I, Zombie

It was the big wheel bolted to the brick, the wire sliding around. Jeffery couldn’t move, but he could gaze through the rusted bars of that fire escape and watch the red fish dart through the air, contracting and spreading its fins. He watched the child swing after, tiny hands clutching the empty air, a good boy in a different window chewing something while he accepted the impossible. Chewing something. Pulling wire. While a hunger of a different sort took hold of the man formerly known as Jeffery Biggers.

Part IV • The Leftovers Rhoda Shay • Carmen Ruiz • Margie Sikes

30 • Rhoda Shay

The streets of New York glittered like those rare moments after a sudden hailstorm. That slice of startled time when clouds part, the sun returns, and its light catches in a field of summer ice before hot pavement vanishes it into puddles. Rhoda had seen it happen a few times in the city, frozen balls the size of her thumb falling from the sky on a hot and humid day, a thing to puzzle over before it was gone and she was left wondering what had happened, something to call a friend to verify, to turn to Google for answers.

But this wasn’t one of those long-ago days. It wasn’t hail, this glittering field. It wasn’t warm enough in the city for ice to fall from the sky. This was the weather of the apocalypse, the sign that the end times had arrived. It was streets of broken glass. Broken glass everywhere, and no one left to sweep it up.

Rhoda trudged through the glitter, unable to divert her course, and the shards crunched beneath her bare feet. The pain was intolerable, but that’s precisely what she had to do: tolerate it. There was no choice, no motor function, not really. She couldn’t even roll her feet to the outside to lessen the impact. The glass simply drove deep into her sensitive soles with every new shimmering puddle of it she crept through. Just a plodding shuffle, pure pain lancing up through her bones and into her knees, a constant flame held to the tenderness of her poor feet, all for not being adequately prepared.

She should’ve prepped differently. Rhoda kept berating herself for not prepping differently. All around her were people in shoes, some in boots, women in heels that had popped off their feet and clung to their ankles, the dainty straps like thin and desperate arms. They dragged along behind bare feet through pink-tinted glass.

There was a woman up ahead in trainers, glorious trainers. A man in work boots, a blue-collar and burly man that Rhoda would never have traded places with under any circumstances. But now. Oh, now. His steel-toed Hummers crunched through the glass oblivious to the pain, and this was all Rhoda could think about. Nerve endings burned throughout her body. The pain was up to her elbows. She thought of that guy from Moonlighting who’d gone bald and been in that movie, the one with the skyscraper. The scene of him sitting down and pulling clear daggers out of his feet, she couldn’t stop picturing that scene. Rhoda had daggers like that right up against the bone, could feel her shredded flesh dragging across the pavement behind her in torn ribbons. Another glittering puddle ahead, and the scent was gonna drag her right through it. Shop glass: the worst. From a nearby storefront looted early on. There were real jewels in the window, absolutely worthless.

Worthless.

Rhoda’s mind swung back and forth around what was valuable and what wasn’t. She’d been through this once before, a breakdown just like this. And now somewhere, someone was probably coming across her stash. She feared they were finding what she’d hidden away, and at the same time: she hoped someone was. She hoped it wouldn’t go to waste. She imagined them breaking into her apartment and finding her closet full of prepper gear, all the gear her friends had made fun of her for.

A closet full of supplies. Water, food, camping gear, purification tablets, protection, even a small generator that she ran once a week like the manual said. Exhaust hose shoved out the window, her tiny apartment smelling faintly of gas. There was a pump for pulling moisture out of the air that she could never quite get to work right, not the liter of potable fluid a day that it promised. There were the flashlights and a radio that she could wind up to power. Everything in her closet that her friends said she didn’t need, not in New York City, that island of plenty.