I, Zombie

24 • Jeffery Biggers

Where were the people? It was hard to figure at first, why with the outbreak there weren’t more people. Ten million in New York, and most of them were just… gone. Jeffery had assumed it would spread, that the avenues and streets would be crowded from one side to the other with the chompers. But then, most people didn’t get away, did they? They got more than a bite. They got consumed.

And so the streets were full of cars, but no people. Just remains. That was the sickest thing, seeing the bones, all the cleaned carcasses. Getting bit and surviving was rarer than getting eaten whole. Rarer and worse. Being infected was hella worse. But so few got infected, right? How many got a scratch or a bite like Jeffery did and still managed to get clear, find a place to hole up until it weren’t their choice how to move or what to do? Not many, he didn’t figure. Most got eaten. That’s where the ten million went. Gone. Eaten up and shat out by those who remained.

Jeffery remembered the one that got him. Goddamn that woman. Goddamn that crazy bitch.

He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop playing that day over and over in his head as he rode among the pack, weaving around the jammed cars with blinking hazards and open doors, a picked-clean skeleton sitting there in one of ’em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the engine and go for a drive, some ad for a damn MADD commercial.

Jeffery remembered spotting the bitch from that upstairs apartment he’d staked out for his own. He hadn’t planned on leaving that place until the cupboards were bare. Earlier that morning, he had escaped a few mobs, had used that combination of boot camp army know-how and the black spirit that had helped generations of his color make it through the deep shit time and time again. He’d seen some brutal stuff in his weeks of running, more gruesome even than the crap he’d seen in the war. Roadside bombs and flesh eaters had some things in common, except these monsters didn’t leave limbs behind. They took them with them, munching on them like turkey legs while they tracked down another scent.

Jeffery had been surviving okay for a week or two, getting clear, avoiding one nick after another. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky. Jeffery was used to that, the inequitable luck of two people sitting side-by-side in the same Hummer. One man gets a scratch, the other is holding his guts in his lap and screaming for his momma. All luck. Where you’re sitting’, where you’re born. Dumb fucking luck.

Well, there’s dumb luck, and then there’s just plain stupid. Jeffery had been stupid, trying to save that baby, thinking shit could be saved anymore. Stupid.

He’d seen the woman from the apartment window, down in the alley, three stories below. One of the flesh-eaters was walking in circles, waving her arms over her head. Hadn’t seen one do that. Most walked with their arms out like goddamn Frankenstein, like the soul trapped inside can see but the shit in charge can’t. Like they gotta feel their way through the breeze.

So this one, arms wiggling like thick snakes over her head and around her shoulders, spinning and spinning all alone. He figured what the fuck? What’s her disorder? Jeffery had watched from the window, curious, eating someone else’s potato chips, whoever the fuck used to live there. And then he saw what the damn flesh-eating bitch was doing. Naw, he heard it. It was the wail of the living—a baby awake, screaming from one of those goddamn yuppie backpacks. The mother must’ve just turned in the last day or two for that thing to still be alive. Jeffery leaned out the window to see better. Damn woman was waving her arms, trying to get at the morsel of noisy flesh strapped to her back, trying to eat her own goddamn baby.

Up till then, Jeffery had done well by looking out for himself—no point risking two lives where one was in jeopardy. Hell, he’d seen so many dead by that point, so many go down that could’ve been him if he were a little slower, if he’d hesitated or panicked, if he’d stuck his neck out for someone else.

But something about the baby’s cries got to him. That sound dove into his bones and clawed at something deep, something primal. Maybe it was this last chance at life. All the death and dying, and here was something that’d just been born, a memory of how shit used to work. The thought of leaving that baby to starve to death on its mother’s back—or worse, for those writhing arms to finally get it free, for those clacking teeth to set to work—he couldn’t sit there and wait.

He remembered leaning out the window and scanning the alley. There was a van crashed into the corner of the building, the hood buckled up around the old brick. The body of the van blocked the alley off from the street. It looked safe enough. Boxed in. One woman spinning in circles, grunting and groaning. Jeffery set the bag of chips aside, wiped the grease off on his blue jeans, and threw his leg out the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he scrambled onto the fire escape.

A gas grill blocked access to the ladder—a ghetto balcony. Pots of dirt with wilted brown stalks lay over on their sides, a luckier kind of dead. Jeffery wrestled the grill out of the way, metal squealing on metal. He flashed a glance across the alley at a spot of movement, saw a young man watching him from a window in the building over, late teens or early twenties. Surviving age, as Jeffery had come to think of it. The boy leaned out the window and looked down at the woman in the alley. Jeffery squeezed around the grill and descended the metal stairs.

At the end of the stairs, he knelt and started to free the telescoping ladder at the bottom, but wondered if the chompers could manage to scramble up. He was pretty sure they couldn’t, but why risk it, now that he’d found someplace safe? He gauged the distance below and figured he could jump up and grab the lowest rung, used to go around the neighborhood leaping up and doing pull-ups on ’em to impress his friends when he was younger. Better safe than sorry, so he left the ladder the way it was.

He scrambled down the rungs, the cries from the baby louder now and somehow soothing. The noise it made was a sign that it was still alive, that the woman hadn’t gotten it free. Jeffery didn’t know what he’d do to take care of the thing. Maybe it’d be his ticket onto one of the rescue helicopters he’d heard about but had never seen. If they were real, the baby would be his way on board. Jeffery could be that soldier helping a friend cradle his guts for a change. He remembered. They always took that other soldier out of the shit-storm. They saw him helping like that, squeezing a friend’s grave wound, and they treated him like some necessary bandage, some emotional tourniquet. Jeffery would save the baby and be saved himself. That became the plan.

Working down to the last rung, he dangled there for a moment, feet swinging high over the windswept garbage in the alley, the grunts from the woman changing as she spotted him there, as she caught his scent.

Jeffery let go and dropped through the air to the pavement. He landed in a crouch, moving from a safe world to one of danger, a slender bridge having been crazily crossed.

The woman staggered toward him, hands opening and closing like a crab’s pinchers. Jeffery hadn’t thought this through. He scrambled backwards, feet kicking through loose newspaper and swollen bags of trash chewed open by rats.

The lady moved like a drunk. Jeffery’s heart pounded through his sweatshirt. He thought he heard the whistle of mortars whizzing down toward his base in the middle of the night, that feeling that death was everywhere and it could suddenly choose you. But this weren’t mortars. He could see her coming. Could outrun her. He told himself there weren’t nothin’ to be afraid of.

Hurrying backwards, Jeffery made some space between him and her. One thing about the chompers was that they never stopped. Always coming forward, lips flapping, eyes unblinking, arms out. They were fuckin’ tireless. He grabbed a lid off one of the metal trashcans. The baby had fallen quiet. The damn thing had better make it, risking his neck like this. An aluminum painter’s pole rested against the pipes that ran up the side of the building, a crusted roller still on the end. He grabbed it as well and glanced up at the boy watching from the window, wondering how crazy he looked down in that alley with a lid and a stick, a shield and a sword.

The woman in the dress kept coming. Jeffery waited, a tight grip on the lid’s handle, the dented metal resting against his forearm, the pole in his other hand. She was nearly within reach when he finally spotted the wound that’d turned her. It was at the base of her neck, a nasty bite, the gurgles and moans leaking from there rather than her lips. The dried blood running down her neck and chest was like a red scarf tucked into her dress. Her crab-claws pinched for him. Jeffery swung his shield and knocked her arms aside. The woman did a pirouette, bending at the waist as she flailed for balance. He lunged forward and shoved her in the back, tried to get his feet tangled in hers, but in a drunken stagger she shuffled out of the way. He tried again, the baby watching him with wide, white eyes, and this time the bitch flopped forward into the garbage.

Jeffery was on her before she could push her way to her feet. He kept a knee at the base of her spine, easy as pie, dropped the pole and the lid and fumbled with the clasps on the pack. He should have brought a knife from the kitchen to cut the damn thing free. The woman’s arms slid back and forth through the trash, the rotten fruit rinds, the empty tin cans, like it was trying to make a snow angel. An alley angel, Jeffery thought to himself. He was giddy. Laughing. The adrenaline was melting away, the fear fading to a tingling sense of relief now that she was pinned on her belly, jaws well away from him. It reminded Jeffery of the sound of a distant mortar blast, knowing a tent down the row had caught the whistling reaper and not you. He worked one buckle loose and moved to the other. The baby’s little arms twirled in mimicry of its mother’s, little pink lips kissing the air, mother and son both hungry and grunting and crying from being so close to each other, so close to the sustenance they needed, neither of them able to reach it.

The other buckle finally came free. Jeffery yanked the straps out from under the pinned and writhing woman. He slid his knee up her spine to where the baby had been, listened to her teeth clack shut over and over, head turned to the side, eyes straining for a sight of him, eager to eat them both.

The baby cried. Jeffery took his time strapping the kid to his back, made sure the buckles were tight. He eyed the jump down the alley, thinking how heavy the kid was, if he could still make the leap. Hadn’t thought this shit through. Not at all.

The boy in the window above whistled at him. Jeffery glanced up and frowned at the kid for all his waving and shouting. Stupid fool, making all that noise, gonna summon more of ’em.

And then Jeffery saw where the kid was pointing. He looked toward the van, cold fear clawing at his guts, as Jeffery Biggers saw that the boxed-in alley weren’t so empty anymore.

25 • Jeffery Biggers

Jeffery could still hear that baby’s wails. He could feel the little guy writhing against his back, legs kicking, lungs screaming, missing his mother. But the baby and his mother were long gone. And as he stumbled along the Hudson through cleaned bones and past skeletons jumbled and missing pieces, he flashed back to that mother pinned beneath his knee, face down in alley filth, swimming through that accumulation of garbage like she was trying to get somewhere.

“Fuck,” he remembered saying, realizing his situation. He remembered the bark of a cuss, a war-born habit. And even though the shit of the world had been up to his eyeballs in that closed-in alley, some part of him had felt bad for dropping the F-bomb around the kid. As if the tyke were even old enough to learn words. As if a word were any worse a thing to learn than all the craziness beneath Jeffery’s knee and crowding past that wrecked van. Words were hollow compared to this, and yet some of them still felt good to say. Good and wrong, what with that kid strapped to his back.

There were six or seven of the air-chomping assholes in the alley. They squeezed between the wrecked van’s rear bumper and the brick apartment building, drawn in by the baby’s screams, no doubt. There was a loud pop at Jeffery’s feet. He glanced up, thinking something had been dropped from above, then felt a thing brush up against his boot. Flinching, he slapped his hand at the trash to shoo off the rats and felt the mother’s hand grabbing for him, instead.

Glancing down, Jeffery saw her arm snaking back around at him, out of joint, muscles so desperate to get at him that they’d popped her shoulder. He gagged at the sight, this misshapen animal face-down in open bags of rotten garbage, an arm waving at him like some appendage, like a tentacle or tail. What the fuck was he doing down there? And the baby’s screams were deafening—it was fucking up his mojo. What they hell had he been thinking, dropping into that alley? He’d been munching potato chips five minutes ago, safe and sound, and now this.

The half dozen chompers reached the dangling fire escape. Too many to dodge. Jeffery wasn’t sure if he could make the bottom rung in one try, anyway, not with the baby on his back. While the chompers shuffled toward him, he scanned the alley, his heart pounding, for sure they’d gotten him now. Him and the baby. Fucking pointless, coming down there, trying to save anything in that world.

Behind him, the opposite end of the alley ended abruptly in a brick wall. A building had been planted between two other buildings, New York’s empty alleys serving as vacant lots. The chompers were twenty paces away, and Jeffery had to move. He had to release the pissed off mom beneath his knee, needed to make a run for it. He cursed the developers who’d clogged the alleys with their skinny-ass buildings, who’d bricked up so many windows, who’d made running and surviving an absolute bitch.

There was a dumpster across the way. Jeffery made sure the yuppie backpack thing was snug over his shoulders. He grabbed the aluminum pole he’d dropped in the trash, looked for the trashcan lid, decided to leave it, and dashed to the large green container. His knees banged on the metal as he scampered up on the plastic lid. The thing rang hollow, its booming echoes upsetting the child and setting off its wails once more.

The dumpster’s lid sagged under his weight. Jeffery glanced up to see the kid from earlier hanging out his window, watching him. Fucking spectator. Jeffery remembered watching his fair share of disasters the past weeks, wondering when he’d be on the other side. And now here he was. He gazed longingly over the heads of the scrambling groaners as they arrived at the dumpster and clawed and banged against it. The black painted ladder of the fire escape dangled from the sky, an apartment up there that he knew was clean, no chompers hiding in the bathroom, some food and diet cokes in the pantry.

The mother with the fucked-up shoulder righted herself and joined the others around the dumpster. A few were actually trying to climb up, were miming with their legs like walking up steps, the stupid fucks. Jeffery could smell them over his own weeks-old ripeness. A fucking mass grave, that’s what they smelled like. He was standing over the lip of that one in Samawah, the reek of rotting flesh swirling up out of the desert soil. Goddamn, nothing smelled worse than the long dead. The mother waved one arm for her baby, wanting to eat the damn thing and Jeffery both. Its other arm hung like a flapping sleeve by its body, the shoulder not right. More of the chompers were squeezing in between the van and the building. No fuckin’ way out. Goddamn. And that mother really had her eyes set on him.

The lid to the dumpster popped and shifted beneath his feet. Jeffery backed up toward the brick wall behind him. No windows low down on this side of the alley. He pushed against the building to see if he could slide the dumpster on its rusted wheels. No fuckin’ way. Like trying to shove a Hummer uphill. The goddamn undead were rustling the thing, though. The dumpster was shaking and jiving as they bumped mindlessly for the meat up on the lid.

Fucking meat. All those chompers wanted was a bite of his flesh. At least, if he went like this, he’d be a pile of bones. Better that than a nick and getting free. He’d seen both cases. Better to be bones.

The baby stopped screaming. It left the alley full of the grunts and ahhs from the hungry dead. Their teeth clacked on the air, their empty and unblinking eyes fixated on Jeffery. And oh, fuck, he had this idea. Fuck. He glanced up the wall and saw the kid in the window still peepin’ at his misadventures, leaning out over the sill. Black boy. Local, probably. In his teens, younger than Jeffery had figured at first. Goddamn, it’d suck to have anyone watch this. Like a fuckin’ conscience. Like God himself staring down while you did something gravely wrong.

Jeffery thought of all the times he’d been too terrified to masturbate when he was that boy’s age, worried God was watching. Now he worried about this teenager seeing what he was about to do. He loosened the yuppie pack. The chompers wanted meat. Jeffery had meat on him.

The baby resumed its wailing as soon as he got it free. It wailed as he held it out, dangling it like a bag of takeout over the undead, and this awful idea formed solid like a scab in Jeffery’s mind.

Starving eyes lifted to the baby. The dumpster jostled as the damn thing was surrounded, arms waving, more chompers crowding in, nudging the large metal box with their gyrations and hungry growls.

Jeffery felt the eyes from above, staring down. Goddamn, he thought. Don’t watch this shit. He held the aluminum painter’s pole between his knees and loosened the plastic rings that let the sections extend, let the brush reach those high ceilings. Please, God, Jeffery thought. Please don’t watch this shit—

26 • Jeffery Biggers

Days had passed since he’d dropped down into that alley, and Jeffery had run the end of his life over and over in his mind. There was always something he’d change, a knife to take down with him, lowering that damn ladder, being just a bit faster, but never a regret about going in general. Never a pang of regret for that child.

He headed south. There was no traffic—the noise of the city had just stopped, those great and ceaseless rivers of mostly yellow falling perfectly still. The last bit of flow had come days ago with that white pickup that’d barreled through Harlem, an old man behind the wheel trying his damnedest to get the fuck out. He had plowed through row after row of chompers like high corn, tossing bodies aside and running them over.

When his front axle got stuck on a pile of crushed chompers—mounds of them like deep mud—the man had tried rocking it back and forth, the transmission growling as he threw it in and out of gear. Gathering around him, the starving mob had banged on the glass while spinning rubber tore through the bodies stuck beneath the cab. Arms had waved under there like thick grass, the rest of the person crushed. And the smell, an odor horrible enough to drown out all the other horrible smells, rubber and flesh both heating up to burning.

Jeffery hadn’t been one of the lucky ones that got run over, hadn’t been one of those too far away to miss out on the feed. He’d been somewhere in the middle, that worst place possible.

That had been the last time he’d seen a moving vehicle, that white man in that white truck plowing through the hordes of chompers. Now the streets stood still, grotesque and disfigured men and women prowling among the cars like bugs picking through rocks. High above, shapes moved behind shimmering windows, no telling if the people inside were dead or undead, not unless there was a jagged hole and the breeze blew just the right way.

This was what his city had become. Shattered glass, unmoving traffic, hungry packs roaming aimlessly.

But not Jeffery. He was aimless no longer. He felt a pull southward like the slope of a crater, felt drawn by more than the mere scent of the living. Drawn by something else.

It occurred to him, as he strode toward the winter sun in its low, noonday position, that this wasn’t the first time he had looked south while all the traffic stopped. He had been fourteen when the planes hit. He remembered the smell, that acrid odor of asbestos and melted steel and who knew what else. Paper had fluttered on the breeze clear up to Harlem, little charred pieces of the stuff like burning snow. That was how white-collar buildings bled: They leaked paperwork, filing cabinets full of the shit, coughing it out through broken glass to flap in the same wind that brought the smoke all the way up to Harlem.

The wind had been out of the south that day, just like it was right then. It was the world’s way of sharing its misery with the whole island, the stench flowing through the glass caverns of uptown, over the park, and infecting the colored streets with the ruin of a white man’s world.

At the time, of course, Jeffery hadn’t known what the smoke was all about, hadn’t understood the sickness at the yoke of those planes, but he knew a personal attack when he saw one. He knew when a man fronted you, you didn’t back down. Men were like dogs. You give ’em something to chase, and they’ll chase it. You turn, and they’ll bite you.

And so his mother had cried when he’d enlisted. Jeffery didn’t tell her beforehand. Shit, she still had the acceptance letter from Medgar Evers on the fridge when he deployed, dreamed of him coming home and getting a business degree, dreamed of him coming home at all.

Jeffery told everyone it was 9/11 that made him sign up. Part of him believed it. The rest of him knew better. He had known since he was born that he would go off and fight in a war, whether he wanted to or not. His old man had fought. Back in his father’s day you were drafted by law rather than circumstance. The world sent a man off to fight another man who had never fronted at all, just wanted to be left alone. It weren’t like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, some slap in the face like that shit. His old man said it was just confused men killing confused men so they might be the one to come home in one piece. That was all.

Jeffery believed him. He knew his father. Not like knew-who-he-was, but really knew him. That bullshit about black boys not knowing who their daddies were drove him fucking crazy. Every kid he grew up with knew who his daddy was. How could you not, when your momma spent most of her days cursing his name over and over, telling her kids what a shit that man was. Most everyone knew their father, sometimes got a letter or a guilty glance on the street, but Jeffery was different. He knew his dad. They’d spent hours and hours bullshitting after the war, drinking malts on the stoop while kids screamed down the street and traffic drifted by, his father telling him the shit he’d seen, Jeffery keeping mostly quiet.

The talks would last until nine o’clock, when his dad would get up, knees making noises, and reach out a hand calloused from handling ropes all day. The Liberty Landing Ferry made its first run at five in the morning. Jeffery’s dad had to be on the boat by four-thirty. So they would shake hands around nine, father and son, and his dad would glance up at the lit window a few stories above but never ask how she was doing.

“No one told you that you had to do it,” his father often said back then, referring to the fighting Jeffery had done.

And Jeffery had known right from the start what his old man was trying to say. There was something different about volunteering, something else about being taken. All the questions about who he was dating, was he in love, what’s she like, any kids? Jeffery knew his old man. He had worried that his son, this second chance at life, a life full of freedom and free of mistakes, would mess up and lose the same wars he’d lost. The same wars overseas and battles in those streets. Battles in one’s own mind.

But Jeffery couldn’t lose. That only happened when a man fronted you, when you turned and ran. Wars were only lost when they breathed down your neck. And so Jeffery headed south, drawn by more than the breeze, freer in some ways than the unthinking monsters crushing and bumping all around him, pulled down the slope of that distant crater, and not for the first time.

There was something else the same, he saw. It was the crowds, just like all those years ago. People had staggering about, confused, dazed, half-dead. Jeffery didn’t know what the smoke meant back then, but he knew where his dad worked. Something bad had happened on the tip of the island.

He was cutting class that day, not because he did it often, but the weather had been too nice for being inside. He could feel it that morning when he left the apartment, the crispness in the air like a spring or fall day that would warm up to something special. The sort of day where clouds played hooky, and so should he.

At first, people said it was a bomb. Some said it was a fire or a small plane, like a Cessna. All Jeffery knew was that it had happened at the World Trade Center, and that’s where his father worked. That’s where he said he worked, anyway. Jeffery had never been. All the weekends he’d been invited out to ride the boat back and forth across the Hudson, and he’d never been.

He went that time, on that day many years ago, but not by choice. His young legs just took him at a trot, his thoughts rattling around in his skull, people on the sidewalks actin’ crazy, the traffic coming to a halt.

Some others had moved with him, more and more, curiosity flowing south. He remembered angling toward the river, noticing the change in the traffic, the cars backed up at the tunnel, a sudden explosion in cops and firefighters. They yelled at him and others to turn around, more cops than he’d ever seen.

The blocks had gone by in a blur. He remembered his father arriving at their apartment once, smiling and sweating, claiming to have walked all the way there from work. Jeffery didn’t believe him. No one walked the length of the island. But jogging it that day, gray smoke clogging a cloudless sky, blocks and blocks drifting by of stuck traffic and people holding their phones, mouths covered with trembling hands, Jeffery saw that the island weren’t as big as he liked to think.

He never got there, of course, to where the smoke was coming from. The crowds heading south bumped into the much different crowds fleeing north. This is what reminded him of that day eleven years ago, what looked the same between the island getting hit and bit. The people staggering north back then had been pale, skin white like ghosts, even the brothers and sisters. They looked like the dead, their eyes these dark and unblinking circles. They pawed at their own faces, groaning, holding shoulders to see where they were going, just like the undead did now.

Jeffery remembered how they cried and moaned, how they fell in the streets, shaking. People were hugging whoever was there, was closest, didn’t matter. Jeffery remembered that. It didn’t matter.

A cop had told him to get lost. He picked Jeffery out of the downtown crowd, could tell that he was different, didn’t belong. Jeffery’s skin glistened with sweat from the long run, his eyes wide with curiosity, wide with all he hadn’t seen. They were different than the look from those who had.

“My daddy’s down there,” he tried to tell the cop.

“Then your dad’s in a world of hurt,” the officer had said.

Jeffery had been pissed. It was a shitty thing to say. But he realized later that the cop was just like him. There was no blanket of ash on that man, no desire to hug a stranger. He hadn’t seen. Hadn’t seen a thing. Was just reacting. Drafted into a war, not asked.

His father, Jeffery would learn, was not in a world of hurt. He was helping that world. The ferry had run back and forth across those cold September waters for much of the morning, people piling aboard from the seawall like an army of the undead, more and more of them, always coming, crowding aboard pale as ghosts and shaking like grocery bags caught on a clothesline. And Jeffery’s dad, hands rough from handling ropes all those long years, had been there, pulling those people aboard.

27 • Jeffery Biggers

The dumpster lurched as the dead knocked against it, and Jeffery nearly fell on his ass. He steadied himself and held the extended aluminum pole with both hands, leaving him with only his jutting elbows for balance. More bangs, and the dumpster slid a few inches, tired wheels groaning, the hollow metal resounding beneath him.

It was working. Holy shit, it was working!

Jeffery spread his feet, his knuckles pale as he gripped that cool aluminum pole, his arms shaking from the strain of holding the thing out as far as he could.

They’d done this in boot camp, he remembered. It was a form of punishment. Made them hold their rifles by the barrels, parallel to the ground, the heavy butts dipping toward the earth. Joints and muscles would scream while the drill sergeant came around and rested his pasty hands on the stocks, pressing them down.

The dumpster moved again. The baby wailed. Beneath it, dozens of hands pawed at the air like drunken fans at a concert, like kids lining a parade, hoping for someone on a float to throw them candy.

The thing they craved swung from one of those yuppie backpacks. It was looped over the crusty paint roller, the pole bending under the strain. The alley had collected a mob. Some stood waving beneath the kid. Others crowded from the far side—and the dumpster shifted.

Jeffery laughed and shuffled his feet on the unsteady plastic lid. It was fucking working. If he got out of this shit, he’d have a helluva story for the next group he bumped into. He was already retelling it as the dumpster moved a few more inches, the casters squealing as they worked free. The body of the metal container rang with the angry bangs of scrambling arms and legs trying to get up from the other side. The ones on the near side weren’t trying to climb at all, just fixating on the little feet wheeling in the air over their heads. One crowd pushed and the other did nothing, and the dumpster moved.

A hand got close to the screaming kid, a tall fucker. Jeffery bit his lip and steadied the pole. Goddamn, this was wrong. But it weren’t like he was throwing the kid over their heads and making a dash. Hell, he didn’t have to risk his neck to be down there in the first place.

The dumpster moved quite a bit, the kid swinging in its harness, Jeffery letting go with one hand and swinging his free arm for balance. He used the kid like bait to guide some of the chompers between the dumpster and the brick wall behind him. They followed like sheep. As they crowded in and scrambled for the prize, the dumpster really moved. It lurched away from the building, and more of them filed into place. Too damn easy. Too predictable.

He swung the kid around and steered the biggest crush of foul undead toward the other side of the alley, getting the hang of it. There was an urge to glance up at his audience above, the boy in the window, to shout out that he was gonna be okay, but there was so much to concentrate on. He switched hands and gave his other one a shake, fingers tingling. The plastic lid buckled some more. Jeffery had a thought of falling through, of losing his platform. The paranoia that’d built up over weeks of running told him this would happen next. The worst shit possible would always happen next. And there would be a goddam chomper in the dumpster, lying in wait. He shook this thought away. That’s not how this was going down. He was already telling the story to the next group, telling them how near he’d come from having his bones picked clean. He was gonna make it.

A few inches at a time, the dumpster crept across the alley. More of the fuckers squeezed in around the wrecked van, joining the pack. Jeffery worried it would be too many, that the crush would get so dense that the dumpster would simply stop moving. He was already out in the center of the alley, an island in a shark-infested sea. Man, this would be a story. He laughed with nerves, the metallic taste of adrenaline on his tongue, thinking of all the times he’d been shot at and how he thought it’d make for a good story back home. Fuck, he shoulda re-upped. Another tour, and he’d be safer over there than he was now.

One of the undead managed to get its armpits up on the lip of the dumpster, scrambling over some of those that’d fallen down. Jeffery kicked him in the head. He tried to keep toward the edges of the lid where it was more solid, but hands were brushing his boots. Shit, this was tenuous. Tightroping this motherfucker. Six feet away from the nearest window. Four feet. Almost three feet, when his plan hit a snag. The bastards on that side of the dumpster wouldn’t clear out. They were like a bumper, a wall, blocking progress.

He shifted hands again and tried urging them out with the kicking and screaming kid, but more took their place from the other side. Jeffery was fucked. He looked back at the kid in the window, needing to see some other living soul, and the boy’s wide eyes and slack mouth confirmed his own fears: well and truly fucked.

He pulled the kid back in. The chompers were piling up, banging into the dumpster from all sides. Soon they would start forming ramps and making their way to the top. Jeffery pictured them crashing through the lid with him, banging on the insides of the reeking container, being eaten away at from all sides, him and the baby, mixing in the same guts.

Fuck. Fuck.

He loosened the backpack from the end of the painting handle and worked his arms through the straps. “C’mon, kid,” he breathed. The groans and the stench were everywhere. This was it. This was it. He twisted the knobs on the handle again and extended it all the way, really cinched them down tight. Another fucker was up to her armpits, face caked in blood, a real hungry one. Jeffery stepped away and concentrated on the window. “C’mon, kid.” He speared the glass with the handle, punching it through panes set in place in the 50s, maybe earlier. Several more pokes and the window was busted up good. He used the pole to slap the glass out of the frame—thank God they didn’t have them damn bars on them—and kicked the bitch in the head who was biting after his boots. Fuck. Fuck. Chomper slobber on his goddamn boots.

The thin strips of wood that formed a grid between the panes of glass were all that was left. Like an empty game of tic-tac-toe. No breaking them with the painting stick, but how sturdy could they be? Jeffery pulled the stick back, used it to push a chomper’s forehead away, the thing snarling angrily at being toyed with by its food. The plastic lid faintly buckled. The banging and groaning were like drums reaching some sort of crescendo. Even the kid had fallen quiet, maybe for being pressed back against a body, maybe just fuckin’ exhausted, maybe sensing what Jeffery was sensing: that the end was well fucking nigh.

He ran along the edge of the lid to keep it from collapsing, ran past the waving and groping hands, trying not to trip over them, and threw himself through the void, over the heads, jumping like a kid again, back when he liked to pretend the ground was lava.

He crashed halfway through the wooden slats. They snapped by his shoulders and arms, his waist catching on the window, feet scrambling. An old wound on his stomach lanced out with a pain so sudden and sharp that he nearly fainted. It felt like one of the slats had fucking pierced him, but it was just a deep bruise that would never heal, a former injury being struck again.

Hands fell on his calves. One of his boots was torn off as he tried to pull himself inside, damn things screaming and moaning and his body on fire with a thousand aches.

Jeffery scrambled through the busted window, one boot on, another off. He laughed and whooped. He jumped around a disgusting living room torn up by scavengers, the baby hollerin’ on his back, its voice going up and down as it rode the sickening roller coaster of Jeffery’s elation.

With a loud hack and coughing noise, and then a splatter of nasty warmness against his neck, the kid lost the last meal it would ever get from its mother. Jeffery didn’t give a shit. He laughed at this, knowing it was the perfect punch line to the goddamn most unbelievable bullshit story anyone in this living nightmare would ever share with another wide-eyed and doubting soul.

He limped around on his one boot, laughing. Limping. The aches wore off from holding that painting stick so far out, from smashing through the goddamn window. Limping. Looking down. Blood on the filthy carpet, blood on his sock.

“No,” Jeffery muttered. “Oh, fuck, fuck, no.” He hopped to the sofa with its stuffing erupting like pearly white guts.

“Fuck me, no. C’mon, kid. C’mon.”

Jeffery sat down and tore off his sock, hand shaking. His bladder felt near to burst with diet coke. No. Not after all that. No fucking way.

The sock came away easy, the blood not nearly begun to set, not an old wound like he’d hoped, not a scab ripped open like he prayed it was.

“Oh, fuck, kid.”

Jeffery worked at the buckles on the yuppie pack. He pulled the infant around and laid him gently on his back amid the disgorged white furniture innards. He had no idea how old the child was, always got that wrong whenever he guessed. It coulda been born yesterday. Could be three months. No fuckin’ clue.

He studied the wound. Saw the bite marks, the torn flesh. Knives in the kitchen, probably. He could saw through the thing, hack through the bone. But he’d heard from that one group that it didn’t work. They said their one-armed friend was still out there somewhere, clacking at the air with his teeth. It’d been no good at all to cut his arm off.

The kid looked at him with something like worry, with his little nose and raised brow. There were angry bangs and groans from the alley heard through the smashed window. The infant had those big eyes babies have, those little pink lips all puckered up, asking for their next meal. Just like Jeffery and all the survivors, just like that alley full of chompers, everyone was always looking for their next meal.

Jeffery studied the little guy, the kid who was supposed to’ve been his ticket out of there. A one-way ride on one of them helicopters, always the helicopters comin’ to pull him out of the deep shit. Just one more ride, that’s all he wanted. Come and get me. Save me from my own goddamn country. Here’s the red smoke right fuckin’ here. Here’s me waving my rifle, barrel pointed right back at me, motherfuckers, just like you taught. Here I am. Come and get me.

Jeffery looked down at his foot, dripping blood.

They already had, he figured. They’d already got him fucking good.

28 • Jeffery Biggers

Jeffery could still feel that original wound, but he no longer limped. He walked just as unsteadily on both legs. And what control he could exert over where they took him seemed to come from resignation. That’s how he could somewhat operate his body. The less he struggled, the more say he had in where he went. He could steer by thinking about a place, by leaning into the walls of his own self—not aggressively, that didn’t work—but just a gradual lean, like guiding a bowling ball after it had already left his hand. It reminded Jeffery of the Buddhists he’d read about, their fascination with water, how it flowed to fill any vessel, how it moved around a pier rather than put up a fight and try and bash through it.

It was one of his dad’s books, a ratty paperback passed to him on the stoop, a book he’d never finished. His old man was always bringing him worn books with chipped edges and broken spines that smelled of wet rope and low tide. He said he read them while the ferry was waiting on passengers. Jeffery never asked where his father got the books, always assumed he stole them from those racks of dollar paperbacks crazy white bookstore owners left on the sidewalk like a temptation. He tended to assume the worst about his old man. It was hard not to, growing up in a nest with his momma’s hate—all those vile thoughts regurgitated and forced down Jeffery’s open beak.

Most of the books his father gave him went in the trash. He would try and read them, try and sell them, but they rarely took to him or were taken up by others. The only book his old man ever gave him that he read cover to cover was the one on sculpture. It was a guilty pleasure, that book. Not sure what the draw was, and Jeffery had never told anyone about it. His father had brought it one day to show Jeffery where he worked. There was a picture of two sculptures by the water, two towers. The Pylons, the book called them. They sat on the edge of the Hudson right there at the World Trade Center where his father’s boat docked six times a day.

“A black man made these,” his father had said.

The picture showed the two sculptures looking out over the river toward Jersey, a big clock on the other side that his father said all the men in suits could see clear across the Hudson so they could manage their time, clock in and clock out, cinch up or loosen their ties.

“This is where we been,” his old man had said, tapping one of the towers. It was a blocky structure, the corners sharp and built of heavy stone. It had sections, like the body of an insect, six or seven of them. They got more squat toward the bottom, all of them pointing down into the earth. It was the saddest thing Jeffery had ever seen, this coming before he’d seen war. Something about the heavy weight of those sections, crushing each other, made it the most heartbreaking of sights.

It looked like the sculpture was being driven into the earth, the sections on top weighing the others down, the ones on the bottom squashed and flattened. And maybe those towers could represent anything a person wanted to see, but Jeffery saw what his old man saw. This was their race captured by a brother sculptor; this was the generations piling up on those that came before. Once you saw it like that, it was impossible to see anything else.

“And this is us dreamin’,” his father said, running his finger across the neighboring tower. “This is hope.”

If the stone sculpture made Jeffery frown without knowing why, if it made his gut sink, this one made him suck in his breath. It was a sculpture crafted of air. A wire frame, twisting and weaving, pointing up like smoke rising toward the sky. It was a sister’s braids. It was a dozen long-fingered hands interlocked with glory, the blue sky caught between their palms. It was the flutter above a choir as those voices and arms and those gaping sleeves raised up and lost themselves in their own song.

A black man had made these, his father had told him. This was where he worked.

That chapter was about a man named Martin. Here were these two towers, sadness and joy, hope and resignation, side by side. It was a father on a stoop, back bent, the years driving him toward his grave. It was a son with a thrust chest and lifted chin, full of dreams and news of enlistment. It was a boy signing up for a thing he didn’t know, vigor in his limbs, hopes and wishes of becoming a man in other men’s eyes. It was a sculpture of the before and after, of that man returning home, cast out of a war he understood even less having looked it in its eyes, his belly a knot of scars from where they’d pulled out bits of Hummer, shoved him back together, sewn him up.

Jeffery felt the pull of those towers, that place, that zero ground, that wharf where his old man wrapped lines around bollards and greeted passengers while the captain stood on the deck smoking cigarettes. He felt the pull of those towers, a Pylon full of life pointing toward the heavens, one full of despair driving deep into the earth.

He had spent hours looking at that picture, but he had never seen them with his own eyes.

A block away, as he leaned south, guiding his limbs like water around a pier, he heard the sounds of a fight, the familiar pops of gunfire that used to mean grabbing your helmet and running off to kill someone. Sounds that now meant there were still people alive and able to put up a fight. Jeffery could smell living meat and fresh fear in the direction of the gunfire. Most of the tottering undead around him angled that way, picking up the pace, pushing deeper into the heart of the financial district.

But not Jeffery. He leaned on the walls of the hollow thing he’d become, this walking fist of hunger, this shell grown exhausted from not sleeping. He steered toward the unfinished skyscraper standing in the empty space where two other towers once stood, an incomplete boy trying to stand proud now that its parents were gone. He saw Winter Garden, a glass dome his father had described in whispers, these landmarks a simple walk from his home, but he had never taken the time to visit. All within reach, a long walk, that place where those towers stood, those Pylons near where his father worked, but he had never taken the time to visit. Not even back when he could.

29 • Jeffery Biggers

Jeffery knew from watching unfortunate others that he didn’t have long. Fifteen minutes? Twenty? He’d seen it go fast for neck bites. Seen it take almost an hour for that big brother who’d lost a finger and had asked to be locked down with bike chains. Decisions. Damn. He had run this shit through his mind every possible way a thousand times, but it was different now with the clock tickin’, with the sickness spreading in his veins. Damn. Fifteen minutes to off himself or to crawl away somewhere safe where he wouldn’t be eaten, where he could slip off into that gazing stupor people went into until they came back as something else.

Fifteen minutes. He gazed at the smashed window he’d come through. The frustrated gurgles and hungry groans could be heard from the alley. The dumpster was still being knocked around out there. One dive back through, he thought. Give them what they want, make sure there was nothing left. Go be bones.

The kid kicked his legs on the sofa beside him, riding an imaginary bike. Jeffery looked over and watched the boy yawn, eyes puckered shut, tiny hands waving at the air. No one would ever teach him how to ride a bike. That shit was through. This kid had no idea what he’d been born into. In fact, he looked bored, like: let’s get this over with, motherfucker.

Jeffery looked around the apartment. No lurkers. Safe, not like that mattered. It was the typical wreck he’d seen the last weeks: cabinets standing open, drawers a-kilter, nothing put back in its place. The coffee table had been used as an ashtray. It smelled like the sink had been used as a toilet. The fucking world he lived in. Used to live in. How much longer?

The goddamn kid. Jeffery felt like his own father must’ve felt. A man, terrified, stuck with this kid. Shit. Shit. How do you blame a guy? A ticket out of there, and now what? Your life was over.

He felt old. Old and tired. Was this the sickness? Was this the first thing you felt when you got bit: old? All the damn stages of life, and now this one. The baby. His old man. Him—

The kid across the alley.

Jeffery sat up. Goddamit. Ten minutes left? Fuck.

He grabbed the baby and the stupid yuppie pack. The kid squealed as Jeffery pushed away from that busted sofa with its white foam guts hanging out. The ashes on the table stirred in his wake.

The door swung open, lock busted. He didn’t pause to listen for the dragging of feet, didn’t stop to sniff for that putrified smell that sometimes preceded an attack. He’d been through the building once before, and now it didn’t matter. Fuck. How long? His foot hurt like a sonofabitch, worse than anything that’d earned him those two Purple Stars. He dripped blood and limped his way up crooked stairs that could somehow still command any damn rent they wanted. Third floor. He needed the third floor.

On the landing of the second, someone banged a door shut. Another survivor. They were like rats scurrying from the sounds of each other. People living on top of people and pretending they weren’t there. Just like it’d always been. A hotel of strangers. The only sign of a neighbor the voices from their TVs seeping through ceiling and walls. Now, not even that.

Jeffery didn’t call out, didn’t ask for help. He didn’t know this person, this rat. The kid across the alley. That’s who. No one else.

He spotted the boy again from the old apartment. The bag of chips was still there, the window still open, ugly curtains fluttering like the building was still alive, still doing its thing. Across the way, the teenager was watching the scene in the alley, the boxed-in chompers agitated and confused, stuck like fish that’d swum into a net and couldn’t figure how to get loose.

There was no clothesline from that apartment, just a jury-rigged wire for sharing cable TV, a pair of shoes hanging from its laces, a long-ago prank from laughing days.

Jeffery spotted a clothesline next door. He went down the hall to a place he’d cleared hours earlier. Putrified remains of a likely renter swung from an electrical wire in the bedroom, neck bulging. He’d taken the lazy way out. Jeffery ignored this, wondered vaguely if he’d be eating that mess in half an hour. Or maybe he’d be going after the survivor one floor down, that rat. He forgot about this and made sure the squirming kid was in the backpack, did the restraints up tight, swung him over his shoulders. Goddamn, his foot hurt. He could feel it working up past his knee. Five minutes? Goddamn.

The window wouldn’t budge. Painted tight a long time ago. Jeffery didn’t have time for this bullshit. He could see the clothesline right out by the fire escape, but he didn’t want to go through the bedroom with the dangler, so he shoved his boot through the glass. He kicked the remaining shards out and beat the top pane with his fist to knock the hangers loose. He’d gotten good at this, he saw, busting in and out of places. Damn. A lot of talents wasted. Gone. Stupid.

He stooped real low to get outside, mindful of the kid on his back. The young man from across the way was watching him. Shit, this was a lot to saddle a young man with. A lot. Then again, giving life to someone weren’t always a gift. You’d really done something when you knocked a girl up. Done something with lasting consequences. All the good and bad in a life, all set into motion with a mindless romp.

The kid watched him, chewing something. He had food. That was good. Must be a good kid to still be around. By now they were either the best of them or the worst of them. This kid didn’t look like one of the worst of them.

The straps of the yuppie pack cinched tight to the line. There was a pair of red boxers flapping out there like some kind of flag, one of those messages the Navy cats used. Fuck, that was a different lifetime, all the fighting. This was something else.

The line squeaked around the white plastic pulley as Jeffery hauled the cord. The boxers jerked through the air like a fish, contracting as it dove forward, fins popping out when it paused. The baby with no name, a name lost with its momma, slid out after it. Squealing with delight, a cluster of foul motherfuckers down in the alley sniffing the air, the baby chased the red fish across the alley.

Jeffery looked up and saw that the kid from the window was gone. Damn, his shoulders were stiff. Fuck. Hard to move. He gritted his teeth and kept pulling in cord. Fingers would lock on the wire, but it was getting difficult to open them back up. Damn. Happening fast. Needed to sit down. Took work to breathe. Instead, he leaned against the creaky metal railing of the high fire escape and tried to grab more wire. A clothespin popped off out there in the alley and tumbled down into the orgy of undead. An infant bobbed, precarious, squealing faintly, hanging from a thread.

Jeffery couldn’t move his arms. He sagged down on stiff and tired legs, collapsed back on his ass, his pulse in his foot, but not so much blood leaking out anymore.

Hungry. He thought about those potato chips, still crisp, but they didn’t seem appetizing. He thought about that poor man swinging from a length of electrical wire in the other room, the one who’d given up, the dangler who took the lazy way. Meanwhile, an infant swung on a different wire, squealing, legs walking on empty air.

Goddamn.

The end comes slow so you can think about it. Jeffery thought of the soldier from another unit whose hand he’d held while he’d panted those thin gasps that you reckon for a man’s last. He’d watched the life spiral out of that soldier while gunfire popped all around, helicopters saying it was too hot to land. Wasn’t much later he’d been on the other end, fighting for his own lungful of air, squeezing the hand of an Iraqi militia man they were there to advise, there to hand off the deep shit to someone else, like generations coming one after another. An old man was hanging in the next room, a baby dangling from a wire, Jeffery sitting powerless in between. Nothing moving for a long moment. Nothing moving maybe ever again.

There was a squeak.

Jeffery figured it came from his own lungs, from the baby, from the dumpster far below. He’d seen that big brother with the missing finger start making noises after a period of quiet.

Another squeak.

Again.

It was the big wheel bolted to the brick, the wire sliding around. Jeffery couldn’t move, but he could gaze through the rusted bars of that fire escape and watch the red fish dart through the air, contracting and spreading its fins. He watched the child swing after, tiny hands clutching the empty air, a good boy in a different window chewing something while he accepted the impossible. Chewing something. Pulling wire. While a hunger of a different sort took hold of the man formerly known as Jeffery Biggers.