I, Zombie

She felt afraid for her feet. Concentrating on the breeze, on the smells, Gloria felt fear anew. If the scents wavered, she could be the one splashing in, the one throwing up concentric swells. The thought of the dark and deep, the bitingly cold, it was worse than her fear of a feed. But there was also something like hope there on that shoreline. Maybe there was an end, a completion to what God had begun.

The breeze stirred. It swam like a nearly visible serpent through the trees. Gloria spotted a woman walking through the woods, dragging her leg. The dead were everywhere, fanning out, sniffing and listening, and Gloria prayed:

Dear God, please forgive me. Whatever I’ve done, please forgive me. Take me, God, with the others. Please don’t leave me here.

She tried to think of some forgotten offense, some reason to have been left behind. God knew everything about her. What could she add? How could she feel more sorry?

Please don’t leave me here, Lord.

Her shoes crunched through the gravel by the edge of the pond. She imagined herself veering to the side and walking out across the waters, ripples spreading out from her footsteps, and then her soul rising up through the clouds as a grand mistake was corrected. There would be apologies and explanations. Maybe she would discover that this was her penance. She thought of her mother’s rosary beads, the quiet prayer she was always whispering, and maybe Gloria had been damned by her father’s church, by being raised a Protestant. Maybe it was that Carl’s sins in prison were great enough to damn them both.

She shook such thoughts from her head. How many extra days would she suffer in her damnable state for thinking such things? And how many more days for feeling this fear rather than true guilt? And more days heaped on for worrying about that? And that? And so on and forever—

A smell distracted her. It came from the woods, the drift of meat. Gloria’s feet chose to put distance between the rest of her and the water’s edge. She bumped into a low wrought-iron fence once, twice, before finding the gap that led into the deeper woods. There, through the crunching leaves and scattering of squirrels, a group of her kind had formed, a cluster of the damned. They milled about the base of a tree, arms in the air, rotting noses lifted high.

Gloria looked. She saw the dangling shoes. And then the swinging legs. There was a scabbed knee with a dried trickle of delicious red running down a shin. There were arms wrapped around a mother, who was wedged between the great divide of the tree’s largest boughs, fifteen or more feet off the ground. And over the grunts and struggles of the tottering dead rained the whispers of a parent who did not seem to know that those below could still hear, still understand:

“Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

Lies, Gloria thought, joining the others. She stared heavenward. The woman smoothed the young girl’s hair, consoling her. She looked ten or eleven, but starvation took years as well as pounds. The mother peered down, cheeks gaunt, and watched the new arrivals. Gloria felt horrible for these two. Gloria was starving.

The child sobbed. Her feet kicked out of agitation. Or maybe those frail legs had grown so used to running the past weeks that they couldn’t stop moving. While they wheeled the air, Gloria circled the tree, her eyes locked on that limb, the smell of the living intoxicatingly near and impossibly far. Here was the manna of her desire, craving it even as she feared it, causing her to wonder, with the hellishness of all that she’d seen and the ungodly predicament of mother and child, not how the two of them had gotten up on that limb and what would become of them, but what Gloria had done to deserve to be there, to be left wandering in circles on that lowly, cursed, and unholy ground.

12 • Michael Lane

Michael balanced on a flopping leg, a limb like a prosthetic, kicking his unfeeling foot forward as split bone bore down on split bone. He moved slowly in this teetering fashion toward the end of the garbage strewn alley behind his apartment building. A handful of undead just like him shuffled past. There was a smell of the living, the smell of meat, new smells instantly understood. Unless these odors had always been there, and now his locked-in state made him newly sensitive to them. Or perhaps not sensitive to them—maybe he had simply become dead to everything else.