I, Zombie (25 page)

There were so many. Running over her feet, stepping on them,
crushing some, them biting back with sharp and fearful teeth. Her blind legs
marched forward, oblivious to the pain. Gloria’s head simply remained full of
her silent screams, her prayers, other repeated nonsense, loops of songs from a
far-gone life, all roaring noiselessly in the hemispheres of her small mind as
her feet carried her along.

She could hear the others walking with her, the squish of
dozens of feet in the mud and garbage, their wheezing and rattling, their
miserable pleas. This grotesque and invisible mass trudged downward into the
darkness. Water dripped from overhead, occasionally striking her scalp. Every
nerve was heightened by the pitch black. There were splashes ahead that warned
her of the flood, and the scents that drew them in began to grow weak.

Gloria bumped into those who circled back. The gathering
seemed to mix aimlessly in the darkness, trapped by the eddy of odors. She was
one of the few who followed a slender tendril onward, into the flooded tunnel
that sloped down and down.

Her feet hit the water, ankles covered, then her calves,
knees, thighs—and still her dumb body forged ahead, following a scent and then
just the memory of a scent. Rats swam alongside, their tiny claws pawing at
her, scampering up her back and around her neck, riding her shoulders, little
teeth sampling her rotting flesh.

Deeper. Splashes in the darkness as others waded in
different directions. All confused, now. Just moving in order to move. A tunnel
sloping ever downward, no train station in what felt like forever, and Gloria
knew what part of the line she was on. This was the way.
Forward, forward,
she urged the man at the tiller.
Go
.

The water was freezing. It numbed all her hurts, soothed the
craziness spreading in her brain. Even that organ would rot, she had
discovered. It would go last, some part of this disease, some obsession that
forsook everything but the memory of a life lived, gave up the body to save the
ghost. But it was going, too. Memories and dreams fading, thoughts coming out
of sequence. She was stuck in that morning haze where the nonsensical made
sense for but a moment, just awake enough to realize things weren’t clear.

Her shoulders sank beneath the waters. Rats clung to her
face and tangled in her hair, little feet tearing at her lips and scratching on
her teeth, higher and higher up their sinking raft, until she was fully under
and they paddled away.

Gloria came up a while later with the slope. Below the East
River, she suspected. The Blue Line was flooding. Or flooded on purpose. She
rarely came this way. This was the train to Brooklyn and beyond. This was the
tunnel that cut beneath the earth and popped up on the other side. The rats
squealed with delight as they returned to dry land. They chased between her ruined
feet and scampered over the dead tracks and the wet garbage. Foul water leaked
out of Gloria’s mouth, out of the hole in her cheek, and she didn’t care. She
was in the morning shower, nothing about the world yet making sense, not quite
awake yet, not quite dead.

There was a soft breeze ahead. Rising. She bumped shoulders
with another, a reminder that there were people in these bodies just like her.
The darkness faded as distant daylight scattered down the tunnel. Black became
gray became the barest of hoary gold. The smell of the living carried on the
sinking air. Rats twittered, agitated, and ran forward, an army of scouts, the
presages of death and plague, the scavengers of rot and ruin.

Gloria was one of the horde to make it through. Bumping and
jostling. They scampered over a wall of rubble, hands and knees, sharp rock,
the roof of the tunnel bumping their heads, forcing them on their bellies,
crawling and pulling toward the smell—and then an arc of bright light growing,
approaching, until she could see the lurching bodies ahead of her, could make
out familiar forms, soaked and rat-nicked and still moving.

The sunlight hit Gloria’s skin as she emerged on the
elevated platform, and it felt good. It would feel good until the smell of
baking, decayed flesh returned. It would feel good until it didn’t.

There was a train standing dead on the tracks ahead, stopped
at a station. Nobody moving. An elevated rail a few stories above the rooftops.
Gloria shuffled toward the train and the station, the smell of a place where
people had lived rising up from the streets, driving her forward. Behind her,
there was the rumble of jets, the silent whistle of swooping birds, the rise of
new and strange suns to the west where suns should not rise at all, and a wound
cauterized, but much too late. A wound sealed shut like a cancerous tumor, but
not before it had spread to the liver, deep to the marrow, working its way at
the very last to the most necessary organ of them all—

But that was for others to say. Gloria smiled. She staggered
away from the city that held her dreams and contained her past, a hole in her
cheek the size of an apple.

www.hughhowey.com

About the Author

Ten years after that horrible day, I returned with my wife
to the very spot where I stood as the second plane hit. My heart goes out to
all across the globe who were affected by the events of that day. When I fly
over New York now, I still see a gaping wound. I see her missing teeth. But she
seems to be stitching together much as we do. This book is about her and my
love for a one-time home.

Dedicated to The One
Thousand

You know who you are.

Romans 7:15-24

For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to
do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I
will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer
I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my
flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform
what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but
the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do,
it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who
wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But
I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched
man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?