Hugh Howey: I, Zombie

Sights like these gradually faded as darkness fell across the city streets, smothering them like a heavy blanket. There hadn’t been power in the tall buildings for over a week, and with the moon in full wane, the nighttime became a mass of shifting dead beneath a glittering sprinkle of stars. Bodies bumped against Jennifer, some of them still sticky from a feed the shuffle had shared earlier that day. What had been revolting the first few nights was now something different. A knock against her neighbor was the only touch she knew. If it wasn’t this, it was the frantic clawing from a woman dying on the sidewalk, eyes wide with fear, shrieks turning to gurgles as Jennifer devoured her from belly to neck. It was a small thing, these bumps in the night. Small, but then it was the only .

The shuffle moved through the pitch black streets by scent and by feel, groans escaping from the most miserable among them. Evidence of survivors became more apparent after dark. The living stirred in the tall buildings with the bob and weave of flashlights, or the orangish flicker of fires that burned where fires should never be. Jennifer remembered her days of surviving. She remembered the black ring of char on carpets and expensive hardwoods as folders full of projects that seemed so dire weeks ago were tossed on as fuel for warmth. There were others up there doing today what weeks ago she had done. How safe did they think they were? How secure? The attack could come at any time for them. She knew. From out of nowhere, BAM! And then the running, the metallic taste of fear and the hollow and cool rasp of desperate lungs, the danger around every corner, new allies split up and separated, friends becoming monsters, sitting in a stall in a men’s restroom, heels tucked up on the seat, growing numb. Shivering, back when she could.

Jennifer sniffed the air and saw the glitter of a fire high up in the heavens. What was life like for the living up there? Had it changed? Were people still subsisting on vending machine scraps? Food running low? Fights breaking out as fear and hunger took hold? She remembered how lonely it had felt. Anyone she had cared about or known had been stripped away from her, gone. She was left surviving with strangers. Getting to know people the next cubicle down. But they hadn’t been as alone as they’d imagined. The hallways and floors of sameness had gradually become infested with small shuffles. Jennifer remembered running. She remembered the boy who bit her. If she had known, she would have just laid down and waited for her own eyes to dim, for her soul to escape.

The lights from a helicopter drifted among the stars, faintly blinking. They had grown fewer in recent days. Jennifer had hoped they would become more abundant. She had imagined them bringing supplies back in the time when she’d known hope. She had dreamed of them coming to haul away the living. Someone had said they’d seen this happen the first day or two. But those were private helicopters or ones with television station numbers on the side. The hunter green and black helicopters had soon replaced these, and they now hovered warily and only at a distance. They did nothing. And gone were the days of hope.

Now, when Jennifer saw a helicopter, she didn’t imagine it bringing supplies. She pictured instead a man inside with a long gun trained across her shuffle. Shoot , she would plead to this young soldier. Do it . It comforted her to imagine the warmth of a red dot on the center of her forehead. She would silently scream and wave imagined limbs while she prayed for the bullet—but it never came. The helicopters simply hovered and watched, and Jennifer imagined they had their reasons. Maybe the members of the shuffle were still considered citizens. Hadn’t there been a controversy once? Some woman with a man’s name who had captivated America? A woman mostly gone, obviously not able to do anything but suffer, and yet that’s all they would allow her to do.

Terry, right? What finally happened to her? Jennifer couldn’t remember. The story had gone on too long for her to care.

Maybe it would be the same for her and the shuffle. Maybe the soldiers had orders to observe, nothing more. Maybe the politicians were meeting in chambers somewhere and dithering. Maybe the rest of America was glued to its televisions, watching in amazement, the elderly covering their mouths in shock, the young calling their friends and making jokes, saying how cool this shit was, could you believe it?

The helicopter lights moved against stars impossibly far away. All the lights were far away and out of reach. Jennifer remembered what a boyfriend had once told her about the stars, how they could be long gone but still shining. They could have burned out a thousand years ago, and their light would just now be reaching Earth. Gone and yet still there. Dead and seen at the same time.

Trash rustled in the darkness and stirred against Jennifer’s ankles. There was no one left to come and sweep it away. It flew out from busted windows when the wind gusted. It gathered against the stoops and in the gutters. There was the smell of a fire somewhere, the distant whisper of conspiring flames, and Jennifer wondered what the rest of the world was doing. Were they succumbing to the same disease as her shuffle? Or did they watch, glued to their televisions once again as her city burned, as it all came crumbling down into streets of staggering ruin? Was this nothing more than another story for gaping jaws and wide eyes? Or would the soldiers in those faraway helicopters and the politicians in their chambers find some way to shut it down, to turn it off, to do anything more for her than change the fucking channel—?

Michael ate his mother until his stomach burst. He could feel it rupture, could feel the organ stretch to bloating as he ate and kept on eating—and then it popped. His insides seemed to rearrange themselves as hastily swallowed mouthfuls of her flesh sagged down inside his own guts. Small bits of sinew and fat remained stuck between his teeth like roast beef.

One craving had been sated. Michael thought again of the little black kit on top of the fridge, the spoon with its heat-warped patina, a plastic orange lighter low on fluid, a needle that had dipped into his arm a thousand times, depositing its nectar like a honeybee, leaving him there on the sofa, head lolling in rapture, his mother drooling on herself in the next room as she filled a clear bag with frothing yellow piss.

From the neck up, she still looked the same. She was just as dead to him, just as eerily alive. Eyes open, she stared at an empty patch of floor. Her jaw was slack, her lips parted, as if she might finally say something, might finally snap out of it and fucking say something.

Michael felt the strain of her flesh inside his belly. The cat and his mother felt heavy in his abdomen, taut from taking in too much. Greedy. Always greedy.

He moved away from her, numb and disgusted with himself. Her chest stood open. Blood dripped from Michael’s face, and contented grunts came from somewhere. Before him, his mother’s belly was a gory pit, her ribs like pink fingers, like two open hands cradling nothing. Michael imagined crawling inside those glistening palms. He felt himself shrinking down, time zipping backwards, until he could fit inside her belly, could pull the flaps of loose skin over him like a blanket and return to the womb in which he had gestated. Maybe he could be born again, not like those assholes at NA but really born again. He wouldn’t be a monster this time. He’d be someone who takes care of his mother. Someone who takes better care of himself.

A scent from the streets wafted in and filled the decrepit apartment, nicotine-stained curtains flapping in the breeze. Michael turned, his nose following the smell of the living, his guts full of his mother’s guts but already thinking of the next fix. One more bite, like that bee sinking its stinger into his arm, filling him with its nectar.