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Chapter Text

dedicated to cerase11a, my long island girl, because warm bodies is her favorite movie and toronto is her favorite city <3

A city that was once lively and thriving has become a decaying, hollow shell of itself. What remained was a corpse of a once-happy place, now filled with death and the scent of decay. Toronto used to be a place of happiness and laughter, and it never would be that city ever again. 

Dahlia was a peculiar soul, wandering through the desolate streets with a mind that was different from her fellow undead. While she had to eat humans for survival, she didn’t enjoy it and thrive off of it the way that everyone around her did. She didn’t know how, but her soul seemed to be longing for something unknown. 

Toronto was her favorite city as a human. Born on Long Island, she visited Toronto often through her teenage years. There was something about the city that she just connected with. How fitting that she ended up dying there, when it was formerly a place where she was at her liveliest. 

Dahlia walked the streets of Toronto endlessly, searching for something . She didn’t know what, or if she ever would know. She just… was .  Her existence had no real meaning anymore. 

Until meaning came in the form of a beautiful blonde girl.

Chapter Text

BEING dead isn’t as bad as you would think it would be. I was used to it. The only reason I remember my name– Dahlia– was solely because I found a piece of paper in my sweatshirt pocket that was a note addressed to me, aka Dahlia, from someone that was my sister, though it didn’t say a name, just literally ‘ from your favorite sister .’ If that note hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have known what my name was when I was alive. Once you die, become like me, you forget that stuff. Nobody around me remembers their names. I do have a best friend, however, and I refer to her as “J” because she remembers her name starting with a J, but that was about it. She looked extremely similar to me. I wondered if that note in my pocket was from her. We probably were sisters. We had pretty much the same face, with minor differences, and her hair was a chocolate brown, while mine was blonde. 

Both of us aren’t as decayed as a lot of these others around us. We still looked somewhat human, just a little rotted. Our skin was gray and we had purple bags under our eyes. We must have died together, because the first time I saw when I “woke up” was her face next to mine. We just looked extremely tired, and maybe a little sick, but still, human. 

Seeing as we don’t remember anything about our human lives, and neither does anyone else, we like to look around at everyone and try to guess together what they were, when they were living based on their clothes. Sometimes, it was hard though. One girl was in shorts and a sweater, another in a skirt and a blouse. That wasn’t much to go off of. So we just randomly assign them a career we think fits their face.

The one in a sweater, we decided, was a waitress. The one in the blouse was a student. We knew that they were completely out of left field, but still. It was fun to imagine, and it made us laugh, keeping us occupied. If we never did anything, we wouldn’t be able to keep functioning. We’d keep rotting away more and more. So we tried to be as happy as we could. 

No one we knew had any actual memories. Just faded, vague, blurry images in their mind of whatever the world was before. They lingered in our dead brains like a polaroid that never fully developed. Basic things we recognized, like buildings and cars, stuff like that. But no specific details of our own lives. We just exist now. Time moves and so do we, just… endlessly here . It may sound dreadful, but really, it isn’t. Our brains are still in our heads. They don’t work as well as a living person’s would, but they do still work. I can understand things, I can enjoy things. My speech was a lot better than those around me, which was cool, I guess. 

It’s sad, though, that none of us have any real identities anymore. We are all just simply existing , with no purpose or reason anymore. I miss the life I had before, even if I don’t remember it. I hope it was happy. I hope I was happy. I hoped I loved people—and I’m sure I did, going off of that note in my pocket. I wish I could feel what love feels like, because I’m not capable of it anymore. 

• • •

I don’t know exactly how many, but I’d guess hundreds, of us living in an obviously abandoned airport on the outskirts of a large city. We don’t need shelter to survive, nor can we feel cold, but it's kind of nice to have a place to “live” anyway. I think just blankly wandering the streets with nowhere to go, no place to stop, would be even more depressing than our existence already was. Having nothing to look at, nothing to touch, nothing to come back to would be horrible. I imagine that is what truly being dead would be like. Just… empty. Alone. Stranded. 

I don’t know how long we’ve been in this airport, either, but I’d wager it’s been quite a while. All of my flesh is still intact on my body, but there are older ones that look more like skeletons now, with barely any flesh clinging to their bones. None of us can “die”, but we certainly can wither away. 

• • •

I was taking a walk through the airport when J found me. I liked going for walks. I go for multiple walks a day. Sometimes, the power of the airport would flicker on for brief moments, most likely from emergency generators still breathing a sign of life, but it was fun to go on the escalators whenever that did happen. Some lights will flicker on, screens too, and machines will weakly start. These moments give me an odd feeling—I think it might be what hope once felt like, or the shadow of hope. 

After riding the escalator a few times, I rise to find J waiting for me at the top. She is tall, five-foot-eight, but an inch shorter than I am. She had long chocolate hair that was almost to her waist and blue eyes that were identical to mine. When we were alive, they probably were very bright, but now, there’s a thin sheen of murkiness laid overtop of them. 

She pointed to the side, grunting out, “City.” 

I nodded and followed her. 

We were going out to find food. A hunting party formed around us as we shuffled toward town. It’s not hard to find recruits for these expeditions, even if no one is hungry. Focused thought is not something that happens around here, and we all just follow it when we see a herd forming. If we didn’t, we would just be standing around, groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning. Years passed that way. The flesh still on our bones continued to decay and we just stand, waiting for nothing as time keeps going. I wondered how old I was, as I had no real idea. 

• • •

Luckily for us, the area where we get our “meals” is pretty close. We got there right before the afternoon of the next day and started looking for something to eat. Undead hunger is a weird feeling. We don’t feel it in our stomachs, like a living human being would. We just feel it… everywhere . It was similar to a sinking feeling, like when you’re on a roller coaster and that first big drop happens. It almost felt like our cells were deflating inside of us. Last winter, so many new Living joined the Dead, which made our food source scarce, and it keeps getting scarcer. Some of my Dead friends became full-dead after our food supply dwindled. While you would think that it would be a dramatic experience, it was very anticlimactic. They just… slowed down one day and then eventually stopped moving altogether. It was disturbing to me at first, to just see the life leave them completely finally, but it was considered rude to stare when someone dies. 

The city we wandered through looked as rotten as us Dead did. A lot of the buildings have long-since collapsed. There were rusted, decaying cars filling the streets. Most windows of any physical structure were shattered, and the wind blowing through the hollow, utterly empty city sounded kind of like deathly groans. I didn’t know how it all happened. A disease seemed the most obvious and logical explanation, but who knew. It’s not like it was relevant. Once you became one of us, it didn’t matter how you got there. 

We started to get whiffs in the air of the Living as we approached a lopsided, unstable apartment building. The scent that we get isn’t the literal smell of a human—we caught the scent of life energy; a smell that I didn’t even know how to begin to describe, just that it was strong. And like hunger, it didn’t happen like it would for one of the Living. We didn’t get scent in our noses—we got it in our brain stems. We entered the building and crashed our way inside like a pack of animals. 

We found the Living huddled in a small studio apartment with all of the windows boarded up with slabs of wood. They were dressed like the Dead, and if they didn’t smell Living, I would have thought they were dead. 

We walked with an urgency, but it was slow and clumsy as we launched ourselves at the Living. Gunshots filled the air, cutting through the dust that seemed like a fog over this place. On top of that dust, there was now gunpowder and blood. Blackish-red blood splattered against the walls. An arm got ripped off, a leg, a chunk of a torso—but I paid it no mind. It didn’t matter to us Dead. Losing a limb didn’t actually hurt us, it just changed our appearance. That was all. The only thing that can take us down is a shot to the brain, and I saw a couple of members of our herd get just that. The zombies to my left and right both got taken down, hitting the floor with a spongy-sounding thud. But there were plenty of us. An overwhelming amount. 

Eating wasn’t fun, I didn’t enjoy it. I chewed off a man’s arm, and I hated it the whole time. I hated how he screamed in pain and terror—I hated pain, I hated hurting people, but this was the way of the world now. This is what we had to do. I didn’t have a choice, otherwise I, too, would wither away and become a corpse, never moving ever again. 

I ate the brain, as much as I hated doing that. If we eat the brain of our meals, they don’t come back as one of us. If we spare the brain, they would pop right back up shortly and just follow us back to the airport. But sometimes, it was hard to control myself and stop myself from eating the brain, as it was the tastiest part and it was what kept us the most “fresh.” 

I trailed behind the group as we left the city once everyone was done with the meal. I didn’t know why we had to kill people. I mean, I know it was so I could stay “alive”, but still—I wish there was some other way. 

Often, I wondered how this all started, how we became what we are. Some mysterious, out-of-the-blue, powerful virus? Or something else? No one talked about it, like it was an unspoken rule. We weren’t supposed to complain. We weren’t supposed to ask questions. We were supposed to just go on. 

I felt so disconnected from the world outside of me. It was such a wide gap that I couldn’t comprehend it. 

• • •

At the Arrivals gate of the airport, we were greeted by a small crowd, who watched us with hungry eyes—the ones that still had eyes, that is. We dropped our to-go delivery on the floor in front of them, two men that were mostly intact, a handful of thighs, and a dismembered torso. They were all still warm. The group fell to the floor next to the food, eating on the floor right there. The food that we bring them keeps them alive, but the Dead who don’t hunt in herds will never be fully satisfied. They will wither faster than those who hunt, and are weaker than us. 

I gave J a wave and then separated myself from the crowd. The Dead had a stench to them, but of course, by now, I was very used to it. However, the reek rising off of them smelled particularly rancid today. I was lucky that I didn’t have to breathe to stay alive, so I didn’t, and instead went outside to get some fresh air, away from the stinking. 

I wandered out into the connecting hallways and rode the conveyors. I stood on the belt and just watched the outdoors from the window parallel to me. Not much happened out there. The runways were turning green, nature taking back. Planes laid motionless, parked on the concrete. 

When I was still alive, I could never have done this; standing still, watching the world pass by me, nothing on my mind. I remembered what effort felt like. I remembered deadlines, goals, and ambition. I remembered what having a purpose felt like. But now I just stood on the conveyor belt, just moving along for the ride. I reached the end, turned around, and went back the other way. 

After a few hours of doing this, I saw a woman on the conveyor next to mine. She didn’t lurch or groan like most; her head just lazily lolled from side to side. I decided I liked that; that she doesn’t lurch or groan. I caught her eye and stared at her as we approached each other. For a brief moment we stood side by side, separated by only a few feet. We passed by, and then ended up on opposite sides of the hallway. We turned around to look at each other, then we got back on the conveyors. We passed each other again, like before. On our third pass-by, the airport power died, and we came to a halt right in front of each other. I wheezed a hello, and she responded with a hunch of her shoulder. 

I liked her. I reached out a hand to touch her hair softly. Like me, her decomposition was at an early stage. Her skin was pale and her eyes were sunken, but she had no exposed bones poking out or organs. Her irises are an extremely light shade of that odd dusty gray majority of the Dead share (unlike me and J, who were pretty much the only ones with bright blue eyes, hers more than mine). She was wearing a black skirt and a tight white button up. 

On her chest, there was a pinned nametag. 

She had a name. Like me. 

I stared hard at the tag, leaning in close, but it was very hard for me to read; the letters just spun and reversed in my eyes. When I was first changed, I could read better—seeing as I was able to read the note in my pocket. But as time went by, that ability got away from me. 

It was very ironic—name tags, newspapers, whatever it may be, the answers to every question we asked ourselves were written down all around us, and none of us knew how to read. 

I pointed at the name tag and looked up, meeting her eyes. “Your… name?” 

She stared blankly at me. 

I pointed at myself and roughly pronounced my own name. “Daahhhliiia.” Then I pointed at her again, hoping she understood what I was implying. 

Her eyes fell to the floor. She shook her head—she didn’t remember it. She didn’t even remember the first letter, like J did. She was a nobody. But I always expected too much. I reached out and took her hand in mine. We walked off the conveyors with our arms stretched across the divider, attached. 

This woman and I have fallen in love. Or, at least, the Dead version of being in love. 

I remembered, a bit, what love was like before, but I wasn’t fully confident if I was remembering correctly. There were complex emotions and feelings involved. It was a whirlwind of strong emotions, agonizing and blissfully sweet all at once. And it made you feel alive . But this new “love” was a lot more simple. It was easier. But it was insignificant, just as dead as us. 

My girlfriend didn’t talk much. We walked through the eerily empty corridors of the airport, occasionally passing someone who was staring out a window or at a wall. I tried to think of what to say to her, but no words came to the forefront of my mind. This was a big issue of mine, like a giant crack in the road I could never seem to get the courage to jump over. In my own mind, I had no issue speaking, my thoughts forming eloquently and understandable; my thoughts were in vibrant color and vivid emotions. But when I would go to open my mouth to let those words out, it just… crumbled . The beautiful, colorful thoughts of my mind just collapsing, like the structure of a once-stunning city suddenly giving out, falling to ruins. I could never get more than a few words out without getting stuck, like a piece of gum stuck in a gear. And I was the most “functional” zombie in this whole airport. 

I didn’t know—nor did I understand—why we didn’t speak. I couldn’t find an explanation for the suffocating vise of silence that wrapped around each and every one of us, condemning us to be trapped in our own skulls, cutting us off from one another, like our vocal cords had been severed. It was almost like being paralyzed—forced to look at each other and try to force the words out of our mouths, but not being able to beyond some small words and grunts. 

I attempted to talk to my girlfriend, trying out some small awkward sentences and shallow questions, trying to get some kind of reaction from her, any twitch of life, of personality. But she just looked at me like there was something wrong with me.

We wandered the halls for a few hours, with no direction, then she gripped my hand and started pulling me somewhere. We stumbled and limped our way down the frozen escalators and outside onto the tarmac. I sighed tiredly. 

She was taking me to the church. 

The Dead had built something of a sanctuary on the runway. At some point in the faraway past, someone pushed all of the stair trucks together into a circle, forming a makeshift amphitheater. We gathered around it, stood there, lifted our arms, and moaned. The ancient Boneys waved their skeleton arms in the center of the circle, letting out raspy, dry wordless sermons through toothy grins. I didn’t understand what this was. I didn’t think anyone did. But it was the only time we gathered together under the open sky. The vast expanse of the sky and space above us, endless stretching of air and time. Was there life on other planets? Were they riddled by an apocalypse, too? Or were they thriving, while we sat here, a corpse of a planet, just floating through the galaxy? 

My girlfriend seemed to be more devout than I was. She closed her eyes and waved her arms in a way that appeared almost heartfelt, in our Dead way. I stood next to her with my arms in the air, stiff and rigid. At some unspoken cue, maybe drawn by her passion, the Boneys stopped their preaching and stared at us. One of them came forward, climbed our stairs, and took us both by our wrists. It led us down into the circle and raised our hands in its harsh grip. It lets out a shriek, an unearthly sound that was like a blast of air through a broken airhorn, startlingly loud, frightening birds out of their homes in the trees. 

The congregation murmured in response, and the deed was done. We were married. 

We stepped back onto the stair seats. The service continued. My new wife closed her eyes and waved her arms once more.

Chapter Text

I T WAS time to feed again. 

I didn’t know how long it had been since our previous venture to the city for food, likely only a few days, but I could feel it. I could feel the electricity in my extremities bubbling, then fading. I saw neverending scenes of blood in my mind, that brilliant, mesmerizing red, flowing through bright pink tissues in intricate webs and Pollock fractals, pulsing and vibrating with life. 

I found J in the food court talking to some girls. She was a little different than me. She did seem to enjoy the company of women, and her better-than-average dictation drew them in like dazzled carp, but she kept a distance. She laughed them off. The Boneys once tried to set her up with a wife, but she simply walked away. Sometimes I wondered if she had a philosophy. Maybe even a worldview. I’d like to sit down with her and pick her brain, just a tiny bite somewhere in the frontal lobe to get a taste of her thoughts. But she was too tough to ever be that vulnerable. 

“City,” I said, putting a hand on my stomach. “Food.” 

The girls she was talking to looked at me and shuffled away. I’d noticed I made some people nervous, though I couldn’t guess why. 

“Just . . . ate,” J said, frowning at me a little. “Two days . . . ago.” 

I grabbed my stomach again. “Feel empty. Feel . . . dead.” 

She nodded. “Marr . . . iage.” 

I glared at her. I shook my head and clutched my stomach harder. “ Need . Go . . . get others.” 

She sighed and walked out, bumping into me hard on her way past, but I wasn’t sure if it was intentional. She was, after all, a zombie. 

She managed to find a few others with appetites and we formed a small posse. Very small. Unsafely small. But I didn’t care. I didn’t recall ever being this hungry. 

We set out toward the city. We took the freeway. Like everything else, the roads were returning to nature. We wandered down empty lanes and under ivy-curtained overpasses. My residual memories of these roads contrasted dramatically with their peaceful present state. I took a deep breath of the sweet, silent air. 

We pushed deeper into the city than usual. The only scents I picked up were rust and dust. The unsheltered Living were getting scarcer, and the ones with shelter were venturing out less frequently. I suspected their stadium fortresses were becoming self-sufficient. I imagined vast gardens planted in the dugouts, bursting with carrots and beans. Cattle in the press box. Rice paddies in the outfield. We could see the largest of these citadels looming on the hazy horizon, its retractable roof wide open to the sun, taunting us. 

But finally, we sensed prey. The life scent electrified our nostrils, bright and strong. They were close, and there were a lot of them. Maybe half our own number. We hesitated, stumbling to a halt. J looked at me. She looked at our small group, then back at me. “No,” she grunted. 

I pointed toward the crooked, collapsed skyscraper that was emitting the aroma, a cartoon tendril of scent beckoning us come hither. 

“Eat,” I insisted. 

J shook her head. “Too . . . many.” 

“ Eat. ” 

She looked at our group again. She sniffed the air. The rest of them were undecided. Some of them also sniffed warily, but others are more single-minded like me. They groaned and drooled and snapped their teeth. 

I was getting agitated. “Need it!” I shouted, glaring at J. “Come . . . on.” I turned and started speed-lumbering toward the skyscraper. Focused thought. The rest of the group reflexively followed. J caught up and walked beside me, watching me with an uneasy grimace. 

Spurred to an unusual level of intensity by my desperate energy, our group crashed through the revolving doors and rushed down the dark hallways. Some earthquake or explosion had knocked out part of the foundation, and the entire high-rise leaned at a dizzying, fun house angle. It was hard to navigate the zigzagging halls, and the inclines made it a challenge to even walk, but the scent was overpowering. After a few flights of stairs I started to hear them as well, clattering around and talking to each other in those steady, melodious streams of words. Living speech had always been a sonic pheromone to me, and I spasmed briefly when it hit my ears. I had yet to meet another zombie who shared my appreciation for those silky rhythms. J thought it was a sick fetish. 

As we approached their level of the building, some of us started groaning loudly, and the Living heard us. One of them shouted the alarm and I heard guns cocking, but we didn’t hesitate. We burst through a final door and rushed them. J grunted when she saw how many there were, but she lunged with me at the nearest man and grabbed his arms while I ripped out his throat. The burning red taste of blood flooded my mouth. The sparkle of life sprayed out of his cells like citrus mist from an orange peel, and I sucked it in. 

The darkness of the room was pulsing with gunfire, and by our standards we were grossly outnumbered—there were only three of us to every one of them—but something was tipping things in our favor. Our manic speed was characteristic of the Dead, and our prey were not prepared for it. Was this all coming from me? Creatures without desire didn’t usually move quickly, but they were following my lead, and I was an angry whirlwind. What had come over me? Was I just having a bad day? 

There was one other factor working to our advantage. These Living were not seasoned veterans. They were young. Teenagers, mostly. Boys and girls. One of them had such gruesome acne he was likely to get shot by mistake in this flickering light. Their leader was a slightly older kid with a patchy beard, standing on a cubicle desk in the middle of the room and shouting panicked commands to his men. As they fell to the floor under the weight of our hunger, as dots of blood pointilized the walls, this boy leaned protectively over a small figure crouched below him on the desk. A girl, young and blonde, bracing her shoulder against her shotgun as she fired blindly into the dark. 

I loped across the room and grabbed the boy’s boots. I pulled his feet out from under him and he fell, cracking his head on the edge of the desk. Without hesitation I pounced on him and bit through his neck. Then I dug my fingers into the crack in his skull, and pry his head open like an eggshell. His brain pulsed hot and pink inside. I took a deep, wide, ravenous bite. 

I felt the carpet under my fingers. I heard the gunshots. I stood up and looked around, dizzy and reeling. The sting of tears burned in my eyes, but my ducts no longer had fluid. The feeling raged unquenched like pepper spray. It was the first time I’d felt pain since I died. 

I heard a scream nearby and I turned. It was the girl from before, the blonde. I heard someone shout her name, Hailey . She was older, like the guy I killed, looking in her early twenties. She had fine poise, her muscles small but toned on her curvy frame. She was huddled in a corner, unarmed, sobbing and screaming as J crept toward her. She always found the women. I still felt disoriented, unsure where or who I was, but . . . 

I shoved J aside and snarled, “ No . Mine.” 

She gritted her teeth like she was about to turn on me, but a gunshot tore into her shoulder and she shuffled across the room to help two other zombies bring down a kid. 

I approached the girl. She cowered before me, her tender flesh offering me all the things I was accustomed to taking, and my instincts started to reassert themselves. The urge to rip and tear surged into my arms and jaw. But then she screamed again, and something inside me moved, a feeble moth struggling against a web. In this brief moment of hesitation, I made a choice. 

I let out a gentle groan and inched toward the girl, trying to force kindness into my dull expression. 

She threw a knife at my head. 

The blade stuck straight into the center of my forehead and quivered there. But it had penetrated less than an inch, only grazing my frontal lobe. I pulled it out and dropped it. I held out my hands, making soft noises through my lips, but I was helpless. How did I appear unthreatening when her lover’s blood was running down my chin? 

I was just a few feet away from her now. She was fumbling through her jeans for another weapon. Behind me, the Dead were finishing their butchery. Soon they would turn their attention to this dim corner of the room. I took a deep breath. 

“ Hai . . . ley ,” I said. 

It rolled off my tongue like honey. I felt good just saying it. 

Her eyes went wide. She froze. 

“Hailey,” I said again. I put out my hands. I pointed at the zombies behind me. I shook my head. 

She stared at me, making no sign that she understood. But when I reached out to touch her, she didn’t move. And she didn’t stab me. 

I reached my free hand into the head wound of a fallen zombie and collected a palmful of black, lifeless blood. Slowly, with gentle movements, I smeared it on her face, down her neck, and onto her clothes. She didn’t even flinch. She was probably catatonic. 

I took her hand and pulled her to her feet. At that moment J and the others finished devouring their prey and turned to inspect the room. Their eyes fell on me. They fell on Hailey. I walked toward them, gripping Hailey’s hand, not quite dragging her. She staggered behind me, staring straight ahead. 

J sniffed the air cautiously. But I knew she was smelling exactly what I was smelling: nothing. Just the negative-smell of Dead blood. It was splattered all over the walls, soaked into our clothes, and smeared carefully on a young Living girl, concealing the glow of her life under its dark, overpowering musk. 

Without a word, we left the high-rise and headed back to the airport. I walked in a daze, full of strange and kaleidoscopic thoughts. Hailey held limply to my hand, staring at the side of my face with wide eyes, trembling lips.

Chapter Text

A FTER DELIVERING our abundant harvest of leftover flesh to the nonhunters—the Boneys, the children, the stay-at-home moms—I took Hailey to my house. My fellow Dead gave me curious looks as I passed. Intentionally converting the Living was rarely performed because it required both volitation and restraint. Most conversions happened accidentally: a feeding zombie was killed or otherwise distracted before finishing her business, voro interruptus . The rest of our converts arose from traditional deaths, private affairs of illness or mishap, or classical Living-on-Living violence that took place outside of our sphere of interest. So the fact that I had purposely brought this girl home unconsumed was a thing of mystery, a miracle on par with giving birth. J and the others allowed me plenty of room in the halls, regarding me with confusion and wonder. If they knew the full truth of what I was doing, their reactions would be . . . less moderate. 

Gripping Hailey’s hand, I hurried her away from their probing eyes. I led her to Gate 12, down the boarding tunnel, and into my home: a 747 commercial jet. It wasn’t very spacious, the floor plan was impractical, but it was the most isolated place in the airport and I enjoyed the privacy. Sometimes it even tickled my numb memory. Sometimes when I “slept” here, I felt the faint rising sensation of flight, the blasts of recycled air blowing in my face, the soggy nausea of packaged sandwiches. And then the fresh lemon zing of poisson in Paris. The burn of tajine in Morocco. Were these places all gone now? Silent streets, cafés full of dusty skeletons? 

Hailey and I stood in the center aisle, looking at each other. I pointed to a window seat and raised my eyebrows. Keeping her eyes solidly on me, she backed into the row and sat down. Her hands gripped the armrests like the plane was in a flaming death dive. 

I sat in the aisle seat and released an involuntary wheeze, looking straight ahead at my stacks of memorabilia. Every time I went into the city, I brought back one thing that caught my eye. A puzzle. A shot glass. A Barbie. A dildo. Flowers. Magazines. Books. I brought them here to my home, strew them around the seats and aisles, and stared at them for hours. The piles reached the ceiling now. J kept asking me why I did this. I had no answer. 

“Not . . . eat,” I groaned at Hailey, looking her in the eyes. “I . . . won’t eat.” 

She stared at me. Her lips were tight and pale. 

I pointed at her. I opened my mouth and pointed at my bloodstained teeth. I shook my head. She pressed herself against the window. A terrified whimper rose in her throat. This was not working. 

“Safe,” I told her, letting out a sigh. “Keep . . . you safe.” 

I stood up and went to my record player. I dug through my LP collection in the overhead compartments and pulled out an album. I took the headphones back to my seat and placed the big metal cans on Hailey’s ears. She was still frozen, wide-eyed. 

The record played. It was Billie Eilish. I could hear it faintly through the headphones, like a distant eulogy drifting on autumn air. 

Things fall apart and time breaks your heart . . . 

I closed my eyes and hunched forward. My head swayed vaguely in time with the music as verses floated through the jet cabin, blending in my ears. 

I wasn’t there, but I know . . . 

“Safe,” I mumbled. “Keep you . . . safe.” 

She was your girl, you showed her the world . . . 

When my eyes finally opened, Hailey’s face had changed. The terror had faded, and she regarded me with disbelief. 

“What are you?” she whispered.

I turned my face away. I stood and ducked out of the plane. Her bewildered gaze followed me down the tunnel. 

• • • 

In the airport parking garage, there was a classic Mercedes convertible that I’d been playing with for several months. After weeks of staring at it, I figured out how to fill its tank from a barrel of stabilized gasoline I found in the service rooms. Then I remembered how to turn the key and start it, after pushing its owner’s dry corpse to the pavement. But I had no idea how to drive. The best I’d been able to do was back out of the parking spot and ram into a nearby Hummer. Sometimes I just sat there with the engine purring, my hands resting limply on the wheel, willing a true memory to pop into my head. Not another hazy impression or vague awareness cribbed from the collective subconscious. Something specific, bright, and vivid. Something unmistakably mine. I strained myself, trying to wrench it out of the blackness. 

• • • 

I met J later that evening at her home in the women’s bathroom. She was sitting in front of a TV plugged into a long extension cord, gaping at a late-night superhero movie she found in some dead man’s luggage. I didn’t know why she did this. The action was meaningless for us now. The blood didn’t pump, the adrenaline didn’t rush. 

I watched J from the doorway. She sat on the little metal folding chair with her hands between her knees like a schoolgirl facing the principal. There were times when I could almost glimpse the person she once was under all that rotting flesh, and it prickled my heart. 

“Did . . . bring it?” she asked without looking away from the TV. 

I held up what I’d been carrying. A human brain, fresh from today’s hunting trip, no longer warm but still pink and buzzing with life. 

We sat against the tiles of the bathroom wall with our legs sprawled out in front of us, passing the brain back and forth, taking small, leisurely bites. 

“Good . . . shit,” J wheezed. 

I watched her mouth form silent words. I watched her face shuffle through emotions. It was like watching a dreaming dog kick and whimper, but far more heartbreaking. When she woke up, this would all disappear. She would be empty again. She would be dead. 

After an hour or two, we were down to one small gobbet of pink tissue. J popped it into her mouth and her pupils dilated. The brain was gone, but I wasn’t satisfied. I reached furtively into my pocket and pulled out a fist-sized chunk that I’d been saving. This one was different. This one was special. I tore off a bite and chewed. 

J was looking at me. “You . . . have more?” she grunted and held out her hand for me to pass it. But I didn’t pass it. I took another bite and closed my eyes.  

“Hey!” 

My eyes snapped open. J was glaring at me. She made a grab for the piece of brain in my hand and I yanked it away. 

“ No, ” I growled.

J was my friend, but this was mine . 

J looked at me. She saw the warning flare in my eyes and heard the rising air raid siren. She dropped her hand away. She stared at me for a moment, annoyed and confused. She muttered something to herself and locked herself in a toilet stall. 

I left the bathroom with abnormally purposeful strides. I slipped in through the door of the 747 and stood there in the faint oval of light. Hailey was lying back in a reclined seat, snoring gently. I knocked on the side of the fuselage and she bolted upright, instantly awake. She watched me warily as I approached her. My eyes were burning again. I grabbed her messenger bag off the floor and dug through it. I found her wallet, and then I found a photo. A portrait of a young man. I held the photo up to her eyes. 

“I’m . . . sorry,” I said hoarsely. 

She looked at me, stone-faced. 

I pointed at my mouth. I clutched my stomach. I pointed at her mouth. I touched her stomach. Then I pointed out the window, at the cloudless black sky of merciless stars. I clenched my jaw and squinted my eyes, trying to ease their dry sting. 

Hailey’s lower lip was tensed. Her eyes were red and wet. “Which one of you did it?” she said in a voice on the verge of breaking. “Was it that tall one? The fuck that almost got me?” 

I stared at her for a moment, not grasping her questions. And then it hit me, and my eyes went wide.

She didn’t know it was me. 

The room was dark and I came from behind. She didn’t see it. She didn’t know. Her eyes addressed me like I was a creature worthy of address, unaware that I recently killed her lover, eaten his life, and was right now carrying a prime cut of his brain in the front of my jeans. I could feel it burning there like a coal of guilt, and I reflexively backed away from her, unable to comprehend this curdled mercy. 

“Why me?” she demanded, blinking an angry tear out of her eye. “Why did you save me ?” She twisted her back to me and curled up on the chair, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. “Out of everyone . . . ,” she mumbled into the cushion. “Why me.” 

Those were her first questions. Not the ones urgent for her wellbeing, not the mystery of how I knew her name or the terrifying prospect of what my plans for her might be; she didn’t rush to satisfy those pangs of hunger. Her first questions were for others. For her friends, for her lover, wondering why she couldn’t take their place. 

I was the lowest thing. I was the bottom of the universe. 

I dropped the photo onto the seat and looked at the floor. “I’m . . . sorry,” I said again and left the plane. 

When I emerged from the boarding tunnel there were several Dead grouped near the doorway. They watched me without expressions. We stood there in silence, still as statues. Then I brushed past them and wandered off into the dark halls.

Chapter Text

IN THE MORNING, my wife found me slumped against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the runways. My eyes were open and full of dust. My head leaned to one side. I rarely allowed myself to look so corpse-like. 

Something was wrong with me. There was a sick emptiness in my stomach, a feeling somewhere between starvation and hangover. My wife grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. She started walking, dragging me behind her like rolling luggage. I felt a flash of bitter heat pulse through me and I started speaking to her. “Name,” I said, glaring into her ear. “Name?” 

She shot me a cold look and kept walking. 

“Job? School?” My tone shifted from query to accusation. “Movie? Song?” It bubbled out of me like oil from a punctured pipeline. “ Book? ” I shouted at her. “Food? Family? Name? ” 

My wife turned and spat at me. Spat on my shirt, snarling like an animal. But the look in her eyes instantly cooled my eruption. She was . . . frightened. Her lips quivered. What was I doing? 

I looked at the floor. We stood in silence for several minutes. Then she resumed walking, and I followed her, trying to shake off this strange black cloud that’d settled over me. 

• • • 

She led me to a gutted gift shop and let out an emphatic groan. There was a human forearm on a bookcase, slightly brown at the stumps, not exactly fresh. 

“Where did . . . get those?” I asked her. She shrugged. “Need . . .  better.” 

She frowned and pointed at me. She grunted angrily, and I averted my eyes, duly chastised. It was true, I hadn’t been the most involved spouse. Was it possible to have a midlife crisis if you had no idea how old you were? I could be in my early thirties or late teens. I could be younger than Hailey. 

• • • 

I paced outside the 747 boarding tunnel for about an hour before going in. I opened the jet’s door quietly. Hailey was curled up in business class, sleeping. She had wrapped herself in a quilt made of cut-up jeans that I brought back as a souvenir a few weeks ago. The morning sun made a halo in her yellow hair, sainting her.

“Hailey,” I whispered. 

Her eyes slid open a crack. This time she didn’t jolt upright or edge away from me. She just looked at me with tired, puffy eyes. “What,” she mumbled. 

“How . . . are . . . ?” 

“How do you think I am.” She put her back to me and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. 

I watched her for a moment. Her posture was a brick wall. I lowered my head and turned to go. But as I stepped through the doorway she said, “Wait.” 

I turned around. She was sitting up, the blanket piled on her lap. “I’m hungry,” she said. 

I looked at her blankly. Hungry? Does she want an arm or leg? Hot blood, meat, and life? She was Living . . . did she want to eat herself? Then I remembered what being hungry used to mean. I remembered beefsteaks and pancakes, grains and fruits and vegetables, that quaint little food pyramid. Sometimes I missed savoring taste and texture instead of just swallowing energy, but I tried not to dwell on it. The old food did nothing to satisfy us anymore. Even bright red meat from a freshly killed rabbit or deer was beneath our culinary standards; its energy was simply incompatible, like trying to run a computer on diesel. There was no easy way out for us, no humane alternative for the fashionably moral. The new hunger demanded sacrifice. It demanded human suffering as the price for our pleasures, meager and cheap as they were. 

“You know, food? ” Hailey prompted. She mimed the act of taking a bite. “Sandwiches? Pizza? Stuff that doesn’t involve killing people?” 

I nodded. “I’ll . . . get.” 

I started to leave but she stopped me again. 

“Just let me go ,” she said. “What are you doing? Why are you keeping me here?” 

I thought for a moment. I stepped to her window and pointed to the runways below. She saw the church service in progress. The congregation of the Dead, swaying and groaning. The skeletons rattled back and forth, voiceless but somehow charismatic, gnashing their splintered teeth. There were dozens of them down there, swarming. 

“Keep you . . . safe.” 

She looked up at me from her chair with an expression I couldn’t read. Her eyes were narrowed and her lips were tight, but it was not exactly rage. “How do you know my name?” she demanded. 

“In that building. You said my name, I remember it. How the fuck do you know my name?” 

I did not attempt to answer. Even though the answer was simple, I couldn’t answer with my kindergarten vocabulary and speech impediments. So I simply retreated, exiting the plane and trudging up the boarding tunnel, feeling more acutely than ever the limitations of what I was. 

As I stood in Gate 12 considering where to go from here, I felt a touch on my shoulder. Hailey was standing behind me. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her tight black jeans, looking uncertain. “Just let me get out and walk around a little,” she said. “I’m going crazy in that plane.” 

I didn’t answer. I looked around the hallways. 

“Come on,” she said. “I walked in here and nobody ate me. Let me go with you to get food. You don’t know what I like.” 

I nodded slowly and pointed at her. “Dead,” I pronounced. I clicked my teeth and did an exaggerated zombie shuffle. 

“Okay,” she said. 

I lumbered around in a circle with slow, shaky steps, letting out an occasional groan. 

“Got it.” 

I took her by the wrist and led her out into the hallway. I gestured in each direction, indicating the small cliques of zombies wandering in the dim morning shadows. I looked her straight in the eyes. “Don’t . . . run.” 

She crossed her heart. “Promise.” 

Standing so close to her, I found that I could smell her again. She had wiped much of the black blood off her skin, and through the gaps I could detect traces of her life energy. It bubbled out and sparkled like champagne, igniting flashes deep in the back of my sinuses. Still holding her gaze, I rubbed my palm into a recent gash on my forearm, and although it was nearly dry now, I managed to collect a thin smear of blood. I slowly spread this ink on her cheek and down her neck. She shuddered, but didn’t pull away. She was, at the bottom of everything, a very smart girl. 

“Okay?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. 

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, cringed at the smell of my fluids, then nodded. “Okay.” 

I walked and she followed, stumbling along behind me and groaning every three or four steps. She was overdoing it, overacting like high school Shakespeare, but she would pass. We bumped through crowds of Dead, large hunting parties shambling past us on both sides, and no one glanced at us. To my amazement, Hailey’s fear seemed to be diminishing as we walked, despite the obvious peril of her situation. At a few points, I caught her fighting a smile after letting out a particularly hammy moan. I felt an unfamiliar but pleasant sensation in my lips, tugging them upward. 

This was . . . new.