A FEAST OF FLESH: STORIES OF ZOMBIES, MONSTERS, and DEMONS
by
AARON POLSON
* * * * *
A FEAST OF FLESH
Published by Aaron Polson on Smashwords
Copyright 2011 by Aaron Polson
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Table of Conents
The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country
Start with the remnants of a desert town, a little girl, a man with a truck.
The town consists of shacks and ruined shells of larger buildings, rolls of barbed wire and sharpened lumber surrounding it on all sides like a great, prickly tortoise slumbering in the heat. The girl is too thin, like the rest of the survivors, with naps of sun-bleached hair in long, disordered strands. Her large eyes call from an impish face, blue and clear like the sky on good days, the days without dust storms. Both the man and the truck wear layers of grime like armor.
He only works after a moonless night, the ones survivors call “nameless.”
The Ruined Ones come with secret, padding feet to the edge of the wire. They learn the hard lesson of sharpened lumber and rolls of razor wire after scores of their brothers and sisters—should they even consider the word—thrust themselves into the teeth of the village’s defense. On nameless nights, their hot, angry cries scald the sky. In the morning, the man starts his truck, a rusted, grumbling thing, and rides it toward the gates. The men at the gates collect the dead—humans wrapped in burial shrouds and those grim-grey husks impaled on the fortifications—and heave body upon body until the bed of the truck hunches under the load.
On most days, no one watches him drive through the broken remnants of city streets.
No one expects anything from the man but to be rid of the bodies. For this, they keep him fed from their gardens. For this, no one expects more. On the days with cargo, the man and his truck chug across the dusty flats to the pit. He earns his food and shelter on the days with cargo.
Since Red shot himself in the mouth, he does the job alone.
He carries dozens of dirty pseudonyms, glares, and hateful, whispered rumors so the rest of the survivors can pretend they are safe and different and far away from the rotten, dying world. After the nameless nights, the others shut themselves in. They live without the burden of the dead. For nearly a month, they pretend the world can be good again and they all love one another.
Everyone but the man and his truck.
No one knows his proper name.
After one “nameless” night, the girl stands by the side of the road and waits as the truck rumbles past. The man hardly offers a glance, but the girl’s bone-thin hand reaches out. Dust blows in her face. She squints through the cloud of brown ash, studying as the men piled bodies onto the bed. She watches until the truck fades from the gate into a dark speck in the desert.
The man wears one long scar across his left cheek and nose. Red’s face had been scarred too many times to count, his skin a latticework of pockmarks and lines. Before the end of everything, Red raced dirt bikes, and half the scars dated from that far back. The survivors chose Red because of fear, because no one else had enough courage to leave the wire barricades even during daylight. Red chose the man because he could drive the truck, and the man wasn’t afraid, either. Handling corpses, tossing them into the pit like garbage, meant nothing to either of them. At the pit, the smell lingered, always lingered. Death and decay and ruin in one, cloying stew.
Red claimed he lost his sense of smell in a bike crash.
The man never said much at all.
On the night after she watches the truck, the Ruined Ones grow bold and attack again despite the sliver of moon. Howls of pain and hunger break through the whispering, desert winds. Behind walls and under roofs, children huddle with the elderly, clutching at each other to fight away the real boogiemen that probe the edges of their fortified oasis.
In the center of the village, the man sits on the cab of his truck and watches. He sees waves of Ruined Ones fall upon the defenses in the dim moonlight, and then those behind scramble over the bodies of their dead to get into the compound. The man smiles when defenders push forward carrying sharpened timbers, scrap lumber fashioned into pikes to impale the coming monsters. Bullets are precious, and the Ruined Ones are legion. Nights are cold in the desert.
He climbs down, ducks inside his shelter, and goes to sleep despite the shrieks in the distance. Tomorrow will be a busy day, and he needs his rest.
In the morning, she waits again, standing in the same spot. The man downshifts, and the truck protests with a shuddering stop. Already, volunteers pile the dead near the gates, but the rest of the city is silent.
“You got a pickup?” he asks through the window.
The girl hesitates, kicks and the ground with the toe of her shoe, and shakes her head. “Just wondered what you looked like,” she says, lifting her eyes to his. “Grandpa calls you the Grim Reaper. I’ve never seen the Grim Reaper.”
The man scratches his stubble, grunts, and drives away. Spouts of dust kick into the air, swirling like brown ghosts as he passes. The girl starts to run. Her mouth opens and shuts like she has something else to say, something she wants the man to hear, but his eyes aim forward. When he glances behind, she’s stopped running, just a shape behind a tan cloud.
Red shot himself in the mouth with snub-nosed .38 revolver six months before the man met the girl. Six months ago, the end of the world was a fresh, palpable thing. They both carried guns then, both the driver and Red. The survivors in the village told stories about the Ruined Ones, how they ate flesh or drank blood, how their teeth carried poison. How they could change shape in the shadows. Not much was really known about them, what their limits were, how they thrived only in the darkest nights. Only stories. Stories could lie. Each man carried his weapon with fear-charged hands.
But that day the truck lurched unexpectedly and came to a sudden stop. Red, often asleep during the short, jostling ride to the pit, woke with a start.
“Whassthat?”
The man peered out his open window. “Nothing. Nothing I can see, anyway.” He scanned the rearview mirror, checking the load of corpses for movement. “Can’t tell.”
Both men gathered their guns, Red his .38 and the man a Luger older than either of them. They hopped from the cab onto the dusty, sandy ground, their boots grinding into the earth with a crunch. Heat shimmered in the distance, dancing from the horizon in all directions. The man held his gun in front of him in one hand. He walked with even, slow steps. By the time he rounded the end of the truck, Red knelt over a black mass thirty yards away.
Bodies slid off at times, especially those shrouded with cloth or plastic, unfortunates among the survivors. When the man reached Red, he knew without looking. A body had fallen from the side and the truck’s rear tires dragged it under, smashing the chest and lower abdomen. Crushed and twisted, the bag opened at one end to reveal a face, a young girl, pale and almost peaceful. The desert wind caught the plastic cloak and rattled it in the wind.
“Shit, man.” Red closed his eyes.
The man wrapped the corpse as well as he could and helped Red carry it to the truck. They finished the run at a slower pace, neither talking, just listening to the rattle of metal and grind of tires against rocky path until they reach their destination. The man’s eyes roved the horizon, scanning for a shift in the rough brown smudge of a world. Nothing but scrub grass, sand, and dirt. Wasteland.
Before them, the pit showed itself, a scar on the earth, a black, hungry mouth. The truck slid to a halt at the lip of the pit. Dust skittered across the landscape in a game of chase.
Both men continued in silence, tossing body after body into the smoldering remains below. The charred remnants of a thousand lives lay in the pit, broken and blackened bits of bone and scorched flesh. The bodies landed with tiny thumps. Without rain to quench its thirst, a fire burned at the bottom. At last they tossed in the girl’s body, the last body, each taking one end and heaving it together, until it hung in the air, suspended for a moment, then twisted and tumbled with the others into the reeking smoke below.
The man climbed into the cab.
Red didn’t move. He slid his .38 from his waistband. “Fuck this, man. I’m done.”
The gun made a tiny noise in Red’s mouth, a quick, muted pop. A spray of blood, flesh, bone and brain matter colored the sky momentarily, and then his lifeless body tumbled over, and slid into the pit.
The girl is gone when the truck lumbers toward the gate after the third consecutive night of attacks. There are mutters from the men near the fence, mutters of creatures not afraid of death, a host of horrors willing to run themselves onto a stake, clawed hands and yellow teeth snapping at the air. The black eyes, they say, are the worst. The Ruined Ones have lost their fear of the moon. Casualties are high, and the man looks away when a tiny, shrouded body is loaded on the truck.
He drives alone, in silence, the Luger sitting on the empty seat next to him. The grind of rubber tires against packed desert sings through the metal of the truck. At the pit, the work is hard for one man, but no one else will come. No one else dares the awful, pungent stench of burnt flesh. No one else carries enough courage to tread in the silent, dead places of the world. He pulls the bodies from the bed one by one, saving the small, shrouded victim for last.
He avoids it until—
It shifts.
He staggers back.
A thin hand pokes through the fold, and the man wishes for his gun. The girl’s face emerges from the shroud. Her cheeks are smudged and dirty, but her eyes steal the blue from the sky.
She doesn’t move for a few, sluggish seconds. “Sorry,” she says. She stretches and dusts off her clothes, and the cloth falls to the bed like a discarded shadow. Desert winds kick up and chase her hair across her face.
“I wanted to see outside the village.”
“Dangerous,” he mutters.
She nods. Her eyes soften. “Sorry.”
The man hoists the girl to the desert floor. Her body doesn’t weigh much. For a moment, they stare at each other, the girl with her blue eyes and the man behind his shell. Smoke winds from the bottom of the pit. The girl’s eyes follow a tendril of dark grey until it fades into the clouds. She climbs into the cab as the man brushes sweat from his face, realizing the girl must have crawled into that shroud before the night had ended, before the men near the gate had collected all the bodies from the night’s butchery. He climbs into the driver’s seat.
“Where’d you get that scar?” she asks.
The man touches his face, runs a finger over the shallow groove in his skin. “Before…this,” he says.
Neither speaks for a minute. The man pinches the wires together, starting the truck. The engine spits and growls to life. Another gust tosses some dirt into the air, and the dusty cloud gallops across the flats. Behind them, in the distance, the remains of the city stand out like a smudge of black in the tan wasteland not much different than the pit.
“What’s your name?” she asks, eyes forward.
“Does it matter?”
She studies him. “Not really, I guess.”
He forces the metal beast into gear. Neither speaks as they crawl toward the remnants of civilization. The flats stretch on, seemingly an endless plain of brown nothing.
“I’d like to help you.”
He shakes his head.
“When I’m older,” she adds quickly. “When I have to choose something for my life, I want to help you do what you do.”
He drives, thinking of the choices already made for her, for all of them. Back inside the fence, the truck slows. She glances at the man as the truck idles in front of her shack. The weight of her blue eyes presses against his chest. He looks away and watches the volunteers work the defenses, string barbed wire, and push sharpened stakes into the ground.
Less than a year, and the Ruined Ones are this strong?
He closes his eyes. “Maybe.”
Her hand brushes against the rough skin on the back of his. In a moment, she’s gone, running into the shack. A voice rises over the grumbling engine—her grandfather’s, berating her for being gone, asking why she was with the man in the truck. The reaper. The man who will always be unclean.
He smiles, pushes the shifter into gear, and rumbles away.
Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.
“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.
Despite the smell, the ashen hue in Tesoro’s cheek, they are brothers. Saul basks in Tesoro’s machismo and wants to be a Marine one day.
On the mornings after Tesoro’s late nights, Saul sleeps late and skips school. In Garden City, a place of pork and beef processors surrounded by Kansas plains, no one notices, no one wonders about another Latino kid missing school. The teachers lose count of their shifting student body, and Saul becomes less than a number. He sleeps late those mornings. He sleeps easier because the sun is up, warming his bed through the open window. Bad dreams hide during the daylight, so Saul sleeps a black sleep with no dreams.
It happened like this:
Tesoro was on foot patrol in Baghdad. A car exploded, bright flames pushing the sky. The other Marines tensed, took cover. Tesoro didn’t move, watching a woman stream from the flames with a tail of smoke. She screamed louder than the bellow of the burning wreck, and the sound solidified his flesh just long enough. Too long. When the bullet broke through his chest, tearing cloth and skin and bone, his ears lost everything: the screaming woman, his sergeant’s barking voice, the fire, and the crunch of his body on the rocky dust. His ears lost everything except the snap of that bullet, the sound coming after it cut into his body.
A moment later, return fire from the Marines sounded distant, like firecrackers under metal cans. The blue sky lay across his dying eyes like a shroud.
In the evenings, after all but Tesoro dine together at the table, their father listens to an AM radio station that broadcasts the news in Spanish. He sits in his chair, worn and tired; lines like wrinkled leather punctuate his face. His finger taps against his lips as he listens.
The radio announcer reads the police reports, and sometimes their father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the victims have been the children of undocumented workers—killed by a bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death, mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think of his son’s late nights. He fights against the horrible visions of those victims—bodies that must share a raw, red color with the beef carcasses hanging in the plant cooler.
In the kitchen, their mother scrubs the sink, pushing hard with the wire brush to blot the sound of the announcer’s voice while Saul sits at the little table and ignores his homework. The kitchen stings of bleach before she is through. Tesoro’s truck rumbles in the yard—the ’62 Ford that he promises to paint one day and their father once joked was dead and resurrected. The joke died when Tesoro came back with the bullet around his neck. The truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.
Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.
When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”
On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.
Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark magic.
The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and laughed, too.
That afternoon, a car exploded in a small, Baghdad market.
That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.
Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”
Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him. He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul keeps it close.
But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are strangers.
A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway, and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.
His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother. His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.
Saul starts on the steps, and a little creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.
“Saul?” Tesoro asks through the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.
Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted. Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown—a blank expression with black eyes.
“You brought a gun?”
Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking. “Papa’s.”
Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.
For a moment, neither speaks.
In that moment, Saul understands; in that moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.
He smiles, showing the full horror of his tainted mouth.
“I’m leaving.”
Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s shoulder. The flesh ticks like a horse’s flank chasing a fly. The skin is cold and almost grey. “We can take your truck.”
“Si,” Tesoro replies. “Mi hermano.”
Saul hesitates, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell. He looks at his fingers, imagines the skin peeling away from scrubbing. Blood makes a stubborn stain. “First the bleach. I will clean your clothes… the truck, and then we go.” He stoops, gathers Tesoro’s shirt, and leaves the room without another glance at his brother.
The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country
The search beams crossed in front of the gate when my buddy Dan, broad and strong like a spit of granite, hunched over on all fours and made a little scaffold out of his back for me to climb. I scrambled over his shoulders, flopped over the gate, and dropped to the ground on the other side. The first over, Davin, was waiting for me with his shotgun poking out into the kill zone. Once I dusted off a bit and straightened my glasses, we waited for the lights to swing by again before tossing Dan the rope; I held the outside end steady while he climbed. Davin kept me covered. I was scared, shaking like chimes in the wind, but Davin held steady.
Once Dan dropped to the ground, I reeled in the rope, and the three of us hunched in the shadow of the big gate while the lights swung by once more. Davin looked at Dan and me, smiled crookedly, and nodded. The lights rotated away, and we sprinted for the shadows at the edge of Old Town. I figured the guards probably saw dumb kids like us half the time, but no one ever fired a shot.
So there we were: seventeen, full of piss and stupidity, creeping through ruined streets on a Friday night with a couple of jars of Uncle Jeb’s homemade booze, our guns, and an ache to celebrate Dan’s eighteenth birthday. One week later, hopping the fence would land Dan in the stockade—a crime believed to endanger the whole village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brother’s eighteenth.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity, the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the wall—a man’s right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing we’d bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, too—personally caught me in the throat.
“What’ll it be boys?” Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.
“Hell, I’m itching to splat a couple tonight.” Dan walked ahead a few steps with long, loping strides, the pinnacle of our small triangle.
“Old man Jantz says we have to check out the church. Says it’s beautiful, sacred ground. Inside the building, with a moon like this, the whole place lights up like a rainbow.” Davin stopped and cocked his head to once side, pointing toward the hill that led to the little building. We all knew about the church, the center of so many stories. Supposedly, that building remained mostly intact after all these years; a vestige of old superstitions lurking in our new ones kept folks from smashing it up.
“Fine, but I want to show you guys something first. Something my brother told me about.” Dan pointed the barrel of his shotgun into a thick patch of inky shadow ahead and strode forward.
Most of the big trees in Old Town were gone, knocked down for safety, but saplings, crooked grass, and snaking weeds groped toward the sky all around. I was surprised at how well I could see with just the moon. With the bright searchlights back at the wall, the rest of the night world look as black as spent oil, but the hunched backs of old houses, broken business, and other buildings rubbed against the blue night and field of stars in plain detail as we walked through Old Town.
I’d heard some stories, mostly from Grandpa, that the bigger cities had drained the plains of their population long before the end. In the meantime, the big corporate farms finished off the aquifers and sucked the land dry. Without water, there wasn’t much reason to live in the flat land. Without too many people out here, there couldn’t be too many of them, the zombies. Hell, I’d only seen maybe a dozen in my life, but they left the taint of decay smeared across everything. You could see it all over Old Town.
As we stumbled down the split asphalt of an ancient street, Dan reached into his pack, rummaged around, and produced a jar of booze. It was nothing but rot-gut moonshine, but all we had because most drivers wouldn’t risk a run through the wastelands just to drop off some beer for a bunch of hold-out hicks. That’s the way Grandpa painted it, anyway. The scavengers in the wastelands seemed worse than a whole stockyard of zombies.
Dan screwed off the lid, tossed back a swig, and shook his head. “Not bad, boys.” He slowed, passed the jar to Davin.
“No,” Davin said, waving Dan off with the barrel of his gun. “Not until I’m kicked back in the church.”
“Nate?”
“Sure,” I said, cupping the jar in one hand while clutching my own shotgun in the other. The gun had my great-grandfather’s; Grandpa said he used it on birds—quail and pheasant mostly—as a boy. I’d only fired the thing a few times myself, mostly at wooden targets that wouldn’t bite. The guns did make me nervous—we were warned against using them as the report would rouse any undead in the area. I tossed back a swig from the jar. Damn, that shit tasted awful, but the warm humming feeling that grew out to my finger tips after a few swigs kept me going.
“Did hear about Stacy’s cousin, over in New Colby?” Dan asked, reaching for the jar.
“Yeah,” Davin muttered.
“Gawd, I never want to see another burning in my life.” Dan spat on the street.
Davin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want those superstitious old bastards to set me on fire when I kick off.”
I shook my head and fingered Dad’s old lighter in my pocket, fighting a shiver born of too many burnings. Mom, for one, after Melina was born. Too much blood, not enough medical knowledge, a bad mix of both. Dad tried to explain the need for a burning, the whole ritual, but I wanted none of it. I know you can’t just bury the dead anymore—paranoia, hysteria, and the real likelihood that the undead will sniff out a fresh corpse. When I was five, watching my mother burn to black ash, none of that rationalization amounted to a hill of shit. Grandpa whispered something about Viking warriors in my ear that day, trying to cheer me. “Great big pyres, big as a house,” he said, “it was pride, not fear and shame made ‘em build those pyres.”
Dan clicked on the lantern he’d taped to the barrel of his gun. “Here we are fellas. Used to serve food here. C’mon.” The light reached out, starting to grope the heavy shadow inside a mashed up brick building. I’d never heard anything about that particular spot, and I couldn’t figure what he wanted us to see.
Rows of benches stretched down a tiled hallway; some broken with bits tossed askew to the grid. Across a counter to our right sat the old kitchen, a steel grill and some broken cash machines. A few coins littered the floor, shining on the floor like dead minnows. The whole place rested under a thick dust like frost on a January morning.
“Ssssh.” Dan, walking just ahead of us, waved back with one hand. My heart started pumping against my ribcage until I thought it would spring free and skitter across the floor. I heard why Dan shushed us then—I could smell the thing, too, a rotten, fishy smell mixed with mud.
Davin pushed forward, raising his gun. “Dan, give me a little,” he whispered, and Dan obliged, poking his flashlight around the corner.
“Use a baton,” I whispered, fearing gun’s report and its siren song to other zombies. I reached down to my side and fingered the black rod hanging on my belt.
Davin glanced back at me and uttered a low, “naw.”
Then I saw it, a little thing, bobbing its matted blonde head up and down as it munched on something—most likely a rat or stray cat. Davin clicked his tongue to get its attention, and the thing rotated to face us. It was a girl, six or seven maybe, although she could’ve been six or seven for years now. The undead didn’t age like us. Her little mouth, blotted with blood, opened and a little moaning sound trickled out. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw my sister’s face.
Davin raised the gun, butted the stock against his shoulder, and said, “bye, bye sissy.” The building shook with his report, frozen for an instant in a muzzle flash, and settled under Dan’s dim yellow beam. Its body slumped over on the ground, headless.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.” Dan thumped Davin on the back. Davin nodded, fished in his pocket for a folding knife, and carved a notch in the stock. I staggered to bench and held my head.
“You alright, ya pansy?” Dan kicked my boots.
“Yeah. Fine. Hand me the jar, okay?”
After Dan and I swallowed a few more swigs, he led us out back, to the barrels. In my mind’s eye, every shadow grew arms and reached for us. All the warnings about the guns materialized in my imagination.
“This is what I wanted to show you boys.” He leaned his shotgun against the grey boards of an old fence, a little shelter that hid two black-steel drums. “My brother told me about this shit. Says they used to cook food in it, but even the rot-bags won’t touch it.” His hands worked one of the lids free, and it dropped to the ground with a dull thunk.
The barrel looked to be half full of thick oil, black as midnight blood. The smell—heavy and sweet—knocked me back.
“Can you believe people used to eat this?”
The world started spinning while we humped over to the church. Not the whole world, just my piece of it—my brains sloshing around inside my skull, knocking against my ears. I thought maybe it was the booze; loads of stories circulated about bad home-brew. Dan seemed fine, striding ahead like usual, and Davin hadn’t touched the drink.
“Gawd, you’re a pansy.” Dan called after I stumbled and called for a break. I didn’t wallow on his insult, but the shadows started poking their fingers at me. I kept seeing that little-girl’s face, smeared and dead, hissing at us as Davin sprayed her brain matter across the dusty tile. We slipped from the relative safety of the compound, only to find our freedom rotten and decayed.
I staggered to my feet after a few minutes. We made the church while the moon was still high, floating overhead like a glowing bobber in a still, blue-black pond. I huffed and puffed up the hill a little more than I’d like to admit. My stomach and head still danced, but I knew once inside we’d loiter a bit, and I could lounge, let my guts come to a rest. Davin spotted something ahead, and sprinted out in front of Dan.
“Mother fuckers,” he hollered.
“What?” Dan jogged to his side. I stumbled behind, nearly slipping to the ground on a patch of fresh mud.
“They chained the god-damn door.” A heavy chain wrapped in repeated loops around the handles, and Davin tapped it with the stock of his gun. “Somebody cries about a few ‘bags and they lock down the fucking church.” He was a small guy, but swelled when angry, his skin burning through a few shades of red. The compound militia had done it; they must have locked up the place.
Davin and Dan took a few steps back. Davin raised his gun like he was going to take a shot at the chain, but lowered the barrel a moment later. This was a thick, coiled bit of steel; a blast from his shotgun wouldn’t scratch it, and we weren’t prepared with anything that could get at the lock. If it was anything but the church, we’d quickly smash up the windows and hop in. All the stories were about the beauty of those windows, and I doubt any of us wanted to smash those stories.
“Give me the jar,” he called to Dan.
I stood apart from the other two and glanced into the night behind us, half expecting a few lumbering undead to stumble from the paper-thin shadows. The waiting, the not knowing, grabbed and twisted at my stomach. I turned back to the church, admiring the long windows decorated with faint images. Grandpa called them stained glass. Almost every other hunk of glass in Old Town had been shattered many times over by guys like us, but something in the artistry of those high panes kept them from harm. I thought how odd and almost blank they looked from the outside, when inside they supposedly burned color across everything.
I looked around at Davin as he tossed an empty jar to the ground, having polished off the last bit. He reached down, palmed a hunk of rock, and stared at the building. “Nobody tells me what to do,” he muttered, taking a few steps closer to the big windows.
The next moment leaked into my eyes slowly, like the whole planet groped through molasses. Davin’s arm sprang forward like a little catapult; the rock tumbled end over through the air, and struck a window dead on. The glass cried out, split, and crumbled in a tinkling heap. It had been the picture of a lady in blue with a little kid on her lap—Mary and Jesus, I think. The frame held, but most of the glass fell, just leaving this odd grey outline of a woman suspended across the opening.
Davin went pale; I think he was struck by how easy the whole thing crumbled. The low buzz of night bugs and bullfrogs slowly swelled to fill the silence. I scanned the slope behind us; nothing.
“Damn, Davin. Nice toss. Well, might as well head back. Fun’s over, I suppose.” His voice fell flat, like he couldn’t really disguise his disappointment. We’d all expected something else out there, maybe legions of undead that would make us happy we stuffed our pockets with shells. Dan trudged downhill, back toward the road leading to the gate. I followed, still queasy and a little unsteady. Davin’s boots crunched against the gravel behind me, and then stopped. I turned and looked at him, this flat emptiness across his face.
“No.”
“No?” My palms started to sweat. The little guy had a temper. I remember one time he knocked Dan flat, bloodied his nose, just because Dan gave him shit about being so short. I’d seen Davin drop a handful of other guys the same way.
He looked at the moon for a moment, and I caught the shine shimmer off the whites around his eyes. “No, I’m not done yet. The whole world has gone to hell.” He flashed around, hurried up the hill to the side of the building, and tumbled inside the rectangular entrance left by the broken window.
I cupped one hand against my mouth and called down the hill. “Dan!” He stopped about thirty yards away, turned, and moved toward me.
“What? Where the hell is Davin?”
I pointed to the church.
“That little bastard,” Dan said and strode uphill.
Shotgun blasts rocked from inside the church. Dan passed me and paused at the side of the building. All I had was the moonlight, but some of the glass glistened a bit, wet with what I confused for oil or some of that grease in the old barrel. Dan and I kicked in the rest of the window, hopped inside, and found our buddy reloading his shotgun, his face covered in a mix of sweat and blood.
“Fucking bullshit, all of it.” He raised the shotgun again, pointing at the large windows opposite us. Five more shots in rapid succession rocked the inside of the chapel, shattered the windows, and brought years of dust and debris raining from above. Sheets of bright glass cascaded to the floor.
Dan placed his hand on Davin’s shoulder. “C’mon, man. Let’s get out of here.”
I backed away, ready to flee, afraid of being trapped inside. Surely the noise would bring the dead. My ears still rang with the recent display of firepower, but my eyes jerked to a noise—a snarling, moaning wail from outside the window. I glanced outside and saw a small group of meat bags shambling towards us. Five of them—fifty yards away.
“Guys…”
Davin shrugged away from Dan and rushed to the window. “It’s about time,” he muttered. He knocked out the remnants of the window with the butt of his gun and sprang outside. “Bring it, you bastards,” he hollered, charging down the slope. The dead responded, lurching toward him, moths to a fire. He hadn’t reloaded his shotgun, but hurried toward the ghouls with it raised like a club.
Dan pushed me aside and started out of the window. As I followed, my pounding heart choked the breath from my chest.
Shadows danced in front of us. Davin howled—not pain, but pleasure. He screamed like a berserker, a mad warrior in his final fight. The stock of his gun smashed through a few skulls; one head came completely off. Dan raised his gun, trying for a clear shot, but cursed under his breath. It was over before we were close enough to help.
Davin knelt, panting, in the midst of five ruined bodies. He managed to bludgeon each into submission, a pile of grey flesh like rotten logs. His clothing, arms, and face were caked with zombie sludge, blood, mud—all except two streaks trailing from his eyes down either cheek.
“That…was..fun,” he breathed. His eyes met mine, sparkling in the moonlight. He held up his left arm, leaning on the shotgun like a crutch with his right. A red gash cut across the forearm where one of the things bit into his skin. “That last little bastard got me…”
I looked at Dan. His face flushed white. “No…”
“You gotta do it, fellas. I’m toast.” Davin shook his head. “What a way to go, huh?” He grinned, white teeth flashing from a mask of blood and offal.
“No.” Dan dropped his gun. “I can’t.”
Davin looked at me. My hands trembled around the gun. I pushed the stock into my shoulder. The trigger was cold against my finger.
“Do it.”
Davin’s body toppled backward with the thunder.
I looked away, ashamed to fear the blood and a little worried some more rot-bags smelled the fresh blood or heard the shot and would swarm the place. Dan didn’t move for a few minutes; he just hunched on grass and stared at Davin’s body. The moonlight filtered through a few drifting clouds, casting a somber pall of blue over the scene while the wind whispered across the jagged tops of nearby trees. After a minute, I heard this sob, starting low like a moan. I clutched my shotgun with white knuckles and turned to Dan. He was crying.
“Stupid bastard. Stupid, fucking bastard.” He drew one foot back as if to kick Davin’s body but stopped, rubbing a sleeve across his face. “We gotta get him outta here,” he said, almost choking on the words.
I looked back at the corpse. His face was ruined, but in my mind’s eye I saw Davin as he was alive. I saw his cockeyed smile and confident flicker in his eye. I knew what would happen if we carried him back to the compound.
“We can’t take him back.”
“What?”
I thought of Mom; the last time I saw her they doused her with fuel, dropped their torches, and her skin cracked and blackened, sending an angry plume of black snaking into the sky. Maybe the booze did it, worked on my stomach and my brain, but I knew we couldn’t bury him out here—the zombies would make a meal of his remains before the day was out. We couldn’t take him back with us either. “I’m not letting those paranoid bastards make a little bonfire of his body. He didn’t want that.”
“Are you nuts?” Dan slumped into a pew. “Those rot-bags will chew him up if we don’t.” Silence filled the little church before he spoke again. “What the hell do you want to do, stuff him in one of those damn grease barrels?”
I reached for Davin’s gun. The stock was battered now, blotted with dried blood and mud, but I could make out the groove Davin had carved with his knife. I counted thirteen older marks from his father and grandfather. Five more tallies for the dead at our feet would make nineteen. That gun had been his grandfather’s, passed down for generations.
“No, we send him out right.”
Dan helped me drag a few pews into a pile, and then I turned over a little table at the center of our kindling. Dan was stronger than me, so he hoisted Davin’s body over his shoulders, lugged him to the front of the church, and laid him out on the table. I pried open our remaining jar of booze and doused his body with it. It tasted like shit, so I knew it was strong enough to burn well. Poking my hand in my jeans, I fished around for the lighter, Dad’s old thing with the initials engraved on the side.
I snapped the lighter open against my leg. With a quick flick of my thumb a small flame lurched toward the dark ceiling of the church, and I touched the fire to the edge of the table, watching it explode as a magnificent pyre fit for our friend.
We stood outside the building for a while, chased back by the heat. I wanted to wait until every beam in the church blackened, devoured by the orange fire, and collapsed on itself. Dan and I were silent. The world was silent. As the fire melted into an ash pile, we turned and stumbled down the hill. On our way back to the wall, I glanced off into the sunrise. We spotted a zombie, a lanky thing stumbling away from us down a quiet street—he hadn’t come with the others, and how many more shambled about in the darkness I would never know. It faced the other way and didn’t see us. Dan raised his gun but hesitated. “Aw hell,” he muttered as he dropped the gun.
Behind the zombie, the eastern sky started to balloon with pinks and oranges, and I took it in, trying to memorize the look of the morning sun cresting a hill. You couldn’t see a sunrise like that in the compound. I realized that the rest of my life would be spent behind the wall, and understood why Davin had charged headlong into the arms of the dead. At that moment, I feared the stifling closeness inside more than the few pathetic, undead bastards that littered the fly-over country.
I.
Something is rotten in my garden.
It was once a man;
his name dangles from
a broken tag on a torn shirt,
a green shirt
from the organic grocery
on the corner.
A vegetarian,
perhaps a vegan?
But now, it
shambles in grey impatience,
snapping its broken-toothed jaw,
dripping strings of
pestilent saliva,
groaning for
the meat
on my bones.
II.
Last summer,
the man brought an audience to
their feet, roaring
for Mark Antony’s revenge--
but the plague
let loose the
dogs of war,
the once-human watchers
of his theatrical game;
his friends, his neighbors, his audience,
fell upon him
chomping and snatching
at scraps of his skin,
rending and tearing
as if to take inside
some bit of the words
he brought to life.
III.
When she taught third grade,
the fence was to keep
the children in,
and she filled their
hungry brains.
Now, she is the worm’s concubine;
her fingers
drape the chain-links,
her flesh hangs in
loose strips,
her eyes
milked-over with cataracts
as she hungers for the
little ones.
But she--it--
is on the outside
and the hunger
is different.
Insatiable.
Foul.
Only slowed by the fence,
never stopping.
Never stopping.
IV.
Walled in her basement studio,
blind eyes staring--
a sort of painter’s block.
Before, when they surprised her at the sink,
the freshly-rinsed brushes
made poor defense
against jaws and fingernails.
Now she gnaws on the canvas,
Pthalo blue smears with
dried brown of human blood.
Too stupid to work the doorknob
with hands torn off at the wrist,
she flails and flails.
Her fluids strike the walls,
an homage to Jackson Pollack.
V.
Old and worn-out.
Retired.
He sat in the rocker on his wide porch,
watching
the first waves stumble and spill
down the street--
a monster of a mob,
all hands and teeth.
Too tired or slow,
he watched them break neighbors’ windows.
Deaf, he barely heard their cries
(the railroad took his ears).
He muttered through the dentures,
(he never said much, anyway).
Sans ears, sans teeth,
he still had eyes
to watch as they shambled up his steps
and took the rest of him
in gulping bites.
The tenement had been a whiskey distillery before the war, but the immigrants poured from steamships, fresh meat from Ireland and Eastern Europe, and they needed housing. Factory rooms were divided, and walls of grey wood thrown together. One became two, two became four, until the building folded in upon itself and became a black maze, choked with the reeking flesh of the poor.
In his fifth floor apartment, Tommy held the small, mewling child in his rough hands. It was his baby—a little girl. Her mother was dead, lost during childbirth, and the small apartment reeked of blood and sweat. The smell blended with other odors—the stench of rot and disease, fever and death. With his daughter in his hands, Tommy’s throat constricted as his eyebrows squeezed together.
“You’ll be havin’ to run, Tommy-boy,” croaked the midwife, a diminutive wrinkle of a woman in a soiled dress. “I’m sure they heard your wife’s cries. They’ll smell the blood, the death, and be on her.”
“Not my Lillian,” he choked. “God, not her.”
“Tommy, for the baby, you’ll be havin’ to run.” The midwife took the infant from his awkward grasp and sponged her pink skin with a rag from a bucket, the water almost as dark as the floor although Tommy had lugged it from the courtyard pump not an hour ago.
Tommy’s face tightened, his eyes wet and lost. “I’ll fight the bastards ‘fore I let them take my Lillian.” Both hands, filthy with the week’s dirt and his wife’s blood, squeezed into stone-like fists. He ignored the hunger that gnawed at the fringe of his consciousness, imagining the man-things that even now crept toward his door.
Sounds echoed in the hallway, shaking through the very brick and wood around Tommy’s small apartment. They were coming. The quarantine held for nearly two weeks, and the survivors that were left in The Points were desperate. The city cast off the healthy as well as the diseased. They were the worst, the Grey Men, and they had come for Lilian’s body.
In the Distillery, it was too easy to forget one’s humanity.
“Tommy go, ‘fore tis too late. You know they’ll take the baby, too—she’s not a chance here. The convent at forty-third and fifth avenue, if you can get past the barricades.” The small woman shoved Tommy’s child, now swaddled tightly in a blanket, into his waiting arm. She took up her sewing shears—the pair she’d used to cut the baby’s umbilical cord—and pressed the handles into Tommy’s other hand. “Go, now—”
A sharp rapping shook the door on its hinges. Tommy, not much more than a child himself despite his thick, black hair and broad frame, clutched the infant to his chest and pushed the shears into the waistband of his pants.
Voices hissed on the other side of the door, muttering low and indistinct, planning and scheming, and the pounding started again. Tommy slipped into the space next to the door and looked back at the squashed woman who delivered his baby as Lillian died.
Thanks, he mouthed. She nodded.
With a heavy crack, the door buckled. A second battering tore the door from its hinges, and it swung inward. Two of them spilled in, their flesh faded as old linen, black veins breaking their faces into awkward jigsaws—victims of the fever become monsters. The Grey Men would have meat.
Only two, Tommy thought. Only two and they haven’t seen me.
“Where’s the dead one?” snarled a tall, balding man-thing with ragged remnants of a beard. His tongue lolled out and slipped over his cracked lips. “Move, woman.”
The midwife folded her arms and stepped in front of the mattress and Lillian’s body. Her eyes flicked to the door and Tommy, only for a moment, but a moment too long. The Grey Men turned their heads just as Tommy squeezed past into the dim hallway.
“What’s the bundle?” the bald ghoul muttered, his hand, raw and chapped, grasped toward Tommy.
Tommy tucked the infant under his arm and scurried into the black hallway. The quickest stairwell was to the right, but they spilled after him, blocking that route, so Tommy was committed to the left. He sprinted as well as he could, his heart clanging away in rhythm with his light footfalls. The fifth floor hallways were generally clear, never as cluttered as the stifled mess below. Occasional beams of amber gaslight or the pale glow of a lantern leaked under a door, but otherwise Tommy moved in darkness. He pulled up, knowing the end of the hallway and the stairs were just ahead.
Tommy listened. Only small voices, muffled in their rooms, broke the stillness. A sharp cry cracked through the dark, and then fell silent. The midwife was dead now. The Grey Men would kill when provoked. No heavy footsteps, though. They weren’t coming. Not yet. But the stairwell before him was smashed between the second and third floors. He faced the prospect of crossing the Distillery on a lower floor, through an unfamiliar hallway, to return to the opposite stairwell and escape.
He swallowed hard, glanced down at the sleeping child swaddled in the crook of his arm, and pushed open the stairwell door.
The heat caught him first, followed by the stench: the awful reek of fouled skin, diseased flesh, urine, and feces. The stairwells at either end of the Distillery seemed to be the incubating ground for every rotten odor in the place. His face, already damp from the rush through the hallway, broke out in more tiny beads of sweat, rivulets that skirted into his eyes and down his cheeks.
He started down, descending uneven steps through near darkness. If one were to find him there, open either door below, he would be trapped. Tommy brushed his damp face with the back of his free arm, and held his breath.
The fever had come without warning, burning through the Distillery and other tenements in The Points neighborhood, infecting all but a misfortunate few. The healthy became outcasts—those who had no place in the new order. Rushed barricades blocked neighborhoods such as The Points, crowded ghettos with citizens whose mouths spoke dozens of languages and whose skins reflected myriad hues between the faded milk-white of Tommy’s Lilian, to the sun-hardened leather of the Italians. Food became scarce after the barricades.
The baby, Lilian had said before labor, was a miracle. A precious gift born in a hive of human rot.
Tommy held the child close to his chest as his feet lit on the last landing before the stairwell became impassable. Third floor, he thought. The core of the Distillery. Hundreds of rooms above, hundreds below. A dark maze. He knew the trip through the heart of the building would be more perilous than his quick flight on the fifth floor. As those in the building sickened, they consolidated their numbers below, and the third floor corridor would be stifled with bodies.
He shrugged off a growing ache—the first sign that the fever had begun its work—and pressed through the doorway separating the humid stairwell and the nightmare hallway. At first, Tommy imagined the place was completely without light, but his eyes adjusted enough to make out misshapen lumps—bodies, surely—littering the narrow path. They were groaning, some asking for water, others food. Instinctively, he tightened the grip on his daughter chest.
God, let me get her to safety.
At the far end of the hallway a shadow moved. Two floors above, the door to the stairwell clicked shut. Tommy pressed the door closed on his level, compelled on by who—what—started down the stairs. He pushed his feet forward, forcing them into the empty spaces between shifting bodies. Twice he felt a damp, boney grip snatch at his legs. Tommy kept walking.
He counted to himself. He saw his wife’s smiling face in each shadow. Each number, each step, one foot, the other, brought him closer to the moving thing at the end of the hallway. It was one of them, he was sure, the half-dead ghouls made by fever and disease, forced to fester in the ghetto by the barricades, the police, and the soldiers with rifles outside. He loathed the Grey Men, but could he kill one if he had to? They had been his neighbors before the fever, his fellow inmates in the tenement, and some of them factory fodder like him. Why was Lilian spared the disease, only to die in childbirth and become food for these awful things? Why had it spared him—no, not spared. He felt the stirrings in his joints over the past week; he woke in the night with silent burning in his bones. He wasn’t spared the fever, only delayed… His sentence only postponed.
The thing turned toward Tommy. Its yellow eyes almost glowed in the dim corridor, black veins cracking across the moony surface. Tommy was only twenty feet away from the Grey Man when it tilted its head to one side. Its vertebrae snapped with a soft, wet pop. It opened its mouth, a black hole above its throat. A noise leaked out.
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