I, Zombie (12 page)

Practice
, she would tell him, kicking a can, just an
extra jerk of her knee as she was stepping along.
See? See?
she would
shout.
I can do it, and so can you!

The words would tumble out different, of course, like
screams in a nightmare, but she thought it was getting better, that her tongue
was learning just as her fingers and hands once had. Everyone has different
abilities, she reminded herself. It was important to be patient with him. Some
people had a hard time getting out of bed, forcing themselves to go to school.
Some could just do it, always could. Different abilities. She would be patient.

In the meantime, she had a playmate to bump after in the
meat shop. And so the two of them played chase during the day and a game she
called
There-You-Are
at night. They played while the smell of their dead
parents mingled in the air, and it was easy to pretend, if you knew how, that
their grunts were giggles, their labored hisses the noise of happy laughter,
just two kids wasting time while they wasted away, the both of them eying that
heavy shelf by the door that kept them trapped inside.

Part III • Jeffery Biggers

24 • Jeffery Biggers

Where were the people? It was hard to figure at first, why
with the outbreak there weren’t more people. Ten million in New York, and most
of them were just . . .
gone
. Jeffery had assumed it would spread, that
the avenues and streets would be crowded from one side to the other with the
chompers. But then, most people didn’t get away, did they? They got more than a
bite. They got
consumed
.

And so the streets were full of cars, but no people. Just
remains. That was the sickest thing, seeing the bones, all the cleaned
carcasses. Getting bit and surviving was rarer than getting eaten whole. Rarer
and worse. Being infected was hella worse. But so few got infected, right? How
many got a scratch or a bite like Jeffery did and still managed to get clear,
find a place to hole up until it weren’t their choice how to move or what to
do? Not many, he didn’t figure. Most got eaten. That’s where the ten million
went. Gone. Eaten up and shat out by those who remained.

Jeffery remembered the one that got him. Goddamn that woman.
Goddamn that crazy bitch.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop playing
that day over and over in his head as he rode among the pack, weaving around
the jammed cars with blinking hazards and open doors, a picked-clean skeleton
sitting there in one of ‘em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the
engine and go for a drive, some ad for a damn MADD commercial.

Jeffery remembered spotting the bitch from that upstairs
apartment he’d staked out for his own. He hadn’t planned on leaving that place
until the cupboards were bare. Earlier that morning, he had escaped a few mobs,
had used that combination of boot camp army know-how and the black spirit that
had helped generations of his color make it through the deep shit time and time
again. He’d seen some brutal stuff in his weeks of running, more gruesome even
than the crap he’d seen in the war. Roadside bombs and flesh eaters had some
things in common, except these monsters didn’t leave limbs behind. They took
them with them, munching on them like turkey legs while they tracked down another
scent.

Jeffery had been surviving okay for a week or two, getting
clear, avoiding one nick after another. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky.
Jeffery was used to that, the inequitable luck of two people sitting
side-by-side in the same Hummer. One man gets a scratch, the other is holding
his guts in his lap and screaming for his momma. All luck. Where you’re
sitting’, where you’re born. Dumb fucking luck.

Well, there’s dumb luck, and then there’s just plain stupid.
Jeffery had been stupid, trying to save that baby, thinking shit could be saved
anymore. Stupid.

He’d seen the woman from the apartment window, down in the
alley, three stories below. One of the flesh-eaters was walking in circles,
waving her arms over her head. Hadn’t seen one do that. Most walked with their
arms out like goddamn Frankenstein, like the soul trapped inside can see but
the shit in charge can’t. Like they gotta
feel
their way through the
breeze.

So this one, arms wiggling like thick snakes over her head
and around her shoulders, spinning and spinning all alone. He figured what the
fuck? What’s her disorder? Jeffery had watched from the window, curious, eating
someone else’s potato chips, whoever the fuck used to live there. And then he
saw what the damn flesh-eating bitch was doing. Naw, he
heard
it. It was
the wail of the living—a baby awake, screaming from one of those goddamn yuppie
backpacks. The mother must’ve just turned in the last day or two for that thing
to still be alive. Jeffery leaned out the window to see better. Damn woman was
waving her arms, trying to get at the morsel of noisy flesh strapped to her
back, trying to eat her own goddamn baby.

Up till then, Jeffery had done well by looking out for
himself—no point risking two lives where one was in jeopardy. Hell, he’d seen
so many dead by that point, so many go down that could’ve been him if he were a
little slower, if he’d hesitated or panicked, if he’d stuck his neck out for
someone else.

But something about the baby’s cries got to him. That sound
dove into his bones and clawed at something deep, something primal. Maybe it
was this last chance at life. All the death and dying, and here was something
that’d just been born, a memory of how shit used to work. The thought of
leaving that baby to starve to death on its mother’s back—or worse, for those
writhing arms to finally get it free, for those clacking teeth to set to
work—he couldn’t sit there and wait.

He remembered leaning out the window and scanning the alley.
There was a van crashed into the corner of the building, the hood buckled up
around the old brick. The body of the van blocked the alley off from the
street. It looked safe enough. Boxed in. One woman spinning in circles,
grunting and groaning. Jeffery set the bag of chips aside, wiped the grease off
on his blue jeans, and threw his leg out the window. After a moment’s
hesitation, he scrambled onto the fire escape.

A gas grill blocked access to the ladder—a ghetto balcony.
Pots of dirt with wilted brown stalks lay over on their sides, a luckier kind
of dead. Jeffery wrestled the grill out of the way, metal squealing on metal.
He flashed a glance across the alley at a spot of movement, saw a young man
watching him from a window in the building over, late teens or early twenties.
Surviving age, as Jeffery had come to think of it. The boy leaned out the
window and looked down at the woman in the alley. Jeffery squeezed around the
grill and descended the metal stairs.

At the end of the stairs, he knelt and started to free the
telescoping ladder at the bottom, but wondered if the chompers could manage to
scramble up. He was pretty sure they couldn’t, but why risk it, now that he’d
found someplace safe? He gauged the distance below and figured he could jump up
and grab the lowest rung, used to go around the neighborhood leaping up and
doing pull-ups on ‘em to impress his friends when he was younger. Better safe
than sorry, so he left the ladder the way it was.

He scrambled down the rungs, the cries from the baby louder
now and somehow soothing. The noise it made was a sign that it was still alive,
that the woman hadn’t gotten it free. Jeffery didn’t know what he’d do to take
care of the thing. Maybe it’d be his ticket onto one of the rescue helicopters
he’d heard about but had never seen. If they were real, the baby would be his
way on board. Jeffery could be that soldier helping a friend cradle his guts
for a change. He remembered. They always took that other soldier out of the
shit-storm. They saw him helping like that, squeezing a friend’s grave wound,
and they treated him like some necessary bandage, some emotional tourniquet.
Jeffery would save the baby and be saved himself. That became the plan.

Working down to the last rung, he dangled there for a
moment, feet swinging high over the windswept garbage in the alley, the grunts
from the woman changing as she spotted him there, as she caught his scent.

Jeffery let go and dropped through the air to the pavement.
He landed in a crouch, moving from a safe world to one of danger, a slender
bridge having been crazily crossed.

The woman staggered toward him, hands opening and closing
like a crab’s pinchers. Jeffery hadn’t thought this through. He scrambled
backwards, feet kicking through loose newspaper and swollen bags of trash
chewed open by rats.

The lady moved like a drunk. Jeffery’s heart pounded through
his sweatshirt. He thought he heard the whistle of mortars whizzing down toward
his base in the middle of the night, that feeling that death was everywhere and
it could suddenly choose
you
. But this weren’t mortars. He could see her
coming. Could outrun her. He told himself there weren’t nothin’ to be afraid
of.

Hurrying backwards, Jeffery made some space between him and
her. One thing about the chompers was that they never stopped. Always coming
forward, lips flapping, eyes unblinking, arms out. They were fuckin’ tireless.
He grabbed a lid off one of the metal trashcans. The baby had fallen quiet. The
damn thing had better make it, risking his neck like this. An aluminum
painter’s pole rested against the pipes that ran up the side of the building, a
crusted roller still on the end. He grabbed it as well and glanced up at the
boy watching from the window, wondering how crazy he looked down in that alley
with a lid and a stick, a shield and a sword.

The woman in the dress kept coming. Jeffery waited, a tight
grip on the lid’s handle, the dented metal resting against his forearm, the
pole in his other hand. She was nearly within reach when he finally spotted the
wound that’d turned her. It was at the base of her neck, a nasty bite, the
gurgles and moans leaking from there rather than her lips. The dried blood
running down her neck and chest was like a red scarf tucked into her dress. Her
crab-claws pinched for him. Jeffery swung his shield and knocked her arms
aside. The woman did a pirouette, bending at the waist as she flailed for
balance. He lunged forward and shoved her in the back, tried to get his feet
tangled in hers, but in a drunken stagger she shuffled out of the way. He tried
again, the baby watching him with wide, white eyes, and this time the bitch
flopped forward into the garbage.

Jeffery was on her before she could push her way to her
feet. He kept a knee at the base of her spine, easy as pie, dropped the pole
and the lid and fumbled with the clasps on the pack. He should have brought a
knife from the kitchen to cut the damn thing free. The woman’s arms slid back
and forth through the trash, the rotten fruit rinds, the empty tin cans, like
it was trying to make a snow angel. An alley angel, Jeffery thought to himself.
He was giddy. Laughing. The adrenaline was melting away, the fear fading to a
tingling sense of relief now that she was pinned on her belly, jaws well away
from him. It reminded Jeffery of the sound of a distant mortar blast, knowing a
tent down the row had caught the whistling reaper and not you. He worked one
buckle loose and moved to the other. The baby’s little arms twirled in mimicry
of its mother’s, little pink lips kissing the air, mother and son both hungry
and grunting and crying from being so close to each other, so close to the
sustenance they needed, neither of them able to reach it.

The other buckle finally came free. Jeffery yanked the
straps out from under the pinned and writhing woman. He slid his knee up her
spine to where the baby had been, listened to her teeth clack shut over and
over, head turned to the side, eyes straining for a sight of him, eager to eat
them both.

The baby cried. Jeffery took his time strapping the kid to
his back, made sure the buckles were tight. He eyed the jump down the alley,
thinking how heavy the kid was, if he could still make the leap. Hadn’t thought
this shit through. Not at all.

The boy in the window above whistled at him. Jeffery glanced
up and frowned at the kid for all his waving and shouting. Stupid fool, making
all that noise, gonna summon more of ‘em.

And then Jeffery saw where the kid was pointing. He looked
toward the van, cold fear clawing at his guts, as Jeffery Biggers saw that the
boxed-in alley weren’t so empty anymore.

25 • Jeffery Biggers

Jeffery could still hear that baby’s wails. He could feel
the little guy writhing against his back, legs kicking, lungs screaming,
missing his mother. But the baby and his mother were long gone. And as he
stumbled along the Hudson through cleaned bones and past skeletons jumbled and
missing pieces, he flashed back to that mother pinned beneath his knee, face
down in alley filth, swimming through that accumulation of garbage like she was
trying to get somewhere.