Hugh Howey: I, Zombie

Stepping from the curb, her arms out to steady her diminished sense of balance, Jennifer realized she never came this way anymore, not since she was a kid. The shuffle slid around the cars in the street, startling a flock of birds, and Jennifer felt herself cross an imaginary boundary she didn’t even know existed, a separation of two worlds delimited by city blocks and a strip of pavement.

The world she left behind was the one she knew as an adult, living and working on the Upper East Side. And here, the width of a paved river away, Sutton Place, the world of her youth. From one island to another with a few steps. She never came this way anymore.

There was a park on the corner she recognized, a park she knew well. There was a puppy she and her sister had begged for. When the two of them both wanted a thing that badly, they were rarely refused, even when their parents knew better. Likewise, when the two of them disagreed, a stalemate of rare violence formed. She and her sister got the puppy because their wishes overlapped. It remained nameless, referred to simply as “Puppy,” because they could not agree on anything more proper.

Jennifer couldn’t remember the name she had lobbied for, though it seemed a matter of life and death at the time. All she remembered was how fast it grew. Until it was bigger than they were. Until its name made less and less sense. There, in that park, she and her sister had strained against the leash while Puppy dragged them from tree to tree, chasing squirrels. The allure wore off quickly, as Puppy outgrew its cuteness. She and her sister had realized how much work was involved, that their parents were right, and gradually the dog became their mother’s. Which meant their mother didn’t have to be alone when she left the rest of them behind.

The view of her childhood park was lost as Jennifer crowded against the person in front of her. It was the same obese man she’d fallen behind a block earlier. She tried not to look. The man’s ear and a flap of his cheek hung down from where he’d been attacked. When he turned and sniffed the air with his rotting stump of a nose, she was forced to see his grisly molars, his tobacco-stained teeth, right through his open cheek. Flies had taken up residence in his wound and flew about lazily in the cool air, buzzing his head like some great nest, some fleshy hive. Jennifer imagined they would lay eggs in his flesh. The maggots would come soon for him—she’d seen them writhe on others. She wondered how long before she felt them inside her as well.

Ahead of the man was the woman with no eyes in the bright purple dress. She had been a part of the shuffle for five days. Or was it six? Jennifer had lost count. She was envious of this woman. She could see her walking with both arms out, hands tangled up in the clothes and hair of others, her face a blood-caked mess. While she shuffled along blindly in her purple dress, Jennifer longed to switch places. She imagined the games she could play if the world were black. The sounds of car alarms and the crackling of fires might pierce her imaginary travels, but she could learn to ignore the lesser noises, the hiss of boots sliding across asphalt, the grunts and groans of souls disconnected from their bodies, the screams of the terrified living, the wet ripping sounds and crunching bones of a shuffle feeding—

In perfect blackness, in eyeless darkness, she could make the rest disappear. She knew that she could. There were games her father didn’t know about, games she and her sister played under the covers while arguments leaked through walls. But being forced to see what her body saw, to endure the flow of the mob, made it impossible to hide from what she’d become. Even when she managed to dream herself away for a few moments, something awful would rip her back into the here and now with hideous force.

Down the block, her old school loomed into blurry view: P.S. 312. A massive brick structure from the days when things were built with someone else’s future in mind. Jennifer tried to focus on the school, but she didn’t even have control of what she saw. Not always. The constant hunger meant her vision was forever fixed on potential meat. It left her eyes constricting and warping to bring the wounds of others into view. While she tried to concentrate on the edges of her vision, a director with some sick mind roamed the hurts of the world. And so they passed her old school, which remained a blur, much like her childhood.

A neighborhood with old memories, a few of them good. Why didn’t she ever walk this way anymore? What was it about this city, with its endless possibilities, that elicited such limited routines? Was it the fear of the faceless hordes? Was it the allure of the known and the familiar? Or was it mere habit?

Jennifer suspected it was none of these things. She thought she knew why she stuck to a track like a subway train, why her selection of favorite restaurants numbered in the handful, why she shopped and visited the same spots over and over, even the same bench in the same park, so consistently that she knew how and when the shade fell across it, thought she recognized the squirrels, even.

To her, the routine was an inoculation against the daily and constant influx of the lost and bewildered, the baggage-draggers, the upward-gazers, the camera-strangled gawkers. It was this plague, this disease, that her life on rails was meant to protect against. It was the abject terror of feeling like— of becoming —a tourist.

A friend of Jennifer’s confessed this once, that within a month of moving to the city, she had desperately wanted to be recognized as a local, as someone who now lived there. And she harbored jealousy toward Jennifer for being born in the city, which Jennifer found strange. This friend had divulged another secret: that when tourists asked her directions, even if she didn’t know the answer, she just made something up. She would only feel bad after they walked away, as they followed her directions and muttered how nice everyone in New York was. It was easier for her to lead nice people astray than to admit she didn’t know her way around, that she was in many ways a visitor as well.

It was hard to judge her friend. Jennifer felt the same desire to both blend in and be recognized, to never glance up at the remarkable buildings for fear of being spotted. She went to the same handful of restaurants and bars where she could bump into people she knew, wave exaggeratedly to a bartender or patron, sprawl out in booths with her laptop and newspaper, and prove that she belonged.

A routine. That’s what she had fallen into. Decades on rails. She might hear of a new joint opening up with the best such-and-such, but it was in a part of town she never went to. Not a bad part, just a different part. Not her part.

A bodega on the corner came into focus. Her hungry eyes spotted movement inside. Survivors. Her potential food scrounging for their potential food.

The shuffle turned that way, holes in faces where noses used to be sniffing at the air, and Jennifer remembered the store. It had been there as long as she’d been alive. She’d just forgotten about it. She never came this way anymore.

And so she shuffled along, moving toward another feed, a fat man’s face hanging open in front of her near enough to worry the flap of flesh might touch her nose, close enough to smell the awful breath leaking out of his clenched but gaping jaw. There was the buzz from one of the flies circling his head, the tickle of it crawling in her ear, another one at the corner of her mouth, and she was unable to swat them away or dig her finger after them.

Laying eggs, Jennifer thought, horrified. Soon, their brood would wiggle within her. They would hatch and grow and feed on her flesh. They would writhe within her, like the man with the hinged cheek and flopping ear.