I, Zombie

The mother with the fucked-up shoulder righted herself and joined the others around the dumpster. A few were actually trying to climb up, were miming with their legs like walking up steps, the stupid fucks. Jeffery could smell them over his own weeks-old ripeness. A fucking mass grave, that’s what they smelled like. He was standing over the lip of that one in Samawah, the reek of rotting flesh swirling up out of the desert soil. Goddamn, nothing smelled worse than the long dead. The mother waved one arm for her baby, wanting to eat the damn thing and Jeffery both. Its other arm hung like a flapping sleeve by its body, the shoulder not right. More of the chompers were squeezing in between the van and the building. No fuckin’ way out. Goddamn. And that mother really had her eyes set on him.

The lid to the dumpster popped and shifted beneath his feet. Jeffery backed up toward the brick wall behind him. No windows low down on this side of the alley. He pushed against the building to see if he could slide the dumpster on its rusted wheels. No fuckin’ way. Like trying to shove a Hummer uphill. The goddamn undead were rustling the thing, though. The dumpster was shaking and jiving as they bumped mindlessly for the meat up on the lid.

Fucking meat. All those chompers wanted was a bite of his flesh. At least, if he went like this, he’d be a pile of bones. Better that than a nick and getting free. He’d seen both cases. Better to be bones.

The baby stopped screaming. It left the alley full of the grunts and ahhs from the hungry dead. Their teeth clacked on the air, their empty and unblinking eyes fixated on Jeffery. And oh, fuck, he had this idea. Fuck. He glanced up the wall and saw the kid in the window still peepin’ at his misadventures, leaning out over the sill. Black boy. Local, probably. In his teens, younger than Jeffery had figured at first. Goddamn, it’d suck to have anyone watch this. Like a fuckin’ conscience. Like God himself staring down while you did something gravely wrong.

Jeffery thought of all the times he’d been too terrified to masturbate when he was that boy’s age, worried God was watching. Now he worried about this teenager seeing what he was about to do. He loosened the yuppie pack. The chompers wanted meat. Jeffery had meat on him.

The baby resumed its wailing as soon as he got it free. It wailed as he held it out, dangling it like a bag of takeout over the undead, and this awful idea formed solid like a scab in Jeffery’s mind.

Starving eyes lifted to the baby. The dumpster jostled as the damn thing was surrounded, arms waving, more chompers crowding in, nudging the large metal box with their gyrations and hungry growls.

Jeffery felt the eyes from above, staring down. Goddamn, he thought. Don’t watch this shit. He held the aluminum painter’s pole between his knees and loosened the plastic rings that let the sections extend, let the brush reach those high ceilings. Please, God, Jeffery thought. Please don’t watch this shit—

26 • Jeffery Biggers

Days had passed since he’d dropped down into that alley, and Jeffery had run the end of his life over and over in his mind. There was always something he’d change, a knife to take down with him, lowering that damn ladder, being just a bit faster, but never a regret about going in general. Never a pang of regret for that child.

He headed south. There was no traffic—the noise of the city had just stopped, those great and ceaseless rivers of mostly yellow falling perfectly still. The last bit of flow had come days ago with that white pickup that’d barreled through Harlem, an old man behind the wheel trying his damnedest to get the fuck out. He had plowed through row after row of chompers like high corn, tossing bodies aside and running them over.

When his front axle got stuck on a pile of crushed chompers—mounds of them like deep mud—the man had tried rocking it back and forth, the transmission growling as he threw it in and out of gear. Gathering around him, the starving mob had banged on the glass while spinning rubber tore through the bodies stuck beneath the cab. Arms had waved under there like thick grass, the rest of the person crushed. And the smell, an odor horrible enough to drown out all the other horrible smells, rubber and flesh both heating up to burning.

Jeffery hadn’t been one of the lucky ones that got run over, hadn’t been one of those too far away to miss out on the feed. He’d been somewhere in the middle, that worst place possible.

That had been the last time he’d seen a moving vehicle, that white man in that white truck plowing through the hordes of chompers. Now the streets stood still, grotesque and disfigured men and women prowling among the cars like bugs picking through rocks. High above, shapes moved behind shimmering windows, no telling if the people inside were dead or undead, not unless there was a jagged hole and the breeze blew just the right way.