I, Zombie

The boy in the window above whistled at him. Jeffery glanced up and frowned at the kid for all his waving and shouting. Stupid fool, making all that noise, gonna summon more of ‘em.

And then Jeffery saw where the kid was pointing. He looked toward the van, cold fear clawing at his guts, as Jeffery Biggers saw that the boxed-in alley weren’t so empty anymore.

25 • Jeffery Biggers

Jeffery could still hear that baby’s wails. He could feel the little guy writhing against his back, legs kicking, lungs screaming, missing his mother. But the baby and his mother were long gone. And as he stumbled along the Hudson through cleaned bones and past skeletons jumbled and missing pieces, he flashed back to that mother pinned beneath his knee, face down in alley filth, swimming through that accumulation of garbage like she was trying to get somewhere.

“Fuck,” he remembered saying, realizing his situation. He remembered the bark of a cuss, a war-born habit. And even though the shit of the world had been up to his eyeballs in that closed-in alley, some part of him had felt bad for dropping the F-bomb around the kid. As if the tyke were even old enough to learn words. As if a word were any worse a thing to learn than all the craziness beneath Jeffery’s knee and crowding past that wrecked van. Words were hollow compared to this, and yet some of them still felt good to say. Good and wrong, what with that kid strapped to his back.

There were six or seven of the air-chomping assholes in the alley. They squeezed between the wrecked van’s rear bumper and the brick apartment building, drawn in by the baby’s screams, no doubt. There was a loud pop at Jeffery’s feet. He glanced up, thinking something had been dropped from above, then felt a thing brush up against his boot. Flinching, he slapped his hand at the trash to shoo off the rats and felt the mother’s hand grabbing for him, instead.

Glancing down, Jeffery saw her arm snaking back around at him, out of joint, muscles so desperate to get at him that they’d popped her shoulder. He gagged at the sight, this misshapen animal face-down in open bags of rotten garbage, an arm waving at him like some appendage, like a tentacle or tail. What the fuck was he doing down there? And the baby’s screams were deafening—it was fucking up his mojo. What they hell had he been thinking, dropping into that alley? He’d been munching potato chips five minutes ago, safe and sound, and now this.

The half dozen chompers reached the dangling fire escape. Too many to dodge. Jeffery wasn’t sure if he could make the bottom rung in one try, anyway, not with the baby on his back. While the chompers shuffled toward him, he scanned the alley, his heart pounding, for sure they’d gotten him now. Him and the baby. Fucking pointless, coming down there, trying to save anything in that world.

Behind him, the opposite end of the alley ended abruptly in a brick wall. A building had been planted between two other buildings, New York’s empty alleys serving as vacant lots. The chompers were twenty paces away, and Jeffery had to move. He had to release the pissed off mom beneath his knee, needed to make a run for it. He cursed the developers who’d clogged the alleys with their skinny-ass buildings, who’d bricked up so many windows, who’d made running and surviving an absolute bitch.

There was a dumpster across the way. Jeffery made sure the yuppie backpack thing was snug over his shoulders. He grabbed the aluminum pole he’d dropped in the trash, looked for the trashcan lid, decided to leave it, and dashed to the large green container. His knees banged on the metal as he scampered up on the plastic lid. The thing rang hollow, its booming echoes upsetting the child and setting off its wails once more.

The dumpster’s lid sagged under his weight. Jeffery glanced up to see the kid from earlier hanging out his window, watching him. Fucking spectator. Jeffery remembered watching his fair share of disasters the past weeks, wondering when he’d be on the other side. And now here he was. He gazed longingly over the heads of the scrambling groaners as they arrived at the dumpster and clawed and banged against it. The black painted ladder of the fire escape dangled from the sky, an apartment up there that he knew was clean, no chompers hiding in the bathroom, some food and diet cokes in the pantry.