I, Zombie

1 • Gloria

There was a hole in Gloria’s smile the size of an apple. When she ate, much of what she chewed passed through her cheek and spilled down her neck. And when a scent caught her attention—usually the smell of the living—she would lift her head to take a sniff and feel the air pass through her open face to hammer her rotting teeth.

Gloria was dead, and so were her teeth, but they were all still sensitive to the pain.

Bowing her head back over her meal, she tried not to watch what she was doing. The stench and texture were visceral enough, the taste both revolting and sickly soothing. A pack of five or so ripped into the man, the scene calmer than a big feed. There were grunts and contented smacking sounds, not the angry roars from those on the outside clawing to get in. Instead, she and four other monsters huddled together like hyenas on the Serengeti. They rubbed shoulders and listened to the sounds of flesh tearing and tendons snapping, the hotness of the man up to her elbows, blood dripping from her chin.

Gloria ate, and much of what she chewed spilled down her neck.

The revulsion she felt was mental. Gloria wished it were physical. She wanted to vomit, dearly wanted to vomit, but she couldn’t. The meat of the man tasted too good. It satisfied too deep and strong a craving, this new hunger that reminded her of all her old and equally primal urges.

There were two years in high school when Gloria had tried to become a vegetarian. This monster she had turned into reminded her of those years, of the meals that came after she’d given up trying to be good. She remembered how badly she had felt for that chicken even as she tore through its meat. There was a night out with friends, laughing, spilling beer, a hundred screens of sports she cared nothing about, and baskets of wings. She had held one, fingers sticky with sauce, a bite taken out of the flesh, and she had looked down, had seen those tendons and bone, and had realized what she was doing.

Even then, Gloria had known it was wrong. But she loved it too much. The taste was always stronger than her compassion. And so she ate and felt sick at the same time. She loved the meat and hated herself.

The dead body in the blue jeans and ruined button-up reminded her of that chicken wing. It was barely recognizable as a person anymore, covered in its own sauce. The pack grew to seven, and the man’s lower half was dragged away and fought over. More yummy disgustingness spilled out from his torso and spread across the warm pavement. The monster across from Gloria scrambled for the same slick ropes as she. The purple meat slid through both of their hands, their lips dribbling sauce back down on their food, fighting for scraps.

This other monster’s fingers were missing from one of his hands, bitten off, leaving him with a stump. Gloria saw the familiar black char of an original wound, the bite that had infected this man, working its way up his wrist. Still, he clawed for the meat with what was left of his hand. Like Gloria, he was only half in control of what he was doing. They were along for the ride, each of them. At the wheel—but without the power steering.

2 • Michael Lane

Michael remembered being a boy. He remembered the times from before. Michael could remember everything.

He remembered doctors in white coats telling him that his mother was still in there, that she was still alive behind those glassy eyes and that distant stare. In his more hopeful moments he would sit by her side, hold her hand, and believe them. He would pretend it was true.

And when her wheelchair squeaked and rattled with another shaking fit, Michael would squeeze her withered and trembling hands and talk to her, try to reason with her, ask her to please stop.

These were the times when he believed the doctors, when he thought his mother was still in there, peering out. He would talk to her like this when he was most hopeful. He would talk to her calmly.

And then there were days when he didn’t believe, when he couldn’t believe—and he would have to scream.

Michael Lane remembered screaming at his mother. He remembered this as he staggered through the apartment, knocking over furniture, chasing her hissing cat.

“Wake up!” he would yell at his mom, back when he could yell at anything.

“Wake the fuck up!”

And he would shake her. He would want to hit her, but he never did. At least, he didn’t think so.

It had been tempting at times. Not because he thought it would do her any good or snap her out of the degenerative palsy into which she had fallen, but because punching a hole in the wall didn’t make him feel any better. He wasn’t pissed off at the wall. Walls were supposed to just sit there. That’s what walls did.

His mother’s old black cat stood in the corner by the radiator, its spine arched, fur spiked, pink tongue and white teeth visible as it hissed at him. The damn thing was thin as a shadow. Starving. Michael was starving, too. He closed in, remembering the doubts he’d had about his mother’s condition. Those doubts had nagged at him for years.

What if his mother was just acting? What if this was her way of avoiding the world? He hadn’t been able to stop thinking these things. Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they better than her in that way?

Falling forward as much as lunging, Michael seized the weak and cornered cat. Sharp claws gouged his hands, burning where they broke the skin. He ignored this—he had no choice—and concentrated on the past. The times he had screamed at his mother were painful memories, so Michael orbited those. Pain was a distraction from what he knew he was about to do. And so he tried to remember if he had ever hit his mother, even a little. He couldn’t. Couldn’t remember. Maybe he had.

The cat clawed at his face as he bowed his head into its fur. It batted at his unblinking eyes, and Michael—the memory of Michael—recoiled in fear. But the body he was trapped inside did not pull back. The hunger was too great, that mad craving for meat too strong. Not this meat, perhaps. Not cat meat. But he was barricaded inside his apartment with little else. He had locked himself inside, thinking he was safe, that he’d be okay. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t okay.

Michael’s teeth sank past the fur to tear at the animal’s flesh. The cat was a screaming, writhing blur. It clawed at his open eyes, tore at his ears, while Michael ate.

He couldn’t stop himself.

This was not him.

The blood ran down his throat, warm and foul, the cat’s shrieks fading to rattling groans, and he could taste it. He could taste the meat. But this was not him. This was not Michael Lane.

Michael remembered being a boy, once.

He remembered the doctors telling him things, how a person could be locked away inside a body they couldn’t control.

And Michael never believed them, not really.

Until now.

3 • Jennifer Shaw

A grist of bees. A bevy of deer. A mob of—

What was a mob again? Yaks?

Emus. It was emus, Jennifer decided. But what animal made up a gang? Or a boil? Wasn’t there some creature that combined to form a bloat? Bloat was taken, she was pretty sure.

Jennifer drifted back to the games her father played. This was but one of many. She remembered hanging from his arm, her sister on the other side, as he swung them through Central Park Zoo. He called them monkeys—

“A band!” she and her sister would squeal.

“You little gorillas.”

“A troop!”

“You smelly baboons.”

“A flange!”

“I’m not smelly,” her sister would add, pouting.

Up and down the tree of life they would climb, learning useless facts that made their peers roll their eyes and their teachers clap with delight. Their father never taught them state capitals or anything normal. Nothing other people might already know. He filled their heads with reptiles and minerals and trivia. Jennifer never saw a garter snake slither through the grass without thinking: There goes Massachusetts.

“A family is more than just its members,” their father had said. “Together, we become something different.”

He said this a lot after their mother left. Swinging them through the zoo, he had shown his girls all the animals that hate to be alone, that prefer to go in groups. Each group had its own name, he taught them. In company they were something more than they could be in solitude.

So what was this, Jennifer wondered? What had she become? What was she a part of?

It couldn’t be a plague; those were locusts. Couldn’t be an intrusion because of the roach. And wasn’t a group of midges called a bite? She was pretty sure that was right. Shame, that one. And mosquitoes were a scourge. All the good ones were taken.

Herd. Herd was overdone, as was pack. Too many animals shared those. Too obvious.

And then it came to her.

It came to her as the skull Jennifer was trapped inside lolled down, as the nose that used to be hers twitched at the smell of meat.

An arm lay on the pavement, a torn sleeve wrapping it like a cloak, a cloud of flies drawn to the rotting meat. Its owner was long gone.

Jennifer had no appetite for it. She lumbered onward, no longer in control, forced to see whatever her head saw as it followed some scent, some impulse, some new reflex.

And for a moment—because of the dismembered arm, perhaps—the direction of her gaze allowed Jennifer to study the feet, her feet, and the feet of those around her. The bare feet and the feet in ragged slippers; the work boots and the worn trainers; the feet sliding and dragging; the feet of the people bumping into her, all of them moving in one direction, upwind, toward the smell of living meat.

She was one of them, and Jennifer knew what she was, what the group would be called.

She filed this trivia away. She took it with her as she disappeared into the recesses of her recollections, back to the times before she’d joined this trembling mass, this vile and grotesque thing her flesh had become. She skipped into the past, swinging on her father’s strong arms, beating her sister to calling this one out:

“A shuffle,” she cried. “A shuffle of zombies!”

And the animals of Central Park Zoo paced inside their cages, watching her and her dead family stagger by.

And they were all afraid.

4 • Michael Lane

Michael was suffering from withdrawal. He wasn’t sure at first—it was hard to tell one madness from the other—but now he knew.

He still had the taste of cat blood in his mouth, could feel this voice in his head, this lunatic starving for meat, this new animal in control of his body. And behind the thick curtain of horror that had drawn shut across his awareness, a tiny, familiar, persistent shout could be heard: he needed a fix. His veins hungered for the prick of steel, for the warm flow of numbness and that perfect release. He needed it now more than ever before. An overdose, Michael decided, would be fucking heavenly. A way to go. Any way to go for good.

The kit was on top of the fridge. Everything was there to help him die in bliss. He could sate the urge to which he’d been a slave for longer than he could remember, for longer than he’d ever been in control of himself, for almost as long as his mother had been seized by her blank stares and her shivering fits.

But now there was a new monster guiding his hand, dictating the direction of his mindless stagger. And this new thirst, this awful craving, carried him not toward the kitchen, but toward the door to his mother’s room.

The cat was dead. Michael had eaten most of it. Its fur was still stuck in his throat, his body too dumb to cough it up. It left a powerful tickle he could do nothing about.

With the animal gone, there was only one other scent of flesh nearby, only one other piece of meat in the tiny apartment.

Michael’s bloodstained hands banged and gouged at the door, swimming toward the smell of flesh on the other side. He cried out in silent despair, knowing what the monster in him craved. There was no controlling it. He couldn’t even command his swollen tongue to lie still—it lolled with every grunt and seemed to fill his mouth with its writhing. It felt liable to choke him.

His fingernails caught on the door’s panels and bent backward. The smears of cat blood on the door looked like something a child would come home from school with and be proud of, or something one of the museums uptown would charge millions for. Michael felt a swallowed laugh, thinking of that door hanging on a wall with his name under it. The world’s first zombie art. His laugh came out a gurgle.

The gory brush strokes, meanwhile, worked their way toward the doorknob. Had he been thinking about how to open the door? He tried not to, tried to conceal this knowledge from his terrible side, but picturing the mechanism brought it to the surface. One monster spoke to another, and crimson claws fell to the fake brass.

Michael couldn’t control it, couldn’t stop himself. All he could do was spill secrets to this dark animal inside him. All he could do—as ever—was betray his mother. Or maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was chance, he thought, as he watched a torturous eternity of banging and fumbling. Maybe it was just bad luck, all out of his control.

The handle twisted, and the door popped open. Michael lurched forward, a passenger, a man beating on a window, begging the conductor to stop, to let him out, to let him just jump out and please run him the fuck over.

His mother was by the window, right where he’d left her two days earlier. The curtains rustled in the breeze. It was cold in the room, and the smell of flesh was intoxicating. It bled into his rush for a fix. It confused him, this lust for eating the living. A warm patch grew around his crotch, and Michael realized his bladder was letting loose. He was an animal. Untrained. Barbaric. Just needs and impulses, cravings, and a mass of muscles that drove him toward sating those cravings. Simple as that. His ability to do as he chose—if ever he’d possessed that skill at all—was gone.

Michael staggered toward the open window and sobbed inwardly for his mother. The new hunger inside him swelled and grew until it drowned out even the urge for a fix. Even that.

His hands were still sticky from the cat, still matted with fur, his stomach lurching around the foulness he’d consumed, the ropes of guts, the sinew and muscle, the dark pouch that had slid down his throat, the purple sacs, all the shit he’d been able to name long enough to pass a goddamned biology test years ago, now just one revolting taste after another.

All this was on his breath and in his mind as Michael fell upon his still and defenseless mother.

Withdrawing in horror, curling up in his former skull, tucking his imaginary knees against his chest, he tried his damnedest not to watch. He tried his damnedest not to taste. But teeth and tongue fell into soft flesh, and his mother didn’t stir, didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there, warm and still alive, the bag hanging from her chair overfull, her body wasting away, even though he knew—with horror he fucking knew—that she was still in there.

She was in there and trapped, suffering with him.

She had known.

She had known when he’d hit her, when he had slapped her face in frustration. Fuck, it was years ago. Years ago, but he’d done it. And all those times he’d shouted at her, shook her shoulders, told her to wake the fuck up… she had known. Every time he had aimed her chair at the window before crawling out to smoke a joint, she had watched. She’d been forced to witness while he shot up on the sill, had been forced to sit there, unblinking, every time he collapsed in her old bed, gloriously high, the room reeking of her piss and shit.

Fuck.

Michael Lane had devoured his mother’s soul in a feast of years, had done it while she sat, paralyzed, made to endure. He’d done that, a morsel at a time, not knowing he was doing it at all.

And now her body faintly rocked, her wide eyes and expressionless face lolling as he consumed the rest of her, as Michael’s mad cravings ripped his mother’s shell apart to get at what little inside still remained.

5 • Gloria

Every day undead brought new discoveries, new horrors to learn and accept. It was how prison must’ve felt for Carl, Gloria decided. She could only imagine. Her husband would never talk about it, would never allow her to visit, and so she spent her lonely nights imagining. Picturing what he was going through. She decided it was a lot like this.

First fears were naïve, fears of never seeing family again, agony over luxuries lost, thinking of the places you couldn’t go, things you couldn’t eat, walls you couldn’t climb. But more basic freedoms soon drown these out. There’s the unnatural horror of not being able to walk in a straight line, of not being able to get out of a tight cell—

Jail cell. Human cell. Gloria felt like an embryo trapped in a womb. She saw what her brain saw, but her thinking was removed from the action. She was strapped to a bunk, inmates all around her, new horrors to learn at every turn.

Prison must be like this, she thought. First, you concern yourself with freedoms lost. But soon, new worries take precedence. She had gone from fearing for her safety to fearing for others’. From the horror of being bitten to the horror of eating others. There was the pain of hunger—but the agony of a feed, of seeing what she did to others, was far worse.

She imagined what Carl had gone through those first days locked away. She had always thought he’d be missing her, couldn’t understand why he didn’t take her calls, allow her to visit, even write back. It was because he’d had other things to fear. Maybe something as simple as taking a shower. Or the daily badgering from some sadistic guard or inmate. Gloria didn’t have to imagine any longer how a person might have to learn to become worse just to fit in—she knew. She knew what it was like to become something worse, all the while wondering if everyone around her was doing the same, being something they weren’t.

This was just like prison, she decided. This was her solitary confinement, her mute holding cell, walls of her own flesh tailored as tightly as humanly possible.

What she wouldn’t give for one good scream, for one glorious wail, one bone-trembling blast from cold and terrified lungs. But even this was a freedom snatched away from her—the most basic of freedoms gone. She couldn’t even complain. Couldn’t shout. The gurgles and groans that dribbled out, leaked from the hole in her smile, were the best that she could manage. It was all any of them could manage. Around her, stumbling through the streets, there was this chorus of stifled screams—a hellish and chilling choir. It was just one more horror to learn about her new life in prison, one more fact to get used to and to accept.

Gloria listened to the sounds she made, and her thoughts strayed from Carl and drifted to her grandfather. She could hear in her own rattling exhalations his dying voice. She could hear his groans and gurgles from that miserable and drawn-out death of his.

It had started small, with him forgetting things. And just as the family learned to cope with his blank stares and his groping for the right word, they had to worry about him wandering off. And as they got used to penning him up like a rooster, he started falling, banging his head on furniture, breaking his wrist. The bleeding in his brain from the fall in the driveway didn’t help. Not enough. As bad as that day was for the family, it was only the beginning. Years later, Gloria would look back on those early struggles and wish he’d struck his head harder. She would wish that he didn’t have to live and see what he would eventually become.

This was easier to admit now that she was beyond death herself, now that she was whatever she had turned into, now that she could wish a similar fate on herself. All these discoveries felt much the same, this coping with a new reality that gradually got worse and worse. It was a lot like prison, she imagined. A lot like hospital beds. A lot like life, in many ways. Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.

Gloria began to appreciate all she once had somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd. It was a week ago, during her first feed, while tasting human flesh. Burying her head in some dead man’s abdomen, she’d had this spark of awareness that all the bullshit fears of her former life were nothing. Worries over money, over Carl, her grandmother, over not having kids of her own, never once thinking how amazing it was to breathe and not feel the cool air flowing through one’s cheek and hammering sensitive teeth, never once going outside to walk in whatever direction she chose, just because she could.

There were things she could now admit. Like wanting her grandfather dead because it affected her routine, because it meant guilt-ridden visits to that nasty hospital. She never gave much thought to him being inside there, terrified, dizzy, all alone. Not until somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd when she’d felt it, too. Not until this sudden awakening that here was her eternity, eating those who themselves were starving, shuffling after gaunt survivors as they sprinted terrified through the streets, often alone, hoping to find sanctuary or company, armed with guns or sticks or nothing at all.

This was her life, roaming the city day and night while these startled fish flapped through shallowing streams, while the living ran out of water, while they swam from the sharks and tumbled into nets.

Gloria remembered her first feed, that older man, and how her thoughts back then had also turned to her grandfather. There she was, killing a man, and wishing she wasn’t. Wishing she could stop. The irony struck her there in the middle of that intersection, the years of keeping her grandfather alive, saving him over and over, and wishing she hadn’t.

The shadows of Manhattan stretched across its wide streets. One of Gloria’s shoes was gone; she didn’t remember when or how. It’d probably happened at night. Here was another prison discovery, another thing to learn about life behind bars. It was the fitful, waking sleep. Never quite asleep, though. Always moving. Always standing or crawling. There was no stop to anything anymore. It was hell eternal. It was hospital beds and reruns and fucking remote controls always out of reach—

Gloria’s stomach churned. The sleep wasn’t the worst part. Oh, not even the worst part. That would be the bowel movements. The same had been true of her grandfather. It had come in stages. Innocently enough, at first. A nice man in blue work pants on his knees in the bathroom installing handles by the toilet. He had spoken of his own grandmother. He told Gloria about these new bathtubs with little doors for getting in and out. Made it safer. Said the seals on them leaked sometimes, but it was worth it. Finding a puddle on the tile was better than finding a loved one with a broken hip, right? He said this with a smile, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, tightening that last screw on the handle and insisting Gloria look into them. Gloria had said she would.

Her grandfather barely had time to test that handle. He moved to bedpans and sponges before she or her sister got the chance to look into those bathtubs with their leaky doors. It happened so fast, his downhill slide. It went on forever and seemed to happen so fast. One moment, a stranger is installing a handle by his toilet. The next moment, the strongest and ablest man she had ever known is found sleeping in his own shit.

So fast.

The old washing machine broke down during those weeks. They cycled through a few sets of bed sheets, trying to keep up. The next step had been bags and tubes, dignity restored with plastic contraptions, family members wrinkling their noses, even those whose diapers he had long ago changed. They couldn’t stomach what he had once endured. Their mighty old grandfather was now mucking up their routines.

Gloria’s stomach churned, returning her to the here and now. The bowel movements were the worst, something to dread. The undead, like the barely living, they had no dignity. They ate their fellow man. They shat like birds on the wing. The guts of others spilled from tattered dresses. Gloria saw it all day ahead of her: the stained pants and the rivers of gore streaming out the cuffs. She could feel it coming in her own body, the horror brewing, cramps in her bowels as though her intestines were tying themselves in knots. And then the evacuation, the indignity, the hotness down her legs, clothes crusted fast to chapped and undead skin, a bare foot slipping in it, no memory of where that shoe went.

It wasn’t a touch they put in the movies, Gloria thought. It wasn’t something you thought about while that nice man was tugging on a silver bar by the toilet, testing the bolts, cleaning up after a job well done, gathering his tools. We can get through this, you think to yourself. The whole family tells themselves this. They can get through it. This is before the washing machine breaks down. This is before your brother breaks down. This is when you think you can handle the pain because you fool yourself into thinking it’ll be brief. This is when they’re locking your husband away for a few short years, putting an innocent man behind bars, and you tell yourself you can handle him being gone for a little while. This is before he succumbs to whatever that hell is like, before he’s innocent no more, when you’re lying in bed at night no longer fearing that he’s cheating on you with some harlot, but that he’s done other, unspeakable, horrible things.

This is before the years stretch out into what feels like a forever. When sick men refuse to die. When innocent men find something to be guilty of. When years jumble together like water beading up on glass.

Gloria thought of the men in her life she had lost while another man passed through her guts. She shambled on, foul and reeking, a single day’s horror stretching out like the wide avenue before her, no end in sight, no more fooling herself, no more thinking: I can take this.

6 • Jennifer Shaw

New York had long been a city of hurry. Even the tourists couldn’t relax when they came on vacation. Jennifer watched them fly from one must-see to another, packing in shows, walking until their feet and backs hurt, always terrified they’d miss one more sight. Few could simply sit in a park and feed the birds. And yet, that was all any of them did anymore. Tourists strewn throughout the parks, feeding the birds until their bones showed. Resting.

The only thing that came in a hurry anymore was the sunsets. The light dwindled to the west without warning, impossibly tall buildings catching the last of the rays, shadows creeping up their gaunt faces and stretched necks until the sky turned the color of blood and finally the deep black of death.

This was when the misery of the shuffle grew impossibly worse. Jennifer found she couldn’t sleep, didn’t even know what that would mean anymore. Her body roamed eternal, her mind trapped. Entire city blocks would go by like sleepy miles on a long drive. She would snap alert and wonder how she got there, have a brief moment of panic like waking to a dead limb, fighting to control some horribly numb part of herself, all to no avail. That surge of adrenaline would soon subside as chemicals both useless and impotent faded into her dead flesh. These responses were only good for rattling her poor nerves. They were old ghosts of her former self, shaking useless and haunting chains.

The air grew cool with the setting sun, and Jennifer remembered those interminable drives across Long Island to see her parents, pushing herself late into the night after a long day of work. With the radio blaring and the windows down, her thoughts would tune out while her body cruised on auto. Coming to miles later, she would glance in the rearview mirror and marvel at turns she’d steered around with absolutely no awareness of them.

The walks at night were like those drives. Every grueling and frigid night since that boy bit her arm was like a dozen of those long drives. From sundown to sunup, the fitful non-sleep of scents and sounds, an occasional feed, the sad company of the groaning and jostling shuffle.

The cold of looming winter made it even easier to drift in and out. The chill worked itself deep into her bones, attacking her skin where it was bare. An early encounter with a handful of survivors had shredded her shirt, leaving it hanging from her belt in bloody tatters. Her thin bra offered little comfort. At night, her nipples grew sore from staying hardened so long. It was as if some parts of her were still alive, but only the parts that could add to her suffering.

When she was most miserable—in the dead of night with her nipples aching—her thoughts turned to the boy who had bitten her. And invariably from there, she thought of the young man she had days later bitten in turn. Like her, the young man she had attacked managed to get away. It felt like the thing to do when it was happening. You’re threatened, hormones and chemicals serve their purpose, instilling you with fear, and so your body wants to yank loose and flee.

But now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was like a dog’s bite, where pulling just made it worse. She’d watched an older man’s eyes go dim during a feed, once. Enough of him had been eaten that he didn’t have time to turn. There wasn’t enough to come back. Jennifer had seen the last of that man’s life leave his body, had felt him go perfectly still, and was beginning to count men like him among the lucky.

There was a desperate need to shiver, but she couldn’t. It was worse than an itch she couldn’t reach, a crippling form of paralysis. The sunset came like a switch flicked, the temperature plummeting, and Jennifer imagined wrapping her arms around her body, tried to will her hands to adjust the remains of her shredded shirt—

Instead, she trudged along, frozen and freezing, unable to move and unable to stop.

There were others among the shuffle who had it even worse. She felt horrible for the half-naked members, for those who looked as though they’d been bitten in their sleep and had somehow startled awake and managed to get away. They walked barefoot through the streets of broken glass and left smears of foul-smelling blood behind them.

Sights like these gradually faded as darkness fell across the city streets, smothering them like a heavy blanket. There hadn’t been power in the tall buildings for over a week, and with the moon in full wane, the nighttime became a mass of shifting dead beneath a glittering sprinkle of stars. Bodies bumped against Jennifer, some of them still sticky from a feed the shuffle had shared earlier that day. What had been revolting the first few nights was now something different. A knock against her neighbor was the only touch she knew. If it wasn’t this, it was the frantic clawing from a woman dying on the sidewalk, eyes wide with fear, shrieks turning to gurgles as Jennifer devoured her from belly to neck. It was a small thing, these bumps in the night. Small, but then it was the only.

The shuffle moved through the pitch black streets by scent and by feel, groans escaping from the most miserable among them. Evidence of survivors became more apparent after dark. The living stirred in the tall buildings with the bob and weave of flashlights, or the orangish flicker of fires that burned where fires should never be. Jennifer remembered her days of surviving. She remembered the black ring of char on carpets and expensive hardwoods as folders full of projects that seemed so dire weeks ago were tossed on as fuel for warmth. There were others up there doing today what weeks ago she had done. How safe did they think they were? How secure? The attack could come at any time for them. She knew. From out of nowhere, BAM! And then the running, the metallic taste of fear and the hollow and cool rasp of desperate lungs, the danger around every corner, new allies split up and separated, friends becoming monsters, sitting in a stall in a men’s restroom, heels tucked up on the seat, growing numb. Shivering, back when she could.

Jennifer sniffed the air and saw the glitter of a fire high up in the heavens. What was life like for the living up there? Had it changed? Were people still subsisting on vending machine scraps? Food running low? Fights breaking out as fear and hunger took hold? She remembered how lonely it had felt. Anyone she had cared about or known had been stripped away from her, gone. She was left surviving with strangers. Getting to know people the next cubicle down. But they hadn’t been as alone as they’d imagined. The hallways and floors of sameness had gradually become infested with small shuffles. Jennifer remembered running. She remembered the boy who bit her. If she had known, she would have just laid down and waited for her own eyes to dim, for her soul to escape.

The lights from a helicopter drifted among the stars, faintly blinking. They had grown fewer in recent days. Jennifer had hoped they would become more abundant. She had imagined them bringing supplies back in the time when she’d known hope. She had dreamed of them coming to haul away the living. Someone had said they’d seen this happen the first day or two. But those were private helicopters or ones with television station numbers on the side. The hunter green and black helicopters had soon replaced these, and they now hovered warily and only at a distance. They did nothing. And gone were the days of hope.

Now, when Jennifer saw a helicopter, she didn’t imagine it bringing supplies. She pictured instead a man inside with a long gun trained across her shuffle. Shoot, she would plead to this young soldier. Do it. It comforted her to imagine the warmth of a red dot on the center of her forehead. She would silently scream and wave imagined limbs while she prayed for the bullet—but it never came. The helicopters simply hovered and watched, and Jennifer imagined they had their reasons. Maybe the members of the shuffle were still considered citizens. Hadn’t there been a controversy once? Some woman with a man’s name who had captivated America? A woman mostly gone, obviously not able to do anything but suffer, and yet that’s all they would allow her to do.

Terry, right? What finally happened to her? Jennifer couldn’t remember. The story had gone on too long for her to care.

Maybe it would be the same for her and the shuffle. Maybe the soldiers had orders to observe, nothing more. Maybe the politicians were meeting in chambers somewhere and dithering. Maybe the rest of America was glued to its televisions, watching in amazement, the elderly covering their mouths in shock, the young calling their friends and making jokes, saying how cool this shit was, could you believe it?

The helicopter lights moved against stars impossibly far away. All the lights were far away and out of reach. Jennifer remembered what a boyfriend had once told her about the stars, how they could be long gone but still shining. They could have burned out a thousand years ago, and their light would just now be reaching Earth. Gone and yet still there. Dead and seen at the same time.

Trash rustled in the darkness and stirred against Jennifer’s ankles. There was no one left to come and sweep it away. It flew out from busted windows when the wind gusted. It gathered against the stoops and in the gutters. There was the smell of a fire somewhere, the distant whisper of conspiring flames, and Jennifer wondered what the rest of the world was doing. Were they succumbing to the same disease as her shuffle? Or did they watch, glued to their televisions once again as her city burned, as it all came crumbling down into streets of staggering ruin? Was this nothing more than another story for gaping jaws and wide eyes? Or would the soldiers in those faraway helicopters and the politicians in their chambers find some way to shut it down, to turn it off, to do anything more for her than change the fucking channel—?

7 • Michael Lane

Michael ate his mother until his stomach burst. He could feel it rupture, could feel the organ stretch to bloating as he ate and kept on eating—and then it popped. His insides seemed to rearrange themselves as hastily swallowed mouthfuls of her flesh sagged down inside his own guts. Small bits of sinew and fat remained stuck between his teeth like roast beef.

One craving had been sated. Michael thought again of the little black kit on top of the fridge, the spoon with its heat-warped patina, a plastic orange lighter low on fluid, a needle that had dipped into his arm a thousand times, depositing its nectar like a honeybee, leaving him there on the sofa, head lolling in rapture, his mother drooling on herself in the next room as she filled a clear bag with frothing yellow piss.

From the neck up, she still looked the same. She was just as dead to him, just as eerily alive. Eyes open, she stared at an empty patch of floor. Her jaw was slack, her lips parted, as if she might finally say something, might finally snap out of it and fucking say something.

Michael felt the strain of her flesh inside his belly. The cat and his mother felt heavy in his abdomen, taut from taking in too much. Greedy. Always greedy.

He moved away from her, numb and disgusted with himself. Her chest stood open. Blood dripped from Michael’s face, and contented grunts came from somewhere. Before him, his mother’s belly was a gory pit, her ribs like pink fingers, like two open hands cradling nothing. Michael imagined crawling inside those glistening palms. He felt himself shrinking down, time zipping backwards, until he could fit inside her belly, could pull the flaps of loose skin over him like a blanket and return to the womb in which he had gestated. Maybe he could be born again, not like those assholes at NA but really born again. He wouldn’t be a monster this time. He’d be someone who takes care of his mother. Someone who takes better care of himself.

A scent from the streets wafted in and filled the decrepit apartment, nicotine-stained curtains flapping in the breeze. Michael turned, his nose following the smell of the living, his guts full of his mother’s guts but already thinking of the next fix. One more bite, like that bee sinking its stinger into his arm, filling him with its nectar.

He stood and staggered toward the window. He craved a cigarette. Michael always craved a smoke after a meal. A clay pot on the sill used to hold flowers when his sister was still coming around, before she’d given up on the two of them. Now it was mounded with crushed butts, filters stained muddy brown with tar, trails of ash everywhere.

Knocking over the pot, he clumsily groped through the open window and fell head-first onto the landing. His shoulder slammed painfully into the steel grating, and his overfull belly sloshed sickeningly. Michael could taste the bile and blood come partway up his throat before sinking back down. Almost reflexively, he righted himself, arms waving for balance, grunts and groans that were not his leaking past bloody lips.

Here was Michael’s sanctuary, high above the streets. Here was where he sat between soaring highs, filling himself with deep inhalations of smoke to choke down the numb lows. Here was where he suffered the broad and empty valleys between his life’s feeble peaks, so few in number.

Years suddenly felt like mere days. The past had piled up without him noticing. Maybe it was from living the same day over and over: cashing government checks, never enough to properly care for her, way more than was needed to improperly care for her, making deals with the leftovers, getting high, drifting off through the roof and into the clouds while his mom sat quietly in the next room.

Years and years that felt like days. It was all the same day. The same craving every moment, the itching urge, the temporary relief, the guilt and self-loathing, burning cigarettes down to the butt on the fire escape, peering through the glass where the flashing cherry lit up his reflection, his mother in the room beyond, locked in her chair, her back turned, forced to stare glassy-eyed at an empty corner of the room rather than out the window she loved, because Michael couldn’t take being seen by her some days, the days when he feared she was still in there, when he suspected the doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.

He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered into it, not watching where it was going.

Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around and around.

Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for more.

8 • Gloria

The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun. They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.

The dogs were newly wild. They were still in the process of returning to their lurking, primal states. When they fought over scraps—tugging at a boot until the leg came away from the hip—Gloria saw herself in them. Many of them jangled with the baubles of ownership. A few dragged ruined leashes through the scrap heap humanity had left behind. They howled in the distance or from within buildings and fenced lots. They growled and snarled at each other, fur matted and hackles up. They scratched and bit at their flanks, their own infestations to deal with. Gloria hated seeing the dogs. Many of the poor creatures looked as though they wouldn’t last another day or two. Others would probably thrive.

This was the end of the world, that’s what she was privy to. She thought of her brother and sister, thought of Carl in prison upstate, and wondered if their world was ending as well. Maybe not. Not yet. Maybe this island was a wound the rest of America would cauterize and survive. Just a nick, perhaps. Either way, here was a glimpse of the inevitable. The world could stagger on a bit, but here was an early view of the looming fate of mankind.

Gloria remembered classes she had taken in college. She had majored in English, but never got far enough to take the classes she wanted to take. It was all the pre-requisites before dropping out, before trying to make it as a dancer on Broadway, eventually resigning herself to waiting tables, partying, marrying the first guy who knocked her up, staying with him even after the pregnancy failed, even after he was locked away. Before all that, there had been a pre-req, a geology class. She had learned a bunch about rocks and volcanoes, couldn’t remember what else. All she came away with was an appreciation of time, for the vast eons that stretched out in both directions.

The dogs and the birds and the rats owned this city. The cockroaches and the gnats and the maggots. Gloria stumbled down the streets toward the hope of another meal and was witness to Armageddon. And it was more peaceful than she imagined. The time stretched out and was filled with life being busy living. Humans would die and rot, would shamble around with their arms outstretched groping for the meaningless, and time would stretch out and engulf them like the long roads she’d seen pictures of out west.

Ahead of her rose a barricade of cars. A bus parked across the curb, not by accident. The smell came from the other side, people alive. A pocket of survivors. An oasis of ripe flesh. The barricade rose like the Rockies, blocking out ideas of time stretching off forever. There was this thing to consider. The band of undead pressed against the overlapped cars, and an alarm rang out, a car alarm. Clever if done on purpose, a ring of cars that would sound an alarm when the dead came calling.

Gloria crowded in with the rest. She bumped against the bus, waved her arms at the bright smells in the air that seemed to tinge everything pink and shiny. There were people on the other side. Living people. She was one of the animals fenced out. Gloria knew this, knew what she was, what side of the fence she lived on. And she saw that the end of the world was not quite yet. Some were still trying, banding together, building a fortress of buses and cars in the middle of a crumbling city. Fires crackled, the smell of cooked pigeons, maybe dog, maybe something else.

Gloria sniffed the air, taking it all in, feeling that vast stretch of time soaring out to either side of her, knowing this was but a slice, and that the ruin would come to all else. The end of things. And her kind would hasten it, whether they wanted to or not.

9 • Jennifer Shaw

Jennifer’s shuffle, which had grown to three dozen since yesterday, made its way across 59th. The promise of living flesh continued to drift north on a breeze steered by glass-walled canyons. It smelled like dozens of survivors, so many that their fear mixed and blended until they couldn’t be told apart. Curiosity as much as hunger seemed to drive the shuffle south. As if any reason were needed for limbs long out of control.

Stepping from the curb, her arms out to steady her diminished sense of balance, Jennifer realized she never came this way anymore, not since she was a kid. The shuffle slid around the cars in the street, startling a flock of birds, and Jennifer felt herself cross an imaginary boundary she didn’t even know existed, a separation of two worlds delimited by city blocks and a strip of pavement.

The world she left behind was the one she knew as an adult, living and working on the Upper East Side. And here, the width of a paved river away, Sutton Place, the world of her youth. From one island to another with a few steps. She never came this way anymore.

There was a park on the corner she recognized, a park she knew well. There was a puppy she and her sister had begged for. When the two of them both wanted a thing that badly, they were rarely refused, even when their parents knew better. Likewise, when the two of them disagreed, a stalemate of rare violence formed. She and her sister got the puppy because their wishes overlapped. It remained nameless, referred to simply as “Puppy,” because they could not agree on anything more proper.

Jennifer couldn’t remember the name she had lobbied for, though it seemed a matter of life and death at the time. All she remembered was how fast it grew. Until it was bigger than they were. Until its name made less and less sense. There, in that park, she and her sister had strained against the leash while Puppy dragged them from tree to tree, chasing squirrels. The allure wore off quickly, as Puppy outgrew its cuteness. She and her sister had realized how much work was involved, that their parents were right, and gradually the dog became their mother’s. Which meant their mother didn’t have to be alone when she left the rest of them behind.

The view of her childhood park was lost as Jennifer crowded against the person in front of her. It was the same obese man she’d fallen behind a block earlier. She tried not to look. The man’s ear and a flap of his cheek hung down from where he’d been attacked. When he turned and sniffed the air with his rotting stump of a nose, she was forced to see his grisly molars, his tobacco-stained teeth, right through his open cheek. Flies had taken up residence in his wound and flew about lazily in the cool air, buzzing his head like some great nest, some fleshy hive. Jennifer imagined they would lay eggs in his flesh. The maggots would come soon for him—she’d seen them writhe on others. She wondered how long before she felt them inside her as well.

Ahead of the man was the woman with no eyes in the bright purple dress. She had been a part of the shuffle for five days. Or was it six? Jennifer had lost count. She was envious of this woman. She could see her walking with both arms out, hands tangled up in the clothes and hair of others, her face a blood-caked mess. While she shuffled along blindly in her purple dress, Jennifer longed to switch places. She imagined the games she could play if the world were black. The sounds of car alarms and the crackling of fires might pierce her imaginary travels, but she could learn to ignore the lesser noises, the hiss of boots sliding across asphalt, the grunts and groans of souls disconnected from their bodies, the screams of the terrified living, the wet ripping sounds and crunching bones of a shuffle feeding—

In perfect blackness, in eyeless darkness, she could make the rest disappear. She knew that she could. There were games her father didn’t know about, games she and her sister played under the covers while arguments leaked through walls. But being forced to see what her body saw, to endure the flow of the mob, made it impossible to hide from what she’d become. Even when she managed to dream herself away for a few moments, something awful would rip her back into the here and now with hideous force.

Down the block, her old school loomed into blurry view: P.S. 312. A massive brick structure from the days when things were built with someone else’s future in mind. Jennifer tried to focus on the school, but she didn’t even have control of what she saw. Not always. The constant hunger meant her vision was forever fixed on potential meat. It left her eyes constricting and warping to bring the wounds of others into view. While she tried to concentrate on the edges of her vision, a director with some sick mind roamed the hurts of the world. And so they passed her old school, which remained a blur, much like her childhood.

A neighborhood with old memories, a few of them good. Why didn’t she ever walk this way anymore? What was it about this city, with its endless possibilities, that elicited such limited routines? Was it the fear of the faceless hordes? Was it the allure of the known and the familiar? Or was it mere habit?

Jennifer suspected it was none of these things. She thought she knew why she stuck to a track like a subway train, why her selection of favorite restaurants numbered in the handful, why she shopped and visited the same spots over and over, even the same bench in the same park, so consistently that she knew how and when the shade fell across it, thought she recognized the squirrels, even.

To her, the routine was an inoculation against the daily and constant influx of the lost and bewildered, the baggage-draggers, the upward-gazers, the camera-strangled gawkers. It was this plague, this disease, that her life on rails was meant to protect against. It was the abject terror of feeling like—of becoming—a tourist.

A friend of Jennifer’s confessed this once, that within a month of moving to the city, she had desperately wanted to be recognized as a local, as someone who now lived there. And she harbored jealousy toward Jennifer for being born in the city, which Jennifer found strange. This friend had divulged another secret: that when tourists asked her directions, even if she didn’t know the answer, she just made something up. She would only feel bad after they walked away, as they followed her directions and muttered how nice everyone in New York was. It was easier for her to lead nice people astray than to admit she didn’t know her way around, that she was in many ways a visitor as well.

It was hard to judge her friend. Jennifer felt the same desire to both blend in and be recognized, to never glance up at the remarkable buildings for fear of being spotted. She went to the same handful of restaurants and bars where she could bump into people she knew, wave exaggeratedly to a bartender or patron, sprawl out in booths with her laptop and newspaper, and prove that she belonged.

A routine. That’s what she had fallen into. Decades on rails. She might hear of a new joint opening up with the best such-and-such, but it was in a part of town she never went to. Not a bad part, just a different part. Not her part.

A bodega on the corner came into focus. Her hungry eyes spotted movement inside. Survivors. Her potential food scrounging for their potential food.

The shuffle turned that way, holes in faces where noses used to be sniffing at the air, and Jennifer remembered the store. It had been there as long as she’d been alive. She’d just forgotten about it. She never came this way anymore.

And so she shuffled along, moving toward another feed, a fat man’s face hanging open in front of her near enough to worry the flap of flesh might touch her nose, close enough to smell the awful breath leaking out of his clenched but gaping jaw. There was the buzz from one of the flies circling his head, the tickle of it crawling in her ear, another one at the corner of her mouth, and she was unable to swat them away or dig her finger after them.

Laying eggs, Jennifer thought, horrified. Soon, their brood would wiggle within her. They would hatch and grow and feed on her flesh. They would writhe within her, like the man with the hinged cheek and flopping ear.

The itch in Jennifer’s ear grew to a great pressure, a pounding agony, an amazing torture to be stomped by such tiny feet. Her body groaned, her voice a wheezing whisper, as the buzzing grew and the flies burrowed themselves deeper.

She screamed in her head for it to stop and prayed for death, but Jennifer shuffled silently onward, no control over where she went, the same as she ever was.

10 • Michael Lane

Michael tumbled down the fire escape. His legs moved on their own, numbly, like the unfeeling stagger of a good high. He was three stories above the pavement when his feet tangled and he crashed into the railing. Bending at the waist, his head flopped forward, and there was a moment of panic and a last desperate attempt to control his limbs before he tumbled over, his heels flying up above his head.

The fall lasted a brief forever. There was the sensation of dropping, wind on his face, body contorting out of control, windows flashing by, and then, finally, interminably, the thud of impact.

The landing was catastrophic. He couldn’t twist to soften the blow or pull his feet beneath himself. Both knees struck first, and then his face. Michael felt a tug on his thigh, a deep wound. His body writhed out of control, trying to right itself. Arms flailed like a petulant child told it couldn’t have some cherished thing. He could feel powdered bone grind and grit inside his knees as he rolled over.

Putting weight on one leg caused it to buckle, bone hinging where it shouldn’t. Michael tried to lie still, but his body made another attempt, less weight this time, balancing on a flopping leg, cracked bone spearing his flesh, his face on fire from the pavement, lips stinging, the taste of his own blood mixing with that of his mother’s.

Both knees were crushed. One leg was shattered, his thighbone bending like a second knee, but the pain didn’t do shit. Muscles still worked. Tendons were connected to bones, even if bones weren’t connected to each other. With spasming jerks, his body worked it out, throwing a leg forward like one of those hinged prosthetics, balancing on a clean break, throwing another leg forward on a crushed knee, balancing, arms out, groans of agony leaking through split lips, the smell in the air of living flesh driving his body forward.

Michael watched through the lens of his soul, a victim of every lanced nerve, the agony horrific. Needles shot through his legs and face. Something was wrong with his abdomen, his stomach cramping and full. At the end of the alley, he saw shapes—people—moving through the parked cars spread across the wide avenue beyond. Moving gracelessly, these other people threw their bodies forward, arms out, shoulders stooped, many of them injured as well, a macabre dance of wounded limbs, a strut of shattered bone.

The pain. It meant nothing. It wasn’t a signal to lie still, to stop. It just was. A thing. Something to endure. No purpose, except…

Michael noticed something through the burn.

As his body was consumed with this fiery hell and his mother sagged in his guts, he realized the old craving was gone. The withdrawals. They were over. Passed by. Cauterized. Melted through. Ground to ash.

The only pain left was the physical. Nails were driven through him with each hammering lurch. And his other hurts, the ones he always thought debilitating, the ones that kept him on the sofa for days, they cowered in some hidden recess, terrified of this new, sudden, and real misery that had wrapped itself around him, squeezing him so tightly that his bones crunched into smaller and smaller pieces, bits of glass slicing him from the inside, needles, the sting of angry nectarless bees.

Out of the alley, Michael emerged broken, dizzy, and aware. He was dead in some ways and alive in others. The sun was high, the rays warming a city that still held the chill from a clear fall evening. Monsters lurched everywhere, following a scent to the next feed, dragging their wounds along with them, oblivious, enduring, or both.

Hesitating a moment, his balance unsure, Michael felt a twinge of control, a sliver of time when desire and deed overlapped, when he found his body doing what he perfectly wished. Just a moment, like a broken clock that twice a day tells the proper time, and then Michael Lane threw a leg ahead of himself. He limped forward, despite his wishes. He merged, blending, joining the others.

11 • Gloria

There were good moments. Somehow, there were moments less miserable than others. The group Gloria had fallen in with might splinter in the swirling breeze, and a small troop would find itself rambling through a park beneath the twittering birds, the air midday warm and the taste of human flesh mostly gone from her mouth.

Even there, in the end of times, when God had taken the righteous from the earth and had left her behind, there were moments less miserable than others.

Central Park brought one such respite. It stood like an oasis, a perfectly rectangular eruption of nature in the center of that mad island with its spikes and spines of concrete and steel. The greenery beckoned. It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors, this weak smell of fear among the earthy tang of mulch and the mint and spice of untamed plants.

Gloria’s small group of bloodstained stragglers splintered among the benches and bushes. Deeper within, a large rock wall confounded a few, the trees dividing the pack like fingers running through tangled hair. The city disappeared, just as the park’s designers must’ve intended. Gloria thought of all those who came here to escape the bustle and noise. Now they came to be surrounded by things alive, to take leave of all the death in the streets, perhaps to find wild mushrooms, trap wildlife, scrounge for food.

Through the mulch and tall weeds, through the last grasses of fall, Gloria trudged deeper. She came to one of the park’s many bodies of water, a pond scattered with unmanned boats steered only by the breeze. Gloria watched, mesmerized, while one of the monsters ahead of her steered into the water. The young man sank to his knees, his arms flailing, before tipping forward. He made a splash, writhed for a moment, then disappeared. A duck coasted on the swell he made, its tail twitching in brief annoyance.

Gloria never stopped moving. She continued along the pond’s edge, wondering what would happen to that man. Would he remain there beneath the water, the shadows of ducks blotting the sun? For how long? Forever? Or would he float to the surface? Or would his flailing arms learn to swim?

The ripples he’d made faded as Gloria’s feet carried her along the rocky shoreline. Trees denuded of most of their leaves reflected in the mirrored surface, tall buildings rising up beyond, one of the buildings on fire and belching dark smoke, the nostrils of a fierce beast. Gloria imagined the man walking along the bottom of the lake, no bubbles leaking out, the depths down there freezing and dark as ink.

Would he die? Was that still possible? Was it possible for her?

She felt afraid for her feet. Concentrating on the breeze, on the smells, Gloria felt fear anew. If the scents wavered, she could be the one splashing in, the one throwing up concentric swells. The thought of the dark and deep, the bitingly cold, it was worse than her fear of a feed. But there was also something like hope there on that shoreline. Maybe there was an end, a completion to what God had begun.

The breeze stirred. It swam like a nearly visible serpent through the trees. Gloria spotted a woman walking through the woods, dragging her leg. The dead were everywhere, fanning out, sniffing and listening, and Gloria prayed:

Dear God, please forgive me. Whatever I’ve done, please forgive me. Take me, God, with the others. Please don’t leave me here.

She tried to think of some forgotten offense, some reason to have been left behind. God knew everything about her. What could she add? How could she feel more sorry?

Please don’t leave me here, Lord.

Her shoes crunched through the gravel by the edge of the pond. She imagined herself veering to the side and walking out across the waters, ripples spreading out from her footsteps, and then her soul rising up through the clouds as a grand mistake was corrected. There would be apologies and explanations. Maybe she would discover that this was her penance. She thought of her mother’s rosary beads, the quiet prayer she was always whispering, and maybe Gloria had been damned by her father’s church, by being raised a Protestant. Maybe it was that Carl’s sins in prison were great enough to damn them both.

She shook such thoughts from her head. How many extra days would she suffer in her damnable state for thinking such things? And how many more days for feeling this fear rather than true guilt? And more days heaped on for worrying about that? And that? And so on and forever—

A smell distracted her. It came from the woods, the drift of meat. Gloria’s feet chose to put distance between the rest of her and the water’s edge. She bumped into a low wrought-iron fence once, twice, before finding the gap that led into the deeper woods. There, through the crunching leaves and scattering of squirrels, a group of her kind had formed, a cluster of the damned. They milled about the base of a tree, arms in the air, rotting noses lifted high.

Gloria looked. She saw the dangling shoes. And then the swinging legs. There was a scabbed knee with a dried trickle of delicious red running down a shin. There were arms wrapped around a mother, who was wedged between the great divide of the tree’s largest boughs, fifteen or more feet off the ground. And over the grunts and struggles of the tottering dead rained the whispers of a parent who did not seem to know that those below could still hear, still understand:

“Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

Lies, Gloria thought, joining the others. She stared heavenward. The woman smoothed the young girl’s hair, consoling her. She looked ten or eleven, but starvation took years as well as pounds. The mother peered down, cheeks gaunt, and watched the new arrivals. Gloria felt horrible for these two. Gloria was starving.

The child sobbed. Her feet kicked out of agitation. Or maybe those frail legs had grown so used to running the past weeks that they couldn’t stop moving. While they wheeled the air, Gloria circled the tree, her eyes locked on that limb, the smell of the living intoxicatingly near and impossibly far. Here was the manna of her desire, craving it even as she feared it, causing her to wonder, with the hellishness of all that she’d seen and the ungodly predicament of mother and child, not how the two of them had gotten up on that limb and what would become of them, but what Gloria had done to deserve to be there, to be left wandering in circles on that lowly, cursed, and unholy ground.

12 • Michael Lane

Michael balanced on a flopping leg, a limb like a prosthetic, kicking his unfeeling foot forward as split bone bore down on split bone. He moved slowly in this teetering fashion toward the end of the garbage strewn alley behind his apartment building. A handful of undead just like him shuffled past. There was a smell of the living, the smell of meat, new smells instantly understood. Unless these odors had always been there, and now his locked-in state made him newly sensitive to them. Or perhaps not sensitive to them—maybe he had simply become dead to everything else.

Wavering in the street on his busted legs, the air swirling around him, Michael saw that all of New York now resembled his apartment. There was trash everywhere. Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing with them before losing interest, before becoming distracted. Several were wrecked, hoods bent, glass everywhere. It was close to noon, and the buildings stood tall without shadow. The pavement held that mild warmness in the middle of a fall day, that brief respite before the chill set back in with the night.

How long since Michael had been bitten? How long since he’d used? It felt like a week ago that there’d been a banging on the door. It had to be the Chinese food, about two goddamn hours too late. Or maybe the bitch down the hall with the rock she owed him.

It’d been neither. A grotesque monster, some kind of a prank, but a bite on his wrist anyway.

Michael could still hear the slammed door, the slobbering noises and the bangs on the walls.

That thing could smell him. It was after him the way he’d gone after the cat, the way he’d gone after his 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 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.

A job she hated, turning over rooms, making bed after bed, picking up scattered towels and restocking stolen toiletries. Every day, tiptoeing through wrecks that looked more like robberies than a night’s stay, dealing with creepy men who put signs out for service, but were still in there, sometimes a towel around their waists, pretending to be startled, sometimes wearing nothing at all. Men sent by the devil to harass her, tell her she was pretty when she knew better, offer her money for unspeakable things.

A job she hated, but change was the other way. Applications and learning something new were the icy deep.

The city was a funnel. Gloria looked around her, something she secretly did on the subway. All different colors, different backgrounds, all the accents. Ants drawn to honey, but they can’t get away from the city. They land with their parents or bring their own children, get that first job, learn to drive a cab or flip a room, and never leave.

This was her sin, Gloria thought. God had given her command of her feet and had set her on the shore of life, and she had chosen to live the least. She had always chosen to avoid her fears, had shrunk from the daunting and the risky. And what had her Savior done? Had he walked away from the challenge, or had he strolled across the water knowing he would not sink?

Gloria let out a frustrated gurgle, a prayer to Saint Anthony, the liberator of prisoners:

Tear down my prison walls. Break the chains that hold me captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me. Amen.

She prayed to Saint Leonard, the patron Saint of captives, slaves, and all those held against their will:

Pray for those like me in prison, St. Leonard. For those forgotten in prison, pray for them. Amen.

Gloria prayed for herself, for her own plights. She prayed for someone to grant her the courage. She prayed for deliverance, for rescue, for something to break her free of the cycle in which she’d long been trapped. She prayed that she could do it all over again, that she might head west and live in a small town, find a different job, a good man, try once more to start a family, to have a child or two or four. She prayed and prayed the same prayers, her words running out, forming small loops, memorized verse, begging and begging for release as she circled that tree, bumping into so many others, but giving little thought to them at all.

15 • Michael Lane

Michael’s balancing act came to an end, his good leg chewed away by the shotgun blast. He tipped forward, stumbling on the flopping lower half of his shin, which bent and twisted until his foot was pointing backward. His face struck the pavement, his discombobulated arms fluttering uselessly by his side, too uncoordinated to break his fall.

He waited for death. He waited for unconsciousness. His sister was there, bending down, reaching out a hand to him—but it was the fever of sobriety. It was a construct of the pain.

Screams came out as gurgles, bloody drool dripping onto the pavement, a flashback to a thousand nights spent hugging a toilet, the taste of bile in one’s mouth, the smell of urine, realizing he’d wetted himself in his stupor.

A new low. This was always his thought, every weekend in college getting smashed and regretting it, every Monday morning hung over in class, promising he’d never do it again. By Thursday, such promises were forgotten. By Saturday, he hated himself once more.

Michael’s limbs stirred. He screamed internally as hot steel was pressed to a dozen unnatural joints in his legs. His dumb physical self was trying to stand. His unthinking body was telling the rest of him, a friend who knew better, that he was good enough to walk.

Propped up on his arms, he felt the ravenous puppeteer that had a hold of his will command his legs forward, foot twisting unnaturally, the sensation of his skin being tugged as it was the only thing holding him together.

Several times, his body tried to get his mangled feet beneath him. Each time was a new height of sensation, bones like shattered glass grinding together, the crunch and pop of thin shards giving way, a dull roar reaching his ears that he vaguely recognized as his own voice. He was unable, even, to mercifully pass out.

Eventually, his drunken body learned what the brain could not tell it: walking was out. It would never happen again.

Michael lay still a moment, appreciating the end of the struggle, the throbs and electricity soaring and coursing through his body. This could be the end. Please, let this be the end. There would be no more regrets. No chance at anything regrettable. Come for me, darkness! he screamed in his mind. And he could hear it. He could hear that reading voice that used to pop in his mind when he was forced to stare at books, that ability for the talking side of his brain to send signals over to the hearing side.

Fucking die! he yelled to himself. He yelled it so loudly that he could hear it in his mouth, in the depths of his throat, like a swallowed whisper.

He thought of his sister. His mother, whom he carried inside of him. He was losing it, but this time to clarity. He laughed madly and silently at the thought of his mother carrying him inside her belly, and now she was inside his, a mystical torus, a fucking Möbius strip of mother and son in each other’s guts.

What if he’d never die?

There was a scraping sound nearby. Michael’s sideways view of the world was momentarily full of dragging feet, and then a yellow cab, pavement, and a building where survivors must be laughing and raiding, scrambling for food, popping another shell into a shotgun.

Passing minutes. Dragging feet. The undead surrounded him, and then moved on. They were summoned perhaps by the blast that took his good leg or by the smell of the living, a smell that lingered somewhere beyond the persistent pain—

More scraping. The world lurched forward. Michael spilled out of his agony-filled haze and realized he was moving. Something was dragging him along.

And then he felt it. His arms reaching out, fingernails finding the rough nicks in the city streets, fingernails bending backward and breaking as he hauled himself forward, fingernails dragging him along after the others.

No.

Fuck no, Michael screamed.

Oh, fucking no dear God please fucking kill me now, he yelled.

And nobody heard him. All that remained was the scraping noise, hands clawing at the pavement, a body learning to adjust itself to this new and crippling low as it figured out how to move, how to go out and seek ever new and deeper valleys in which to crawl.

16 • Gloria

Morning came, and birdsong filled the air around all the trees but one. Unlike the squirrels, which would burrow through the leaves by undead feet, the birds chirped warily and from a distance. When they did swoop in, it was only briefly to pick maggots from a cheek or eye socket. They would perch on a shoulder and pluck a morsel or scrap of rotten flesh, maybe a torn bit of fabric for their nest, and then flap away to a far branch. While they preened and ate and squawked at the world, another leaf would lose its precarious grip and drift down around Gloria and the others.

It had been an especially cold night for all of them. Frost lay in patches, the browning leaves looking as if dusted in sugar, the uncut grass and tall weeds adorned with frozen crystals. Gloria wasn’t sure how the mother and child in the tree had survived the bitter cold, but they were already moving about on the broad limb. The mom directed her child into a patch of sunlight that managed to lance through the distant buildings and silent trees to warm a spot of air. Their whispers leaked through chattering teeth.

Gloria had spent much of the night drifting in and out. She remembered coming to and hearing the sobs, which she assumed at first to be from the child, but it was the mother crying. She also saw the pack had grown in number. The tree was one of those crab pots the poor animals could crawl into but never get out of. Gloria and the rest would be there until the couple starved and rotted, until the appetite was gone, the scent dissipating.

It was bitingly cold, and the evidence formed in puffs of false breath, the undead groaning in hungry frustration, the woman and young girl above adding their own shivering clouds to the air.

Gloria circled beneath them. She watched as the mother seemed to succumb to the stress and cold, as she lost her mind. It took a moment to realize what she was doing, that she was stripping herself bare in the morning chill. With her chin lifted toward the promise of a meal, Gloria followed, curious and confused, as the woman tore her thin shirt into strips and began twisting them together. She was talking to her daughter as she worked, explaining something, some kind of plan.

Whispers of a plan made Gloria feel torn. There was the thrill of maybe witnessing an escape, perhaps a dash down the creaking and frost-slick limbs, a daring swing or jump to a neighboring tree. Some plan that relied on racing naked ahead of the stumbling pack, running through the woods still dappled in darkness, hoping to avoid the promise of a roaming bite.

Gloria felt the allure of such daring and guile. She also dreaded the loss of a meal, no end to her infernal hunger, and all those days wasted following their scents.

Strips of clothing were tied together. A belt. Torn and threadbare jeans, much too large. The mother worked in her underwear fifteen feet above Gloria’s head. It was the daughter’s turn to cry. While she sobbed, her mother looped the knotted fabric around the limb on which they crouched. They were both sobbing. The mother stroked the girl’s hair, caressed her cheek. Gloria could see them shivering. Maybe she imagined the blue cast to the woman’s naked skin. Perhaps it was real. How they survived the night, she couldn’t understand. With her clothes off, Gloria felt she could see every bone in her emaciated body.

“Shhh,” she said, consoling her child. “It’s okay.”

She arranged the improvised rope around her daughter’s neck, adjusting it as if getting her ready for school. The girl’s thin arms held her mother’s wrists. Bits of bark rained down from their movement on the limb.

“I love you,” the mother said. The words were interspersed with sobs.

And before Gloria could process what was happening, before she could fully wake, there was a final kiss on the forehead, a scrambling of thin arms as the child realized what plans her mother had for their escape, and then a painful shove out into the open air, the crunch of rope on bark, the yank and pop of a young neck, and then bare feet swinging in the frosty air, the last of the leaves from that great bough leaping to their deaths, shaken off by this disturbance in the tree.

Gloria circled beneath the girl, horrified. A police officer waved at the air, the flesh hanging just out of reach, the child slowly spinning as the twisted rope settled.

There were curses above, the mad screech of a woman at the end of a more figurative rope, the yell of anger at the world that Gloria secretly longed to erupt with, that sort of anger with a silent, invisible, and cruel God that bubbles up with every injustice, every heartbreaking loss, every turn of bad luck. Screams instead of whispered prayer. A woman’s throat working and yelling all that needed saying.

Gloria’s gaze was lifted to the heavens, to this brave mother, and she saw that the curses and screeches were not directed at any God, but rather at the demons below, the hellspawn she had joined.

More leaves fluttered from their weakening stems as the mother pushed off. And with a great leap, she threw herself out of her misery, not enough rope for the both of them, and Gloria, unable to resist, horrified, dove in with the others and claimed her share. And as she fell on the brave soul, something snapped. Some sinew or thread in her brain, whatever it was that anchored her to sanity, she felt it snap and knew, with righteous surety, that God made no mistakes. He had left her there for her sins, for not being perfect enough. This was her damnation, her eternal reward.

She fought her way through the feeding pack and lowered her face toward the mother’s screams. Her first bite was of gaunt and trembling cheek, flesh tearing away. She chewed the mouth of this fallen woman, the rubbery lips, hungry for the mind inside. Hungry for it, even as she lost her own. Even though she was, as ever, unaware that anyone resided there. Unaware that anyone other than her suffered at all.

17 • Jennifer Shaw

It was early morning when the shuffle entered the killing zone. Jennifer had heard the echoing cracks the day before, had wondered what was going on. It sounded like sticks of dynamite the way the noise reverberated off the high walls of glass and steel.

They crossed 23rd heading up Sixth Avenue, leaving the heart of the Village where dormitories lay scattered amid office buildings. There had been a feeding the night before, a bizarre scene where a man, obviously half-starved, had burst out of a ruined pizza shop and had thrown himself into the shuffle, screaming and senseless. It was as though he had given up and couldn’t stand the waiting. A depressing thought, but Jennifer’s father had taught her how to create stories to give a positive spin to any bit of news. In her mind, the man’s mad act had been a noble sacrifice, a distraction while his family fled through the back of the parlor. She pictured them dancing through the streets toward a silent helicopter, a soldier’s gloved hand extended, the wind of the rotors kicking up the yellow dress of the man’s young daughter, a stuffed animal dragging from her tiny, clenched, and terrified fist.

More games, these little fictions. Stories of what her mother was doing now. Always the fantasy of scanning faces on the walk to work, looking up and down the subway car, seeing her there reading a book or clutching an umbrella, or maybe watching her in turn, smiling.

Little fictions. That’s what her father called them. Not lies, just stories to twist the brain into a new shape, to allow the light to spill in with a different color, to throw rainbows instead of shadows. If only he had warned Jennifer how exhausting fictions could be. They were as addicting as they were difficult to keep straight. And when you spent your entire day looking forward to sleep, to those broad moments before you drifted off when you could exist anywhere, a lottery winner, the owner of an island, the last person on earth, the center of a loving family, it didn’t make reality more bearable. It made it dull and uninteresting. A slog. A mindless shuffle.

These little fictions, games her father used to play. Jennifer thought of her sister, wondered what had happened to her. Even though her fingers were growing numb with rot, maggots writhing beneath the wound in her wrist, she still imagined she could feel her sister’s hand, could hear her voice, could skip through the past and away from the cruel world.

Crossing 23rd, the head of a woman further up the shuffle exploded. They were ranging back over the same city blocks they had already crossed before, passing through silent intersections with dead stoplights that swayed in the breeze, and the head of a woman limping not far ahead of Jennifer simply erupted in a shower of dull gray mist.

What life remained in the woman evaporated. Her body sagged sideways to the ground, the step she had been taking unfinished, just the wobble of a planted knee, a jerk of her arms, what little was left of her head lifted toward the clouds, and then the rest of the pack was shuffling around her, the smell of her dead meat doing nothing for their hunger.

The crack of the rifle came much later, after the woman lay supine in the street. It brought to mind days Jennifer had spent in Central Park, lying in the warm grass, men with unathletic bellies hanging over their belts as they played ball on the dirt diamonds. In the distance, their bats smacked the softballs over feeble leapers with open gloves, the sound coming well after the sight.

The next shot was off-center. It sliced away a woman’s crown, a half-cap of hair and skull, a gray mass beneath. The woman’s soul left this grateful opening and soared up as her body crashed down. There was a crack in the air that echoed between the buildings, a stick of dynamite. Jennifer felt a mix of emotions as the shuffle trundled along, sniffing the air. There was fear, fear of true death, of parting with her thoughts forever. She was trapped in that rotting body, yes, and dead in so many ways—but still aware. She still had her games, her little fictions. Could these suddenly be taken from her as well? Would she want them to be?

It was like being a prisoner, someone with a life sentence with no chance of parole being told by a nurse that she might have but moments to live. How was she to feel about this? Panic? A sense of looming escape? Jennifer’s mind whirled with the sudden implications of death popping up among the already dead. Her torment took a new shape. If she had moments left to live, were there any thoughts she would want to have before she went? Any words to the gods she didn’t believe in? Any prayers to those she would never see again? The interminable minutes of her infinite days now felt like precious moments, little jewels. The woman directly in front of her took the next bullet in her shoulder and spun around, arms rising from the centrifugal pull as she twirled. Crack-pow! None in the shuffle flinched. Maybe they were also silently praying for and dreading the next one.

This was what a death sentence felt like, Jennifer realized. She was walking down a prison aisle, cages on both sides of her, like Central Park Zoo. She was walking to her death, unable to control her legs, terrified and resigned. This was what it felt like.

The woman who had been hit and spun around had a new jagged wound to live with. She straightened herself and trudged forward with the rest. Another hit, another excellent shot, Jennifer both spared and cursed. Where was this person with the gun? Why shoot them from a distance? And how did they choose? Would she be next?

Her feet dodged around one of the victims of their own accord. All women, Jennifer realized. Four in a row.

The shooter knew. He had to. Or was it a she? A sympathizing woman or some kind of gentleman. Jennifer became convinced of this as an elderly woman in a nightgown with a horrible neck wound was the next to go. There was an eruption of blood, a warm mist on Jennifer’s cheek, and then the woman’s body sagged straight to the pavement like a fuse had been removed.

Someone was sparing them this torture. They had limited ammunition. Couldn’t save them all. Someone knew. Not those army pricks who flew by with their hazard suits on, watching, watching. They probably had orders. Don’t kill civilians. As if that’s what any of them still were.

But this angel with her long barrel of release, with gifts of lead as valuable as gold, these bullets that could transmute the half-dead into the full, she had watch over them.

Jennifer’s fear vanished. It was the intentions that warped her mind, twisting shadows into bright ribbons of color. The shooter was up there crying, wiping tears from her eyes, using a skill her father had blessed her with on a farm out west, releasing poor creatures from the half-grip of death every time she pulled the trigger—a nice little fiction.

Another soul was released, a cloud of brains raining down, splattering the others, the delayed echo of a bang, the crack of prison walls crumbling, the resounding boom of freedom.

Sounds. Sounds that came late. Sounds Jennifer Shaw never heard for herself as they came, singing through that mad, mad air, to release her.