I, Zombie

He was cutting class that day, not because he did it often, but the weather had been too nice for being inside. He could feel it that morning when he left the apartment, the crispness in the air like a spring or fall day that would warm up to something special. The sort of day where clouds played hooky, and so should he.

At first, people said it was a bomb. Some said it was a fire or a small plane, like a Cessna. All Jeffery knew was that it had happened at the World Trade Center, and that’s where his father worked. That’s where he said he worked, anyway. Jeffery had never been. All the weekends he’d been invited out to ride the boat back and forth across the Hudson, and he’d never been.

He went that time, on that day many years ago, but not by choice. His young legs just took him at a trot, his thoughts rattling around in his skull, people on the sidewalks actin’ crazy, the traffic coming to a halt.

Some others had moved with him, more and more, curiosity flowing south. He remembered angling toward the river, noticing the change in the traffic, the cars backed up at the tunnel, a sudden explosion in cops and firefighters. They yelled at him and others to turn around, more cops than he’d ever seen.

The blocks had gone by in a blur. He remembered his father arriving at their apartment once, smiling and sweating, claiming to have walked all the way there from work. Jeffery didn’t believe him. No one walked the length of the island. But jogging it that day, gray smoke clogging a cloudless sky, blocks and blocks drifting by of stuck traffic and people holding their phones, mouths covered with trembling hands, Jeffery saw that the island weren’t as big as he liked to think.

He never got there, of course, to where the smoke was coming from. The crowds heading south bumped into the much different crowds fleeing north. This is what reminded him of that day eleven years ago, what looked the same between the island getting hit and bit. The people staggering north back then had been pale, skin white like ghosts, even the brothers and sisters. They looked like the dead, their eyes these dark and unblinking circles. They pawed at their own faces, groaning, holding shoulders to see where they were going, just like the undead did now.

Jeffery remembered how they cried and moaned, how they fell in the streets, shaking. People were hugging whoever was there, was closest, didn’t matter. Jeffery remembered that. It didn’t matter.

A cop had told him to get lost. He picked Jeffery out of the downtown crowd, could tell that he was different, didn’t belong. Jeffery’s skin glistened with sweat from the long run, his eyes wide with curiosity, wide with all he hadn’t seen. They were different than the look from those who had.

“My daddy’s down there,” he tried to tell the cop.

“Then your dad’s in a world of hurt,” the officer had said.

Jeffery had been pissed. It was a shitty thing to say. But he realized later that the cop was just like him. There was no blanket of ash on that man, no desire to hug a stranger. He hadn’t seen. Hadn’t seen a thing. Was just reacting. Drafted into a war, not asked.

His father, Jeffery would learn, was not in a world of hurt. He was helping that world. The ferry had run back and forth across those cold September waters for much of the morning, people piling aboard from the seawall like an army of the undead, more and more of them, always coming, crowding aboard pale as ghosts and shaking like grocery bags caught on a clothesline. And Jeffery’s dad, hands rough from handling ropes all those long years, had been there, pulling those people aboard.

27 • Jeffery Biggers

The dumpster lurched as the dead knocked against it, and Jeffery nearly fell on his ass. He steadied himself and held the extended aluminum pole with both hands, leaving him with only his jutting elbows for balance. More bangs, and the dumpster slid a few inches, tired wheels groaning, the hollow metal resounding beneath him.

It was working. Holy shit, it was working!

Jeffery spread his feet, his knuckles pale as he gripped that cool aluminum pole, his arms shaking from the strain of holding the thing out as far as he could.

They’d done this in boot camp, he remembered. It was a form of punishment. Made them hold their rifles by the barrels, parallel to the ground, the heavy butts dipping toward the earth. Joints and muscles would scream while the drill sergeant came around and rested his pasty hands on the stocks, pressing them down.

The dumpster moved again. The baby wailed. Beneath it, dozens of hands pawed at the air like drunken fans at a concert, like kids lining a parade, hoping for someone on a float to throw them candy.

The thing they craved swung from one of those yuppie backpacks. It was looped over the crusty paint roller, the pole bending under the strain. The alley had collected a mob. Some stood waving beneath the kid. Others crowded from the far side—and the dumpster shifted.