Hugh Howey: I, Zombie

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

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

So fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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