Hugh Howey: I, Zombie

He stood and staggered toward the window. He craved a cigarette. Michael always craved a smoke after a meal. A clay pot on the sill used to hold flowers when his sister was still coming around, before she’d given up on the two of them. Now it was mounded with crushed butts, filters stained muddy brown with tar, trails of ash everywhere.

Knocking over the pot, he clumsily groped through the open window and fell head-first onto the landing. His shoulder slammed painfully into the steel grating, and his overfull belly sloshed sickeningly. Michael could taste the bile and blood come partway up his throat before sinking back down. Almost reflexively, he righted himself, arms waving for balance, grunts and groans that were not his leaking past bloody lips.

Here was Michael’s sanctuary, high above the streets. Here was where he sat between soaring highs, filling himself with deep inhalations of smoke to choke down the numb lows. Here was where he suffered the broad and empty valleys between his life’s feeble peaks, so few in number.

Years suddenly felt like mere days. The past had piled up without him noticing. Maybe it was from living the same day over and over: cashing government checks, never enough to properly care for her, way more than was needed to improperly care for her, making deals with the leftovers, getting high, drifting off through the roof and into the clouds while his mom sat quietly in the next room.

Years and years that felt like days. It was all the same day. The same craving every moment, the itching urge, the temporary relief, the guilt and self-loathing, burning cigarettes down to the butt on the fire escape, peering through the glass where the flashing cherry lit up his reflection, his mother in the room beyond, locked in her chair, her back turned, forced to stare glassy-eyed at an empty corner of the room rather than out the window she loved, because Michael couldn’t take being seen by her some days, the days when he feared she was still in there, when he suspected the doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.

He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered into it, not watching where it was going.

Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around and around.

Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for more.

The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun. They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.

The dogs were newly wild. They were still in the process of returning to their lurking, primal states. When they fought over scraps—tugging at a boot until the leg came away from the hip—Gloria saw herself in them. Many of them jangled with the baubles of ownership. A few dragged ruined leashes through the scrap heap humanity had left behind. They howled in the distance or from within buildings and fenced lots. They growled and snarled at each other, fur matted and hackles up. They scratched and bit at their flanks, their own infestations to deal with. Gloria hated seeing the dogs. Many of the poor creatures looked as though they wouldn’t last another day or two. Others would probably thrive.

This was the end of the world, that’s what she was privy to. She thought of her brother and sister, thought of Carl in prison upstate, and wondered if their world was ending as well. Maybe not. Not yet. Maybe this island was a wound the rest of America would cauterize and survive. Just a nick, perhaps. Either way, here was a glimpse of the inevitable. The world could stagger on a bit, but here was an early view of the looming fate of mankind.

Gloria remembered classes she had taken in college. She had majored in English, but never got far enough to take the classes she wanted to take. It was all the pre-requisites before dropping out, before trying to make it as a dancer on Broadway, eventually resigning herself to waiting tables, partying, marrying the first guy who knocked her up, staying with him even after the pregnancy failed, even after he was locked away. Before all that, there had been a pre-req, a geology class. She had learned a bunch about rocks and volcanoes, couldn’t remember what else. All she came away with was an appreciation of time, for the vast eons that stretched out in both directions.

The dogs and the birds and the rats owned this city. The cockroaches and the gnats and the maggots. Gloria stumbled down the streets toward the hope of another meal and was witness to Armageddon. And it was more peaceful than she imagined. The time stretched out and was filled with life being busy living . Humans would die and rot, would shamble around with their arms outstretched groping for the meaningless, and time would stretch out and engulf them like the long roads she’d seen pictures of out west.

Ahead of her rose a barricade of cars. A bus parked across the curb, not by accident. The smell came from the other side, people alive. A pocket of survivors. An oasis of ripe flesh. The barricade rose like the Rockies, blocking out ideas of time stretching off forever. There was this thing to consider. The band of undead pressed against the overlapped cars, and an alarm rang out, a car alarm. Clever if done on purpose, a ring of cars that would sound an alarm when the dead came calling.

Gloria crowded in with the rest. She bumped against the bus, waved her arms at the bright smells in the air that seemed to tinge everything pink and shiny. There were people on the other side. Living people. She was one of the animals fenced out. Gloria knew this, knew what she was, what side of the fence she lived on. And she saw that the end of the world was not quite yet. Some were still trying, banding together, building a fortress of buses and cars in the middle of a crumbling city. Fires crackled, the smell of cooked pigeons, maybe dog, maybe something else.

Gloria sniffed the air, taking it all in, feeling that vast stretch of time soaring out to either side of her, knowing this was but a slice, and that the ruin would come to all else. The end of things. And her kind would hasten it, whether they wanted to or not.

Jennifer’s shuffle, which had grown to three dozen since yesterday, made its way across 59th. The promise of living flesh continued to drift north on a breeze steered by glass-walled canyons. It smelled like dozens of survivors, so many that their fear mixed and blended until they couldn’t be told apart. Curiosity as much as hunger seemed to drive the shuffle south. As if any reason were needed for limbs long out of control.