Chapter 2

Emma 's POV

I snapped upright . Bottom right of the monitor: 9:55.

On the phone's lock screen a delivery notice was sitting there — your iced Americano, rider five minutes away.

Was I dreaming? I remembered it plain as day — I had been trampled to death by zombies.

I pinched my arm as hard as I could, and the pain nearly shot me out of my chair.

"Emma. My iced Americano." The voice came from the far side of the partition.

I looked up and saw Sarah standing there, blonde bob immaculate, tablet held in both hands.

I had actually reborn.

I didn't answer. I pushed my chair back, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window on the street side, and put my forehead against the glass.

Down there everything was still normal: taxis waiting out the light, a man on the corner drinking coffee out of a cup, a courier parking his handcart by the door.

Ten o'clock. The alarm went at ten; the broadcast went off, nobody moved, the ground floor went bad, they came up, everyone piled against the front doors — and from the broadcast to that door jamming shut was under five minutes.

Coming back was a good thing, but I feeling a little helpless: what exactly was five extra minutes supposed to do for me?I couldn't run anyway. I'd have been better off just dying back there.

But I still couldn't bring myself to waste it.

I slapped the desk and shot to my feet, shouting at the top of my lungs, "Zombies are coming! Run for your lives!"

The floor went quiet for about two seconds.The entire office went silent, and everyone turned to stare at me like I'd lost my mind.

Not a single one of them believed me.

I grabbed the canvas tote off the back of my chair, dropped my phone into it, and walked toward the stairwell.

The lobby was normal. The guard still at his post, the revolving door going around on its own schedule, a handful of people standing in front of the elevator watching the numbers.

I badged through the turnstile, pushed the glass door open onto the portico, and stopped for one second to look back.

"Sir, there are zmobies — you need to run." He looked up at me, looked at the badge in my hand, looked at the street outside, and then said, "Ma'am, did you file a leave request in the system?" I was already gone.

Out front the street still had its ordinary face on. The subway was three blocks south, and from there it was about fifty minutes back to the old neighborhood. I bolted for the subway.

I made it less than half a block. A delivery e-bike swung out of the corner with the rider's chin down over his phone, and I hit the front wheel at an angle I couldn't get around. The bike went down, the lid on the insulated box popped open, a paper cup rolled out, the lid came off, and brown liquid spread across the pavers with the ice scattered through it.

I caught the lamp post to keep from going over with him and then looked down. The logo printed on the side of the cup was the shop I order from three mornings a week.

My eyes slid to the phone still clipped to his handlebar: the delivery screen, the recipient's number ending 4471. My number. The Americano was mine.

I stood there for maybe a second and a half, and then I turned to run, because I would have done anything at all to stay alive. Then something took hold of my ankle.

I looked down and he was lifting his head slowly, the helmet knocked crooked so that it covered half his face; the scratch across his throat had already darkened along the edges and something rust-colored was running from the corner of his mouth.

Through the gap in the helmet one eye came up at me, the white webbed with fine red threads, the pupil like a glass marble that had sat in water too long.

A sharp tearing pain went through my ankle, and then heat poured through all of me. My muscles began to contract, my knees bent without being asked, my soles rolled inward, and it was my own body that lifted me up off the pavement and arranged my two legs into a stance I had never once chosen for myself: bowlegged, toes turned in, weight dropped low. I was inside my own body, entirely awake, feeling all of it. No. No, no, no, no.

The zombies came up to me and stopped. The nearest one swept a clouded eyeball across my face, turned away, and the rest turned away with it.

Then my body started walking on its own. My steps dragged, my head hung over to one side, the drool kept running.

I went past a wall of glass on the side of an office building and my body stopped in front of it, head tipped, as if those cloudy eyes were trying to work out what was inside the glass.

And I saw myself: blonde hair loose and stuck to my cheek, my eyeballs skewed up and to the left with clouded rims, my jaw hanging slack with my tongue on my lower lip, my shoulders down, my legs bowed.

I knew that posture. I had seen it behind the glass of the ground-floor lobby, on the guard who died and then got up again.

I had died, and this was what I had turned into, and I was still in here. I tried to move one finger and nothing answered; I tried to open my mouth and say something, and my mouth opened, and what came out was a low noise forced up from the bottom of my throat.

I stared at that face and came apart in complete silence and complete consciousness for a few seconds, and then I thought: maybe I could live like this too?

At ten exactly the EAS alert tone came out of the building's lobby, shrill and unbroken, cutting through the glass doors and out into the street. My body turned toward the entrance.

"Help!" A scream came from inside the building, and the instant I heard it my body started hauling itself toward the source.

I went tearing into the building.

The ground-floor lobby was already carnage — infected everywhere, zombies down and biting.

The hunger was navigating for me, steering me toward the thickest part of the crowd.

My body pulled someone down onto the floor. They landed on the tile, thrashed, made a sound that came out of them like a child crying.

I put my head down, and from less than eight inches away I recognized that immaculate blonde bob, and the eyes that spent every day moving across the people who worked for them — full of tears and fear now and Sarah, my boss.

What came up in me was complicated and shameful: I had imagined, more times than I would ever admit, making this woman genuinely afraid of me.

Then my jaw came down. I tried to stop it and my jaw did not belong to me anymore.

My teeth went through her forearm, she screamed with a tear in the sound, and I felt the whole force of the bite and the specific texture of skin and muscle between my teeth, and somewhere at the bottom of my consciousness my mind let out a howl that made no sound at all. I'm sorry.