I, Zombie

Jeffery remembered spotting the bitch from that upstairs apartment he’d staked out for his own. He hadn’t planned on leaving that place until the cupboards were bare. Earlier that morning, he had escaped a few mobs, had used that combination of boot camp army know-how and the black spirit that had helped generations of his color make it through the deep shit time and time again. He’d seen some brutal stuff in his weeks of running, more gruesome even than the crap he’d seen in the war. Roadside bombs and flesh eaters had some things in common, except these monsters didn’t leave limbs behind. They took them with them, munching on them like turkey legs while they tracked down another scent.

Jeffery had been surviving okay for a week or two, getting clear, avoiding one nick after another. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky. Jeffery was used to that, the inequitable luck of two people sitting side-by-side in the same Hummer. One man gets a scratch, the other is holding his guts in his lap and screaming for his momma. All luck. Where you’re sitting’, where you’re born. Dumb fucking luck.

Well, there’s dumb luck, and then there’s just plain stupid. Jeffery had been stupid, trying to save that baby, thinking shit could be saved anymore. Stupid.

He’d seen the woman from the apartment window, down in the alley, three stories below. One of the flesh-eaters was walking in circles, waving her arms over her head. Hadn’t seen one do that. Most walked with their arms out like goddamn Frankenstein, like the soul trapped inside can see but the shit in charge can’t. Like they gotta feel their way through the breeze.

So this one, arms wiggling like thick snakes over her head and around her shoulders, spinning and spinning all alone. He figured what the fuck? What’s her disorder? Jeffery had watched from the window, curious, eating someone else’s potato chips, whoever the fuck used to live there. And then he saw what the damn flesh-eating bitch was doing. Naw, he heard it. It was the wail of the living—a baby awake, screaming from one of those goddamn yuppie backpacks. The mother must’ve just turned in the last day or two for that thing to still be alive. Jeffery leaned out the window to see better. Damn woman was waving her arms, trying to get at the morsel of noisy flesh strapped to her back, trying to eat her own goddamn baby.

Up till then, Jeffery had done well by looking out for himself—no point risking two lives where one was in jeopardy. Hell, he’d seen so many dead by that point, so many go down that could’ve been him if he were a little slower, if he’d hesitated or panicked, if he’d stuck his neck out for someone else.

But something about the baby’s cries got to him. That sound dove into his bones and clawed at something deep, something primal. Maybe it was this last chance at life. All the death and dying, and here was something that’d just been born, a memory of how shit used to work. The thought of leaving that baby to starve to death on its mother’s back—or worse, for those writhing arms to finally get it free, for those clacking teeth to set to work—he couldn’t sit there and wait.

He remembered leaning out the window and scanning the alley. There was a van crashed into the corner of the building, the hood buckled up around the old brick. The body of the van blocked the alley off from the street. It looked safe enough. Boxed in. One woman spinning in circles, grunting and groaning. Jeffery set the bag of chips aside, wiped the grease off on his blue jeans, and threw his leg out the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he scrambled onto the fire escape.

A gas grill blocked access to the ladder—a ghetto balcony. Pots of dirt with wilted brown stalks lay over on their sides, a luckier kind of dead. Jeffery wrestled the grill out of the way, metal squealing on metal. He flashed a glance across the alley at a spot of movement, saw a young man watching him from a window in the building over, late teens or early twenties. Surviving age, as Jeffery had come to think of it. The boy leaned out the window and looked down at the woman in the alley. Jeffery squeezed around the grill and descended the metal stairs.

At the end of the stairs, he knelt and started to free the telescoping ladder at the bottom, but wondered if the chompers could manage to scramble up. He was pretty sure they couldn’t, but why risk it, now that he’d found someplace safe? He gauged the distance below and figured he could jump up and grab the lowest rung, used to go around the neighborhood leaping up and doing pull-ups on ‘em to impress his friends when he was younger. Better safe than sorry, so he left the ladder the way it was.