I, Zombie

she’d done and the money she’d spent to prepare for her survival. When what she should’ve been readying for was what came after.

31 • Carmen Ruiz

There were three of them still alive in the break room: Jackie, Sam, and Anna. Carmen could hear them talking through the door. She could smell them through the walls and through the vents. The two women cried while Sam tried to comfort them, but Carmen could smell the fear on him the worst. They talked and talked and filled the air with their ripe scents, no clue that the rest of the office could hear what they were saying, could smell what they were afraid of.

Carmen jostled among her coworkers outside the door, her belly swollen with an overdue baby and yesterday’s grisly meal. She could flash back to eating Kassie or being bitten by Rhonda, but where does the blame start? Where does it stop? Each of them did what they were bound to do, and it probably went right back to the very first person with the sickness. Bit by a monkey in a lab somewhere, pricked by an experimental needle, a rip in a white suit, any of the scenes from all the films Carmen had seen.

However it started, there was a chain of blame that linked them all together. Carmen had been angry at the start, angry and scared, pissed at Rhonda, but those feelings had grown stale as the days piled up. Gruesome black bites marked the faces and arms of men and women she’d known for years, and it was getting hard to remember who had bitten whom. Those frantic days were long gone: the quarantine of the office, the handful who had tried to make it home, the cell phones clogged from overuse and then batteries dead from trying over and over anyway.

Now there were only three of them left, terrified and starving in the break room, and Carmen could hear them conspiring. They didn’t know she and the others could understand. How could they? How could they know the monsters jostling outside the door were still aware of what was going on? Look at Mr. Helm, their asshole boss. He stumbled around in the dim hallway with the rest, eyes glazed over, shoulders hunched, a nasty wound on his chin where white bone peeked out between flaps of gray flesh. He looked as dead as the rest, but Carmen knew better. He was locked away just like her, trapped with his own demons, brushing up against the rest and hungry as hell.

The three of them inside the break room argued for the dozenth time about what to do. There had been five of them for a while. Louis had made a run for it. The idiot tried crawling through the ceiling, white flakes of Styrofoam or whatever the hell those panels were made of snowing down in drifts while he crept noisily overhead. Carmen had been one of the small pack to follow, sniffing after him. When the idiot broke through and crashed into Margarite’s cubicle, she’d gotten a few bites in before the others crowded her away. And then there’d been four of them left to argue about what to do.

The three who now remained argued over the food, over how to get started. Anna said she wanted to start a fire. Sam called her a stupid bitch. He was from accounting, where Carmen imagined the phrase stupid bitch was common. He reeked of fear. Bullied the others. Carmen was hungry for him. She was hungry in general. Everyone was. But she had a baby inside her, taking up space, and maybe that made her more famished than the rest.

There were footsteps in the break room, the smell of Jackie approaching the door. She pounded on it with her fists. She yelled at those outside, almost as if she knew their souls were still trapped in there, as if she knew they would hear. But Carmen suspected she just needed to yell at something.

“Goddamn you!” Jackie screamed. “Let us go, you fuckers!”

Anna tried to calm her down. Sam told her to shut the fuck up. He said if they kept quiet, maybe the infected would leave. But Jackie knew what Carmen and the rest of the undead office knew: They weren’t leaving. None of them were. Maybe not ever.

The survivors returned to their discussion in the break room. There were plastic forks and plastic knives. There had been five of them, now there were three. Louis had gotten himself eaten when he fell through the ceiling. Bits of him were all over Margarite’s desk, smears on a monitor. On both sides of the break room door, there were groans from trapped and tortured souls. Sam told the girls that the plastic knives were a lot sharper than they looked. Anna wanted to build a fire. Sam told her she was a dumb bitch, that they would suffocate.

And so the shambling monsters of Della, Baigaint & Padder moved in agitated circles outside the break room. There was a smell in the air, a maddening smell. On the other side of the door, a starving trio continued to argue, even as they began to eat. There were five of them two days before. Carmen and the others had gotten one. Now she listened as Sam showed them just how sharp the plastic knives were, sharp enough to bite into flesh. Anna made gagging sounds. She wanted to build a fire. Jackie sobbed and filled the air with fear while Sam took the first bite.

There had been five of them, now three. Carmen shuffled in circles, her stomach full of unborn baby and the meat of her coworkers. And she wondered, listening to the survivors in the break room eat their gory meal, how the barred door between them made them any different.

32 • Margie Sikes

There was a boy in the back seat, no more than fifteen or sixteen, and not for the first time, Margie Sikes found herself feeding on the young. She ripped the poor boy apart, him kicking and screaming and pleading for her to stop, tears rolling down his unblemished cheeks, Margie trying her best not to think of what she was doing.

The boy had been cornered car-hopping. Margie had seen it before, had even seen it work a time or two. Survivors ran through the streets and dove into intact cars while they waited for the wind to shift and lure the infected away. She’d seen it work up close. A good seal on a car, and the smell of its contents would eventually fade. It was maddening to be driven off by a fickle breeze. In her mind, she knew a good meal lay cowering on the floorboard of that SUV, but her brain would catch a whiff elsewhere, and try as she might to urge herself to stay and wait the hopper out, her feet would carry her inanely upwind toward some other struggling soul.

The smart hoppers stuck with the newer model vehicles. Tempered glass. Better seals and gaskets around the doors. And if there was space in the parked traffic and keys in the ignition, one might even roar to life and go on a spree or just sit and run the heat for a while. The sprees were something to watch. Besides the distant helicopters and the wildlife, the streets were a dull and lifeless place. The only movement was that of a rotting corpse shuffling behind storefront glass or in a restaurant full of tipped chairs and tangled bones. To see an exhaust sputter in the crisp fall air, hear an engine roar, watch a grille smack down a few of her own—it was exhilarating to Margie. She was just happy to be whatever she was. Not-quite-dead. Senses intact. Here, for however much longer.

The boy in the old gray sedan stopped screaming, but his limbs continued to move as Margie tore into his abdomen. Arms that waved feebly with the last of his young life. Groans and murmurs escaping his lips, but he made them insensibly. These were the noises people made in deep comas, tiptoeing along that narrowing ledge that everyone scooted across, a ledge that eventually melded into flat stone high above a deep and shadowy ravine.

Glass from the sedan’s shattered window gouged into Margie’s stomach as she bent over the door and worked on the boy. She had a grandson this kid’s age. Nathan, her eldest daughter’s boy. Margie wondered if upstate New York was similarly cursed. She tended to think it wasn’t. That part of New York was a world apart. They shouldn’t even share a name, the city and the state. Two completely different things. Like the difference between the living and whatever Margie had become.

Others in her pack jostled behind her, fairly roaring in frustration. They clawed at her and the air, which was heady with the scent of a feed. It was a private snack for Margie, who was swifter than most. Always at the front. Always first to dine. She stuffed herself with the soft and easy meat in the boy’s stomach. She deserved it. It was she who had gotten him open.

The human body was a tricky thing to tear into without the proper tools. It reminded Margie of her