I, Zombie (23 page)

The bundle was unrolled. It reminded her of her mother’s
silverware. And then the implements were removed, one by one, and placed on the
table. Curved things that gleamed in the overhead light. Tiny and sharp things.
Something like pliers. Alien tools. Expensive tools.

The old woman with the kind and wrinkled eyes held out a
gloved hand. Her lips moved, and a tiny blade was placed handle-first into her
palm. Darnell gurgled and tried to form the words. She wanted to cry, but felt
nothing on her cheeks. In the next room, a monster rattled its chains behind
the glass.

Please
, Darnell thought as the blade was brought to
her stomach.
Don’t
.

There was a dull ache as the woman went to work. Not the
sharp sting of a little cut, but the deep bruise of something much worse. One
of the men by the table of tools turned and looked away. The other reached
forward with the little canister like something used for leftovers while the
woman with the wrinkled eyes took her sample. A pinch. The smell of rotten
blood. Another sample—Darnell in agony—but no closer to death, as they removed
her flesh piece by gory piece.

They aren’t here to save me
, she realized.
Dear
God, they’re seeing what it takes to kill me.

45 • Lewis Lippman

It was loud in the compartment. Not just the constant
banging of knees and elbows, but the grunts and groans from those pressed in
beside him. Lewis hit his head repeatedly on the metal arms that held the door
shut from the inside. His hands slapped uselessly against the wall. But it was
someone else that broke the door free. Just the right spasm with their hand,
and suddenly a crack of light appeared at Lewis’s knees. The dark barrier in
front of him hinged up, swung away, and vile humans swarmed out like dirty
rats.

There was a cry of alarm, someone screaming, gunshots.
Bodies tumbled over Lewis and crawled forward. They stood and lurched toward
the men and women scrambling everywhere. They fell down when shot or just spun
around and kept going. Lewis tried to stand and kept getting knocked back down.
So many. Like oil spilling through a funnel, coming and coming. The gunshots
were like fireworks,
pow pow pow.
The smell of meat, human and something
else. Something cooking. Dogs or birds, who knew? Chaos. An encampment of cars.

The cars were like tents, people moving inside, more running
from a clearing in the middle of the intersection to dive into open vehicles
and slam the doors shut. Windows were cracked, barrels poking out. Their aim
wasn’t good. Lewis saw one of his kind break out the back glass of a yellow cab
and begin to worm her way inside. Her dress caught and tore on the bumper. She
was shot in the head and fell limp, but there were more to follow. People were
shouting about the bus, trying to organize, but it was every man for himself.
The undead swarmed, spilling and spilling through.

Lewis banged on the side of a car, trying to get at the meat
inside. A pistol, a small black thing, waved in his face. The muzzle flashed
like a camera, the taste of powder in his mouth, a punch to his teeth. Lewis
spun around as another shot went off, the zing of a far ricochet. Another
zombie reached her fingers in the window, a young girl, a teen. She broke the
top half of the glass out just as a bullet went through her brain. Collapsing,
her arms twitched against Lewis’s shins as he reached through the hole she’d
made. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, a last gasp from the young man
inside, and then Lewis had a hold of him, others had a hold of him, dragged him
out into the streets.

Gunfire grew heavy, and then lessened. There was a pause for
reloading, a last round of patter, and then the relative quiet as a boisterous
family finally sat down to eat. The feed became an orgy. Fights broke out over
the scraps, a man still able to scream as his arms and legs went different
directions, lungs bellowing even as ropes of purple intestines were pulled away
like a magician’s scarf.

Lewis spun in the middle of it all, eating and terrified,
wounds throbbing, the muted pops of gunfire fading into the distance, the
sudden appearance of a helicopter several blocks away, doing nothing, watching,
drawn perhaps to the noise of this last stand, this party, the fireworks and
celebration of no one’s independence.

46 • Darnell Lippman

The woman in the suit was clinical and calm as she went
about her sample-taking. It didn’t matter that Darnell felt alive, she was cut
into like a cadaver, like a swollen thing washed up on the rocks. The straps
kept her pinned to the table, muscles straining futilely. She tried to scream
as the knife bit into her, but the cry for help stayed with the agony, locked
up inside her head, hers alone to hear and endure.

The doctor rarely looked Darnell in the face as she worked.
Her exhalations fogged the plastic visor of her suit, and her voice remained a
muted drone. But when her lips moved, the men behind her reacted. Some kind of
radio, like on Lewis’s boat, like the handheld he kept by the recliner in case
a fishing buddy got into trouble. Darnell imagined squeezing that radio and
calling for help, calling for Lewis to come and get her. She was awash in
misery, drowning, stranded, bit at by gleaming fish that carried away her
flesh. And the worst part was that she couldn’t die.

Her twitching muscles felt near enough like wracking sobs.
Struggling on that table felt near enough like times she’d clutched her knees
and sobbed quietly in the tub. Life and love. When the bad parts crept in,
sometimes she wished it would end. Wished there was some quick way out for
cowards. She loved her husband, wasn’t sure how not to, but sometimes she sat
in the tub with the water running dangerously hot and wanted out. Like now,
just wanting to die.

The doctor took something from her abdomen without asking.
Machines beeped and whirred as they measured the nothing. But there was still
something there, something they couldn’t take. And the struggles against those
straps felt near enough like uncontrolled sobs.

Darnell opened her eyes, couldn’t remember closing them,
wasn’t sure how. But the dry and burning in them that she had long grown used
to was gone for a moment, something like a spider’s touch tickling her rotting
cheeks. And above her, a fogged visor cleared as the old woman with wrinkled
eyes held her breath, watching, squinting, staring through Darnell’s eyes and
deep into whatever remained of her soul.

Darnell lunged forward with her thoughts, her prayers, her
begging wishes. She felt her arms and legs strain against the straps. She
screamed and screamed as loud as she could, yelling “HEY!” and “HELP!” and “I’M
ALIVE!”

The woman in the puffy suit remained frozen. After a pause,
her lips moved. The men by the tables stirred, hard to see what they were
doing. The doctor held Darnell’s gaze a moment longer, then pulled away, the
flash of a blade disappearing, the torment coming to an end.

Darnell was left in motionless agony. All her new wounds
sang to her. They were electric currents clipped to her naked flesh, the juice
dialed up and down, up and down, sagging and spiking. She lay there for what
felt like days. When her head lolled to the side, she could see the man in the
next cage bucking against his straps, no one else around.

The people in the puffy suits returned. A bright light
stabbed Darnell in the eyes. The man holding her head wore metal gloves of a
fine mesh that reminded Darnell of Lewis cleaning his fish. Lewis sometimes
wore gloves like that.

Her head was strapped still. She had the sense that things
would soon get worse, not better. More probes were stuck to her flesh, itching.
Equipment set up. Something by her head, a heavy box, scraping against the
metal surface of the table.

The doctor held a wire, a thin cord. She bent it into a
gentle curve, tapped her finger on the end and there was a harsh pop from the
box. She did this again:
tap, tap. Pop, pop
.

Darnell could smell oil on the metal glove as the man forced
her chin down, as he held her mouth open. The doctor’s lips were moving. She
slid the cord into Darnell’s mouth, across her tongue, into her throat. The
box, the speaker by her head, amplified the grunts and rattling groans. Darnell
was horrified by the sound of what she’d become. It was like a mirror turned on
a burn victim.

She cried out, and the speaker hissed with her pointless
breath. Darnell wondered how long it could go on, how many ways they could
experiment on her, when her affliction would finally end. The woman with the
kind eyes watched her, waiting, measuring something. Darnell had no idea. They
all seemed to be waiting. Expecting. What had they seen? They were looking at
her differently, now. Like they wondered if someone was peering back.

“I’M HERE!” Darnell yelled. She screamed with that voice
that appeared when she read, when she thought to herself, that silent voice
that somehow could be heard, could have an accent, could be quiet or loud, but
always silent.

“HELP!” she cried. “HELP HELP HELP HELP.”

She threw the words over and over, pounded them like her
pulse forgotten, made that reading voice a wispy rattle in her neck, audible in
her cheeks, deafening in her skull.

“I’M ALIVE! I’M ALIVE! I’M IN HERE! HELP! HELP! HELP!”

The speaker gurgled with wet sounds. Something was adjusted.
The doctors leaned close as if they heard a whisper. Darnell could only hear
her pleading screams in her head and the amplified, bodily noises her thrashing
made.

HELP HELP HELP.

There came a trickle of tears from her exertion. Wrinkles
faded as eyes widened. And Darnell felt the strangeness of a connection, of a
person reacting to her thoughts, the thrill of communication. Her chest and
neck felt sore from trying so hard to scream, it coming out no more than a
hissing whisper. But it was enough. The cord was extracted. The doctor stood.
Equipment was gathered, and once again, Darnell was left alone for what felt an
eternity.

••••

They returned with a roll of paper, a gently curving line
etched down the middle, nearly flat, something from one of their useless
machines. It was just paper, now, something to write on. That’s all it would
ever be.

With a fat black marker, the same kind they’d used to draw
on her flesh before cutting it, something was written:

1 for Yes. 2 for No.

Darnell felt a flush of hope. The wire slid back into her
mouth, as welcome as that suction tube from the dentist. More writing.

Can you read this?

Darnell tried to blink, but couldn’t. She screamed YES in
her mind, felt like she could hear it in her cheeks. She yelled ONE. She yelled
YES YES YES, and heard mostly gurgles. The doctor seemed agitated, anxious.
Darnell worried she should have only tried yelling a single word. Maybe that’s
what they were after. A length of paper was torn off. The doctor tried tossing
it to the side, but it stuck to her rubber gloves. One of the men helped her.
She pressed the marker back to the roll with that gentle, wavy line.

Is there anyone in there?

Darnell imagined taking a deep breath. It was more a pause
of thought. She gathered her will, all her imagined strength, and tried to
force it out all at once, to erupt in a mighty roar, all the screams she’d ever
felt inside while sitting in her tub, clutching her shins, trying not to let
Lewis hear her cry:

YEEEEESSSSS

There was a moment of stillness, a place that heartbeats
used to fill. The other doctors came into view as they crowded around, as they
bent over to peer at her. The marker squeaked against the glossy paper.

We want to help you.

Darnell felt a wave of anger rather than relief. Parts of
her were missing, were sitting in plastic tubs and containers. Her wounds, the
damage to her flesh, could still be felt. She felt exhausted from the effort of
crying out. Her chest was empty in more ways than one. She was exhausted from
the long death she was suffering, but Darnell summoned the last of her will.

KILL!
she yelled, sensing that these people could
hear, that the screams in her head were quiet words that leaked out their box
and into the room; they emanated like some pale echo deep in her throat.

KILL ME! DIE DIE DIE DIE!

Like the gulls by the pier while Lewis cleaned fish:

DIE DIE DIE DIE!

The birds floating on the air, swooping for scraps, for
flesh torn mindlessly from bone:

KILL KILL KILL KILL!

The doctor straightened. Darnell collapsed within herself,
her consciousness drained, the animal within her taking over her limbs again,
writhing against the bonds while doctors in puffy suits stood around, lips
moving, conferring.

They were going to help her, she thought. Darnell had done
it. She had made a connection, had reached out to another human being and made
contact. She sobbed without moving, cried without shedding a tear. And when the
paper appeared above her with the simple question:
You wish you were dead?
she could do little more than emit a soft gurgle, a dry croak, a whisper from
her sturdy tomb.

The room fell deathly quiet. The cord was removed from her
throat, the speaker scratching the table as it was pulled away, the little
wires and itchy cups pulled from her skin, and Darnell thought they were going
to do it, right then, somehow. She prayed they would bring mercy on her, that
they would bring mercy upon them all.

47 • Lewis Lippman

A gray dawn broke over the destroyed encampment. Falling
from the sky was what Kyle liked to call a “fighting snow.” It was those fat
flakes that came down the size of silver dollars and laden with moisture. Lewis
had seen them get palm-sized back home, even as big around as dinner plates.
When a few inches of these flakes gathered, you could scoop up a snowball in
your hand, give it a squeeze, and hurl away. With enough work, you could
compress it down to a ball of ice that’d leave a bruise or dent a car.