A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims Read Free Book Online

if thinking. A minute passed like this, and in that minute my adrenaline receded. I remembered—it occurred to me—that he had been a man once. He would have been a jogger, I decided. Bitten while jogging, on his left shoulder. He would have staggered home for help, where tragically he died, reanimated, and bit into his wife (whose blood it was soaked through his shirt). When he was seventeen he would have run cross-country with Baton Rouge High School’s track team, would have been one among that shoal of shirtless boys whom I used to see jogging listlessly, glistening, through the Garden District on humid afternoons. And now that he was undead—a creature of habit now, compelled to return to those sites whose pellets were most prominent in the chaff cloud of his memory—he would have wandered out here to the Garden District, as if reporting for another session of track practice. That was what he was doing tonight, I decided: waiting outside for the track team, for them to come meet him. And maybe they would, one day: maybe other varsity runners from the class of ’XX would be bitten and reanimated, and maybe, like this man, they would be compelled toward the neighborhood where they had trained. They would all find each other here one night, a dozen undead reunited, to begin shambling through these streets as a team.
    These and like thoughts are what I found myself thinking. ‘So that’s the kind of man he was,’ I reveried, even as I stared at that revenant—that killing machine!—just two blocks away. That it had had a track team, a wife, a whole life, when what I should have been keeping strenuously in mind was that it had nothing, nothing but this nothing that it was infected with and that it had to give, if I was stupid and slow enough to let it. Of course, when it finally seemed to move—when I saw or imagined that I saw it shuffle one foot out in front of the other—I tensed my entire body. The second it shuffled its foot I remembered clearly all that it was sick with and all that the spit in its
mouth meant, how everything breaks with the skin that breaks beneath that bite. Had it seen me? Was it hungry? But they were never not hungry: they fed until they burst. I knew that, just as I knew, if it were to let out its throaty gurgle, exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. Panic, start running, or scream for help, for instance. Instead I was supposed to back away without attracting any more of its attention, or else it would moan still louder, and there would be others. The track team! How could I have forgotten? Twenty spindly undead in short shorts would come trotting out into the street, as promptly as at a coach’s whistle, the minute it started moaning! Together they would run me down and feast on my body, I was sure of it. Tearing open my stomach to sift through my intestines, turning me inside out like a Necker cube. My death—my gory death, my careless, ass’s, idiot’s death—more than my life flashed before my eyes.
    And not only my own death. For once I reanimated, I realized, I would return automatically to our apartment, as much a danger to Rachel as the jogger had been to its wife. My hand would bloody the front door, slap after insistent slap, until Rachel, waking alone in bed, would rush worriedly to the peephole to see—me, vindicated by the grisliness of my own end! Victim of the streets she’d insisted on the statistical safety of! She would fling open the door to me, I imagined, unable to do what needed to be done, and hug me, too, as I’d always feared hugging her. And then I would do what I was programmed to: with inexorable reflexivity my mouth would clamp down on her throat, my uncontrollable, remote-controlled mouth, while, entranced, my face and eyes would remain expressionless. Biting into my lover as I’d gnaw a pillow in my sleep. Rachel! Measureless were the remorseful transports that this image of