I, Zombie

The sun slanted through the window, casting shadows of words in reverse, and little motes of dust dipped and swirled like fairies with a life of their own. There were two chairs of ornate wood tipped on their sides, catching the sun. The flesh up past the knees might sate Chiang’s painful hunger, but she could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any more. She had eaten all that she could. She was powerfully hungry and all alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.

20 • Dennis Newland

“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Matt had told Dennis, holding out a smoking roach, the day before they’d made a run at the grocery store, the day before Dennis had been bit.

They were still in that office building where they’d been rationing candy bars. They’d just killed a group of survivors eerily similar to their own foursome, another pair of couples thrown together by the nightmare of the world. This other group had been surviving noisily one floor above, carrying on, acting like maniacs. After a long discussion about whether to bring trouble or wait for it to come to them, Dennis and Matt had opted for the latter. They convinced Lisa and Sarah that it was best, that this other group would bring death upon them all. And so they rehearsed and checked their gear and went on the offensive for the very first time.

“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld,” Sarah had joked, sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep. She thought they looked like them. It took some explaining before any of the rest of them got the joke. Sarah was the only one who watched old sitcoms. And besides: nothing much was funny after you’d shot a living person, not while you were digging through their pockets and the bodies were still warm.

Matt was the one who’d discovered the stash. Later that night, he’d held out that roach, the ember fading, telling Dennis to take a hit, that it’d be good for him, that it was the end of the fucking world and to stop being such a pussy.

Dennis had passed. He always did. He mumbled something about asthma, his old and entirely made-up excuse to not smoke. Matt had shrugged and had given life to that ember with a noisy intake of air.

Dennis had no problem lying to friends. He was used to keeping secrets, was skilled at keeping things from others. The sticky wound beneath his sleeve was just the latest. Later that night, while their cubicle fortress filled with smoke, Dennis had found an empty cubicle down the endless row. He had shuffled through the scattered supplies and loose paper like snowdrifts from some weeks-old panic and made himself comfortable in quiet solitude.

He didn’t know how to explain to his new friends what getting stoned felt like to him. Hell, he’d been with Lisa for years and had never even told her. He was pretty sure it was a singular reaction, that everyone else must feel something different, but to him getting stoned was a scary place, not a soothing one.

The first time he’d smoked up, he was convinced he would die. The high had lasted for hours, for most of the damn day. He remembered standing in Lisa’s kitchen, the cabinet open, hand on the knob, looking at an assortment of glasses. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Must’ve teleported from the living room. The TV and the laughter from his friends were faraway sounds. He was disconnected from everything.

Later, sitting under a cold shower, praying impatiently for the numbness that had crawled into his veins to crawl the fuck back out, he had watched the hair on his legs wave as the water rained down from the faucet. The hair stirred like the seaweed at the breaker’s edge on Far Rockaway, like small arms pushing out of his skin and trying to get his attention, trying to wiggle free. A million dead things buried alive and working to escape their epidermal graves.

Dennis had become terrified that he would always be like that. The pot had permanently dumbed him. Hours later, lying perfectly still on the bathroom floor, his thoughts had begun to clear. He could analyze what had gone wrong. But summoning his thoughts seemed to make his flesh melt away, his body go perfectly numb. And if he tried to move, the opposite happened. He could feel again, but now he couldn’t think.

It was one or the other. It couldn’t be both. His brain or his flesh, never the two.

Three times in his life Dennis had gotten stoned, and every time it was this choice. He could have his body or his thoughts, but not both at the same time. That little bridge between the hemispheres of his soul got fogged up by the smoke. That bridge had a name. Corpus Christi or some shit. Once it was severed, he had to choose. One or the other. Lie still and think or get the fuck up and lose his mind.

So he didn’t smoke. Was terrified of the shit. And now it was happening again.