Apocalypse Soup Kitchen
A short story
By A.W. Wilson
Copyright Alan Wilson 2011
Published at Smashwords
The apocalypse came and went and I missed it. It’s all a bit of a shame. Not the fact that I missed it, that’s not a shame. I mean it’s a shame about the apocalypse. There doesn’t seem to be anybody about. Well, there’s a few people about but they tend to be mutants, all deformed and bloodthirsty. Well, I say, tend to be mutants – really they’re all mutants. Bit grim, that. They’re very bloodthirsty. Properly thirsty for blood.
And they’re all deformed. Not nice at all, there’s a lot of lumpiness and a lot of oozing discharge. The discharge is the worst part. Apart from anything else, it smells, it smells bad. It’s a dreadful business: the stinky discharge, the lumpiness and the thirst for blood. Really, it’s a terrible business.
Right, so I’m still about and I’m not a mutant. Could I be the last man alive? It’s tricky to tell because there’s nothing in the way of communication, and I can’t travel very far because of all the bloodthirsty mutants. It could be that there are survivors of whatever it was that ended the world. Like they say in those post-apocalyptic movies – pockets of humanity, ramshackle bands just trying to survive, to rebuild. Perhaps.
Or. It could be that nobody else survived and I really am the last man standing. The last man on earth. The last non-mutant on earth.
Or. It could be that just my town has been affected by whatever the thing was that made such a mess. It could have been a purely local catastrophe. If that’s the case then I’m going to look a right muppet when I’m rescued. Living as I am like Omega Man.
Better explain the lapse in memory, not sure who I’m explaining to though, there may be nobody to read this. Oh well. Better not think like that, keep the pecker up and all that. Anyway, back to the explanation. Back to the lapse. It all went off while I wasn’t around to see it. I was in a right old state, really messed up. Here’s what happened.
Big night. Big session. There were three of us, Rachel and Pete and me. We really went for it. We all called in sick from work on the Friday and went out for a late breakfast. Then we started on the beer. We really hammered it all afternoon. Then afternoon became evening and evening became night and we carried on hammering it. The class A drugs came out at some point, they had to or we wouldn’t have lasted. It was very messy indeed. We ended up back at Pete’s. I don’t remember much apart from feeling really up for it with Rachel and realising pretty quickly that she was feeling really up for it with Pete. I think I might have toyed with the idea of trying to tag-team on Rachel with Pete. But that would have been weird, and more likely, why would he have wanted me involved when he was in line to get Rachel on his own anyway? And Rachel didn’t seem to want me to get involved either. Bit grim, that.
So I left them to it. I remember leaving them to it. I remember the walk home. It was stupid o’clock, maybe 5 am, proper light and a few people from the real world starting to go about their business. I just kept my head down - I was in a right old state and just needed to get home. My pride was hurt because of the Rachel and Pete thing and I was coming down like a sledgehammer on a rock.
When I got home I made a decision, a necessary decision. There was no way I was going to spend one of those horrible sleepless comedowns lying in my bed, sweating, tossing (and I mean tossing) and turning. Starting to doze off then realising my mind’s not going to stop what with all the chemicals still racing around it, making it buzz and whirr and spin, and not stop not stop not stop. I’ve endured enough of those bad times. So I hit my stash: Temazipam, mazzies, jellies, downers, whatever you want to call them. I hammered a load, I was taking no chances, I dosed up good and proper.
Then I had a big whiskey and a big spliff and that was that.
I woke up a long time later. About a day later. I knew I’d been properly knocked out. It took me a while to shake the fug of sleep out of my head, seemed to take hours, then I realised I was in a different kind of fug. A fever. Proper hot and proper ill - that was me. I started to shiver like crazy so I wrapped myself tightly in the duvet and tried to sweat it out, and I was really sweating - burning up but freezing too. I was a human baked alaska. I clung onto the duvet, holding it round me really tight but still freezing. I jumped out of bed to get a jumper and in the few seconds I was out, the chill hit me double hard. I shivered plenty - I thought my teeth would fall out with all the rattling. I’ve not known shivering like that before. So I grabbed not just the jumper but all the clothes I could take at once, then bounded back under the duvet, still shaking like I was drilling a road. I put on the clothes under the duvet and just lay there, burning up. Burning and shaking. I was having hallucinations, delirium spiced up by whatever residue of Friday’s session was still lurking about in my messed up system.
I don’t know how long I lay in that sweaty pit but it was more than a couple of days. More than a few days. It was more than a bit grim. I didn’t drink anything in that time and I didn’t use the bathroom. Every bit of liquid in me was sweated out. I thought I would die.
But I didn’t die. Weird that.
I was, as they say, in and out of consciousness. Slipping in and out like they say in books. Then one time I slipped back into consciousness and it felt different. Something had changed. The fug and the fever and the shivering - all gone. I still felt awful, after all I was dangerously dehydrated and starved of food, and all this from a base of over 24 hours of drink and drug abuse. Not really abuse though is it, that’s how they’re meant to be used.
I was back though, back amongst the land of the living, as they say. But I wasn’t was I, I was just back.
For about an hour all I did was drink and eat. I filled and refilled a glass, downing it and downing it. Everything in the fridge was off so I feasted on biscuits and crackers whilst the frozen burgers and sausages fried. Then I ate them straight from the pan. My mouth burned but my stomach was grateful, more than grateful. I swear I could hear it thanking me over and over, its voice muffled by all the food it was wolfing down.
I got back into the sweat bed and I slept again. But a different sleep, a normal sleep, a nap really - about an hour. I woke up and felt much better than before. I showered, cold water unfortunately but I had to get the stench of sweat off. And I got dressed. And I decided to go out and get some bread and milk. I thought about turning on my phone but didn’t feel in the right state of mind to trawl through however many millions of messages would have been left over the last, how many days? Nearly a week.
Before I could do anything there was a knock at the door. I didn’t open it immediately, I called out instead. I called out with a who-is-it or something along those lines.
“Good afternoon sir. I’ve been doing a sweep of this area and your residence was previously marked down as inactive, marked down by me as inactive. Because I couldn’t observe any activity. That is, until the last few hours, when there have been signs of activity. I’ve observed signs of activity. So now your residence is marked as active.”
I responded with a what-are-you-talking-about or something similar.
“This is my area, sir, my sector if you will, sir. It is my assumption that you will have flesh available, flesh and sinew. Flesh and sinew and blood, oh my.”
It was Pete. Of course it was Pete. He liked doing voices, pulling pranks. It had to be Pete. I opened the door. It wasn’t Pete. It was one of those mutants. It was lumpy headed and oozing discharge. Awful looking thing, human but all melted and lumpy. And holding a clipboard.
I slammed the door but it blocked it. It continued to speak, all polite. Weirdly polite and well spoken. “You need to let me in sir, so I can get to your meat. Got to eat, sir. This is my area, my sector.”
I had no replies, just violence. I slammed and slammed on the door against the thing and knocked it down with a well placed kick, although not so well placed that I didn’t get stinky discharge on my socked foot.
I ran past it, up the steps and into the street.
I kept on the move for a while. I found some shoes from a bony corpse. There were plenty of bony corpses. Properly stripped clean. They really do like their flesh and sinew, this lot. They seem to like the offal too, all of it. And of course the blood, they like to wash it all down with the blood. That’s what they like most. They’re a very bloodthirsty bunch.
I avoided the mutants as best I could. They’re a funny lot. I’ve seen countless zombie movies and so I’m not used to them being able to talk, and if they do it’s just to howl the word ‘brains’ over and over. Not so this batch, they’re a very talkative lot. Quite chatty really. I should qualify that, they’re not really chatty in the how-was-your-weekend way, they’re chatty in a can-I-eat-your-liver-and-drink-your-blood way. Always polite, but very assertive, very clear. I respect that in them, you know where you stand with these mutants. Admittedly, that first one was a bit slippery, with his attempt at fooling me into thinking he was in some official capacity, what with the clipboard and the idea of his sector and all, but fair play to him for using what was left of his imagination.
As I travelled around town, avoiding mutants and picking up stuff I thought would come in handy from the bony corpses, I wondered about their verisimilitude. In the movies it’s very clearly defined. The rules are clear. The mutants - or the zombies, they’re pretty much interchangeable really - have always come into being because of something specific. A military weapon – biological or chemical - a plague, an alien invasion, something along those lines. With this lot I have no idea what the premise is, what kicked it all off. It’s quite frustrating really. I’d like to know. I’m very curious about it. I’ve tried asking but they can’t tell me, they don’t remember anything before mutation.
Then there’s the process of the mutantness - the zombieness - being passed on to humans. In the movies, a scratch or a bite does it, or sometimes you have to be killed by one, then you come round a few hours later with your eyes all weird, a lopsided gait and a hankering for brains. I was none the wiser on that score either. Is there a fixed number from whatever catastrophe caused it or are more humans getting turned? Would I get turned or would they just eat me? They seem just to want to eat me. They’ve made that fairly clear. Abundantly clear. This lot are obviously former humans, obvious because they still have a bit of human in their looks, and because they have clothes on, torn human clothes, hanging off their lumpy, slimy bodies. I saw one with a hat, stupid hat. Must have been a prick before being a mutant if he wore that hat. He’s a mutant prick now.
So the mutants don’t live up to the expectations that Hollywood has drilled into me. But I have learned something from the movies. Supplies. It’s all about supplies.
So I avoided the mutants as best I could and I found a secure spot, with supplies, essential supplies. I’m hunkered down now. Another thing about this lot, apart from their polite manner, is that they have a bit of discretion. In the movies, when they find a bit of torso to chew on, or when they literally tear someone limb from limb and eat their insides - uncoiling their intestine like a floppy garden hose – they attract a lot of attention from other mutants by howling and screaming as they go. Before you know it the scene is besieged and nobody gets a decent share. But these ones, these real ones, they’re more discreet. They realise they’ll get more if they keep it to themselves. The result is that they don’t tend to be in massive hordes, which I prefer. I respect their discretion.
So I’m hunkered down in my secure spot. It’s a morgue. Clean lines, low roof, minimalist design. I like my morgue. It’s a nice morgue. It’s nicely secure. Morgues don’t tend to be big open buildings - they’re not tourist attractions. They’re designed to be unseen and they don’t have lots of windows, well this one doesn’t. So it’s pretty secure here, and I’ve done a bit of fortification, taken some precautions, done a bit of nailing of boards across potential access points, got a mop sticking through the double door handles, that sort of caper. Done a decent job really. I’ve got plenty of food, not nice food but edible food. Cereal and the like. And I’ve got all the water I need. I brought books and crossword puzzles from my travels around the town. It’s not much fun but I’m not dead. And you’d be surprised how important staying alive actually is - even when life seems like no existence at all. Something makes you hang on. Maybe it’s the hope of rescue. I hope I get rescued. But I know I’m not going to be. Help’s clearly not on its way anytime soon.
It’s well stocked, this place, it’s got everything any good morgue attendant might need. There’s loads of things to cut with, proper Aladdin’s cave of blades. There’s scalpels, saws, tongs, clamps and pokey things. There’s things like ice-cream scoops, but sharp and with a longer handle. Well stocked.
Another thing I respect about this breed of mutants is their ability to reason. They’re a bit stubborn and will go on a bit about the stuff that’s important to them, namely the fact that they want to eat me, but once I get their attention they do listen. They have listened. The five that are outside have listened, and they’ve been discreet and not made a big fuss over the fact that there’s a live human inside the morgue building, the fortified morgue. So they’re a manageable number, my five.
There were six bodies in the cold drawers set into the wall.
I held my breath and got busy, slicing and dicing and jabbing and tugging at the first cold storage corpse. I went for the leg first, the least gooey bit, thought I’d ease in slowly. I tried to tell myself I was just slicing the meat for a kebab. Course I puked and I puked all the way through and gagged and coughed and puked again. I sliced the shin and the calf and the ankle - and even through all the sick and all the snot – and even through all the tears - I couldn’t help but marvel at the quality of the tools, so sharp, so sleek. The choice of the professional. I put the meat into these stainless steel trays that were stacked in a cupboard – very well stocked this place – and then I was ready to serve.
And that’s how I manage them.
I had to make an announcement. I had to tell them that there’s no point in them making a big fuss outside, I wasn’t going to let them come in and eat me. But I told them I can give them a daily meal. There’s a hatch at the side. It’s where the corpses would have been unloaded from the ambulances - they’d be passed through and presumably loaded onto one of the stainless steel trolleys that are in here before being rolled to the cold storage drawers. This is the serving hatch for my canteen – my soup kitchen.
I slide open the hatch a little and pass the daily meals. I make them take it in turns so they all get a portion each. I don’t want one getting starved and going nuts, I want them all under control.
They moaned a bit at first, insisting they were used to bigger meals, but I had to take a hard line to make the supplies last.
Very occasionally they’ll get a treat, like yesterday I surprised them with a handful of toes. They liked that, very appreciative they were.
I’ve been doing what I can to plan for the future. I found some blood bags and syringes and all that transfusion paraphernalia and I’ve been storing up a pint of mine at a time. I’ve started giving them my blood every two days to save on the corpse meat. They don’t seem to mind it but they’re always a little more restless on the liquid days. There’s only half a dozen bags so I have to get them to chuck them back through the hatch so I can refill them. They seem happy to recycle - they’re friends of the earth mutants.
It’s getting harder and harder to keep the bags topped up - my blood is running thin.
I asked them this morning what will happen when I run out of stuff to give them. Of course I was suitably vague and didn’t indicate how low on supplies this particular soup kitchen actually is. Didn’t want to stir them up. They’re polite as I’ve said, but they’re determined. And bloodthirsty. Very thirsty for blood they are. Anyway, I asked them what they will do and the one that’s the most articulate, I guess he’s the leader. He said. “We will decide that there is no longer any reason for discretion. We will bang on these metal doors with sticks and bars to make as much noise as possible. This will bring many others of our kind. We five will make sure we are at the front, for purely selfish reasons, but we will use the strength in numbers - the actual physical strength of the large numbers - to break into this facility. Then we will tear the sinew and muscle and fat from your bones. And we will drink your blood.”
I have one and a half corpses left, not counting mine. Bit grim, that.
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