off her glass slippers. And
besides, as foul as the taste was, Rhoda had prepared for this. Life in the
aftermath meant eating for sustenance, not for pleasure. It meant holding one’s
breath and forcing down dry and pre-packaged meals. It meant eating bugs, which
Rhoda had done in abundance to prepare herself. Six times, she had taken that
tour with the smelly guy from Craigslist who for twenty bucks would turn over
logs in Central Park and show you what you could and couldn’t eat. They tasted
like peanuts, he said, and Rhoda hadn’t believed him. Just like peanuts. He’d
been right. The power of suggestion, perhaps.

Rhoda told herself that this feast would be like sushi. It
was a game show. All she had to do to win a million dollars was gobble it down
and keep it down. Which she knew wouldn’t be a problem, she just needed to
forgive the taste.

Two jumpers. She’d seen the remnants of another jumper a
week ago, but it’d been at night and after a soft rain and much of the mess was
gone before her nose led her to the smear. This was fresh. Two others were
already there, lapping up pink globs amid scraps of clothes. The bodies had
exploded, the clothing shredded. Like a bomb going off. Maybe they’d gone from
the top. A man and a woman, judging by the clotted tangle of hair at the end of
one mess and the beard on what looked like a chin a pace away.

The insides were everywhere. Made it easy. Like finding a
buffet on the pavement. Scrambled human. Rhoda fell to her knees, so thankful
to her body for doing so, and the pressure and pain in her mangled feet
lessened. The perpetual burning became a distant hum. Eating meant forgetting
these other things. Being disgusted lessened her physical pain.

A crowd headed their way in the distance. Rhoda ate while
she could. Two jumpers. She wondered if they’d gone together, a lover’s leap.
Maybe they’d held hands. It was hard to tell where their hands were. The man’s
arm had split open like a lobster tail cooked too long, a neat rupture from
impact, a baked potato with all the fixings.