I, Zombie

And Michael had this sudden sense that other people were people like him. Like he used to be. That was him behind the car, joking with a friend, peering down that barrel, wrapped in rags soaked in perfume, playing like characters in a video game. That was him making fun of a sick fuck who couldn’t even stagger down the street without looking a fool. That was his sister over there, hair curling out of those rags, one of her boyfriends busting into a supermarket, doing the cool shit of surviving, of living, rather than locked away in some fleshy cocoon, some goddamn filthy apartment.

Someone raised a fist. Michael knew that meant they were about to move. More leapfrogging. The door to the building swung open, a mummy’s arm waving the others his way.

One of the jokesters turned and jogged toward the supermarket, clover or honeysuckle or some shit stirring in the air. Michael shuffled down the middle of the street, a patch of open pavement, a man in rags pointing a gun at him from behind a cab and laughing.

“What?” Michael wanted to shout. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

The two friends by the door hissed at him to come. The man behind the cab raised his fist, and then his hand returned to the gun, steadied it as the barrel lowered, Michael getting closer by the inch.

Laughter. And then it stopped for a moment. The barrel did as well.

A thunderclap. A roar. A flash and a geyser of smoke.

And the only leg Michael had left, the only thing he could prop himself on—this was taken from him as well. Hot steel chewed through the better of his two knees like a charging dog. Michael’s leg shattered. His leg was blown clear away.

He hovered there a moment before the fall, the echo of the gunshot screaming down New York’s perfect canyons, and then, wobbling on split bone and no bone at all, Michael crashed helplessly toward the pavement. Above him somewhere, off to one side, howling laughter erupted before disappearing into the city’s steel walls—and there he went with his friends, rushing inside for good times, for laughing times, for the plunder and play, the life he thought he was living even as he pissed it all away.

13 • Jennifer Shaw

Jennifer found herself in the middle of the shuffle. Along the edge, one had a better view of the world. You could get a sense of where the group was heading, whom they were after, see survivors making a dash or boarding up windows. In the middle, all you saw were your decaying neighbors, a menagerie of wounds and disgustingness, up-close horrors like a Google image search of festering pus.

Moving along in the middle of a large shuffle also meant never knowing where the victims of a feed came from. You never saw how they began. There would be a distant smell of fear, the gurgling sounds of hungry rage, an excited quickening of the pace, some tottering stampede.

If the living put up a fight—and Jennifer always prayed they would—the fallen members of her shuffle would appear on the pavement with their heads bashed in or blown away. Sometimes their arms and legs would still be moving, clutching and kicking at the feet sliding by, tripping up their fellow undead.

The latest feed began like so many others: a scream and the smell of someone surrounded, the raw odor of a living person who knows that death is upon them, the starving snarls of anticipation.

Jennifer found herself hurrying with the rest of the shuffle, many of the limps growing exaggerated, rotten heads bobbing up and down. There were no lucky zombies to trip over along the way. No souls spared the waking nightmare. No gunshots, the promise and hope of a stray bullet. The victim of this feed wasn’t the result of a group fight, just someone who had gotten in the way. Had stumbled or had become cornered. A shriek while they were still able, and then the maddening smell of blood and meat released into the air.

Part of Jennifer hoped the meat was gone before she got there. She was most happy when the other half of her mind, the mad half, was starved and weak. She would rather starve, rather feel empty inside, suffer the gnaw of her gut, than watch herself eat.

This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. Jennifer swam through the shuffle until she came upon a mother with her son, neither swift enough to get away. Maybe the boy had fallen, tripped, and the mother did what any mother would: made the mistake of going back for him.