I, Zombie

18 • Dennis Newland

Dennis sat in a pile of cereal boxes while the others stacked food in shopping carts. Cans rattled to the ground one aisle over. In front of him, little sacks of organic coffee rustled on the shelf as his girlfriend Lisa dug through something on the other side. Dennis looked down at his arm, pulled his hand away from the sleeve of his denim jacket. It was dark and sticky with blood. He should tell somebody. He should tell somebody. He should have told them back when he still could.

A cart squeaked past, little wheels spinning, a crushed box of Cheerios wedged under the front bar. Matt stopped and grabbed a few boxes, threw them on his pile of canned goods. “You okay, dude?”

Dennis jerked his head up and down. He could still do that. Maybe he could still speak if he really had to. He hoped he didn’t have to. His jaws felt locked together. Stiff.

“That shit was close back there. I thought we were goners for sure this time.”

More jerking of his head up and down. Matt stooped and grabbed a box of Captain Crunch. “I like this stuff. Good without milk.” He glanced over at Dennis. “You think we’ll ever taste fresh milk again? Or just that Parmalat crap for however long we’ve got left?”

Dennis tried to shrug. He couldn’t tell if he succeeded.

“Ah, fuckit.” Matt threw the box in the cart, adjusted the strap he’d rigged to his shotgun, and pushed his spoils down the aisle. “Better get your head together and grab some shit,” he called over his shoulder. “You ain’t eating nothin’ of mine!”

Dennis was left alone with his sticky sleeve. A bag of coffee tumbled off the shelf across from him and landed with a sad thud on the ground, the contents spilling out in a brown avalanche. Lisa was still digging through something on the other side. He could hear her cussing about the batteries in another iPod running dry. They were going through them like packs of gum. Stupid.

He looked down at his arm.

So fucking stupid.

It was getting more and more difficult to move. He had assumed it would be like a light switch when it came, like the Incredible Hulk turning green and ripping his shirt off, some kind of instant morphing into his own permanent Mr. Hyde. But it had started with a slow paralysis, a gradual fatigue that turned into frozen limbs. He could move his wounded arm if he wanted to—he was pretty sure he could lift it up over his head if he really wanted to—but he couldn’t make himself want to. Staring down at it, Dennis tried to give his own body a weak command. It felt locked. Pinned. He tried harder. Some part of him was still there, was telling him that if he produced a sudden burst of energy, if he just tried hard enough, it would be like breaking out of some kind of packed sand.

That’s what this was. It was the time his older brothers had buried him in the sand at Virginia Beach. Everything had been funny until he wasn’t sure if he could get out or not. They would’ve made fun of him if he had panicked and tried, but he would die if he couldn’t be sure. So Dennis would twitch and wiggle just enough to crack the sand, enough to see if he could still move, and his brothers would laugh and pack it back down, slapping the ground with the flats of their shovels, making the cool sand tight against his chest.

When the sand had been up to his neck and Dennis had realized he couldn’t move at all, he’d gotten scared. He had begged them, tears running down his face, salt in his mouth, to please dig him out. And they had laughed. Laughed until his screaming had summoned their mother from the water and their scowls had told Dennis that he would never live this down.

For the second time in his life, Dennis couldn’t move. He couldn’t lift his hand. Couldn’t even twitch his little finger.

He sat there among the cereal boxes, terrified. This time he wouldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry. He wasn’t able.

But then his head moved. It moved of its own accord. Someone else was doing it, pulling strings. And the coffee, the open bag of spilled coffee sitting across from him—Dennis couldn’t smell it anymore.

He couldn’t smell the coffee. But he could smell Lisa.

19 • Chiang Xian

There was meat hanging in the window. Chickens strung up by their necks, pigs wrapped in twine with their little hooves in prayer, fish frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground like silver blossoms. The meat was rotten. The air in the tiny shop was heavy with the stench of it after being locked tight for days and days. Clouds of flies gathered and maggots squirmed. The meat had long since ceased to be appetizing.

Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate chairs of carved wood. The shop owners had used those chairs to hang their daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices fluctuated daily. Chiang Xhen now roamed that shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables, her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts drifting toward her parents.

The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese girl. Her parents had been born in China whereas she had been born in this tiny microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.

Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally, but not often. Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases while her mother showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how her hand lays over to the side with just the edges of her fingers sliding up and down the strings.

Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten, that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. And when they got home that night, Chiang’s mother uncovered her own feet and pointed to them, and Chiang kept future discomforts to herself.

Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in their hearts a fantasy version of their homeland. Chiang was now eleven, and had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been. It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.

At her one-room school over a noisy restaurant, with the banging of pots and pans in the background, they learned a lot of politics. Her teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news in China than she did of the city in which they lived. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was lucky to be alive. Back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. But here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.

She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all night, making it impossible to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.

Usually, it was at the bold stripes on the flags of Little Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned this to her father once—that she felt badly for the Italians—he had shrugged. Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that some people care more about where they come from than others. He told her to feel sorry for them about that while he hammered the meat with more anger.

Chiang had felt sorry for her father that day, and for the meat.

She made another circuit of the shop, her parents’ shop. She had never been so hungry in all her life. The days had gotten away from her—not for lack of counting or so grand a number, but because her mind wandered as it grew dark and light again outside. Strangers occasionally pressed against the glass, eying the meat, deciding it wasn’t for them. This much hadn’t changed. Tourists, turning their noses up at delicacies. Laughing and taking pictures. Only, they didn’t take pictures anymore. They paused with their horrible wounds. The disgusting display was in reverse, now. And then they lumbered onward, these tourists who had become grosser than the things they used to mock.

Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the most, the wide eyes and slack jaws of the adults hurrying away with their children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loudly as they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it wasn’t right. The people simply scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams at all.

Or maybe they didn’t want to draw attention. The sick were already in the streets. It was difficult to see them, for they moved slowly. They didn’t stand out. Not until you bumped into them, looking for your parents, fighting the crowds to get home, when a kind stranger takes your hand, bends down to see if you need help, and bites off your fingers.

Chiang made another lap of the shop. She had never been so hungry before. Even waiting until the last customer was served before her mother made something in the back had never been this bad. Nothing had. She’d lost count of the days spent circling the shop, but it had been three since she’d had anything to eat. Three days with the hunger driving her mad, the feeling of her insides turning out.

A newspaper fluttered by outside and pressed itself to the glass. It was like a tourist, peeping in. Headlines from those last days were spread across its face—news of an outbreak entirely under control. Until it wasn’t. Chiang wondered what was happening in China. She thought of her school teacher and all her friends and wondered what had happened to them. As the people passed, she looked for anyone she knew, but they were all tourists.

The newspaper flapped away on the breeze. Where it had pressed, Chinese characters painted with a young and unsure hand could be seen against the fading backlight of another counted day. The characters were supposed to say:

Outside, it would have read this way. To the tourists, of course, it meant nothing. Just part of the backdrop that lent Chinatown its authenticity. For locals, however, it promised something: healthy ingredients and traditional medicines. Eternal life.

Chiang had laughed when she’d first seen it from the inside. After she had drawn it for the third time, washing off each attempt with a bucket of water and a rag as she attempted to satisfy her mother’s exacting standards, she saw what it meant in reverse. From the inside, the brush strokes were backwards. It looked more like:

A stranger life. Life as a stranger. A girl growing up in a home away from home, people she didn’t know peering through the glass, taking pictures of and pointing at the delicacies hanging in the window. It was funny how that worked out. Like the characters knew all along that this was coming. A secret only they were privy to.

Chiang laughed in her mind. It was the only place she could laugh or cry anymore. She wanted out. She wanted to run, to skip and shout and scream, but knotted chains hung from the doors of the little shop. Her parents had locked her inside with them, had locked away their one precious girl while she grew sicker and sicker, and they worried more and more.

The sun slanted through the window, casting shadows of words in reverse, and little motes of dust dipped and swirled like fairies with a life of their own. There were two chairs of ornate wood tipped on their sides, catching the sun. The flesh up past the knees might sate Chiang’s painful hunger, but she could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any more. She had eaten all that she could. She was powerfully hungry and all alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.

20 • Dennis Newland

“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Matt had told Dennis, holding out a smoking roach, the day before they’d made a run at the grocery store, the day before Dennis had been bit.

They were still in that office building where they’d been rationing candy bars. They’d just killed a group of survivors eerily similar to their own foursome, another pair of couples thrown together by the nightmare of the world. This other group had been surviving noisily one floor above, carrying on, acting like maniacs. After a long discussion about whether to bring trouble or wait for it to come to them, Dennis and Matt had opted for the latter. They convinced Lisa and Sarah that it was best, that this other group would bring death upon them all. And so they rehearsed and checked their gear and went on the offensive for the very first time.

“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld,” Sarah had joked, sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep. She thought they looked like them. It took some explaining before any of the rest of them got the joke. Sarah was the only one who watched old sitcoms. And besides: nothing much was funny after you’d shot a living person, not while you were digging through their pockets and the bodies were still warm.

Matt was the one who’d discovered the stash. Later that night, he’d held out that roach, the ember fading, telling Dennis to take a hit, that it’d be good for him, that it was the end of the fucking world and to stop being such a pussy.

Dennis had passed. He always did. He mumbled something about asthma, his old and entirely made-up excuse to not smoke. Matt had shrugged and had given life to that ember with a noisy intake of air.

Dennis had no problem lying to friends. He was used to keeping secrets, was skilled at keeping things from others. The sticky wound beneath his sleeve was just the latest. Later that night, while their cubicle fortress filled with smoke, Dennis had found an empty cubicle down the endless row. He had shuffled through the scattered supplies and loose paper like snowdrifts from some weeks-old panic and made himself comfortable in quiet solitude.

He didn’t know how to explain to his new friends what getting stoned felt like to him. Hell, he’d been with Lisa for years and had never even told her. He was pretty sure it was a singular reaction, that everyone else must feel something different, but to him getting stoned was a scary place, not a soothing one.

The first time he’d smoked up, he was convinced he would die. The high had lasted for hours, for most of the damn day. He remembered standing in Lisa’s kitchen, the cabinet open, hand on the knob, looking at an assortment of glasses. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Must’ve teleported from the living room. The TV and the laughter from his friends were faraway sounds. He was disconnected from everything.

Later, sitting under a cold shower, praying impatiently for the numbness that had crawled into his veins to crawl the fuck back out, he had watched the hair on his legs wave as the water rained down from the faucet. The hair stirred like the seaweed at the breaker’s edge on Far Rockaway, like small arms pushing out of his skin and trying to get his attention, trying to wiggle free. A million dead things buried alive and working to escape their epidermal graves.

Dennis had become terrified that he would always be like that. The pot had permanently dumbed him. Hours later, lying perfectly still on the bathroom floor, his thoughts had begun to clear. He could analyze what had gone wrong. But summoning his thoughts seemed to make his flesh melt away, his body go perfectly numb. And if he tried to move, the opposite happened. He could feel again, but now he couldn’t think.

It was one or the other. It couldn’t be both. His brain or his flesh, never the two.

Three times in his life Dennis had gotten stoned, and every time it was this choice. He could have his body or his thoughts, but not both at the same time. That little bridge between the hemispheres of his soul got fogged up by the smoke. That bridge had a name. Corpus Christi or some shit. Once it was severed, he had to choose. One or the other. Lie still and think or get the fuck up and lose his mind.

So he didn’t smoke. Was terrified of the shit. And now it was happening again.

Dennis marveled at the similarities of getting stoned and becoming a zombie as his willpower faded and his arm began to sting less and less. He watched, powerless, as his legs kicked. The movement was a relief, but only for a moment. Cornflakes crunched under the heels of his salvaged boots. And when he began to rise, he did it with the grace of a drunk, with limbs jerking out of control, unsure of themselves.

Dennis was a joystick with its wires crossed. He was playing Dead or Alive 3, that fighting game on his XBox, but the man on the screen wasn’t pulling off the moves he was sending it. He felt that video game lean, the attempt to urge the action in one direction through willpower alone, but that never worked. Instead, his body lurched across the aisle toward the nearest scent. The player was out of his control. The game had gone to a cutscene, and Dennis had an awful feeling of how it would turn out.

He watched as his arms slashed through sacks of disheveled coffee, digging for Lisa. Some distant and half-sane shard of his former self knew what he was doing. It was as though he’d been locked away in his own skull, some interloper crowding in beside him, and the confines and proximity meant that feeble thoughts and silent screams from the one could bleed over into the other. A monster had taken up residence in his head, and he could read the foul beast’s mind, know what it was thinking.

Entire shelves of organic and fair trade scattered to the tiles around his feet. Dark roast and decaf. Coffee from countries where Dennis imagined life continued apace, maybe a news story in Portuguese about an outbreak in Manhattan. Or maybe the entire world was overrun, who the fuck knew?

He heard Lisa calling for him. She was excited, had finally found some special ingredient to this secret meal she’d been promising for weeks. If they ever found a decent store, she’d said, one that hadn’t been stripped bare, one dangerous enough on the outside to be rewarding enough within, she’d make him something special.

Well, we made it, Dennis wanted to say, to shout through the shelves. The old part of him wanted to, at least. The new part grunted with hunger and frustration—it had a different meal in mind. This was the part that made him writhe between the tight shelves, forcing his body past rows of coffee. An inhuman gurgle dribbled past his lips, a verbal drool.

Lisa was reaching for something, telling him to come over. Dennis’s arms found her arm. The touch was electric—skin meeting skin on a first date, the feel of one’s own deadened limb in the morning as numbness wore away into tingles. Dennis’s fear for Lisa melted in a flare of endorphins. His worry disintegrated at this discovery, this touch of meat, of real food among pre-packaged and processed shit.

Lisa shrieked. Dennis was on his belly like a snake, lurching side to side, sending more cans to their dented fates as he tunneled from aisle eighteen to aisle seventeen.

His girlfriend’s screams grew louder and more panicked. It reminded him of all the times he’d hid behind a door before leaping out. Reminded him of the insane pranks of the past week, the humor only boys found funny, the madness wrought of dark survival and fading adrenaline. He would pinch Lisa’s calf with the claw of a hand when she wasn’t looking, making her think she’d been bit. He’d watch Matt do the same or similar to Sarah, the boys laughing with tears in their eyes while trembling hands slapped at their shoulders, girlfriends calling them assholes, thinking for a moment that the end had come for them.

He didn’t know why they did it, why there was this compulsion to strike terror in the hearts of those they loved. More cans scattered as Lisa fought his grip. She was yelling at him now. Her fear had flipped to anger. This was how it worked. Frightened for a moment until she realized it was him, and then just pissed. She tried to pull away, but Dennis wasn’t playing this time. He held her arm with a starving grasp, his brain dripping sick thoughts and remnants of guilt.

Why did he ever scare her for fun? He tried to make caveman sense of it. For Dennis, every human drive had to make caveman sense. Where had it come from, this universal oddity? Why did humans do the shit they did? Where did it originate?

Lisa smacked his head as he emerged through the shelves. She begged him to let go. Dennis made zombie noises, grunts and groans of lungs compressed by metal shelving, the air just leaking past his vocal cords. Why did they do it? Did they scare their women as some sort of training? Was it to teach them to never trust any man, even their own? Or was the fear some subconscious attempt to cow them, keep their women feeling helpless and reliant on the protective brawn they provided, like the mafia feigning worry for some shopkeeper who had only them to fear.

Dennis didn’t know.

He didn’t know why they did it any more than he knew why he was doing it for real this time.

Urges.

Caveman shit.

Like eating raw meat. Dennis had never eaten raw meat before, not even sushi. This was his last pre-monster thought as he wrestled his girlfriend’s arm to his lips, jaws parting, teeth bared, the anger in her shouts sliding to full-on panic.

She shrieked piercing wails, and Lisa knew. She had to know as he bit down on her forearm, a patch of skin he used to kiss, that creamy white with a single mar of a mole that she insisted was a freckle. When his tongue hit her flesh, there was a familiar taste, the salt from weeks of running and not bathing, the hot skin like a day on the beach, the same flavors that tinted their lovemaking. His girlfriend tasted the exact same on the surface.

It was the unfamiliar that lay beneath.

Dennis felt an eruption in his brain like an orgasm. Better. Better than an orgasm. This was what he was wired for. His teeth came together, and Lisa’s arm jerked. Desperation. There was desperation in both of them. Panic and starvation were at odds with each other. The desire to eat and to not be eaten. Dennis thought of make-up sex they’d had once, the rough sex. He thought of that first time, when she’d said she didn’t want to, but he had convinced her. They were both drunk. He was too far along to turn back. Both naked and willing to do so much, but then him wanted more. More than she did. The drive in him to eat was like that drive to fuck. He would’ve insisted it was something containable until he’d actually felt it, until he’d gone that far. That far, and you were going all the way. He couldn’t stop. Too weak.

Dennis also thought, as he bit down, that teeth were meant for this, just not his. He never would’ve guessed that they could rip flesh. Not his teeth. Maybe those of another monster but not his. The flesh of Lisa’s arm gave way, his jaw clenching on the softness, and then her skin stopped moving, became tight, could stretch no more, and with a pop, with a sudden orgasmic burst of power, his bottom teeth met his top teeth, a chunk of her arm in his mouth, him chewing.

There wasn’t a product on the supermarket shelves as delicious as this. Lisa’s safety receded from his mind. What he was doing faded; what he had become made the rest of him cower in fear. Lisa gurgled in pain and staggered backwards, and Dennis latched onto her like a rabid dog. He slid forward, cans bouncing, and emerged from the shelves a different thing than what had entered. He and Lisa were on the ground, rolling around like they used to wrestle, Dennis pulling his way up her body even as he chewed this first glorious taste and swallowed it down.

He wanted her neck. She was yelling for him to stop, begging. The sample in his mouth drove him forward, craving more. This was why he shied away from anything he knew he’d like. One try, and it was over for him. There was nothing for Dennis in moderation.

Lisa cried out for help. She prayed to a god he knew she didn’t believe in. Panting for air, yelling for Matt and Sarah, Dennis felt just a hint of guilt. The old him was still in there, sad that shit had gone bad like this. He remembered, even drunk that one night, knowing that he was doing something wrong, that he should stop. But he had driven forward until screams and moans couldn’t be told apart, until cries and gasps were the same, until he could convince himself that she was enjoying it too, that she would forgive him, that they would never talk about it, try not to think about it, forget that she had ever begged him to stop.

That was the old him in there, feeling sorry. The rest of him wanted a second hit of this new drug. The rest of him wanted Lisa to shut the fuck up. And as he pulled himself up her chest, he found a way to do both, to get a taste and to silence her. And it amazed him, again, that teeth were meant for this. It was some caveman shit, he thought, as his jaw opened a gushing and hissing hole in his girlfriend’s throat. It was some caveman shit as her cries for help were silenced, as her body fell into reluctant submission, he on top of her, getting his way.

21 • Chiang Xian

Chiang was in the back of the meat shop, cornering a rat in her slow and clumsy steps, when the strangers broke in. It was the fifth day of her terrible hunger, the countless day of her imprisonment, and the third time she’d chased after the same rat. It cowered under the old radiator in the back room while someone shattered the glass door at the front of the shop.

Chiang could smell the tiny animal under there. The last two times she’d seen this morsel of brown meat scurry across the floor, her starving body and senseless mind had charged directly after the thing. She had been forced to watch, mad with hunger, as it disappeared into its home behind the cupboard.

This time, Chiang had a better idea. And somehow, her body listened. Like an exhausted arm and trembling brush finally obeying her concentration and producing the perfect stroke, if she thought hard enough on a thing, a direction, her feet seemed to shuffle according to her will. But just barely. And it wasn’t easy.

I can do this, she told herself. It was no different than stretching her tiny hands around the neck of a violin. It was just like origami, biting her lip and making sure the edges of the paper lined up just right, to within a hair, that with the drag of a fingernail the folds were crisp and sharp, her miniature paper cranes nearly as good as her mother’s. Chiang felt she had studied all her life for this, to corner this one little rat.

She banged into the radiator, and the frightened animal shot off toward her father’s back office. Good, good. Chiang shuffled after. Her limbs were too slow to catch the thing by hand. That was true even before she’d lost the fingers on one hand. But there were swifter limbs in her father’s office. And so she lurched sideways, frightening the little guy through the open door before following after.

Following after. Chiang thought about an old worry of hers as the rat scrambled beneath her father’s cluttered desk. She had this feeling, this nagging sensation even back when her parents were still alive, that her thoughts followed after the things she did. They were the echoes of her actions, not the causes of them.

There was something Confucius had once said: The superior man acts before he speaks. She didn’t think Confucius meant it the way she read it, though. Her fear, as she had struggled to be the perfect girl her parents desired, was that there wasn’t any control at all. All men act first and speak after. She felt it herself. She would do a thing and then take credit or make excuses. In truth, she did the thing because she was born to. Because, in that moment, how could she not?

She banged into the desk, just like she had the radiator. On purpose, she thought. She hoped. Almost there. Swifter arms than hers. She could smell the fear leaking out of the rat and figured it was doing much the same as she. Reacting and then feeling something. Some mix of chemicals. Happiness or sadness, fear or desire, these chemicals causing limbs to move toward or away from the good or bad.

Chiang tried to scare the rat from the bad to the worse. She nudged the desk again. The last project her father had been working on—ledgers full of meticulous script, purchase orders for half a dozen vendors—was spread out across the surface just the way he had left it so many days ago. There was an agitated squeak by the wall, the scratch of tiny claws, and then the clack and slam of a metallic arm and the snapping of a tiny neck as a trap long picked clean did its swift work.

Chiang fell to the floor and lumbered beneath the desk. The darkness was no concern; she could smell the crushed flesh like a piece of cracked ginger. Her hands groped for the trap and found it. She pulled the contraption out, the animal’s tiny arms still twitching with something that resembled life.

Fists smaller than any intricate crane her mother had ever made unfolded into pink and perfect palms. Chiang only studied them a moment before bringing the trap to her lips. She bit the rat in the belly, still warm and heaving, and her mouth was filled with the hot and sticky scraps picked over and digested by the foul beast, this little survivor. The trap itself was something to chew around. The rest was for her. She peeled slivers of flesh off its body and chewed through bones like chopsticks while someone rummaged noisily in the meat shop.

Chiang stopped chewing and listened. Beyond the moist steam rising from the rat’s insides, there was another smell cutting through. Living meat. Something not rancid and spoiled. She could smell them like spices, at least a few of them out there, the odor getting stronger.

Voices.

A whispered hush. The sound of canned goods being scraped off of shelves. There were people in her parents’ shop, scrounging for food. Chiang dropped what remained of the rat and shuffled toward the door. She was still hungry. So very hungry. And her limbs seemed to move of their own accord, her mind making excuses, telling herself a story of reasons, as she went along like a puppet.

A family of three. They didn’t hear her coming out of the back room, sliding through the red curtains with the green dragons. Chiang saw that they had pressed one of the shelving units against the door. These people had broken in, and her first thought wasn’t anger; her first thought was that maybe she could get out.

Chiang saw a baseball bat by the cash register, the wide end of it painted and spattered red. It hadn’t been there before. She passed behind the counter where her father folded meat into sheets of brown paper, her head just barely poking above. Around the counter and into the store, she nearly bumped into the woman. Chiang saw how the lady’s body trembled and froze. The scream came a full breath later, but Chiang was already sinking her teeth into the woman’s hip, a mouthful of sweaty-salty shirt and the tender flesh beneath.

Canned goods spilled everywhere. The screaming was hurting Chiang’s ears. It stopped as she bit again, the woman going limp and collapsing to the ground, passing out.

A large man shouted. A cry of anguish. He skipped and slid through the piles of canned Chinese ingredients, around the tables and chairs, dashing for the cash register.

The bat. Chiang lumbered to intercept the man. The woman writhed and groaned on the floor like she was having bad dreams. There was a third shape moving in the dimness of the shop. More screaming.

Chiang felt afraid of these people. Maybe they had brought food to her, their untainted flesh. Maybe they had brought escape by shattering what she could not. But they had also brought a lasting death with them, the desire to end her. The man reached the counter and grabbed the bat. Chiang could smell his intentions, his rage and fear. She hurried through the spilled cans, her teeth clacking anxiously on the empty air, arms out in front of her as he reared the bat to the side.

It was a can of asparagus. One of Chiang’s senseless feet slipped on the can, shooting her legs out from underneath her, and the stained bat whistled through the air above her head. With a ferocious crack, the bat met the old cash register with its brass buttons and little tombstone prices. Chiang flailed to right herself. Inhuman screams came from the large man. His knees were wobbling like Chiang’s. The smell of rage on him grew to a stench. There were sobs behind her from a third person, a shadow. The bat screamed through the air again as Chiang stumbled toward her feet.

The blow grazed the side of her head and came down on her shoulder. Something snapped. Chiang felt her shoulder twist out of place. She kept moving forward. The man was holding half a bat, the splintered ends trembling in his fist. He tried to move backwards, slipped on a can of onions, and Chiang was on him, pulling herself with one good arm and another flashing in pain, the man’s hands scrambling to keep her off, until she reached his neck.

Countless days of hunger disappeared in a gushing instant. Blood jetted into her mouth as she tore open the man’s neck. It tasted just as her desperate cravings had led her to expect. Warm and vital. Like the sashimi her father would cut and feed her while she worked.

The man’s voice left his lips and emerged from his neck, gurgles and bubbles flooding around Chiang’s mouth. There was more here than she could eat in a week. She lapped hungrily at the gushing fountain, which gave of itself in throbbing spurts. The two powerful hands scrambling at her face seemed to fade. They pawed listlessly now as Chiang’s limbs found new purpose and strength.

A loud crack filled her ears, her head bobbing forward, the delayed sense that someone had struck her. Chiang rolled off the bleeding man to find a young boy standing over her, a white boy, maybe her age. He held the broken end of a bat in his trembling hands.

Chiang lunged forward. She watched as her arms tangled around the boy’s legs, his eyes opening in horror. The boy brought the short piece of wood back down on her head, mimicking his father. It bounced off her head and out of his hands. He shrieked as Chiang wrapped herself around his knees and toppled him. She pulled herself up his frail body, hands grabbing fistfuls of his rumpled and smelly clothes, blood spilling out of her mouth and down her chin, mouthfuls of blood from the neck of the boy’s father.

This boy’s father, Chiang thought. A boy. She pulled herself toward his more youthful neck while his hands beat uselessly against her cheeks. She thought of Shen, the cute boy with the jet black hair who sat across from her at school. Chiang wondered suddenly if he had made it home that day. Was he out there, breaking into stores with his parents, killing animals like her with baseball bats?

The white boy screamed and begged. He was pleading with her. Sobbing. As if she had any choice.

Chiang opened her mouth. The boy’s hands were on her face, covering her eyes, trying to push her away. He felt so thin. Like bones. Like a disappointing catch her father might curse as he cleaned for the salvageable scraps.

“No!” the boy screamed. His mother had fallen still. Chiang thought of all the flesh in the room. Weeks and weeks worth of flesh. The taste of the father was powerful on her lips.

She bent her head toward the boy’s screaming throat and fought through his pushing and shoving arms, and she hated herself for this. It wasn’t what she wanted, killing this boy who reminded her of Shen. But try as she might, Chiang couldn’t do anything else. Even though she wanted to pull away, her head continued to bend toward his neck. She could add her own silent pleas to his, and yet her body moved to sate its hunger.

And Chiang was afraid. Not of these people, no longer, but of herself.

She wailed inside her own head. She yanked with her mind like a person inside one of those jackets from the movies, with the long arms strapped around the back, the crazy people. She bucked and jerked with her mind, tugging and pulling her head away, even as clacking teeth drew closer.

The boy was sobbing, crying, begging, digging his fingers at her eyes.

Chiang thought of the hours she had wrestled with a paintbrush, the long days with her tiny hands wrapped around the infuriating neck of her violin, practicing, practicing, perfecting. Concentrate, her mother would say. Try harder, her father would say.

Chiang concentrated. She tried harder than she’d ever tried concentrating on anything. The setting sun bounced through the streets and cast shadows across the spilled cans and the scene of violence. There was a symbol for life painted out there, but it read stranger from the inside. Chiang’s lips brushed against the boy’s throbbing neck. His poor arms were too weak. His mother stirred; Chiang could hear the lady’s groans.

And then some handhold was reached. Like the thrill of her fingers finally bending into place and a sonorous and rewarding cry spilling from her violin—or the graceful arc of ink left from the supple perfection of her spinning wrist—there was this moment of complete control, this eyeblink of a mind taking over a body and bending raw impulse to graceful will.

Chiang’s mouth brushed against the boy’s neck, but she did not bite him there. She pulled away. Really pulled away. In charge for a slender moment.

When his hands came back to her face, pushing her, Chiang turned to the side and bit his finger. She crunched through to the bone and then bit down even harder. Her teeth went through the knuckle, the pop of something solid in her mouth, something to chew on as she fell away from the boy, a fleshy coating and a hard candy center.

The mother was stirring, holding her wounded side, coming to. The boy gasped and peered wide-eyed at his hand, clutching the spurting wound where his finger once stood. He would survive. Chiang knew very well that he would survive. She scrambled across the floor after the woman, still hungry, knowing what she needed to do. She glanced down at her hands as they brushed canned goods aside, at her missing fingers, the black char of her infected wound wrapping up her arm like a twisted tattoo, and Chiang was happy.

Look at what these people had brought her, she thought, as she turned the woman’s groans into screams. Food and a way out. Flesh and blood. But more than that, as she bit the woman beneath the ear—

Company.

A friend.

Chiang ate and ate while the frightened boy beat her weakly and pathetically with what remained of his father’s bat. She ate and smiled while his tormented screams filled her parents’ shop. He was frightened, now, just as she had been. But that would change, Chiang thought to herself.

Everything does.

22 • Dennis Newland

Lisa’s face was a mess. Her chest had stopped heaving—the foamy bubbles of blood no longer gathering at the holes in her neck—and Dennis couldn’t tell if there was enough of her left to come back or not. He’d seen others so eaten up that they didn’t turn, just stayed dead.

He felt less horror than he thought he should over what he’d done. His body still tingled from the feed, from the raw fury of it all. But it was something else that kept him from being as frightened as he should have. It was over. The fucking dread was gone, the running and running, the fear. Over. He was what he was, and he could still think. He was still him. How long would that last?

Footsteps. Someone yelling his name. Lisa’s name.

Neither of them said a thing.

Dennis left her where she lay and lumbered down the aisle of canned goods. It was hard to tell if he was in control. His body moved, and he seemed to go along with it. Confusing. Like a dream. A nightmare had ended, and now he was in a dream. He couldn’t die. Nothing bad could happen to him. Dennis felt a thrill of immortality, of eating like he just ate, of reveling in the very thing he had spent weeks fearing.

Sneakers chirped as they approached aisle eighteen. Matt hurried around the corner, breathless, panting, shotgun in his hands. He stopped and gaped at the mess, the scattered cans, the spreading slick of blood. His eyes darted to Lisa on the ground and then to Dennis.

Dennis was nearly upon him, willing his legs faster, his gut gloriously and nauseatingly full. He’d seen the bloated ones among the crowds before, blood caked down their chins, and now he knew. He reached for his best friend, eager to end his running days as well. Just a bite, no room in his belly for a feed, and they would live forever, the both of them, immortal.

A roar. A skull-splitting bang. The furious bark of Matt’s shotgun, and Dennis’s leg was kicked out from underneath him, his thigh on fire, his ears ringing. He flopped forward, fingers brushing against Matt, face slamming into the floor, hands groping for his sneakers.

“Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck…” Matt was saying.

Dennis clawed for his best friend, angry now. The fucker shot him. A groan leaked out, a mix of frustration and pain. As he crawled forward, he caught a glimpse of his own leg trailing behind, white bone and crimson muscle, his jeans and a good part of his thigh chewed off from the point-blank blast.

Fucker, I’m bringing you a gift, he wanted to say. This was it, the end of their running. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t death at all. It was just… different.

There was a clack as Matt pumped the gun, jacking another shell into the barrel. “No, no, no, no,” his friend was saying, as if it were his head being aimed at, someone else’s finger on the trigger, like he was the one who should be pissed.

More slaps of footfalls. A shriek. Dennis managed to get to his knees, what was left of one of them. He felt so full and happy. Matt was fucking it up. Sarah was screaming like they were back to day one, like she’d never seen anything like this before in her life.

Matt’s shotgun was lowered at his face. Dennis tried to call out, to beg his friend to wait, the words a bloody hiss. As much as he wanted to duck and weave, to bob his head out of the way, all his body did was lumber forward, dragging a leg behind him, hands waving at the air as Matt took steps backwards.

“Fucking do it!” Sarah screamed. Tears coursed down her cheeks. Her eyes darted frantically from what was left of her friend to the mess Dennis had become. Dennis tried to beg Matt to swing the gun around on her. Couldn’t he see? This was the end of things. This was the inevitable. The shotgun’s long barrel shook, that cylinder of deep shadow aimed right between Dennis’s eyes, the panic and terror rising up that his friend would do it, just as they had promised to each other all those long days ago.

“I’m sorry,” Matt said. He was crying, too. His fucking best friend in the world, his new friend, his only friend, was crying. The shock was wearing off. Matt’s jaw was set, old promises remembered. Sarah begged him, her hands on his arm, barrel trembling, and Dennis begged him as well in mute gurgles. A new fear took hold. This was the end, one pull of the trigger. For weeks, the terror of being turned had spurred them on, but it wasn’t the fear of death, of not existing, but of existing like this. And now Dennis knew it wasn’t that bad. There was nothing to be scared of. Except now, he was scared of his friend, of that barrel of deep shadow.

His screams filled his own head as he waited for it to come. Screams that tickled the region of his brain that could listen to silence, that could hear his own thoughts, the area where reading and nightmares took place. His fingertips brushed Matt’s thigh, dragging one leg along, lurching forward.

“I’m sorry,” Matt said again.

Set teeth. An ungodly thunderclap, a violence of noise, a trill of panic as Dennis braced for the end of all things.

He felt the blow to his other leg, felt it kick back behind him, the flesh flayed off by the eruption of metal pellets. Dennis flopped to the ground, utterly deaf, the world spinning and ringing, hot lava spreading from his knee to his groin.

For all his gyrations, he was able merely to roll over. One of his legs mostly didn’t. It was attached by a few strands of soft tissue, skin and tendon and blue jean.

He heard Sarah’s voice first, the high-pitched bitching joining the scream of sirens in his stunned eardrums. She was screaming Lisa’s name, begging her boyfriend to do it, what had to be done.

And then Matt’s voice, the deafness receding a notch, saying he couldn’t, forgetting his promises, the pact they’d made. Saying, goddammit and shut up, he fucking couldn’t.

Dennis lay there, his legs burning, his body on fire, arms waving at the air. Sarah ran past, blubbering, to cradle Lisa. Matt yelled at her to stay away. To stay the fuck away. He cocked the shotgun, the hollow clunk of an empty shell bouncing on the tile, and went to pull her off.

The two of them were cussing and crying as they hurried from the scene of what Dennis had done. They left him there, arms gyrating at the darkened ceiling, the smell of Lisa fading, a wheel on a shopping cart crying out as it was pushed along under a heavy load, and then silence. And a thought. A sickening thought for Dennis that this was how his forever would remain.

23 • Chiang Xian

The throngs of sick tourists had wandered off, the streets outside full of the silent traffic of darting candy bar wrappers and the haze of smoke from unseen fires. There were pink smears on the glass, streaks of gore and abraded flesh where the undead had bumped and pressed and waved their stupid arms to get at the foul meat.

Chiang cared less and less for what went on out there. She had company, now. And while this boy—whose name would be Shen, she’d decided—stumbled and bumped in staggering circuits throughout the shop, she practiced chasing him, practiced controlling her feet, making a game of it, stopping now and then to eat from his parents before they lost their taste.

Shen, of course, hadn’t quite the hang of it. He knocked things over and stumbled on the cans scattered about. He crawled up in the window display and sampled some of the rancid meat, even gnawed on her parents’ shins. And since neither of them could talk, not yet at least, it was up to Chiang to supply the dialogue. She would crouch by Shen’s father while the boy ate what was left of the man’s thigh, and do both their voices over his loud smacking. Mostly, she would coach him, urging him to exert more will, to maybe one day help her move the heavy shelf blocking the door so they could both get out.

Practice, she would tell him, kicking a can, just an extra jerk of her knee as she was stepping along. See? See? she would shout. I can do it, and so can you!

The words would tumble out different, of course, like screams in a nightmare, but she thought it was getting better, that her tongue was learning just as her fingers and hands once had. Everyone has different abilities, she reminded herself. It was important to be patient with him. Some people had a hard time getting out of bed, forcing themselves to go to school. Some could just do it, always could. Different abilities. She would be patient.

In the meantime, she had a playmate to bump after in the meat shop. And so the two of them played chase during the day and a game she called There-You-Are at night. They played while the smell of their dead parents mingled in the air, and it was easy to pretend, if you knew how, that their grunts were giggles, their labored hisses the noise of happy laughter, just two kids wasting time while they wasted away, the both of them eying that heavy shelf by the door that kept them trapped inside.