I, Zombie

His mother’s old black cat stood in the corner by the radiator, its spine arched, fur spiked, pink tongue and white teeth visible as it hissed at him. The damn thing was thin as a shadow. Starving. Michael was starving, too. He closed in, remembering the doubts he’d had about his mother’s condition. Those doubts had nagged at him for years.

What if his mother was just acting? What if this was her way of avoiding the world? He hadn’t been able to stop thinking these things. Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they better than her in that way?

Falling forward as much as lunging, Michael seized the weak and cornered cat. Sharp claws gouged his hands, burning where they broke the skin. He ignored this—he had no choice—and concentrated on the past. The times he had screamed at his mother were painful memories, so Michael orbited those. Pain was a distraction from what he knew he was about to do. And so he tried to remember if he had ever hit his mother, even a little. He couldn’t. Couldn’t remember. Maybe he had.

The cat clawed at his face as he bowed his head into its fur. It batted at his unblinking eyes, and Michael—the memory of Michael—recoiled in fear. But the body he was trapped inside did not pull back. The hunger was too great, that mad craving for meat too strong. Not this meat, perhaps. Not cat meat. But he was barricaded inside his apartment with little else. He had locked himself inside, thinking he was safe, that he’d be okay. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t okay.

Michael’s teeth sank past the fur to tear at the animal’s flesh. The cat was a screaming, writhing blur. It clawed at his open eyes, tore at his ears, while Michael ate.

He couldn’t stop himself.

This was not him.

The blood ran down his throat, warm and foul, the cat’s shrieks fading to rattling groans, and he could taste it. He could taste the meat. But this was not him. This was not Michael Lane.

Michael remembered being a boy, once.

He remembered the doctors telling him things, how a person could be locked away inside a body they couldn’t control.

And Michael never believed them, not really.

Until now.

3 • Jennifer Shaw

A grist of bees. A bevy of deer. A mob of—

What was a mob again? Yaks?

Emus. It was emus, Jennifer decided. But what animal made up a gang? Or a boil? Wasn’t there some creature that combined to form a bloat? Bloat was taken, she was pretty sure.

Jennifer drifted back to the games her father played. This was but one of many. She remembered hanging from his arm, her sister on the other side, as he swung them through Central Park Zoo. He called them monkeys—

“A band!” she and her sister would squeal.

“You little gorillas.”

“A troop!”

“You smelly baboons.”

“A flange!”

“I’m not smelly,” her sister would add, pouting.

Up and down the tree of life they would climb, learning useless facts that made their peers roll their eyes and their teachers clap with delight. Their father never taught them state capitals or anything normal. Nothing other people might already know. He filled their heads with reptiles and minerals and trivia. Jennifer never saw a garter snake slither through the grass without thinking: There goes Massachusetts.

“A family is more than just its members,” their father had said. “Together, we become something different.”

He said this a lot after their mother left. Swinging them through the zoo, he had shown his girls all the animals that hate to be alone, that prefer to go in groups. Each group had its own name, he taught them. In company they were something more than they could be in solitude.

So what was this, Jennifer wondered? What had she become? What was she a part of?

It couldn’t be a plague; those were locusts. Couldn’t be an intrusion because of the roach. And wasn’t a group of midges called a bite? She was pretty sure that was right. Shame, that one. And mosquitoes were a scourge. All the good ones were taken.

Herd. Herd was overdone, as was pack. Too many animals shared those. Too obvious.

And then it came to her.

It came to her as the skull Jennifer was trapped inside lolled down, as the nose that used to be hers twitched at the smell of meat.

An arm lay on the pavement, a torn sleeve wrapping it like a cloak, a cloud of flies drawn to the rotting meat. Its owner was long gone.

Jennifer had no appetite for it. She lumbered onward, no longer in control, forced to see whatever her head saw as it followed some scent, some impulse, some new reflex.