I, Zombie

30 • Rhoda Shay

The streets of New York glittered like those rare moments after a sudden hailstorm. That slice of startled time when clouds part, the sun returns, and its light catches in a field of summer ice before hot pavement vanishes it into puddles. Rhoda had seen it happen a few times in the city, frozen balls the size of her thumb falling from the sky on a hot and humid day, a thing to puzzle over before it was gone and she was left wondering what had happened, something to call a friend to verify, to turn to Google for answers.

But this wasn’t one of those long-ago days. It wasn’t hail, this glittering field. It wasn’t warm enough in the city for ice to fall from the sky. This was the weather of the apocalypse, the sign that the end times had arrived. It was streets of broken glass. Broken glass everywhere, and no one left to sweep it up.

Rhoda trudged through the glitter, unable to divert her course, and the shards crunched beneath her bare feet. The pain was intolerable, but that’s precisely what she had to do: tolerate it. There was no choice, no motor function, not really. She couldn’t even roll her feet to the outside to lessen the impact. The glass simply drove deep into her sensitive soles with every new shimmering puddle of it she crept through. Just a plodding shuffle, pure pain lancing up through her bones and into her knees, a constant flame held to the tenderness of her poor feet, all for not being adequately prepared.

She should’ve prepped differently. Rhoda kept berating herself for not prepping differently. All around her were people in shoes, some in boots, women in heels that had popped off their feet and clung to their ankles, the dainty straps like thin and desperate arms. They dragged along behind bare feet through pink-tinted glass.

There was a woman up ahead in trainers, glorious trainers. A man in work boots, a blue-collar and burly man that Rhoda would never have traded places with under any circumstances. But now. Oh, now. His steel-toed Hummers crunched through the glass oblivious to the pain, and this was all Rhoda could think about. Nerve endings burned throughout her body. The pain was up to her elbows. She thought of that guy from Moonlighting who’d gone bald and been in that movie, the one with the skyscraper. The scene of him sitting down and pulling clear daggers out of his feet, she couldn’t stop picturing that scene. Rhoda had daggers like that right up against the bone, could feel her shredded flesh dragging across the pavement behind her in torn ribbons. Another glittering puddle ahead, and the scent was gonna drag her right through it. Shop glass: the worst. From a nearby storefront looted early on. There were real jewels in the window, absolutely worthless.

Worthless.

Rhoda’s mind swung back and forth around what was valuable and what wasn’t. She’d been through this once before, a breakdown just like this. And now somewhere, someone was probably coming across her stash. She feared they were finding what she’d hidden away, and at the same time: she hoped someone was. She hoped it wouldn’t go to waste. She imagined them breaking into her apartment and finding her closet full of prepper gear, all the gear her friends had made fun of her for.

A closet full of supplies. Water, food, camping gear, purification tablets, protection, even a small generator that she ran once a week like the manual said. Exhaust hose shoved out the window, her tiny apartment smelling faintly of gas. There was a pump for pulling moisture out of the air that she could never quite get to work right, not the liter of potable fluid a day that it promised. There were the flashlights and a radio that she could wind up to power. Everything in her closet that her friends said she didn’t need, not in New York City, that island of plenty.

They made fun of her for keeping her clothes in plastic crates, shoved under the bed, the bed she’d raised on cinder blocks to make more room. They’d made fun of her apartment, not quite 400 square feet, and a good bit of that devoted to the end times. They told her to live in the moment, the now. Rhoda had always smiled and kept her thoughts to herself. She knew. She watched the History channel, which was as good as any university, and she learned. She studied. She read all the books, the ones she had to order because the library didn’t carry them.

And Rhoda got ready.

Her sister Charlotte had outed her at Thanksgiving two years back. Charlotte claimed to be worried about her, said she saw the stuff Rhoda was reading, or maybe she’d heard from her friends or spotted the pattern on Facebook. Whatever. She had grown concerned. And so she outed her right there in the kitchen in front of everyone. Rhoda’s mom had been confused.

“I think it’s fine that she dresses nice,” her mother had said, peering into the oven to make sure she didn’t burn the turkey like the year before.

“Prepper, mom,” Charlotte had said, exasperated. “Not preppy.”

Rhoda had argued and felt betrayed as Charlotte explained the differences. But their mother was impervious to either of their worries. While Charlotte stressed about where her sister was putting her money, Rhoda had much larger concerns. She tried to tell them all that could happen, explain to her mother and sister about the Mayans and how their calendar could be read so many different ways, that time could run out tomorrow or maybe ten years later. And didn’t they know New York was due for the Next Big One? Or about the bees and their collapsing colonies? Or how water was running out, and the weather changing? Didn’t they watch the news? Tornados were popping up everywhere. And look at what happened to the dinosaurs. Another impact like that, and every human being alive—

A stab of pain reminded Rhoda of the now, of the moment. It dragged her back from the past with an electrical shock shooting up her bare feet. She wore glass slippers. Glass crunching on glass. Soles embedded with a fine layer of what felt like razors drenched in alcohol. Needles into her heels, the flesh between her toes ripped and burning, glass caught between them and driving between the small bones there. Her feet were being mutilated. It felt like she was hobbling along on bare bone, on the ends of her shins.

The sight of others in shoes drove her mad. How one was shod when they got bit was important. Maybe this was the most important thing. It wasn’t a detail that came up on the History channel, shaking her confidence in that learning institution. Unless she missed that show. Maybe she had. Boots, of course, she owned. Good ones. But she never wore them. They were stowed away in her closet, balls of white paper huddled inside, perfectly safe and snug, protected from the holocaust.

Her closet.

Rhoda imagined someone finding all her gear. The MREs and the jugs of water. Guns she’d only fired the once at a range. Stupid stuff. Before she’d started prepping, before she’d needed to put her bed on cinder blocks to make room, the closet had been full of clothes. It’d been full of shoes and belts and jewelry. Preppy stuff.

Her sister Charlotte had been no different, even back then. Always making fun of how she spent her money. Laughing at her collection of shoes, some of them too painful to even wear, some of them that didn’t go with a thing she owned or a night out she could possibly imagine having. And Charlotte had been right to make fun. Rhoda knew she had a problem. New York was a difficult place for a woman. So many windows full of tempting footwear, so dainty and perfect on their glass stands, beautiful just like that: Empty. Waiting. Footless.

There were shoes that felt perfect off the feet, their straps caught in the pads of her fingers while Rhoda strolled through the great lawn in Central Park. Shoes that looked perfect lying on their sides at the foot of the bed, ready to be donned and seen. Shoes that were wonderful simply in pairs of pairs of pairs at the bottom of her closet, lined up like soldiers. Perfect shoes, just knowing she had them.

But, instead of wearing them out to be seen, she stayed in and watched her little TV. And the shoes ate at her soul. Money wasted. Charlotte’s voice. The end was coming, and she would be caught flat-footed. She wouldn’t be ready. She was wasting her money. Her time. She needed to prepare.

When it finally and truly dawned on her, she’d made a drastic change. There had been a purge, and the purge had made Rhoda feel alive. Her friends were more than happy to come over and paw through her collection, seeing what fit, snagging designer heels at a fraction of the price. Rhoda watched them behave like animals. She watched from the bed, seeing herself as she had once been, digging through the aisles at Macy’s on Memorial Day. She had been disgusted and relieved, seeing people she thought she knew behave like that. They paid her a fraction, and she took it gladly, the proceeds going to things that mattered. Rhoda would prepare for the worst. And when her few and sporadic dates came over after dinner or back from a bar, she would pray they wouldn’t look inside her closet at the things she had chosen to accumulate.

More glass in the streets. Glass from smashed traffic and from storefront windows, glass from overhead where people had tossed furniture out of offices to make the only escape they knew how. Glass from bottles tossed for fun and dropped by looters, all picked up a shard at a time by tender flesh.

She should have known better, should have taken steps. But how would she have guessed that her mind would make this journey intact, that her flesh would rot, her nose wear away, while her every thought remained to haunt her?

Charlotte had been right: Rhoda had been a blasted idiot. She had wasted her money and time prepping to survive. Stomping heavily through that shimmering hell-storm, that weather of the apocalypse, she dwelled on all she’d done and the money she’d spent to prepare for her survival. When what she should’ve been readying for was what came after.

31 • Carmen Ruiz

There were three of them still alive in the break room: Jackie, Sam, and Anna. Carmen could hear them talking through the door. She could smell them through the walls and through the vents. The two women cried while Sam tried to comfort them, but Carmen could smell the fear on him the worst. They talked and talked and filled the air with their ripe scents, no clue that the rest of the office could hear what they were saying, could smell what they were afraid of.

Carmen jostled among her coworkers outside the door, her belly swollen with an overdue baby and yesterday’s grisly meal. She could flash back to eating Kassie or being bitten by Rhonda, but where does the blame start? Where does it stop? Each of them did what they were bound to do, and it probably went right back to the very first person with the sickness. Bit by a monkey in a lab somewhere, pricked by an experimental needle, a rip in a white suit, any of the scenes from all the films Carmen had seen.

However it started, there was a chain of blame that linked them all together. Carmen had been angry at the start, angry and scared, pissed at Rhonda, but those feelings had grown stale as the days piled up. Gruesome black bites marked the faces and arms of men and women she’d known for years, and it was getting hard to remember who had bitten whom. Those frantic days were long gone: the quarantine of the office, the handful who had tried to make it home, the cell phones clogged from overuse and then batteries dead from trying over and over anyway.

Now there were only three of them left, terrified and starving in the break room, and Carmen could hear them conspiring. They didn’t know she and the others could understand. How could they? How could they know the monsters jostling outside the door were still aware of what was going on? Look at Mr. Helm, their asshole boss. He stumbled around in the dim hallway with the rest, eyes glazed over, shoulders hunched, a nasty wound on his chin where white bone peeked out between flaps of gray flesh. He looked as dead as the rest, but Carmen knew better. He was locked away just like her, trapped with his own demons, brushing up against the rest and hungry as hell.

The three of them inside the break room argued for the dozenth time about what to do. There had been five of them for a while. Louis had made a run for it. The idiot tried crawling through the ceiling, white flakes of Styrofoam or whatever the hell those panels were made of snowing down in drifts while he crept noisily overhead. Carmen had been one of the small pack to follow, sniffing after him. When the idiot broke through and crashed into Margarite’s cubicle, she’d gotten a few bites in before the others crowded her away. And then there’d been four of them left to argue about what to do.

The three who now remained argued over the food, over how to get started. Anna said she wanted to start a fire. Sam called her a stupid bitch. He was from accounting, where Carmen imagined the phrase stupid bitch was common. He reeked of fear. Bullied the others. Carmen was hungry for him. She was hungry in general. Everyone was. But she had a baby inside her, taking up space, and maybe that made her more famished than the rest.

There were footsteps in the break room, the smell of Jackie approaching the door. She pounded on it with her fists. She yelled at those outside, almost as if she knew their souls were still trapped in there, as if she knew they would hear. But Carmen suspected she just needed to yell at something.

“Goddamn you!” Jackie screamed. “Let us go, you fuckers!”

Anna tried to calm her down. Sam told her to shut the fuck up. He said if they kept quiet, maybe the infected would leave. But Jackie knew what Carmen and the rest of the undead office knew: They weren’t leaving. None of them were. Maybe not ever.

The survivors returned to their discussion in the break room. There were plastic forks and plastic knives. There had been five of them, now there were three. Louis had gotten himself eaten when he fell through the ceiling. Bits of him were all over Margarite’s desk, smears on a monitor. On both sides of the break room door, there were groans from trapped and tortured souls. Sam told the girls that the plastic knives were a lot sharper than they looked. Anna wanted to build a fire. Sam told her she was a dumb bitch, that they would suffocate.

And so the shambling monsters of Della, Baigaint & Padder moved in agitated circles outside the break room. There was a smell in the air, a maddening smell. On the other side of the door, a starving trio continued to argue, even as they began to eat. There were five of them two days before. Carmen and the others had gotten one. Now she listened as Sam showed them just how sharp the plastic knives were, sharp enough to bite into flesh. Anna made gagging sounds. She wanted to build a fire. Jackie sobbed and filled the air with fear while Sam took the first bite.

There had been five of them, now three. Carmen shuffled in circles, her stomach full of unborn baby and the meat of her coworkers. And she wondered, listening to the survivors in the break room eat their gory meal, how the barred door between them made them any different.

32 • Margie Sikes

There was a boy in the back seat, no more than fifteen or sixteen, and not for the first time, Margie Sikes found herself feeding on the young. She ripped the poor boy apart, him kicking and screaming and pleading for her to stop, tears rolling down his unblemished cheeks, Margie trying her best not to think of what she was doing.

The boy had been cornered car-hopping. Margie had seen it before, had even seen it work a time or two. Survivors ran through the streets and dove into intact cars while they waited for the wind to shift and lure the infected away. She’d seen it work up close. A good seal on a car, and the smell of its contents would eventually fade. It was maddening to be driven off by a fickle breeze. In her mind, she knew a good meal lay cowering on the floorboard of that SUV, but her brain would catch a whiff elsewhere, and try as she might to urge herself to stay and wait the hopper out, her feet would carry her inanely upwind toward some other struggling soul.

The smart hoppers stuck with the newer model vehicles. Tempered glass. Better seals and gaskets around the doors. And if there was space in the parked traffic and keys in the ignition, one might even roar to life and go on a spree or just sit and run the heat for a while. The sprees were something to watch. Besides the distant helicopters and the wildlife, the streets were a dull and lifeless place. The only movement was that of a rotting corpse shuffling behind storefront glass or in a restaurant full of tipped chairs and tangled bones. To see an exhaust sputter in the crisp fall air, hear an engine roar, watch a grille smack down a few of her own—it was exhilarating to Margie. She was just happy to be whatever she was. Not-quite-dead. Senses intact. Here, for however much longer.

The boy in the old gray sedan stopped screaming, but his limbs continued to move as Margie tore into his abdomen. Arms that waved feebly with the last of his young life. Groans and murmurs escaping his lips, but he made them insensibly. These were the noises people made in deep comas, tiptoeing along that narrowing ledge that everyone scooted across, a ledge that eventually melded into flat stone high above a deep and shadowy ravine.

Glass from the sedan’s shattered window gouged into Margie’s stomach as she bent over the door and worked on the boy. She had a grandson this kid’s age. Nathan, her eldest daughter’s boy. Margie wondered if upstate New York was similarly cursed. She tended to think it wasn’t. That part of New York was a world apart. They shouldn’t even share a name, the city and the state. Two completely different things. Like the difference between the living and whatever Margie had become.

Others in her pack jostled behind her, fairly roaring in frustration. They clawed at her and the air, which was heady with the scent of a feed. It was a private snack for Margie, who was swifter than most. Always at the front. Always first to dine. She stuffed herself with the soft and easy meat in the boy’s stomach. She deserved it. It was she who had gotten him open.

The human body was a tricky thing to tear into without the proper tools. It reminded Margie of her honeymoon in Puerto Rico nearly sixty years ago, trying to get into that coconut. It wasn’t until a local showed her husband how to strike it on a rock, peel back the husk, then crack the nut on some sharp edge that they’d gotten the knack of it.

With a body, she’d found, the first bite was the hardest. Trickier than you’d think. A flat abdomen could have teeth scraped across it to no effect. Fat around the middle made it easier, but the easy kills were gone or had wasted down to bone. A bite along the ribs usually gave purchase. Once a hole was started, like digging that first finger into the skin of an orange, the rest could be gradually peeled away. It was a pain, however, when the orange was kicking you in the chest and clawing at your eyes. But the hunger always found a way.

Margie stuffed herself with the choice bits before she was crowded out. Glass from the old window broke off in her abdomen. The pack roared forward. A fat old woman grabbed some of the intestine hanging from Margie’s fist and chewed on that. A man caked in yesterday’s blood dove for Margie’s face to lick around and inside her mouth, lapping at the blood Margie was still trying to swallow. She recoiled in horror at this, and luckily her body did as well, lurching away from the man, a maggot stuck in her gums that must’ve come from him. The pack swelled in size and crowded close, and Margie was lucky to be squeezed toward the perimeter. There was the loud crack of more glass shattering. Someone began wasting their time going for the brains through the other door, that frustrating and alluring coconut.

As she stumbled away, overly full, Margie shat herself. There was no telling which feed it was, if it was the girl from yesterday or the old man from two days ago that ran down her legs. No one to sponge her. Staggering down the street, giddy and drunk from a feed, Margie thought of her old nurse and how what had seemed miserable in the days of the before was now a luxurious dream. Someone to bathe her, a feeding delivered on a plastic tray—old humiliations she would now kill for.

She passed a Bank of America with an odd scene, a man infected and stuck inside the glass ATM room, all alone. There were smears across the glass where he’d bumped against it or banged with his fists, a spread of gore from a long-ago feed. He gazed hungrily past Margie at the crowd in the streets. He was trapped there by the sudden loss of electricity, probably aware of what it would take to pry his fingers in the sliding doors and pull them aside, but unable to communicate this to his limbs. Margie felt bad for him. He was stuck in there forever. She thought again of that coconut.

Another faint scent pulled her past the ATM. It was difficult to nose over the fresh blood dripping from her chin. Ironically, the smell seemed to point toward the hospital, her old hospital. She thought of her nurse and the nice doctors there, helping her through those last years, a service that had become expected. Seven hundred dollars a day. More, when there were procedures. Gobs more when the procedures had complications.

Margie thought of her eldest daughter upstate and her grandson Nathan. Insurance covered much of it. Her savings and Carlos’s pension helped with the rest. It was a nest egg, a pile of nuts squirreled away that once tapped into was easy to keep chewing away at. Margie remembered watching those savings dwindle as she lay in bed, a daily sponge bath, re-runs on the TV in the corner, keeping her alive for another day. Another day just like the one before. Every day precious and miserable.

Margie pictured Nathan as she had last seen him, standing there beside her bed, fidgeting and glancing from the TV to the door. The boy had wanted to be anywhere else but standing there, that close to death. His nose had that wrinkle of someone scared to contract a disease. Margie wondered how much more disgusted he would have been had he’d known his college education was keeping her alive. Keeping her around to watch one more re-run, get one more bath.

She thought of the boy in the gray sedan near to Nathan’s age. Kicking. Screaming. Begging her to stop. As if she had any choice, any say in the matter. It was the way things worked. And so Margie Sikes lumbered down 68th, a faint smell in the air, a boy in her belly, remembering the times she had senselessly fed on the young.

33 • Carmen Ruiz

Forty-eight hours. A mere two days. That was the difference. Two days before they would’ve induced labor, before they would’ve stopped waiting. There was a time set—she’d written it down—her baby would be born, or begin to be born, at two o’clock, right on the dot.

Dot. Dotty. Dorothy.

Carmen still hadn’t decided on a name. They kept coming to her, every one imperfect. And now, it wouldn’t matter. Maddie. Madeline. She liked that one.

Something in Carmen’s belly moved. At least, she thought it did. It was impossible to tell. Her limbs were lifeless and yet full of some other life. Both dead and animated, her arms and legs stirred beyond her control. She wanted dearly to rub her belly, to feel her baby kick. Other times, she wanted it to be still.

Two days.

If she hadn’t been bitten by Rhonda, there would already be a new person in the world. A little baby to demand a name. If Carmen hadn’t been bitten, she probably would’ve given birth in the office building somewhere, maybe locked up in the break room with Anna and the others.

A scene played out in her head: Sam delivering the baby, Anna mopping her head with water from the cooler, Jackie holding her hand—

No, that wouldn’t work. The water from the cooler was almost out. They wouldn’t waste what was left on her.

She imagined lying on the floor, knees spread before her coworkers, the tile running red around her with amniotic fluid and blood and who knew what else. It was easy to imagine such a scene. Blood ran down her legs already from what she’d done to Alice. Two cubicles over for the last five years, and now she was the stickiness beneath Carmen’s maternity dress. Now Carmen’s belly bulged with more than one life.

The carpet beneath her feet was threadbare and stained. Coffee, ink toner, blood, cigarette burns, all from the past weeks: the panic, the fighting, the feeding. She roamed the same patches, the same winding circuit as the others, shuffling across a carpet that told stories, some gory impressionist painting.

Manet. What a beautiful name.

All around her, throughout the sea of neatly cubed personal spaces with their shoulder-high walls, the scent of the barely living stirred through lifeless vents and ducts. The odor caused Carmen and the others to gyre like leaves and sticks in a stream’s eddy, trapped but always moving.

Always moving.

A mere two days.

If she hadn’t insisted on working right up to the last moment, she might’ve been in Jersey with her mom right then. No bite. A doctor delivering her baby instead of Sam in the break room, instead of whatever would happen now. A hospital with food, water, the unimaginable glory of juice or any meal but meat. She’d be able to brush her teeth whenever she wanted. Take a shower. Talk. Say her baby’s name, hear what it sounded like in her ears rather than her mind. She couldn’t even whisper a name.

But she had insisted on working—she’d bragged about working right up to the last moment. She had fantasized about her water breaking at her desk. See? This was serious. An ambulance would come. A procedure had been scheduled. Maybe they would have to cut her open. It would require surgery.

So much to prove. So much guilt about being a mom, the maternity leave, the imagined whispers and the words she placed behind every glance at her belly. All Carmen could think of was the incredible amount of work the baby would mean for her, but what she imagined was everyone else thinking: Vacation. Leave time. Unfair. More work for us.

So much guilt. For what? For bringing life into the world?

Carmen fumed as her powerless meandering took her into Mr. Helm’s office. There was a vent in there that still oozed the smallest hint of life, probably from the break room, maybe from Louis’s antics in the ceiling. Bumping around the wide desk, arms wavering in front of her, she made a circuit past the tall windows, an executive’s reward for years of service, for never moving on to something better.

Through the expanse of glass, she spotted Jersey. Across the Hudson, where no boats stirred, no barges or ferries, the sun twinkling on ripples that gave her a sense of the forgotten and inaccessible wind. The buildings across the water stood like silent observers, like tourists huddled against a railing, their windows peeping eyeballs that scanned unblinking this new disaster across the way.

Carmen looked hard for signs of life while she had the chance. She scanned the shore, looking for little blips of people with binoculars, men talking into radios with a plan for saving them all, but it was perfectly still.

Perfectly still.

Hudson was a good name for a boy. Knowing the sex would be nice. It would narrow it down. But Carmen wanted to be surprised. She told everyone the child was a surprise.

Lumbering around the desk, she lost the view and stared at a wall, a calendar of appointments, a clock that still ticked on its little batteries. What did that glimpse of the far shore tell her? No movement. And what still moved anymore? Only the dead.

So Jersey must be alive, Carmen decided. Or was that simply what she wanted to believe? It was counterintuitive, this idea that stillness meant life and that movement across the water would just signify more shuffling and unthinking souls. This could be her wishful thinking, but she truly believed Jersey was alive for being able to remain quiet, able to hold its breath, to fall still. Jersey, and perhaps the rest of the country. Carmen thought it was just Manhattan that had succumbed. This is what she had pieced together with that occasional view. The rest were pulling back, keeping their distance, still able to choose where to go and choosing to go away.

Two days.

That’s how long, and she would’ve been there pulling back with them, clutching her precious baby, reading the headlines, wondering what horrible things her friends were going through, feeling guilty perhaps for leaving work, for leaving them behind to have a baby she always said she never wanted.

But no. She was here. And her legs were sticky with the guts of a friend. Her dress was a bib of gore. The flesh on her one hand was rotting away, charred black where Rhonda had gotten her through the door and the others had left her to become something else. And in her belly, in her belly, something stirred. A nameless baby moved.

It moved, she was sure of that now. And what still moved? What moved anymore in that wretched place?

It was counterintuitive, she knew. Or maybe it was just her fears. Carmen asked herself this question over and over as she lumbered around the island of cubicles once more, bumping into her coworkers, all of them dead just like her. Dead, and still moving. The only things that moved anymore.

34 • Rhoda Shay

clack. clack. thwump.

Central Park was covered in frost. Overgrown and unruly grass let off steam as the ground warmed, the sun slanting through trees oblivious to the ruin of the city all around this green patch. The trees stood as motionless sentinels in the calm air of daybreak, dark shapes flitting between their boughs, birds calling to one another, still thinking about sex and territory and food while monsters roamed below.

clack. thump.

Fallen and crisp leaves rustled with squirrels. Inured as ever to the presence of people, they sat on their haunches, cheeks twitching, and watched Rhoda stumble by. Desperately hungry, she occasionally lurched toward them when they ranged too close, but the squirrels could bolt out of reach in an instant. Her body felt as mindless and ineffectual as a dog, always thinking the next try would nab the impossible. Around a thick tree, two squirrels chased one another in furry spirals of clicking and scratching claws, a much more even match. Too even. They would never catch each other or truly get away.

clack. clack.

The joggers were the only thing missing. The joggers and those early risers who found the time to sit on park benches with coffees and newspapers and bagels, their suits and dresses lending them the air of the gainfully employed. Rhoda guessed it was between six and eight. The sun normally rose while she was slapping the snooze button or waking up in the shower. Of all the many and new powerless things, not knowing the time was just another. No cell phone to glance at. No one to ask. In ancient times, she imagined people just knew how far along the day was. One glance at the spinning constellations, and it was time to plant or harvest or head south.

Rhoda’s constellations had vanished. She didn’t even know they were there until they were gone. There were the joggers in the morning that let her know she would be early to work, kids being walked to school by their parents or older siblings, trucks squeaking to a stop by curbs so burly men could unload boxes of food and cases of beer. There were the subways full of people hurrying for trains, the express packed so full that the last ones in had to laugh, their skirts flapping between the rubber seals as the conductor—after four or five tries to get the doors together—finally zipped them away from the station.

thump.

There were the nighttime stars that gave her the hour as well. The crush that spread from Times Square when the shows let out. The boys and girls in tight jeans flowing to and from Brooklyn in the wee hours, looking for somewhere hip to hang out. The city changed by the hour. It changed by the day. The flower district seemed to explode more lushly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The streets fell quiet on the weekends, the cabs thinning to a yellow trickle for much of the morning. Time. Taken for granted. Everything changing until it didn’t, until the sameness stirred memories of the way things used to be.

clackclack. clack. thwump.

Rhoda enjoyed the walk through the park. The glass in her feet didn’t press so hard, and there was less of it to pick up. She watched a young girl chase a squirrel through the woods. The girl moved fast for one of the dead, was either recently turned or mad with hunger. Rhoda wanted to call out that it was no use, to leave the poor things alone, but she probably wouldn’t even if she could. It wasn’t as if the girl had a choice.

The sun rose while she walked aimlessly. That distant star no longer lit the undersides of the tall trees, but began to dribble light down through them. Rhoda passed the wide streets where cars were not allowed, the separate paths for bikes and anything on wheels. The joggers were the only thing missing from the hour. There was just one man, a pathetic man on rollerblades, sitting on his ass with a haunting and bewildered look on his ashen face. One of his arms was broken and flopped with an extra elbow as he tried to push himself up. There would be something comical about his plight if Rhoda didn’t know that a man was still inside there. Still trapped. Locked in the hour. He was like a broken clock that only felt right once a day as the rising sun came to him.

She watched him struggle and felt like weeping, imagining what it must be like to be locked in that head, strapped to those skates, pushing down with an arm that gave way where arms shouldn’t.

A young girl chased a squirrel and ran face-first into a tree, and nothing about that was funny to Rhoda.

The man in skates tried once more to get up, but the hour for skating had passed him by. What remained was sad and pathetic, an awful drumbeat beneath the singing birds, a sound that faded as Rhoda chased a scent of the living world she once knew and was starting to forget.

clack. clack.

thump.

35 • Margie Sikes

Margie chased the living down the street, her old bones moving better than they had in decades. The survivors had squeezed through a gap between two buildings, another group of undead flushing them out. She moved as quickly as she could, her legs rotting and yet not falling apart as they once had. This was something different. Now, she could practically totter. It felt so fast. Dozens of others shuffled along behind, a few keeping up. The running meat, five survivors, were hurrying through an alley a block and a half away.

Margie could picture them, even though they weren’t yet in sight. She’d seen enough survivors clutching their belongings and glancing over their shoulders with wide eyes. They were invariably thin and gaunt, looking like how Margie felt. Hunger drove them out. It stirred the living much as it moved the dead. For weeks, these survivors had taken to scurrying like roaches through the impressive towers of glass and steel, scrounging for crumbs, avoiding the slow horrors in the hallways and cubicles until the primal need for food or water forced them out into the streets.

Margie remembered. She remembered her own time hiding out, scrounging, getting up from a bed she had long fibbed about not being able to leave.

This group of five made a now familiar dash. They ran from one island tower to the next, the streets between like shark infested waters. Margie could smell each one of them like a distinct meal. Her hunger noted their hunger, this trotting meat marinating in a hormonal blend of fear and panic that she longed to taste.

Another pack emerged from an alley; they stopped and turned what was left of their soft noses into the breeze, half circles of bone visible beneath their haunted eyes. Holes where noses once lay groped for the scent, for the smells that had become something like flavored ropes in the air. These holes in rotting heads grasped for scented threads that led back to their source, to the meat running and clutching their belongings.

The world looked different and strange to Margie. She could see the odors in the air. This was how prey saw the world, she thought. This was how deer made scarce when man intruded. They knew long before they could see.

A small pack of undead lumbered after the survivors. Larger and slower armies converged from all over. There was no escape. Just a matter of time. Who ate and who didn’t. Who went hungry and who got a nick and managed to get away to become something worse than starvation.

The others, the slow, they were converging. The meal would be hemmed in.

Margie went as fast as her body could, passing a few less fortunate, the longer-since dead, those with clumsy wounds. Her body was degrading as well. Only a matter of time. She caught sight of her arms and hands as she hurried along, the holes in the flesh only half the story. The soft parts of her were going to waste on the inside as well. Bone rubbed on bone where tendons and cartilage used to lie. At times, Margie squeaked. Her curse had taken hold a week ago, give or take. The senseless nights made it difficult to be sure. Others in her pack fared better or worse, rotted more swiftly or slowly. It was a puzzle, everything a puzzle. Something to keep her mind occupied.

The group of five was going to emerge from the alley ahead. Margie could smell them coming. They had chosen to make their break in the predawn hours. Smart. The wind was at its most calm during the break of day. Scents were relatively feeble. But then, the living had no idea the traces they left, the odors they put out, how the molecules swam through the air. For them, it was all guessing. She remembered guessing like this, back before she knew.

Two females and three males. Even out of sight, she could nose them. She followed. Not followed, moved to intercept. They were coming toward her, half a block away. There was a surge of panic and disappointment in the air as one of their number tried a door and couldn’t get in. The living made it hard on their fellow man—their barricades were everywhere. It was only the desperate starvation that drove them to this. The last of the candy from smashed vending machines, another water cooler bled dry, that secret stash in a nurse’s bottom drawer of Cheetos and diet cola, the cramps and headaches from meals of sugar and little else.

Margie remembered. The hospital had descended into chaos. Food lying around everywhere, but not for the living. Food lying in beds, watching TVs.

Her small pack broke out of the alley and across 6th, the Avenue of the Americas. Street signs seemed pointless with all the unmoving cars. No one was going anywhere. She moved to intercept five students of this lesson, five who were about to learn. The end of them was inevitable. She had seen it play out too often the past weeks and from both sides. Sometimes she rooted for the living when they made a break for it—but pity turned to contentment as the meat was corralled. The living made mistakes, simple ones from her vantage, the same mistakes she’d made and that the man in the ragged overcoat beside her must’ve made, that all of them in her pack had made. Dire mistakes that now made sense. Hidden secrets, which seemed suddenly clear. Give her a second chance with what she now knew, give back her youth and this knowledge, and Margie thought she’d make it. She’d be one of those she heard about in rumors who swam the Hudson or East River to safety. She’d be one of those.

The small group of survivors spotted her pack as they emerged from the alley. Margie scurried after them. The living twitched in a way that made them stand out from their surroundings. Everything else swayed and lurched, lurched and swayed, the dragging of limbs, the pendulum swing of darkened stoplights, the dance of debris caught up in the wind. But meat alive had a raw panic in its joints. Heads turned this way and that, noses blind, eyes scanning the littered streets, wary of danger.

Two of the men in the group wrestled with a door while a pair of women supported a third man, who seemed to be the one filling the air with blood smells. There were plenty of buildings wide open, plenty of gaping maws bashed in with glittering and ragged teeth. But these were both ransacked and infested. Margie remembered. A group of five didn’t last this long without learning a few things. She found herself rooting for them a little more as her pack closed in.

They were smart, this group, but time was running out. Others were out sniffing for a meal. Margie spotted the rhythmic lumbering of their approach from a block north, a pack twice the size of her own. They would converge, she saw. The two men rattled the door, desperate to get inside. They knew better than to bash it down with a trashcan, to destroy the walls they would soon need. The smell of the bleeding one was intoxicating. Margie was near the front of her pack, joints squeaking, angling through the frozen traffic, piles of clean bones scattered across front seats, just half a block away.

Margie could see the wide eyes on the girls, the whispering and urgent lips. Too skinny, these survivors. She wondered if these women had been too skinny to begin with. The men wrestled with the door and watched both packs grow nearer, the dead closing like a vise. They were being stupid, now. It was time to run. Time to grab one of those steel trashcans and bash a hole through perfect teeth. The time for smart was petering out.

A hundred feet away. The bleeding man hopped on one foot, scanning the doom lumbering at his group from all sides. A third pack tumbled around the corner from 22nd. This would be a big feed, an ugly one. Five bodies and five hundred mouths. Margie felt a rush of dread even as she quickened her squealing and squeaking pace. Two of her fingers had disappeared in a feed like this, back in those first days. She still wasn’t sure if she’d done it herself or if it’d been a neighbor. Her brain had wandered into some kind of orgasmic state, the feed witnessed through a straw of awareness, pure pleasure squeezing down around her. She moved now as fast as she could, wishing she could turn and run the other way, confused by the stupidity of the men wrestling with that unyielding door.

Paces away, now. Packs converging. The roar of pure hunger, of intense starvation, like waves crashing on a beach. Margie marveled for the millionth time at this city that could not feed itself, these towering islands reliant on daily deliveries, reefers idling along the curb, men with carts pushing boxes of food from open farmland over the rivers and a distant world away. No more than two or three days of food stockpiled on the island, isn’t that what someone had told her? And it had been run through quickly. And now these poor and ragged things were being swarmed by sharks as they hunted for a scrap or two.

Margie nosed ahead of the others. A man wearing the remnants of a business suit at the head of the opposite pack would beat her to them, but there was enough meat for them all. Here was where rooting for the survivors ended, where her own needs took over. The world around her narrowed as she anticipated the orgasmic feast. The five survivors were surrounded, walking corpses staggering between all the parked and wrecked cars, every avenue of escape writhing with the undead, closing on the wide-eyed and the stupid, stupid meat.

Movement inside the glass building was mistaken for a reflection at first. But it was the hurry and twitch of the living. One of the men by the door shouted to the heavens, a curse or a blessing or a command.

Margie was near enough to taste them when the wires went taut. The bleeding man straightened, the women stepped away, angry fire replacing the fear in their eyes. Margie groped ahead of herself, pawing the air, as the group floated up, sneakers squeaking on a wall of glass, the shouts from concerted others a few stories up, their smells drifting down as the overpowering scent of the bleeding man faded.

Three packs converged. Margie was hungry enough to eat the man in the tattered business suit, whose flesh had not been rotting for long, might still taste alive. They bumped and jostled while wires sang and sneakers squeaked. There was movement inside the building.

Margie watched. She saw her own reflection, the hideous condition of herself, half naked and dilapidating, a hole in her skull where her nose had been, what flesh remained already old and wrinkled and revolting from a life much too long in the living. And beyond her reflection, a man with fire. A twinkling fuse, a rag like a candle. Legs that could still run, fading deep into her reflection, disappearing into the building’s hallway guts.

The merging packs formed a crush of rot, the heady scent of blood and flesh replaced by the stench of the unburied dead, the blood and shit and half-digested flesh in their pants and under their skirts, the groans vibrating through the mass as they all pushed in toward an empty and confusing feed.

Margie was pinned against the glass, the living scampering above to safety, a drop or two of sacrificial blood plummeting down from the heavens.

The fuse shortened. The candle burned down to the red jug stenciled with the word “gas.” Margie tried to scream, her loose flesh coming off as she was smeared against the window, remembering how stupid she’d been. Remembering.

Until, in a flash, she could remember no more.

36 • Carmen Ruiz

There was a stabbing pain in Carmen’s gut like the twist of a knife. She felt her knees wobble and very nearly buckle as the thing in control of her responded to a hurt for once. Her body seemed startled by the sensation. A few steps more, and the jolt came again. Her chin dipped toward the source, eyes falling to her swollen belly protruding naked and taut between her sagging skirt and bunched-up blouse. It was dim on the back side of the cubicles near the copier room, but she could see her protruding bellybutton like a small thumb sticking from her belly.

Another lance, a lightning bolt, and Carmen’s shoulder bumped into the wall and knocked a motivational poster loose, the cheap frame bouncing to the floor. Donald from the sales department lumbered past, sniffing at the air, jostling against her. His face was a mess of parallel gashes from where a colleague had put up a fight. His head turned to follow Carmen as she staggered past. Her pain was intolerable.

Carmen regretted the lies. She thought Donald and the others could smell it on her, the lie of this pregnancy. She worried that her mother knew, that everyone knew this thing inside her was no accident, but rather a planned and pathetic secret.

The pain in her belly sent Carmen back to a game she used to play, a soothing game. Alone in the sandbox or at the beach, she remembered the calming scoops of sand, the way its cool heft conformed to her hand. Carmen used to love spilling that sand from palm to palm, marveling at the dwindling supply no matter how carefully she tried to catch it all. A mound would become a trickle, a pinch, and then a mere row of tiny grains caught in the two lines of her young hands.

She banged into the water cooler stand, the empty bottle long since knocked free, as pure agony dragged her from past to present like a dog shaking a toy with its teeth.

The game. The loose fist. Sand running out through the curl of her pinky to fall and pile up in her other palm. So careful and exacting, but it all disappeared. Forty passes, maybe fifty, the wind snatching it away invisibly.

A lurch in Carmen’s belly. A kick. The game had gone from soothing to sad as she grew older. She began to see it everywhere, could feel life mimic this obsession of hers. Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.

Carmen was punched in the gut. She saw the thumb-like button of flesh protruding from her belly. A malformed hand was going to come out right where that button was, a tiny claw ripping her open from the inside. Carmen could feel her baby gnawing on her organs. At least, that’s what she thought this was. The pain was her little monster chewing through her, a grotesqueness that would emerge from her skin like some horror movie.

She silently wept.

She imagined her precious baby eating its way through her flesh and falling to the ground, helpless. She pictured it dragging behind her on its slimy cord, wailing and ignored, until it caught on the edge of a cubicle as she turned a corner.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

She was scared enough being alone, having this baby by herself, her and some anonymous donor. She was terrified and tired from keeping the lies straight, the stories of one-night stands and ex-boyfriends, of not wanting anything to do with the father. The truth was pathetic: she just needed someone in her life, a person who couldn’t choose to go away.

Oh fuck. That someone was coming. A rage formed in her powerless limbs, a shuddering violence beneath her skin. It was that feeling she got in her legs sometimes, the need to shake them, to move them, but no amount of activity made the sensation go away. So she would try and hold still, to ride it out, but the pain would grow and grow until she was forced into paroxysms of jitteriness that still didn’t touch the need, that still left her feeling cramped with something worse than broken bones.

Carmen wanted to shout. She wanted to plunge from some great height. The torture in her abdomen grew worse. Her baby was alive. Both alive and undead. And she would not be giving birth to it so much as watching it emerge unbidden from a tear in her flesh.

A wave of blackness, pain so intolerable that Carmen came to on the carpet. Her body struggled to right itself. She moved to her knees, began to stand. And then a sudden release, another surprise urination, warm and sticky running down her legs.

Donald circled back and stood over her. Harris was there, kicking through spilled paperwork. The smell of blood, not urine, was in the air.

Her knees gave out once more, her shoulder striking the ground. She flopped onto her back. In the dim space between the cubicles and the copier room, Carmen lay gazing up at the ceiling, at the hole Louis had fallen through. There was the smell of blood in the air, the ripe smell of a thing alive in a space long devoid of such a scent. Pressure between her legs, the throb of something like a pulse, but Carmen had no pulse. She couldn’t see. Oh fuck, what was happening to her? She couldn’t see, but could feel a thing, a solid thing, press between her thighs. And she thought she heard, maybe, just barely, the cry of her unnamed child as its lungs filled with air for the first time, born into utter hell, not undead at all.

She thought she heard the cry. It was impossible to tell. All was drowned out by the hungry gurgles and shuffling feet as her coworkers converged on their prize, on this thing they had secretly hated her for and now desired to have for their own.

37 • Rhoda Shay

The eating wasn’t too bad. It was better than the walking. It meant kneeling down and taking the weight off her glass slippers. And besides, as foul as the taste was, Rhoda had prepared for this. Life in the aftermath meant eating for sustenance, not for pleasure. It meant holding one’s breath and forcing down dry and pre-packaged meals. It meant eating bugs, which Rhoda had done in abundance to prepare herself. Six times, she had taken that tour with the smelly guy from Craigslist who for twenty bucks would turn over logs in Central Park and show you what you could and couldn’t eat. They tasted like peanuts, he said, and Rhoda hadn’t believed him. Just like peanuts. He’d been right. The power of suggestion, perhaps.

Rhoda told herself that this feast would be like sushi. It was a game show. All she had to do to win a million dollars was gobble it down and keep it down. Which she knew wouldn’t be a problem, she just needed to forgive the taste.

Two jumpers. She’d seen the remnants of another jumper a week ago, but it’d been at night and after a soft rain and much of the mess was gone before her nose led her to the smear. This was fresh. Two others were already there, lapping up pink globs amid scraps of clothes. The bodies had exploded, the clothing shredded. Like a bomb going off. Maybe they’d gone from the top. A man and a woman, judging by the clotted tangle of hair at the end of one mess and the beard on what looked like a chin a pace away.

The insides were everywhere. Made it easy. Like finding a buffet on the pavement. Scrambled human. Rhoda fell to her knees, so thankful to her body for doing so, and the pressure and pain in her mangled feet lessened. The perpetual burning became a distant hum. Eating meant forgetting these other things. Being disgusted lessened her physical pain.

A crowd headed their way in the distance. Rhoda ate while she could. Two jumpers. She wondered if they’d gone together, a lover’s leap. Maybe they’d held hands. It was hard to tell where their hands were. The man’s arm had split open like a lobster tail cooked too long, a neat rupture from impact, a baked potato with all the fixings.

This was ketchup, Rhoda said to herself as she buried her nose in the gash and ate. She chewed down to the bone—the plate, she corrected herself. It wasn’t bad. The constant jolt of electricity in her feet receded to a thrum. It was amazing what one ill could do for another. Amazing what could be justified.

Rhoda ate her way from the man to the woman, ate in that place where the two mingled. The birds plucked scraps of flesh from a dozen feet away, little pink worms. They squawked at each other as the crowds grew closer, and Rhoda thought of the jumpers she’d seen on TV once. Little black shapes falling. Like swooping birds. They caught her eye before the anchor noticed, before the cameraman zoomed in. Yes, those where what the anchorman thought they were. A jacket rippling in the wind, trailing the falling man like a shadow, peeled away as it left one arm and then the other.

Several of them. She had watched, horrified, while they showed it live. A man in a pike position, head at his knees, turning over and over.

Rhoda never understood why.

Why?

Why jump?

But now she knew. It was the glass in her feet, the little shards of wisdom grinding into her bones. She ate warm muscle, teeth scraping on the insides of the skin—a baked potato, she reminded herself. It wasn’t that bad. Not as bad as the walking.

Rhoda remembered the jumpers. Why leap like that? Because the sitting had to’ve been worse. Trapped in there, the heat intolerable, mangled bodies of people they’d worked with for years, getting hotter and hotter. The only relief was by the shattered windows, the breeze that sucked at the wrecked filing cabinets, the whoosh of winds high above the streets.

Cool by the window, but growing warmer. Fires advancing. No way out. Like slippers of glass and just wanting to fall to one’s knees, to do anything but suffer.

Rhoda ate. If she could have done it with grace, she would have. She pictured herself in a glorious pike, high over a shimmering pool of water, flying down like the swooping bird that stopped, cawed, and with its perfect beak, caught the eye of that plummeting jumper.