much too long in the living. And beyond her reflection, a man with fire. A twinkling fuse, a rag like a candle. Legs that could still run, fading deep into her reflection, disappearing into the building’s hallway guts.
The merging packs formed a crush of rot, the heady scent of blood and flesh replaced by the stench of the unburied dead, the blood and shit and half-digested flesh in their pants and under their skirts, the groans vibrating through the mass as they all pushed in toward an empty and confusing feed.
Margie was pinned against the glass, the living scampering above to safety, a drop or two of sacrificial blood plummeting down from the heavens.
The fuse shortened. The candle burned down to the red jug stenciled with the word “gas.” Margie tried to scream, her loose flesh coming off as she was smeared against the window, remembering how stupid she’d been. Remembering.
Until, in a flash, she could remember no more.
36 • Carmen Ruiz
There was a stabbing pain in Carmen’s gut like the twist of a knife. She felt her knees wobble and very nearly buckle as the thing in control of her responded to a hurt for once. Her body seemed startled by the sensation. A few steps more, and the jolt came again. Her chin dipped toward the source, eyes falling to her swollen belly protruding naked and taut between her sagging skirt and bunched-up blouse. It was dim on the back side of the cubicles near the copier room, but she could see her protruding bellybutton like a small thumb sticking from her belly.
Another lance, a lightning bolt, and Carmen’s shoulder bumped into the wall and knocked a motivational poster loose, the cheap frame bouncing to the floor. Donald from the sales department lumbered past, sniffing at the air, jostling against her. His face was a mess of parallel gashes from where a colleague had put up a fight. His head turned to follow Carmen as she staggered past. Her pain was intolerable.
Carmen regretted the lies. She thought Donald and the others could smell it on her, the lie of this pregnancy. She worried that her mother knew, that everyone knew this thing inside her was no accident, but rather a planned and pathetic secret.
The pain in her belly sent Carmen back to a game she used to play, a soothing game. Alone in the sandbox or at the beach, she remembered the calming scoops of sand, the way its cool heft conformed to her hand. Carmen used to love spilling that sand from palm to palm, marveling at the dwindling supply no matter how carefully she tried to catch it all. A mound would become a trickle, a pinch, and then a mere row of tiny grains caught in the two lines of her young hands.
She banged into the water cooler stand, the empty bottle long since knocked free, as pure agony dragged her from past to present like a dog shaking a toy with its teeth.
The game. The loose fist. Sand running out through the curl of her pinky to fall and pile up in her other palm. So careful and exacting, but it all disappeared. Forty passes, maybe fifty, the wind snatching it away invisibly.
A lurch in Carmen’s belly. A kick. The game had gone from soothing to sad as she grew older. She began to see it everywhere, could feel life mimic this obsession of hers. Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.
Carmen was punched in the gut. She saw the thumb-like button of flesh protruding from her belly. A malformed hand was going to come out right where that button was, a tiny claw ripping her open from the inside. Carmen could feel her baby gnawing on her organs. At least, that’s what she thought this was. The pain was her little monster chewing through her, a grotesqueness that would emerge from her skin like some horror movie.
She silently wept.
She imagined her precious baby eating its way through her flesh and falling to the ground, helpless. She pictured it dragging behind her on its slimy cord, wailing and ignored, until it caught on the edge of a cubicle as she turned a corner.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.
She was scared enough being alone, having this baby by herself, her and some anonymous donor. She was terrified and tired from keeping the lies straight, the stories of one-night stands and ex-boyfriends, of not wanting anything to do with the father. The truth was pathetic: she just needed someone in her life, a person who couldn’t choose to go away.
Oh fuck. That someone was coming. A rage formed in her powerless limbs, a shuddering violence beneath her skin. It was that feeling she got in her legs sometimes, the need to shake them, to move them, but no amount of activity made the sensation go away. So she would try and hold still, to ride it out, but the pain would grow and grow until she was forced into paroxysms of jitteriness that still didn’t touch the need, that still left her feeling cramped with something worse than broken bones.
Carmen wanted to shout. She wanted to plunge from some great height. The torture in her abdomen grew worse. Her baby was alive. Both alive and undead. And she would not be giving birth to it so much as watching it emerge unbidden from a tear in her flesh.
A wave of blackness, pain so intolerable that Carmen came to on the carpet. Her body struggled to right itself. She moved to her knees, began to stand. And then a sudden release, another surprise urination, warm and sticky running down her legs.
Donald circled back and stood over her. Harris was there, kicking through spilled paperwork. The smell of blood, not urine, was in the air.
Her knees gave out once more, her shoulder striking the ground. She flopped onto her back. In the dim space between the cubicles and the copier room, Carmen lay gazing up at the ceiling, at the hole Louis had fallen through. There was the smell of blood in the air, the ripe smell of a thing alive in a space long devoid of such a scent. Pressure between her legs, the throb of something like a pulse, but Carmen had no pulse. She couldn’t see. Oh fuck, what was happening to her? She couldn’t see, but could feel a thing, a solid thing, press between her thighs. And she thought she heard, maybe, just barely, the cry of her unnamed child as its lungs filled with air for the first time, born into utter hell, not undead at all.
She thought she heard the cry. It was impossible to tell. All was drowned out by the hungry gurgles and shuffling feet as her coworkers converged on their prize, on this thing they had secretly hated her for and now desired to have for their own.
37 • Rhoda Shay
The eating wasn’t too bad. It was better than the walking. It meant kneeling down and taking the weight off her glass slippers. And besides, as foul as the taste was, Rhoda had prepared for this. Life in the aftermath meant eating for sustenance, not for pleasure. It meant holding one’s breath and forcing down dry and pre-packaged meals. It meant eating bugs, which Rhoda had done in abundance to prepare herself. Six times, she had taken that tour with the smelly guy from Craigslist who for twenty bucks would turn over logs in Central Park and show you what you could and couldn’t eat. They tasted like peanuts, he said, and Rhoda hadn’t believed him. Just like peanuts. He’d been right. The power of suggestion, perhaps.
Rhoda told herself that this feast would be like sushi. It was a game show. All she had to do to win a million dollars was gobble it down and keep it down. Which she knew wouldn’t be a problem, she just needed to forgive the taste.
Two jumpers. She’d seen the remnants of another jumper a week ago, but it’d been at night and after a soft rain and much of the mess was gone before her nose led her to the smear. This was fresh. Two others were already there, lapping up pink globs amid scraps of clothes. The bodies had exploded, the clothing shredded. Like a bomb going off. Maybe they’d gone from the top. A man and a woman, judging by the clotted tangle of hair at the
