I, Zombie

now as Chiang’s limbs found new purpose and strength.

A loud crack filled her ears, her head bobbing forward, the delayed sense that someone had struck her. Chiang rolled off the bleeding man to find a young boy standing over her, a white boy, maybe her age. He held the broken end of a bat in his trembling hands.

Chiang lunged forward. She watched as her arms tangled around the boy’s legs, his eyes opening in horror. The boy brought the short piece of wood back down on her head, mimicking his father. It bounced off her head and out of his hands. He shrieked as Chiang wrapped herself around his knees and toppled him. She pulled herself up his frail body, hands grabbing fistfuls of his rumpled and smelly clothes, blood spilling out of her mouth and down her chin, mouthfuls of blood from the neck of the boy’s father.

This boy’s father, Chiang thought. A boy. She pulled herself toward his more youthful neck while his hands beat uselessly against her cheeks. She thought of Shen, the cute boy with the jet black hair who sat across from her at school. Chiang wondered suddenly if he had made it home that day. Was he out there, breaking into stores with his parents, killing animals like her with baseball bats?

The white boy screamed and begged. He was pleading with her. Sobbing. As if she had any choice.

Chiang opened her mouth. The boy’s hands were on her face, covering her eyes, trying to push her away. He felt so thin. Like bones. Like a disappointing catch her father might curse as he cleaned for the salvageable scraps.

“No!” the boy screamed. His mother had fallen still. Chiang thought of all the flesh in the room. Weeks and weeks worth of flesh. The taste of the father was powerful on her lips.

She bent her head toward the boy’s screaming throat and fought through his pushing and shoving arms, and she hated herself for this. It wasn’t what she wanted, killing this boy who reminded her of Shen. But try as she might, Chiang couldn’t do anything else. Even though she wanted to pull away, her head continued to bend toward his neck. She could add her own silent pleas to his, and yet her body moved to sate its hunger.

And Chiang was afraid. Not of these people, no longer, but of herself.

She wailed inside her own head. She yanked with her mind like a person inside one of those jackets from the movies, with the long arms strapped around the back, the crazy people. She bucked and jerked with her mind, tugging and pulling her head away, even as clacking teeth drew closer.

The boy was sobbing, crying, begging, digging his fingers at her eyes.

Chiang thought of the hours she had wrestled with a paintbrush, the long days with her tiny hands wrapped around the infuriating neck of her violin, practicing, practicing, perfecting. Concentrate, her mother would say. Try harder, her father would say.

Chiang concentrated. She tried harder than she’d ever tried concentrating on anything. The setting sun bounced through the streets and cast shadows across the spilled cans and the scene of violence. There was a symbol for life painted out there, but it read stranger from the inside. Chiang’s lips brushed against the boy’s throbbing neck. His poor arms were too weak. His mother stirred; Chiang could hear the lady’s groans.

And then some handhold was reached. Like the thrill of her fingers finally bending into place and a sonorous and rewarding cry spilling from her violin—or the graceful arc of ink left from the supple perfection of her spinning wrist—there was this moment of complete control, this eyeblink of a mind taking over a body and bending raw impulse to graceful will.

Chiang’s mouth brushed against the boy’s neck, but she did not bite him there. She pulled away. Really pulled away. In charge for a slender moment.

When his hands came back to her face, pushing her, Chiang turned to the side and bit his finger. She crunched through to the bone and then bit down even harder. Her teeth went through the knuckle, the pop of something solid in her mouth, something to chew on as she fell away from the boy, a fleshy coating and a hard candy center.

The mother was stirring, holding her wounded side, coming to. The boy gasped and peered wide-eyed at his hand, clutching the spurting wound where his finger once stood. He would survive. Chiang knew very well that he would survive. She scrambled across the floor after the woman, still hungry, knowing what she needed to do. She glanced down at her hands as they brushed canned goods aside, at her missing fingers, the black char of her infected wound wrapping up her arm like a twisted tattoo, and Chiang was happy.

Look at what these people had brought her, she thought, as she turned the woman’s groans into screams. Food and a way out. Flesh and blood. But more than that, as she bit the woman beneath the ear—

Company.

A friend.

Chiang ate and ate while the frightened boy beat her weakly and pathetically with what remained of his father’s bat. She ate and smiled while his tormented screams filled her parents’ shop. He was frightened, now, just as she had been. But that would change, Chiang thought to herself.

Everything does.

22 • Dennis Newland

Lisa’s face was a mess. Her chest had stopped heaving—the foamy bubbles of blood no longer gathering at the holes in her neck—and Dennis couldn’t tell if there was enough of her left to come back or not. He’d seen others so eaten up that they didn’t turn, just stayed dead.

He felt less horror than he thought he should over what he’d done. His body still tingled from the feed, from the raw fury of it all. But it was something else that kept him from being as frightened as he should have. It was over. The fucking dread was gone, the running and running, the fear. Over. He was what he was, and he could still think. He was still him. How long would that last?

Footsteps. Someone yelling his name. Lisa’s name.

Neither of them said a thing.

Dennis left her where she lay and lumbered down the aisle of canned goods. It was hard to tell if he was in control. His body moved, and he seemed to go along with it. Confusing. Like a dream. A nightmare had ended, and now he was in a dream. He couldn’t die. Nothing bad could happen to him. Dennis felt a thrill of immortality, of eating like he just ate, of reveling in the very thing he had spent weeks fearing.

Sneakers chirped as they approached aisle eighteen. Matt hurried around the corner, breathless, panting, shotgun in his hands. He stopped and gaped at the mess, the scattered cans, the spreading slick of blood. His eyes darted to Lisa on the ground and then to Dennis.

Dennis was nearly upon him, willing his legs faster, his gut gloriously and nauseatingly full. He’d seen the bloated ones among the crowds before, blood caked down their chins, and now he knew. He reached for his best friend, eager to end his running days as well. Just a bite, no room in his belly for a feed, and they would live forever, the both of them, immortal.

A roar. A skull-splitting bang. The furious bark of Matt’s shotgun, and Dennis’s leg was kicked out from underneath him, his thigh on fire, his ears ringing. He flopped forward, fingers brushing against Matt, face slamming into the floor, hands groping for his sneakers.

“Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck…” Matt was saying.

Dennis clawed for his best friend, angry now. The fucker shot him. A groan leaked out, a mix of frustration and pain. As he crawled forward, he caught a glimpse of his own leg trailing behind, white bone and crimson muscle, his jeans and a good part of his thigh chewed off from the point-blank blast.

Fucker, I’m bringing you a gift, he wanted to say. This was it, the end of their running. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t death at all. It was just… different.

There was a clack as Matt pumped the gun, jacking another shell into the barrel. “No, no, no, no,” his friend was saying, as if it were his head being aimed at, someone else’s finger on the trigger, like he was the one who should be pissed.

More slaps of footfalls. A shriek. Dennis managed to get to his knees, what was left of one of them. He felt