I, Zombie

48 • Jeffery Biggers

The jets were flying low. They rumbled down the Hudson, booms and echoes like thunderclaps amid the walls of glass and steel, and Jeffery was reminded of that September morning so long ago. He’d been a boy, cutting class because it was too beautiful outside, when he’d heard the roar of the jet overhead, a distant grumble, acrid smoke filling the air for days and days.

Most of the pack ignored the whine of the turbines, but it triggered a deep memory for Jeffery. It was the sound of deployment, the noise of good men and women ferried off to another life. It was stub-nosed C-130s and C-5As that left with children and came home mostly empty. Only the bags were full. Laid out on the deck. All black. The color of grief. Plastic zippered up tight.

His head lifted, some primal fear network still intact, still pulling the puppet’s strings. Navy gray slid across the brilliant blue, contrails of speed and the cool atmosphere streaking from wingtips. The lead jet was in a dive. Jeffery remembered jumping out of a plane a long time ago. He remembered thinking the chute wouldn’t open, that he would plummet to his death. He remembered calling his mom from camp, still breathless, her so proud of all the places he was going, the things he was doing.

He only told her about the good places. The good things.

The landing gear was open, hatch doors like little fins on the plane’s belly, clear as day. Nothing sticking out.

Jeffery remembered flying home—he remembered the party they threw. All his mom’s friends had crowded around. They grabbed his biceps and patted his stomach, squealed and told him how handsome he was, showed him their phones, pictures of their daughters.

He had smiled and eaten off his paper plate, standing up, telling himself to eat slow. No mortars would scream into the mess tent. He wouldn’t have to drop what he was doing and find his rifle. Smile and eat. A woman twice his age told him how pretty his eyes were. How the military done him good.

He had nodded, didn’t tell her what his eyes had seen. Five miles driving a jeep, an arm in his lap, a friend laid out in the back seat, wondering all the while if they could put it back on. Ears still ringing, but the screams of anguish that would echo forever. Like that buzzing you get when you’re going deaf to a sound. Going deaf, but there it was anyway. And no digging could get it out.

They had patted his stomach and asked him how many sit-ups he could do. Was he going to college? Jeffery had wanted to lift his shirt and show them. Not his knotted muscles but the scars on top. The white fingers of flesh where the doctors had saved him. Look, his mom had the Purple Heart, the trophy of his wounds there over the mantel. Look. Because even she hadn’t seen. No more playing in the yard with his shirt off. Nothing to see here.

It wasn’t the landing gear that was open, Jeffery saw. This was a different plane. Something else nosed out of that hatch and dropped away, and he knew, with a horror that matched the last weeks of his life, he knew what they’d calculated.

It was a heavy bomb. It didn’t wiggle, didn’t succumb to the fickle air. There was no second-guessing its intent. A city in exchange for a continent. He remembered decisions like that. We’ll give up this town if it means winning the war. Level the streets so there’s no place to hide. A town for a country. Until there weren’t no towns left.

Turbines screamed as the pilot pulled away, a jet arcing up while a bomb slid across the blue sky. It fell forever. Jeffery’s body remained still, that monstrous side of him seeming to understand, to hear his thoughts. It was almost over.

When it disappeared behind the buildings, there was a silent pause, the fear of a dud, of nothing.

And then a flash of light shining through the streets and filling the sky, a billowing bubble of white rising up, a cascade of shattering glass and toppling steel.

Jeffery braced himself in that hollow head he’d been a prisoner in for too long. He watched the destruction roar faster than thought itself. He had but a moment, standing between towers of hope and despair in the shadow of his father’s work—a moment to be thankful that the end was near, that the fire would come to take him and his brothers as well.

49 • Michael Lane

Michael was going to hell. He could feel the inexorable flow downward, gravity and sin tugging on his heels, pulling him toward the center of the earth.

From the apartment to the streets, and now he was about to join the crush that flowed beneath them. He had crawled westward from his shithole neighborhood near the East River and into Tribeca. Neighborhoods that had been worlds apart now looked the same to him, all seen from pavement level. Cars lay scattered, abandoned in the middle of the street, doors left open, hazards blinking, obstacles it took forever to drag himself around. Newspapers tumbled across the pavement like flightless birds to attack his face. They spread themselves across the wrought iron gates and fences that protected walk-ups from the infected sidewalks. They gathered against the gutters in origami nests until a brave soul—the sports page or classifieds—tore off and flapped to freedom.

Shopping bags had better luck. Except for those caught on coils of razor wire, they fluttered up on the breeze like jellyfish pulsing through the air, torn handles hanging like tentacles and stingers.

Michael had pulled himself along for days. He couldn’t remember why he was doing this, but couldn’t seem to stop. It reminded him of a former life, getting up and doing things that made no sense, hating himself, hating his routine, the eternal disgust, and no ability to break free.

He used his palms to lift himself. Pushing down and then bending his elbows made him flop forward a few inches. There was hardly any pause before he did it again. Over and over. The flesh from both hands had been ripped away. Bone made clacking sounds on the pavement. Several of his fingers were bent back and pointed unnaturally toward the sky.

Groups of walkers passed him by now and then. They all grunted and groaned to some degree, weak sounds of agony from those dragging a broken leg or suffering a gaping wound. It was the accordion squeeze of organs like great bellows, wheezing and rattling as they chased down anyone still clinging and surviving, anyone with meat still worth taking.

A pregnant woman in a tattered green dress had made an especial racket. Her groans rose above the others, a noise among the inhuman sounds that stood out for being… human. Michael had watched her as she passed him by, the back of her dress torn open, her underwear riding up, half of her ass hanging out, skinny everywhere except for that bulge of a belly.

He had lost contact with the woman after a block or so. She had drifted uptown on some scent Michael couldn’t nose, moving faster with her waddling stagger than he could ever hope to on his belly. He had followed a different scent, one that pulled jostling masses down flights of stairs, into a station, nearer to hell with every painful pull and lunge forward.

And it wasn’t his addiction taking him there. He didn’t think any god would punish a man for being happy, for victimless crimes. No, he was on this inexorable crawl into the pits of hell for all the things his addiction made him forsake. It wasn’t eating his mother, the smear of her trailing behind him for blocks and city blocks, leaking out his cuffs in oozing trickles… it was the way he’d cared for her all the years before.

Michael finally understood this as he reached those subway steps and began dragging himself down, another finger popping up to point at the heavens. He finally understood as he slid on his belly and the birds swooped down, as flames rushed down the streets, his torment and fiery hell not eternal at all.

50 • Gloria

The darkness had a smell. It was the wet of rot, of cool air trapped and festering, the odor of mud, of standing water, accumulated waste, and damp fur. Piercing it all was the intoxicating scent of cooked flesh, a zombie perhaps who had fallen on the third rail back when it still had power. An impenetrable cluster of gnashing mouths worked on the remains of this accident in pure desperation. Hunger had driven those who’d stumbled underground to eat what on the surface would be less tempting. Gloria and the rest of the blind and groping column passed these pathetic souls by and followed the sounds of rats.

Their squeaking filled the dark subway tunnel. It reminded Gloria of birthday parties as a kid. It was the chirp of balloons rubbing together, short outbursts from tiny lungs, a jittery stampede beneath this much slower, plodding, and rotting one.

There were so many. Running over her feet, stepping on them, crushing some, them biting back with sharp and fearful teeth. Her blind legs marched forward, oblivious to the pain. Gloria’s head simply remained full of her silent screams, her prayers, other repeated nonsense, loops of songs from a far-gone life, all roaring noiselessly in the hemispheres of her small mind as her feet carried her along.

She could hear the others walking with her, the squish of dozens of feet in the mud and garbage, their wheezing and rattling, their miserable pleas. This grotesque and invisible mass trudged downward into the darkness. Water dripped from overhead, occasionally striking her scalp. Every nerve was heightened by the pitch black. There were splashes ahead that warned her of the flood, and the scents that drew them in began to grow weak.

Gloria bumped into those who circled back. The gathering seemed to mix aimlessly in the darkness, trapped by the eddy of odors. She was one of the few who followed a slender tendril onward, into the flooded tunnel that sloped down and down.

Her feet hit the water, ankles covered, then her calves, knees, thighs—and still her dumb body forged ahead, following a scent and then just the memory of a scent. Rats swam alongside, their tiny claws pawing at her, scampering up her back and around her neck, riding her shoulders, little teeth sampling her rotting flesh.

Deeper. Splashes in the darkness as others waded in different directions. All confused, now. Just moving in order to move. A tunnel sloping ever downward, no train station in what felt like forever, and Gloria knew what part of the line she was on. This was the way. Forward, forward, she urged the man at the tiller. Go.

The water was freezing. It numbed all her hurts, soothed the craziness spreading in her brain. Even that organ would rot, she had discovered. It would go last, some part of this disease, some obsession that forsook everything but the memory of a life lived, gave up the body to save the ghost. But it was going, too. Memories and dreams fading, thoughts coming out of sequence. She was stuck in that morning haze where the nonsensical made sense for but a moment, just awake enough to realize things weren’t clear.

Her shoulders sank beneath the waters. Rats clung to her face and tangled in her hair, little feet tearing at her lips and scratching on her teeth, higher and higher up their sinking raft, until she was fully under and they paddled away.

Gloria came up a while later with the slope. Below the East River, she suspected. The Blue Line was flooding. Or flooded on purpose. She rarely came this way. This was the train to Brooklyn and beyond. This was the tunnel that cut beneath the earth and popped up on the other side. The rats squealed with delight as they returned to dry land. They chased between her ruined feet and scampered over the dead tracks and the wet garbage. Foul water leaked out of Gloria’s mouth, out of the hole in her cheek, and she didn’t care. She was in the morning shower, nothing about the world yet making sense, not quite awake yet, not quite dead.

There was a soft breeze ahead. Rising. She bumped shoulders with another, a reminder that there were people in these bodies just like her. The darkness faded as distant daylight scattered down the tunnel. Black became gray became the barest of hoary gold. The smell of the living carried on the sinking air. Rats twittered, agitated, and ran forward, an army of scouts, the presages of death and plague, the scavengers of rot and ruin.

Gloria was one of the horde to make it through. Bumping and jostling. They scampered over a wall of rubble, hands and knees, sharp rock, the roof of the tunnel bumping their heads, forcing them on their bellies, crawling and pulling toward the smell—and then an arc of bright light growing, approaching, until she could see the lurching bodies ahead of her, could make out familiar forms, soaked and rat-nicked and still moving.

The sunlight hit Gloria’s skin as she emerged on the elevated platform, and it felt good. It would feel good until the smell of baking, decayed flesh returned. It would feel good until it didn’t.

There was a train standing dead on the tracks ahead, stopped at a station. Nobody moving. An elevated rail a few stories above the rooftops. Gloria shuffled toward the train and the station, the smell of a place where people had lived rising up from the streets, driving her forward. Behind her, there was the rumble of jets, the silent whistle of swooping birds, the rise of new and strange suns to the west where suns should not rise at all, and a wound cauterized, but much too late. A wound sealed shut like a cancerous tumor, but not before it had spread to the liver, deep to the marrow, working its way at the very last to the most necessary organ of them all—

But that was for others to say. Gloria smiled. She staggered away from the city that held her dreams and contained her past, a hole in her cheek the size of an apple.