I, Zombie

A hundred feet away. The bleeding man hopped on one foot, scanning the doom lumbering at his group from all sides. A third pack tumbled around the corner from 22nd. This would be a big feed, an ugly one. Five bodies and five hundred mouths. Margie felt a rush of dread even as she quickened her squealing and squeaking pace. Two of her fingers had disappeared in a feed like this, back in those first days. She still wasn’t sure if she’d done it herself or if it’d been a neighbor. Her brain had wandered into some kind of orgasmic state, the feed witnessed through a straw of awareness, pure pleasure squeezing down around her. She moved now as fast as she could, wishing she could turn and run the other way, confused by the stupidity of the men wrestling with that unyielding door.

Paces away, now. Packs converging. The roar of pure hunger, of intense starvation, like waves crashing on a beach. Margie marveled for the millionth time at this city that could not feed itself, these towering islands reliant on daily deliveries, reefers idling along the curb, men with carts pushing boxes of food from open farmland over the rivers and a distant world away. No more than two or three days of food stockpiled on the island, isn’t that what someone had told her? And it had been run through quickly. And now these poor and ragged things were being swarmed by sharks as they hunted for a scrap or two.

Margie nosed ahead of the others. A man wearing the remnants of a business suit at the head of the opposite pack would beat her to them, but there was enough meat for them all. Here was where rooting for the survivors ended, where her own needs took over. The world around her narrowed as she anticipated the orgasmic feast. The five survivors were surrounded, walking corpses staggering between all the parked and wrecked cars, every avenue of escape writhing with the undead, closing on the wide-eyed and the stupid, stupid meat.

Movement inside the glass building was mistaken for a reflection at first. But it was the hurry and twitch of the living. One of the men by the door shouted to the heavens, a curse or a blessing or a command.

Margie was near enough to taste them when the wires went taut. The bleeding man straightened, the women stepped away, angry fire replacing the fear in their eyes. Margie groped ahead of herself, pawing the air, as the group floated up, sneakers squeaking on a wall of glass, the shouts from concerted others a few stories up, their smells drifting down as the overpowering scent of the bleeding man faded.

Three packs converged. Margie was hungry enough to eat the man in the tattered business suit, whose flesh had not been rotting for long, might still taste alive. They bumped and jostled while wires sang and sneakers squeaked. There was movement inside the building.

Margie watched. She saw her own reflection, the hideous condition of herself, half naked and dilapidating, a hole in her skull where her nose had been, what flesh remained already old and wrinkled and revolting from a life much too long in the living. And beyond her reflection, a man with fire. A twinkling fuse, a rag like a candle. Legs that could still run, fading deep into her reflection, disappearing into the building’s hallway guts.

The merging packs formed a crush of rot, the heady scent of blood and flesh replaced by the stench of the unburied dead, the blood and shit and half-digested flesh in their pants and under their skirts, the groans vibrating through the mass as they all pushed in toward an empty and confusing feed.

Margie was pinned against the glass, the living scampering above to safety, a drop or two of sacrificial blood plummeting down from the heavens.

The fuse shortened. The candle burned down to the red jug stenciled with the word “gas.” Margie tried to scream, her loose flesh coming off as she was smeared against the window, remembering how stupid she’d been. Remembering.

Until, in a flash, she could remember no more.

36 • Carmen Ruiz

There was a stabbing pain in Carmen’s gut like the twist of a knife. She felt her knees wobble and very nearly buckle as the thing in control of her responded to a hurt for once. Her body seemed startled by the sensation. A few steps more, and the jolt came again. Her chin dipped toward the source, eyes falling to her swollen belly protruding naked and taut between her sagging skirt and bunched-up blouse. It was dim on the back side of the cubicles near the copier room, but she could see her protruding bellybutton like a small thumb sticking from her belly.

Another lance, a lightning bolt, and Carmen’s shoulder bumped into the wall and knocked a motivational poster loose, the cheap frame bouncing to the floor. Donald from the sales department lumbered past, sniffing at the air, jostling against her. His face was a mess of parallel gashes from where a colleague had put up a fight. His head turned to follow Carmen as she staggered past. Her pain was intolerable.