I, Zombie

Michael watched through the lens of his soul, a victim of every lanced nerve, the agony horrific. Needles shot through his legs and face. Something was wrong with his abdomen, his stomach cramping and full. At the end of the alley, he saw shapes—people—moving through the parked cars spread across the wide avenue beyond. Moving gracelessly, these other people threw their bodies forward, arms out, shoulders stooped, many of them injured as well, a macabre dance of wounded limbs, a strut of shattered bone.

The pain. It meant nothing. It wasn’t a signal to lie still, to stop. It just was. A thing. Something to endure. No purpose, except…

Michael noticed something through the burn.

As his body was consumed with this fiery hell and his mother sagged in his guts, he realized the old craving was gone. The withdrawals. They were over. Passed by. Cauterized. Melted through. Ground to ash.

The only pain left was the physical. Nails were driven through him with each hammering lurch. And his other hurts, the ones he always thought debilitating, the ones that kept him on the sofa for days, they cowered in some hidden recess, terrified of this new, sudden, and real misery that had wrapped itself around him, squeezing him so tightly that his bones crunched into smaller and smaller pieces, bits of glass slicing him from the inside, needles, the sting of angry nectarless bees.

Out of the alley, Michael emerged broken, dizzy, and aware. He was dead in some ways and alive in others. The sun was high, the rays warming a city that still held the chill from a clear fall evening. Monsters lurched everywhere, following a scent to the next feed, dragging their wounds along with them, oblivious, enduring, or both.

Hesitating a moment, his balance unsure, Michael felt a twinge of control, a sliver of time when desire and deed overlapped, when he found his body doing what he perfectly wished. Just a moment, like a broken clock that twice a day tells the proper time, and then Michael Lane threw a leg ahead of himself. He limped forward, despite his wishes. He merged, blending, joining the others.

11 • Gloria

There were good moments. Somehow, there were moments less miserable than others. The group Gloria had fallen in with might splinter in the swirling breeze, and a small troop would find itself rambling through a park beneath the twittering birds, the air midday warm and the taste of human flesh mostly gone from her mouth.

Even there, in the end of times, when God had taken the righteous from the earth and had left her behind, there were moments less miserable than others.

Central Park brought one such respite. It stood like an oasis, a perfectly rectangular eruption of nature in the center of that mad island with its spikes and spines of concrete and steel. The greenery beckoned. It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors, this weak smell of fear among the earthy tang of mulch and the mint and spice of untamed plants.

Gloria’s small group of bloodstained stragglers splintered among the benches and bushes. Deeper within, a large rock wall confounded a few, the trees dividing the pack like fingers running through tangled hair. The city disappeared, just as the park’s designers must’ve intended. Gloria thought of all those who came here to escape the bustle and noise. Now they came to be surrounded by things alive, to take leave of all the death in the streets, perhaps to find wild mushrooms, trap wildlife, scrounge for food.

Through the mulch and tall weeds, through the last grasses of fall, Gloria trudged deeper. She came to one of the park’s many bodies of water, a pond scattered with unmanned boats steered only by the breeze. Gloria watched, mesmerized, while one of the monsters ahead of her steered into the water. The young man sank to his knees, his arms flailing, before tipping forward. He made a splash, writhed for a moment, then disappeared. A duck coasted on the swell he made, its tail twitching in brief annoyance.

Gloria never stopped moving. She continued along the pond’s edge, wondering what would happen to that man. Would he remain there beneath the water, the shadows of ducks blotting the sun? For how long? Forever? Or would he float to the surface? Or would his flailing arms learn to swim?

The ripples he’d made faded as Gloria’s feet carried her along the rocky shoreline. Trees denuded of most of their leaves reflected in the mirrored surface, tall buildings rising up beyond, one of the buildings on fire and belching dark smoke, the nostrils of a fierce beast. Gloria imagined the man walking along the bottom of the lake, no bubbles leaking out, the depths down there freezing and dark as ink.

Would he die? Was that still possible? Was it possible for her?