I, Zombie by Howey Hugh

Author:Howey, Hugh [Howey, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Broad Reach Publishing
Published: 2012-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

26 • Jeffery Biggers

Days had passed since he’d dropped down into that alley, and Jeffery had run the end of his life over and over in his mind. There was always something he’d change, a knife to take down with him, lowering that damn ladder, being just a bit faster, but never a regret about going in general. Never a pang of regret for that child.

He headed south. There was no traffic—the noise of the city had just stopped, those great and ceaseless rivers of mostly yellow falling perfectly still. The last bit of flow had come days ago with that white pickup that’d barreled through Harlem, an old man behind the wheel trying his damnedest to get the fuck out. He had plowed through row after row of chompers like high corn, tossing bodies aside and running them over.

When his front axle got stuck on a pile of crushed chompers—mounds of them like deep mud—the man had tried rocking it back and forth, the transmission growling as he threw it in and out of gear. Gathering around him, the starving mob had banged on the glass while spinning rubber tore through the bodies stuck beneath the cab. Arms had waved under there like thick grass, the rest of the person crushed. And the smell, an odor horrible enough to drown out all the other horrible smells, rubber and flesh both heating up to burning.

Jeffery hadn’t been one of the lucky ones that got run over, hadn’t been one of those too far away to miss out on the feed. He’d been somewhere in the middle, that worst place possible.

That had been the last time he’d seen a moving vehicle, that white man in that white truck plowing through the hordes of chompers. Now the streets stood still, grotesque and disfigured men and women prowling among the cars like bugs picking through rocks. High above, shapes moved behind shimmering windows, no telling if the people inside were dead or undead, not unless there was a jagged hole and the breeze blew just the right way.

This was what his city had become. Shattered glass, unmoving traffic, hungry packs roaming aimlessly.

But not Jeffery. He was aimless no longer. He felt a pull southward like the slope of a crater, felt drawn by more than the mere scent of the living. Drawn by something else.

It occurred to him, as he strode toward the winter sun in its low, noonday position, that this wasn’t the first time he had looked south while all the traffic stopped. He had been fourteen when the planes hit. He remembered the smell, that acrid odor of asbestos and melted steel and who knew what else. Paper had fluttered on the breeze clear up to Harlem, little charred pieces of the stuff like burning snow. That was how white-collar buildings bled: They leaked paperwork, filing cabinets full of the shit, coughing it out through broken glass to flap in the same wind that brought the smoke all the way up to Harlem.

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