I, Zombie

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.