I, Zombie

Any slack in the poles, and her long gray fingernails swiped at their masked faces, an inhuman power wrestling against the sticks, a croak of a scream dribbling out. They pulled her through an inflated arch and into one of the trailers, one not connected to the rest. Loud fans whirred, more cool air on thawing flesh, the tingle of frost-nipped skin, the half-numb of an Alaskan night spent camping out too early—too eagerly—in the spring. Darnell snapped at one of the men in the suits. This was not like her at all.

Glass rooms for each of them. More rooms in the trailer as well, but all empty. They were the first. There were drains in the floor, gurneys with straps, chains bolted to the walls with metal plates. The men held Darnell with their sticks and loops of wire, the one around her neck causing her to gurgle, the pain very real as her flesh thawed.

She was pinned against the wall, the skin of the trailer booming as her elbow slammed into it with animal strength. One of the men, visor fogged with effort or nerves, stepped forward and secured her ankle with a pole. As she snapped at him, she saw that her net-mates were getting similar treatment beyond the glass. All the workers pulled, lifting her into the air, a fresh catch flopping on the end of a line. It felt like they would rip her body apart, pulling her in all directions like that. She was moved over the gurney, hovered there, and then was settled down. Cool against her back. Each limb was pinned with the sticks until they could work the straps tight. Darnell wrestled against the pinch on her wrists and ankles. If she had a pulse—she wasn’t sure if she did or didn’t—surely it would be cut off. The straps were too tight.

They released her and withdrew their poles, and Darnell bucked against her restraints. She was a monster in a film, a horrible movie, her view through the screen the wrong way.

A groan leaked out as she tried to form the words. She really concentrated this time, did her best to yell out that she was a person inside there, that she was a real person and not an animal. She wasn’t like the others caught in the net with her; she was different, still alive.

She tried to form these words, but they remained loud thoughts. Silent screams. All that emerged were roars and spit. She arched her back and banged on the gurney just like the monsters in the other rooms, but she wasn’t like them. Images from a TV show her husband used to watch flooded back. She wasn’t like these people at all.

43 • Lewis Lippman

Lewis was lost. He had no idea what street he was on or which part of town he was in. But he knew he’d finally found what they were all looking for, the source of this alluring odor drifting through the air: It was meat, holed up in the middle of a massive intersection the size of a city block. The smell oozed through and over a barrier wall of cars and trucks, tantalizing but nearly drowned out as he got closer by the reek of the undead pressed all around. There was a bus, one of the big flat-fronted kind that rose high as an overpass and brought whale-watchers from Anchorage. It had been parked sideways, nose crushed against an old brick facade, a dump truck shoved against its rear.

Lewis’s group melded with the many others that were already there, a fucking jamboree of zombies. They all milled around, groaning like a bunch of drunks, like goddamn stoned hippies waiting for a show to start. They crowded at each other’s backs, all hoping to be near the stage.

Lewis rode a surge through the crowd. A woman pressed against him, her lower jaw missing, tongue dangling down like a necktie, eyes wide with fear. Her gurgles had a unique ring to them. She disappeared, replaced by the sight of a tall man who must’ve been one of the first to go. A patch of hair on his scalp and ribbons of flesh stretched across his cheek were almost all that remained on his skull. His eyes were comically wide, much too round. Maggots the size of peanuts dotted his neck.

So many stages of decay, so many people, but not people anymore. Lewis was pushed forward by the crowds at his back. Some of those ahead were shambling the other direction as if disappointed the show wouldn’t start. It was hard to smell the living meat from the middle of the crowd; the change in scents created eddies of undead, a swirling of rotting bodies like by the fish cleaning station at slack tide.

Lewis made it to the front and found himself pressed against the bus. There were smears there from those who came before, a clump of hair and a bit of flesh. He felt something like a gag reflex in his mind, but his body made no response. It was searching after the smell of meat.