I, Zombie (11 page)

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.

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
.

Dennis lay there, his legs burning, his body on fire, arms
waving at the air. Sarah ran past, blubbering, to cradle Lisa. Matt yelled at
her to stay away. To stay the fuck away. He cocked the shotgun, the hollow
clunk
of an empty shell bouncing on the tile, and went to pull her off.

The two of them were cussing and crying as they hurried from
the scene of what Dennis had done. They left him there, arms gyrating at the
darkened ceiling, the smell of Lisa fading, a wheel on a shopping cart crying
out as it was pushed along under a heavy load, and then silence. And a thought.
A sickening thought for Dennis that this was how his forever would remain.

23 • Chiang Xian

The throngs of sick tourists had wandered off, the streets
outside full of the silent traffic of darting candy bar wrappers and the haze
of smoke from unseen fires. There were pink smears on the glass, streaks of
gore and abraded flesh where the undead had bumped and pressed and waved their
stupid arms to get at the foul meat.

Chiang cared less and less for what went on out there. She
had company, now. And while this boy—whose name would be Shen, she’d
decided—stumbled and bumped in staggering circuits throughout the shop, she
practiced chasing him, practiced controlling her feet, making a game of it,
stopping now and then to eat from his parents before they lost their taste.

Shen, of course, hadn’t quite the hang of it. He knocked
things over and stumbled on the cans scattered about. He crawled up in the
window display and sampled some of the rancid meat, even gnawed on her parents’
shins. And since neither of them could talk, not yet at least, it was up to
Chiang to supply the dialogue. She would crouch by Shen’s father while the boy
ate what was left of the man’s thigh, and do both their voices over his loud
smacking. Mostly, she would coach him, urging him to exert more will, to maybe
one day help her move the heavy shelf blocking the door so they could both get
out.