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 purple ropes that came unknotted from the woman’s belly. The young boy was
torn in two. The mother’s face jerked, mouth open, eyes unblinking, staring up
at the clouds overhead. This was what the world had become.
A warm and tangy taste filled Jennifer’s mouth, blood
running down her throat, down her chin, the feeling in some dark recess of her
soul like a flash of guilt-ridden joy, this radiance of a hunger sated,
emotions from the black side of her bleeding over into what little of her old
self remained.
Her hands pawed through the woman’s remains, dozens of other
hands fighting, teeth gnashing, a leg dragged away by several others, the flesh
between pulling apart like Silly Putty before snapping. Jennifer was forced to
witness it all. To smell it and consume it.
She bit into a length of intestine, raw shit in her mouth,
and still could not physically gag, could only recoil emotionally. She tried
reciting the alphabet backwards, tried singing long forgotten songs in her
mind. She repeated the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, but what was
stronger than this? What mental effort or childhood game could silence the
gluttonous undead, could overpower the stench of an opened body, the taste of
human waste?
The rear of the shuffle crowded in, jostling her, rubbing up
against her flesh, fighting for scraps. Jennifer urged these competitors
forward.
Eat, eat,
she cried to herself. They were all that she pulled
for. Her own body was the enemy.
She and the fat man fought over an unidentifiable scrap. He
was larger—and won. Jennifer watched the red prize spill from the open wound on
his neck, empty and yellowed teeth chomping on nothing, a satisfied vigor in
his dead limbs.
And the awful truth, the glaring obviousness of it all
finally struck her. Jennifer’s gaze met the fat man’s, their eyes locking for a
moment, and she saw, somehow, through that soulless window and into the mind
beyond. Past this blood-smeared face, the happy chewing, the twitching arms,
was a frightened man. Trapped. Terrified. Imprisoned like a passenger in that
roaming form, looking out like a frightened child between cracked blinds at the
scary world beyond.
It wasn’t just her.
And with an explosion of clarity the entire shuffle came to
life around her. She thought of the thousands of trapped souls scrambling for
sanity, clutching their private pasts, forced to watch what they’d all become.
And the crushing blow of this was like a bat to Jennifer’s head. There was a
man
in that fat face with its hideous wound. A man like her who remembered this
city, remembered what they
used
to be. Jennifer wanted to call out, to
wave, but didn’t know how. And she wondered if he knew she was in this body of
hers, watching him, knowing him. Was he scared of her? How bad were her own
wounds? What did he see?
She couldn’t know.
And in the same instant that Jennifer Shaw realized she
wasn’t alone, she felt it more powerfully than ever before. They were
all
alone. All in their individual hells. No escape, no hope, no control. No way of
even saying to each other:
I see you in there
.
14 • Gloria
It sounded like hands digging in buckets of popcorn, like
Velcro pressed together and ripped back apart, all those fingernails gouging
and scrambling against the bark of the tree. Gloria jostled with the pack
beneath the limb. Mother and daughter sat above, quietly crying and whispering
false hopes, cornered like cats by a pack of dogs.
There was no escape, Gloria saw. For the past few hours, she
had studied the predicament of the two women, and there was no escape. Not for
any of them. This was what frightened her the most: The left-behind souls
scrambling at the trunk were just as trapped as the starving couple in the
tree. And a steady trickle of the blood-crusted meat-eaters was shambling
through the woods to cluster beneath that limb. It was like ants spilling down
a slippery funnel they couldn’t get back out of. They were all trapped, every
one. They would be until those women on that limb starved to death or lost
their balance, until they were either consumed or their meat rotted in death
and stopped smelling like sweet succor.
This was not a problem Gloria had foreseen. The living
simply did not do this, they didn’t hover almost within reach, neither running
nor dying. They survived or they were consumed. They got away or they passed
through the guts of the damned. One side or the other won, never a stalemate.
Not a stalemate, Gloria thought. Purgatory. Trapped in the
in-between. They were a lot like Gloria in that way, and she wondered what they
had done to deserve this. Something, obviously. The Lord was just, all sins
accounted for. They had all done something to be trapped there.
Hours went by, thinking such circular thoughts. Gloria
circled that tree, which she thought was an oak. She bumped into the others and
took her turn scratching the rough bark. She clawed at the air and groaned at
the nothing, secretly privy to the voiced fears and panicked whispers that
drifted down from above.
And Gloria prayed for deliverance. She thought of that
shoreline she had walked down hours before and wondered if turning toward the
water, toward the thing she feared in that moment, may not have been the better
choice. Wasn’t this her lot? Her life? Was this the lesson God was attempting
to hammer home?
Gloria kicked through the dry leaves and mulled over the
times she’d felt both trapped and safe. Trapped in marriage, even after the
baby was taken from her, even after her husband was locked away. The sin of
divorce was that frigid lake, and so she circled Carl for years and years,
pawing at the empty space around her.