I, Zombie Read Online Free

their gaunt faces and
stretched necks until the sky turned the color of blood and finally the deep
black of death.
    This was when the misery of the shuffle grew impossibly
worse. Jennifer found she couldn’t sleep, didn’t even know what that would mean
anymore. Her body roamed eternal, her mind trapped. Entire city blocks would go
by like sleepy miles on a long drive. She would snap alert and wonder how she
got there, have a brief moment of panic like waking to a dead limb, fighting to
control some horribly numb part of herself, all to no avail. That surge of
adrenaline would soon subside as chemicals both useless and impotent faded into
her dead flesh. These responses were only good for rattling her poor nerves.
They were old ghosts of her former self, shaking useless and haunting chains.
    The air grew cool with the setting sun, and Jennifer
remembered those interminable drives across Long Island to see her parents,
pushing herself late into the night after a long day of work. With the radio
blaring and the windows down, her thoughts would tune out while her body
cruised on auto. Coming to miles later, she would glance in the rearview mirror
and marvel at turns she’d steered around with absolutely no awareness of them.
    The walks at night were like those drives. Every grueling
and frigid night since that boy bit her arm was like a dozen of those long
drives. From sundown to sunup, the fitful non-sleep of scents and sounds, an
occasional feed, the sad company of the groaning and jostling shuffle.
    The cold of looming winter made it even easier to drift in
and out. The chill worked itself deep into her bones, attacking her skin where
it was bare. An early encounter with a handful of survivors had shredded her
shirt, leaving it hanging from her belt in bloody tatters. Her thin bra offered
little comfort. At night, her nipples grew sore from staying hardened so long.
It was as if some parts of her were still alive, but only the parts that could
add to her suffering.
    When she was most miserable—in the dead of night with her
nipples aching—her thoughts turned to the boy who had bitten her. And
invariably from there, she thought of the young man she had days later bitten
in turn. Like her, the young man she had attacked managed to get away. It felt
like the thing to do when it was happening. You’re threatened, hormones and
chemicals serve their purpose, instilling you with fear, and so your body wants
to yank loose and flee.
    But now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was like a dog’s bite,
where pulling just made it worse. She’d watched an older man’s eyes go dim
during a feed, once. Enough of him had been eaten that he didn’t have time to
turn. There wasn’t enough to come back. Jennifer had seen the last of that
man’s life leave his body, had felt him go perfectly still, and was beginning
to count men like him among the lucky.
    There was a desperate need to shiver, but she couldn’t. It
was worse than an itch she couldn’t reach, a crippling form of paralysis. The
sunset came like a switch flicked, the temperature plummeting, and Jennifer
imagined wrapping her arms around her body, tried to will her hands to adjust
the remains of her shredded shirt—
    Instead, she trudged along, frozen and freezing, unable to
move and unable to stop.
    There were others among the shuffle who had it even worse.
She felt horrible for the half-naked members, for those who looked as though
they’d been bitten in their sleep and had somehow startled awake and managed to
get away. They walked barefoot through the streets of broken glass and left
smears of foul-smelling blood behind them.
    Sights like these gradually faded as darkness fell across
the city streets, smothering them like a heavy blanket. There hadn’t been power
in the tall buildings for over a week, and with the moon in full wane, the
nighttime became a mass of shifting dead beneath a glittering sprinkle of
stars. Bodies bumped against Jennifer, some of them still