In the meantime, she had a playmate to bump after in the meat shop. And so the two of them played chase during the day and a game she called There-You-Are at night. They played while the smell of their dead parents mingled in the air, and it was easy to pretend, if you knew how, that their grunts were giggles, their labored hisses the noise of happy laughter, just two kids wasting time while they wasted away, the both of them eying that heavy shelf by the door that kept them trapped inside.
Part III • Jeffery Biggers
24 • Jeffery Biggers
Where were the people? It was hard to figure at first, why with the outbreak there weren’t more people. Ten million in New York, and most of them were just… gone. Jeffery had assumed it would spread, that the avenues and streets would be crowded from one side to the other with the chompers. But then, most people didn’t get away, did they? They got more than a bite. They got consumed.
And so the streets were full of cars, but no people. Just remains. That was the sickest thing, seeing the bones, all the cleaned carcasses. Getting bit and surviving was rarer than getting eaten whole. Rarer and worse. Being infected was hella worse. But so few got infected, right? How many got a scratch or a bite like Jeffery did and still managed to get clear, find a place to hole up until it weren’t their choice how to move or what to do? Not many, he didn’t figure. Most got eaten. That’s where the ten million went. Gone. Eaten up and shat out by those who remained.
Jeffery remembered the one that got him. Goddamn that woman. Goddamn that crazy bitch.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop playing that day over and over in his head as he rode among the pack, weaving around the jammed cars with blinking hazards and open doors, a picked-clean skeleton sitting there in one of ’em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the engine and go for a drive, some ad for a damn MADD commercial.
Jeffery remembered spotting the bitch from that upstairs apartment he’d staked out for his own. He hadn’t planned on leaving that place until the cupboards were bare. Earlier that morning, he had escaped a few mobs, had used that combination of boot camp army know-how and the black spirit that had helped generations of his color make it through the deep shit time and time again. He’d seen some brutal stuff in his weeks of running, more gruesome even than the crap he’d seen in the war. Roadside bombs and flesh eaters had some things in common, except these monsters didn’t leave limbs behind. They took them with them, munching on them like turkey legs while they tracked down another scent.
Jeffery had been surviving okay for a week or two, getting clear, avoiding one nick after another. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky. Jeffery was used to that, the inequitable luck of two people sitting side-by-side in the same Hummer. One man gets a scratch, the other is holding his guts in his lap and screaming for his momma. All luck. Where you’re sitting’, where you’re born. Dumb fucking luck.
Well, there’s dumb luck, and then there’s just plain stupid. Jeffery had been stupid, trying to save that baby, thinking shit could be saved anymore. Stupid.
He’d seen the woman from the apartment window, down in the alley, three stories below. One of the flesh-eaters was walking in circles, waving her arms over her head. Hadn’t seen one do that. Most walked with their arms out like goddamn Frankenstein, like the soul trapped inside can see but the shit in charge can’t. Like they gotta feel their way through the breeze.
So this one, arms wiggling like thick snakes over her head and around her shoulders, spinning and spinning all alone. He figured what the fuck? What’s her disorder? Jeffery had watched from the window, curious, eating someone else’s potato chips, whoever the fuck used to live there. And then he saw what the damn flesh-eating bitch was doing. Naw, he heard it. It was the wail of the living—a baby awake, screaming from one of those goddamn yuppie backpacks. The mother must’ve just turned in the last day or two for that thing to still be alive. Jeffery leaned out the window to see better. Damn woman was waving her arms, trying to get at the morsel of noisy flesh strapped to her back, trying to eat her own goddamn baby.
Up till then, Jeffery had done well by looking out for himself—no point risking two lives where one was in jeopardy. Hell, he’d seen so many dead by that point, so many go down that could’ve been him if he were a little slower, if he’d hesitated or panicked, if he’d stuck his neck out for someone else.
But something about the baby’s cries got to him. That sound dove into his bones and clawed at something deep, something primal. Maybe it was this last chance at life. All the death and dying, and here was something that’d just been born, a memory of how shit used to work. The thought of leaving that baby to starve to death on its mother’s back—or worse, for those writhing arms to finally get it free, for those clacking teeth to set to work—he couldn’t sit there and wait.
He remembered leaning out the window and scanning the alley. There was a van crashed into the corner of the building, the hood buckled up around the old brick. The body of the van blocked the alley off from the street. It looked safe enough. Boxed in. One woman spinning in circles, grunting and groaning. Jeffery set the bag of chips aside, wiped the grease off on his blue jeans, and threw his leg out the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he scrambled onto the fire escape.
A gas grill blocked access to the ladder—a ghetto balcony. Pots of dirt with wilted brown stalks lay over on their sides, a luckier kind of dead. Jeffery wrestled the grill out of the way, metal squealing on metal. He flashed a glance across the alley at a spot of movement, saw a young man watching him from a window in the building over, late teens or early twenties. Surviving age, as Jeffery had come to think of it. The boy leaned out the window and looked down at the woman in the alley. Jeffery squeezed around the grill and descended the metal stairs.
At the end of the stairs, he knelt and started to free the telescoping ladder at the bottom, but wondered if the chompers could manage to scramble up. He was pretty sure they couldn’t, but why risk it, now that he’d found someplace safe? He gauged the distance below and figured he could jump up and grab the lowest rung, used to go around the neighborhood leaping up and doing pull-ups on ’em to impress his friends when he was younger. Better safe than sorry, so he left the ladder the way it was.
He scrambled down the rungs, the cries from the baby louder now and somehow soothing. The noise it made was a sign that it was still alive, that the woman hadn’t gotten it free. Jeffery didn’t know what he’d do to take care of the thing. Maybe it’d be his ticket onto one of the rescue helicopters he’d heard about but had never seen. If they were real, the baby would be his way on board. Jeffery could be that soldier helping a friend cradle his guts for a change. He remembered. They always took that other soldier out of the shit-storm. They saw him helping like that, squeezing a friend’s grave wound, and they treated him like some necessary bandage, some emotional tourniquet. Jeffery would save the baby and be saved himself. That became the plan.
Working down to the last rung, he dangled there for a moment, feet swinging high over the windswept garbage in the alley, the grunts from the woman changing as she spotted him there, as she caught his scent.