I, Zombie

Yes, take your samples, Darnell thought. Make me better.

She was thinking this as the swabs and the wooden sticks were put away. A black bundle was placed on the steel table. Plastic canisters like Tupperware were arranged. Someone began to draw on her, began to probe her skin and tap on her chest with stiffened fingers. Darnell pleaded with her eyes—she tried to let them know she was in there. She tried to speak, all to no avail.

The bundle was unrolled. It reminded her of her mother’s silverware. And then the implements were removed, one by one, and placed on the table. Curved things that gleamed in the overhead light. Tiny and sharp things. Something like pliers. Alien tools. Expensive tools.

The old woman with the kind and wrinkled eyes held out a gloved hand. Her lips moved, and a tiny blade was placed handle-first into her palm. Darnell gurgled and tried to form the words. She wanted to cry, but felt nothing on her cheeks. In the next room, a monster rattled its chains behind the glass.

Please, Darnell thought as the blade was brought to her stomach. Don’t.

There was a dull ache as the woman went to work. Not the sharp sting of a little cut, but the deep bruise of something much worse. One of the men by the table of tools turned and looked away. The other reached forward with the little canister like something used for leftovers while the woman with the wrinkled eyes took her sample. A pinch. The smell of rotten blood. Another sample—Darnell in agony—but no closer to death, as they removed her flesh piece by gory piece.

They aren’t here to save me, she realized. Dear God, they’re seeing what it takes to kill me.

45 • Lewis Lippman

It was loud in the compartment. Not just the constant banging of knees and elbows, but the grunts and groans from those pressed in beside him. Lewis hit his head repeatedly on the metal arms that held the door shut from the inside. His hands slapped uselessly against the wall. But it was someone else that broke the door free. Just the right spasm with their hand, and suddenly a crack of light appeared at Lewis’s knees. The dark barrier in front of him hinged up, swung away, and vile humans swarmed out like dirty rats.

There was a cry of alarm, someone screaming, gunshots. Bodies tumbled over Lewis and crawled forward. They stood and lurched toward the men and women scrambling everywhere. They fell down when shot or just spun around and kept going. Lewis tried to stand and kept getting knocked back down. So many. Like oil spilling through a funnel, coming and coming. The gunshots were like fireworks, pow pow pow. The smell of meat, human and something else. Something cooking. Dogs or birds, who knew? Chaos. An encampment of cars.

The cars were like tents, people moving inside, more running from a clearing in the middle of the intersection to dive into open vehicles and slam the doors shut. Windows were cracked, barrels poking out. Their aim wasn’t good. Lewis saw one of his kind break out the back glass of a yellow cab and begin to worm her way inside. Her dress caught and tore on the bumper. She was shot in the head and fell limp, but there were more to follow. People were shouting about the bus, trying to organize, but it was every man for himself. The undead swarmed, spilling and spilling through.

Lewis banged on the side of a car, trying to get at the meat inside. A pistol, a small black thing, waved in his face. The muzzle flashed like a camera, the taste of powder in his mouth, a punch to his teeth. Lewis spun around as another shot went off, the zing of a far ricochet. Another zombie reached her fingers in the window, a young girl, a teen. She broke the top half of the glass out just as a bullet went through her brain. Collapsing, her arms twitched against Lewis’s shins as he reached through the hole she’d made. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, a last gasp from the young man inside, and then Lewis had a hold of him, others had a hold of him, dragged him out into the streets.

Gunfire grew heavy, and then lessened. There was a pause for reloading, a last round of patter, and then the relative quiet as a boisterous family finally sat down to eat. The feed became an orgy. Fights broke out over the scraps, a man still able to scream as his arms and legs went different directions, lungs bellowing even as ropes of purple intestines were pulled away like a magician’s scarf.

Lewis spun in the middle of it all, eating and terrified, wounds throbbing, the muted pops of gunfire fading into the distance, the sudden appearance of a helicopter several blocks away, doing nothing, watching, drawn perhaps to the noise of this last stand, this party, the fireworks and celebration of no one’s independence.

46 • Darnell Lippman