I, Zombie

Forty-eight hours. A mere two days. That was the difference. Two days before they would’ve induced labor, before they would’ve stopped waiting. There was a time set—she’d written it down—her baby would be born, or begin to be born, at two o’clock, right on the dot.

Dot. Dotty. Dorothy.

Carmen still hadn’t decided on a name. They kept coming to her, every one imperfect. And now, it wouldn’t matter. Maddie. Madeline. She liked that one.

Something in Carmen’s belly moved. At least, she thought it did. It was impossible to tell. Her limbs were lifeless and yet full of some other life. Both dead and animated, her arms and legs stirred beyond her control. She wanted dearly to rub her belly, to feel her baby kick. Other times, she wanted it to be still.

Two days.

If she hadn’t been bitten by Rhonda, there would already be a new person in the world. A little baby to demand a name. If Carmen hadn’t been bitten, she probably would’ve given birth in the office building somewhere, maybe locked up in the break room with Anna and the others.

A scene played out in her head: Sam delivering the baby, Anna mopping her head with water from the cooler, Jackie holding her hand—

No, that wouldn’t work. The water from the cooler was almost out. They wouldn’t waste what was left on her.

She imagined lying on the floor, knees spread before her coworkers, the tile running red around her with amniotic fluid and blood and who knew what else. It was easy to imagine such a scene. Blood ran down her legs already from what she’d done to Alice. Two cubicles over for the last five years, and now she was the stickiness beneath Carmen’s maternity dress. Now Carmen’s belly bulged with more than one life.

The carpet beneath her feet was threadbare and stained. Coffee, ink toner, blood, cigarette burns, all from the past weeks: the panic, the fighting, the feeding. She roamed the same patches, the same winding circuit as the others, shuffling across a carpet that told stories, some gory impressionist painting.

Manet. What a beautiful name.

All around her, throughout the sea of neatly cubed personal spaces with their shoulder-high walls, the scent of the barely living stirred through lifeless vents and ducts. The odor caused Carmen and the others to gyre like leaves and sticks in a stream’s eddy, trapped but always moving.

Always moving.

A mere two days.

If she hadn’t insisted on working right up to the last moment, she might’ve been in Jersey with her mom right then. No bite. A doctor delivering her baby instead of Sam in the break room, instead of whatever would happen now. A hospital with food, water, the unimaginable glory of juice or any meal but meat. She’d be able to brush her teeth whenever she wanted. Take a shower. Talk. Say her baby’s name, hear what it sounded like in her ears rather than her mind. She couldn’t even whisper a name.

But she had insisted on working—she’d bragged about working right up to the last moment. She had fantasized about her water breaking at her desk. See? This was serious. An ambulance would come. A procedure had been scheduled. Maybe they would have to cut her open. It would require surgery.

So much to prove. So much guilt about being a mom, the maternity leave, the imagined whispers and the words she placed behind every glance at her belly. All Carmen could think of was the incredible amount of work the baby would mean for her, but what she imagined was everyone else thinking: Vacation. Leave time. Unfair. More work for us.

So much guilt. For what? For bringing life into the world?

Carmen fumed as her powerless meandering took her into Mr. Helm’s office. There was a vent in there that still oozed the smallest hint of life, probably from the break room, maybe from Louis’s antics in the ceiling. Bumping around the wide desk, arms wavering in front of her, she made a circuit past the tall windows, an executive’s reward for years of service, for never moving on to something better.

Through the expanse of glass, she spotted Jersey. Across the Hudson, where no boats stirred, no barges or ferries, the sun twinkling on ripples that gave her a sense of the forgotten and inaccessible wind. The buildings across the water stood like silent observers, like tourists huddled against a railing, their windows peeping eyeballs that scanned unblinking this new disaster across the way.

Carmen looked hard for signs of life while she had the chance. She scanned the shore, looking for little blips of people with binoculars, men talking into radios with a plan for saving them all, but it was perfectly still.

Perfectly still.

Hudson was a good name for a boy. Knowing the sex would be nice. It would narrow it down. But Carmen wanted to be surprised. She told everyone the child was a surprise.