I, Zombie

It must’ve been snowing at night for so much to accumulate. Lewis hadn’t felt a thing. His skin was too numb to know anything was coming down at all. He did hear some crunching when he came to now and then, as he circled within the walls that had trapped the living. But in his groggy half-sleep he had figured the sound for more of the broken glass that littered the scene of yesterday’s fight.

It almost made him feel home again, seeing the snow as the sky brightened. It was the sort of day he loved to spend on the water, those early morning hours when the sea was flat as glass, when the only breeze was the one he made with the throttle, and when the sun didn’t rise so much as the clouds lightened from coal black to ash gray.

Home. Homer, Alaska.

No matter how badly he’d like to be there, Lewis knew he never would again. He was trapped. They were all trapped. High walls of steel, cars jumbled up, buses and dump trucks. There would be no call for stooping down and squeezing out of that block-sized arena. No way to the other side of that hastily constructed fence. Lewis had it worse than those damn Mexicans. All they had to do was scale a wall, crawl through some grass, go for a swim, and they were pretty much free to live wherever they wanted. They weren’t pinned like this.

Damn Mexicans.

Lewis couldn’t feel his feet. His shoes were soaked and frozen solid, his toes little cubes of ice. He would love to have wept for his feet, which must be ruined. Frostbitten. Falling apart. Probably worse than his arm, which hung open and gathered snow. His flesh was gray, two fingers bent backwards, and all he wanted was to go home. He wanted to see his kids. See Darnell. What the fuck had he done with his life?

Killed a bunch of fish. Made more money than he needed to. He could’ve stopped going out if he’d spent it smarter. If he’d invested. But it was always there for the taking, just a few nights out with his crew and he’d come back with enough to pay the bank, fill up with diesel, sit at the bar a few nights and check out asses and down beers.

Lewis couldn’t feel anything. Not his body. But he felt something else, something besides the regret. He felt sad for the way he used to get a kick out of seeing them Mexicans get rounded up. Goddamn, there was enough fishing out there to do. He made more than he needed. Enough to waste. What he shoulda done is spent more time with his family.

The snow was a few inches deep. Enough to cover the bodies scattered in the streets. Fires were burning out of control in the buildings overhead, survivors overrun by the undead who managed to worm inside. The remnants of this last bastion of humanity were rising in the form of gray smoke, billowing up to touch the sad sky, a stream of ash rising like a river to a broader sea.

The world below, meanwhile, was turning white, getting its skin back. And across the confines of that city block, there shuffled dark and grisly shapes. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, who knew what else. They were all starting to look the same to Lewis, anyway. Same deadened skin turning shades of pale gray, same collections of wounds, of gashes and cuts, same tattered clothes and scraps of fashion, just one river of tottering undead with their arms out, mouths open, eyes wide and unblinking, the snow dusting their hair and hiding their hurts.

One mass, Lewis thought. All the damn same. And goddamn, all he wanted was to go home, to be with his family. But he couldn’t. There was no river to cross, nothing to crawl through. He was more stuck than birthright, forced to live where his feet were pinned. He thought of all the fish he’d seen flapping on his deck, eyeing the scuppers, no chance in hell of ever getting over the side. He thought of all the times he’d felt that twinge, just a pause, to knock a fish with his boot, to send it back into the water to be with its family, but he never did. He was a man with a knife and metal gloves standing on that deck. And he never did.

Part VI The Swooping Birds that Caught Her Eyes

48 • Jeffery Biggers

The jets were flying low. They rumbled down the Hudson, booms and echoes like thunderclaps amid the walls of glass and steel, and Jeffery was reminded of that September morning so long ago. He’d been a boy, cutting class because it was too beautiful outside, when he’d heard the roar of the jet overhead, a distant grumble, acrid smoke filling the air for days and days.

Most of the pack ignored the whine of the turbines, but it triggered a deep memory for Jeffery. It was the sound of deployment, the noise of good men and women ferried off to another life. It was stub-nosed C-130s and C-5As that left with children and came home mostly empty. Only the bags were full. Laid out on the deck. All black. The color of grief. Plastic zippered up tight.