The world lurched to the side with awareness of just what kind of shit he was in, that this was real. His stomach strained against his jeans, felt tight and bloated. Something warm ran down his legs, the taste in his mouth foul, fur and flesh caught in his teeth.
Michael pissed himself. The barrels shivered with laughter.
And Michael had this sudden sense that other people were people like him. Like he used to be. That was him behind the car, joking with a friend, peering down that barrel, wrapped in rags soaked in perfume, playing like characters in a video game. That was him making fun of a sick fuck who couldn’t even stagger down the street without looking a fool. That was his sister over there, hair curling out of those rags, one of her boyfriends busting into a supermarket, doing the cool shit of surviving, of living, rather than locked away in some fleshy cocoon, some goddamn filthy apartment.
Someone raised a fist. Michael knew that meant they were about to move. More leapfrogging. The door to the building swung open, a mummy’s arm waving the others his way.
One of the jokesters turned and jogged toward the supermarket, clover or honeysuckle or some shit stirring in the air. Michael shuffled down the middle of the street, a patch of open pavement, a man in rags pointing a gun at him from behind a cab and laughing.
“What?” Michael wanted to shout. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
The two friends by the door hissed at him to come. The man behind the cab raised his fist, and then his hand returned to the gun, steadied it as the barrel lowered, Michael getting closer by the inch.
Laughter. And then it stopped for a moment. The barrel did as well.
A thunderclap. A roar. A flash and a geyser of smoke.
And the only leg Michael had left, the only thing he could prop himself on—this was taken from him as well. Hot steel chewed through the better of his two knees like a charging dog. Michael’s leg shattered. His leg was blown clear away.
He hovered there a moment before the fall, the echo of the gunshot screaming down New York’s perfect canyons, and then, wobbling on split bone and no bone at all, Michael crashed helplessly toward the pavement. Above him somewhere, off to one side, howling laughter erupted before disappearing into the city’s steel walls—and there he went with his friends, rushing inside for good times, for laughing times, for the plunder and play, the life he thought he was living even as he pissed it all away.
13 • Jennifer Shaw
Jennifer found herself in the middle of the shuffle. Along the edge, one had a better view of the world. You could get a sense of where the group was heading, whom they were after, see survivors making a dash or boarding up windows. In the middle, all you saw were your decaying neighbors, a menagerie of wounds and disgustingness, up-close horrors like a Google image search of festering pus.
Moving along in the middle of a large shuffle also meant never knowing where the victims of a feed came from. You never saw how they began. There would be a distant smell of fear, the gurgling sounds of hungry rage, an excited quickening of the pace, some tottering stampede.
If the living put up a fight—and Jennifer always prayed they would—the fallen members of her shuffle would appear on the pavement with their heads bashed in or blown away. Sometimes their arms and legs would still be moving, clutching and kicking at the feet sliding by, tripping up their fellow undead.
The latest feed began like so many others: a scream and the smell of someone surrounded, the raw odor of a living person who knows that death is upon them, the starving snarls of anticipation.
Jennifer found herself hurrying with the rest of the shuffle, many of the limps growing exaggerated, rotten heads bobbing up and down. There were no lucky zombies to trip over along the way. No souls spared the waking nightmare. No gunshots, the promise and hope of a stray bullet. The victim of this feed wasn’t the result of a group fight, just someone who had gotten in the way. Had stumbled or had become cornered. A shriek while they were still able, and then the maddening smell of blood and meat released into the air.
Part of Jennifer hoped the meat was gone before she got there. She was most happy when the other half of her mind, the mad half, was starved and weak. She would rather starve, rather feel empty inside, suffer the gnaw of her gut, than watch herself eat.
This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. Jennifer swam through the shuffle until she came upon a mother with her son, neither swift enough to get away. Maybe the boy had fallen, tripped, and the mother did what any mother would: made the mistake of going back for him.
Despite her revulsion, Jennifer fell beside the fat man with the flopping ear and began to feed. She tried to look away, to look anywhere else, but her body was locked rigid and wide-eyed on the still-warm flesh, on the purple ropes that came unknotted from the woman’s belly. The young boy was torn in two. The mother’s face jerked, mouth open, eyes unblinking, staring up at the clouds overhead. This was what the world had become.
A warm and tangy taste filled Jennifer’s mouth, blood running down her throat, down her chin, the feeling in some dark recess of her soul like a flash of guilt-ridden joy, this radiance of a hunger sated, emotions from the black side of her bleeding over into what little of her old self remained.
Her hands pawed through the woman’s remains, dozens of other hands fighting, teeth gnashing, a leg dragged away by several others, the flesh between pulling apart like Silly Putty before snapping. Jennifer was forced to witness it all. To smell it and consume it.
She bit into a length of intestine, raw shit in her mouth, and still could not physically gag, could only recoil emotionally. She tried reciting the alphabet backwards, tried singing long forgotten songs in her mind. She repeated the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, but what was stronger than this? What mental effort or childhood game could silence the gluttonous undead, could overpower the stench of an opened body, the taste of human waste?
The rear of the shuffle crowded in, jostling her, rubbing up against her flesh, fighting for scraps. Jennifer urged these competitors forward. Eat, eat, she cried to herself. They were all that she pulled for. Her own body was the enemy.
She and the fat man fought over an unidentifiable scrap. He was larger—and won. Jennifer watched the red prize spill from the open wound on his neck, empty and yellowed teeth chomping on nothing, a satisfied vigor in his dead limbs.
And the awful truth, the glaring obviousness of it all finally struck her. Jennifer’s gaze met the fat man’s, their eyes locking for a moment, and she saw, somehow, through that soulless window and into the mind beyond. Past this blood-smeared face, the happy chewing, the twitching arms, was a frightened man. Trapped. Terrified. Imprisoned like a passenger in that roaming form, looking out like a frightened child between cracked blinds at the scary world beyond.
It wasn’t just her.
And with an explosion of clarity the entire shuffle came to life around her. She thought of the thousands of trapped souls scrambling for sanity, clutching their private pasts, forced to watch what they’d all become. And the crushing blow of this was like a bat to Jennifer’s head. There was a man in that fat face with its hideous wound. A man like her who remembered this city, remembered what they used to be. Jennifer wanted to call out, to wave, but didn’t know how. And she wondered if he knew she was in this body of hers, watching him, knowing him. Was he scared of her? How bad were her own wounds? What did he see?