I, Zombie

And for a moment—because of the dismembered arm, perhaps—the direction of her gaze allowed Jennifer to study the feet, her feet, and the feet of those around her. The bare feet and the feet in ragged slippers; the work boots and the worn trainers; the feet sliding and dragging; the feet of the people bumping into her, all of them moving in one direction, upwind, toward the smell of living meat.

She was one of them, and Jennifer knew what she was, what the group would be called.

She filed this trivia away. She took it with her as she disappeared into the recesses of her recollections, back to the times before she’d joined this trembling mass, this vile and grotesque thing her flesh had become. She skipped into the past, swinging on her father’s strong arms, beating her sister to calling this one out:

“A shuffle,” she cried. “A shuffle of zombies!”

And the animals of Central Park Zoo paced inside their cages, watching her and her dead family stagger by.

And they were all afraid.

4 • Michael Lane

Michael was suffering from withdrawal. He wasn’t sure at first—it was hard to tell one madness from the other—but now he knew.

He still had the taste of cat blood in his mouth, could feel this voice in his head, this lunatic starving for meat, this new animal in control of his body. And behind the thick curtain of horror that had drawn shut across his awareness, a tiny, familiar, persistent shout could be heard: he needed a fix. His veins hungered for the prick of steel, for the warm flow of numbness and that perfect release. He needed it now more than ever before. An overdose, Michael decided, would be fucking heavenly. A way to go. Any way to go for good.

The kit was on top of the fridge. Everything was there to help him die in bliss. He could sate the urge to which he’d been a slave for longer than he could remember, for longer than he’d ever been in control of himself, for almost as long as his mother had been seized by her blank stares and her shivering fits.

But now there was a new monster guiding his hand, dictating the direction of his mindless stagger. And this new thirst, this awful craving, carried him not toward the kitchen, but toward the door to his mother’s room.

The cat was dead. Michael had eaten most of it. Its fur was still stuck in his throat, his body too dumb to cough it up. It left a powerful tickle he could do nothing about.

With the animal gone, there was only one other scent of flesh nearby, only one other piece of meat in the tiny apartment.

Michael’s bloodstained hands banged and gouged at the door, swimming toward the smell of flesh on the other side. He cried out in silent despair, knowing what the monster in him craved. There was no controlling it. He couldn’t even command his swollen tongue to lie still—it lolled with every grunt and seemed to fill his mouth with its writhing. It felt liable to choke him.

His fingernails caught on the door’s panels and bent backward. The smears of cat blood on the door looked like something a child would come home from school with and be proud of, or something one of the museums uptown would charge millions for. Michael felt a swallowed laugh, thinking of that door hanging on a wall with his name under it. The world’s first zombie art. His laugh came out a gurgle.

The gory brush strokes, meanwhile, worked their way toward the doorknob. Had he been thinking about how to open the door? He tried not to, tried to conceal this knowledge from his terrible side, but picturing the mechanism brought it to the surface. One monster spoke to another, and crimson claws fell to the fake brass.

Michael couldn’t control it, couldn’t stop himself. All he could do was spill secrets to this dark animal inside him. All he could do—as ever—was betray his mother. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was chance, he thought, as he watched a torturous eternity of banging and fumbling. Maybe it was just bad luck, all out of his control.

The handle twisted, and the door popped open. Michael lurched forward, a passenger, a man beating on a window, begging the conductor to stop, to let him out, to let him just jump out and please run him the fuck over.

His mother was by the window, right where he’d left her two days earlier. The curtains rustled in the breeze. It was cold in the room, and the smell of flesh was intoxicating. It bled into his rush for a fix. It confused him, this lust for eating the living. A warm patch grew around his crotch, and Michael realized his bladder was letting loose. He was an animal. Untrained. Barbaric. Just needs and impulses, cravings, and a mass of muscles that drove him toward sating those cravings. Simple as that. His ability to do as he chose—if ever he’d possessed that skill at all—was gone.

Michael staggered toward the open window and sobbed inwardly for his mother. The new hunger inside him swelled and grew until it drowned out even the urge for a fix. Even that.