45 • Lewis Lippman
It was loud in the compartment. Not just the constant banging of knees and elbows, but the grunts and groans from those pressed in beside him. Lewis hit his head repeatedly on the metal arms that held the door shut from the inside. His hands slapped uselessly against the wall. But it was someone else that broke the door free. Just the right spasm with their hand, and suddenly a crack of light appeared at Lewis’s knees. The dark barrier in front of him hinged up, swung away, and vile humans swarmed out like dirty rats.
There was a cry of alarm, someone screaming, gunshots. Bodies tumbled over Lewis and crawled forward. They stood and lurched toward the men and women scrambling everywhere. They fell down when shot or just spun around and kept going. Lewis tried to stand and kept getting knocked back down. So many. Like oil spilling through a funnel, coming and coming. The gunshots were like fireworks,
The cars were like tents, people moving inside, more running from a clearing in the middle of the intersection to dive into open vehicles and slam the doors shut. Windows were cracked, barrels poking out. Their aim wasn’t good. Lewis saw one of his kind break out the back glass of a yellow cab and begin to worm her way inside. Her dress caught and tore on the bumper. She was shot in the head and fell limp, but there were more to follow. People were shouting about the bus, trying to organize, but it was every man for himself. The undead swarmed, spilling and spilling through.
Lewis banged on the side of a car, trying to get at the meat inside. A pistol, a small black thing, waved in his face. The muzzle flashed like a camera, the taste of powder in his mouth, a punch to his teeth. Lewis spun around as another shot went off, the zing of a far ricochet. Another zombie reached her fingers in the window, a young girl, a teen. She broke the top half of the glass out just as a bullet went through her brain. Collapsing, her arms twitched against Lewis’s shins as he reached through the hole she’d made. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, a last gasp from the young man inside, and then Lewis had a hold of him, others had a hold of him, dragged him out into the streets.
Gunfire grew heavy, and then lessened. There was a pause for reloading, a last round of patter, and then the relative quiet as a boisterous family finally sat down to eat. The feed became an orgy. Fights broke out over the scraps, a man still able to scream as his arms and legs went different directions, lungs bellowing even as ropes of purple intestines were pulled away like a magician’s scarf.
Lewis spun in the middle of it all, eating and terrified, wounds throbbing, the muted pops of gunfire fading into the distance, the sudden appearance of a helicopter several blocks away, doing nothing, watching, drawn perhaps to the noise of this last stand, this party, the fireworks and celebration of no one’s independence.
46 • Darnell Lippman
The woman in the suit was clinical and calm as she went about her sample-taking. It didn’t matter that Darnell felt alive, she was cut into like a cadaver, like a swollen thing washed up on the rocks. The straps kept her pinned to the table, muscles straining futilely. She tried to scream as the knife bit into her, but the cry for help stayed with the agony, locked up inside her head, hers alone to hear and endure.
The doctor rarely looked Darnell in the face as she worked. Her exhalations fogged the plastic visor of her suit, and her voice remained a muted drone. But when her lips moved, the men behind her reacted. Some kind of radio, like on Lewis’s boat, like the handheld he kept by the recliner in case a fishing buddy got into trouble. Darnell imagined squeezing that radio and calling for help, calling for Lewis to come and get her. She was awash in misery, drowning, stranded, bit at by gleaming fish that carried away her flesh. And the worst part was that she couldn’t die.
Her twitching muscles felt near enough like wracking sobs. Struggling on that table felt near enough like times she’d clutched her knees and sobbed quietly in the tub. Life and love. When the bad parts crept in, sometimes she wished it would end. Wished there was some quick way out for cowards. She loved her husband, wasn’t sure how not to, but sometimes she sat in the tub with the water running dangerously hot and wanted out. Like now, just wanting to die.
The doctor took something from her abdomen without asking. Machines beeped and whirred as they measured the nothing. But there was still something there, something they couldn’t take. And the struggles against those straps felt near enough like uncontrolled sobs.
Darnell opened her eyes, couldn’t remember closing them, wasn’t sure how. But the dry and burning in them that she had long grown used to was gone for a moment, something like a spider’s touch tickling her rotting cheeks. And above her, a fogged visor cleared as the old woman with wrinkled eyes held her breath, watching, squinting, staring through Darnell’s eyes and deep into whatever remained of her soul.
Darnell lunged forward with her thoughts, her prayers, her begging wishes. She felt her arms and legs strain against the straps. She screamed and screamed as loud as she could, yelling “HEY!” and “HELP!” and “I’M ALIVE!”
The woman in the puffy suit remained frozen. After a pause, her lips moved. The men by the tables stirred, hard to see what they were doing. The doctor held Darnell’s gaze a moment longer, then pulled away, the flash of a blade disappearing, the torment coming to an end.
Darnell was left in motionless agony. All her new wounds sang to her. They were electric currents clipped to her naked flesh, the juice dialed up and down, up and down, sagging and spiking. She lay there for what felt like days. When her head lolled to the side, she could see the man in the next cage bucking against his straps, no one else around.
The people in the puffy suits returned. A bright light stabbed Darnell in the eyes. The man holding her head wore metal gloves of a fine mesh that reminded Darnell of Lewis cleaning his fish. Lewis sometimes wore gloves like that.
Her head was strapped still. She had the sense that things would soon get worse, not better. More probes were stuck to her flesh, itching. Equipment set up. Something by her head, a heavy box, scraping against the metal surface of the table.
The doctor held a wire, a thin cord. She bent it into a gentle curve, tapped her finger on the end and there was a harsh pop from the box. She did this again:
Darnell could smell oil on the metal glove as the man forced her chin down, as he held her mouth open. The doctor’s lips were moving. She slid the cord into Darnell’s mouth, across her tongue, into her throat. The box, the speaker by her head, amplified the grunts and rattling groans. Darnell was horrified by the sound of what she’d become. It was like a mirror turned on a burn victim.
She cried out, and the speaker hissed with her pointless breath. Darnell wondered how long it could go on, how many ways they could experiment on her, when her affliction would finally end. The woman with the kind eyes watched her, waiting, measuring something. Darnell had no idea. They all seemed to be waiting. Expecting. What had they seen? They were looking at her differently, now. Like they wondered if someone was peering back.
“I’M HERE!” Darnell yelled. She screamed with that voice that appeared when she read, when she thought to herself, that silent voice that somehow could be heard, could have an accent, could be quiet or loud, but always silent.
“HELP!” she cried. “HELP HELP HELP HELP.”
She threw the words over and over, pounded them like her pulse forgotten, made that reading voice a wispy rattle in her neck, audible in her cheeks, deafening in her skull.
“I’M ALIVE! I’M ALIVE! I’M IN HERE! HELP! HELP! HELP!”
The speaker gurgled with wet sounds. Something was adjusted. The doctors leaned close as if they heard a whisper. Darnell could only hear her pleading screams in her head and the amplified, bodily noises her thrashing made.
