I, Zombie

clawed at his open eyes, tore at his ears, while Michael ate.

He couldn’t stop himself.

This was not him.

The blood ran down his throat, warm and foul, the cat’s shrieks fading to rattling groans, and he could taste it. He could taste the meat. But this was not him. This was not Michael Lane.

Michael remembered being a boy, once.

He remembered the doctors telling him things, how a person could be locked away inside a body they couldn’t control.

And Michael never believed them, not really.

Until now.

3 • Jennifer Shaw

A grist of bees. A bevy of deer. A mob of—

What was a mob again? Yaks?

Emus. It was emus, Jennifer decided. But what animal made up a gang? Or a boil? Wasn’t there some creature that combined to form a bloat? Bloat was taken, she was pretty sure.

Jennifer drifted back to the games her father played. This was but one of many. She remembered hanging from his arm, her sister on the other side, as he swung them through Central Park Zoo. He called them monkeys—

“A band!” she and her sister would squeal.

“You little gorillas.”

“A troop!”

“You smelly baboons.”

“A flange!”

“I’m not smelly,” her sister would add, pouting.

Up and down the tree of life they would climb, learning useless facts that made their peers roll their eyes and their teachers clap with delight. Their father never taught them state capitals or anything normal. Nothing other people might already know. He filled their heads with reptiles and minerals and trivia. Jennifer never saw a garter snake slither through the grass without thinking: There goes Massachusetts.

“A family is more than just its members,” their father had said. “Together, we become something different.”

He said this a lot after their mother left. Swinging them through the zoo, he had shown his girls all the animals that hate to be alone, that prefer to go in groups. Each group had its own name, he taught them. In company they were something more than they could be in solitude.

So what was this, Jennifer wondered? What had she become? What was she a part of?

It couldn’t be a plague; those were locusts. Couldn’t be an intrusion because of the roach. And wasn’t a group of midges called a bite? She was pretty sure that was right. Shame, that one. And mosquitoes were a scourge. All the good ones were taken.

Herd. Herd was overdone, as was pack. Too many animals shared those. Too obvious.

And then it came to her.

It came to her as the skull Jennifer was trapped inside lolled down, as the nose that used to be hers twitched at the smell of meat.

An arm lay on the pavement, a torn sleeve wrapping it like a cloak, a cloud of flies drawn to the rotting meat. Its owner was long gone.

Jennifer had no appetite for it. She lumbered onward, no longer in control, forced to see whatever her head saw as it followed some scent, some impulse, some new reflex.

And for a moment—because of the dismembered arm, perhaps—the direction of her gaze allowed Jennifer to study the feet, her feet, and the feet of those around her. The bare feet and the feet in ragged slippers; the work boots and the worn trainers; the feet sliding and dragging; the feet of the people bumping into her, all of them moving in one direction, upwind, toward the smell of living meat.

She was one of them, and Jennifer knew what she was, what the group would be called.

She filed this trivia away. She took it with her as she disappeared into the recesses of her recollections, back to the times before she’d joined this trembling mass, this vile and grotesque thing her flesh had become. She skipped into the past, swinging on her father’s strong arms, beating her sister to calling this one out:

“A shuffle,” she cried. “A shuffle of zombies!”

And the animals of Central Park Zoo paced inside their cages, watching her and her dead family stagger by.

And they were all afraid.

4 • Michael Lane

Michael was suffering from withdrawal. He wasn’t sure at first—it was hard to tell one madness from the other—but now he knew.

He still had the taste of cat blood in his mouth, could feel this voice in his head, this lunatic starving for meat, this new animal in control of his body. And behind the thick curtain of horror that had drawn shut across his awareness, a tiny, familiar, persistent shout could be heard: he needed a fix. His veins hungered for the prick of steel, for the warm flow of numbness and that perfect release. He needed it now more than ever before. An overdose, Michael decided, would be fucking heavenly. A way to go. Any way to go for good.

The kit was on top of the fridge. Everything was there to help him die in bliss. He could sate the urge to which he’d been a slave for longer than he could remember, for longer than he’d ever been in control of himself, for almost as long as his mother had been seized by her blank stares and her shivering fits.

But now there was a new monster guiding his hand, dictating the direction of his mindless stagger. And this new thirst, this awful craving, carried him not toward the kitchen, but toward the door to his mother’s room.

The cat was dead. Michael had eaten most of it. Its fur was still stuck in his throat, his body too dumb to cough it up. It left a powerful tickle he could do nothing about.

With the animal gone, there was only one other scent of flesh nearby, only one other piece of meat in the tiny apartment.

Michael’s bloodstained hands banged and gouged at the door, swimming toward the smell of flesh on the other side. He cried out in silent despair, knowing what the monster in him craved. There was no controlling it. He couldn’t even command his swollen tongue to lie still—it lolled with every grunt and seemed to fill his mouth with its writhing. It felt liable to choke him.

His fingernails caught on the door’s panels and bent backward. The smears of cat blood on the door looked like something a child would come home from school with and be proud of, or something one of the museums uptown would charge millions for. Michael felt a swallowed laugh, thinking of that door hanging on a wall with his name under it. The world’s first zombie art. His laugh came out a gurgle.

The gory brush strokes, meanwhile, worked their way toward the doorknob. Had he been thinking about how to open the door? He tried not to, tried to conceal this knowledge from his terrible side, but picturing the mechanism brought it to the surface. One monster spoke to another, and crimson claws fell to the fake brass.

Michael couldn’t control it, couldn’t stop himself. All he could do was spill secrets to this dark animal inside him. All he could do—as ever—was betray his mother. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was chance, he thought, as he watched a torturous eternity of banging and fumbling. Maybe it was just bad luck, all out of his control.

The handle twisted, and the door popped open. Michael lurched forward, a passenger, a man beating on a