I, Zombie (8 page)

More games, these little fictions. Stories of what her
mother was doing now. Always the fantasy of scanning faces on the walk to work,
looking up and down the subway car, seeing her there reading a book or
clutching an umbrella, or maybe watching her in turn, smiling.

Little fictions. That’s what her father called them. Not
lies, just stories to twist the brain into a new shape, to allow the light to
spill in with a different color, to throw rainbows instead of shadows. If only
he had warned Jennifer how exhausting fictions could be. They were as addicting
as they were difficult to keep straight. And when you spent your entire day
looking forward to sleep, to those broad moments before you drifted off when
you could exist anywhere, a lottery winner, the owner of an island, the last
person on earth, the center of a loving family, it didn’t make reality more
bearable. It made it dull and uninteresting. A slog. A mindless shuffle.

These little fictions, games her father used to play. Jennifer
thought of her sister, wondered what had happened to her. Even though her
fingers were growing numb with rot, maggots writhing beneath the wound in her
wrist, she still imagined she could feel her sister’s hand, could hear her
voice, could skip through the past and away from the cruel world.

Crossing 23rd, the head of a woman further up the shuffle
exploded. They were ranging back over the same city blocks they had already
crossed before, passing through silent intersections with dead stoplights that
swayed in the breeze, and the head of a woman limping not far ahead of Jennifer
simply erupted in a shower of dull gray mist.

What life remained in the woman evaporated. Her body sagged
sideways to the ground, the step she had been taking unfinished, just the
wobble of a planted knee, a jerk of her arms, what little was left of her head
lifted toward the clouds, and then the rest of the pack was shuffling around
her, the smell of her dead meat doing nothing for their hunger.

The crack of the rifle came much later, after the woman lay
supine in the street. It brought to mind days Jennifer had spent in Central
Park, lying in the warm grass, men with unathletic bellies hanging over their
belts as they played ball on the dirt diamonds. In the distance, their bats smacked
the softballs over feeble leapers with open gloves, the sound coming well after
the sight.

The next shot was off-center. It sliced away a woman’s
crown, a half-cap of hair and skull, a gray mass beneath. The woman’s soul left
this grateful opening and soared up as her body crashed down. There was a crack
in the air that echoed between the buildings, a stick of dynamite. Jennifer
felt a mix of emotions as the shuffle trundled along, sniffing the air. There
was fear, fear of true death, of parting with her thoughts forever. She was
trapped in that rotting body, yes, and dead in so many ways—
but still aware.
She still had her games, her little fictions. Could these suddenly be taken
from her as well? Would she want them to be?

It was like being a prisoner, someone with a life sentence
with no chance of parole being told by a nurse that she might have but moments
to live. How was she to feel about this? Panic? A sense of looming escape?
Jennifer’s mind whirled with the sudden implications of death popping up among
the already dead. Her torment took a new shape. If she had moments left to
live, were there any thoughts she would want to have before she went? Any words
to the gods she didn’t believe in? Any prayers to those she would never see
again? The interminable minutes of her infinite days now felt like precious
moments, little jewels. The woman directly in front of her took the next bullet
in her shoulder and spun around, arms rising from the centrifugal pull as she
twirled. Crack-pow! None in the shuffle flinched. Maybe they were also silently
praying for and dreading the next one.

This was what a death sentence felt like, Jennifer realized.
She was walking down a prison aisle, cages on both sides of her, like Central
Park Zoo. She was walking to her death, unable to control her legs, terrified
and resigned. This was what it felt like.

The woman who had been hit and spun around had a new jagged
wound to live with. She straightened herself and trudged forward with the rest.
Another hit, another excellent shot, Jennifer both spared and cursed. Where was
this person with the gun? Why shoot them from a distance? And how did they
choose? Would she be next?

Her feet dodged around one of the victims of their own
accord. All women, Jennifer realized. Four in a row.

The shooter knew. He had to. Or was it a she? A sympathizing
woman or some kind of gentleman. Jennifer became convinced of this as an
elderly woman in a nightgown with a horrible neck wound was the next to go.
There was an eruption of blood, a warm mist on Jennifer’s cheek, and then the
woman’s body sagged straight to the pavement like a fuse had been removed.

Someone was sparing them this torture. They had limited
ammunition. Couldn’t save them all. Someone knew. Not those army pricks who
flew by with their hazard suits on, watching, watching. They probably had
orders. Don’t kill civilians. As if that’s what any of them still were.

But this angel with her long barrel of release, with gifts
of lead as valuable as gold, these bullets that could transmute the half-dead
into the full, she had watch over them.

Jennifer’s fear vanished. It was the intentions that warped
her mind, twisting shadows into bright ribbons of color. The shooter was up
there crying, wiping tears from her eyes, using a skill her father had blessed
her with on a farm out west, releasing poor creatures from the half-grip of
death every time she pulled the trigger—a nice little fiction.

Another soul was released, a cloud of brains raining down,
splattering the others, the delayed echo of a bang, the crack of prison walls
crumbling, the resounding boom of freedom.

Sounds. Sounds that came late. Sounds Jennifer Shaw never
heard for herself as they came, singing through that mad, mad air, to release
her.

Part II • Dying for Seconds

Chiang Xian •
Dennis Newland

18 • Dennis Newland

Dennis sat in a pile of cereal boxes while the others
stacked food in shopping carts. Cans rattled to the ground one aisle over. In
front of him, little sacks of organic coffee rustled on the shelf as his
girlfriend Lisa dug through something on the other side. Dennis looked down at
his arm, pulled his hand away from the sleeve of his denim jacket. It was dark
and sticky with blood. He should tell somebody. He should tell somebody. He
should have told them back when he still could.

A cart squeaked past, little wheels spinning, a crushed box
of Cheerios wedged under the front bar. Matt stopped and grabbed a few boxes,
threw them on his pile of canned goods. “You okay, dude?”

Dennis jerked his head up and down. He could still do that.
Maybe he could still speak if he really had to. He hoped he didn’t have to. His
jaws felt locked together. Stiff.

“That shit was close back there. I thought we were goners
for sure this time.”

More jerking of his head up and down. Matt stooped and
grabbed a box of Captain Crunch. “I like this stuff. Good without milk.” He
glanced over at Dennis. “You think we’ll ever taste fresh milk again? Or just
that Parmalat crap for however long we’ve got left?”

Dennis tried to shrug. He couldn’t tell if he succeeded.

“Ah, fuckit.” Matt threw the box in the cart, adjusted the
strap he’d rigged to his shotgun, and pushed his spoils down the aisle. “Better
get your head together and grab some shit,” he called over his shoulder. “You
ain’t eating nothin’ of mine!”

Dennis was left alone with his sticky sleeve. A bag of
coffee tumbled off the shelf across from him and landed with a sad thud on the
ground, the contents spilling out in a brown avalanche. Lisa was still digging
through something on the other side. He could hear her cussing about the
batteries in another iPod running dry. They were going through them like packs
of gum. Stupid.

He looked down at his arm.

So fucking stupid.

It was getting more and more difficult to move. He had
assumed it would be like a light switch when it came, like the Incredible Hulk
turning green and ripping his shirt off, some kind of instant morphing into his
own permanent Mr. Hyde. But it had started with a slow paralysis, a gradual
fatigue that turned into frozen limbs. He could move his wounded arm if he
wanted to—he was pretty sure he could lift it up over his head if he really
wanted to—but he couldn’t make himself
want to
. Staring down at it,
Dennis tried to give his own body a weak command. It felt locked. Pinned. He
tried harder. Some part of him was still there, was telling him that if he
produced a sudden burst of energy, if he just tried
hard
enough, it
would be like breaking out of some kind of packed sand.

That’s what this was. It was the time his older brothers had
buried him in the sand at Virginia Beach. Everything had been funny until he
wasn’t sure if he could get out or not. They would’ve made fun of him if he had
panicked and tried, but he would die if he couldn’t be sure. So Dennis would
twitch and wiggle just enough to crack the sand, enough to see if he could
still move, and his brothers would laugh and pack it back down, slapping the
ground with the flats of their shovels, making the cool sand tight against his
chest.

When the sand had been up to his neck and Dennis had
realized he couldn’t move at all, he’d gotten scared. He had begged them, tears
running down his face, salt in his mouth, to please dig him out. And they had
laughed. Laughed until his screaming had summoned their mother from the water
and their scowls had told Dennis that he would never live this down.

For the second time in his life, Dennis couldn’t move. He
couldn’t lift his hand. Couldn’t even twitch his little finger.

He sat there among the cereal boxes, terrified. This time he
wouldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry. He wasn’t able.

But then his head moved. It moved of its own accord. Someone
else was doing it, pulling strings. And the coffee, the open bag of spilled
coffee sitting across from him—Dennis couldn’t smell it anymore.

He couldn’t smell the coffee. But he could smell
Lisa
.

19 • Chiang Xian

There was meat hanging in the window. Chickens strung up by
their necks, pigs wrapped in twine with their little hooves in prayer, fish
frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground
like silver blossoms. The meat was rotten. The air in the tiny shop was heavy
with the stench of it after being locked tight for days and days. Clouds of
flies gathered and maggots squirmed. The meat had long since ceased to be
appetizing.

Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate
chairs of carved wood. The shop owners had used those chairs to hang their
daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices fluctuated daily.
Chiang Xhen now roamed that shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables,
her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes
occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts
drifting toward her parents.

The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese
girl. Her parents had been born in China whereas she had been born in this tiny
microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.

Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally, but not often.
Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases
while her mother showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand
both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of
practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how
her hand lays over to the side with just the edges of her fingers sliding up
and down the strings.

Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten,
that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. And when they got home that
night, Chiang’s mother uncovered her own feet and pointed to them, and Chiang
kept future discomforts to herself.

Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of
it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The
more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in
their hearts a fantasy version of their homeland. Chiang was now eleven, and
had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been.
It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.

At her one-room school over a noisy restaurant, with the
banging of pots and pans in the background, they learned a lot of politics. Her
teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news in China than she did
of the city in which they lived. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was
lucky to be alive. Back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. But
here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.