I, Zombie (9 page)

She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her
mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only
begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all
night, making it impossible to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such
things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.

Usually, it was at the bold stripes on the flags of Little
Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned
this to her father once—that she felt badly for the Italians—he had shrugged.
Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that
some people care more about where they come from than others. He told her to
feel sorry for them about
that
while he hammered the meat with more
anger.

Chiang had felt sorry for her father that day, and for the
meat.

She made another circuit of the shop, her parents‘ shop. She
had never been so hungry in all her life. The days had gotten away from her—not
for lack of counting or so grand a number, but because her mind wandered as it
grew dark and light again outside. Strangers occasionally pressed against the
glass, eying the meat, deciding it wasn’t for them. This much hadn’t changed.
Tourists, turning their noses up at delicacies. Laughing and taking pictures.
Only, they didn’t take pictures anymore. They paused with their horrible
wounds. The disgusting display was in reverse, now. And then they lumbered
onward, these tourists who had become grosser than the things they used to
mock.

Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before
everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School
had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people
running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the
most, the wide eyes and slack jaws of the adults hurrying away with their
children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loudly as
they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its
scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it
wasn’t right. The people simply scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams
at all.

Or maybe they didn’t want to draw attention. The sick were
already in the streets. It was difficult to see them, for they moved slowly.
They didn’t stand out. Not until you bumped into them, looking for your
parents, fighting the crowds to get home, when a kind stranger takes your hand,
bends down to see if you need help, and bites off your fingers.

Chiang made another lap of the shop. She had never been so
hungry before. Even waiting until the last customer was served before her
mother made something in the back had never been this bad. Nothing had. She’d
lost count of the days spent circling the shop, but it had been three since
she’d had anything to eat. Three days with the hunger driving her mad, the
feeling of her insides turning out.

A newspaper fluttered by outside and pressed itself to the
glass. It was like a tourist, peeping in. Headlines from those last days were
spread across its face—news of an outbreak entirely under control. Until it
wasn’t. Chiang wondered what was happening in China. She thought of her school
teacher and all her friends and wondered what had happened to them. As the
people passed, she looked for anyone she knew, but they were all tourists.

The newspaper flapped away on the breeze. Where it had
pressed, Chinese characters painted with a young and unsure hand could be seen
against the fading backlight of another counted day. The characters were
supposed to say:

Rénshēng.
Life
.

Outside, it would have read this way. To the tourists, of
course, it meant nothing. Just part of the backdrop that lent Chinatown its
authenticity. For locals, however, it promised something: healthy ingredients
and traditional medicines. Eternal life.

Chiang had laughed when she’d first seen it from the inside.
After she had drawn it for the third time, washing off each attempt with a
bucket of water and a rag as she attempted to satisfy her mother’s exacting
standards, she saw what it meant in reverse. From the inside, the brush strokes
were backwards. It looked more like:

Shēngrén.
Stranger
.

A stranger life. Life as a stranger. A girl growing up in a
home away from home, people she didn’t know peering through the glass, taking
pictures of and pointing at the delicacies hanging in the window. It was funny
how that worked out. Like the characters knew all along that this was coming. A
secret only they were privy to.

Chiang laughed in her mind. It was the only place she could
laugh or cry anymore. She wanted out. She wanted to run, to skip and shout and
scream, but knotted chains hung from the doors of the little shop. Her parents
had locked her inside with them, had locked away their one precious girl while
she grew sicker and sicker, and they worried more and more.

The sun slanted through the window, casting shadows of words
in reverse, and little motes of dust dipped and swirled like fairies with a
life of their own. There were two chairs of ornate wood tipped on their sides,
catching the sun. The flesh up past the knees might sate Chiang’s painful
hunger, but she could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any
more. She had eaten all that she could. She was powerfully hungry and all
alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.

20 • Dennis Newland

“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Matt had told Dennis,
holding out a smoking roach, the day before they’d made a run at the grocery
store, the day before Dennis had been bit.

They were still in that office building where they’d been
rationing candy bars. They’d just killed a group of survivors eerily similar to
their own foursome, another pair of couples thrown together by the nightmare of
the world. This other group had been surviving noisily one floor above,
carrying on, acting like maniacs. After a long discussion about whether to
bring trouble or wait for it to come to them, Dennis and Matt had opted for the
latter. They convinced Lisa and Sarah that it was best, that this other group
would bring death upon them all. And so they rehearsed and checked their gear
and went on the offensive for the very first time.

“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld,” Sarah had joked,
sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep. She thought
they looked like them. It took some explaining before any of the rest of them
got the joke. Sarah was the only one who watched old sitcoms. And besides:
nothing much was funny after you’d shot a living person, not while you were
digging through their pockets and the bodies were still warm.

Matt was the one who’d discovered the stash. Later that
night, he’d held out that roach, the ember fading, telling Dennis to take a
hit, that it’d be good for him, that it was the end of the fucking world and to
stop being such a pussy.

Dennis had passed. He always did. He mumbled something about
asthma, his old and entirely made-up excuse to not smoke. Matt had shrugged and
had given life to that ember with a noisy intake of air.

Dennis had no problem lying to friends. He was used to
keeping secrets, was skilled at keeping things from others. The sticky wound
beneath his sleeve was just the latest. Later that night, while their cubicle
fortress filled with smoke, Dennis had found an empty cubicle down the endless
row. He had shuffled through the scattered supplies and loose paper like
snowdrifts from some weeks-old panic and made himself comfortable in quiet
solitude.

He didn’t know how to explain to his new friends what
getting stoned felt like to him. Hell, he’d been with Lisa for years and had
never even told her. He was pretty sure it was a singular reaction, that
everyone else must feel something different, but to him getting stoned was a
scary place, not a soothing one.

The first time he’d smoked up, he was convinced he would
die. The high had lasted for hours, for most of the damn day. He remembered
standing in Lisa’s kitchen, the cabinet open, hand on the knob, looking at an
assortment of glasses. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Must’ve
teleported from the living room. The TV and the laughter from his friends were
faraway sounds. He was disconnected from everything.

Later, sitting under a cold shower, praying impatiently for
the numbness that had crawled into his veins to crawl the fuck back out, he had
watched the hair on his legs wave as the water rained down from the faucet. The
hair stirred like the seaweed at the breaker’s edge on Far Rockaway, like small
arms pushing out of his skin and trying to get his attention, trying to wiggle
free. A million dead things buried alive and working to escape their epidermal
graves.

Dennis had become terrified that he would always be like
that. The pot had permanently dumbed him. Hours later, lying perfectly still on
the bathroom floor, his thoughts had begun to clear. He could analyze what had
gone wrong. But summoning his thoughts seemed to make his flesh melt away, his
body go perfectly numb. And if he tried to move, the opposite happened. He
could feel again, but now he couldn’t think.

It was one or the other. It couldn’t be both. His brain or
his flesh, never the two.

Three times in his life Dennis had gotten stoned, and every
time it was this choice. He could have his body or his thoughts, but not both
at the same time. That little bridge between the hemispheres of his soul got
fogged up by the smoke. That bridge had a name. Corpus Christi or some shit.
Once it was severed, he had to choose. One or the other. Lie still and think or
get the fuck up and lose his mind.

So he didn’t smoke. Was terrified of the shit. And now it
was happening again.

Dennis marveled at the similarities of getting stoned and
becoming a zombie as his willpower faded and his arm began to sting less and
less. He watched, powerless, as his legs kicked. The movement was a relief, but
only for a moment. Cornflakes crunched under the heels of his salvaged boots.
And when he began to rise, he did it with the grace of a drunk, with limbs
jerking out of control, unsure of themselves.

Dennis was a joystick with its wires crossed. He was playing
Dead or Alive 3
, that fighting game on his XBox, but the man on the
screen wasn’t pulling off the moves he was sending it. He felt that video game
lean, the attempt to urge the action in one direction through willpower alone,
but that never worked. Instead, his body lurched across the aisle toward the
nearest scent. The player was out of his control. The game had gone to a cutscene,
and Dennis had an awful feeling of how it would turn out.

He watched as his arms slashed through sacks of disheveled
coffee, digging for Lisa. Some distant and half-sane shard of his former self
knew what he was doing. It was as though he’d been locked away in his own
skull, some interloper crowding in beside him, and the confines and proximity
meant that feeble thoughts and silent screams from the one could bleed over
into the other. A monster had taken up residence in his head, and he could read
the foul beast’s mind, know what it was thinking.

Entire shelves of organic and fair trade scattered to the
tiles around his feet. Dark roast and decaf. Coffee from countries where Dennis
imagined life continued apace, maybe a news story in Portuguese about an outbreak
in Manhattan. Or maybe the entire world was overrun, who the fuck knew?

He heard Lisa calling for him. She was excited, had finally
found some special ingredient to this secret meal she’d been promising for
weeks. If they ever found a decent store, she’d said, one that hadn’t been
stripped bare, one dangerous enough on the outside to be rewarding enough
within, she’d make him something special.

Well, we made it
, Dennis wanted to say, to shout
through the shelves. The old part of him wanted to, at least. The new part
grunted with hunger and frustration—it had a different meal in mind. This was
the part that made him writhe between the tight shelves, forcing his body past
rows of coffee. An inhuman gurgle dribbled past his lips, a verbal drool.