I, Zombie

This time, Chiang had a better idea. And somehow, her body listened. Like an exhausted arm and trembling brush finally obeying her concentration and producing the perfect stroke, if she thought hard enough on a thing, a direction, her feet seemed to shuffle according to her will. But just barely. And it wasn’t easy.

I can do this, she told herself. It was no different than stretching her tiny hands around the neck of a violin. It was just like origami, biting her lip and making sure the edges of the paper lined up just right, to within a hair, that with the drag of a fingernail the folds were crisp and sharp, her miniature paper cranes nearly as good as her mother’s. Chiang felt she had studied all her life for this, to corner this one little rat.

She banged into the radiator, and the frightened animal shot off toward her father’s back office. Good, good. Chiang shuffled after. Her limbs were too slow to catch the thing by hand. That was true even before she’d lost the fingers on one hand. But there were swifter limbs in her father’s office. And so she lurched sideways, frightening the little guy through the open door before following after.

Following after. Chiang thought about an old worry of hers as the rat scrambled beneath her father’s cluttered desk. She had this feeling, this nagging sensation even back when her parents were still alive, that her thoughts followed after the things she did. They were the echoes of her actions, not the causes of them.

There was something Confucius had once said: The superior man acts before he speaks. She didn’t think Confucius meant it the way she read it, though. Her fear, as she had struggled to be the perfect girl her parents desired, was that there wasn’t any control at all. All men act first and speak after. She felt it herself. She would do a thing and then take credit or make excuses. In truth, she did the thing because she was born to. Because, in that moment, how could she not?

She banged into the desk, just like she had the radiator. On purpose, she thought. She hoped. Almost there. Swifter arms than hers. She could smell the fear leaking out of the rat and figured it was doing much the same as she. Reacting and then feeling something. Some mix of chemicals. Happiness or sadness, fear or desire, these chemicals causing limbs to move toward or away from the good or bad.

Chiang tried to scare the rat from the bad to the worse. She nudged the desk again. The last project her father had been working on—ledgers full of meticulous script, purchase orders for half a dozen vendors—was spread out across the surface just the way he had left it so many days ago. There was an agitated squeak by the wall, the scratch of tiny claws, and then the clack and slam of a metallic arm and the snapping of a tiny neck as a trap long picked clean did its swift work.

Chiang fell to the floor and lumbered beneath the desk. The darkness was no concern; she could smell the crushed flesh like a piece of cracked ginger. Her hands groped for the trap and found it. She pulled the contraption out, the animal’s tiny arms still twitching with something that resembled life.

Fists smaller than any intricate crane her mother had ever made unfolded into pink and perfect palms. Chiang only studied them a moment before bringing the trap to her lips. She bit the rat in the belly, still warm and heaving, and her mouth was filled with the hot and sticky scraps picked over and digested by the foul beast, this little survivor. The trap itself was something to chew around. The rest was for her. She peeled slivers of flesh off its body and chewed through bones like chopsticks while someone rummaged noisily in the meat shop.

Chiang stopped chewing and listened. Beyond the moist steam rising from the rat’s insides, there was another smell cutting through. Living meat. Something not rancid and spoiled. She could smell them like spices, at least a few of them out there, the odor getting stronger.

Voices.

A whispered hush. The sound of canned goods being scraped off of shelves. There were people in her parents’ shop, scrounging for food. Chiang dropped what remained of the rat and shuffled toward the door. She was still hungry. So very hungry. And her limbs seemed to move of their own accord, her mind making excuses, telling herself a story of reasons, as she went along like a puppet.

A family of three. They didn’t hear her coming out of the back room, sliding through the red curtains with the green dragons. Chiang saw that they had pressed one of the shelving units against the door. These people had broken in, and her first thought wasn’t anger; her first thought was that maybe she could get out.