I, Zombie (4 page)

Years suddenly felt like mere days. The past had piled up
without him noticing. Maybe it was from living the same day over and over:
cashing government checks, never enough to properly care for her, way more than
was needed to
improperly
care for her, making deals with the leftovers,
getting high, drifting off through the roof and into the clouds while his mom
sat quietly in the next room.

Years and years that felt like days. It was all the same
day. The same craving every moment, the itching urge, the temporary relief, the
guilt and self-loathing, burning cigarettes down to the butt on the fire
escape, peering through the glass where the flashing cherry lit up his
reflection, his mother in the room beyond, locked in her chair, her back
turned, forced to stare glassy-eyed at an empty corner of the room rather than
out the window she loved, because Michael couldn’t take being seen by her some
days, the days when he feared she was still in there, when he suspected the
doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.

He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother
before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one
flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the
distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered
into it, not watching where it was going.

Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not
to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal
clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around
and around.

Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How
could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and
around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of
the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time
wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life,
gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for
more.

8 • Gloria

The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human
world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The
pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city
long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags
flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted
everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun.
They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile
legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.

The dogs were newly wild. They were still in the process of
returning to their lurking, primal states. When they fought over scraps—tugging
at a boot until the leg came away from the hip—Gloria saw herself in them. Many
of them jangled with the baubles of ownership. A few dragged ruined leashes
through the scrap heap humanity had left behind. They howled in the distance or
from within buildings and fenced lots. They growled and snarled at each other, fur
matted and hackles up. They scratched and bit at their flanks, their own
infestations to deal with. Gloria hated seeing the dogs. Many of the poor
creatures looked as though they wouldn’t last another day or two. Others would
probably thrive.

This was the end of the world, that’s what she was privy to.
She thought of her brother and sister, thought of Carl in prison upstate, and
wondered if their world was ending as well. Maybe not. Not yet. Maybe this
island was a wound the rest of America would cauterize and survive. Just a
nick, perhaps. Either way, here was a glimpse of the inevitable. The world
could stagger on a bit, but here was an early view of the looming fate of
mankind.

Gloria remembered classes she had taken in college. She had
majored in English, but never got far enough to take the classes she wanted to
take. It was all the pre-requisites before dropping out, before trying to make
it as a dancer on Broadway, eventually resigning herself to waiting tables,
partying, marrying the first guy who knocked her up, staying with him even
after the pregnancy failed, even after he was locked away. Before all that,
there had been a pre-req, a geology class. She had learned a bunch about rocks
and volcanoes, couldn’t remember what else. All she came away with was an
appreciation of time, for the vast eons that stretched out in both directions.

The dogs and the birds and the rats owned this city. The
cockroaches and the gnats and the maggots. Gloria stumbled down the streets
toward the hope of another meal and was witness to Armageddon. And it was more
peaceful than she imagined. The time stretched out and was filled with life
being busy
living
. Humans would die and rot, would shamble around with
their arms outstretched groping for the meaningless, and time would stretch out
and engulf them like the long roads she’d seen pictures of out west.

Ahead of her rose a barricade of cars. A bus parked across
the curb, not by accident. The smell came from the other side, people alive. A
pocket of survivors. An oasis of ripe flesh. The barricade rose like the
Rockies, blocking out ideas of time stretching off forever. There was this
thing to consider. The band of undead pressed against the overlapped cars, and
an alarm rang out, a car alarm. Clever if done on purpose, a ring of cars that
would sound an alarm when the dead came calling.

Gloria crowded in with the rest. She bumped against the bus,
waved her arms at the bright smells in the air that seemed to tinge everything
pink and shiny. There were people on the other side. Living people. She was one
of the animals fenced out. Gloria knew this, knew what she was, what side of
the fence she lived on. And she saw that the end of the world was not quite
yet. Some were still trying, banding together, building a fortress of buses and
cars in the middle of a crumbling city. Fires crackled, the smell of cooked
pigeons, maybe dog, maybe something else.

Gloria sniffed the air, taking it all in, feeling that vast
stretch of time soaring out to either side of her, knowing this was but a
slice, and that the ruin would come to all else. The end of things. And her
kind would hasten it, whether they wanted to or not.

9 • Jennifer Shaw

Jennifer’s shuffle, which had grown to three dozen since
yesterday, made its way across 59th. The promise of living flesh continued to
drift north on a breeze steered by glass-walled canyons. It smelled like dozens
of survivors, so many that their fear mixed and blended until they couldn’t be
told apart. Curiosity as much as hunger seemed to drive the shuffle south. As
if any reason were needed for limbs long out of control.

Stepping from the curb, her arms out to steady her
diminished sense of balance, Jennifer realized she never came this way anymore,
not since she was a kid. The shuffle slid around the cars in the street,
startling a flock of birds, and Jennifer felt herself cross an imaginary
boundary she didn’t even know existed, a separation of two worlds delimited by
city blocks and a strip of pavement.

The world she left behind was the one she knew as an adult,
living and working on the Upper East Side. And here, the width of a paved river
away, Sutton Place, the world of her youth. From one island to another with a
few steps. She never came this way anymore.

There was a park on the corner she recognized, a park she
knew well. There was a puppy she and her sister had begged for. When the two of
them both wanted a thing that badly, they were rarely refused, even when their
parents knew better. Likewise, when the two of them disagreed, a stalemate of
rare violence formed. She and her sister got the puppy because their wishes
overlapped. It remained nameless, referred to simply as “Puppy,” because they
could not agree on anything more proper.

Jennifer couldn’t remember the name she had lobbied for,
though it seemed a matter of life and death at the time. All she remembered was
how fast it grew. Until it was bigger than they were. Until its name made less
and less sense. There, in that park, she and her sister had strained against
the leash while Puppy dragged them from tree to tree, chasing squirrels. The
allure wore off quickly, as Puppy outgrew its cuteness. She and her sister had
realized how much work was involved, that their parents were right, and
gradually the dog became their mother’s. Which meant their mother didn’t have
to be alone when she left the rest of them behind.

The view of her childhood park was lost as Jennifer crowded
against the person in front of her. It was the same obese man she’d fallen
behind a block earlier. She tried not to look. The man’s ear and a flap of his
cheek hung down from where he’d been attacked. When he turned and sniffed the
air with his rotting stump of a nose, she was forced to see his grisly molars,
his tobacco-stained teeth, right through his open cheek. Flies had taken up
residence in his wound and flew about lazily in the cool air, buzzing his head
like some great nest, some fleshy hive. Jennifer imagined they would lay eggs
in his flesh. The maggots would come soon for him—she’d seen them writhe on
others. She wondered how long before she felt them inside her as well.

Ahead of the man was the woman with no eyes in the bright
purple dress. She had been a part of the shuffle for five days. Or was it six? Jennifer
had lost count. She was envious of this woman. She could see her walking with
both arms out, hands tangled up in the clothes and hair of others, her face a
blood-caked mess. While she shuffled along blindly in her purple dress,
Jennifer longed to switch places. She imagined the games she could play if the
world were black. The sounds of car alarms and the crackling of fires might
pierce her imaginary travels, but she could learn to ignore the lesser noises,
the hiss of boots sliding across asphalt, the grunts and groans of souls
disconnected from their bodies, the screams of the terrified living, the wet
ripping sounds and crunching bones of a shuffle feeding—

In perfect blackness, in eyeless darkness, she could make
the rest disappear. She knew that she could. There were games her father didn’t
know about, games she and her sister played under the covers while arguments
leaked through walls. But being forced to see what her body saw, to endure the
flow of the mob, made it impossible to hide from what she’d become. Even when she
managed to dream herself away for a few moments, something awful would rip her
back into the here and now with hideous force.

Down the block, her old school loomed into blurry view: P.S.
312. A massive brick structure from the days when things were built with
someone else’s future in mind. Jennifer tried to focus on the school, but she
didn’t even have control of what she saw. Not always. The constant hunger meant
her vision was forever fixed on potential meat. It left her eyes constricting
and warping to bring the wounds of others into view. While she tried to
concentrate on the edges of her vision, a director with some sick mind roamed
the hurts of the world. And so they passed her old school, which remained a
blur, much like her childhood.

A neighborhood with old memories, a few of them good. Why
didn’t she ever walk this way anymore? What was it about this city, with its
endless possibilities, that elicited such limited routines? Was it the fear of
the faceless hordes? Was it the allure of the known and the familiar? Or was it
mere habit?

Jennifer suspected it was none of these things. She thought
she knew why she stuck to a track like a subway train, why her selection of
favorite restaurants numbered in the handful, why she shopped and visited the
same spots over and over, even the same bench in the same park, so consistently
that she knew how and when the shade fell across it, thought she recognized the
squirrels, even.

To her, the routine was an inoculation against the daily and
constant influx of the lost and bewildered, the baggage-draggers, the
upward-gazers, the camera-strangled gawkers. It was this plague, this disease,
that her life on rails was meant to protect against. It was the abject terror
of feeling like—
of becoming
—a tourist.

A friend of Jennifer’s confessed this once, that within a
month of moving to the city, she had desperately wanted to be recognized as a
local, as someone who now lived there. And she harbored jealousy toward
Jennifer for being born in the city, which Jennifer found strange. This friend
had divulged another secret: that when tourists asked her directions, even if
she didn’t know the answer, she just made something up. She would only feel bad
after they walked away, as they followed her directions and muttered how nice everyone
in New York was. It was easier for her to lead nice people astray than to admit
she didn’t know her way around, that she was in many ways a visitor as well.

It was hard to judge her friend. Jennifer felt the same
desire to both blend in and be recognized, to never glance up at the remarkable
buildings for fear of being spotted. She went to the same handful of
restaurants and bars where she could bump into people she knew, wave
exaggeratedly to a bartender or patron, sprawl out in booths with her laptop
and newspaper, and prove that she belonged.

A routine. That’s what she had fallen into. Decades on
rails. She might hear of a new joint opening up with the best such-and-such,
but it was in a part of town she never went to. Not a bad part, just a
different
part. Not her part.

A bodega on the corner came into focus. Her hungry eyes
spotted movement inside. Survivors. Her potential food scrounging for their
potential food.

The shuffle turned that way, holes in faces where noses used
to be sniffing at the air, and Jennifer remembered the store. It had been there
as long as she’d been alive. She’d just forgotten about it. She never came this
way anymore.