Bike Rider
You know that moment when you realize you've made a terrible decision? Not in some philosophical, regret-laden way—though there's plenty of that too—but in the immediate, physical sense where your legs are screaming and your lungs feel like they're made of wet concrete? That's where I was. Three weeks into a commitment I'd made to myself in the kind of drunken sincerity that only comes after a few glasses of wine and a conversation with your husband about mortality. "I'm going to get healthy," I'd said. Martin had nodded, supportive as always, and then smiled in that way that suggested he'd heard similar declarations before.
Three weeks in, and I was still showing up. That's something, at least.
The bike I'd bought was a mistake. I'd gone to one of those big box stores and picked something that looked sturdy enough, but now—pushing it up the Elm Street hill—I was realizing that my frame and the bike's frame were having a significant disagreement about how size and weight should work together. The bike was built for someone about my height but half my mass. I'd convinced myself at the time that I'd grow into my equipment, that commitment would make up for the undersizing. What I'd really done was buy a bike that squeaked when I pedaled and made me feel like I was perpetually on the verge of breaking it.
The morning was quiet. That was the thing about early rides—before the city properly woke up, before the traffic and the noise. Just the sound of my breathing, labored and somewhat embarrassing in its intensity. The road beneath me was smooth, winding upward with a persistence that seemed almost intentional, like the hill was daring me to keep going.
I was thinking about quitting. This is not an admission I make lightly. Quitting means Martin was right about the wine-fueled motivation. Quitting means another shelf in the garage where an expensive bike would gather dust alongside other abandoned projects. Quitting means admitting that my body, this thing I've lived in for four decades, is not a vehicle I can simply will into better performance.
That's when I heard the voices behind me.
Two cyclists came up from behind, moving with the kind of effortless grace that only comes from knowing your body will do exactly what you ask of it. They were older—maybe in their seventies—and they passed me without any strain visible in their faces or bodies. One of them nodded at me as they went by, a gesture that might have been encouraging or might have been pity. I chose to believe it was encouragement.
"Nice morning," one of them said to the other.
"Perfect for a ride," the second replied.
They disappeared up the hill, and I watched them go, jaw clenched. Fine. One foot in front of the other. Or in this case, one pedal rotation after another.
The road stretched ahead of me, unforgiving and long. I reached for my phone to call Martin. This was becoming a ritual—him at work or on his way there, me struggling up this hill like some modern Sisyphus, and the small comfort of his voice making the effort feel less solitary.
"Hey, babe," he answered, his voice clear through the car's Bluetooth. "You're up early."
"Yeah, I'm on the hill. The one past Elm."
"How's it going?"
I wanted to answer honestly. I wanted to say that my legs felt like they'd been dipped in battery acid, that I was sweating through my shirt, that I was pretty sure I could feel the exact moment my knees were considering staging a revolt. Instead, I said what I'd been saying for three weeks.
"It's steeper than I remember."
Martin laughed, not unkindly. "You're doing great. You've been at this, what, three weeks?"
"Feels like three years."
He was patient with me, which somehow made it worse. If he'd been dismissive, I could have pushed harder just to prove him wrong. But Martin's faith in my capabilities was the kind of thing that made me want to try harder, not for myself, but for him. Marriage is a strange negotiation. You end up doing things for the other person that you'd probably quit for yourself.
I was pushing through the next stretch when I felt it.
There's a particular sensation when something mechanical fails catastrophically—a moment of wrongness that your body recognizes before your brain does. The pedal crank arm unscrewed suddenly, completely, dropping the entire assembly like it had simply decided to stop participating in the exercise. My left leg went down into nothing, and for a moment I thought I was going over the side of the road.
I managed to catch myself, but barely. The narrow path beside the drop-off was not where I wanted to take a tumble. I dismounted on the left side of the bike, still shaking, holding the detached crank arm and bolt in my hands. There was grease under my fingernails. My hands were already slick with sweat, and now they felt filthy and useless.
My first instinct was to laugh. It was the kind of situation that was only funny in retrospect, but I was having the retrospect right now, watching it happen. Of all the things that could go wrong, of all the ways this hill could defeat me, it wasn't my physical weakness. It was a mechanical failure. The bike had given up before I did.
I called Martin again.
"Uh, Martin? The pedal arm just unscrewed. Like, the whole thing. I'm holding it."
There was a beat of silence. Then Martin shifted into problem-solving mode. This is his gift. While I'm standing on a hillside holding broken bike parts, Martin is already thinking two steps ahead.
"Okay, you're fine. Check the pouch under the seat. There should be a small wrench and an Allen key."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to point out that I was literally standing on the side of a hill, that I was already uncomfortable and now covered in grease. But Martin's calm competence was contagious.
"I'm standing on the side of a hill," I said anyway.
"I know, babe. You got this. Breathe."
I found the tool pouch, fumbled with the zipper. My hands were shaking—not from fear, just from the accumulated adrenaline and exertion of the last few weeks. Everything was shaking. I started working on the bolt, trying to thread the crank arm back onto the spindle. The alignment was tricky. I missed twice. My exhaustion was making the simple task feel impossible.
"You got it?" Martin asked from the phone.
"Yeah. I think so. Bolt's going in."
"Not too tight. Just snug."
I tightened the bolt, and for a moment, everything felt normal again. The small victory of fixing something, of taking a problem and solving it. This is what my husband did for a living—he solved problems. He made broken things work. And now I was doing the same thing, if in a much smaller way, on a much smaller scale.
"Almost done," I said.
I was close to breathing normally. Close to being able to continue. Close to this third week of commitment paying off with something resembling competence.
Then I heard it.
It started as a rustling from above, from the jogging trail that ran parallel to the road but at a higher elevation. Then the rustling became crashing, the crashing became violent, and something heavy burst through the vegetation above and came tumbling down the hillside.
A body crashed into the brush beside the road, landing hard. A person in jogging clothes—or what used to be jogging clothes. The jogger was wrong in ways that took a moment to process. The legs were bent at angles that legs don't bend. The skin had a quality that skin shouldn't have. And when the jogger moved—crawled—out of the brush toward me, there was no question about what it was.
"What the fuck?" I said, because articulate language abandoned me.
"What? Jared?" Martin's voice came through the phone, suddenly sharp with alarm.
"Oh God—oh God—something just fell—" I was backing away, the bike parts still in my hands. The jogger was crawling toward me, slowly, but with a terrible inevitability. Broken legs dragging uselessly, arms pulling the body forward. Mouth open. Snarling.
"Are you okay? What happened?" Martin was panicked now, his calm problem-solver mode overridden by something more primal.
"Something fell from the trail above. I don't know what—"
I approached closer, drawn by a kind of morbid curiosity that overrides survival instinct. I was still holding the grease and bike parts, as though they might protect me or explain this. I peered into the brush where the jogger had landed.
For a second, there was just the sound of breathing. The jogger's breathing and my own, both ragged and urgent.
Then the jogger exploded from the brush, crawling toward me with surprising speed.
I screamed. It was not a dignified sound.
I threw the wrench at the thing without thinking, acting on pure panic. It hit the jogger's shoulder. The jogger didn't slow down.
"Jared? JARED?" Martin was shouting through the phone.
"There's—there's a person—oh my God—"
I scrambled backward toward the bike, my mind making a calculation that if I could get moving downhill, I could outrun this. Except the bike was broken. Except I was exhausted. Except the universe had apparently decided that today was the day everything would go wrong simultaneously.
I grabbed the bike and shoved the crank arm back onto the spindle, not thinking about orientation, just thinking about speed. My fingers were shaking so badly that I could barely thread the bolt. Not tight. Tight enough. It would have to be tight enough.
I tried to ride down the hill, but the crank was backwards—my leg went down into nothing. The bike moved but not with any forward momentum I could control.
"No, no, no—" I abandoned the riding attempt and started pushing the bike uphill instead. If I could get to the top, I could coast down. The absence of a working pedal was suddenly an advantage instead of a problem. If I could reach the summit, I wouldn't need to pedal at all.
The zombie was behind me, crawling but persistent. Slow but inevitable.
I was breathing hard, phone still in my ear. "Oh believe it. One of them is on the trail with me."
I stuffed the broken crank arm into my sweater pouch, grease and all, and kept pushing. My legs were screaming. My lungs were screaming. And behind me, something that used to be human was crawling up a hill with broken legs.
"Martin... Martin, I'm pushing the bike up the hill."
"Pushing? Why are you pushing?"
"Because the pedal's not working and there's a THING chasing me!"
I heard him take a breath. Then another. When he spoke again, his voice had that focused quality that meant he was shifting into crisis mode.
"Okay. Hold on. Let me turn on the TV. Just hold on."
Martin had been driving to work when I called. He'd been thinking about whether to stop for coffee, whether to grab lunch at the place downtown or bring something from home. His life was ordinary. His concerns were small. He was the kind of person who organized his day around efficiency and comfort.
The radio had been playing softly when he pulled into his driveway—something about weather and traffic patterns. Normal morning sounds.
Then I called.
He'd listened to my panic with the kind of calm that comes from years of handling practical problems. Broken bike? There's a tool pouch. Need to fix something? Martin knew where things were. Martin had a solution for almost everything, which is probably why I married him. When the world feels chaotic, there's something deeply comforting about someone who can look at a problem and see a path through it.
But when he turned on the television—after I'd mentioned something falling, something attacking, something that looked like a person but wasn't—he realized that his tool pouch didn't contain a solution for this.
The news broadcast was showing downtown. Streets in chaos. Overturned cars. People running. The anchor's voice had that quality of someone trying to maintain professionalism while describing the end of the world.
"There are... there are things attacking people," Martin heard himself say into the phone.
He watched a reporter in the field, mid-sentence, suddenly descend into screaming. The reporter's colleagues pulled them away from whatever was in frame. The broadcast cut back to the studio anchor, who looked like he'd aged ten years in the last sixty seconds.
Martin sat down slowly, phone still to his ear, listening to his husband's breathing on the other end.
"Jared? I'm looking at the news right now. And I don't... I don't believe what I'm seeing."
Jared explained what was happening on his end of the phone—the jogger in the brush, the broken bike, the hill he had to climb. Martin watched the television and understood, with terrible clarity, that these two separate crises were actually part of the same thing. That whatever was happening downtown was also happening on the hill where his husband was trying to push a broken bike away from something that used to be human.
The decision came to him fully formed: he was going to get his husband off that hill.
He grabbed his keys and ran out of the house.
The climb was killing me. Every step was an argument with my own body. My lungs felt like they were made of fire. My legs had stopped screaming and had moved into a kind of numb resignation, just moving because that's what they did.
Behind me, the zombie crawled. It was slow. Impossibly slow. This should have been easy—I should have been able to outrun something so obviously incapacitated. But I was out of shape and exhausted, and slow is relative when you're already struggling.
Martin was driving. I could hear the car sounds, the distant noise of the wider world going to hell. He was describing what he was seeing, trying to narrate the journey, trying to keep both of us connected to some sense of what was real.
"I'm heading toward the hill," he said. "I'm on Main Street. There's a lot of damage here. Someone's car is on its side."
I kept pushing. The bike weighed more than it should. My sweater pocket felt heavy with the broken crank arm and the bolt, useless hardware dragging me down.
"Focus on driving," I told him.
"I'm driving. But there are people running. Toward me. No. Away from something."
I could hear the shift in his voice. The moment when he understood that the city was erupting. That what had seemed like a localized incident was actually everywhere.
The top of the hill was visible now, just ahead. I could see the summit—the place where the road would level out and I could finally, finally stop climbing.
"I'm almost to the top," I told him. "How far away are you?"
"Two minutes. Maybe less. Stay on the phone with me."
I could hear him swerving, could imagine him driving through the chaos, and I realized something. He was running toward this. Toward me. While everything was falling apart, while the world was apparently eating itself, my husband was driving toward the thing that terrified him—toward me—because that's what you do.
I pushed harder.
The zombie behind me had fallen further back. It couldn't climb as fast as I could push. Broken legs are broken legs, no matter how urgent your hunger might be. In another circumstance, I might have found this funny. Zombie defeated by hill fatigue.
Martin kept narrating. He was on Elm Street now, coming toward the base of the hill on the other side. He'd hit something—a zombie, he said, or maybe a fire hydrant attached to a zombie. The details were becoming surreal. His car was damaged. He mentioned driving around debris, around people, around the physical manifestation of catastrophe.
And then I was at the summit.
I stopped, breathing hard, completely drenched in sweat. The zombie was far behind now, still crawling, but it couldn't catch me. Not from this distance. Not anymore.
"I made it," I said. "I'm at the top."
"Okay," Martin said. "Now coast down. Toward the secondary road. I'll be at the bottom."
"The pedal's broken. I can coast."
I mounted the bike, and gravity did what it does. The bike picked up speed, and for the first time in three weeks, I wasn't fighting the hill. The hill was carrying me down, down, away from the thing behind me.
"I'm coming down," I said.
The descent was fast. Faster than I'd anticipated. I was using the brakes to manage the speed, but the momentum was significant. The undersized bike that had felt so fragile on the way up now felt alive, electric, dangerous in its velocity.
Then I saw another zombie.
This one was in a business suit. It was standing in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, like it was waiting for an embrace.
I swerved, nearly losing control, but the speed gave me an advantage. I was past it before it could do more than swivel toward me.
There were more of them scattered along the road as I descended. The outbreak wasn't just on the hill or downtown. It was everywhere. It was distributed across the city like some kind of contagion, which of course it was.
"There are more of them! On the downhill!" I shouted into the phone.
"Just keep going!" Martin's voice came through, urgent but steady. "Don't stop!"
I could hear him driving, could hear the scrape of metal, could hear him swearing and describing what he was seeing. He was close now. So close.
The bottom of the hill approached. The secondary road. My heart was pounding with something other than exertion now. Relief was approaching. Connection was approaching.
And then I saw Martin's car.
It was damaged. The passenger side was scraped, dented, marked by the violence of his drive through chaos. He pulled alongside me and threw open the passenger door.
"Get in! Get in!"
I threw the bike toward the curb—abandoning it, not caring anymore about the thing that had been my project for three weeks—and dove into the passenger seat.
Martin hit the gas before I'd even fully closed the door.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. We just breathed. My breathing was ragged from the physical exertion. His was ragged from adrenaline.
"Did you hit something?" I asked finally.
"Multiple things," Martin said, his hands tight on the wheel. "Zombies. A fire hydrant. A fence. In that order."
"You hit a fire hydrant?"
Martin's mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile. "It was attached to a zombie."
And then, for reasons I didn't entirely understand, I laughed. It was the kind of laughter that only comes after surviving something impossible. Martin joined in—nervous, relief-filled laughter, the kind that sounds a little bit like crying but feels like living.
He glanced over at me, eyes still on the road. "You okay?"
"My bike pedal unscrewed," I said.
"I know."
"And then there was a zombie."
"Yeah."
"Best cardio workout ever."
Martin laughed again, shaking his head, and I realized something. Three weeks ago, I'd decided to get healthy because I was afraid of time passing, of my body failing me, of mortality creeping up without warning. I'd bought an undersized bike and ridden up a hill that nearly killed me.
And then an outbreak happened, and I learned that time and mortality don't care about your fitness level. They come when they come. But my husband—he came too. He drove through chaos to reach me. That wasn't about health or fitness or self-improvement.
That was about choosing to run toward someone you love when everything is falling apart.
The car moved away from the hill, away from the infected areas, toward somewhere safer. Behind us, the zombie jogger was still crawling slowly downhill, no longer a threat. In the distance, sirens wailed. The world was ending in specific, manageable ways.
And I was breathing.
Much later, when the immediate chaos had settled into something more manageable—when safe zones had been established and survivors had found each other in the wreckage—I found myself sitting in a shelter with Martin and several other refugees. A news broadcast was playing in the background, something about containment and investigation.
I was telling someone the story.
"So I'm pushing this bike up a hill, right? Out of shape, sweating profusely, and then the pedal just unscrews."
The person listening looked appropriately horrified.
"Just comes off?" they asked.
"Just unscrews. And then—"
"He threw a wrench at it," Martin interjected.
"I panicked!" I said in my own defense.
"At a zombie?" another survivor asked.
"At a zombie that crawled out of the bushes with broken legs."
The group laughed. Real laughter, the kind that sounds almost normal.
"He pushed a bike uphill during a zombie outbreak," Martin said. "Without a pedal."
"The worst part," I added, "was that the pedal was on backwards."
More laughter, and I felt something settle in my chest. This story—this ridiculous, absurd story about a bike malfunction during an outbreak—would be my story now. It would be the thing I remembered about the day the world changed. Not the fear, though there was plenty of that. Not the chaos, though that was real too.
Just a broken bike, an undersized frame, and the moment when everything going wrong somehow made it possible to survive.
Martin reached over and squeezed my shoulder. The gesture was small, almost casual. But it meant everything.
We were alive. The bike was abandoned somewhere at the bottom of the hill. And somewhere above, a zombie jogger was still crawling downhill, moving toward a destination it would never reach.
The world had changed, but in this moment, in this shelter, with my husband beside me, I felt like maybe that was okay.
Maybe we'd be okay.