I, Zombie

Margie went as fast as her body could, passing a few less fortunate, the longer-since dead, those with clumsy wounds. Her body was degrading as well. Only a matter of time. She caught sight of her arms and hands as she hurried along, the holes in the flesh only half the story. The soft parts of her were going to waste on the inside as well. Bone rubbed on bone where tendons and cartilage used to lie. At times, Margie squeaked. Her curse had taken hold a week ago, give or take. The senseless nights made it difficult to be sure. Others in her pack fared better or worse, rotted more swiftly or slowly. It was a puzzle, everything a puzzle. Something to keep her mind occupied.

The group of five was going to emerge from the alley ahead. Margie could smell them coming. They had chosen to make their break in the predawn hours. Smart. The wind was at its most calm during the break of day. Scents were relatively feeble. But then, the living had no idea the traces they left, the odors they put out, how the molecules swam through the air. For them, it was all guessing. She remembered guessing like this, back before she knew.

Two females and three males. Even out of sight, she could nose them. She followed. Not followed, moved to intercept. They were coming toward her, half a block away. There was a surge of panic and disappointment in the air as one of their number tried a door and couldn’t get in. The living made it hard on their fellow man—their barricades were everywhere. It was only the desperate starvation that drove them to this. The last of the candy from smashed vending machines, another water cooler bled dry, that secret stash in a nurse’s bottom drawer of Cheetos and diet cola, the cramps and headaches from meals of sugar and little else.

Margie remembered. The hospital had descended into chaos. Food lying around everywhere, but not for the living. Food lying in beds, watching TVs.

Her small pack broke out of the alley and across 6th, the Avenue of the Americas. Street signs seemed pointless with all the unmoving cars. No one was going anywhere. She moved to intercept five students of this lesson, five who were about to learn. The end of them was inevitable. She had seen it play out too often the past weeks and from both sides. Sometimes she rooted for the living when they made a break for it—but pity turned to contentment as the meat was corralled. The living made mistakes, simple ones from her vantage, the same mistakes she’d made and that the man in the ragged overcoat beside her must’ve made, that all of them in her pack had made. Dire mistakes that now made sense. Hidden secrets, which seemed suddenly clear. Give her a second chance with what she now knew, give back her youth and this knowledge, and Margie thought she’d make it. She’d be one of those she heard about in rumors who swam the Hudson or East River to safety. She’d be one of those.

The small group of survivors spotted her pack as they emerged from the alley. Margie scurried after them. The living twitched in a way that made them stand out from their surroundings. Everything else swayed and lurched, lurched and swayed, the dragging of limbs, the pendulum swing of darkened stoplights, the dance of debris caught up in the wind. But meat alive had a raw panic in its joints. Heads turned this way and that, noses blind, eyes scanning the littered streets, wary of danger.

Two of the men in the group wrestled with a door while a pair of women supported a third man, who seemed to be the one filling the air with blood smells. There were plenty of buildings wide open, plenty of gaping maws bashed in with glittering and ragged teeth. But these were both ransacked and infested. Margie remembered. A group of five didn’t last this long without learning a few things. She found herself rooting for them a little more as her pack closed in.

They were smart, this group, but time was running out. Others were out sniffing for a meal. Margie spotted the rhythmic lumbering of their approach from a block north, a pack twice the size of her own. They would converge, she saw. The two men rattled the door, desperate to get inside. They knew better than to bash it down with a trashcan, to destroy the walls they would soon need. The smell of the bleeding one was intoxicating. Margie was near the front of her pack, joints squeaking, angling through the frozen traffic, piles of clean bones scattered across front seats, just half a block away.

Margie could see the wide eyes on the girls, the whispering and urgent lips. Too skinny, these survivors. She wondered if these women had been too skinny to begin with. The men wrestled with the door and watched both packs grow nearer, the dead closing like a vise. They were being stupid, now. It was time to run. Time to grab one of those steel trashcans and bash a hole through perfect teeth. The time for smart was petering out.