I, Zombie (2 page)

With the animal gone, there was only one other scent of
flesh nearby, only one other piece of meat in the tiny apartment.

Michael’s bloodstained hands banged and gouged at the door,
swimming toward the smell of flesh on the other side. He cried out in silent
despair, knowing what the monster in him craved. There was no controlling it.
He couldn’t even command his swollen tongue to lie still—it lolled with every
grunt and seemed to fill his mouth with its writhing. It felt liable to choke
him.

His fingernails caught on the door’s panels and bent
backward. The smears of cat blood on the door looked like something a child
would come home from school with and be proud of, or something one of the
museums uptown would charge millions for. Michael felt a swallowed laugh,
thinking of that door hanging on a wall with his name under it. The world’s
first zombie art. His laugh came out a gurgle.

The gory brush strokes, meanwhile, worked their way toward
the doorknob. Had he been thinking about how to open the door? He tried not to,
tried to conceal this knowledge from his terrible side, but picturing the
mechanism brought it to the surface. One monster spoke to another, and crimson
claws fell to the fake brass.

Michael couldn’t control it, couldn’t stop himself. All he could
do was spill secrets to this dark animal inside him. All he could do—as
ever—was betray his mother. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was chance, he
thought, as he watched a torturous eternity of banging and fumbling. Maybe it
was just bad luck, all out of his control.

The handle twisted, and the door popped open. Michael
lurched forward, a passenger, a man beating on a window, begging the conductor
to stop, to let him out, to let him just jump out and please run him the fuck
over.

His mother was by the window, right where he’d left her two
days earlier. The curtains rustled in the breeze. It was cold in the room, and
the smell of flesh was intoxicating. It bled into his rush for a fix. It
confused him, this lust for eating the living. A warm patch grew around his
crotch, and Michael realized his bladder was letting loose. He was an animal.
Untrained. Barbaric. Just needs and impulses, cravings, and a mass of muscles
that drove him toward sating those cravings. Simple as that. His ability to do
as he chose—if ever he’d possessed that skill at all—was gone.

Michael staggered toward the open window and sobbed inwardly
for his mother. The new hunger inside him swelled and grew until it drowned out
even the urge for a fix. Even that.

His hands were still sticky from the cat, still matted with
fur, his stomach lurching around the foulness he’d consumed, the ropes of guts,
the sinew and muscle, the dark pouch that had slid down his throat, the purple
sacs, all the shit he’d been able to name long enough to pass a goddamned
biology test years ago, now just one revolting taste after another.

All this was on his breath and in his mind as Michael fell
upon his still and defenseless mother.

Withdrawing in horror, curling up in his former skull,
tucking his imaginary knees against his chest, he tried his damnedest not to
watch. He tried his damnedest not to taste. But teeth and tongue fell into soft
flesh, and his mother didn’t stir, didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there,
warm and still alive, the bag hanging from her chair overfull, her body wasting
away, even though he knew—with horror he fucking knew—that she was still in
there.

She was in there and trapped, suffering with him.

She had known.

She had known when he’d hit her, when he had slapped her
face in frustration. Fuck, it was years ago. Years ago, but he’d done it. And
all those times he’d shouted at her, shook her shoulders, told her to wake the
fuck up . . . she had known. Every time he had aimed her chair at the window
before crawling out to smoke a joint, she had watched. She’d been forced to
witness while he shot up on the sill, had been forced to sit there, unblinking,
every time he collapsed in her old bed, gloriously high, the room reeking of
her piss and shit.

Fuck.

Michael Lane had devoured his mother’s soul in a feast of
years, had done it while she sat, paralyzed, made to endure. He’d done that, a
morsel at a time, not knowing he was doing it at all.

And now her body faintly rocked, her wide eyes and
expressionless face lolling as he consumed the rest of her, as Michael’s mad
cravings ripped his mother’s shell apart to get at what little inside still
remained.

5 • Gloria

Every day undead brought new discoveries, new horrors to
learn and accept. It was how prison must’ve felt for Carl, Gloria decided. She
could only imagine. Her husband would never talk about it, would never allow
her to visit, and so she spent her lonely nights imagining. Picturing what he
was going through. She decided it was a lot like this.

First fears were naïve, fears of never seeing family again,
agony over luxuries lost, thinking of the places you couldn’t go, things you
couldn’t eat, walls you couldn’t climb. But more basic freedoms soon drown
these out. There’s the unnatural horror of not being able to walk in a straight
line, of not being able to get out of a tight cell—

Jail cell. Human cell. Gloria felt like an embryo trapped in
a womb. She saw what her brain saw, but her thinking was removed from the
action. She was strapped to a bunk, inmates all around her, new horrors to
learn at every turn.

Prison must be like this
, she thought. First, you
concern yourself with freedoms lost. But soon, new worries take precedence. She
had gone from fearing for her safety to fearing for others’. From the horror of
being bitten to the horror of eating others. There was the pain of hunger—but
the agony of a feed, of seeing what she did to others, was far worse.

She imagined what Carl had gone through those first days
locked away. She had always thought he’d be missing her, couldn’t understand
why he didn’t take her calls, allow her to visit, even write back. It was
because he’d had other things to fear. Maybe something as simple as taking a
shower. Or the daily badgering from some sadistic guard or inmate. Gloria
didn’t have to imagine any longer how a person might have to learn to become
worse just to fit in—she knew. She knew what it was like to become something
worse, all the while wondering if everyone around her was doing the same, being
something they weren’t.

This was just like prison, she decided. This was her
solitary confinement, her mute holding cell, walls of her own flesh tailored as
tightly as humanly possible.

What she wouldn’t give for one good scream, for one glorious
wail, one bone-trembling blast from cold and terrified lungs. But even this was
a freedom snatched away from her—the most basic of freedoms gone. She couldn’t
even complain. Couldn’t shout. The gurgles and groans that dribbled out, leaked
from the hole in her smile, were the best that she could manage. It was all any
of them could manage. Around her, stumbling through the streets, there was this
chorus of stifled screams—a hellish and chilling choir. It was just one more
horror to learn about her new life in prison, one more fact to get used to and
to accept.

Gloria listened to the sounds she made, and her thoughts
strayed from Carl and drifted to her grandfather. She could hear in her own
rattling exhalations his dying voice. She could hear his groans and gurgles
from that miserable and drawn-out death of his.

It had started small, with him forgetting things. And just
as the family learned to cope with his blank stares and his groping for the
right word, they had to worry about him wandering off. And as they got used to
penning him up like a rooster, he started falling, banging his head on
furniture, breaking his wrist. The bleeding in his brain from the fall in the
driveway didn’t help. Not enough. As bad as that day was for the family, it was
only the beginning. Years later, Gloria would look back on those early
struggles and wish he’d struck his head harder. She would wish that he didn’t
have to live and see what he would eventually become.

This was easier to admit now that she was beyond death
herself, now that she was whatever she had turned into, now that she could wish
a similar fate on herself. All these discoveries felt much the same, this
coping with a new reality that gradually got worse and worse. It was a lot like
prison, she imagined. A lot like hospital beds. A lot like life, in many ways.
Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by
harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the
one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what
you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees
start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably
won’t be any sooner.

Gloria began to appreciate all she once had somewhere
between 2nd Avenue and 3rd. It was a week ago, during her first feed, while
tasting human flesh. Burying her head in some dead man’s abdomen, she’d had
this spark of awareness that all the bullshit fears of her former life were
nothing. Worries over money, over Carl, her grandmother, over not having kids
of her own, never once thinking how amazing it was to breathe and not feel the
cool air flowing through one’s cheek and hammering sensitive teeth, never once
going outside to walk in whatever direction she chose, just because she could.

There were things she could now admit. Like wanting her
grandfather dead because it affected her routine, because it meant guilt-ridden
visits to that nasty hospital. She never gave much thought to him being inside
there, terrified, dizzy, all alone. Not until somewhere between 2nd Avenue and
3rd when she’d felt it, too. Not until this sudden awakening that
here
was her eternity, eating those who themselves were starving, shuffling after
gaunt survivors as they sprinted terrified through the streets, often alone,
hoping to find sanctuary or company, armed with guns or sticks or nothing at
all.

This was her life, roaming the city day and night while
these startled fish flapped through shallowing streams, while the living ran
out of water, while they swam from the sharks and tumbled into nets.

Gloria remembered her first feed, that older man, and how
her thoughts back then had also turned to her grandfather. There she was,
killing a man, and wishing she wasn’t. Wishing she could stop. The irony struck
her there in the middle of that intersection, the years of keeping her
grandfather alive, saving him over and over, and wishing she hadn’t.

The shadows of Manhattan stretched across its wide streets.
One of Gloria’s shoes was gone; she didn’t remember when or how. It’d probably
happened at night. Here was another prison discovery, another thing to learn
about life behind bars. It was the fitful, waking sleep. Never quite asleep,
though. Always moving. Always standing or crawling. There was no stop to anything
anymore. It was hell eternal. It was hospital beds and reruns and fucking
remote controls always out of reach—

Gloria’s stomach churned. The sleep wasn’t the worst part.
Oh, not even the worst part. That would be the bowel movements. The same had
been true of her grandfather. It had come in stages. Innocently enough, at
first. A nice man in blue work pants on his knees in the bathroom installing
handles by the toilet. He had spoken of his own grandmother. He told Gloria
about these new bathtubs with little doors for getting in and out. Made it
safer. Said the seals on them leaked sometimes, but it was worth it. Finding a
puddle on the tile was better than finding a loved one with a broken hip,
right? He said this with a smile, wiping his forehead with his sleeve,
tightening that last screw on the handle and insisting Gloria look into them.
Gloria had said she would.

Her grandfather barely had time to test that handle. He
moved to bedpans and sponges before she or her sister got the chance to look
into those bathtubs with their leaky doors. It happened so fast, his downhill
slide. It went on forever and seemed to happen so fast. One moment, a stranger
is installing a handle by his toilet. The next moment, the strongest and ablest
man she had ever known is found sleeping in his own shit.

So fast.

The old washing machine broke down during those weeks. They
cycled through a few sets of bed sheets, trying to keep up. The next step had
been bags and tubes, dignity restored with plastic contraptions, family members
wrinkling their noses, even those whose diapers he had long ago changed. They
couldn’t stomach what he had once endured. Their mighty old grandfather was now
mucking up their routines.

Gloria’s stomach churned, returning her to the here and now.
The bowel movements were the worst, something to dread. The undead, like the
barely living, they had no dignity. They ate their fellow man. They shat like
birds on the wing. The guts of others spilled from tattered dresses. Gloria saw
it all day ahead of her: the stained pants and the rivers of gore streaming out
the cuffs. She could feel it coming in her own body, the horror brewing, cramps
in her bowels as though her intestines were tying themselves in knots. And then
the evacuation, the indignity, the hotness down her legs, clothes crusted fast
to chapped and undead skin, a bare foot slipping in it, no memory of where that
shoe went.

It wasn’t a touch they put in the movies, Gloria thought. It
wasn’t something you thought about while that nice man was tugging on a silver
bar by the toilet, testing the bolts, cleaning up after a job well done,
gathering his tools.
We can get through this
, you think to yourself. The
whole family tells themselves this. They can get through it. This is before the
washing machine breaks down. This is before your brother breaks down. This is
when you think you can handle the pain because you fool yourself into thinking
it’ll be brief. This is when they’re locking your husband away for a few short
years, putting an innocent man behind bars, and you tell yourself you can
handle him being gone for a little while. This is before he succumbs to
whatever that hell is like, before he’s innocent no more, when you’re lying in
bed at night no longer fearing that he’s cheating on you with some harlot, but
that he’s done other, unspeakable, horrible things.