I, Zombie

“It’s just a scratch,” she’d tried to tell him.

A scratch. In a thing that don’t heal, he could see that now. Another scratch, and the wound is open. Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.

A gash is what it becomes. And then a stump, until you can’t feel it anymore. Until there’s just an itch where things used to be, a phantom love you feel silly for recalling. Now it’s someone who takes care of the kids, does the dishes, talks your head off when you get back from being on the water a few days. Now it’s just someone you live with. It’s excuses to get away so you can meet the boys at the bar. It’s inconvenient phone calls in the winter when she’s visiting her sister in Anchorage, too scared to walk out of the grocery store and across the parking lot in the dark. That was a wound, that one. Yelling at her for being afraid. Yelling at her to keep up all the time. Yelling at her for being scared of the crowds in the city.

Goddamn, he missed her. Why didn’t he ever tell her that? Those long nights on the water with the decks slippery and lit up from the flood lights, Kyle telling a joke, and all Lewis wanted was to get home to a hot meal, to their bed, to a hug and her joking that if his neck smelled any more like fish he’d have gills.

And he’d feel it for a little while, that joy of being home, but never say it. Little cells of thought that didn’t know how to reach out to the other side and start pulling back together. A tongue for lashing but not for stitching.

He missed her terribly now that he felt this fear of the crowd, the helplessness that she must’ve felt. And he had yelled at her for it, for being afraid. All he’d had to say was that it was gonna be okay, but he’d made it worse instead. It was easier to imagine, now, how the world must’ve seemed to her. The fear of not being in control. The fear of being lost all the time. Lewis no longer had any idea where he was—all the blocks looked the same to him. He had no map, no chart, no points of reference. The first time he’d popped up from a subway station, back before all the madness began, he’d felt the first tickle of this, of not knowing where he was. You pop up and you can’t see the horizon. Just tall buildings on all sides, no feeling of where east or west was, no idea which way to start out, all turned around from winding down a flight of stairs in one part of the city, riding that train somewhere, and then winding his way back up. Dizzy, and he couldn’t ask anyone, couldn’t do that, not in front of her. It was scary, feeling that for the first time. Completely and utterly lost.

Darnell must’ve felt like that a lot.

It was getting colder every day, and Lewis wondered if the pain would eventually get so great that he wouldn’t feel anything anymore. Enough wounds, and you just go numb. He hoped that happened soon. He was just glad it wasn’t August with all that heat. The smell and the torture would be worse in August. Maybe he would still be alive and around then and he’d find out. But he hoped not. He’d rather be buried in the snow come winter, cover these wounds up. That was the thing about a scratch or a gash: sometimes there weren’t no healing from them at all. Sometimes you had to hope for them to get worse and worse until the mechanisms shut down, until you couldn’t feel nothing. That was easier, somehow. Easier than doing the unnatural thing—than doing whatever it took to stitch a wound back to how it was before.

42 • Darnell Lippman

She thought the helicopter would take them far away, would whisk them out over the river to the forest of low buildings and those red-and-white factory smokestacks beyond. But the net swayed to the side as the helicopter banked low over the water. And pinned to the rough twine of the net, a man chewing on her arm, the scent of blood in the cool air, Darnell peered through the holes of her confinement and spotted the thing they were aiming for.

It was a pair of barges strapped together, the kind that pushed through Homer Sound with tugs chugging at their stern. Orange rust, like lacy adornment, decorated the barges. Taut cables stretched from the corners of their metal decks out to the rock-shrouded legs of one of the ruined bridges. The river flowed angrily against the contraption, upset at this intrusion along its surface. On one side, the water pushed and frothed in a white mustache. Eddies and curls of water danced and spun along the calmer side, the river racing and turbulent and chilly.

They drifted down toward the combined decks of the two barges, and Darnell saw the small sheds dotting their surface. They looked like the containers from ships, the backs of tractor trailers, or those little temporary classrooms the middle school bought because it couldn’t afford anything else. Plastic tubes ran between the containers, the wind from the props causing them to shimmer and whip about. It was a hastily constructed place, this metal island set in the roiling waters. A good sign, Darnell thought. The ruined bridges and this rusted place were good signs. They didn’t want the horror to spread, which maybe meant that it hadn’t.

Her thoughts drifted to one of Lewis’s favorite TV shows as the helicopter made its slow descent. It was a show about the men and women who worked border control down south, a terribly long way from Alaska. She remembered how those men would round up people at night with goggles that turned the world green, that made eyeballs shine like headlamps in the tall grass. They rounded them up and treated them something like this, something less than human but not quite animal.

She remembered dark-skinned immigrants with plastic straps around their wrists. They were shoved into vans by men with guns so big they rested them on their shoulders. These men chewed toothpicks and wore shades and smiled and talked into the cameras. Lewis loved these men, even though they lived and worked a terribly long way from Alaska. “Keeping the country clean,” he’d said, finishing another beer and crushing the tin with his fist.

The net of writhing monsters landed harshly on the wet and rusty decks, right beside a large white ‘H’ painted in the middle of a big circle. Darnell couldn’t feel her own skin from the frigid ride, couldn’t tell if the man pinned beside her was still biting her arm or not.

People in plastic suits came at them warily with long poles and hooks. They tugged the nets loose with these tools, and the helicopter made thwumping sounds as the rotor kept spinning. A man in a shiny helmet peered through the helicopter’s window toward the net, gloved hand on the glass. As soon as they got the net free, the rotor grew more angry, and the helicopter lifted away.

Darnell’s nose was frozen stiff, and the men with the poles were completely covered, but she could still catch a faint whiff of the living on them. Her ghastly neighbors could, too. Their ragged breath fogged the air with hungry grunts. Darnell suspected something different was wrong with these other two, that the locals, the New Yorkers who’d gotten sick, had lost their minds more fully. It never occurred to her that they were as trapped as she, or that any of them might be tourists as well, or that her breath was also clouding the air and filling it with inhuman sounds. In her mind, it was just she who was out of place and alone. Everyone else was different.

The men in the suits sure treated them the same. They used poles like for wrangling rabid dogs and hooked their limbs. One suited figure snagged Darnell’s wrist, another dropped a loop around her neck. She watched as they tried to snare the arm of her neighbor, but he had no hand to catch it on, so the loop kept sliding off his black and mangled wrist. Muffled shouts and pointing from the men in the yellow suits, and they managed to tighten the loop over his elbow.

The three of them were half-dragged across the steel deck, slippery with sea salt and ice. Darnell’s feet tangled in the net imbued with someone’s blood and brains. She fought against these men, but not of her own accord. She was precisely the animal they were treating her like.

Darnell remembered being not sick. She wanted to tell them, tell them she remembered being petrified that she might catch it, holding her breath, cowering in a department store, wondering where Lewis had gotten to, why he wasn’t answering his cell phone. This wasn’t her. She wasn’t like this.

Any slack in the poles, and her long gray fingernails swiped at their masked faces, an inhuman power wrestling against the sticks, a croak of a scream dribbling out. They pulled her through an inflated arch and into one of the trailers, one not connected to the rest. Loud fans whirred, more cool air on thawing flesh, the tingle of frost-nipped skin, the half-numb of an Alaskan night spent camping out too early—too eagerly—in the spring. Darnell snapped at one of the men in the suits. This was not like her at all.

Glass rooms for each of them. More rooms in the trailer as well, but all empty. They were the first. There were drains in the floor, gurneys with straps, chains bolted to the walls with metal plates. The men held Darnell with their sticks and loops of wire, the one around her neck causing her to gurgle, the pain very real as her flesh thawed.

She was pinned against the wall, the skin of the trailer booming as her elbow slammed into it with animal strength. One of the men, visor fogged with effort or nerves, stepped forward and secured her ankle with a pole. As she snapped at him, she saw that her net-mates were getting similar treatment beyond the glass. All the workers pulled, lifting her into the air, a fresh catch flopping on the end of a line. It felt like they would rip her body apart, pulling her in all directions like that. She was moved over the gurney, hovered there, and then was settled down. Cool against her back. Each limb was pinned with the sticks until they could work the straps tight. Darnell wrestled against the pinch on her wrists and ankles. If she had a pulse—she wasn’t sure if she did or didn’t—surely it would be cut off. The straps were too tight.

They released her and withdrew their poles, and Darnell bucked against her restraints. She was a monster in a film, a horrible movie, her view through the screen the wrong way.

A groan leaked out as she tried to form the words. She really concentrated this time, did her best to yell out that she was a person inside there, that she was a real person and not an animal. She wasn’t like the others caught in the net with her; she was different, still alive.

She tried to form these words, but they remained loud thoughts. Silent screams. All that emerged were roars and spit. She arched her back and banged on the gurney just like the monsters in the other rooms, but she wasn’t like them. Images from a TV show her husband used to watch flooded back. She wasn’t like these people at all.

43 • Lewis Lippman

Lewis was lost. He had no idea what street he was on or which part of town he was in. But he knew he’d finally found what they were all looking for, the source of this alluring odor drifting through the air: It was meat, holed up in the middle of a massive intersection the size of a city block. The smell oozed through and over a barrier wall of cars and trucks, tantalizing but nearly drowned out as he got closer by the reek of the undead pressed all around. There was a bus, one of the big flat-fronted kind that rose high as an overpass and brought whale-watchers from Anchorage. It had been parked sideways, nose crushed against an old brick facade, a dump truck shoved against its rear.

Lewis’s group melded with the many others that were already there, a fucking jamboree of zombies. They all milled around, groaning like a bunch of drunks, like goddamn stoned hippies waiting for a show to start. They crowded at each other’s backs, all hoping to be near the stage.

Lewis rode a surge through the crowd. A woman pressed against him, her lower jaw missing, tongue dangling down like a necktie, eyes wide with fear. Her gurgles had a unique ring to them. She disappeared, replaced by the sight of a tall man who must’ve been one of the first to go. A patch of hair on his scalp and ribbons of flesh stretched across his cheek were almost all that remained on his skull. His eyes were comically wide, much too round. Maggots the size of peanuts dotted his neck.

So many stages of decay, so many people, but not people anymore. Lewis was pushed forward by the crowds at his back. Some of those ahead were shambling the other direction as if disappointed the show wouldn’t start. It was hard to smell the living meat from the middle of the crowd; the change in scents created eddies of undead, a swirling of rotting bodies like by the fish cleaning station at slack tide.

Lewis made it to the front and found himself pressed against the bus. There were smears there from those who came before, a clump of hair and a bit of flesh. He felt something like a gag reflex in his mind, but his body made no response. It was searching after the smell of meat.

Gunshots rang out from above. He had heard potshots the day before as he closed in on the area, wondered what they were shooting at. If anyone in the crowd took a hit, he couldn’t see. There were others at his back trying to take his place, and Lewis found himself shoved to the side along the length of the bus. He could imagine himself swirling like this forever until he looked like the man with the maggots on his neck. Another shot from what sounded like a high caliber rifle. That was another possibility, another way out. He tried to gurgle louder, to make himself a target, to seem especially threatening. He thought of a movie he’d seen once with monsters like him in it, had laughed while they trudged forward in a stupor getting their heads blown off, and now it occurred to him that maybe they were begging for it. Maybe they were trying to hold perfectly still.

Stupid thoughts. Just a movie. Actors. They hadn’t been thinking shit other than when the next smoke break was coming or hitting those tables of food. Fuck, Lewis couldn’t stop thinking about food and cigarettes. He banged his knee on something, something hard. One of those luggage compartments had come open, had been knocked loose.