I, Zombie

mother.

Michael’s stomach was at a boil. He felt clammy and cool. There was a stench in the air, a new reek across a city rife with them, and he suspected he contributed to the foulness.

How long since he’d been bitten?

Michael felt his insides shiver from something like withdrawals, but different. Another itch he couldn’t scratch, a new urge wafting on the air along with the smoke from various fires. Several blocks away he could see more monsters like him, like that fucked-up asshole at the door who bit him. They were staggering after one smell, but there was some other scent closer by—

Someone shouted. A person. Someone with lips and a tongue that obeyed the urge to speak.

“Stay!”

Michael wobbled in place. The pain flowed from the broken bones and soothed all his discomforts. Behind him, three men moved from car to car. Wrapped in rags and carrying guns, they looked like terrorists, like those jihad fucks, whatever they were called.

Two guns swung up from behind a yellow cab. The third person moved to another car, trained his gun as well, hissed something, and one of the men moved. They were leapfrogging across the street. Michael could barely smell them. He smelled a hint of something else. Something powerful that he was dead to, so it barely leaked through. He was bad at this, naming flower smells. Those books he had to read in college, always jasmine and honeysuckle and clover and some shit that meant nothing to him. It was one of those smells.

It felt good to move toward the men, to limp at them. The pain in his leg beat the ever-living shit out of the pain in his head. Goddamn, that was something. The pains he’d lived with all his life, and they were pussies to something as simple as balancing on a shattered leg. How about that. People broke legs all the goddamn time. And here he thought his private hell was something special.

The men played leapfrog. Michael tried to keep up. They raised rag-wrapped fists to each other, made hand signals, trained their barrels. They kept an eye on Michael, watching him struggle with his legs, arms jerking for balance, a distant groan dribbling past his lips as he tried to yell at them, to ask them who the fuck they were. Not military, he didn’t think. Just people getting by.

They were almost to the corner of the street, moving slowly and methodically, weeks of practice. One of them worked on a door, the other two watching him. Maybe it’d been Stray they’d yelled earlier, not Stay. Made more sense. They must know Michael couldn’t stay. Couldn’t control shit. He was a loner away from the herd, a straggler, a new arrival to whatever this was, this sickness throughout the city.

One of the men laughed at something, and his neighbor joined in. They were laughing at him, these men in rags. Their barrels shook with humor.

The man by the door hissed at them to shut up, but the others continued to quietly laugh. And Michael saw himself the way he sometimes did when he got high: His mind leapt out of his body and zoomed away until it could peer down at his shell, see his place in the cosmos, see how others might see him, not passed out on the floor or the couch this time, needle still embedded in his arm, dipped in a blue river, just dangling there. Not in the bathroom, throwing up in the shower, on himself, the water having run cold an hour ago. He was in the streets, cars scattered, some shit on fire somewhere, jerking his arms so he didn’t tip over, propped on one busted leg and another that was mangled.

The world lurched to the side with awareness of just what kind of shit he was in, that this was real. His stomach strained against his jeans, felt tight and bloated. Something warm ran down his legs, the taste in his mouth foul, fur and flesh caught in his teeth.

Michael pissed himself. The barrels shivered with laughter.

And Michael had this sudden sense that other people were people like him. Like he used to be. That was him behind the car, joking with a friend, peering down that barrel, wrapped in rags soaked in perfume, playing like characters in a video game. That was him making fun of a sick fuck who couldn’t even stagger down the street without looking a fool. That was his sister over there, hair curling out of those rags, one of her boyfriends busting into a supermarket, doing the cool shit of surviving, of living, rather than locked away in some fleshy cocoon, some goddamn filthy apartment.

Someone raised a fist. Michael knew that meant they were about to move. More leapfrogging. The door to the building swung open, a mummy’s arm waving the others his way.

One of the jokesters turned and jogged toward the supermarket, clover or honeysuckle or some shit stirring in the air. Michael shuffled down the middle of the street, a patch of open pavement, a man in rags pointing a gun at him from behind a cab and laughing.

“What?” Michael wanted to shout. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

The two friends by the door hissed at him to come. The man behind the cab raised his fist, and then his hand returned to the gun, steadied it as the barrel lowered, Michael getting closer by the inch.

Laughter. And then it stopped for a moment. The barrel did as well.

A thunderclap. A roar. A flash and a geyser of smoke.

And the only leg Michael had left, the only thing he could prop himself on—this was taken from him as well. Hot steel chewed through the better of his two knees like a charging dog. Michael’s leg shattered. His leg was blown clear away.

He hovered there a moment before the fall, the echo of the gunshot screaming down New York’s perfect canyons, and then, wobbling on split bone and no bone at all, Michael crashed helplessly toward the pavement. Above him somewhere, off to one side, howling laughter erupted before disappearing into the city’s steel walls—and there he went with his friends, rushing inside for good times, for laughing times, for the plunder and play, the life he thought he was living even as he pissed it all away.

13 • Jennifer Shaw

Jennifer found herself in the middle of the shuffle. Along the edge, one had a better view of the world. You could get a sense of where the group was heading, whom they were after, see survivors making a dash or boarding up windows. In the middle, all you saw were your decaying neighbors, a menagerie of wounds and disgustingness, up-close horrors like a Google image search of festering pus.

Moving along in the middle of a large shuffle also meant never knowing where the victims of a feed came from. You never saw how they began. There would be a distant smell of fear, the gurgling sounds of hungry rage, an excited quickening of the pace, some tottering stampede.

If the living put up a fight—and Jennifer always prayed they would—the fallen members of her shuffle would appear on the pavement with their heads bashed in or blown away. Sometimes their arms and legs would still be moving, clutching and kicking at the feet sliding by, tripping up their fellow undead.

The latest feed began like so many others: a scream and the smell of someone surrounded, the raw odor of a living person who knows that death is upon them, the starving snarls of anticipation.

Jennifer found herself hurrying with the rest of the shuffle, many of the limps growing exaggerated, rotten heads bobbing up and down. There were no lucky zombies to trip over along the way. No souls spared the waking nightmare. No gunshots, the promise and hope of a stray bullet. The victim of this feed wasn’t the result of a group fight, just someone who had gotten in the way. Had stumbled or had become cornered. A shriek while they were still able, and then the maddening smell of blood and meat released into the air.

Part of Jennifer hoped the meat was gone before she got there. She was most happy when the other half of her mind, the mad half, was starved and weak. She would rather starve, rather feel empty inside, suffer the gnaw of her gut, than watch herself eat.

This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. Jennifer swam through the shuffle until she came upon a mother with her son, neither swift enough to get away. Maybe the boy had fallen, tripped, and the mother did what any mother would: made the mistake of going back for him.

Despite her revulsion, Jennifer fell beside the fat man with the flopping ear and began to feed. She tried to look away, to look anywhere else, but her body was locked rigid and wide-eyed on the still-warm flesh, on the