window, begging the conductor to stop, to let him out, to let him just jump out and please run him the fuck over.
His mother was by the window, right where he’d left her two days earlier. The curtains rustled in the breeze. It was cold in the room, and the smell of flesh was intoxicating. It bled into his rush for a fix. It confused him, this lust for eating the living. A warm patch grew around his crotch, and Michael realized his bladder was letting loose. He was an animal. Untrained. Barbaric. Just needs and impulses, cravings, and a mass of muscles that drove him toward sating those cravings. Simple as that. His ability to do as he chose—if ever he’d possessed that skill at all —was gone.
Michael staggered toward the open window and sobbed inwardly for his mother. The new hunger inside him swelled and grew until it drowned out even the urge for a fix. Even that.
His hands were still sticky from the cat, still matted with fur, his stomach lurching around the foulness he’d consumed, the ropes of guts, the sinew and muscle, the dark pouch that had slid down his throat, the purple sacs, all the shit he’d been able to name long enough to pass a goddamned biology test years ago, now just one revolting taste after another.
All this was on his breath and in his mind as Michael fell upon his still and defenseless mother.
Withdrawing in horror, curling up in his former skull, tucking his imaginary knees against his chest, he tried his damnedest not to watch. He tried his damnedest not to taste. But teeth and tongue fell into soft flesh, and his mother didn’t stir, didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there, warm and still alive, the bag hanging from her chair overfull, her body wasting away, even though he knew—with horror he fucking knew—that she was still in there.
She was in there and trapped, suffering with him.
She had known.
She had known when he’d hit her, when he had slapped her face in frustration. Fuck, it was years ago. Years ago, but he’d done it. And all those times he’d shouted at her, shook her shoulders, told her to wake the fuck up… she had known. Every time he had aimed her chair at the window before crawling out to smoke a joint, she had watched. She’d been forced to witness while he shot up on the sill, had been forced to sit there, unblinking, every time he collapsed in her old bed, gloriously high, the room reeking of her piss and shit.
Fuck.
Michael Lane had devoured his mother’s soul in a feast of years, had done it while she sat, paralyzed, made to endure. He’d done that, a morsel at a time, not knowing he was doing it at all.
And now her body faintly rocked, her wide eyes and expressionless face lolling as he consumed the rest of her, as Michael’s mad cravings ripped his mother’s shell apart to get at what little inside still remained.
5 • Gloria
Every day undead brought new discoveries, new horrors to learn and accept. It was how prison must’ve felt for Carl, Gloria decided. She could only imagine. Her husband would never talk about it, would never allow her to visit, and so she spent her lonely nights imagining. Picturing what he was going through. She decided it was a lot like this.
First fears were naive, fears of never seeing family again, agony over luxuries lost, thinking of the places you couldn’t go, things you couldn’t eat, walls you couldn’t climb. But more basic freedoms soon drown these out. There’s the unnatural horror of not being able to walk in a straight line, of not being able to get out of a tight cell —
Jail cell. Human cell. Gloria felt like an embryo trapped in a womb. She saw what her brain saw, but her thinking was removed from the action. She was strapped to a bunk, inmates all around her, new horrors to learn at every turn.
She imagined what Carl had gone through those first days locked away. She had always thought he’d be missing her, couldn’t understand why he didn’t take her calls, allow her to visit, even write back. It was because he’d had other things to fear. Maybe something as simple as taking a shower. Or the daily badgering from some sadistic guard or inmate. Gloria didn’t have to imagine any longer how a person might have to learn to become worse just to fit in—she knew. She knew what it was like to become something worse, all the while wondering if everyone around her was doing the same, being something they weren’t.
This was just like prison, she decided. This was her solitary confinement, her mute holding cell, walls of her own flesh tailored as tightly as humanly possible.
What she wouldn’t give for one good scream, for one glorious wail, one bone-trembling blast from cold and terrified lungs. But even this was a freedom snatched away from her—the most basic of freedoms gone. She couldn’t even complain. Couldn’t shout. The gurgles and groans that dribbled out, leaked from the hole in her smile, were the best that she could manage. It was all any of them could manage. Around her, stumbling through the streets, there was this chorus of stifled screams—a hellish and chilling choir. It was just one more horror to learn about her new life in prison, one more fact to get used to and to accept.
Gloria listened to the sounds she made, and her thoughts strayed from Carl and drifted to her grandfather. She could hear in her own rattling exhalations his dying voice. She could hear his groans and gurgles from that miserable and drawn-out death of his.
It had started small, with him forgetting things. And just as the family learned to cope with his blank stares and his groping for the right word, they had to worry about him wandering off. And as they got used to penning him up like a rooster, he started falling, banging his head on furniture, breaking his wrist. The bleeding in his brain from the fall in the driveway didn’t help. Not enough. As bad as that day was for the family, it was only the beginning. Years later, Gloria would look back on those early struggles and wish he’d struck his head harder. She would wish that he didn’t have to live and see what he would eventually become.
This was easier to admit now that she was beyond death herself, now that she was whatever she had turned into, now that she could wish a similar fate on herself. All these discoveries felt much the same, this coping with a new reality that gradually got worse and worse. It was a lot like prison, she imagined. A lot like hospital beds. A lot like life, in many ways. Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.
Gloria began to appreciate all she once had somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd. It was a week ago, during her first feed, while tasting human flesh. Burying her head in some dead man’s abdomen, she’d had this spark of awareness that all the bullshit fears of her former life were nothing. Worries over money, over Carl, her grandmother, over not having kids of her own, never once thinking how amazing it was to breathe and not feel the cool air flowing through one’s cheek and hammering sensitive teeth, never once going outside to walk in whatever direction she chose, just because she could.
There were things she could now admit. Like wanting her grandfather dead because it affected her routine, because it meant guilt-ridden visits to that nasty hospital. She never gave much thought to him being inside there, terrified, dizzy, all alone. Not until somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd when she’d felt it, too. Not until this sudden awakening that
This was her life, roaming the city day and night while these startled fish flapped through shallowing streams, while the living ran out of water, while they swam from the sharks and tumbled into nets.
Gloria remembered her first feed, that older man, and how her thoughts back then had also turned to her grandfather. There she was, killing a man, and wishing she wasn’t. Wishing she could stop. The irony struck her there in the middle of that intersection, the years of keeping her grandfather alive, saving him over and over, and
