I, Zombie

38 • Darnell Lippman

Darnell told Lewis something like this would happen. She told him. Probably happened all the time. Who knew how often New York City went through this sort of thing without word ever reaching Homer? Alaska was practically a world apart. The East Coast was a foreign land where their days slipped by before Darnell’s had even begun. Coming here was his idea. He wanted to see Ground Zero, see the new tower going up, had found a deal on tickets. But Darnell had told him something like this would happen. She knew it. They’d get crushed by the traffic, mugged, lost, separated. She knew they’d get separated, torn apart by the crowds. She wouldn’t be able to find him and would be stranded there forever, she knew it. And now look.

As soon as they’d landed, she’d had this feeling. Was it three weeks ago? It was in Times Square, that’s when the real panic had started, when she just knew she’d lose him. They’d taken a cab straight from the airport, suitcases and all. Lewis said he couldn’t wait, said they could just walk to the hotel from there. He’d wanted to see this since he was a kid, all the lights and those big video screens. It was where the New Year was ushered in. Prematurely, as far as Darnell was concerned. A new year just in time for dinner back in Homer.

But Darnell had gone along just like she always did. Anything to see him happy. But the crowds! The throngs. Streets packed from sidewalk to sidewalk, closed to traffic, and not even a holiday! Just the regular mob. The daily flow. As crazy as if salmon spawned year-round, like flapping fish that didn’t know when to quit.

She had chased him for blocks, her suitcase swerving behind her and nearly twisting out of her grip, wrist still sore from getting through that crazy airport with a bazillion foreigners, losing sight of him over and over, his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.

And that’s why the green hat she’d bought him. The “I LOVE NY” hat that used a heart in place of “LOVE.” Darnell made him stop right there in Times Square and try it on. She told him it was his color. She told him he needed it, that he looked so handsome.

Lewis asked if he was going bald, if that had anything to do with the sudden interest. She told him “no.” The street vendor took their money and stopped Lewis from taking the sticker off the brim, said he was supposed to leave that on. Lewis narrowed his eyes, and Darnell knew he would be peeling it off as soon as he got away. She didn’t care. All she wanted was a bright canopy on that bobbing raft, a flag on his head like the one that always helped her spot his boat when he pulled back into the harbor.

They had dragged their suitcases—still cool from the altitude—through a New York night throbbing with neon and noise and a frightening amount of life. And Darnell had watched for the green hat. She had followed along, a few paces behind, no idea where they were going, no idea what she would do if they got separated. Would he hear his phone ring over all that noise? Would she know how to hail a cab? She didn’t even know where the hotel was. This was her nightmare, the flashing billboards, videos and commercials the size of football fields, people waving tickets at her, asking her if she liked comedy, no safe way to clutch her purse and still drag her bag, the jostling and bumping, people looking at her, Lewis disappearing between two people ahead, that way cinching shut, have to jump the curb, hurrying down a street closed off to cars, a cop on a clomping and snorting horse, where did he go?

And Lewis, meanwhile, darting merrily through the crowd, oblivious to her fears, looking up at the flashing billboard of a practically nude woman illuminated with countless lights, his mouth hanging open like he’d passed out drunk on the recliner.

The green hat, Darnell told herself.

Don’t lose it.

The green hat.

It bobbed on a sea of the dead, on a crowd of a different kind.

Darnell could see it rise up in the distance, then slink out of sight. It had been knocked askew during the last day or two. She didn’t think it would stay on much longer, wondered if the sticker was still there, that hologram of authenticity.

She followed numbly, but it wasn’t Lewis she seemed to be after. Her limbs lurched of their own accord, an unknown number of days passing, losing sight of him and then regaining it.

That green hat.

Darnell didn’t heart anything about New York. Not now, not even before this nightmare. She knew something like this would happen. As the sun gradually rose on another day of being trapped, of unholy horror, she felt resigned to never seeing home again. She would have woken up by now if this were a dream. She had given up on thinking this hell wasn’t real.

The sun rose and lit the faces of impossibly tall buildings, but not her. Not yet. Darnell was thankful for the night, for the cold that reminded her of Alaska. The smell lessened at night, the shuffle of the mob seemed to slow, the hunger abated. And while there was no sleep, time seemed to pass in long jerks of unconsciousness.

Her prayers had changed over the course of days. At first, she had prayed for it to end, to wake up in that filthy and cramped hotel they’d paid too much for, or to wake up in her home or on a plane. Later, she’d prayed for her soul to go away, for it to leak out her nose or ears and drift up to heaven, to fly away from all the bad her body had done. Now she simply prayed for the cool nighttime, the numbness, the brief interludes of not knowing where she was, what she was doing.

She prayed for the snow.

She thought it would be colder in October in New York, but it had been warm everywhere. A warm year. Not much snow, even back home. And snow made everything look whole. It was the flesh of the soil, the epidermis of Alaska. It turned brown like decay in the sun. But there was no snow in New York City. No flesh. No gleaming white skin to cover the asphalt bones, the gristle in the gutters, the stained underbelly of Manhattan. All that remained was the rot, the putrid browns and the ash charcoals of an Alaskan thaw. And a green hat floating on it like a patch of kelp in Coal Bay, a spot of life among the dead, a remembrance of hope, a symbol of her sorrow, something to pretend she was following.

Anything. Anything but the scent of the terrified and hidden living, clinging to the dark corners for one more day, watching with hope that same sunrise Darnell Lippman sensed with utter dread, a day of hoping not to be eaten, a day of dreading to be fed.

39 • Lewis Lippman

The fat lay in golden layers beneath the skin. It was like roe, stored away amid the deep organs and the bright muscle. The color of butter and the texture of firm cottage cheese, it came away easily and went down hungrily.

Lewis pawed into the woman’s steaming abdomen. He made happy, wet smacking sounds and slurped raw fat down his throat. It was as glorious as it was vile. He ate and ate, squishy fists of the stuff oozing through his fingers, his belly straining against a belt he couldn’t command his hands to loosen, his distended flesh pinched tight against his blue jeans like a bloated fish that’d been pulled behind his boat for miles.

His bladder and bowels released while he ate. They went at the same time to make more room—and his blue jeans, already caked to his skin, filled with gore. He felt all this, tasted all this. He knelt over the morbidly obese woman they’d caught running through the streets, screaming her fool head off, and he made her fat his fat.

And as Lewis Lippman wallowed in the woman’s meat, slurping her golden goodness, he thought about how he’d always hated fat people. And now, how he couldn’t get enough.

It was a matter of will, he’d always thought. He hated them for that, for being weak. Why couldn’t they just stop?

Lewis remembered giving them dirty looks in the marina. He would fire up a cigarette and glare at the waddling tourists who tottered down a finger pier into one of the whale-spotting boats. The docks would groan and shift on the Styrofoam floats as they went.

He even said something once in the Chinese restaurant where he and the boys often went for the lunch buffet. He watched as a man well over three hundred pounds grabbed his dirty plate, squeezed out of the booth, and went to attack his seconds or thirds.

“Don’tcha think you’ve had enough?” he grumbled, just loud enough for the man and his fat family to hear. Kyle and the others laughed, even though Kyle was lugging around a few extra pounds himself. But nothing gross, not like this.

Flashing back to the gruesome present, Lewis watched himself as he dug sideways under the woman’s skin. Here was that feller from the buffet that day. No telling them apart from their insides like this. He scooped the fat with his hands, tearing it away from the skin and the meat below, like cleaning a fish.

Lewis used to shock the tourists he took out in his boat by cutting off a piece of a fresh catch and popping it in his mouth. He’d offer them a chunk on the end of his fillet knife and take pleasure in the way they recoiled from him. Once they were out on the sea with him and Kyle, they were stuck. Hauling in the fish they’d dreamed of catching—that they’d paid good money to catch—Lewis would watch them as the seas picked up and they turned a hundred shades of green. He’d delight in their sickness, watch them turn up their noses to the smell when the belly of a nice big jack was opened like a purse, his knife the zipper, the ripe contents sliding toward feet picked off the deck in a hurry.

It was fun, that, having them trapped out there, the sea roiling the lunches in their landlubbing guts, the smell of fish innards that Lewis had become inured to crowding their noses with a ripe stench. He and the others would turn and smile as their fares lost it over the gunwale. Crowds of little fish would come to the surface and chew the lost breakfasts of strangers from Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.

And now Lewis was the passenger, the one shitting himself at sea, this concrete sea. A world he’d dreamed of seeing, that he’d fantasized about from a distance, Times Square with all those crowds as the ball dropped, as the date changed for the East Coast well ahead of the great big nothing that happened in Coal Bay.

He was the tourist, now. He was trapped in this skull of his, watching the guts spill, smelling the horror, feeling sick and being unable to vomit. He was the man growing bloated like a fish dragged on the end of a line, the man with his plate, bending over seconds and thirds. No willpower. No willpower in the world was enough.

Lewis tried to remember days on the docks, smoking cigarettes, watching fat tourists from the Dakotas bend the finger piers as they crowded onto whale-spotting boats. He tried to remember it again without him glaring, without the sneers and jokes to Kyle and the others. In his mind, he took another glorious drag from that smoke before flicking it into the sea with a sputtering hiss. He tried to travel back there, to pretend the little globules of yellow fat sucked out of his palms were caviar and that the rats burrowing in among his knees to feed alongside him were little fish, nosing up to the surface, eating the chum from the guts of strangers, and that this time he wouldn’t turn and smile and judge anymore.

40 • Darnell Lippman

Darnell had hoped and prayed from the moment she was attacked that someone would come for her. But not like this. This wasn’t a rescue. It was the hand of some angry god reaching down from the clouds and plucking her off the ground. She was discarded fruit, all of them were. Nasty fruit fallen from a tree and riddled with worms, and now they have come to choose the rotten among the rotten.

They lured them into their trap with blood. Blood and something else. Darnell thought of her husband chumming for sharks off Spit Point. She knew what these people were doing, and still it worked. It was like that cartoon she’d clipped for Lewis, the one with a fish commenting on a hook before going for the bait. It knew, and still it went. It had no choice. There was only the hunger.

This wasn’t the first trap they’d set. She’d seen them try before, the helicopters swooping in among the same low buildings, the same alleys. Whatever they’d used the first time didn’t work. The smell wasn’t right. Darnell wondered if it was animal blood at first, or human blood with the life melted out of it, maybe with the soul evaporated. That first time, she could smell the copper in the air, but it didn’t move her feet. It wasn’t the same.

They came back the next day with something different; her group could smell it. Their shuffling went from aimless to concerted action as they spilled into the baited alley, the thwump-thwump-thwump of the fishermen hovering in helicopters overhead, a rotor like an outboard, the hook both visible and irresistible.

Darnell and the others bit. The alley tightened between a set of rusty green dumpsters. She was near the front, crowding against the pawing others, the groans and grunts filling the narrow space between the buildings with an eerie roar. One of the dumpsters squealed as the crush of undead pressed hard enough to jar its wheels. Those alongside her kicked through trash, waving their arms after the fetid odor, a long rope like a line with a sinker and bobber dangling down between the brick walls.

They could see it. Darnell knew everyone else could see the lure as well. And still, they went after.

The alley forked where it met the crumbling wall of the building along its back. The sun was low, the shadows deep, and the smell was everywhere. It trailed off in both directions, further dividing the narrow stream of disfigured and disgusting animals.

Darnell was being culled from the herd. She felt the panic of a hook sinking into her lip, the lonely fear of being left to drown. Where was Lewis? She wept silently and tearlessly, powerfully alone, wishing he were there, but she hadn’t seen his hat for days.

She hurried at the front of the group that veered left, following the smell of blood and the smell of something else as well. It was a heady odor she’d nosed from a man with a split skull, a feed from a week ago. The smell of brains.

Onward, deeper into the alley, thwump-thwump-thwump from the propeller above her. Darnell imagined it was Lewis. He was here to catch her, to lift her out of her misery and into his reeking boat, to wrap her in a blanket and tell her that he loved her, to make her feel safe.

She and three others were standing on the net when it rose up from the camouflage of newspapers and soggy cardboard. The man beside her with the broken leg was caught on the edge. As the net cinched tight, he tumbled out, his foot catching in one of the square holes, grunts from the rest of them as they were pressed together and lifted skyward.

The man with the broken leg wiggled free and tumbled with a sick crunch to the pavement. Darnell and the other two were packed gill to gill in the tight net. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as they rose higher. The man beside her made a gurgling sound. He was chewing the rope, the air so laden with the scent of blood and brains that Darnell feared one of the monsters would begin to chew on her. Or that she might turn on them.

Fortunately, she was too pinned to do so. Instead, she watched through a hole in the net as the rooftops of the low buildings came into view and as the helicopter pulled them up into the low rays of the setting sun. The city below seemed to shrink. The cars scattered everywhere became toys, the people moving amongst them like clumsy insects. The totality of the horror loomed below, smoke drifting from fires, a bus turned on its side, something moving within. The helicopter angled out over one of the rivers that framed the city on either side—Darnell didn’t know their names, couldn’t tell which direction they were flying. The net drifted behind on its long strand of cable, the air numbingly cold. She saw a bridge she recognized from postcards, the stone arches like something on a church. It was a landmark, a distinctly New York monument, and it was in ruin. The center half was gone, tangles of broad cables dangling toward the icy waters, piers of pavement laced with iron bars that jutted out like mangled limbs.

The two other bridges she could see were the same, the middles blown to bits. The island had been cast off. Darnell thought of all the mornings she’d brought coffee down to the dock, chatted with Lewis while he’d loaded the boat, then tossed him his lines. She would stand there, watching him chug out toward the inlet, her hands smelling like the fishy ropes, the steam dissipating from her rapidly cooling mug.

The net spun lazily beneath the helicopter, the earth seeming to revolve on its axis below. One of the creatures pinned beside her gnawed on her arm, the scent of blood still in the net. Darnell could feel the bites but could not move. She watched, frozen and numb in more ways than one, as a loathsome spit of land drifted away, and knew that this time her fears would be confirmed. Darnell Lippman knew she would never see her husband again.

41 • Lewis Lippman

Healing was the strangest of things. His stricken condition gave Lewis time to ponder the basic stuff, stuff you never thought about. Like healing. When you got down to it, healing was far stranger than what he did now. What he was doing now seemed natural. This was how things should be. Not because it was better or preferable, but because it just made more sense.

There was a gash on Lewis’s forearm from swimming through a pile of wrecked cars to get at a survivor. And now, with his hands out in front of him as he staggered along, he was able to study the wound, able to see the white bone where it lay exposed between the torn flesh. Strands of what he thought was muscle hung out in cables and ropes. It was like the insides of every fish he’d caught, but it was him. And this made more sense, that things were cut and they stayed cut. How much stranger was the notion that they could knit back together, that wounds could disappear?

It was like those lizards that lost their tails and grew them back. These were mutant abilities taken for granted, abilities no less strange than the closing of a nick. His friend Kyle had that scar on his leg from his long-lining days, that nasty length of white tissue bumped up along his knee from where the hook got him and wouldn’t let go. How was that normal, a body knowing what part of itself it was supposed to be? Knowing how to grow across and stitch to its neighbor, and then knowing when to stop? He knew people who had complained about their scars, about this miraculous gift. It never occurred to them that their wound could just as easily hang open.

There was a white cord of tendon dangling from Lewis’s arm, and this was how things were meant to be. A man would be careful if he knew ahead of time that wounds didn’t grow back. People would act different, think twice. No more bumbling about with arms flailing, not looking where they were going.

Lewis rarely looked where he was going. He tried to remember the first time he’d yelled at his wife. It’d been back before they’d gotten married, but just a time or two. Hadn’t really lit into her until later. There was the time she’d wrecked the truck, said it was a patch of black ice, but he’d let her have it anyway. Never struck her, but she recoiled just the same. Made him feel like shit, the way she flinched from his words. Pissed him off even more for her to make him feel that way.

“It’s just a scratch,” she’d tried to tell him.

A scratch. In a thing that don’t heal, he could see that now. Another scratch, and the wound is open. Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.

A gash is what it becomes. And then a stump, until you can’t feel it anymore. Until there’s just an itch where things used to be, a phantom love you feel silly for recalling. Now it’s someone who takes care of the kids, does the dishes, talks your head off when you get back from being on the water a few days. Now it’s just someone you live with. It’s excuses to get away so you can meet the boys at the bar. It’s inconvenient phone calls in the winter when she’s visiting her sister in Anchorage, too scared to walk out of the grocery store and across the parking lot in the dark. That was a wound, that one. Yelling at her for being afraid. Yelling at her to keep up all the time. Yelling at her for being scared of the crowds in the city.

Goddamn, he missed her. Why didn’t he ever tell her that? Those long nights on the water with the decks slippery and lit up from the flood lights, Kyle telling a joke, and all Lewis wanted was to get home to a hot meal, to their bed, to a hug and her joking that if his neck smelled any more like fish he’d have gills.

And he’d feel it for a little while, that joy of being home, but never say it. Little cells of thought that didn’t know how to reach out to the other side and start pulling back together. A tongue for lashing but not for stitching.

He missed her terribly now that he felt this fear of the crowd, the helplessness that she must’ve felt. And he had yelled at her for it, for being afraid. All he’d had to say was that it was gonna be okay, but he’d made it worse instead. It was easier to imagine, now, how the world must’ve seemed to her. The fear of not being in control. The fear of being lost all the time. Lewis no longer had any idea where he was—all the blocks looked the same to him. He had no map, no chart, no points of reference. The first time he’d popped up from a subway station, back before all the madness began, he’d felt the first tickle of this, of not knowing where he was. You pop up and you can’t see the horizon. Just tall buildings on all sides, no feeling of where east or west was, no idea which way to start out, all turned around from winding down a flight of stairs in one part of the city, riding that train somewhere, and then winding his way back up. Dizzy, and he couldn’t ask anyone, couldn’t do that, not in front of her. It was scary, feeling that for the first time. Completely and utterly lost.

Darnell must’ve felt like that a lot.

It was getting colder every day, and Lewis wondered if the pain would eventually get so great that he wouldn’t feel anything anymore. Enough wounds, and you just go numb. He hoped that happened soon. He was just glad it wasn’t August with all that heat. The smell and the torture would be worse in August. Maybe he would still be alive and around then and he’d find out. But he hoped not. He’d rather be buried in the snow come winter, cover these wounds up. That was the thing about a scratch or a gash: sometimes there weren’t no healing from them at all. Sometimes you had to hope for them to get worse and worse until the mechanisms shut down, until you couldn’t feel nothing. That was easier, somehow. Easier than doing the unnatural thing—than doing whatever it took to stitch a wound back to how it was before.

42 • Darnell Lippman

She thought the helicopter would take them far away, would whisk them out over the river to the forest of low buildings and those red-and-white factory smokestacks beyond. But the net swayed to the side as the helicopter banked low over the water. And pinned to the rough twine of the net, a man chewing on her arm, the scent of blood in the cool air, Darnell peered through the holes of her confinement and spotted the thing they were aiming for.

It was a pair of barges strapped together, the kind that pushed through Homer Sound with tugs chugging at their stern. Orange rust, like lacy adornment, decorated the barges. Taut cables stretched from the corners of their metal decks out to the rock-shrouded legs of one of the ruined bridges. The river flowed angrily against the contraption, upset at this intrusion along its surface. On one side, the water pushed and frothed in a white mustache. Eddies and curls of water danced and spun along the calmer side, the river racing and turbulent and chilly.

They drifted down toward the combined decks of the two barges, and Darnell saw the small sheds dotting their surface. They looked like the containers from ships, the backs of tractor trailers, or those little temporary classrooms the middle school bought because it couldn’t afford anything else. Plastic tubes ran between the containers, the wind from the props causing them to shimmer and whip about. It was a hastily constructed place, this metal island set in the roiling waters. A good sign, Darnell thought. The ruined bridges and this rusted place were good signs. They didn’t want the horror to spread, which maybe meant that it hadn’t.

Her thoughts drifted to one of Lewis’s favorite TV shows as the helicopter made its slow descent. It was a show about the men and women who worked border control down south, a terribly long way from Alaska. She remembered how those men would round up people at night with goggles that turned the world green, that made eyeballs shine like headlamps in the tall grass. They rounded them up and treated them something like this, something less than human but not quite animal.

She remembered dark-skinned immigrants with plastic straps around their wrists. They were shoved into vans by men with guns so big they rested them on their shoulders. These men chewed toothpicks and wore shades and smiled and talked into the cameras. Lewis loved these men, even though they lived and worked a terribly long way from Alaska. “Keeping the country clean,” he’d said, finishing another beer and crushing the tin with his fist.

The net of writhing monsters landed harshly on the wet and rusty decks, right beside a large white ‘H’ painted in the middle of a big circle. Darnell couldn’t feel her own skin from the frigid ride, couldn’t tell if the man pinned beside her was still biting her arm or not.

People in plastic suits came at them warily with long poles and hooks. They tugged the nets loose with these tools, and the helicopter made thwumping sounds as the rotor kept spinning. A man in a shiny helmet peered through the helicopter’s window toward the net, gloved hand on the glass. As soon as they got the net free, the rotor grew more angry, and the helicopter lifted away.

Darnell’s nose was frozen stiff, and the men with the poles were completely covered, but she could still catch a faint whiff of the living on them. Her ghastly neighbors could, too. Their ragged breath fogged the air with hungry grunts. Darnell suspected something different was wrong with these other two, that the locals, the New Yorkers who’d gotten sick, had lost their minds more fully. It never occurred to her that they were as trapped as she, or that any of them might be tourists as well, or that her breath was also clouding the air and filling it with inhuman sounds. In her mind, it was just she who was out of place and alone. Everyone else was different.

The men in the suits sure treated them the same. They used poles like for wrangling rabid dogs and hooked their limbs. One suited figure snagged Darnell’s wrist, another dropped a loop around her neck. She watched as they tried to snare the arm of her neighbor, but he had no hand to catch it on, so the loop kept sliding off his black and mangled wrist. Muffled shouts and pointing from the men in the yellow suits, and they managed to tighten the loop over his elbow.

The three of them were half-dragged across the steel deck, slippery with sea salt and ice. Darnell’s feet tangled in the net imbued with someone’s blood and brains. She fought against these men, but not of her own accord. She was precisely the animal they were treating her like.

Darnell remembered being not sick. She wanted to tell them, tell them she remembered being petrified that she might catch it, holding her breath, cowering in a department store, wondering where Lewis had gotten to, why he wasn’t answering his cell phone. This wasn’t her. She wasn’t like this.

Any slack in the poles, and her long gray fingernails swiped at their masked faces, an inhuman power wrestling against the sticks, a croak of a scream dribbling out. They pulled her through an inflated arch and into one of the trailers, one not connected to the rest. Loud fans whirred, more cool air on thawing flesh, the tingle of frost-nipped skin, the half-numb of an Alaskan night spent camping out too early—too eagerly—in the spring. Darnell snapped at one of the men in the suits. This was not like her at all.

Glass rooms for each of them. More rooms in the trailer as well, but all empty. They were the first. There were drains in the floor, gurneys with straps, chains bolted to the walls with metal plates. The men held Darnell with their sticks and loops of wire, the one around her neck causing her to gurgle, the pain very real as her flesh thawed.

She was pinned against the wall, the skin of the trailer booming as her elbow slammed into it with animal strength. One of the men, visor fogged with effort or nerves, stepped forward and secured her ankle with a pole. As she snapped at him, she saw that her net-mates were getting similar treatment beyond the glass. All the workers pulled, lifting her into the air, a fresh catch flopping on the end of a line. It felt like they would rip her body apart, pulling her in all directions like that. She was moved over the gurney, hovered there, and then was settled down. Cool against her back. Each limb was pinned with the sticks until they could work the straps tight. Darnell wrestled against the pinch on her wrists and ankles. If she had a pulse—she wasn’t sure if she did or didn’t—surely it would be cut off. The straps were too tight.

They released her and withdrew their poles, and Darnell bucked against her restraints. She was a monster in a film, a horrible movie, her view through the screen the wrong way.

A groan leaked out as she tried to form the words. She really concentrated this time, did her best to yell out that she was a person inside there, that she was a real person and not an animal. She wasn’t like the others caught in the net with her; she was different, still alive.

She tried to form these words, but they remained loud thoughts. Silent screams. All that emerged were roars and spit. She arched her back and banged on the gurney just like the monsters in the other rooms, but she wasn’t like them. Images from a TV show her husband used to watch flooded back. She wasn’t like these people at all.

43 • Lewis Lippman

Lewis was lost. He had no idea what street he was on or which part of town he was in. But he knew he’d finally found what they were all looking for, the source of this alluring odor drifting through the air: It was meat, holed up in the middle of a massive intersection the size of a city block. The smell oozed through and over a barrier wall of cars and trucks, tantalizing but nearly drowned out as he got closer by the reek of the undead pressed all around. There was a bus, one of the big flat-fronted kind that rose high as an overpass and brought whale-watchers from Anchorage. It had been parked sideways, nose crushed against an old brick facade, a dump truck shoved against its rear.

Lewis’s group melded with the many others that were already there, a fucking jamboree of zombies. They all milled around, groaning like a bunch of drunks, like goddamn stoned hippies waiting for a show to start. They crowded at each other’s backs, all hoping to be near the stage.

Lewis rode a surge through the crowd. A woman pressed against him, her lower jaw missing, tongue dangling down like a necktie, eyes wide with fear. Her gurgles had a unique ring to them. She disappeared, replaced by the sight of a tall man who must’ve been one of the first to go. A patch of hair on his scalp and ribbons of flesh stretched across his cheek were almost all that remained on his skull. His eyes were comically wide, much too round. Maggots the size of peanuts dotted his neck.

So many stages of decay, so many people, but not people anymore. Lewis was pushed forward by the crowds at his back. Some of those ahead were shambling the other direction as if disappointed the show wouldn’t start. It was hard to smell the living meat from the middle of the crowd; the change in scents created eddies of undead, a swirling of rotting bodies like by the fish cleaning station at slack tide.

Lewis made it to the front and found himself pressed against the bus. There were smears there from those who came before, a clump of hair and a bit of flesh. He felt something like a gag reflex in his mind, but his body made no response. It was searching after the smell of meat.

Gunshots rang out from above. He had heard potshots the day before as he closed in on the area, wondered what they were shooting at. If anyone in the crowd took a hit, he couldn’t see. There were others at his back trying to take his place, and Lewis found himself shoved to the side along the length of the bus. He could imagine himself swirling like this forever until he looked like the man with the maggots on his neck. Another shot from what sounded like a high caliber rifle. That was another possibility, another way out. He tried to gurgle louder, to make himself a target, to seem especially threatening. He thought of a movie he’d seen once with monsters like him in it, had laughed while they trudged forward in a stupor getting their heads blown off, and now it occurred to him that maybe they were begging for it. Maybe they were trying to hold perfectly still.

Stupid thoughts. Just a movie. Actors. They hadn’t been thinking shit other than when the next smoke break was coming or hitting those tables of food. Fuck, Lewis couldn’t stop thinking about food and cigarettes. He banged his knee on something, something hard. One of those luggage compartments had come open, had been knocked loose.

There was a smell. Lewis fell to the ground, sniffing. Others joined him. They could go even closer to the stage, he realized. They could go under it.

He crawled inside the compartment, over a cardboard box wrapped in tape and past a duffel bag. A few suitcases crowded a dark corner, the other side of the compartment shut tight.

Lewis banged against it. Others pressed up behind him, knees ringing on steel, heads hitting the roof, dark and cramped and slamming against this other door, wondering if it might pop loose as well.

44 • Darnell Lippman

They left Darnell alone on the gurney with her thoughts. When her head twisted to the side, she could see them working on one of the others in the adjoining room. They crowded around while the monster thrashed, back arching and knees kicking, men in rubber suits trying to hold it still while doctors went to work.

She didn’t see it all. Her eyes roamed, following the smells coming through the loose joints and cracks of the place. It looked hastily put together. It reminded her of Lewis’s boat with its rough scars of metal where he used those bright torches to join plates together. The glass was glued in with something like that 5200 stuff. She knew from the clothes he ruined. “What’s this?” She would scratch at the hardened crust on his blue jeans. “Fifty-two-hundred,” he’d say. Always 5200. Funny the things she remembered.

The barge didn’t sway much, not that she could tell. It was anchored by those taut cables and the stiff current. It had to be a good sign, this quarantine. They were trying. There were people out there trying something. The non-infected were doing more than running away or fighting back. And the bridges, that had to be good, too. Darnell thought so. There were so many others to think about. The kids, her parents, all her friends back home. They would be watching TV and calling the authorities, letting them know she and Lewis were in the city, that their cell phones were going straight to voice mail, that they needed help.

Help is here, Darnell thought. Help is coming.

They finished what they were doing to the monster in the next room, and then they came for her, five of them in yellow rubber suits, the same material as Lewis’s knee-high fishing boots. They had hoods built into the suits with plastic visors the size of lunchboxes. Two men with wrinkled brows stood over her and held her shoulders. Darnell felt herself lunge after them, teeth clacking, and she wanted to apologize for this behavior the way her sister was forever apologizing for her yipping dogs. “It isn’t their fault,” Gladys would say. “They’re just being dogs.”

An older woman leaned over, wisps of gray hair framing a face of concentration or worry, hard to tell which. She had old eyes with crow’s feet at the corners and directed the others, her voice muffled by the plastic but her lips moving. She pointed with her thick gloves while machines were arranged, more tools laid out. Darnell’s body twisted and strained against the straps pinning her into place. It was as if the monster side of her knew better than she did what was about to happen. It was as if it were more afraid than she.

They tightened the straps to keep her from yanking about. She could barely move. It felt wonderful to be pinned perfectly still like that—her limbs could no longer betray her. They would see, now that she was calm, they would see in her eyes that she was okay, that she was more terrified than they were.

Her clothes were cut off, nasty scraps of fabric peeled away and preserved like they were unwrapping a gosh-darned mummy. Swabs on her skin, placed into baggies. A long stick shoved between her teeth and her gums, bagged up as well.

Yes, take your samples, Darnell thought. Make me better.

She was thinking this as the swabs and the wooden sticks were put away. A black bundle was placed on the steel table. Plastic canisters like Tupperware were arranged. Someone began to draw on her, began to probe her skin and tap on her chest with stiffened fingers. Darnell pleaded with her eyes—she tried to let them know she was in there. She tried to speak, all to no avail.

The bundle was unrolled. It reminded her of her mother’s silverware. And then the implements were removed, one by one, and placed on the table. Curved things that gleamed in the overhead light. Tiny and sharp things. Something like pliers. Alien tools. Expensive tools.

The old woman with the kind and wrinkled eyes held out a gloved hand. Her lips moved, and a tiny blade was placed handle-first into her palm. Darnell gurgled and tried to form the words. She wanted to cry, but felt nothing on her cheeks. In the next room, a monster rattled its chains behind the glass.

Please, Darnell thought as the blade was brought to her stomach. Don’t.

There was a dull ache as the woman went to work. Not the sharp sting of a little cut, but the deep bruise of something much worse. One of the men by the table of tools turned and looked away. The other reached forward with the little canister like something used for leftovers while the woman with the wrinkled eyes took her sample. A pinch. The smell of rotten blood. Another sample—Darnell in agony—but no closer to death, as they removed her flesh piece by gory piece.

They aren’t here to save me, she realized. Dear God, they’re seeing what it takes to kill me.

45 • Lewis Lippman

It was loud in the compartment. Not just the constant banging of knees and elbows, but the grunts and groans from those pressed in beside him. Lewis hit his head repeatedly on the metal arms that held the door shut from the inside. His hands slapped uselessly against the wall. But it was someone else that broke the door free. Just the right spasm with their hand, and suddenly a crack of light appeared at Lewis’s knees. The dark barrier in front of him hinged up, swung away, and vile humans swarmed out like dirty rats.

There was a cry of alarm, someone screaming, gunshots. Bodies tumbled over Lewis and crawled forward. They stood and lurched toward the men and women scrambling everywhere. They fell down when shot or just spun around and kept going. Lewis tried to stand and kept getting knocked back down. So many. Like oil spilling through a funnel, coming and coming. The gunshots were like fireworks, pow pow pow. The smell of meat, human and something else. Something cooking. Dogs or birds, who knew? Chaos. An encampment of cars.

The cars were like tents, people moving inside, more running from a clearing in the middle of the intersection to dive into open vehicles and slam the doors shut. Windows were cracked, barrels poking out. Their aim wasn’t good. Lewis saw one of his kind break out the back glass of a yellow cab and begin to worm her way inside. Her dress caught and tore on the bumper. She was shot in the head and fell limp, but there were more to follow. People were shouting about the bus, trying to organize, but it was every man for himself. The undead swarmed, spilling and spilling through.

Lewis banged on the side of a car, trying to get at the meat inside. A pistol, a small black thing, waved in his face. The muzzle flashed like a camera, the taste of powder in his mouth, a punch to his teeth. Lewis spun around as another shot went off, the zing of a far ricochet. Another zombie reached her fingers in the window, a young girl, a teen. She broke the top half of the glass out just as a bullet went through her brain. Collapsing, her arms twitched against Lewis’s shins as he reached through the hole she’d made. A bullet slammed into his shoulder, a last gasp from the young man inside, and then Lewis had a hold of him, others had a hold of him, dragged him out into the streets.

Gunfire grew heavy, and then lessened. There was a pause for reloading, a last round of patter, and then the relative quiet as a boisterous family finally sat down to eat. The feed became an orgy. Fights broke out over the scraps, a man still able to scream as his arms and legs went different directions, lungs bellowing even as ropes of purple intestines were pulled away like a magician’s scarf.

Lewis spun in the middle of it all, eating and terrified, wounds throbbing, the muted pops of gunfire fading into the distance, the sudden appearance of a helicopter several blocks away, doing nothing, watching, drawn perhaps to the noise of this last stand, this party, the fireworks and celebration of no one’s independence.

46 • Darnell Lippman

The woman in the suit was clinical and calm as she went about her sample-taking. It didn’t matter that Darnell felt alive, she was cut into like a cadaver, like a swollen thing washed up on the rocks. The straps kept her pinned to the table, muscles straining futilely. She tried to scream as the knife bit into her, but the cry for help stayed with the agony, locked up inside her head, hers alone to hear and endure.

The doctor rarely looked Darnell in the face as she worked. Her exhalations fogged the plastic visor of her suit, and her voice remained a muted drone. But when her lips moved, the men behind her reacted. Some kind of radio, like on Lewis’s boat, like the handheld he kept by the recliner in case a fishing buddy got into trouble. Darnell imagined squeezing that radio and calling for help, calling for Lewis to come and get her. She was awash in misery, drowning, stranded, bit at by gleaming fish that carried away her flesh. And the worst part was that she couldn’t die.

Her twitching muscles felt near enough like wracking sobs. Struggling on that table felt near enough like times she’d clutched her knees and sobbed quietly in the tub. Life and love. When the bad parts crept in, sometimes she wished it would end. Wished there was some quick way out for cowards. She loved her husband, wasn’t sure how not to, but sometimes she sat in the tub with the water running dangerously hot and wanted out. Like now, just wanting to die.

The doctor took something from her abdomen without asking. Machines beeped and whirred as they measured the nothing. But there was still something there, something they couldn’t take. And the struggles against those straps felt near enough like uncontrolled sobs.

Darnell opened her eyes, couldn’t remember closing them, wasn’t sure how. But the dry and burning in them that she had long grown used to was gone for a moment, something like a spider’s touch tickling her rotting cheeks. And above her, a fogged visor cleared as the old woman with wrinkled eyes held her breath, watching, squinting, staring through Darnell’s eyes and deep into whatever remained of her soul.

Darnell lunged forward with her thoughts, her prayers, her begging wishes. She felt her arms and legs strain against the straps. She screamed and screamed as loud as she could, yelling “HEY!” and “HELP!” and “I’M ALIVE!”

The woman in the puffy suit remained frozen. After a pause, her lips moved. The men by the tables stirred, hard to see what they were doing. The doctor held Darnell’s gaze a moment longer, then pulled away, the flash of a blade disappearing, the torment coming to an end.

Darnell was left in motionless agony. All her new wounds sang to her. They were electric currents clipped to her naked flesh, the juice dialed up and down, up and down, sagging and spiking. She lay there for what felt like days. When her head lolled to the side, she could see the man in the next cage bucking against his straps, no one else around.

The people in the puffy suits returned. A bright light stabbed Darnell in the eyes. The man holding her head wore metal gloves of a fine mesh that reminded Darnell of Lewis cleaning his fish. Lewis sometimes wore gloves like that.

Her head was strapped still. She had the sense that things would soon get worse, not better. More probes were stuck to her flesh, itching. Equipment set up. Something by her head, a heavy box, scraping against the metal surface of the table.

The doctor held a wire, a thin cord. She bent it into a gentle curve, tapped her finger on the end and there was a harsh pop from the box. She did this again: tap, tap. Pop, pop.

Darnell could smell oil on the metal glove as the man forced her chin down, as he held her mouth open. The doctor’s lips were moving. She slid the cord into Darnell’s mouth, across her tongue, into her throat. The box, the speaker by her head, amplified the grunts and rattling groans. Darnell was horrified by the sound of what she’d become. It was like a mirror turned on a burn victim.

She cried out, and the speaker hissed with her pointless breath. Darnell wondered how long it could go on, how many ways they could experiment on her, when her affliction would finally end. The woman with the kind eyes watched her, waiting, measuring something. Darnell had no idea. They all seemed to be waiting. Expecting. What had they seen? They were looking at her differently, now. Like they wondered if someone was peering back.

“I’M HERE!” Darnell yelled. She screamed with that voice that appeared when she read, when she thought to herself, that silent voice that somehow could be heard, could have an accent, could be quiet or loud, but always silent.

“HELP!” she cried. “HELP HELP HELP HELP.”

She threw the words over and over, pounded them like her pulse forgotten, made that reading voice a wispy rattle in her neck, audible in her cheeks, deafening in her skull.

“I’M ALIVE! I’M ALIVE! I’M IN HERE! HELP! HELP! HELP!”

The speaker gurgled with wet sounds. Something was adjusted. The doctors leaned close as if they heard a whisper. Darnell could only hear her pleading screams in her head and the amplified, bodily noises her thrashing made.

HELP HELP HELP.

There came a trickle of tears from her exertion. Wrinkles faded as eyes widened. And Darnell felt the strangeness of a connection, of a person reacting to her thoughts, the thrill of communication. Her chest and neck felt sore from trying so hard to scream, it coming out no more than a hissing whisper. But it was enough. The cord was extracted. The doctor stood. Equipment was gathered, and once again, Darnell was left alone for what felt an eternity.

They returned with a roll of paper, a gently curving line etched down the middle, nearly flat, something from one of their useless machines. It was just paper, now, something to write on. That’s all it would ever be.

With a fat black marker, the same kind they’d used to draw on her flesh before cutting it, something was written:

1 for Yes. 2 for No.

Darnell felt a flush of hope. The wire slid back into her mouth, as welcome as that suction tube from the dentist. More writing.

Can you read this?

Darnell tried to blink, but couldn’t. She screamed YES in her mind, felt like she could hear it in her cheeks. She yelled ONE. She yelled YES YES YES, and heard mostly gurgles. The doctor seemed agitated, anxious. Darnell worried she should have only tried yelling a single word. Maybe that’s what they were after. A length of paper was torn off. The doctor tried tossing it to the side, but it stuck to her rubber gloves. One of the men helped her. She pressed the marker back to the roll with that gentle, wavy line.

Is there anyone in there?

Darnell imagined taking a deep breath. It was more a pause of thought. She gathered her will, all her imagined strength, and tried to force it out all at once, to erupt in a mighty roar, all the screams she’d ever felt inside while sitting in her tub, clutching her shins, trying not to let Lewis hear her cry:

YEEEEESSSSS

There was a moment of stillness, a place that heartbeats used to fill. The other doctors came into view as they crowded around, as they bent over to peer at her. The marker squeaked against the glossy paper.

We want to help you.

Darnell felt a wave of anger rather than relief. Parts of her were missing, were sitting in plastic tubs and containers. Her wounds, the damage to her flesh, could still be felt. She felt exhausted from the effort of crying out. Her chest was empty in more ways than one. She was exhausted from the long death she was suffering, but Darnell summoned the last of her will.

KILL! she yelled, sensing that these people could hear, that the screams in her head were quiet words that leaked out their box and into the room; they emanated like some pale echo deep in her throat.

KILL ME! DIE DIE DIE DIE!

Like the gulls by the pier while Lewis cleaned fish:

DIE DIE DIE DIE!

The birds floating on the air, swooping for scraps, for flesh torn mindlessly from bone:

KILL KILL KILL KILL!

The doctor straightened. Darnell collapsed within herself, her consciousness drained, the animal within her taking over her limbs again, writhing against the bonds while doctors in puffy suits stood around, lips moving, conferring.

They were going to help her, she thought. Darnell had done it. She had made a connection, had reached out to another human being and made contact. She sobbed without moving, cried without shedding a tear. And when the paper appeared above her with the simple question: You wish you were dead? she could do little more than emit a soft gurgle, a dry croak, a whisper from her sturdy tomb.

The room fell deathly quiet. The cord was removed from her throat, the speaker scratching the table as it was pulled away, the little wires and itchy cups pulled from her skin, and Darnell thought they were going to do it, right then, somehow. She prayed they would bring mercy on her, that they would bring mercy upon them all.

47 • Lewis Lippman

A gray dawn broke over the destroyed encampment. Falling from the sky was what Kyle liked to call a “fighting snow.” It was those fat flakes that came down the size of silver dollars and laden with moisture. Lewis had seen them get palm-sized back home, even as big around as dinner plates. When a few inches of these flakes gathered, you could scoop up a snowball in your hand, give it a squeeze, and hurl away. With enough work, you could compress it down to a ball of ice that’d leave a bruise or dent a car.

It must’ve been snowing at night for so much to accumulate. Lewis hadn’t felt a thing. His skin was too numb to know anything was coming down at all. He did hear some crunching when he came to now and then, as he circled within the walls that had trapped the living. But in his groggy half-sleep he had figured the sound for more of the broken glass that littered the scene of yesterday’s fight.

It almost made him feel home again, seeing the snow as the sky brightened. It was the sort of day he loved to spend on the water, those early morning hours when the sea was flat as glass, when the only breeze was the one he made with the throttle, and when the sun didn’t rise so much as the clouds lightened from coal black to ash gray.

Home. Homer, Alaska.

No matter how badly he’d like to be there, Lewis knew he never would again. He was trapped. They were all trapped. High walls of steel, cars jumbled up, buses and dump trucks. There would be no call for stooping down and squeezing out of that block-sized arena. No way to the other side of that hastily constructed fence. Lewis had it worse than those damn Mexicans. All they had to do was scale a wall, crawl through some grass, go for a swim, and they were pretty much free to live wherever they wanted. They weren’t pinned like this.

Damn Mexicans.

Lewis couldn’t feel his feet. His shoes were soaked and frozen solid, his toes little cubes of ice. He would love to have wept for his feet, which must be ruined. Frostbitten. Falling apart. Probably worse than his arm, which hung open and gathered snow. His flesh was gray, two fingers bent backwards, and all he wanted was to go home. He wanted to see his kids. See Darnell. What the fuck had he done with his life?

Killed a bunch of fish. Made more money than he needed to. He could’ve stopped going out if he’d spent it smarter. If he’d invested. But it was always there for the taking, just a few nights out with his crew and he’d come back with enough to pay the bank, fill up with diesel, sit at the bar a few nights and check out asses and down beers.

Lewis couldn’t feel anything. Not his body. But he felt something else, something besides the regret. He felt sad for the way he used to get a kick out of seeing them Mexicans get rounded up. Goddamn, there was enough fishing out there to do. He made more than he needed. Enough to waste. What he shoulda done is spent more time with his family.

The snow was a few inches deep. Enough to cover the bodies scattered in the streets. Fires were burning out of control in the buildings overhead, survivors overrun by the undead who managed to worm inside. The remnants of this last bastion of humanity were rising in the form of gray smoke, billowing up to touch the sad sky, a stream of ash rising like a river to a broader sea.

The world below, meanwhile, was turning white, getting its skin back. And across the confines of that city block, there shuffled dark and grisly shapes. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, who knew what else. They were all starting to look the same to Lewis, anyway. Same deadened skin turning shades of pale gray, same collections of wounds, of gashes and cuts, same tattered clothes and scraps of fashion, just one river of tottering undead with their arms out, mouths open, eyes wide and unblinking, the snow dusting their hair and hiding their hurts.

One mass, Lewis thought. All the damn same. And goddamn, all he wanted was to go home, to be with his family. But he couldn’t. There was no river to cross, nothing to crawl through. He was more stuck than birthright, forced to live where his feet were pinned. He thought of all the fish he’d seen flapping on his deck, eyeing the scuppers, no chance in hell of ever getting over the side. He thought of all the times he’d felt that twinge, just a pause, to knock a fish with his boot, to send it back into the water to be with its family, but he never did. He was a man with a knife and metal gloves standing on that deck. And he never did.