Free I, Zombie by Hugh Howey Page A

to shrug. He couldn’t tell if he succeeded.
    “Ah, fuckit.” Matt threw the box in the cart, adjusted the
strap he’d rigged to his shotgun, and pushed his spoils down the aisle. “Better
get your head together and grab some shit,” he called over his shoulder. “You
ain’t eating nothin’ of mine!”
    Dennis was left alone with his sticky sleeve. A bag of
coffee tumbled off the shelf across from him and landed with a sad thud on the
ground, the contents spilling out in a brown avalanche. Lisa was still digging
through something on the other side. He could hear her cussing about the
batteries in another iPod running dry. They were going through them like packs
of gum. Stupid.
    He looked down at his arm.
    So fucking stupid.
    It was getting more and more difficult to move. He had
assumed it would be like a light switch when it came, like the Incredible Hulk
turning green and ripping his shirt off, some kind of instant morphing into his
own permanent Mr. Hyde. But it had started with a slow paralysis, a gradual
fatigue that turned into frozen limbs. He could move his wounded arm if he
wanted to—he was pretty sure he could lift it up over his head if he really
wanted to—but he couldn’t make himself want to . Staring down at it,
Dennis tried to give his own body a weak command. It felt locked. Pinned. He
tried harder. Some part of him was still there, was telling him that if he
produced a sudden burst of energy, if he just tried hard enough, it
would be like breaking out of some kind of packed sand.
    That’s what this was. It was the time his older brothers had
buried him in the sand at Virginia Beach. Everything had been funny until he
wasn’t sure if he could get out or not. They would’ve made fun of him if he had
panicked and tried, but he would die if he couldn’t be sure. So Dennis would
twitch and wiggle just enough to crack the sand, enough to see if he could
still move, and his brothers would laugh and pack it back down, slapping the
ground with the flats of their shovels, making the cool sand tight against his
chest.
    When the sand had been up to his neck and Dennis had
realized he couldn’t move at all, he’d gotten scared. He had begged them, tears
running down his face, salt in his mouth, to please dig him out. And they had
laughed. Laughed until his screaming had summoned their mother from the water
and their scowls had told Dennis that he would never live this down.
    For the second time in his life, Dennis couldn’t move. He
couldn’t lift his hand. Couldn’t even twitch his little finger.
    He sat there among the cereal boxes, terrified. This time he
wouldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry. He wasn’t able.
    But then his head moved. It moved of its own accord. Someone
else was doing it, pulling strings. And the coffee, the open bag of spilled
coffee sitting across from him—Dennis couldn’t smell it anymore.
    He couldn’t smell the coffee. But he could smell Lisa .
     

 
     
    19 • Chiang Xian
     
    There was meat hanging in the window. Chickens strung up by
their necks, pigs wrapped in twine with their little hooves in prayer, fish
frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground
like silver blossoms. The meat was rotten. The air in the tiny shop was heavy
with the stench of it after being locked tight for days and days. Clouds of
flies gathered and maggots squirmed. The meat had long since ceased to be
appetizing.
    Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate
chairs of carved wood. The shop owners had used those chairs to hang their
daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices fluctuated daily.
Chiang Xhen now roamed that shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables,
her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes
occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts
drifting toward her parents.
    The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese
girl. Her parents had been