I, Zombie

Abandon Hope . . .

. . . and bash in her
skull before you go.

Part I • The Hunger

Gloria • Michael
Lane • Jennifer Shaw

1 • Gloria

There was a hole in Gloria’s smile the size of an apple.
When she ate, much of what she chewed passed through her cheek and spilled down
her neck. And when a scent caught her attention—usually the smell of the
living—she would lift her head to take a sniff and feel the air pass through
her open face to hammer her rotting teeth.

Gloria was dead, and so were her teeth, but they were all
still sensitive to the pain.

Bowing her head back over her meal, she tried not to watch
what she was doing. The stench and texture were visceral enough, the taste both
revolting and sickly soothing. A pack of five or so ripped into the man, the
scene calmer than a big feed. There were grunts and contented smacking sounds,
not the angry roars from those on the outside clawing to get in. Instead, she
and four other monsters huddled together like hyenas on the Serengeti. They
rubbed shoulders and listened to the sounds of flesh tearing and tendons
snapping, the hotness of the man up to her elbows, blood dripping from her
chin.

Gloria ate, and much of what she chewed spilled down her
neck.

The revulsion she felt was mental. Gloria
wished
it
were physical. She wanted to vomit, dearly wanted to vomit, but she couldn’t.
The meat of the man tasted too good. It satisfied too deep and strong a
craving, this new hunger that reminded her of all her old and equally primal
urges.

There were two years in high school when Gloria had tried to
become a vegetarian. This monster she had turned into reminded her of those
years, of the meals that came after she’d given up trying to be good. She
remembered how badly she had felt for that chicken even as she tore through its
meat. There was a night out with friends, laughing, spilling beer, a hundred
screens of sports she cared nothing about, and baskets of wings. She had held
one, fingers sticky with sauce, a bite taken out of the flesh, and she had
looked down, had seen those tendons and bone, and had realized what she was
doing.

Even then, Gloria had known it was wrong. But she loved it
too much. The taste was always stronger than her compassion. And so she ate and
felt sick at the same time. She loved the meat and hated herself.

The dead body in the blue jeans and ruined button-up
reminded her of that chicken wing. It was barely recognizable as a person
anymore, covered in its own sauce. The pack grew to seven, and the man’s lower
half was dragged away and fought over. More yummy disgustingness spilled out
from his torso and spread across the warm pavement. The monster across from
Gloria scrambled for the same slick ropes as she. The purple meat slid through
both of their hands, their lips dribbling sauce back down on their food,
fighting for scraps.

This other monster’s fingers were missing from one of his
hands, bitten off, leaving him with a stump. Gloria saw the familiar black char
of an original wound, the bite that had infected this man, working its way up
his wrist. Still, he clawed for the meat with what was left of his hand. Like
Gloria, he was only half in control of what he was doing. They were along for the
ride, each of them. At the wheel—but without the power steering.

2 • Michael Lane

Michael remembered being a boy. He remembered the times from
before. Michael could remember
everything
.

He remembered doctors in white coats telling him that his
mother was still in there, that she was still alive behind those glassy eyes
and that distant stare. In his more hopeful moments he would sit by her side,
hold her hand, and believe them. He would pretend it was true.

And when her wheelchair squeaked and rattled with another
shaking fit, Michael would squeeze her withered and trembling hands and talk to
her, try to reason with her, ask her to please stop.

These were the times when he believed the doctors, when he
thought his mother was still in there, peering out. He would talk to her like
this when he was most hopeful. He would talk to her calmly.

And then there were days when he didn’t believe, when he
couldn’t believe—and he would have to scream.

Michael Lane remembered screaming at his mother. He remembered
this as he staggered through the apartment, knocking over furniture, chasing
her hissing cat.

“Wake up!” he would yell at his mom, back when he could yell
at anything.

“Wake the fuck up!”

And he would shake her. He would want to hit her, but he
never did. At least, he didn’t think so.

It had been tempting at times. Not because he thought it
would do her any good or snap her out of the degenerative palsy into which she
had fallen, but because punching a hole in the wall didn’t make him feel any
better. He wasn’t pissed off at the wall. Walls were supposed to just sit
there. That’s what walls did.

His mother’s old black cat stood in the corner by the
radiator, its spine arched, fur spiked, pink tongue and white teeth visible as
it hissed at him. The damn thing was thin as a shadow. Starving. Michael was
starving, too. He closed in, remembering the doubts he’d had about his mother’s
condition. Those doubts had nagged at him for years.

What if his mother was just acting? What if this was her way
of avoiding the world? He hadn’t been able to stop thinking these things.
Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he
didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated
behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change
her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another.
His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right.
Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they
better than her in that way?

Falling forward as much as lunging, Michael seized the weak
and cornered cat. Sharp claws gouged his hands, burning where they broke the
skin. He ignored this—he had no choice—and concentrated on the past. The times
he had screamed at his mother were painful memories, so Michael orbited those.
Pain was a distraction from what he knew he was about to do. And so he tried to
remember if he had ever hit his mother, even a little. He couldn’t. Couldn’t
remember. Maybe he had.

The cat clawed at his face as he bowed his head into its
fur. It batted at his unblinking eyes, and Michael—the memory of
Michael—recoiled in fear. But the body he was trapped inside did not pull back.
The hunger was too great, that mad craving for meat too strong. Not this meat,
perhaps. Not cat meat. But he was barricaded inside his apartment with little
else. He had locked himself inside, thinking he was safe, that he’d be okay.
But he wasn’t. He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t okay.

Michael’s teeth sank past the fur to tear at the animal’s
flesh. The cat was a screaming, writhing blur. It clawed at his open eyes, tore
at his ears, while Michael ate.

He couldn’t stop himself.

This was not him.

The blood ran down his throat, warm and foul, the cat’s shrieks
fading to rattling groans, and he could taste it. He could taste the meat. But
this was not him. This was not Michael Lane.

Michael remembered being a boy, once.

He remembered the doctors telling him things, how a person
could be locked away inside a body they couldn’t control.

And Michael never believed them, not really.

Until now.

3 • Jennifer Shaw

A grist of bees. A bevy of deer. A mob of—

What was a mob again? Yaks?

Emus
. It was emus, Jennifer decided. But what animal
made up a gang? Or a boil? Wasn’t there some creature that combined to form a
bloat? Bloat was taken, she was pretty sure.

Jennifer drifted back to the games her father played. This
was but one of many. She remembered hanging from his arm, her sister on the other
side, as he swung them through Central Park Zoo. He called them monkeys—

“A band!” she and her sister would squeal.

“You little gorillas.”

“A troop!”

“You smelly baboons.”

“A flange!”

“I’m not smelly,” her sister would add, pouting.

Up and down the tree of life they would climb, learning
useless facts that made their peers roll their eyes and their teachers clap
with delight. Their father never taught them state capitals or anything normal.
Nothing other people might already know. He filled their heads with reptiles
and minerals and trivia. Jennifer never saw a garter snake slither through the
grass without thinking:
There goes Massachusetts.

“A family is more than just its members,” their father had
said. “Together, we become something
different
.”

He said this a lot after their mother left. Swinging them
through the zoo, he had shown his girls all the animals that hate to be alone,
that prefer to go in groups. Each group had its own name, he taught them. In
company they were something more than they could be in solitude.

So what was this, Jennifer wondered? What had she become?
What was she a part of?

It couldn’t be a
plague
; those were locusts. Couldn’t
be an
intrusion
because of the roach. And wasn’t a group of midges
called a
bite
? She was pretty sure that was right. Shame, that one. And
mosquitoes were a
scourge
. All the good ones were taken.

Herd. Herd was overdone, as was pack. Too many animals
shared those. Too obvious.

And then it came to her.

It came to her as the skull Jennifer was trapped inside
lolled down, as the nose that used to be hers twitched at the smell of meat.

An arm lay on the pavement, a torn sleeve wrapping it like a
cloak, a cloud of flies drawn to the rotting meat. Its owner was long gone.

Jennifer had no appetite for it. She lumbered onward, no
longer in control, forced to see whatever her head saw as it followed some
scent, some impulse, some new reflex.

And for a moment—because of the dismembered arm, perhaps—the
direction of her gaze allowed Jennifer to study the feet,
her
feet, and
the feet of those around her. The bare feet and the feet in ragged slippers;
the work boots and the worn trainers; the feet sliding and dragging; the feet
of the people bumping into her, all of them moving in one direction,
upwind
,
toward the smell of living meat.

She was one of them, and Jennifer knew what she was, what
the group would be called.

She filed this trivia away. She took it with her as she
disappeared into the recesses of her recollections, back to the times before
she’d joined this trembling mass, this vile and grotesque thing her flesh had
become. She skipped into the past, swinging on her father’s strong arms,
beating her sister to calling this one out:

“A
shuffle
,” she cried. “A shuffle of zombies!”

And the animals of Central Park Zoo paced inside their
cages, watching her and her dead family stagger by.

And they were all afraid.

4 • Michael Lane

Michael was suffering from withdrawal. He wasn’t sure at
first—it was hard to tell one madness from the other—but now he knew.

He still had the taste of cat blood in his mouth, could feel
this voice in his head, this lunatic starving for meat, this new animal in
control of his body. And behind the thick curtain of horror that had drawn shut
across his awareness, a tiny, familiar, persistent shout could be heard: he
needed a fix. His veins hungered for the prick of steel, for the warm flow of
numbness and that perfect release. He needed it now more than ever before. An
overdose, Michael decided, would be fucking heavenly. A way to go. Any way to
go for good.

The kit was on top of the fridge. Everything was there to
help him die in bliss. He could sate the urge to which he’d been a slave for
longer than he could remember, for longer than he’d ever been in control of
himself, for almost as long as his mother had been seized by her blank stares
and her shivering fits.

But now there was a new monster guiding his hand, dictating
the direction of his mindless stagger. And this new thirst, this awful craving,
carried him not toward the kitchen, but toward the door to his mother’s room.

The cat was dead. Michael had eaten most of it. Its fur was
still stuck in his throat, his body too dumb to cough it up. It left a powerful
tickle he could do nothing about.