I, Zombie

by Hugh Howey

Page 10

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Company.
<
br />   A friend.

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

  Everything does.

  22 • Dennis Newland

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

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

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

  Neither of them said a thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said again.

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

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

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

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

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