I, Zombie

city for ice to fall from the sky. This was the weather of the apocalypse, the sign that the end times had arrived. It was streets of broken glass. Broken glass everywhere, and no one left to sweep it up.

Rhoda trudged through the glitter, unable to divert her course, and the shards crunched beneath her bare feet. The pain was intolerable, but that’s precisely what she had to do: tolerate it. There was no choice, no motor function, not really. She couldn’t even roll her feet to the outside to lessen the impact. The glass simply drove deep into her sensitive soles with every new shimmering puddle of it she crept through. Just a plodding shuffle, pure pain lancing up through her bones and into her knees, a constant flame held to the tenderness of her poor feet, all for not being adequately prepared.

She should’ve prepped differently. Rhoda kept berating herself for not prepping differently. All around her were people in shoes, some in boots, women in heels that had popped off their feet and clung to their ankles, the dainty straps like thin and desperate arms. They dragged along behind bare feet through pink-tinted glass.

There was a woman up ahead in trainers, glorious trainers. A man in work boots, a blue-collar and burly man that Rhoda would never have traded places with under any circumstances. But now. Oh, now. His steel-toed Hummers crunched through the glass oblivious to the pain, and this was all Rhoda could think about. Nerve endings burned throughout her body. The pain was up to her elbows. She thought of that guy from Moonlighting who’d gone bald and been in that movie, the one with the skyscraper. The scene of him sitting down and pulling clear daggers out of his feet, she couldn’t stop picturing that scene. Rhoda had daggers like that right up against the bone, could feel her shredded flesh dragging across the pavement behind her in torn ribbons. Another glittering puddle ahead, and the scent was gonna drag her right through it. Shop glass: the worst. From a nearby storefront looted early on. There were real jewels in the window, absolutely worthless.

Worthless.

Rhoda’s mind swung back and forth around what was valuable and what wasn’t. She’d been through this once before, a breakdown just like this. And now somewhere, someone was probably coming across her stash. She feared they were finding what she’d hidden away, and at the same time: she hoped someone was. She hoped it wouldn’t go to waste. She imagined them breaking into her apartment and finding her closet full of prepper gear, all the gear her friends had made fun of her for.

A closet full of supplies. Water, food, camping gear, purification tablets, protection, even a small generator that she ran once a week like the manual said. Exhaust hose shoved out the window, her tiny apartment smelling faintly of gas. There was a pump for pulling moisture out of the air that she could never quite get to work right, not the liter of potable fluid a day that it promised. There were the flashlights and a radio that she could wind up to power. Everything in her closet that her friends said she didn’t need, not in New York City, that island of plenty.

They made fun of her for keeping her clothes in plastic crates, shoved under the bed, the bed she’d raised on cinder blocks to make more room. They’d made fun of her apartment, not quite 400 square feet, and a good bit of that devoted to the end times. They told her to live in the moment, the now. Rhoda had always smiled and kept her thoughts to herself. She knew. She watched the History channel, which was as good as any university, and she learned. She studied. She read all the books, the ones she had to order because the library didn’t carry them.

And Rhoda got ready.

Her sister Charlotte had outed her at Thanksgiving two years back. Charlotte claimed to be worried about her, said she saw the stuff Rhoda was reading, or maybe she’d heard from her friends or spotted the pattern on Facebook. Whatever. She had grown concerned. And so she outed her right there in the kitchen in front of everyone. Rhoda’s mom had been confused.

“I think it’s fine that she dresses nice,” her mother had said, peering into the oven to make sure she didn’t burn the turkey like the year before.

“Prepper, mom,” Charlotte had said, exasperated. “Not preppy.”

Rhoda had argued and felt betrayed as Charlotte explained the differences. But their mother was impervious to either of their worries. While Charlotte stressed about where her sister was putting her money, Rhoda had much larger concerns. She tried to tell them all that could happen, explain to her mother and sister about the Mayans and how their calendar could be read so many different ways, that time could run out tomorrow or maybe ten years later. And didn’t they know New York was due for the Next Big One? Or about the bees and their collapsing colonies? Or how water was running out, and the weather changing? Didn’t they watch the news? Tornados were popping up everywhere. And look at what happened to the dinosaurs. Another impact like that, and every human being alive—

A stab of pain reminded Rhoda of the now, of the moment. It dragged her back from the past with an electrical shock shooting up her bare feet. She wore glass slippers. Glass crunching on glass. Soles embedded with a fine layer of what felt like razors drenched in alcohol. Needles into her heels, the flesh between her toes ripped and burning, glass caught between them and driving between the small bones there. Her feet were being mutilated. It felt like she was hobbling along on bare bone, on the ends of her shins.

The sight of others in shoes drove her mad. How one was shod when they got bit was important. Maybe this was the most important thing. It wasn’t a detail that came up on the History channel, shaking her confidence in that learning institution. Unless she missed that show. Maybe she had. Boots, of course, she owned. Good ones. But she never wore them. They were stowed away in her closet, balls of white paper huddled inside, perfectly safe and snug, protected from the holocaust.

Her closet.

Rhoda imagined someone finding all her gear. The MREs and the jugs of water. Guns she’d only fired the once at a range. Stupid stuff. Before she’d started prepping, before she’d needed to put her bed on cinder blocks to make room, the closet had been full of clothes. It’d been full of shoes and belts and jewelry. Preppy stuff.

Her sister Charlotte had been no different, even back then. Always making fun of how she spent her money. Laughing at her collection of shoes, some of them too painful to even wear, some of them that didn’t go with a thing she owned or a night out she could possibly imagine having. And Charlotte had been right to make fun. Rhoda knew she had a problem. New York was a difficult place for a woman. So many windows full of tempting footwear, so dainty and perfect on their glass stands, beautiful just like that: Empty. Waiting. Footless.

There were shoes that felt perfect off the feet, their straps caught in the pads of her fingers while Rhoda strolled through the great lawn in Central Park. Shoes that looked perfect lying on their sides at the foot of the bed, ready to be donned and seen. Shoes that were wonderful simply in pairs of pairs of pairs at the bottom of her closet, lined up like soldiers. Perfect shoes, just knowing she had them.

But, instead of wearing them out to be seen, she stayed in and watched her little TV. And the shoes ate at her soul. Money wasted. Charlotte’s voice. The end was coming, and she would be caught flat-footed. She wouldn’t be ready. She was wasting her money. Her time. She needed to prepare.

When it finally and truly dawned on her, she’d made a drastic change. There had been a purge, and the purge had made Rhoda feel alive. Her friends were more than happy to come over and paw through her collection, seeing what fit, snagging designer heels at a fraction of the price. Rhoda watched them behave like animals. She watched from the bed, seeing herself as she had once been, digging through the aisles at Macy’s on Memorial Day. She had been disgusted and relieved, seeing people she thought she knew behave like that. They paid her a fraction, and she took it gladly, the proceeds going to things that mattered. Rhoda would prepare for the worst. And when her few and sporadic dates came over after dinner or back from a bar, she would pray they wouldn’t look inside her closet at the things she had chosen to accumulate.

More glass in the streets. Glass from smashed traffic and from storefront windows, glass from overhead where people had tossed furniture out of offices to make the only escape they knew how. Glass from bottles tossed for fun and dropped by looters, all picked up a shard at a time by tender flesh.

She should have known better, should have taken steps. But how would she have guessed that her mind would make this journey intact, that her flesh would rot, her nose wear away, while her every thought remained to haunt her?

Charlotte had been right: Rhoda had been a blasted idiot. She had wasted her money and time prepping to survive. Stomping heavily through that shimmering hell-storm, that weather of the apocalypse, she dwelled on all