I, Zombie

It was a pair of barges strapped together, the kind that pushed through Homer Sound with tugs chugging at their stern. Orange rust, like lacy adornment, decorated the barges. Taut cables stretched from the corners of their metal decks out to the rock-shrouded legs of one of the ruined bridges. The river flowed angrily against the contraption, upset at this intrusion along its surface. On one side, the water pushed and frothed in a white mustache. Eddies and curls of water danced and spun along the calmer side, the river racing and turbulent and chilly.

They drifted down toward the combined decks of the two barges, and Darnell saw the small sheds dotting their surface. They looked like the containers from ships, the backs of tractor trailers, or those little temporary classrooms the middle school bought because it couldn’t afford anything else. Plastic tubes ran between the containers, the wind from the props causing them to shimmer and whip about. It was a hastily constructed place, this metal island set in the roiling waters. A good sign, Darnell thought. The ruined bridges and this rusted place were good signs. They didn’t want the horror to spread, which maybe meant that it hadn’t.

Her thoughts drifted to one of Lewis’s favorite TV shows as the helicopter made its slow descent. It was a show about the men and women who worked border control down south, a terribly long way from Alaska. She remembered how those men would round up people at night with goggles that turned the world green, that made eyeballs shine like headlamps in the tall grass. They rounded them up and treated them something like this, something less than human but not quite animal.

She remembered dark-skinned immigrants with plastic straps around their wrists. They were shoved into vans by men with guns so big they rested them on their shoulders. These men chewed toothpicks and wore shades and smiled and talked into the cameras. Lewis loved these men, even though they lived and worked a terribly long way from Alaska. “Keeping the country clean,” he’d said, finishing another beer and crushing the tin with his fist.

The net of writhing monsters landed harshly on the wet and rusty decks, right beside a large white ‘H’ painted in the middle of a big circle. Darnell couldn’t feel her own skin from the frigid ride, couldn’t tell if the man pinned beside her was still biting her arm or not.

People in plastic suits came at them warily with long poles and hooks. They tugged the nets loose with these tools, and the helicopter made thwumping sounds as the rotor kept spinning. A man in a shiny helmet peered through the helicopter’s window toward the net, gloved hand on the glass. As soon as they got the net free, the rotor grew more angry, and the helicopter lifted away.

Darnell’s nose was frozen stiff, and the men with the poles were completely covered, but she could still catch a faint whiff of the living on them. Her ghastly neighbors could, too. Their ragged breath fogged the air with hungry grunts. Darnell suspected something different was wrong with these other two, that the locals, the New Yorkers who’d gotten sick, had lost their minds more fully. It never occurred to her that they were as trapped as she, or that any of them might be tourists as well, or that her breath was also clouding the air and filling it with inhuman sounds. In her mind, it was just she who was out of place and alone. Everyone else was different.

The men in the suits sure treated them the same. They used poles like for wrangling rabid dogs and hooked their limbs. One suited figure snagged Darnell’s wrist, another dropped a loop around her neck. She watched as they tried to snare the arm of her neighbor, but he had no hand to catch it on, so the loop kept sliding off his black and mangled wrist. Muffled shouts and pointing from the men in the yellow suits, and they managed to tighten the loop over his elbow.

The three of them were half-dragged across the steel deck, slippery with sea salt and ice. Darnell’s feet tangled in the net imbued with someone’s blood and brains. She fought against these men, but not of her own accord. She was precisely the animal they were treating her like.

Darnell remembered being not sick. She wanted to tell them, tell them she remembered being petrified that she might catch it, holding her breath, cowering in a department store, wondering where Lewis had gotten to, why he wasn’t answering his cell phone. This wasn’t her. She wasn’t like this.