I, Zombie by Hugh Howey

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?
    She couldn’t know.
    And in the same instant that Jennifer Shaw realized she
wasn’t alone, she felt it more powerfully than ever before. They were all alone. All in their individual hells. No escape, no hope, no control. No way of
even saying to each