I, Zombie (7 page)

A job she hated, turning over rooms, making bed after bed,
picking up scattered towels and restocking stolen toiletries. Every day,
tiptoeing through wrecks that looked more like robberies than a night’s stay,
dealing with creepy men who put signs out for service, but were still in there,
sometimes a towel around their waists, pretending to be startled, sometimes
wearing nothing at all. Men sent by the devil to harass her, tell her she was
pretty when she knew better, offer her money for unspeakable things.

A job she hated, but change was the other way. Applications
and learning something new were the icy deep.

The city was a funnel. Gloria looked around her, something
she secretly did on the subway. All different colors, different backgrounds,
all the accents. Ants drawn to honey, but they can’t get away from the city.
They land with their parents or bring their own children, get that first job,
learn to drive a cab or flip a room, and never leave.

This was her sin, Gloria thought. God had given her command
of her feet and had set her on the shore of life, and she had chosen to live
the least. She had always chosen to avoid her fears, had shrunk from the
daunting and the risky. And what had her Savior done? Had he walked away from the
challenge, or had he strolled across the water knowing he would not sink?

Gloria let out a frustrated gurgle, a prayer to Saint
Anthony, the liberator of prisoners:

Tear down my prison walls. Break the chains that hold me
captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me. Amen.

She prayed to Saint Leonard, the patron Saint of captives,
slaves, and all those held against their will:

Pray for those like me in prison, St. Leonard. For those
forgotten in prison, pray for them. Amen.

Gloria prayed for herself, for her own plights. She prayed
for someone to grant her the courage. She prayed for deliverance, for rescue,
for something to break her free of the cycle in which she’d long been trapped.
She prayed that she could do it all over again, that she might head west and
live in a small town, find a different job, a good man, try once more to start
a family, to have a child or two or four. She prayed and prayed the same
prayers, her words running out, forming small loops, memorized verse, begging and
begging for release as she circled that tree, bumping into so many others, but
giving little thought to them at all.

15 • Michael Lane

Michael’s balancing act came to an end, his good leg chewed
away by the shotgun blast. He tipped forward, stumbling on the flopping lower
half of his shin, which bent and twisted until his foot was pointing backward.
His face struck the pavement, his discombobulated arms fluttering uselessly by
his side, too uncoordinated to break his fall.

He waited for death. He waited for unconsciousness. His
sister was there, bending down, reaching out a hand to him—but it was the fever
of sobriety. It was a construct of the pain.

Screams came out as gurgles, bloody drool dripping onto the
pavement, a flashback to a thousand nights spent hugging a toilet, the taste of
bile in one’s mouth, the smell of urine, realizing he’d wetted himself in his
stupor.

A new low. This was always his thought, every weekend in
college getting smashed and regretting it, every Monday morning hung over in
class, promising he’d never do it again. By Thursday, such promises were
forgotten. By Saturday, he hated himself once more.

Michael’s limbs stirred. He screamed internally as hot steel
was pressed to a dozen unnatural joints in his legs. His dumb physical self was
trying to stand. His unthinking body was telling the rest of him, a friend who
knew better,
that he was good enough to walk.

Propped up on his arms, he felt the ravenous puppeteer that
had a hold of his will command his legs forward, foot twisting unnaturally, the
sensation of his skin being tugged as it was the only thing holding him
together.

Several times, his body tried to get his mangled feet
beneath him. Each time was a new height of sensation, bones like shattered
glass grinding together, the crunch and pop of thin shards giving way, a dull
roar reaching his ears that he vaguely recognized as his own voice. He was
unable, even, to mercifully pass out.

Eventually, his drunken body learned what the brain could
not tell it: walking was out. It would never happen again.

Michael lay still a moment, appreciating the end of the
struggle, the throbs and electricity soaring and coursing through his body.
This could be the end. Please, let this be the end. There would be no more
regrets. No chance at anything regrettable.
Come for me, darkness!
he
screamed in his mind. And he could hear it. He could hear that reading voice
that used to pop in his mind when he was forced to stare at books, that ability
for the talking side of his brain to send signals over to the hearing side.

Fucking die!
he yelled to himself. He yelled it so
loudly that he could hear it in his mouth, in the depths of his throat, like a
swallowed whisper.

He thought of his sister. His mother, whom he carried inside
of him. He was losing it, but this time to clarity. He laughed madly and
silently at the thought of his mother carrying him inside her belly, and now
she was inside his, a mystical torus, a fucking Möbius strip of mother and son
in each other’s guts.

What if he’d
never
die?

There was a scraping sound nearby. Michael’s sideways view
of the world was momentarily full of dragging feet, and then a yellow cab,
pavement, and a building where survivors must be laughing and raiding, scrambling
for food, popping another shell into a shotgun.

Passing minutes. Dragging feet. The undead surrounded him,
and then moved on. They were summoned perhaps by the blast that took his good
leg or by the smell of the living, a smell that lingered somewhere beyond the
persistent pain—

More scraping. The world lurched forward. Michael spilled
out of his agony-filled haze and realized he was
moving
. Something was
dragging him along.

And then he felt it. His arms reaching out, fingernails
finding the rough nicks in the city streets, fingernails bending backward and
breaking as he hauled himself forward, fingernails dragging him along after the
others.

No
.

Fuck no
, Michael screamed.

Oh, fucking no dear God please fucking kill me now
,
he yelled.

And nobody heard him. All that remained was the scraping
noise, hands clawing at the pavement, a body learning to adjust itself to this
new and crippling low as it figured out how to move, how to go out and seek ever
new and deeper valleys in which to crawl.

16 • Gloria

Morning came, and birdsong filled the air around all the
trees but one. Unlike the squirrels, which would burrow through the leaves by
undead feet, the birds chirped warily and from a distance. When they did swoop
in, it was only briefly to pick maggots from a cheek or eye socket. They would
perch on a shoulder and pluck a morsel or scrap of rotten flesh, maybe a torn
bit of fabric for their nest, and then flap away to a far branch. While they
preened and ate and squawked at the world, another leaf would lose its
precarious grip and drift down around Gloria and the others.

It had been an especially cold night for all of them. Frost
lay in patches, the browning leaves looking as if dusted in sugar, the uncut
grass and tall weeds adorned with frozen crystals. Gloria wasn’t sure how the
mother and child in the tree had survived the bitter cold, but they were
already moving about on the broad limb. The mom directed her child into a patch
of sunlight that managed to lance through the distant buildings and silent
trees to warm a spot of air. Their whispers leaked through chattering teeth.

Gloria had spent much of the night drifting in and out. She
remembered coming to and hearing the sobs, which she assumed at first to be
from the child, but it was the mother crying. She also saw the pack had grown
in number. The tree was one of those crab pots the poor animals could crawl
into but never get out of. Gloria and the rest would be there until the couple
starved and rotted, until the appetite was gone, the scent dissipating.

It was bitingly cold, and the evidence formed in puffs of
false breath, the undead groaning in hungry frustration, the woman and young
girl above adding their own shivering clouds to the air.

Gloria circled beneath them. She watched as the mother
seemed to succumb to the stress and cold, as she lost her mind. It took a
moment to realize what she was doing, that she was stripping herself bare in
the morning chill. With her chin lifted toward the promise of a meal, Gloria
followed, curious and confused, as the woman tore her thin shirt into strips
and began twisting them together. She was talking to her daughter as she
worked, explaining something, some kind of plan.

Whispers of a plan made Gloria feel torn. There was the
thrill of maybe witnessing an escape, perhaps a dash down the creaking and
frost-slick limbs, a daring swing or jump to a neighboring tree. Some plan that
relied on racing naked ahead of the stumbling pack, running through the woods
still dappled in darkness, hoping to avoid the promise of a roaming bite.

Gloria felt the allure of such daring and guile. She also
dreaded the loss of a meal, no end to her infernal hunger, and all those days
wasted following their scents.

Strips of clothing were tied together. A belt. Torn and
threadbare jeans, much too large. The mother worked in her underwear fifteen
feet above Gloria’s head. It was the daughter’s turn to cry. While she sobbed,
her mother looped the knotted fabric around the limb on which they crouched.
They were both sobbing. The mother stroked the girl’s hair, caressed her cheek.
Gloria could see them shivering. Maybe she imagined the blue cast to the
woman’s naked skin. Perhaps it was real. How they survived the night, she
couldn’t understand. With her clothes off, Gloria felt she could see every bone
in her emaciated body.

“Shhh,” she said, consoling her child. “It’s okay.”

She arranged the improvised rope around her daughter’s neck,
adjusting it as if getting her ready for school. The girl’s thin arms held her
mother’s wrists. Bits of bark rained down from their movement on the limb.

“I love you,” the mother said. The words were interspersed
with sobs.

And before Gloria could process what was happening, before
she could fully wake, there was a final kiss on the forehead, a scrambling of
thin arms as the child realized what plans her mother had for their escape, and
then a painful shove out into the open air, the crunch of rope on bark, the
yank and pop of a young neck, and then bare feet swinging in the frosty air,
the last of the leaves from that great bough leaping to their deaths, shaken
off by this disturbance in the tree.

Gloria circled beneath the girl, horrified. A police officer
waved at the air, the flesh hanging just out of reach, the child slowly
spinning as the twisted rope settled.

There were curses above, the mad screech of a woman at the
end of a more figurative rope, the yell of anger at the world that Gloria
secretly longed to erupt with, that sort of anger with a silent, invisible, and
cruel God that bubbles up with every injustice, every heartbreaking loss, every
turn of bad luck. Screams instead of whispered prayer. A woman’s throat working
and yelling all that needed saying.

Gloria’s gaze was lifted to the heavens, to this brave
mother, and she saw that the curses and screeches were not directed at any God,
but rather at the demons below, the hellspawn she had joined.

More leaves fluttered from their weakening stems as the
mother pushed off. And with a great leap, she threw herself out of her misery,
not enough rope for the both of them, and Gloria, unable to resist, horrified,
dove in with the others and claimed her share. And as she fell on the brave
soul, something snapped. Some sinew or thread in her brain, whatever it was that
anchored her to sanity, she felt it snap and knew, with righteous surety, that
God made no mistakes. He had left her there for her sins, for not being perfect
enough. This was her damnation, her eternal reward.

She fought her way through the feeding pack and lowered her
face toward the mother’s screams. Her first bite was of gaunt and trembling
cheek, flesh tearing away. She chewed the mouth of this fallen woman, the
rubbery lips, hungry for the mind inside. Hungry for it, even as she lost her
own. Even though she was, as ever, unaware that anyone resided there. Unaware
that anyone other than her suffered at all.

17 • Jennifer Shaw

It was early morning when the shuffle entered the killing
zone. Jennifer had heard the echoing cracks the day before, had wondered what
was going on. It sounded like sticks of dynamite the way the noise reverberated
off the high walls of glass and steel.

They crossed 23rd heading up Sixth Avenue, leaving the heart
of the Village where dormitories lay scattered amid office buildings. There had
been a feeding the night before, a bizarre scene where a man, obviously
half-starved, had burst out of a ruined pizza shop and had thrown himself into
the shuffle, screaming and senseless. It was as though he had given up and couldn’t
stand the waiting. A depressing thought, but Jennifer’s father had taught her
how to create stories to give a positive spin to any bit of news. In her mind,
the man’s mad act had been a noble sacrifice, a distraction while his family
fled through the back of the parlor. She pictured them dancing through the
streets toward a silent helicopter, a soldier’s gloved hand extended, the wind
of the rotors kicking up the yellow dress of the man’s young daughter, a
stuffed animal dragging from her tiny, clenched, and terrified fist.