I, Zombie

The water was freezing. It numbed all her hurts, soothed the craziness spreading in her brain. Even that organ would rot, she had discovered. It would go last, some part of this disease, some obsession that forsook everything but the memory of a life lived, gave up the body to save the ghost. But it was going, too. Memories and dreams fading, thoughts coming out of sequence. She was stuck in that morning haze where the nonsensical made sense for but a moment, just awake enough to realize things weren’t clear.

Her shoulders sank beneath the waters. Rats clung to her face and tangled in her hair, little feet tearing at her lips and scratching on her teeth, higher and higher up their sinking raft, until she was fully under and they paddled away.

Gloria came up a while later with the slope. Below the East River, she suspected. The Blue Line was flooding. Or flooded on purpose. She rarely came this way. This was the train to Brooklyn and beyond. This was the tunnel that cut beneath the earth and popped up on the other side. The rats squealed with delight as they returned to dry land. They chased between her ruined feet and scampered over the dead tracks and the wet garbage. Foul water leaked out of Gloria’s mouth, out of the hole in her cheek, and she didn’t care. She was in the morning shower, nothing about the world yet making sense, not quite awake yet, not quite dead.

There was a soft breeze ahead. Rising. She bumped shoulders with another, a reminder that there were people in these bodies just like her. The darkness faded as distant daylight scattered down the tunnel. Black became gray became the barest of hoary gold. The smell of the living carried on the sinking air. Rats twittered, agitated, and ran forward, an army of scouts, the presages of death and plague, the scavengers of rot and ruin.

Gloria was one of the horde to make it through. Bumping and jostling. They scampered over a wall of rubble, hands and knees, sharp rock, the roof of the tunnel bumping their heads, forcing them on their bellies, crawling and pulling toward the smell—and then an arc of bright light growing, approaching, until she could see the lurching bodies ahead of her, could make out familiar forms, soaked and rat-nicked and still moving.

The sunlight hit Gloria’s skin as she emerged on the elevated platform, and it felt good. It would feel good until the smell of baking, decayed flesh returned. It would feel good until it didn’t.

There was a train standing dead on the tracks ahead, stopped at a station. Nobody moving. An elevated rail a few stories above the rooftops. Gloria shuffled toward the train and the station, the smell of a place where people had lived rising up from the streets, driving her forward. Behind her, there was the rumble of jets, the silent whistle of swooping birds, the rise of new and strange suns to the west where suns should not rise at all, and a wound cauterized, but much too late. A wound sealed shut like a cancerous tumor, but not before it had spread to the liver, deep to the marrow, working its way at the very last to the most necessary organ of them all—

But that was for others to say. Gloria smiled. She staggered away from the city that held her dreams and contained her past, a hole in her cheek the size of an apple.

About the Author

Ten years after that horrible day, I returned with my wife to the very spot where I stood as the second plane hit. My heart goes out to all across the globe who were affected by the events of that day. When I fly over New York now, I still see a gaping wound. I see her missing teeth. But she seems to be stitching together much as we do. This book is about her and my love for a one-time home.

www.hughhowey.com

Dedicated to The One Thousand

You know who you are.

Romans 7:15-24

For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?