I, Zombie

Margie felt. Hunger drove them out. It stirred the living much as it moved the dead. For weeks, these survivors had taken to scurrying like roaches through the impressive towers of glass and steel, scrounging for crumbs, avoiding the slow horrors in the hallways and cubicles until the primal need for food or water forced them out into the streets.

Margie remembered. She remembered her own time hiding out, scrounging, getting up from a bed she had long fibbed about not being able to leave.

This group of five made a now familiar dash. They ran from one island tower to the next, the streets between like shark infested waters. Margie could smell each one of them like a distinct meal. Her hunger noted their hunger, this trotting meat marinating in a hormonal blend of fear and panic that she longed to taste.

Another pack emerged from an alley; they stopped and turned what was left of their soft noses into the breeze, half circles of bone visible beneath their haunted eyes. Holes where noses once lay groped for the scent, for the smells that had become something like flavored ropes in the air. These holes in rotting heads grasped for scented threads that led back to their source, to the meat running and clutching their belongings.

The world looked different and strange to Margie. She could see the odors in the air. This was how prey saw the world, she thought. This was how deer made scarce when man intruded. They knew long before they could see.

A small pack of undead lumbered after the survivors. Larger and slower armies converged from all over. There was no escape. Just a matter of time. Who ate and who didn’t. Who went hungry and who got a nick and managed to get away to become something worse than starvation.

The others, the slow, they were converging. The meal would be hemmed in.

Margie went as fast as her body could, passing a few less fortunate, the longer-since dead, those with clumsy wounds. Her body was degrading as well. Only a matter of time. She caught sight of her arms and hands as she hurried along, the holes in the flesh only half the story. The soft parts of her were going to waste on the inside as well. Bone rubbed on bone where tendons and cartilage used to lie. At times, Margie squeaked. Her curse had taken hold a week ago, give or take. The senseless nights made it difficult to be sure. Others in her pack fared better or worse, rotted more swiftly or slowly. It was a puzzle, everything a puzzle. Something to keep her mind occupied.

The group of five was going to emerge from the alley ahead. Margie could smell them coming. They had chosen to make their break in the predawn hours. Smart. The wind was at its most calm during the break of day. Scents were relatively feeble. But then, the living had no idea the traces they left, the odors they put out, how the molecules swam through the air. For them, it was all guessing. She remembered guessing like this, back before she knew.

Two females and three males. Even out of sight, she could nose them. She followed. Not followed, moved to intercept. They were coming toward her, half a block away. There was a surge of panic and disappointment in the air as one of their number tried a door and couldn’t get in. The living made it hard on their fellow man—their barricades were everywhere. It was only the desperate starvation that drove them to this. The last of the candy from smashed vending machines, another water cooler bled dry, that secret stash in a nurse’s bottom drawer of Cheetos and diet cola, the cramps and headaches from meals of sugar and little else.

Margie remembered. The hospital had descended into chaos. Food lying around everywhere, but not for the living. Food lying in beds, watching TVs.

Her small pack broke out of the alley and across 6th, the Avenue of the Americas. Street signs seemed pointless with all the unmoving cars. No one was going anywhere. She moved to intercept five students of this lesson, five who were about to learn. The end of them was inevitable. She had seen it play out too often the past weeks and from both sides. Sometimes she rooted for the living when they made a break for it—but pity turned to contentment as the meat was corralled. The living made mistakes, simple ones from her vantage, the same mistakes she’d made and that the man in the ragged overcoat beside her must’ve made, that all of them in her pack had made. Dire mistakes that now made sense. Hidden secrets, which seemed suddenly clear. Give her a second chance with what she now knew, give back her youth and this knowledge, and Margie thought she’d make it. She’d be one of those she heard about in rumors who swam the Hudson or East River to safety. She’d be one of those.

The small group of survivors spotted her pack as they emerged from the alley. Margie scurried after them. The living twitched in a way that made them stand out from their surroundings. Everything else swayed and lurched, lurched and swayed, the dragging of limbs, the pendulum swing of darkened stoplights, the dance of debris caught up in the wind. But meat alive had a raw panic in its joints. Heads turned this way and that, noses blind, eyes scanning the littered streets, wary of danger.

Two of the men in the group wrestled with a door while a pair of women supported a third man, who seemed to be the one filling the air with blood smells. There were plenty of buildings wide open, plenty of gaping maws bashed in with glittering and ragged teeth. But these were both ransacked and infested. Margie remembered. A group of five didn’t last this long without learning a few things. She found herself rooting for them a little more as her pack closed in.

They were smart, this group, but time was running out. Others were out sniffing for a meal. Margie spotted the rhythmic lumbering of their approach from a block north, a pack twice the size of her own. They would converge, she saw. The two men rattled the door, desperate to get inside. They knew better than to bash it down with a trashcan, to destroy the walls they would soon need. The smell of the bleeding one was intoxicating. Margie was near the front of her pack, joints squeaking, angling through the frozen traffic, piles of clean bones scattered across front seats, just half a block away.

Margie could see the wide eyes on the girls, the whispering and urgent lips. Too skinny, these survivors. She wondered if these women had been too skinny to begin with. The men wrestled with the door and watched both packs grow nearer, the dead closing like a vise. They were being stupid, now. It was time to run. Time to grab one of those steel trashcans and bash a hole through perfect teeth. The time for smart was petering out.

A hundred feet away. The bleeding man hopped on one foot, scanning the doom lumbering at his group from all sides. A third pack tumbled around the corner from 22nd. This would be a big feed, an ugly one. Five bodies and five hundred mouths. Margie felt a rush of dread even as she quickened her squealing and squeaking pace. Two of her fingers had disappeared in a feed like this, back in those first days. She still wasn’t sure if she’d done it herself or if it’d been a neighbor. Her brain had wandered into some kind of orgasmic state, the feed witnessed through a straw of awareness, pure pleasure squeezing down around her. She moved now as fast as she could, wishing she could turn and run the other way, confused by the stupidity of the men wrestling with that unyielding door.

Paces away, now. Packs converging. The roar of pure hunger, of intense starvation, like waves crashing on a beach. Margie marveled for the millionth time at this city that could not feed itself, these towering islands reliant on daily deliveries, reefers idling along the curb, men with carts pushing boxes of food from open farmland over the rivers and a distant world away. No more than two or three days of food stockpiled on the island, isn’t that what someone had told her? And it had been run through quickly. And now these poor and ragged things were being swarmed by sharks as they hunted for a scrap or two.

Margie nosed ahead of the others. A man wearing the remnants of a business suit at the head of the opposite pack would beat her to them, but there was enough meat for them all. Here was where rooting for the survivors ended, where her own needs took over. The world around her narrowed as she anticipated the orgasmic feast. The five survivors were surrounded, walking corpses staggering between all the parked and wrecked cars, every avenue of escape writhing with the undead, closing on the wide-eyed and the stupid, stupid meat.

Movement inside the glass building was mistaken for a reflection at first. But it was the hurry and twitch of the living. One of the men by the door shouted to the heavens, a curse or a blessing or a command.

Margie was near enough to taste them when the wires went taut. The bleeding man straightened, the women stepped away, angry fire replacing the fear in their eyes. Margie groped ahead of herself, pawing the air, as the group floated up, sneakers squeaking on a wall of glass, the shouts from concerted others a few stories up, their smells drifting down as the overpowering scent of the bleeding man faded.

Three packs converged. Margie was hungry enough to eat the man in the tattered business suit, whose flesh had not been rotting for long, might still taste alive. They bumped and jostled while wires sang and sneakers squeaked. There was movement inside the building.

Margie watched. She saw her own reflection, the hideous condition of herself, half naked and dilapidating, a hole in her skull where her nose had been, what flesh remained already old and wrinkled and revolting from a life