His wife, Jesmin, crouched on the concrete yard, gnawing a synthetic chew bone. Saliva glistened off the toy which squeaked each time she bit into the plastic. Her fingers tore at the plaything, and when that didn’t work she clutched it between her teeth and swiped her head from side to side.

He squeezed the chain and slab of tranquilized meat in his hands, wondering how long before she spotted him. The day before she had flung herself at him the instant he strolled outside and his heart leapt with the thrill. Now, his gift distracted her.

The sunlight thrown off the metal brace around her neck revealed the piece was stained with dirt and blood. He had figured the collar would not remain clean for long, and decided to purchase a second one. A pink one; it was her favorite colour, he was certain. He scratched his head. Maybe it was red. He rubbed his ear. Too much time had passed to remember such trivial details.

A clack sounded as the front door locked shut. Jesmin jerked her shoulders backward, and raised her head. Her black eyes locked onto Odan and the toy dropped from her mouth. A deep groan rumbled from her throat, and the sound chilled his bones. Jesmin crawled closer on all fours, with her bottom in the air, just like the monkeys had done on the cyber programs he watched. Drool trickled from her gaping mouth onto the yellow ground, yet always her cold eyes were on him. He caught a hint of the stale decay on the wind.

“Good morning, my peach,” he said and limped closer.

He stopped behind the red line smeared down the centre of the front yard, and waited for the usual display. No rush.

Across the street, a neighbor caught his attention. Odan nodded his head at the elderly bloke dressed in a similar white body suit. At the side of his yard, the young daughter rolled in the dust. The man waved, causing the chain clutched in his hand to dance on the yellow earth.

Odan said, “It’s going to be a nice day.”

As he finished speaking, Jesmin lurched toward him. He never flinched. Snagged by the shackle at her neck, her torso pressed forward while her head pulled back. Gargling noises erupted from her thin mouth. Her extended arms burrowed through the air to reach him, and while he ached to feel her soft caress, he knew the rules.

He lifted the pinkish meat in his hand and swayed it in front of his beloved. “Meal time, my sweet.”

In one swift movement, he tossed the piece of drugged food toward his wife. Her hands jerked and snatched the flesh-like snack out of the air. She shoved it into her mouth, her teeth chomping on the protein. Bent over, she coiled away.

An arid wind whipped across his face as he listened to the sound of lip smacking, tearing and chewing. When Jesmin had first returned home, the sound disgusted him, but now it was normal, just like the howl of the wind.

He retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket. With his fingers wiped clean, he set the timer on his watch to one hour and pressed the lock button before glancing over at the front door.

The small entrance cubicle reminded Odan of the old fashioned telephone boxes he’d read about.  Beyond the front door booth, the land was flat and coated in yellow desert dirt. The room descended into the earth, until it vanished. A sheet of metal slid over the top of the elevator door, and already the wind sprayed golden soil over the top.

Adjusting the dust mask over his nose and mouth, he noticed Jesmin stood upright in the middle of the yard. In a straight posture, she was beautiful. Almost stunning, despite the torn red and white polka-dot dress suspended off her body. Half her black hair had fallen out, but her high-cheeked face remained unscathed. Crimson coated her lips, and Odan’s breath caught in his throat. Aside from the putrefied flesh on her limbs and slim frame, she was still twenty years old, and would always look that age. He looked down at his own wrinkled hands. The trembling had grown worse of late.

Turning his attention to his beloved he tottered over to her side.

“I’ve missed you,” he mumbled. He peeled the mask from his mouth and lifted the scarlet stained hand to his lips. With eyes closed, he kissed her skin. He remembered their wedding day and the promise he had made to care for her always.

Without wasting time, he proceeded to unlock the fetter binding her to the yard. In haste, he looped the chain in his hand through the connector on her metal neck brace.

Her eyes followed his every movement. She watched him with soft eyes, and to Odan it seemed she may want to speak. She never did.

A bare shoulder revealed rotted flesh. An ashen collar bone was exposed, and he tisked. “We can’t go out in that condition.”

Drawing the ends of the strap together, he tied a knot atop her shoulder. He grinned to himself. “Much better.”

The side of his finger trailed the length of her cheek and he picked off remnants of food from around her mouth. “You always were the most beautiful girl.”

Shading his eyes with his hand from the sun’s glare, Odan gazed at the flat land beyond his front yard. Nobody in his street was home. Even his neighbor had commenced his walk. Streets farther away revealed people already strolling with their dead family members. As bizarre as the scene seemed to Odan, the feeling soon passed.

He inhaled the baked air, mingled with the smell of rotten meat. It stung his nostrils. He tugged at the collar of his white jumpsuit and turned his eyes to his wife.

“Sometimes I wonder if this is just in my head.” His voice trembled.

He swallowed a dry lump in his throat and supposed he’d better make a move. Drawing on the chain in his hand, Jesmin followed him onto the cemented path. The yellow desert swept over the passageway and Odan followed the safety of the trail. Each day the path reminded him of the young girl who perished into the golden quick-sand on either side of the man-made track. His lips tightened at the memory, and clasped his wife’s hand.

In front, the neighborhood burnt a sickly hue. He strolled in silence. Her hips touched his with each stride. She was never a talker, and he preferred that, unlike the unstoppable chatting birds his buddies married. He took the time to relish the moment and momentarily glimpsed at Jesmin who stared ahead. Always one to focus on the job at hand, she seemed to almost smile under the sun’s brilliance.

“You are just perfect, my Jesmin. If only…” His head bowed and he kicked the dust at his feet.

If only he had known an outbreak would spread across the world he might have tried harder to save Jesmin. But how could he? Within a week, the air-borne virus spread across the planet. He remembered the news readers had said everyone was a carrier and that the trigger was synthetic food. But not everyone changed. Odan’s head shook and he retrieved the handkerchief to wipe the perspiration gathering across his forehead. Jesmin was one of the unlucky to contract the virus. Nothing could change that, he knew. Yet, it still stung.

Heat waves fluttered in the distant path. The pair followed the circular road which guided them past the myriad of residential streets. Curving onto Eighty-Ninth Street, he spotted his old buddy Charlie.

Dressed in a similar white one piece garment, Charlie strolled in his direction with a puffed-out chest. The man he had bonded with in the Dry Lands was accompanied by two females. Odan knew neither of the women were his wife or partner. They were too young. The reality that infected people who were unclaimed by their families were available for purchase boiled Odan’s blood. How folks discarded their nearest and dearest never sat right with him.

Charlie guided the ladies by a chain attached to their necks. His silver hair, pulled into a pony tail, glistened beneath the sunshine. Charlie’s mouth stretched wide into a warm smile as he approached. In his time, he had been in real estate and earned himself a wealthy bank account. That was before the out-break. Odan recognized snippets of Charlie’s arrogance float to the surface every now and then, yet a lonely life was just that.

“People are starting to talk.” Charlie clapped a hand against Odan’s shoulder. “Always with the same girl.” He chuckled, and the crows feet around his eyes deepened.

Odan glanced at Jesmin and clasped her fingers. “She’s the only one for me.” He turned to face his friend and raked his fingers through the thin layer of white hair on his head. “When’d you get these two?” His eyes flicked to the girls and back.

“Haven’t you heard?” Charlie stepped closer to Odan. The smell of pine and musk lingered near. “Statute Fifty One has been amended. The waiting time for a lifeless has been stamped out. They’re all up for grabs my friend.”

“What?”

Charlie’s brows arched. “The government’s stopped funding the lab tests.” He rubbed his hands together. “They want to get their money back by selling off the lifeless in their cells. Over in Russia, they are being used to work the land, rotating them every hour until their bodies give out.” The man sniggered. “And to think the government tried to pass this over by saying it was a connection to our loved one. Ha!”

Odan’s shoulders drooped. His eyes fell upon the young girls. A brunette, maybe eighteen or nineteen in age, slim and dressed in mini shorts and a tank top. Her tanned skin was almost flawless. Even their putrefied smell was faint, brushed away by the wind. She was a newbie. The red-head by her side was no different.

“There’s only one rule to keeping a lifeless these days,” Charlie gave a crooked smile. “Keep it chained up when it’s not sedated. Otherwise, the guys upstairs don’t really care what happens down here.”

Odan snorted. “What if the girls’ families want them?” Odan’s shaky hand constricted the chain in his hand. “Have you no decency?” His voice climbed more than he expected.

Charlie’s face scrunched up. “Have you forgotten what world we live in? It’s 2096. Decency had flown out the door a long time ago buddy. Accept that, or it’ll eat you up like the virus.” He retrieved a cigarette from inside his chest pocket.

Odan curled his hands into fists and gritted his teeth.

Charlie drew the mask from his mouth and lit his smoke. He inhaled multiple drags, pointed his long chin upward and blew rings of smoke into the air. “You’ve got to change with the times. I’ve been telling you this for ages.”

Odan looked past the man’s clear glasses and into his pale blue eyes. He wondered why he called him a friend.

“This is good.” Charlie took another puff and balanced the cigarette between the tips of his fingers. He drew the butt from his lips and said, “We should make a request to visit the impound together. Get yourself a fresh one.” He winked.

Odan’s body flinched. “You’re a fool.”

Charlie shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself.” He moved closer to the young girls and caressed the brunette’s arm, before pushing her hair behind her ear. His hand cupped one of her breasts.

Heaviness in Odan’s throat prevented him from answering, and then he shook his head. “Let’s be heading home, Jesmin.”

He marched past the man and his escorts.

Charlie’s voice carried on the wind. “You’ll change your mind.”

Odan wanted to yell he would rather sink in the yellow earth before taking someone else’s lifeless. He didn’t. He stomped with his aching hip, refusing to let Charlie catch a glimpse of the pain he suffered. They traveled onward. Other seniors walked with their partners along the wide path. Odan avoided their stares. Instead, he wanted to shout at each one of them.

He traveled past too many front yards with a lifeless still chained to the ground. Mostly children and females. Odan refused to accept that his neighbors might have ordered non-family lifeless just as Charlie had done.

The temperature seemed to rise, or at least it had for Odan. Sadness lay deep in his chest. He wanted to tell Jesmin not to worry because the wrong would correct itself. But he was unable to convince himself. The urge to hug and kiss her in that moment flooded his thoughts. He continued his shuffle and turned right onto the main cemented strip.

Ahead, he noticed a four-man space ship block the entire path. The outside shell was ink black. Wooden crates huddled near the vessel. Several men in blue uniforms unloaded more boxes, no doubt filled with provisions for the locals. Even from afar, he recognized their young and fit physiques, filled with eagerness to prove themselves.

Once at the site, a tall man approached Odan. His brawny frame filled out his uniform, and sweat stains marked his armpits. The shirt carried a golden service badge, in the shape of a half moon with the name Sim printed on the symbol. Odan recognized the insignia as the same league he had served under.

“Your arm,” the young man said as he wiped the sweat bubbles from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

Odan noticed the black laser gun in the officer’s holster. He released Jesmin’s hold and stretched out his arm. The officer scanned the watch on Odan’s wrist with the plate secured to his palm. The fellow’s gaze fell to his own wrist band.

“Mr. Theps.” The young man raised his head. “This passage will be blocked a while longer.” His arm dropped by his side.

“I live on the other side of the transporter,” Odan said, and glimpsed at the count-down on his watch. Five minutes, twenty-two.

The young officer placed his hands on his hips. “As I said, you will need to go around, Sir. We will be a while longer unloading supplies for everyone in the Dry Lands. We can’t move until it’s finished.” He leaned on one leg.

Odan looked into Sim’s eyes for any sign of remorse, anything to find the real human being inside. He held the young man’s stare; his empty expression frozen in time. Was the officer trying to intimidate him?

Odan’s face pinched. “We won’t make it back in time. Please make an exception?”

The side of Sim’s mouth twitched. “I’d like to help, but command makes the calls.” His eyes drifted to the sky and back. “Maybe Mr. Theps, you should leave your lifeless with us?”

Odan stepped backward. “There must be another way.” He glanced frantically over his shoulder to the elderly in the distance then back to the officer. “Do you have some tranquilizer drugs?”

“She’s had her dose for the next twenty four hours. No other drugs will work on her today. You know this.” The boy looked down his nose at Odan. “Those things are an abomination,” he scoffed. “And yet you keep her like a pet. It’s people like you who have divided our society.”

Odan’s feelings frayed against the backdrop of the man’s words, chattering voices and a wailing wind. The predicament was surreal, and he pondered if a dream plagued him. Anger foamed at the back of his throat. A few years earlier, he might have knocked the young man’s block off. Now, his joints and bones ached, and he was tired of too many things.

Sim said, “Your time is ticking away.”

That it was, Odan thought. With another glance to the man’s gun, he turned and trudged along the path he had traveled down. He turned right onto the nearest path with no home lots. The quickest route, he hoped.

He glanced at his watch. Two minutes, fourteen seconds before Jesmin’s sedative wore out.

Half way along the empty street parallel to his own, he pushed his sore legs into a faster walk. Sweat clumped behind his neck and trickled down his back. “Keep walking,” he told himself. The path meandered forever in the distance.

Another glimpse, one minute, six seconds.

To his left, the place he called home pulled further away with each stride. Jesmin remained by his side, calm and lovely as always. He gripped her hand in the rush, relishing her cold touch. “No, this can’t be,” he mumbled. He glimpsed over his shoulder and spotted Sim with folded arms, watching him from a distance.

One quick look at his watch revealed thirty three seconds before his wife reverted back into a bloodthirsty creature.

His ankles burnt, as did his lungs. He gasped for air and halted in the middle of the path. The distance was too much he decided, and turned Jesmin to face him.

“You are special. Always have been. Could never understand why you chose a fool like me.” He glanced at his feet momentarily and then back to his wife.

A flash ran across Jesmin’s face. The muscles around her eyes twitched and the creases reappeared. Her lip peeled back, revealing stained teeth. She cracked her neck.

He felt her hand constrict around his own. When a loud screech permeated Odan’s ears, he pulled his hand free. “Oh dear God, no!”

Time was no longer his friend. He recoiled. “Please don’t do this, my sweet.” He was certain the pain in his chest was his heart splintering.

Jesmin iced over with wide eyes set on him. Her shoulders rasped as they hoisted upward and leaned forward. She readied to attack, and he was all too familiar with the pose.

His body slumped as he closed his watery eyes. Odan no longer cared that his limbs wavered, ready to collapse. His wife would collect him into her arms, like she used to do. Tears dribbled free. In his mind, he already felt her warm embrace, smelt the floral scent of her hair and heard the hushed whispers only meant for his ears.

A high pitched growl hung off the wind. His eyelids and fists scrunched tighter.

The midday quaked with the shrill of a laser. His thoughts spiraled to the officer with the gun, and had no doubt Sim had taken the opportunity to shoot his Jesmin.

Peeling open his eyes, he watched Jesmin’s body hurl backward. She stumbled off the path and dropped into the still sands alongside the path. His hand jutted out for her, but it was too late. The earth swallowed her body with haste. Jesmin didn’t fight the seas of death. She only stared at him. The alarm on his watch screeched. He ripped it off his wrist, flinging it into the quick-sand.

“You will always be beautiful to me,” Odan’s lips quivered.

Splodges of yellow sand bubbled around Jesmin’s body, drawing her deeper within its grasp. Odan thought he spotted a glimmer of change in her eyes, just as her head submerged beneath the yellow mass. Maybe it was in his mind, but relief coated his body as he knew his end was also near.

We started walking quickly, toward a porch light beyond a copse of redwoods. The dark stretch wasn’t paved. Gunner kept looking behind us. I kept looking at the shadows ahead. A shed stood on the right of the road, with a few tools next to it. I reached over and picked up a hoe, gauging its weight with both hands, running my fingers along its metal ridge. “I’m not waiting,” Gunner said, and started to run again. I ran too, holding the hoe across my body with both hands like a soldier’s gun. Only once did I glance back, but the sight chilled me: down the hill, the lights were dying out one by one, and then, running across the path behind us, was a hunched-over thing, his arms hanging down and loose, like a missing link between bipeds and gorillas. It disappeared into the trees.

“I fucking saw one,” I yelled, energy coursing through my burning thighs, and Gunner started sprinting so fast I thought his bouncing potbelly would rip from his body. When we reached the house, I started to run up the porch, but Gunner panted, “No, no,” and waved me around, to the back, where we dodged into a solid-wood shed. He clicked on a naked light bulb and we shut the double doors and barred them with a two-by-four.

“Why not the house?” I asked.

“Windows,” he panted. He finally realized I was holding a hoe. “What the fuck were you going to do with that?”

I made vague hacking motions at the air.

“Shit,” he said. “Your neck’d be a fountain before that touched them.”

I looked around the room, the shadows slicing sharp lines of darkness around lawnmowers and weedwackers, rakes and post-hole diggers. The particleboard on the wall held garden shears and trowels.

“What is all this shit?” I asked. “You garden for a living?”

“It’s called horticulture,” he said. “At least, that’s the bullshit term that opens the pocketbooks of corporations. They want the grass in front of their Lexuses to shine Technicolor green.”

“So what the fuck are we going to use to defend ourselves if those”—I lost the word, or maybe there wasn’t a word to describe the black-socketed things we’d just seen bust into our bar and bite into patron’s necks so ferociously that blood sprayed like garden hoses—“things, those things, come here. You don’t have guns?” He shook his head no.

“Shhh,” he said, and leaned his ear against the door. I heard some shuffling, some sniffling. Sounds of wetness moving over pine needles and dirt. Then it went silent. Our hasty breaths, piped through our nostrils, sounded torrential. It was so silent I could almost hear my nails digging into my fists, almost hear my fear pound across the floor of my brain. I don’t know what tipped him, but Gunner yanked his head back from the door just before the door slammed inward so hard that I thought the hinges might snap off. Luckily, the two-by-four held. The door shook violently. Enamel ground against enamel. Then footsteps ran away quickly.

“He’s gone,” he said.

“You don’t know it’s gone.”

“He’s gone,” he said. He tapped his ears, as though to give me confidence that his hearing had evolved beyond mine. It didn’t.

“I’m going out for a sec. Gotta check something.”

“The hell you are,” I said, thinking he had to be joking, thinking that if he considered those things breaking in the windows he had to be smart enough to not fall for the stay-silent-to-make-prey-emerge trick. But before I could stop him, he threw up the two-by-four and poked his head out. I wanted to scream, but stopped myself because I didn’t want those things to hear. I imagined him pulling back in without his head attached, just a stump with a geyser of blood, or, even worse, pulling back in with his eye sockets faded to black. I imagined the sounds of ripping and tearing and biting and scratching. All the sounds of cannibalism, though those things weren’t really our kind any more, not the way they’d changed. His head was still out. A gust of cool air came in. Through the slit I saw a tiny star that winked out as I stared. Wasn’t going to wish on shit like that.

“Gunner,” I whispered, in the type of tone that tried to communicate I didn’t want to see even a casual beer-drinking friend dead, that I didn’t want to try to find my way out from this Podunk town on the Oregon coastline without him, and didn’t want to pay for another vacation just to get over this goddam vacation where I was supposed to get over my recent divorce. Even though I had a good buzz going on in the bar, as soon as hell erupted and we booked it out of the mayhem, my mind was straight as a teetotaler’s. Realizing your species is not at the top of the food chain any longer does that to you.

I thought about pushing him out. Just a quick shove and his shoulders would be past the door, and then I could throw the wood down and push my indexes into my eardrums when they came for him. It might save me from this idiot. But I couldn’t do it. Fucking conscience. What was that moral dilemma? Sacrifice that child on the train tracks to save the entire passenger train? Well the fucking equation doesn’t look so good when it’s a choice between pushing a new friend out to become ground beef or letting him stay in the safe place that he led you to. Just when I was about to yank him in, he withdrew on his own.

“What the fuck was that about,” I whispered.

“The porch light up on the hill,” he said. “My wife’s best friend’s house. My wife’s there tonight. Playing cards and drinking boxed wine. But the light’s out. It’s never out.” He shook his head. “They never turn it out.”

“So you think—”

“All the lights are out over there.”

I wanted to offer a hand on his back, but thought anything touching him from behind might be slightly startling. Then I thought about saying something sympathetic, but I’ve always left that shit to Hallmark. Besides, guys don’t say those things to other guys. We drink it under the table, we go fuck someone who doesn’t matter to us, we go to the shooting range and destroy cans and clay until we feel like we’ve broken the whole world into shards, but we don’t say “I can feel your pain,” or “It’ll be all right,” or any other sort of quasi-comforting bullshit that belongs in the phrase book of grandmothers with faux-colored hair.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait.” He brushed tools out of the way and jumped up on the wooden bench. “This has happened before.”

“It’s happened before? Here?”

“And it’ll happen again. My grandfather told me once about some crazies that took over a mountain town in Montana. Eyes like black taw marbles, he said. Arms like apes. And my father said a friend of his once saw it too, in Guatemala. Things bit people as if they were rabid. But it’s not rabies. It’s much better than that.”

“Better?”

“Listen, the human species has evolved too far. We’ve gone so far that we can destroy ourselves, and will. Gone so far that we use religion as a way to oppress others, governments as a way to shut people up. Our genetic pool’s all fucked up, and doctors don’t let nature weed the bad ones out, they keep them pumped up with drugs until they can pass their shitty genes on to their shitty children.”

I had the distinct feeling he’d given this talk at many bars, to many strangers, after many drinks.  “Shhh,” I said. “Hear that?” A can rolled in the yard. “Dog?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” he said, but when he continued, his voice had lowered. “These—things—they don’t have any of the hang-ups we do. They operate under simple rules of take what they want, act as they wish. Nothing to hold them back. Pure desire. They’re the height of evolution, man. We’re already on the backside.”

I wondered how I got stuck with this chump. Five minutes after a slaughter, and he’s already talking about how these things are improvements on our race. Next he’d discuss UFOs or talking animals. I’d be trying to hold the bag on our survival as he offered himself as a doorstep to a superior race of beings.

“Don’t go crazy on me man, seriously,” I said. “Hold it together.” He looked too together, actually. He was quiet and composed, calm as a mountaintop yogi. I had the feeling he’d been waiting for this, that he’d thought about this his whole life, just wanting something as strange as this to happen to him as it had happened to his father and his father’s father. Now, if he actually escaped, he could finally tell the story firsthand, not filtered through hearsay.

The feet shuffled around the building, bumping the sides. Many feet. Many bumps. Gunner jumped off the table. “Oh shit,” he said.

I could hear saliva and jaws. I could hear the future: the hum of wind over my open grave, the sound my gnawed-on bones would make when clinking together. Gunner came over to me and examined my face, then my arms. He found what I hadn’t even noticed—a long slit on my forearm seeping blood. “Between the two of us,” he said, “We might as well sprinkle salt and pepper over our heads.” He started rummaging in the tools, throwing off random tools to make way. His sounds enraged the things outside. They rose to a frenzy, bumping against the building like sharks.

“You’ll take the weedwacker,” Gunner said.

“Weedwacker won’t do shit,” I said.

“No, no, no,” Gunner said. “It’s not a pansy one with plastic floss.” He pulled out a bulky tube that looked ancient and rusty and greasy and dangerous as fuck. The end had four metal knives all slightly curved to the right, the way I imagined a handheld garbage disposal. I slipped my hand in and pulled the cord. It growled alive.

“Gasoline powered,” Gunner said. He grabbed a lawn mower and tied a cord to the front. When he lifted it up, one hand held the cord and the other grabbed the handle. He sprung it to life and lifted it to face me. I saw the blur of blades, like a fan of death, and actually felt sorry for a few of the things outside, but my pity died quick as it came. Stomps skipped across the metal roof. When I looked up, I could trace their steps by the dents, pooling their way across as they searched for an entrance.

“One question,” I said as we approached the door. “If you really think they’re better than us, why would you kill them?”

“Survival of the fittest, motherfucker. You know what this makes me?” He waved his lawnmower. “Fucking Fittest. Now either we wait in here for them to break the place down, or we go out revving.”

I revved my answer.

“One last thing,” he said. He looked around, seeming embarrassed. “If you see a small one with red hair, please don’t kill her. Not her.”

It was such a hopeless request, and I think he knew it. In the dark, fighting for your life, figures slashing at you, and you’re supposed to check hair color. Excuse me, are you a blonde? Decapitated. Brunette? Arms amputated. Redhead? Hi, nice to see you, please wait to the side while we kill the rest of your kind. But I told him yes by reaching over and wiping the blood off his face. It had been there all night and would soon be replaced by more, but it just wasn’t human to leave it on.

Then we threw off the two-by-four and went out with engines gunning for flesh.

—–

Jerome Hamilton lives in Orange County with six dogs and a wife, and has traveled to more than forty countries on every continent except Antarctica. His writing has appeared in Red Fence, The Subway Chronicles, and SN Review.

A red grevillea reached toward Brie.  Straining at its roots, tiny red petals, barbed at the end, reached out for flesh.  Grandma brought down her machete chopping the head off the flower.  It fell to the ground with a tiny squeal and rolled down an embankment into a swarming mass of tangled weeds.

Brie clutched her face in her hands and screamed.

“Don’t be such a sissy!” scolded Grandma as she was pushed along in her wheelchair by her son, Edward.  Grandma cackled, her sizeable bosoms heaved up and down causing her necklace made of tiny bones to rattle.

“She’s fine, Ma.”

“Only if she’s gonna be a sissy. I’m raisin’ this one to make it in this world.  She can’t be screamin’ at every goddamn bush, tree or flower that tries to eat her, Edward.”

“Giver her time, Ma.  Brie will be fine, won’t you punkin?”  Brie’s father ran his hand through her hair and smiled.  Brie just stared into the angry swarm of crusty, brown weeds as they tore the red grevillea’s head into tiny pieces and devoured it.

“She’s only ten.”

“I’d like her to make ten more.”

Grandma crossed her arms and Edward wheeled her down the road as Brie followed close behind.  The sun started to drop, rippling the horizon with waves of reds and pinks.  The wind whipped through a group of maple trees up ahead causing their branches to sway and groan like tired old men.  A small finch, with a crimson head, riding the current flew past one of the maples and a thin, brown limb whipped out like a frogs tongue, snatching the bird and stuffing it inside a hole in its trunk.  A few of the finch’s red feathers floated aimlessly in the air above the treetop.

“It’s getting dark,” Edward said.  “We need to hole up.”

Grandma pointed her machete toward a long, winding driveway that disappeared behind several large clusters of trees whose trunks were cracked and weeping sap in thin, hardened streaks.  “Let’s follow the driveway and see what’s there.  The Cookers won’t look for us there.  They’d be too damn scared of those hungry lookin’ trees.”

Edward handed Brie his machete.  His had the leather grip, Grandma’s had the rusted handle.  “Take this.  You might need to hack some branches off if they reach for us.”  Brie shook her head ‘no’.  Grandma let out an exaggerated sigh.

“Get on my back then, while I push Grandma up the driveway.  She can handle any branches that get too grabby.”

“Damn straight I can”, Grandma said as she grabbed the other machete.

Brie climbed up on her father’s back and clung tightly to his neck.   He took a deep breath then shouted, “Here we go!”

Edward ran as fast as he could.  Brie closed her eyes tight and Grandma held a machete in each hand ready to strike, her eyes darting back and forth looking for danger.  The trees that lined the driveway were old and hungry.  When the aged branches tried to reach for them most just snapped off and fell to the ground.  At the end of the driveway was a small trailer home.  The wind howled as the sun slipped beneath the horizon.

“We don’t have much time, let’s hope we get in with no problem,” Edward said as he pried Brie’s fingers from around his neck and lowered her to the ground.

Edward turned the doorknob and it fell off and hit the ground with a clang.  Off in the distance they could hear the growling and cat-like hissing of the Cookers.  Edward took his machete from Grandma and stepped inside.

The small home was cold and dark.  All the furniture was overturned; a green fabric couch was on its back, the matching loveseat upside-down and a round kitchen table stood on its end.

“Looks like a goddamn tornado hit this place,” chuckled Grandma.

“Anyone here?” Edward asked the darkness.

The only reply was the distant cries of the Cookers.

They all stepped inside and Edward wedged the couch and loveseat against the door.  The two front windows were boarded up with plywood.

“We’ll wait here until morning,” Edward said as he took the green backpack that hung from the wheelchair and handed each of them a flashlight.  “Remember, try to shine it in their face if they get in, that hurts them the most.”

The Cookers ruled at night.  Beneath the tatters of a world left behind was translucent skin that covered a pulsating heart, which no longer remembered.  A thin, mucousy layer of epidermis sat like jelly over the Cookers’ thin frames.  A criss-cross highway of blood vessels could be seen churning black blood that fed their stringy, grey muscle.   The tips of bone not covered by frayed connective tissue were dull and pale.  A blooming web of thin, black nerve endings connected everything together.

The beta radiation bombs, or ‘Tritium Bloomers’ as they were called, had perverted the form of every human exposed to its blast, turning man inside out.  The bombs also ramped up their metabolism so high it emitted high levels of heat that could boil people in their own juices; hence this version of man became known as Cookers.  They had to constantly eat to fulfill their high-energy needs or risk being reduced to a smoldering pile of grey ash.

Mother nature found herself unexpectedly affected as well when the Bloomers fell.  Plants turned into starving tangles of vine and blossomed with voracious appetites for flesh and other plants alike.  Plants could still feed on sunlight; however, light of any kind burned the Cookers and could easily be harnessed as a weapon.  The network of black, filament nerves beneath their lucid skin would ignite, like millions of tiny fuses causing protoplasm to sizzle and burst upon exposure.

Some Cookers tried to fashion body suits to protect them from light but the heat they gave off was too intense and would accumulate beneath the protective layers.  They would eventually have to tear their clothes from their bodies screaming as steamed flesh hung loosely from their bodies.

Edward, Brie, and Grandma sat huddled in the living room of the trailer home clutching their flashlights.

Brie put her head on a couch cushion and lay on the floor.  “Why can’t they just eat the plants?  We get sick from the plants but they don’t.”

Edward rolled his flashlight between both hands.  “They eat whatever they can. Whatever provides the most calories.  Also, the plants fight back now.”

“Whatever tastes the best”, Grandma chimed in, “ and that’s us.  Plus I think they’ve cooked their goddamn brains to mush in their skulls.”  Grandma paused then grunted, “Brain stew.”

Outside they heard shrieking and the rustling of branches.  There was a series of dry snaps then a loud squishing sound like someone dropped a watermelon from the roof.

Brie closed her eyes tight and tried to remember what is was like before the bombs went off.  Her thoughts were a blank canvas, empty save for a splash of sky blue.

They could hear the breaking of branches outside.  Grandma grabbed her machete, “They’re commin’.”

They heard the moaning and whispers of the approaching Cookers.  Brie buried her head in a couch cushion and whimpered.  Edward held his flashlight in one hand and blade in the other.  Grandma just smiled and whispered, “I’ll be addin’ to my necklace before this night is through.”

The door shook as it was pressed upon but didn’t budge, then came banging on the boarded windows.  Raspy voices garbled by singed vocal cords howled for food.  The door shook more violently now and Edward pressed his weight against the furniture that kept the door closed.

The Cookers charged against the walls of the house and their heat began to filter into the room.  The nails holding the boards on the windows began to squeak as they loosened.  Edward struggled to keep the door shut as sweat dripped down his face, stinging his eyes and blurring his vision.  Brie’s collar was soaked from the rising temperature and small droplets of sweat rolled down her back.  The stagnant air pressed in on her and she struggled to breathe.  Grandma scanned the room.  Her eyes, dull with cataracts, moved back and forth with a calm urgency.

The whole room started to vibrate, heat rippled in waves, and the boards on the windows became loose, letting fresh darkness pour in.  Clear fingers poked through, like searching worms, and started to pull at the plywood.

Grandma looked at the hole in the front door where the doorknob used to be and saw an eye peering in.  It stared at her suspended in the darkness, a clear orb of jelly with a thick red optic nerve tethered to a floating green iris.  “Gotcha,” she said and clicked on her flashlight.

The beam of light struck the eye and the monster let loose a horrible scream that shook the front door and rattled Edward’s teeth.   Suddenly there was a chorus of shrieks and pounding fists.  The boards over the windows splintered and cracked apart, and fists randomly broke through the walls all around them.  Wood and flakes of paint rained down from the ceiling.

Edward left his position guarding the front door and began to hack off the arms that were reaching inside the windows.  Grandma wielded her flashlight like a laser gun, punishing any Cooker flesh that came into view.  They heard footsteps on the ceiling.  Brie hyperventilated and passed out in the rising heat.  His hands slick with sweat, Edward nearly lost his grip on his machete.

Grandma reached down and picked up Brie’s flashlight and fought with double-barreled fury.  More dust and plaster fell from the ceiling; suspended by humidity they drifted like fat snowflakes.

The front door burst open revealing a swarm of Cookers.  “What do you suggest, ma?”

“I suggest we keep kicking their ass, Eddie!  Take my machete.”

Edward wielded both blades chopping off translucent body parts.  An arm burst through the wall behind him and grabbed him around his neck.  The grip was hot and wet and pulled him tight against the wall.  He dropped both blades and tried to pry the limb from around his throat.  Rancid heat rose up his nose and he quickly lost his breath.  He was suffocating.  His vision dimmed, the black around him growing impossibly darker, when two light beams shinned in his face and hit the arm that was choking him.  The Cooker recoiled in pain and Edward fell to his knees gasping, a red burn mark around his neck.

Leaping over the heap of simmering bodies that lay piled in the front door was a Cooker holding a hammer.  It wore the black scars of burning across his body in criss-crossing patterns and his face bore the grimace of war.  Its lips were curled back to reveal obsidian teeth and the flesh from one check hung loosely in opaque sheets revealing bone that glinted like ice.

Edward could only watch in slow-motion horror as the monster approached Grandma, her back turned to the hammer aimed at her skull.

His neck throbbed and he tried to yell but no sound came out.  Grandma read Edwards eyes and turned around as the hammer descended.  It whistled past her ear and struck the arm or her wheelchair tearing off a piece of the cushion.  She shined the flashlights over her shoulder at her attacker but the Cooker leapt over her and pounced on Edward who had recovered his blade.

Edward drove his machete into the monsters gut letting loose a gush of fetid steam.  The Cooker growled and raised the hammer again but Grandma brought the beams from both flashlights to its head scorching its skull in a cloud of black ash.  The scalding grey body fell over, the hammer still held tightly in its fist.

The attack was over.

Edward and his mother waited in the dark, catching their breath.

“Damn, ma.  That was close.”

“That was one tough hombre.  It was nuthin’ though, you should have seen when they got Grandpa.”

They placed Brie on the old, green couch.  Grandma bit her lower lip.  “She ain’t going to make it, son.”

“She’ll come around.”

They stayed awake until the sun came up.   Bright rays poured through all the newly made holes in the house making a jagged series of intersecting sunbeams.  Finally feeling safe they fell asleep.  An hour or two later Brie woke up rubbing her head.

“Dad, wake up.”

Edward opened his eyes and smiled at the sight of his daughter.  “You O.K.?”

“Fine.”

Hearing voices, Grandma awakened. “We could have used your help last night.”

Brie looked around at the piles of severed arms and legs and heads.  “I’m sorry.”

Edward stood up, his knees snapping.  “I’m hungry, let’s start a fire.”

When burning irradiated wood the flames always started out as low green, then flickered to red, until it glowed a warm shade of yellow.  The fire often sputtered as the thin rings of fat that were stored inside sizzled away.  The surrounding trees moaned in protest and rustled their leaves in anger at the roasting of their comrade.  Edward placed a small frying pan over the spitting yellow flame then dropped a handful of meat strips on it.

“What are we eating today, Dad?”

“I caught a rabbit after you passed out last night.”

Grandma chuckled as she threaded some small ring shaped bones onto her necklace.

“We’re not eating those things are we?”

“You know we can’t, Brie.  We’d get sick.”

“I miss vegetables.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say that!”

Brie smiled and her stomach growled as the small strips of meat sizzled in its own fat.  “I can’t wait to grow some veggies when we get out west.”

Once she finished adding to her necklace Grandma tied it around her neck, “It will be nice to eat something that doesn’t try to eat you back for once.  Vegetables that aren’t nuked?  I’ll believe it when I see it.”

After they finished the scraps of meat they made their way back to the road and continued moving west.  Off to the side of the street was a pile of bones protruding from a thatch of rose bushes.  The bones were still slick, their meat picked clean by the plants hungry thorns, a few strands of gristle still hanging from the leaves and flapping in the slight breeze.  Brie turned her head in disgust and Grandma sighed once more in disappointment.

Further up the road they saw a Cooker chained on the hot tar road writhing in agony.

“Can we go around him?” Brie asked.

Edward scanned the road.  Tall yellow weeds swayed back and forth on each side.   Their spiny leaves rustled as thin, hollow stalks rumbled with hunger.  “Stay with your Grandmother.”

Edward walked closer to the writhing figure.  Its muscles were gray and emaciated and its clear skin, dry and cracked, looked like splintered glass.  When Edward got closer he saw that the chains led to shackles around its legs and were connected to a huge, metal spike that was driven into the road.  The Cooker turned its head toward Edward when he heard him approaching.  Its eyes were cloudy distorting the floating optic nerves within.  When it opened its mouth to speak black vapors escaped from between its cracked lips.

“It’s O.K.,” Edward shouted as he waved Brie and Grandma forward.  As they approached Edward held his machete in both hands and pointed the tip towards the squirming Cooker.  “Once you guys pass, I’ll put him out of his misery.

“Who did this?” Brie asked.

“I told you girl, their brains are mush,” Grandma said.  “They’re probably punishing him for some reason.”

“Or, it was done by another one of us who’s out there somewhere.  Doesn’t matter who did it, nothing deserves to be tortured like this.”

Grandma pointed a shaky finger at Edward, “You didn’t see what they did to your daddy.  They ate him right before my eyes.  I watched as their black teeth chewed his bones.  At night when you both are sleeping and all is quiet I still hear him begging me for help.  I still hear the splatter of him on the floor and the sucking clean of his old marrow.”

“They didn’t choose to be like this, ma.  They can’t help it.”

“Let the girl do it then!  Let Brie put it out of its misery.”  Grandma jutted the rusted handle of her weapon in Brie’s direction.  The shackled Cooker writhed in agony, scraping chunks of clear flesh off on the asphalt.  It bled blue-black blood, which collected on the street in shimmering pools.  The creature moaned and shrieked like a newborn calf, its words making no sense, pain taking its language and distorting it.  They didn’t need to understand what the Cooker said to know what it desired.  With every movement, every inhuman whimper, it begged to die.

Brie grabbed the handle and the weight of the weapon caused her arm to drop, striking the tip of the blade on the ground.  The creature stretched out its neck across the ground and its eyes met Brie’s.  She stared straight through its foggy eyes into its soul and saw merely a wretched inhuman, a wounded beast that knew nothing but suffering.  More steam rose from its parted lips and dissipated in the heat of midmorning.

“Do it!” demanded Grandma.

Brie looked at her father and he was staring at the ground unable to meet her gaze.  She dropped the machete, ran off to the side of the road and cried, her tears spilling into the withered bentgrass.  A moment later she winced as she heard the thump and gush of the Cooker being decapitated behind her.  A thin flow of blood snaked past her foot.  The bentgrass turned away from her tears and reached frantically for the warm tributary.

“Girl’s got no hope,” Grandma spat.

Edward walked over to his weeping daughter and put both hands on her shoulders.  “The world, even this one, needs all kinds, ma.”

Together all three walked further west until they found an abandoned eighteen-wheeler.  Edward slid the back door up stirring up a thick layer of dust and feathers.  Inside were three steel crates, which housed the yellow skeletons of long dead chickens.

Edward climbed inside, “I’ll get rid of these.  We should crash here. It’s getting dark out.”

Brie climbed in and helped her father clear out the truck bay in silence.  After getting Grandma and her wheelchair inside Edward pulled the steel door down.  Saying little more than goodnight to each other they slept amid the settling dust and feathers as the moon bleed into the indigo night.

Brie woke to the crackle of meat sizzling in the skillet.  Her father had opened the back of the truck and started a fire while she slept.  He poked at long triangular slices of meat with a stick.  The tender, pink morsels were turning to tough, brown strips.

“More rabbit, Dad?”

“More food,” Grandma said, sliding a few more bones onto her rattling necklace.  Grandma’s skin was pale and her forehead dotted with beads of sweat.  Edwards handed Brie a paper plate with four pieces of meat.

“Go see if Grandma wants some.”

Brie walked over to Grandma smiling despite the shame she felt in the old woman’s presence.  “Here’s some food, Grandma.”

“I don’t want any of that, thank you.  It looks old and tough and I’ve had my full.”

“What are you going to eat then?”

Grandma looked up at Brie and smiled as she tied her necklace around her neck.    Her grin sent a shiver though Brie’s body.  “I started dying the day the Lord saw fit for me to watch Grandpa get eaten alive.  I’m finishing up here, ready to move on.  You’re a kind girl, Brie, but I worry for you.  I worry you ain’t gonna’ make it when I’m gone.  Even when I’m dead I’ll know if the last branch of my family tree is chewed up and shit out!  I think that would be more than my soul could take.”

Brie placed a stringy morsel of meat in her mouth and chewed, “Are you disappointed in me Grandma?”

“You need to adapt or you’ll be eaten.”

Tears rolled down Brie’s face.

“Look darlin’.  Remember how you were god-awful at soccer?”

Brie nodded her head while wiping away some tears.

“Then what happened?”

“You told me to get my head in the game, to go after the ball and not just wait for it.”

“Then you shined.  You scored in every game.  So, that’s what I’m tellin’ you now, get your head on the game!”

Grandma placed her hand on Brie’s shoulder and kissed her on the forehead.  Brie managed a small smile.

All three of them continued on the deserted highway weaving between the car and trucks that sat in various stages of erosion, baking in the sun.

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you really think we’ll be able to plant food in California?”

“We will be able to plant food and go fishing.  The deepest parts of the ocean weren’t affected by the Bloomers, that’s what I heard anyway, and fresh, clean ocean water has been hitting the coastline, cleaning everything up.”

Grandma wiped sweat from her forehead with her shirt causing an ivory jingle around her neck.  “You guys just need to stay alive long enough for Mother Nature to put things right.”

There was a rustle in the brush to their left.  The bushes, brown and brittle, groaned as they snapped and splintered.  A small brown, furry animal was rushing towards them.  Once it cleared the brush it leapt through the air onto Grandma.

The creature was emaciated; its muscles lean and taught with scruffy auburn fur, wild and mangled, with gold circles around its eyes.  It’s long, black claws dug into Grandma’s abdomen and chest and its teeth sunk into her collarbone, ripping her necklace and causing its pieces to clink and rattle on the pavement.

Grandma dug her thumbs into the creature’s eyes.  It howled in pain and released its vice-like grip on her.  It fell to the ground growling.  Blood spurted out just below Grandma’s neck and started to pool in the fresh claw wounds.   The animal let out a guttural moan as it grabbed hold of the tip of her boot and clamped down.  Edward brought his machete down across the creature’s hindquarters, slicing off a large circular piece of its flesh, exposing a glistening hipbone.

Blind and wounded it yanked the boot from Grandma’s foot and headed off the road into a patch of flowering red weigelas; who smelling blood, finished the job Edward had started.

“I think that was a wolverine”, said Brie, her face white with shock.

Edward ran to his mother who sat pale and motionless in her wheelchair.  Blood dripped off the seat onto the wheels and down the spokes, forming a puddle on the ground.  He put his fingers to her neck and closed his eyes tight hoping to feel some sort of pulse. There was nothing.  He grabbed her shoulder and shook her.  “Ma!  Can you hear me?  Mom?”

Edward clenched his fists and was about to scream when he saw Brie crying.  He held his emotions in check, swallowed hard and motioned for Brie to come to him.  He hugged her tight and whispered in her ear, “We’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t soccer, Dad.”

“What?”

Brie cried into his shoulder.  Edward hugged her a little tighter then stood up.  “We have to find a spot to bury her, Brie.”

They walked for a quarter mile, the wheelchair leaving two crimson streaks in its wake, until they found a clearing where they could put Grandma to rest.   In a small patch of squirming brown grass they lifted Grandma from her chair.  Brie’s hand became slick with blood and she lost her grip, causing Grandma’s body to twist and fall face first onto the ground.  Grandma’s lower back was exposed and Brie covered her mouth and gasped.  There was a series of triangular, sliver-like scars going across her back in neat rows.  Brie noticed her Grandmother’s exposed foot and saw that all of the toes were missing, cut clean off.  Small fragments of bone from Grandma’s necklace sat in the sticky red pool of coagulated mess on the wheelchair.

Brie’s stomach lurched and she dry heaved.  She croaked and spat out a small yellow strand of mucous that hung from her lower lip. She glared at Edward, her eyes glowing with anger and disgust.  “How could you?!” she demanded as she wiped the phlegm from her lip.

“It was her idea.  Without it we would have starved to death”.

“I hate you!  There was never any rabbits was there?”

“She loved you so much and she was so old and tired, ready to be with Grandpa.  She would rather us have her than this world.  She didn’t want to rot uselessly in the ground.”

“Why bury her then, Dad?  Why not roast her on a spit?”

“Because it would be wrong.”

“What’s the difference?!”

“I don’t know, Brie there just is.”

Brie sat in silence as her father used his hands to dig a grave deep enough to bury his mother.  After placing Grandma in her final resting place he noticed a network of roots had already started to envelop her in a cocoon, probing her wounds.  He covered her body with dirt and stood up.

Edward grabbed the backpack from the wheelchair and placed it on his back.  Then he took Grandma’s machete and slid it through his belt.  He left the chair in the grass, which strained upwards, thirsty for the drops of blood that still dripped off the wheel spokes.

They walked in silence as the sun started to set.  Edward looked at his daughter and was sadden to see her eyes showed sadness beyond that which a ten year old should know.  “We need to find shelter.  It’s getting dark.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s O.K.  I get it, I think.”

Up ahead the sun was setting behind a small barn off the side of the road.  Edward pointed his machete at the barn.  “Let’s go there.”

The darkness started to creep in and they picked up their pace.  As they came to the top of a small hill they looked down at the barn.  There were already about ten Cookers there, banging on its door and trying to scale the wooden walls to get to the roof.  Brie remembered their experience two nights ago and a shiver ran through her.

“Shit”, said Edward,

“There must be people in there, Dad.”

“I know.  Look, you should stay here.  I’ll go and try to help whoever is inside.  The bastards won’t even know I’m there until I kill about four of them.”

“No, Dad.”

Edward looked into his daughter’s eyes.  The sadness had melted and in its place was a small spark.

Brie thought of her world, what is was and what it had become.  She thought of hunger and food and sacrifice.  She looked her father in the eyes and Edward saw the spark ignite and ripple into fire.  Brie grinned and Edward saw, for an instant, his mother’s smile.

“I’m ready now, Dad.  I’m ready to help.”

Edward pulled his Grandmother’s machete from his belt and pointed the handle toward her.  She hesitated for a moment, took a deep breath then grabbed the rusted handle. wrapping both hands around it.

“Follow me”, said Edward, “and be careful.”

Together, under the cover of nightfall, they made their way toward the barn.

Screaming could be heard from inside as they approached barn.  The front door had been shattered and the Cookers climbed over themselves to get in.  Edward and Brie approached three of them from behind.  Brie raised her weapon and brought it down across a Cooker’s back leaving a huge gash that spewed bile colored fluid.   She hesitated which allowed the monster to turn to face her, its mouth stretched wide hissing black steam.  She swung her machete like a baseball bat, aiming for the black maw that was closing in on her.  The top half of the Cookers head slid off and its grey body slumped to the ground.  She stared in disbelief at what she’d just done.  Her chest heaved as she caught her breath.  Her body tingled with adrenaline.  Then she heard shouts from inside.

Running into the barn she saw her father pinned down by a Cooker that was chewing on his shoulder.  His blood started to spread across the wooden floor and disappeared between the spaces between the floorboards.  Brie charged and swung her blade into the exposed grey flank of the Cooker, which split open like an overripe plum spilling colorless loops and coils onto the ground.

Edward stood and grabbed his wound.  Together they surveyed their surroundings.  It was hard to tell how many Cookers were dead because they had been hacked into so many pieces but there were at least seven of their heads visible.  Also among the carnage were two dead adult humans, a man and woman.

Sobbing broke the silence.  Brie and Edward looked at each other and followed the crying to an armoire that had been barricaded with several crates.  After clearing the boxes they opened the door to the armoire to find a young girl cradling an aluminum baseball bat.

Brie extended her hand and the girl recoiled, crying louder now.

“Honey,” Brie said pulling her up, “you’re going to have to toughen up to make it in this world.”

He laughed at that thought. It was a running joke around the lab. It had started when a rookie assistant in the University Pathology Laboratory had absent-mindedly wondered where they got all of the dead brains that they studied.

Brian had been that assistant, two years previously. His supervisor, Mr. Leans, had responded with the now-famous joke.

“Son, nearly every brain in this place has died of something. What did you have?”

Something he saw brought him back to the present. Under the bright, white light, Brian noticed a small, dark line on the back of his right hand examination glove.

“Oh, shit!” He yelled.

As he dashed over to an emergency wash station, Mr. Leans approached, attracted by the exclamation.

“What happened, Brian? You alright?”

Pulling the gloves off, one tucked inside the palm of the other, he said, “No, there’s a freaking tear in my glove.”

“You’re on the necrotizing virus, right?”

Elbowing the hot water lever, Brian replied, “Yes, sir. Could you get that light for me?”

Mr. Leans placed a hand on Brian’s back and reached past him.

The emergency wash basin was shiny stainless steel. At eye level, there was a placard describing graphically how to properly wash hands and eyes. Just to the right of the sign was a small metal toggle switch. It had a small line drawing of a light bulb above it, little lines radiating out from the bulb.

When Mr. Leans flipped the switch up, the short circuit in the switch sent a burst of voltage through his body and into Brian. Brian’s hands were under the flow of hot water.

Sparks flew from the switch and from Brian’s hands. Mr. Leans jumped back, stung a little in the fingertips on both hands. Brian jerked and fell, striking his forehead on the rolled edge of the stainless steel sink.

—

The necrotizing virus had not been completely eradicated from the brain by the cleansing and preserving process. When the preservation fluids flowed through the tear in his glove, many individual viruses were carried onto his skin,

The viruses were able to penetrate his skin, entering several capillaries on the back of his hand. This happened long before he reached the emergency wash basin. They went to work on the first cells they encountered, his blood cells.

These blood cells had already delivered their payload of oxygen to the tissues in his hand, and were on their way back to his heart and lungs to gather more. The few of them that were attacked produced more of the viruses, but they were not quite identical to their forebears. The preservation process performed on the brain had damaged the DNA of the original viruses.

The new generation did not destroy the blood cells by lysis, or the rupturing of the cell’s membranes. They released by budding, being released by the victim cell. Thus, the blood cells would continue with their duties, but with the additional ability of providing a host for more of the necrotizing viruses.

Several blood cells were birthing new viruses when the electric shock coursed through Brian’s body. One of these new viruses had budded out of a blood cell carrying methemoglobin, which binds with iron, not oxygen. This iron present in the virus conducted the electricity, mutating the virus’ DNA.

This third generation virus had several unique characteristics.

First, it carried a small electric charge, which was imparted to the cells it conquered. Any virus budding out from one of these cells also carried the charge.

Second, when the virus infected a cell, apoptosis, or the process of natural cell death, was eliminated. In order for an infected cell to die, it now had to lose its electric charge or be physically damaged.

Third, the telomeres on the end of the cell’s DNA molecule were eliminated. Similar to the ends on shoestrings, these cap off the DNA, and determine how many times a particular DNA molecule can replicate itself. Every time the molecule makes a copy of itself, this cap gets shorter. When the virus removed the telomere, it prevented the cells from multiplying.

Fourth, every affected cell no longer used oxygen to power its processes. They all used mineralized iron.

Soon, the newest generation of the virus would outnumber the original. They would assimilate the brain, easily penetrating the blood/brain barrier. The heart would take a while longer, but when it succumbed, it would stop.

—

It took twelve minutes for Brian to be transported to the University Hospital’s Emergency Room, due to the storm which was blowing. The first storm of the year had blown in the day before, on the the third day of the new year. His fever had escalated to an unbelievable 109 degrees by the time the Ambulance arrived.

By the time they had him in an examining room, his heart had stopped. He did not respond to defibrillation, nor to manual Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation.

A nurse closed Brian’s green eyes with her fingers. They covered Brian with a sheet and called for an attendant to take his body to the morgue.

—

The heart, once it had been completely assimilated, was unable to beat. The electric charge present in each of it’s cells prevented it from doing anything but contracting in a final clench. Thus, on it’s last beat, it squeezed most of the blood from it’s chambers, making it nothing more than a congealed lump of dead muscle. It was now only a junction for blood to pass through.

The brain now craved mineralized iron instead of oxygen. Starved of this supply, it started sending out pulses of electrical current. These pulses flexed muscles.

This flexing of muscles created a hydraulic pressure in the circulatory system. This pressure caused blood to flow throughout the body, including into the brain.

The attendant, Henry, nearly screamed when the corpse thrashed its arms and legs, throwing itself off the gurney. Henry crossed himself and moved to aid the man, thinking there had been a horrible mistake.

“Oh, my God, sir! Are you alright? Here, let me help you. Sit up on the gurney.”

The man stood. His body jerked and spasmed, as if being shocked by electricity.

His skin was grey, as if covered in ash. There was a small cut above his left eye. The cut was open and black as night. His sweat matted hair was brown.

The man’s face was slack, slimy grey saliva dripping from between his teeth, which blackened visibly as Henry watched.

What caught Henry’s attention, though, were his eyes. The orbs were the same ash grey as the skin, but the pupils were a brilliant green. There was no intelligence behind them.

Henry reached up to the man’s shoulders in order to assist him in sitting on the gurney.

The man grabbed Henry’s right arm with both of his hands and tore out a mouthful of flesh and muscle with his teeth. Some of the tendons and muscle fibers remained attached to Henry’s arm and pulled out from the man’s teeth, like gory floss.

Henry screamed. He jerked his arm free of the man’s grasp and punched the grey form in the face. The nose flattened, and a thick black tendril ran down.

The strike caused the man stumble back and fall down. Taking this opportunity, Henry bolted up the hallway, yelling for help.

—

Brian was no longer Brian. He was a simple machine.

The brain occupying his skull now subsisted on mineralized iron. This was provided by the flow of blood now black with the mineral.

The brain may have lost the higher functions which made up the man who had been Brian, but the lower functions were still present. The creature knew how to stand up from the ground. It knew how to walk.

It knew hunger. It did not know what it craved, just that it craved.

Even though the lungs had collapsed, no longer able to process gases, air still entered the nostrils. The movements of the body compressed and expanded the chest and neck enough for this.

The creature detected the smell of something. Something desirable. It turned in the direction of the smell and started walking.

A few moments later, it came to a closed door. An echo of a memory sounded through the pathways of the brain, and it put up a hand and pushed.

The door to the morgue opened.

—

One doctor and two University police officers ran down the hall toward the morgue. They found the gurney, but there was no sign of the man who had been dead. Henry was being tended in the Emergency Room.

In this last portion of the hall, there were no doors except those which opened into the cold storage facility. They pushed open the swinging doors and gasped.

The dead man had located a woman’s body which had not yet been placed in the locked refrigerated storage room. Henry had been called away to retrieve the man which now stood over the woman, whose corpse still lay on a gurney.

The dead man had been feasting on the only exposed flesh. The left side of the dead woman’s face had been ravaged, exposing bone and teeth.

The dead man looked up at the sounds of horror behind him. He turned and started toward the men, growling.

Blood and tissue dripped off his chin as he walked. He reached both hands out for the doctor, who was closest. His hands opened and closed, grasping air, searching for something to drag to the mouth.

The officers both reacted. One stepped to the side and drew his sidearm. The other stepped forward to intercept the approaching man.

“Hold it right there, bud. We can help you, but you gotta calm down.” This from the officer who did not have his weapon drawn. “Just take it easy and we’ll take good care of you.”

The man shambled two more steps and then lunged at the officer. The policeman had been ready for an attack, and smoothly grabbed the man’s arm and pivoted the man right down to the floor, twisting the arm severely behind the man’s back.

The other officer placed his gun back into its holster and knelt down beside the struggling figure. He went to place his hand on the man’s neck to hold him down. Before he could accomplish this, the man turned his head and snapped his teeth together with a loud clack, neatly removing the officer’s right pinky finger.

Jumping to his feet, the officer yelled, “Son of a bitch!”

He cradled his hand to his chest as the doctor stepped forward, removing his white smock.

“Let me see it, Bob. Let me see.” The doctor said, pulling the injured hand to him.

He wrapped it tightly with his smock.

“There. You’ll be fine, Bob. We’ll get you back upstairs and take care of you.”

The other officer twisted the arm a little more. “Hey, prick! You just lay nice and still, I won’t have to hurt you.”

To his surprise, the man rolled over on his back. The captured arm snapped at the shoulder, twisting the skin taught. The man on the floor grabbed the officer’s foot with his unfettered hand and reached with his open mouth toward the ankle. The pinky finger fell out of the man’s mouth, chewed and bloody.

“The fuck? Get offa me!” The officer yelled as he jumped back. He drew his pistol and aimed it at the man.

“Just stop right there! I will shoot you if you continue to attack!”

“Just shoot, him, Tom!” Bob yelled. He grabbed the radio off his belt and spoke into it.

“Dispatch, we got a crazy guy down here, eating corpses, trying to bite us. Shit, he did bite me! Bit my fucking finger off! Send somebody down here to help us! We’re in the morgue.”

There was a response, but it went unheard in the chaos.

The doctor had stepped up behind the man on the floor, his hands raised in a placating manner.

“No! Don’t! He’s just sick! There’s no need to shoot him!”

The doctor kneeled down behind the man and put his hands on the twisted shoulder.

“Doc, don’t! This guy’s psycho!” Tom said.

“No, he’s just urrkkk…”

The man turned suddenly on the doctor and bit out his throat. He jerked free, mouth full of blood. He was chewing hard and quick.

The doctor’s body convulsed and he raised his hands to his ruined neck. Blood flowed freely down his shirt and gurgled out of his neck.

Inhaled blood was coughed up to the ceiling, where it dripped a red rain back down on the two.

Tom fired his weapon three times, directly into the grey man’s back. The doctor was already dead, he knew, so there was no fear of injuring him.

The body jerked from the impact, but did not fall. The grey man swallowed forcefully and leaned in for another bite on the doctor’s throat.

A final shot from Tom’s gun exploded the grey man’s forehead, and the body fell. Black ichor oozed from the wound, only to solidify quickly.

The man who had been known as Brian was, finally, dead.

—

Henry was starting to feel very hot, like he was running a fever. The Emergency Room doctors were busily sewing up the gaping bite wound in his arm.

Within a few minutes, long before his arm was sutured, he passed out.

And died.

—

An unidentified homeless woman, who had died earlier in the evening, stood.

One side of her face was stripped to the bone and muscle.

—

Bob had retrieved his finger from the floor, but was burning up by the time he walked into the Emergency Room.

The blood on the stump of his bitten finger had turned black, and it did not hurt anymore.

—

Doctor Andrew Taylor had been laid on a table in the Hospital’s morgue, where he had died. A grey skinned woman stood over him, looking at him with her head tilted to one side, like a dog.

Doctor Taylor twitched, then his arms flailed and legs kicked, and he was off the table, laying on the floor. He stood, his head flopping forward. With an effort, he raised it to look at the woman.

She didn’t smell like food.

“Food?” He thought to her.

“Food.” She agreed.

They walked out of the morgue, the woman in the lead.

It ends in thunder.

Between those two points, there is much blood and screaming.

Have you ever heard the saying “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”?

###

The story begins in silence. The silence of the dead.

Some stare up at the sky, others are face down on the asphalt. Bodies everywhere, in the infinite variety of positions the dead assume when they fall. Infinite variety blending into an infinite monotony of the dead. Each with two wounds to the skull. One massive, brains and bone exploding outward. One small and discrete, half an inch across, edges turning inward. They lie in heaps around the boarded-up convenience store, in the streets that approach this place. All are within fifty yards of this place. All show the bite marks of the walking dead.

“Nothing up here, boss.” Williams, on top of the convenience store. Big, strong, utterly loyal. How smart is he? Well, he’s big, strong and utterly loyal. “No shell casings, no bodies or bloodstains. Buncha these things tho.” He tosses a knot of white paper down to me. I pick it up, smell it. The smell of black powder. Crisp paper, tied at one end. The paper from a phone book.

“No fresh meat, just moaners.” Ashley, going over the bodies with mild curiousity, her fingerless black leather gloves letting her black-nailed fingers caress the corpses. “All these Z’s popped and they didn’t bag a single breeder. What gives?”

Goths are not usually as death oriented and morbid as they are said to be. Ashley, on the other hand, is a walking nightmare of a stereotype. She’d made me promise that when our mission was done, I’d be the one who killed her.

“Hey, I found a broken bell. And some wax paper.” Give Williams that, he’s methodical. Give me a field person who’s methodical and obedient. I’ll pass on the geniuses every time.

Lopez, his dark eyes watching all the approaches, always watchful, sidles over to me. “What happened here, boss?”

“They got on top of that store and they rang a bell.” I examine the bodies as I speak. Almost every wound came from above. “They rang a bell and the zombies came for dinner. Then, they started killing them at their leisure as the zombies milled around down here. Notice: every entrance to the store is barricaded. They probably went up the outside with a ladder. They didn’t even use modern weapons.”

I hold up the paper knot Williams had thrown down. “This is the paper cartridge from a muzzle loading rifle. They fire slowly. But you can make black powder almost anywhere, as much as you want. Never run out of ammunition. Of course, you have to have time to reload. They took their time, as much time as they wanted. When they ran out of zombies to kill, they went back down their ladder with their bell and the muskets and they went home.”

“Some people just don’t get with the program.” Lopez nodded. He was a quick learner. I think he’s gunning for my job. It’s a pretty safe bet he’s going to get it too. “This must be one of those “kill boxes” they been talking about.”

Ashley shakes her head. “Good thing those losers up at Cleveland weren’t doing something like this. We’d never have been able to whistle up enough zombies to take them out if they were doing shit like this.”

She looks over at one zombie who wanders near. It’s eyes are blank from the ultrasonics, the lizard hindbrain dormant, the feeding/aggression mechanism stilled. Thank goodness for ultrasonics.

Ashley walks over to him, strokes his bluish-green cheek. “There, there, baby, you’ll get to feed soon enough.”

###

We work for the Think Tank. The official name doesn’t matter. I can’t tell it to you. Not won’t.

Can’t.

All field teams are conditioned by drugs and hypnotism. They can reveal neither the existence or the location of the Think Tank to anyone not of The Project.

The Think Tank was made to face harsh truth: A world that is heaven for 6 million people is a living hell for 6 Billion. But how do you get it down to six million?

Oh, the Think Tank paid the bills with other projects, other research, all those government grants and private consulting contracts. But the central project always remained. How to dispose of the surplus population while preserving the superior core group?

Plague? Too random. As likely to kill the core group. Plus the human race was simply too adaptable, medical knowledge too distributed. Enough would survive to track down the core group and destroy it.

Nuclear War? A problem worse than the solution. Massive environmental damage, loss of knowledge, of art, of entire species.

Conventional wars? Pointless. In 1945, after 6 years of the human race trying to kill each other off with every weapon they could grab, there were still more human beings alive than there had been in 1939.

Then we found the Venus Plague.

It was on the probe from Venus that crashed. Was it from Venus? Or some microbe that had been mutated by radiation in space? We didn’t know. But it animated the dead. Brought them out of the ground, hungry and vicious, in several counties near Pittsburgh. The incident was hushed up, of course. Samples were sent to CDC for study. The Think Tank got it’s own samples. They made sure that the CDC’s batch was “accidentally” destroyed. Then they went to work.

Study the microbe. Study the walking dead. Find the tools to control them- the subsonic lures to draw them in, the subsonic beacons to pacify them. Find out every way to distribute the microbe quickly and stealthily.

It took decades and cost a fortune. Fortunately, the think tank had both. Plus utter dedication. Finally, we acted.

Newly capitolist China, with its unregulated medical system and transplant harvest was the natural start. Bribes could put you in anywhere. Infected organs could be scattered all over the world, usually with little or no monitoring. Infected immunizations, infected blood and plasma, all going out. All giving the microbe in such minute doses that it could take days, weeks even for the plague to manifest itself. Plenty of time to scramble the records.

Next step was the First World. Use those socialized medical systems and their centralized control to paralyze any response. Plant more incidents of the plague and use the media to spread just enough information to sow panic, not enough to guide effective responses. Our friends in the government were very busy, making reports disappear, making sure the wrong people got the right jobs.

Queens was our ultimate triumph. We started by co-opting the needles for junkies program. Infected needles were given to every junkie in the five boroughs. Raiding the New York City morgues and animating all their inmates, then sending them walking out on the streets. Paralyzing the police radio net for six crucial hours. Flooding the media with false reports. Oh, we were busy. I was busy. And on the higher levels, making sure that the Army response was too late, with the wrong weapons and commanded by a General who was energetic, completely in charge and an idiot.

Then sit back and make sure the results go on national television.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Some people simply refused to panic. Enter us, in three piece suits and government SUV’s and ID. A caravan of four SUV’s into any town where panic hadn’t taken hold. Go to the town hall where some mayor refused to panic, some crusty ex-soldier or police chief or sherriff was organizing a defense, where some man or woman was calmly speaking with a clear, loud voice and a plan.

Flash the ID. Tell them about a refugee camp set up just for them. Food, tents, medicine, army troops guarding it, a secure zone, but they have to get there right now or it’ll be taken away. Mutter some rumors of nuclear strikes or airstrikes on all the abandoned areas. Get them all in their cars, abandoning their homes and supplies, trooping hundreds of miles across panic-choked roads. They finish their journey with empty gas tanks in empty cornfields that our maps told them were refugee camps.

Ahhh, the fun.

Eventually, our field teams began to disappear. Someone had gotten wise. But now we had the locals shooting at the real government officials. That fitted our plan too.

Still, the human race just doesn’t know when to quit. Nearly a year after Queens, there are still hundreds of small communities standing off the zombie hordes. Tens of millions of surplus, useless human beings impeding our plan. Their greedy desire for their own survival distrupting our plan for humanities’ golden future.

So the field teams go out again. Go to the Blue Zones. Pose as survivors. Get inside. Make them fall apart. Like Cleveland. Get a three-way civil war going on in the enclave, while the beacon draws in a full-scale chain swarm attack, forty-thousand zombies storming the broken defenses. That was our latest success.

These guys would be small potatoes. We thought.

I threw down the empty paper cartridge. “Let’s get to work.”

###

We saw signs of the place a mile away. We were in a small city called Canton, Ohio, one of the rust belt cities. This had been one of the poorer neighborhoods, near downtown. Now, more than half the houses were gone, heaps of scorched boards with weeds growing on them. The old factory houses had burned like matchwood. More and more though, the basements were simply trash mounds, the smell of the dead still leeching up from them. Someone had been tearing down the houses, hauling them away, burying corpses in the basement under the trash of discarded ashphalt, plastic, cars and tires. Any large piece of uncovered earth was planted with beans, corn, squash. Indian corn, the seeds probably salvaged from some decoration. Clumps of dandelions, some of them obviously harvested for greens. Trees.

For once, a survivor group hadn’t been tearing down every tree in sight. Apparently, someone bothered to tell them that green wood makes lousy firewood. One tree was bearing fruit, mulberries thick on the branches.

We heard them before we saw them. I turned to Lopez. “I’ll do the infiltration. I need a clump of Z’s as cover. You take beacon two and the team, gather as many Z’s as you can about ten miles north of here and come at this place in three days. I want a nightime assault. In precisely 72 hours, I’ll light off beacon one. Got that?”

Lopez nodded. Beacon Two was our big job, unmistakeably some odd technology. Big unfolding antennas. Powered by a hand crank generator or solar panels, capable of drawing in every zombie for a twenty mile radius with ultrasonics on the right frequency. Mine was smaller, disguised as a boom box, with a ten mile range and less battery capacity.

I checked at myself in a nearby window. Male, mixed-race, thirties, short curly hair, average height, slender build, dressed in nondescript clothes, hiking boots, leather jacket, backpack, canteen, holstered Beretta 92 and a folding stock HK assault rifle over my shoulder. I handed the HK and the ammo bandoliers to Lopez, along with my spare field rations. I’ve passed for black, italian, east indian and hispanic on various jobs. This area, I’d stick with the light-skinned black persona.

Lopez shook his head. “You still look too healthy boss. Nobody gonna believe you ain’t outrunned a bunch of Z’s.”

“Just have them where I need them, Lopez. 72 hours. Move.”

Lopez goes. I light off my beacon, step away from it and hide in cover. I also activate my own ultrasonic.

The beacon draws in a hundred zombies in less than an hour. They come in eager, drawn by urges far beyond what is left of their minds. Any that got close to me went passive as my ultrasonic overrode the beacon.

A hundred was enough. I took out a knife, willed myself to control and stabbed myself in the thigh.

Gritting my teeth, I wondered if sometimes my dedication to the job was not excessive. I kept my blade up and down, between the tendons, not cutting them, near a vein. A nice bloody wound spilling down my slacks. Shame about them, I’d just looted them from a Gap. Can’t beat Tommy Hilfiger.

I walked to the beacon, shut it off and ran away as fast as my leg would help. The Z’s saw me then. There was a second as they made visual ID. Then those outside the range of my ultrasonics set up the moan. I staggered away as fast as possible.

I still had to be far out from this community to keep from being spotted. No chance of fooling people when you’re sitting unmolested in a mob of ghouls. As I hobbled away from the mob, my leg bleeding more, I wondered if I’d been too far out as a hundred zombies moaned and staggered in persuit of me.

I hobbled into the cleared areas a few minutes later. Every building knocked down except a few brick ones, clear fields of fire laid out. Metal light poles with bundles of scrap plastic heaped around them, some hanging from the poles. In the distance, an old school, ringed by barriers. A quarter mile away, dozens of people tearing down one more wooden house, ropes and blocks and tackle. I made a beeline for the school. Several minutes later, the first of the zombies emerged from the buildings and pursued me.

I should have known something was up. An alarm was raised instantly, of course. Any community this size would have one. The first screams began. But the working party kept at their job, after a brief gape in my direction. Only three men were sent after me, one with a wheelbarrow. Ahead, children and adults boiled from the buildings behind an odd fence, began mounting platforms. I saw the outlines of shovels against the sky, spears on top of the walls. Ahead, I realized there were pits and wire laid crisscross on the ground around the walls, ranks of punjii sticks set into the streets.

The guys with the wheelbarrow were breathing hard as they came to me. “Hop in man!” The lead guy was white, heavily muscled, iron grey hair in a widows’ peak, carrying a no-kidding sword at his belt, a heavy piece of metal. He also had a holstered pistol. They all did. He threw me in the wheelbarrow, breathing heavily. “Donner, your turn on the wheelbarrow next, let’s go!”

Donner was skinnier, mixed race like me. He hefted the wheelbarrow and we ran, not too difficult down the empty streets that ran between fields that had once been houses.

The cars were all gone. Where were the cars?

I saw that as we neard the buildings. The cars were on their sides, laid in overlapping order, wired together with power lines. Man-high barriers, flexible, fireproof, too heavy for even the largest zombie surge to move. They formed walls in a perimeter run between the buildings. I took it all in, bouncing in agony in the wheelbarrow as Donner pushed.

Donner grew winded quickly. The white guy shouted “Lucius, you’re up!”

I’d seen the third man, black, younger, pull his pistol out, drop behind. He aimed at the oncoming zombie mob. “In a minute, Conan! Got me some Z’s to service!” He opened fire.

I was relieved. These guys had so far seemed way too competent. But “Lucius” held the pistol sideways like some gangster video, blazing away at the mob. He emptied a 13 round clip. I think I saw one zombie go down. Lucius laughed. “I’m out! I need a reload!”

“Stay out here and get eaten, you idiot!” Fury all over his face, the first man grabbed my wheelbarrow, panting like a steam engine, pushing hard. We made it the last 50 yards to the walls and a gate. Chain link fence backed up by plywood. Lucius ran in ahead of us, pumping his arms like an olympic sprinter. The doors slammed shut behind us.

In seconds, there was someone bandaging the bloody wound on my leg. I ignored that, watched the people.

There was plenty of screaming and shouting, but none of it had the panicked note I was used to. The roof of the school swarmed with kids, teenagers, heaving rocks and bricks. One kid, a skinny dark shape against the sky, was pitching like Roger Clemens, small round stones. The rain of bricks and stones hit the zombies just as they began getting tangled up in the wire and stakes arrangement. It knocked down some with crushed skulls. On raised platforms a dozen more people were firing crossbows, steady aimed shots. In the distance, I heard a dozen rifles, the boom of black powder weapons.

I checked. Almost every adult had a pistol at their belt. I offered my Berretta to the medic. “If you guys are out of ammo-”

The medic grinned, a skinny black girl with big eyes. “We got lots of ammo. Only old Jack, he won’t let us use it. Not for small shit. There he go, doing his ‘Conan the Barbarian shit.’”

A knot of men stepped out of one building, the white haired older guy in the lead. They were strapping on what looked like bad copies of medieval armor, helmets with facemasks, all made from sheet metal. That rang real alarm bells. Sheet metal was not good against human weapons but no zombie ever risen could bite through it.

There were a dozen of them, carrying hatchets, crude maces or swords, short handed pitchforks and shields.

On the wall, I saw dozens of men and women on raised platforms, reaching over the wall with long-handled shovels, the shovel blades rising and falling in a deadly rhythm as they became coated with blood and brains. The mob of zombies rapidly diminished as skulls were crushed, heads chopped off.

A tall man, his skin dark ebony black, walked along the wall. Pistol in one hand, he watched the zombies outside the walls as they threw themselves forward to be destroyed. After things slowed down, he turned to the waiting men in armor, blew on a whistle. It’s piercing note punched through the crowd noise. The kids on the roof stopped throwing rocks. Everyone backed away from the gate as the men in armor formed a line. They threw the gate open.

The dozen or so zombies still moving swarmed in. Each was met by one of the men in armor. Maces swung, swords hacked down. The guys with pitchforks pinned the zombies in place, beheaded their targets with a single sword blow. “Jack” knocked his down with a shield buffet, then rammed his blade into it’s skull. That done, the men in armor marched out the gate, shoulder to shoulder, began finishing off the zombies trapped in the tanglewire, all very businesslike. The kids on the roof were cheering.

Nearby, Lucius was shouting at the tall black man with the whistle, dancing around, animated. “Clive, that white motherfucker left me out there to be eaten! He had his way, I’d be doing the ole’ shamble and moan right-”

His voice choked off. “Clive” had one massive hand around his throat. The man was bald, a thin mustache and goatee on his face. His voice was a low rumble. “Lucius, you hide. You hide right now! Because Jack is fittin’ to put your head on a stick right now and I don’t really feel like stopping him. Get your ignorant black ass out of my sight this second now and we may let you keep your gat!”

That looked promising.

Lucius ran off.

The hubbub gradually died down, crews of people with hooks and ropes dragging the dead off the wall, out of the defenses. They loaded the bodies on truck frames that had been turned into wagons. The tall black man turned to me, put out his hand. “Dude, you were draggin’ more zombies than we seen in a month. You down from Cleveland?”

I nodded, exhausted. The wound, I noticed, had been professionally bandaged. My Tommy Hilfigers were a total loss, however. “Been on the run for a week. Couldn’t seem to lose them. I’m Damon Harris.”

“Clive Haygood. You got any ammo for your pistol?”

“Yeah, but I ain’t giving it up. My gats’ only thing kept me alive. Only got six rounds left for it.”

“S’ight. We’ll top you off once things calm down. But rule number one: guns only come out when I call weapons free. Even when we got Z at the door. You pull that gun on anyone in this compound and we skin you. Literally. Got that?”

“Got it.”

A dog came by, a big mutt on a collar and leash, held by a middle aged woman handler. It sniffed at me, licked my hands. “He’s clean, Clive.”

The knot of men in armor came through the gate. Kids were waiting to dump buckets of water on them from the roof, washing off the blood and gore covering them. The kids laughed as they doused them. The men laughed back, enjoying the cool water in the summer heat. One man wasn’t laughing. You could feel the anger radiating from him like a fire as he stalked towards us. He pulled off his helmet. It was Jack.

“Clive, damnit, I want that idiots’ gun, I want it now. He can’t be trusted with a baseball bat, let alone a firearm.”

“Jack, I make those decisions. We can’t restrict firearms. What if he’s on the work detail and you get Z’s swarming out of some basement?”

“Take him off the working details and put him to work in here then! He’s fucking useless!”

“He says you’re riding him.”

“I am riding him! It’s the only way to keep him from sneaking off when we’re doing demolition! I swear Clive, give me his damn gun or-”

“Or you’ll what?” Clive was obviously fed up at being yelled at. “We held a vote old man! I am in charge! So what you going to do ‘or’?”

Jack glowered at the taller black man, then stomped off, rage and water dripping off him.

Clive shook his head, ran a big hand over his bald head.

Yes, this had potential.

###

Jack left with the demolition crew, talking about how he was really in a mood to smash things. Clive and a couple of other people spent forty minutes quizzing me about where I’d come from and what I’d seen. They took notes, checked the maps. I gave them the cover story I’d been practicing. The quiz ended when two trucks, one pulling trailers, came up to the walls. I smelled fish. I looked out the window. Baskets of carp, catfish, bluegills. Several boxes of rifles and ammo, a few more boxes of canned food. A dozen people with the group, all of them armed with rifles. The people of the community seemed happy to see them, but they seemed subdued.

The short black woman leading the group hopped off, hugged Clive. He was confused. “Mary, what happened? How’s you get the Meyers Lake people to give you all that?”

“They were all dead.” She controlled herself, with an effort. “No Z’s Clive, none at all. It was quiet when we went in. We found them all in the garage. They all locked themselves in the garage, put one of the truck exhausts to the vent and started it running. I think it just happened this morning. All of them Clive, the kids, the dogs, every one. So we stripped the place out, took everything that we could use..The babies, Clive, they killed the babies…”

The crowd grew still then, the mood darkening. Mary was crying. A young light-skinned boy ran up to her, hugged her, then an older red-haired woman as she began to cry harder.

Clive pushed himself away from the group. He pitched his voice to be heard. “The Meyers lake crowd gave up this morning. Nobody killed them but themselves! They had as much as we do, but they quit! If that’s what they want to do, we’re better off without them! Now if any of y’all want to quit, don’t bring that to me! We will never quit! There is no quit in this community! We are the living and we will continue to live! If they don’t want to live, we’ll take what they have and we’ll use it to live! We will continue to see tomorrow until every last Z is back in the earth where they belong and we can walk the streets unafraid!”

That actually picked up the crowd. I could see why they made this guy their leader. He patted “Mary” on the shoulder. “Go get some rest. We’ll unload this and have a fish fry. You rest until you’re ready to come back out.”

The fish fry came two hours later, to the smell of frying fish, woodsmoke and hot oil. Deep-fried cattail roots were the substitute for french fries as boards that had been torn from demolished buildings were used as fuel. Fish too small to fry were tossed into meat grinders and turned into fish cakes. Bowls of dandelion greens and mulberries rounded out the meal and if no one was able to stuff themselves, everyone did get a full meal. They ate in the school gym/cafeteria. Jack and Clive were at the head table with the little light-skinned boy I figured out was Marys’ son. Clive told the crowd that Mary would be down later but that she was fine. He finished the meal by giving out prizes to the teens and children who’d been throwing rocks. The lanky, dark-skinned boy with the good throwing arm turned out to be Clives’ son. He got a candy bar for having killed 3 zombies with his fastball pitches.

I wound up sitting by an older white man, his beard and mustache shaggy and grey. He set down a muzzle loading rifle and a sack of paper cartridges. He gave me a hard look, shrugged and sat down, began eating his serving of fried fish. He huffed through his mustache as Clives’ son took his candy bar. “Typical. Big surprise his kid gets the reward. I killed four zombies today guarding the demolition crew and my reward was jack shit.”

I leaned in and whispered to him. “Guy, you know these fuckin’ niggers is always cuttin’ each other slack.”

He looked at me in surprise. I grinned, leaned in closer. “Vinnie Tortelli. Pleased to meetcha. I’m from South Philly.”

He wasn’t adjusting quickly. “But ain’t you-”

“I ain’t no fucking spook. I play that sometimes cuz’ these nubians are always scratchin’ each others backs but I’m a paisan with a tan from Little Italy and don’t you forget it.”

He extended his hand, grinning. “Hal Thornton. Knew a sicilian from South Philly once, while I was in the army. Good guy.”

We ate for a few minutes, concentrating on the food. I nodded at his musket. “Who are you, the Confederate Army or something?”

Thornton chuckled. “Naw. They call us the Daniel Boone squad. ‘Bout a dozen of us with muzzle loaders. Think we’ve killed more zombies than everyone else here combined. Not that it gets us anything. At least Jack gave us some credits.”

“You ain’t gettin’ no credits either, long as Clive there is in charge.”

Thornton nodded. “I’ll tell you the truth, I’d be worried if I was you. Clive didn’t call you guys back during the attack. What if it had been bigger? Your ass woulda been hanging out in the breeze, with you guys out there on demolition.”

He nodded. “Clive don’t give a damn what happens to us. Never should have let him in. If Jack hadn’t vouched for him, Jack and Mary…”"

“Hey, he’s just one guy, right? One bullet in the middle of a firefight and Jack’d be back in charge, right? Accidents happen.”

Thornton gave me an odd look then. I could see the wheels turning. I’d finished my meal and I still had work to do. “Hell, don’t pay any attention to me, Hal, I’m just blowing smoke. But it might be more than smoke if Clive leaves you guys hanging again. He can’t be happy to know you guys are all still loyal to Jack. One thing these blacks know, it’s who’s in what gang.”

I left, my seeds planted there. I found my next target in an empty classroom, converted to bunks. Lucius was there, eating alone. I sat down with him, fished out a treasured flask of whiskey I carried. “‘sup, Lucius? Yo man, thanks for tryin’ to shoot those Z’s today. Least you wasn’t going out like a punk.”

Lucius drank deep from the flask, nodded his head. “Straight up. That Jack, he’s one hateful motherfucker. If we weren’t all fighting these zombies, wouldn’t be surprised to find a white hood in his shit. He been riding me since the day I came in.”

Lucius looked at the fish, little more than a few bones and scales on the plate now. “Y’know that old ass man is probably eatin’ steak right now. I seen the supply rooms, all the canned food we bring in every day, stockpiled! All sorts of good shit. They keep saying they’re saving it for winter, that we got to eat whatever shit we scrounge up for now. But I’ll bet Jacks’ eatin’ the fuck out of it. Just like we can’t use real ammo! We got a ton of real bullets and we never shoot it! Say they gots to save it for a major attack. Like today wan’t a major attack! They won’t even give me a reload for my pistol!”

I reach into a hidden pocket, pull out a hoarded box of 9mm jacketed hollowpoints and hand it to him. “Dog, Jack ain’t bulletproof, is he? Shooting starts, a bullet goes stray..”

Lucius grinned, a hungry look in his eye. Then fear washed over him. “Naw, if that happened, Clive would-”

“Clive would be glad there’s one less old white motherfucker to give him shit. Can’t do it his own self, might piss off the white dudes but there ain’t so many of them anymore. Might even have a li’l sum-sumthin’ for the cat who did it, once things calm down.”

Lucius gave me a look I was familiar with. Perfect.

###

I’d intended to work on more during the next 48 hours, but it didn’t work that way. The Meyers lake community had to be stripped of useable supplies. Since there was almost no fuel left, that meant a daylong trek with people hauling wagons and carts. Every hand, including mine was needed. It also meant guards standing by with rifles to repel wandering zombies. The Daniel Boone squad was a major part of that.

I worked that for what it was worth, pointing out to black people hauling wagons that the Daniel Boone squad was all white. After a few hours of hauling, watching their guards standing while they worked, it was easy for them to forget that those guards had to stand alert to watch for zombies. It helped that the team beacon was drawing in all the local zombies, so that the guards never actually had a threat to shoot at. By the end of the second day, we were calling ourselves the chain gang. Of course, I also slipped in a few reminders to the guards of how ungrateful these people were for them protecting them. The trick was to never let one group see me talking to the other group.

It was four pm on the third day when I lit off my beacon. We finished pushing back the wagons loaded with loot from the Meyers lake community around 3pm. My beacon was missing from my rack. For one tense hour searched like crazy, until I discovered Lucius had stolen it. He turned it over, angry that it wouldn’t play his CD’s, wondering why I carried around a boom box with a dead battery. Then I lit off the signal and put it on the room of the school building. Not as easy as I thought it would be. A legless, wheelchair-bound sentry was up there with binoculars, but I managed.

The tall dark-skinned boy and the little light-skinned boy were looking at me as I came down from the room. Funny how they’d be hanging together, the way their fathers’ fought. For a moment, I thought of them being ripped apart, devoured screaming by zombies. Imagined them staggering around as bloody, hungry child corpses. With an effort, I put that image out of my mind.

“What were you doing up on the roof?” The tall dark child.

“Just getting some air. You two play a lot together?”

They shrugged. I left, knowing that the clock was ticking.

The dogs on the fence were edgy. The beacons had that effect on them. As the work details come in and the fence was secured, half a dozen zombies emerged from random points, staggering towards the fences as fast as their rotting bodies could carry them. Zombies will go dormant for weeks at a time, the chemicals that activate their remaining nerves depleted, only slowly recharging even in their turgid metabolism. But now the beacon brought them out. They were quickly dispatched.

It was a late july sunset, the nightly games of basketball and bridge and spades keeping the residents of this little fortress entertained when the zombies really started coming in. Scattered ones, not clumps, each one raising the moan that drew in others, the start of a chain swarm attack. The alert went up and everyone went to battle stations. Clive spoke to the group. “I need a dozen healthy men to help the Daniel Boone squad haul ammo to kill box four. All these zombies are trooping by it. They’re going to slow down the attack, but that’ll use up a lot of ammo. Who’ll volunteer?”

I volunteered, of course. We all took double loads of ammo for our pistols, pushed carts of paper cartridges and torches through the city streets, past the pits and farm plots that used to be houses. The squad was using modern rifles to get us through, semiautos that had been stored for this occasion. They were still busy, even though we kept to open fire lanes. Kill box four was a mile away, an old gas station, barricaded again. Torches were lit on the approaching streets to light targets. The ground floor was being used to store dry firewood for the winter. I helped them pass the supplies up to the roof, leaving two little presents of my own shoved into the ground floor. I even got to talk to Thornton.

“Sounds like your ass is left hanging in the breeze again.”

He shook his head. “At least this time we got a phone line back to the school. Maybe I’ll make an obscene phone call to Clive.”

Our smaller detail, running back to the school, still used up most of our pistol ammo against the steadily increasing tide. Shambling, swaying armless corpses emerging from shadows, from side streets. Behind us, we heard the Daniel Boone squad open fire with their muzzle loaders. As we ran, we lit off pre-set bonfires of paper and plastic, to provide light for the people shooting from the school.

Night fell with the guttering, smoky bonfires illuminating swarms of the undead coming in. First one, then another, then two or three, swaying and staggering. Black shapes outlined by the fires or with some of their features illuminated, their mutilations and rot and blood. All of them moving with that unstoppable slowness, a wave of rotted bodies, jagged teeth, mindless hunger. Three became ten, then twenty, then fifty, their forms growing together slowly into clumps.

Columns of black, vile smoke rise to the sky.

All the ammunition had been broken out now. Clive gave weapons free to a dozen marksmen with rifles. They began picking off zombies at a hundred yards. Only a few zombies were making it to the wire, through the hail of stones and the obstacles. The people with shovels finished them off. I checked the load in my pistol, slipped away to where I’d stashed my gear. One more step. I went up to the command post, found Lucius hiding outside it. He was scared. Truly scared. Perfect.

In a command post set up on the room, Thorntons voice was coming loud and clear over the phone. “It’s some kind of fire below, in the firewood! Damn things burning through the roof!”

Ahh, the little surprises I’d left. Timed incendiaries are so much fun.

Clive spoke into the phone. “How’d that happen? Was somebody smoking?”

” Smoking what, you dumb bastard? We ain’t seen tobacco in six months! It’s the roof that’s fucking smoking!”

Jack was there too, in full armor. “Clive, ask him if they can break and run.”

Clive glared at him, spoke. Thorntons’ reply was obscene and full of anger and fear. “We got wall to wall corpses around us, damnit! We can’t shoot our way out alone and this fuckin’ building is burning! Get us the hell out of here!”

Jack nodded. “We’re armored up. I’ll get the boys rolling. We’ll need cover fire.”

Clive put a big hand on his shoulder. “Negits, Jack. That’s over a mile. We’re close to wall to wall Z’s here. You go out there and they’ll swarm you. If I let you die that way, Mary will kill my ass.”

Jack glowered, wanting to argue but staying silent. Thornton took it more personally. “Damnit you fuckin’ nigger, don’t leave our ass hangin’ in the breeze! You’re letting us die because we’re all white here and I know it!”

Jack turned on Clive, his big sword in his hand as I slipped towards the room chimney that Lucius was hiding behind, an eager grin on his face as he watched the argument. “Clive, we can’t leave them out there!”

Thorntons’ voice was rising in panic. “Oh hell, oh sweet janey, the roofs starting to collapse, it’s burning and-” I heard screams over the phone, screams that rose above the sound of the rifles, the moaning of the zombies in the distance. .

Jack hefted his sword in reflex.

I whispered to Lucius. “He’s about to cut him Lucius. Shoot old Jack and you’ll save Lucius’ life!”

Lucius stepped forward, aimed- and then I heard the click of a safety. A woman’s voice. Mary, her dark skin blending into the shadow haunted night. “Lucius, put that gun down or I’ll kill you.”

Lucius dropped the gun. I reached for mine, only to face the barrel of Mary’s’ pistol. Clive and Lucius both looked towards me at the sound of the black womans’ voice. Behind her, I saw the two boys, one holding my beacon, it’s back removed. My hands went up.

“Clive, Jack, come over here. Little Clive, show your uncle what you found.”

The light skinned boy handed my beacon to Clive. Jack looked in the back too. In the distance, there was a calls for weapons free, the rising moan of hundreds, thousands of zombies calling each other to feed.

Clive looked at me. “This doesn’t look like any radio I’ve ever seen.”

Lucius spoke. “Batteries are dead in it. I tried to listen to it.”

Jack spoke. “It’s got power. Some kind of lithium batteries, big ones. Honey, where did you find this?”

“Honey” was apparently Mary. “Your son and his cousin found it on the roof after this man left it here this afternoon. They could tell something was up.”

Lucius spoke up again. “This dude was telling me to shoot Jack. Said he was going to kill Clive.”

Jack came closer, held Mary to him protectively. “Kill my own brother in law? Naw. Kick his ass, maybe. Mary would be mad if I killed him.”

“And my sister has you seriously pussy whipped, you old fart.” Clive came closer, studying me as Jack pulled the pistol from my belt. “So what is this radio? And who are you?”

Jack smashed the beacon to splinters. That caused another argument. A family argument. While their two sons, cousins, watched me. While Jacks’ wife, Lucius’ sister, held the pistol on me and told them to stop arguing. I knew I was screwed. I didn’t need a gun. My personal ultrasonic would protect me beyond the wall. I turned and ran.

Marys’ first shot shattered my kneecap. I went down on the school room, rough gravel and asphalt scraping my face, my hands.

In the distance, I heard the moans of zombies and Clive shouting “weapons free!”

It is an hour later and I am now the one eyed man. Literally. They have survived and survival has made them harsh. They want answers. I cannot give them answers. They keep asking. I know the answers. I babble, I beg, I utter nonsense phrases. I cannot break my conditioning, not even as I scream from the pain of their interrogation.

Outside the steady thunder of the guns is slowing as even their hoarded ammunition begins to run low. The zombies no longer need the beacon. They come forward in a massive chain swarm attack, drawn by the thunder of the guns. A tide of snatching hands, biting teeth, dead staring white eyes. My final mission may still succeed, but I will not live to see that. Not knowing my mission, not knowing what is truly happening, they have still caught me.

And in this valley of the blind, the one eyed man shall not become king.

###

“There aren’t too many women left.” He said. “That’s for sure. Butthere are even less men. Forget about Anneliese man- she’s gone. When things settle down a little bit around here… well you’ll have your pick.”

“You gotta be crazy.” I told him. I would never or could never forget about Anneliese; Her blonde strands scattering across my memory like strips of sunny light streaming through the joined arms of the dead red trees which grew on the despondent landscape of my nightmares. I bluntly asked him to tell me where she was. He pleaded and spoke my name, lowering his arms in a gesture which
represented calm.

“Those women over there are not just as good as dead,” He implored. “I think they are dead.”

“Don’t say…” I began to shout at him before stopping myself in mid-sentence. He sighed and looked at the floor. “I’m sorry Johnny.” I said much lower. “You’re a good friend to me and it’s good of you to tell me. But you know I’m going to have to go over there.”

He shook his head. “It’s been four years a this shit. Weren’t you better off when you thought that she was just dead or gone?” He paused but when I didn’t answer he said, “I’m only against you seeing something that could make it even more terrible.”

I shook my head. “Nothing could be more terrible than this.”

He scoffed and looked out the window. “I doubt that.” He said as I followed his gaze out to the mailbox. One of the balloons- a very small version- floated up to the mailbox. There it birthed a perfectly rectangular slab of tan meat onto the concrete. The patty was smoothly ejected somehow from its silvery surface. Only to land softly on the sidewalk where it sat like a piece of dung on what looked like a plain sheet of tin foil.

“Well,” Johnny said. “Time for lunch. Better get it before the ants do.”

I contemplated this. “Do you think there are any ants left alive.”
I said. “Besides, how do you know what they’re feedin’ ya won’t
kill ya.”

Johnny shrugged. “It’s either that or eat the leaves off the
trees.” He made a move for the front door. “You should try it.” He
said. “With a little water it’s pretty swell.”

“Johnny?” I grabbed his arm. “Where is she?”

I could see these printed lines on his face, as if there were
black ink leaking from his brain and flooding into his blue eyes
until the thought of where she was turned them a dark purple. For
a moment I thought that he was going to tell me that I wasn’t the
only one who’s life had been ruined by all this: That no one had
been left untouched by the balloons: That he couldn’t think of one
person who hadn’t lost everything. I thought that he was going to
tell me that I was acting like a spoiled child. But instead he
only shrugged and said,

“The Municipal Pool.”

#

As I walked along the barren streets towards downtown, I did not
see any girls or women as Johnny had described. I didn’t see any
men either or persons at all for that matter.

Although all of the shops were closed, they had not been boarded
up nor had their outsides been desecrated. I guess the merchants
hadn’t had enough time to gate the doors and windows properly.
Consequently, the stores looked as if all someone had to do was
spin around the OPEN/CLOSED sign and they would be ready for
business once again. Perfectly edible canned goods still lined the
shelves inside, but these were known to be off limits.

It was probably about a two mile walk down to Hill Street. Then
twenty five blocks over to Kecksburg Lane and perhaps another half
mile to where the Municipal Pool sat on the corner of Flatwoods
and Walton.

The balloons were everywhere and they patrolled the streets
endlessly. Since they were in complete control of the city and had
selected whomever they pleased to do God knows what with, those of
us who were left were allowed to roam the thoroughfares freely, so
long as we were on foot. Anyone bold enough to leap behind the
wheel of a car or truck may as well have had the grim reaper
riding in the passenger seat with them.

No one knew where the Balloons came from or who’s bidding it was
that they had manifested onto the town. Some people said they were
from Russia, Cuba or outer space but, to my knowledge, these tired
cold war theories were never proven or even put to the test. I did
not know of one person who had ever communicated with one of the
orbs in any fashion. They came in a plethora of shapes and sizes
and all the same drab iron gray color. You could not go thirty
feet in any direction without seeing one. It was also not known as
to why they were feeding what was left of the population. ( Most
of the time what they were feeding the population was also a
mystery. )

Not really being able to identify them, everyone just started
referring to them as the balloons. Which I think was mainly
because of the way that they floated around or suspended; A slow
oscillating drift which was similar to the flight of helium
balloon’s. ( Although our balloons could go up, down, sideways
and so on and so forth. ) But I think that what they really were
was some sort of pods. They reminded me of a documentary I had
seen on TV several years earlier. It was a dramatization about a
farmer who had spied several “pods” as he called them, taking
soil samples from his bean field somewhere in Iowa. I myself had
once watched a small balloon absorb a rose into its metallic
skin. Whether or not it was using this as a sample or for any
sort of tests were unclear.

They did not resemble any drawings or illustrations that I had
ever seen of UFOs or flying saucers. Although, as objects, they
would certainly have to be classified as unidentified. And, if
they had not been identified by now, I didn’t see how they ever
would be. There were no little green men, grays, or humanoid
figures of any type anywhere. At least not that I had ever seen or
heard of. Actually, it was only an assumption that they had any
connection with or to outer space at all. You could not hear any
engines running when they moved nor did they give off any light in
the extreme darkness of the neon deprived night. Again, the best
way I can think of to describe them is just to say that they
looked exactly like balloons.
Two blocks from Hill Street I came along to the powder blue body of
a dead man propped up against a fire hydrant. It was said that
somehow the balloons could manipulate the life force of a human
being, and since I never really understood or figured out what that
meant, that’s about as simple as I can put it.

I can tell you this much; It was cleaner and quicker than a heart
attack. People simply dropped dead at the will of the balloons.
And for this reason, the gun metal grey anomalies  occupied the
metropolitan area without a shot ever being fired.

All law enforcement officials had been crossed out by the
balloons. Although it would have been difficult to confirm whether
or not they had been targeted specifically. Since you could use
any occupation as an example; A doctor or a lawyer say, and you
would be hard pressed to find any of these people alive. In other
words, so many human beings were dead that it could have just been
random. Although the lack of police presence was not a problem per
se. Since anyone noticed causing even the slightest disturbance
was summarily executed by the balloons. And, since you could not
go outside ( Or in some instances even inside, ) without seeing
one of the orbs, crime rates dropped to an all time low right
along side the population.

As I turned onto Hill Street, on of the bigger balloons was
floating down the avenue about three stories up. Another smaller
one was following close behind. It was like a nightmarish farce of
the Macy’s day parade. On some of the larger balloons, long
spindly sticks jutted out from their sides like the thin legs of
arachnids. These legs appeared to push the balloons away from the
buildings, thereby preventing them from scraping against the
bricks or hard corners. Whether or not there were any beings
inside the big balloons, or whether they were some type of
creatures themselves, was also unclear.

A horrid gray rain began to cascade down from the metallic clouds,
loaning a sheen to the excessive number of balloons Which filled
the shallow sky. The streets were slick, but there was no longer
any rush hour or worry of automobile accidents to contend with.
Wet garbage clogged the curbs and drains. A traffic light which
was stuck on red, or rather, stuck on stop, blinked like a winking
crimson eye squinting from the drizzle.

As I came to Kecksburg Lane I picked up on a flash of motion and
color on the other side of the intersection. In a never ending
wall of blackish glass, which had once been the window of the
Oldsmobile showroom, I saw the reflection of a disheveled and
bedraggled girl. Before her actual figure came into view from
behind the decaying frame of a furniture truck. She was wearing a
long, furry brown coat over a stained and dingy party dress. She
looked like she’d been living outside for weeks.

When she saw me, she immediately began walking towards me, and
that’s when I noticed that there were three little balloons
following behind here like puppy dogs on an invisible  leash.

“Hey Sir!?” She said, hair in tatters, wild as an unkept field.
“Hey Sir?! Do you have any food?” When she stopped, her balloons
stopped. I shook my head no.

She lowered the coat down off of her shoulders and began
unbuttoning the dress. I raised my hand to object but this did not
stop her. Soon she was showing me her red chest, which was  housed
in a slash of black bra. “Now do you have any food?” She said,
swaying seductively. I looked at her coldly and then glanced down
at the ominous balloons. “OH don’t mind them.” She said. “They
like to watch.”

I told her that, if I had any food, I would readily give it to her
and ask nothing in return. “Besides.” I wondered aloud. I couldn’t
understand why she needed food since the balloons were supplying
it to everyone. ( Although their motive for this was murky at
best).

“Maybe I don’t like the cuisine.” She quipped, pulling the coat
back up onto her shoulders and sticking her nose in the air. With
that she walked away, the balloons bobbing behind her like a
banner being pulled by a plane.

As I negotiated the final blocks I felt like my stomach was full
of salt water and the muscles in my legs began to harden and
spasm. I hadn’t been getting very much exercise lately; lying in
bed under waves of blankets, watching the incessant shadows of
circles on the wall. The scent of Anneliese’s skin cream on the
deserted sheets. The stolen specter of feminine powders and
perfumes saturating the pillow cases. Sinking under the waterline
into a paranoid sleep. Balloons in the room, bouncing off the
ceiling, trying to escape as if they really were trapped or full
of helium. But they would never just drift away in the sky…
drift away in the sky.

My knees were heated like half coconut shells baking on a tropical
island and my buttocks felt equally as greasy as I came to my
destination. The Municipal Pool came into view looking as ordinary
as any YWCA. As I got closer the frame of a young man who was
standing at the front door came into focus. He was clean cut,
shaven, well nourished, privileged. He was holding what looked
like a long stick in his hand and, as I got closer, I could see
that it was a shotgun. He barley acknowledged me.

“I’m looking for a woman.” I queried. “I think you may have her
inside there?”

He looked me up and down, the shotgun pointed at the sky. “Yeah,”
He began. “We got lots a women in there. Ya got any money?”

I looked down at the concrete and shook my head. “Let me ask you a
question.” I said pointedly. “What good does money do you or
anybody else now?” Even as I said this, I realized that I still
had a whole wallet full of twenties that I just could not bring
myself to throw away.

He whistled a sigh, his patience seemed to be evaporating. “Do you
have any money or not?!”

“YEAH.!” I growled. “I got money.”

“Go through there,” He began a little nicer, like he just wanted
to get rid of me and an argument would only prolong my standing
there. “Talk to the guy behind the desk.”

I walked through the clear glass doors, then through a brief
breezeway, before quickly locating the ‘desk’ which was really
just a white card table. The fellow who was sitting behind it must
have thought that he was some sort of art type, for he was wearing
an impeccably shaved goatee and a tam. There was a metal strong
box sitting in front of him. A row of plastic slats rose from
inside it to support a bevy of assorted bills.

“Hi.” He said with surprising friendliness.

I nodded.

“Have you been here before?” He asked through the beard.

I shook my head no.

“For five dollars admission; You can select any girl from the pool
area for one on one time in a private enclave, one dollar per
minute with a minimum of twenty minutes. Got it?”

I indicated that I did before pulling the rumpled notes out of my
disintegrating billfold. Past my permanently expired driver’s
license, credit cards, social security. I had hundreds of dollars
in there. I hadn’t spent a penny in over a year. I handed over a
twenty and a rumpled Lincoln which, I guess, were not so worthless
after all. He put it in the strong box. “Have a good time.” He
said.

I had been swimming here on one occasion many years ago. But the
pool area was now drastically different then it had been at that
time. No one had bothered to mop in a while and, what looked like,
black drag marks intersected on various points of the tile floor.
All the deck chairs and lawn furniture had been removed save for
one crooked umbrella shading a plain grey folding chair. Where a
second man, also wielding a shotgun, sat grimly. The setting sun,
its light the hue of a black rose, tried to strain past some
sinking clouds to peer through the high rectangular windows.

I could not imagine why these men figured that they needed
shotguns? Weapons certainly were not required to control the
remaining population. The balloons had already established that
dominance without so much as a shot ever being fired. Or, if these
men were against the balloons, which it was obvious from their
actions that they were not, their guns would have been totally
useless against such a powerful and enigmatic force as the orbs
anyway.

One of the biggest balloons I had ever seen was either attached to
or scraping against the high ceiling. It was rotating slowly, like
the hand which measures seconds on a clock. Dozens of spindly legs
sprouted out from it at various angles and degrees like the limbs
of some mystery arachnid. These apparatuses curved and dropped
down from the body like long steam hoses. There, they were somehow
fashioned to the backs of scores of women. The females milled
through the waist deep septic water. The pool had been partially
drained and what was left of the aqua was browned and rancid. Most
of them were stripped naked with their pale breasts sagging. Their
eyes were the eyes of taxidermy animals, as if their gaze had been
laminated, covered over by a coat of plastic. They shuffled around
slowly in an uninspired circle, goaded along by the tentacles of
the pod, mechanical as carousel ponies.

Mirroring their bitter sleepwalk I shuffled to the edge of the
pool and stared in at them in disbelief. Of all the many
unfortunate ladies sifting through this cesspool broth, I did not
see Anneliese anywhere among them.

“See anything ya like?”

The man with the shotgun had gotten up from the plain grey folding
chair to stand with me by the side of the pool. He was very
muscular and his head looked like a concrete block with black
sideburns. The rifle was down at his side like he was about to run
through a ‘taps’ routine. I resisted an overpowering impulse to
try and drive my fist through his nose. Because I knew that if I
did that, I would either be killed, which I didn’t really have any
aversion to, or that I would never see Anneliese again, which I
could not bear the thought of.

“Um,” I tried to play ball. “I have a favorite you see, a blonde
girl about five foot five, five foot six she…”

“Look friend,” He interrupted me. “They all look the same to me.”

Hurt and confused, I babbled on. “Yeah well, is this everyone? I
mean, are there more? Are they all here?”

His brow zigzagged. He was starting to get annoyed with my
questions. “A few of the girls are tied up right now,” He gestured
with his hand towards nowhere. “But you can’t stay in here. Why
don’t you just pick another one out for today?”

My eyebrows arched. I could feel the sadness collapsing in my mind
like a flash flood sweeping towards a rickety dam. Near tears, I
shook my head. “No,” I pleaded. “I really can’t see anyone else
but her.”

Noticing the hint of spray in my eyes must have alerted him to my
true mission. For he raised the rifle to his chest like a karate
pole and pushed it towards me. “Move out asshole!” He said meanly.

I put up my hands. Not really resisting, yet not really
retreating. “I said MOVE OUT!” He looked like he was about to
swing the butt at my jaw until a new man stopped him by putting
his hand on the barrel.

“It’s o.k. Eric,” The new man said. “Go have a smoke, I’ll sort
this out.” Eric smiled at the second man. Gave me a final dire
stare then walked out of the pool area.

The second man was very young and unusually handsome. He was tall
with blonde streaks through his long rocker’s hairdo and tan like
a surfer dude. Though I doubt that he or anyone else had been
riding the waves lately.

“What do you want?” He said harshly, but his eyes were kinder.

“I want a girl,” I said. “What else?”

“Cut the crap.” He barked back. “I should have let Eric waste you.
Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”

“I paid my money.” I claimed. “Just like everybody else.”

“Look man,” His voice dropped down and lost its curtness. “I’m
just trying to tell you for your own good. If you’ve got an old
lady or a daughter or somethin’ in here… just let it go man.
This place is a bad scene.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I quipped rudely. “But if it’s such a bad
scene what are all you assholes doin’ in here? I mean how the hell
can you be sucking the ass a these monsters just for clean clothes
and a haircut?”

He bit his lip and shook his head. “O.K. asshole,” He began. ‘You
think you know about everything there is to know huh? Why don’t
you come with me?” He walked across the browned tiles and I
followed. He ushered me into a side room lounge where a drab and
faded plaid couch was flanked by two loud orange chairs. “Sit
right here.” He said. “The rest of the girls will be rinsing off
any time now.” With that he ducked out of the lounge. As I sat
down on the couch, a musty moth born stink  bubbled out from the
dusty cushions. As if the furniture had been sitting in an
abandoned lot or a junk covered field. When I was sure he was
gone, I put my face in my hands and began to weep.

After about a minute of miserable heaving I un-tucked my T-shirt
and dried my eyes with it. After that I just stared blankly at the
block wall until the blonde fellow came back in. His kinder side
had won out. “Look,” He began. “Why don’t you just go on home man?
Even if you have someone here… I can promise you that they’re no
longer anyone you want to see.”

I looked at him frankly, my lips trembling. But before I could
even say anything yet another unseen voice from behind the door
said, “What are you a fuckin’ guidance councilor? If the asshole
wants to see some bitch let him see here.” It was the horridly
scratchy voice of a wretchedly thin and wrinkled woman. Her nose
hooked through the doorway, curious and vicious like some predator
bird. She stood in the open threshold with her hands on her hips
and tapped her foot at the young man like an impatient girlfriend
trying to extract a boozing fiancee from a bar. The blonde boy
looked at me almost sadly and said, “All the girls are back now,
if you’d like to go have a look? If you don’t see your favorite in
there now, I don’t know what to tell you.” Acting like he’d washed
his hands of the situation the aryan haired boy walked out. I
followed him and the evil woman out into the pool area. Somewhere
outside, the sound of a train snaked through the comatose city and
I couldn’t imagine who might be driving it or why?

But this time, and almost as soon as I walked through the door, I
could see Anneliese’s luminous and original blonde hair sticking
out among the crowd like a golden coin in a pile of grimy pennies.

“That one,” I said, finally as cold as them. “The blonde.”

Neither of my hosts answered, but almost as soon as the words left
my mouth, the spindly silver appendage pulled Anneliese’s naked
body from the putrid water. Her hairy legs, which had not been
shaved in weeks, shined and dripped the brownish liquid. Her head
lolled groggily and rolled on her shoulders to one side. Just from
that fleeting glance it looked as if she’d gained a little weight.
Then she was out of view, pulled by the pod’s tentacle over a
block wall and into a separate room. Evidently, the top rows of
the blocks had been removed to accommodate the awe inspiring pod.

“Go through there.” The horrid woman said. I quickly obliged,
almost slipping on the slimy tiles. As I hurried past the pool a
second girl was troweled out. Her dark skin looking almost purple
in the dusky light which continued, duller now, to streak through
the high windows. Thick varicose veins were noticeable on her legs
as she also went over the wall.

The door to this new room had been removed and upon entering I
spied a sentry; An aging man with graying sideburns sitting on a
bar stool around a high table. Blurry tattoos of a long defeated
and disbanded navy were sketched onto his forearms. The shotgun
was lying across that stand next to a half empty pint of Jim Beam.
Thick cigar smoke was slowly escaping from the doorway. He looked
at me without much interest, exhaled a smoky mouthful of his
pungent cuban, nodded and said,

“Fourth stall.”

I looked to my right down a long hallway. Where freckles of light
sprinkled onto the partially busted tiles. Evidently this was
where the shower or changing room had once been located. As I got
to the first stall, I could now see that a spotted and stained
mattress had been dumped over the shower’s drain. A naked girl was
laying on top of it, her eyes looked empty, as if she had a bullet
lodged in her brain. A second girl, who was fully clothed in a
long over coat, lay on the mattress with her, hugging her, tears
streaming from both their eyes. She looked enough like the naked
girl to be her sister. I paused momentarily, lifting my hand as if
to help them or say something. But before I could, I felt the butt
of the rifle in the small of my back. It was the grizzled guard
ushering me along. “Fourth stall.” He said, his casual tone and
countenance replaced by a meaner demeanor.

The second stall was empty, with only a blackened mattress laying
sideways under a torn shower curtain.

The third stall had no shower curtain and I could see the wide
back of a rotund man. Thick doodles of dark hair were scribbled
all over his shoulder blades. He was bent over the woman from the
pool, the one with the varicose veins. He looked up as I past, a
beard which had similar circular whiskers as the ones growing from
his back covered his puffy face. Spit flew from his mouth as he
addressed me.

“She used to be a stuck up bitch.” He rationalized. “I used to see
her every day at First National… She wouldn’t even say hi to
me.” I said nothing as I walked past. A dried condom was splotched
onto the wall.

Anneliese was in the fourth stall, laying half in and half out of
the shower. They must have ran out of mattresses, since her legs
were curled under her limp body and her blonde hair lolled wet
against the raised step at the entrance to the stall. I slowly got
around behind her and cradled her head in my lap. The strands of
her locks felt waxy or coated over, like sludge or seaweed. Her
mindless eyes had thick purple crescents  underneath them and her
lips were slit with miniscule cuts and small pin head sized cold
sores. She was still soaked and the septic water from the pool
seeped onto my pants and shirt. These girls and woman had been
conditioned somehow and she could not talk. A sizzle of slobber
ran from the slack corner of her mouth.

I closed my eyes and tried to take in her scent. But I could not
overcome the fecal reek of the Municipal Pool. A white fire like
loud static spread across my brain like windy flames across dry
grass. My mind nearly exploded from the sadness and I prayed that
I would go mad so I could abandon all rational thought. In my
grief my eyes ran down over Anneliese’s violated body. That’s when
I noticed just a hint of mint green branching out from underneath
her arm pits. Her nipples were… crooked almost, one higher than
the other, like a shirt which had been put on inside out. Her
fingers were thicker, not as dainty as I remembered. The toes on
her feet were more rectangular, her biceps more muscular. Her legs
were obviously shorter then I recalled and that’s when I realized;
It was Anneliese’s head and face but it was not her body.

“Ohhh Ohhh,” I said and stared high up at the block walls, salty
tears stunning my lips. I reached into the side pocket of my pants
and pulled out the knife. The Confederate Generals stared at me
from its commemorative handle. Without thinking another thought I
plunged the blade into the chest of whoever’s body that it was.
Anneliese’s face groaned weakly and, for a diced instant, I
thought that I could see a gleam. A glimpse of some recognition
either of or by her: The real Anneliese. Then the eyes waxed over
again and half closed while all the air escaped through the hole I
had made in her transplanted chest. Like all of the air scuttling
out from the inside of a balloon.

END.

Tom Hamilton is an Irish Traveler. He currently lives with the clan
known as the Mississippi Travelers. His work has appeared in over one
hundred publications around the world. Including the Rockford Review,
Red Wheelbarrow Literary Journal and Sinister City among many others.
He has two poetry chapbooks published. ‘The Rain Draw Bridge’ from
‘Alpha Beat Press’ and ‘The Last Days of My Teeth’ from ‘Budget Press’
His short story ‘The Spider’ is available as an E-book from ‘Curious
Volumes Publishing’ Along with his wife Mary Theresa and their three
small daughters, Tiffany, Hope and Catalina, he lives in Rockford IL
USA.

“Aw, shoot,” he said as darkness enveloped him. He waited expectantly for the backup generator to come online, and relaxed when he heard it powering up, exactly as it was supposed to do. The generator at the transmitter shack a mile or so away would be doing the same, he knew. Sure enough, within 15 seconds of the outage, the lights came back on. The security lights outside in the parking lot stayed dark, but this was no surprise. They were off the main circuit and wouldn’t come back until full power returned. Gil glanced around while the fluorescents flickered back into life, waiting for further problems, but nothing else happened. It was unlikely that any listener would notice the brief signal drop-out.

He snarfed the last bit of his sandwich, and drained his can of diet soda. Chucking his trash into the bin he fumbled absent-mindedly in his pocket for his cigarettes. He’d have to log the outage but it was a non-event, really.

“God’s will be done,” Gil muttered, grinning. He moseyed through the station’s little front office to main door, headed outside for a smoke. It was one of the station’s on-air catchphrases. As a lifelong Christian, he approved of the sentiment but deplored its use with the syrupy background music used for some of the public service announcements. He had produced a few PSAs himself, using more cheerful music, and ran them exclusively when he was on duty.

Gil Pevney prided himself on not being a follower. He couldn’t be bothered with the Fox Family Channel, gave the Left Behind books a pass, and disliked being exhorted by radio evangelists. Still, his pastor’s reference had gotten him this job at a time when he needed one, and he was grateful enough to say a daily prayer of thanks.

Heat and humidity smacked into him when he opened the station’s front door. The rain poured down as it had for the past few days. The mere sight of it brought the plight of the Delaware Valley residents to his awareness. Many had already been driven from their homes. Bulletins from the National Weather Service said the skies would clear by morning, but that would be less than comforting to the hundreds of distraught property owners in the region who were receiving their most recent punishment from Mother Nature. He was thankful he didn’t live by the river.

Gil dragged on his cigarette, looking into the dripping darkness for any sign of nearby lights. Nothing. The power failure, almost certainly caused by a downed line somewhere, would probably last a while.

The WGWR building was a single-story structure no bigger than a three-car garage, into which was wedged with devilish ingenuity two studios, a tape and disc library, a work area for the engineers, a teletype room, a small front office, and a lavatory not appreciably larger than a closet. There were just chairs enough to seat the entire staff at one time during the weekly progress meetings. Gil had been present for only two or three such get-togethers during his six months as a staffer; they occurred during his daytime sleep hours. As the night guy he was barely in the loop, but he didn’t mind. Memos stuffed into his mail cubby kept him up to date.

Aside from the power blip, the night was looking to be routine; that is to say, completely and totally boring. Gil hadn’t realized how much he would miss human contact when he took this job. It was very different from his recently ended college days, when he was chief engineer for the school’s FM radio station. Then he’d been in the thick, setting up PA equipment for live events at the coffee house, engineering local bands playing at the station, and covering live sports broadcasts around the U.S. Of course there was also the scutwork: closing down and/or opening the station, turning the transmitter off and on when working morning or late night shifts, and so forth.

None of that carried over to the Christian station, which was AM to begin with, with smaller facilities located out here in the boonies. His training, background, and familiarity with computers and sound equipment had gotten him hired to cover the third shift as engineer, weather announcer, carpenter, vending machine repairman: in short, anything that needed doing when no one else was around. The job itself was turning out to be a real dead end. Easy enough, and appropriate for a night-owl type like himself, but with no future. Pretty soon he’d have to decide what to do about that.

The college years had also gotten him pretty deeply into drugs and alcohol, mostly from hanging around with bands. The defining moment had come in his junior year, during a party at which he’d gobbled down what turned out to be a horse tranquilizer, the most powerful downer he’d ever had. At some point he found himself sitting fully clothed in an empty bathtub, hands wrapped around his knees, vomiting all over himself. The next day, with his head still swimming, he sought out the pastor of his church, where he had not set foot in over a year, and begged for help.

Now, at age twenty-three, he’d been walking a path of recovery for nearly half a year, and intended to stay on it. All in all, what he liked best about this rediscovery of his Christian roots was the sense of caring community it gave him. That had been lacking in his life for a long time.

With a sigh, he flipped the butt of his cigarette out into the rain, where it hissed to death when it hit the asphalt in the parking lot. His chores for the remainder of the night until five AM consisted entirely of scheduled meter readings.

With the parking lot lights out, his eyes had gotten used to the rainy darkness, which is why he saw a figure approaching from across the fields to the southeast.

Staggering, stumbling over the uneven ground, whoever it was seemed injured or disoriented. Someone escaping from the flooding Delaware? Or—worse—a zombie?

#

Four months previously, a terrorist bomb hidden in a cargo container exploded at the Port Newark Container Terminal, spreading a lethal airborne cocktail of chemicals and disease-snippets. This caused an outbreak of a mutated form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that attacked its victims’ brains, causing them to degenerate into wandering predators ravenous for flesh and blood. They were all over the news as “zombies,” even though, from what Gil gathered, being undead they were more properly called “ghouls.” Still, the horror-movie nomenclature took hold and couldn’t be dislodged. Whatever you called them, though, they were dangerous. With their senses rendered painfully acute, they shunned bright lights and loud noises, and fanned out into more rural areas far from the blast point, traveling by night, attacking the unwary. Local and federal law enforcement officials were tracking the zombies down, but some of them always managed to elude capture.

They couldn’t live long once infected, but often they retained enough autonomy to be able to drive cars far from the infection point, only to abandon the vehicles and wander off in search of food once the illness destroyed their ability to drive.

But as the ghostly, staggering figure drew nearer, Gil saw that this was not a ghoul. It was a girl about his own age, ragged and pale but unmarred by the wens and unheeded injuries marking the bomb victims. She had to be a refugee of the flood.

“Hey!” she called out weakly as she stepped onto the wet asphalt of the parking lot. “Can you help me?”

That decided him; zombies didn’t retain the power of articulate speech. “Yeah, sure,” he said, hurrying into the rain. She sagged in his arms when he reached her and he found himself all but carrying her into the shelter of the station. The heavy glass door clicked closed behind him.

She leaned heavily on him, looking around almost uncomprehendingly, squinting in the lights, swaying from exhaustion, dripping wet. He sat her down in a plastic chair in the common room.

She grimaced and shielded her eyes against the fluorescents. She looked terrible in their purple-white glare. “I have such a wretched headache,” she groaned. “Can you turn off some of the overheads?”

“Umm, okay,” he said, and flipped them off. The room, illuminated now by under-cabinet lights and the vending machine, took on a slightly mysterious aspect.

The girl began shivering violently. He moaned in concern. It was air conditioned inside, and she had just made a trek in the steaming darkness of an August night. He pulled open a locker and seized a couple of maintenance uniforms.

“Here,” he said, thrusting them at her. “Dry yourself with one, and put the other on. There’s a bathroom,” he added, pointing to a door.

She stood and nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know your name,” she added shyly.

“Oh! I’m Gil,” he said, and stuck out his hand. She took it in hers, which was small and cold. Then she tottered into the lav, leaving Gil to wonder what in the world he had done.

He wasn’t supposed to have visitors: station policy. But she wasn’t a visitor, she was a victim of the flood. Well, the smart thing to do was to call for help. He was no doctor, and the girl looked like she needed one. There was a phone on the common room wall. He lifted the receiver and put it to his ear. Dead.

With a sigh he took the cell phone off his belt and flipped it open. NO SERVICE. “Balls,” he muttered. A falling tree had probably taken down a relay tower somewhere. It might be hours before service was restored on either the station’s land line or his cell. Now what? Well, once she was dried off, she’d be fine. He could feed her from the vending machines, and let her rest. There was a cot in the maintenance shack out back; he would bring that in and set it up for her. She certainly looked as if she needed some sleep.

From the bathroom he heard the sound of running water. Nodding to himself in satisfaction, he went to the snack machine and selected cheese crackers, a candy bar, and a small packet of trail mix. After a moment’s debate he poured a cup of hours-old brew from the coffee maker. It was slightly burned, but hot. He put the cup on the table along with the selection of snacks. Then he dumped the last dregs of the old coffee down the sink and set the pot aside to be cleaned after it cooled. He tore the last paper towel off the roll hanging below the cabinet where coffee makings were stored and wiped the counter.

“Better get more,” he muttered, heading for the utility cabinet in the front office where the paper towels were stored. While he opened the cabinet he glanced out through the glass front door. The office was unlit save for the reduced light from the common room behind him, which was too faint to show anything outside but a rising mist and the rain. He took a couple of rolls of towels out and closed the cabinet.

The dark form of a young boy stood at the door, looking in through the glass. He wore khaki shorts and was using a branch as a staff, leaning on it. Gil gasped; where in Heaven’s name had the kid come from?

As soon as he saw Gil notice him, the boy raised one hand in a tentative wave, then tapped on the glass. “Hey,” he said. “Is my sister okay?”

“Sister?” Gil said, approaching the door. Now he saw that the kid was looking a little banged up, as if he’d spent the past few hours in the woods. He was scratched and dirty. The staff kept his weight off his left leg, which looked swollen. He couldn’t be more than about nine or ten years old.

“Yeah, Toni… Antonia. My sister, you know? I was with her but I twisted my ankle pretty bad across the fields there.” He gestured back across the parking lot. “Then we saw your lights, so she came on ahead.”

The light in the common room grew dimmer behind Gil. At the same time, a voice called “Tommy!”

The voice was so close behind him that Gil jumped. He whirled around. The girl—-Toni–dressed in the too-large maintenance uniform, had managed to clean herself up and looked almost pretty. “Please,” she said to Gil, “it’s my brother, he’s hurt. Let him in?”

“Uh.” Gil glanced back at the door as Tommy tapped on it again. He could see the resemblance between the two; Tommy had his sister’s light hair and narrow face. “Well, okay. The phones are out, though,” he added, unlocking the door. Tommy limped inside and Toni hugged him.

“Everything okay?” she asked him.

“Sure, everything’s fine,” he said. “I’m soaked through, is all.”

“You didn’t tell me you had a brother with you,” said Gil, unable to keep a slight note of accusation out of his tone.

They turned to look at him. Gil thought he saw a flash of dark anger flicker in their eyes, but it was gone almost instantly. Toni said, “I’m sorry, I was in such a state when I got here.”

“We’ve been wandering around out there for a couple of hours,” said Tommy, adding a grin to his words. His nighttime excursion apparently hadn’t quelled his spirit. “Power’s out everywhere around!” He sounded just like an excited ten-year-old having an adventure.

“Want me to take a look at your ankle?” Gil asked, looking closely at Tommy’s leg. Even in the semi-darkness he could see that the exposed flesh was a nasty dark purple color. The kid was wearing hiking boots; a good thing, because they’d give the injury some pressure and support. Otherwise, even with the staff, he would have had a terrible time walking on the uneven ground at night in the rain.

“Huh? Oh, no; no, it’s okay.” He gave a pained look as he moved. “Maybe a place to sit down, and a towel to dry off?”

“Paper towels’re about all I got,” said Gil, leading the way into the common room. “But I can prob’ly find some more overalls if you wanna get out of your wet clothes.”

“Cool.”

Gil gave the roll of towels to Tommy. “So,” he said lightly, watching the kid dry off, “anyone else out there with you?” He grinned at the sibs.

Toni chuckled. “Nope, no, it’s just us.”

“Where are your folks?”

Again he thought he saw their eyes go dark when they exchanged glances. “They’re back at the house,” said Toni. “Mom slipped and broke her arm in the dark so Dad is staying with her. We don’t have any phone, either, so we went out looking for help. I guess we got lost.”

“I guess you did,” Gil said. Anyone living around here would have to know more or less where they were, even in the dark. Of course, without lights, and in the pouring rain, people could get disoriented. “Whereabout’s your house?” he asked casually.

Toni gestured vaguely to the south. “Oh, uh Frenchtown, you know, near the roller-skating rink?”

He nodded. Locals would know about that place, but most outsiders wouldn’t. “Well look,” he said, “there’s a fold-up Army cot in the shed out back, so let me get it. It’s pretty late and you look like you could use a rest.”

Toni cast him a grateful look. “That would be super, thanks,” she said. As he left the room, he saw brother and sister lean closer together, exchanging murmured conversation.

Outside, the rain continued pouring down. “Stopping by dawn, huh?” he muttered to himself as he unlocked the shed. “Yeah.” The cot was going to get a little wet during the dash back to the station, but that couldn’t be helped. He grabbed hold of it, levered it outside and kicked the door shut behind him, then ran for the station.

Inside he set it down and started brushing water off himself. Hearing a footstep behind him he said, “Well, it isn’t much, but let me clean it off a bit, and you—” The swish of air behind him made him look up just as Tommy’s staff connected with his head.

#

“At least you didn’t kill him,” he heard Toni say from a long way off.

“It wouldn’t have mattered much if I did,” Tommy replied. He was a little closer, Gil thought.

“That’s not what they’d say.”

“They won’t say anything.”

Gil managed to open his eyes. Things swam into focus. The common room, lights still off, everything else dark. Not yet dawn. How long had he been out? He tried to move and discovered he was duct-taped to a chair.

He licked his lips.

“Water?” Toni asked, putting a plastic cup to his mouth. He drank.

“What’s going on? What are you doing?” he managed to ask. A bit more awareness returned. The air conditioning was off, and the room was getting stuffy. A faint odor of decay rattled in his nostrils. Tommy sat across the room, examining his leg. His boot was off and he had the station’s first aid kit on his lap. His ankle was as purple as an eggplant and terribly swollen. In fact, it was lacerated, and Gil’s stomach flip-flopped when he saw a spur of white poking through the boy’s flesh. A compound fracture?

“Won’t be going far on this,” Tommy said in disgust, looking at the injury.

“You won’t have to,” said Toni. “Gil here has a car.”

“I’m not driving you anywhere,” Gil said. “You kidding?”

Brother and sister laughed. “That’s right, you’re not,” said Toni. “Don’t worry, Gil, you’re staying right here.”

Gil strained against the tape. The effort made his blood pound in his head, and he worked to stifle a groan. He thought his left hand might be a bit loose.

“You better wrap that up anyway,” Toni said, wrinkling her nose at her brother’s injury.

He shrugged. “I s’pose,” he muttered and busied himself with the first aid kit.

“Listen,” said Gil. His voice broke, so he cleared his throat and began again. “You don’t have to do this.”

Tommy glanced at him, rolled his eyes, and went back to dressing his wound. Toni dragged a plastic chair over next to Gil and sat. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Gil chewed his lower lip. If he was to free himself, he didn’t want her so near. On the other hand, perhaps they could be talked out of doing—whatever it was they intended. “Okay, look,” he said. “We all have choices to make. Sometimes we make bad ones. That’s if we just listen to ourselves. You know? But if you listen to a higher authority, you make better choices.”

“Is that what you’re doing here?” she asked. “Listening to a higher authority?”

“Yeah, like on AM,” said Tommy. “I’d try FM at least. Maybe a Podcast.”

Gil glanced at him. “You’re awfully cynical for a kid your age,” he said.

“You think we have a moral issue,” said Toni. “Right? Like we’re here to rip this place off, or something?”

He shrugged against the tape. “Well, yeah,” he said. “What else?”

Tommy rolled his eyes again. Then he stiffened. “Car!”

“How can you—” Gil broke off as light slid into the front room: headlights.

“Expecting someone?” Toni asked, standing. “Some late-night lady friend?”

Mystified, Gil shook his head. “No… it might be the station manager. Sounds like his SUV. He lives a couple miles away. I suppose he might’ve come by to see if everything’s okay after the power outage.” Gil expected the car’s lights to go off, but they remained on, shining into the darkened front office. Bryon had obviously noticed the inside lights were off, and wanted to be able to see when he went inside.

“Fuck me dead,” said Toni. “Tommy?”

“I’m on it,” said the boy. He used his staff to help himself get to his feet, and limped into the front room while Toni tore off a strip of duct tape and slapped it over Gil’s mouth.

When he tried to protest she pressed a clasp knife to his throat. “Listen, asshole, you and I both want you alive,” she whispered as the car door slammed. “So don’t make a sound, capish?”

Gil did his best to calm himself but his breath whistled raggedly, wetly, in and out of his nose. A creak from the office: Gil’s eyes went wide. He knew that sound. The little cabinet in the front office containing a fire extinguisher and an axe… its hinges needed lubricating but no one ever got around to it. Tommy was going for the axe.

The tip of Toni’s blade pushed a little more firmly against Gil’s neck and he swallowed so hard it hurt. He heard Byron’s keys enter the front door lock and turn. The door opened.

Against the glare from the SUV’s headlights Gil saw shadows move. The entire drama was astonishingly clear. Byron, silhouetted against the light, entered. Tommy stepped in from the side. Axe upraised. Then, amazingly, Byron’s shadow dropped out of view and Gil heard a thud as he hit the floor.

Slipped in a patch of water! Gil thought. And, to Jesus: Oh thank You! Thank You!

Tommy’s axe whistled through the place where Byron’s head had been.

“Judas Priest!” Byron’s profanity, the only phrase he ever used.

Then shadows wrestling, and Tommy snarling. A confused motion, a shriek from Tommy. Shadow of an upraised axe, a flash downward and a sickening noise unlike anything Gil had ever heard: the axe head smashing Tommy’s breastbone.

Toni screamed and stepped away from Gil, the knife in her hand faltering. He worked frantically at the tape restraining him and felt it give way. Sweat coursed down his forehead as he glanced up and watched Byron’s shadow as the station manager, gagging, leaned over and tugged the axe out of his assailant’s chest.

Alerted by the girl’s cry of horror that there was at least one more possible attacker in the station, Byron took a cautious step into the common room as Gil finished ripping himself free. Toni leaped for the station manager just as Gil pulled the tape off of his mouth and shouted wordlessly.

But Byron was ready. He brought the axe handle up, catching Toni a brutal blow under the chin. Her head snapped back and she went down without a sound.

As abruptly as it had started, it was over. Byron automatically groped for the light and flicked it on. There he stood, a beefy man in his forties with a buzz cut and a look of astonishment in his pale eyes.

He took in Gil, still draped with duct tape, and said, “By thunder, Gilbert, what is going on here?”

Gilbert smiled tiredly. He hated being called Gilbert, but Byron was not one for nicknames.

“I’m not really sure I know,” Gil said while Byron helped him free himself from the tape. “The girl showed up in the rain saying she was a flood refugee, and her brother came along a few minutes later.”

“Judas, Gilbert, they’re zombies!” Byron said.

“Well, I never saw any except on TV. And they weren’t falling apart or growling. How was I supposed to know?” Together they hoisted the girl into the chair where Gil had been bound.

Byron snorted. “They’re just not that far along, is all,” he said. Using the rest of the duct tape, they secured her to the chair. “There,” Byron said when they stood back. “That ought to hold her.” Toni’s head hung down so that her hair hid her face.

Gil stared fearfully at the unconscious form. “What are we going to do with them?” Gil asked. “A captive zombie and a dead one?”

“Let me go.”

Startled, they looked at Toni. Her head was up and she regarded them from clear, unblinking eyes. “Let me go,” she said again, straining against the tape.

Byron simply laughed humorlessly. “Soon’s the power comes back on, we’re calling the authorities,” he said to Gil. “They’ve got holding facilities for these things where medics study them for a cure.” He went out to turn off his car’s headlights.

Toni bared her teeth. To Gil, they seemed somehow longer and sharper than normal human dentition. “Concentration camps!” she said. “All they do there is destroy us.”

“But you’re not like most of the others,” Gil said, crouching down next to her. She stared at him. He added, “If you agree to help them, let them examine you…?”

She shook her head and sighed. “Sometimes you just get hooked into things and find yourself trapped. It’s like… well, did you ever do drugs?” She leaned forward and sniffed at him. “Yeah, you have. Not for a while though.”

“How can you possibly…?” He glanced at Byron, who had come back in in time to hear the exchange. The manager’s eyes went wide. “Ah, you’re just guessing,” Gil said hurriedly. “Guy with long hair, tattoos, must be a druggie.”

“No, you smell vaguely of cocaine and marijuana. What happened to us gives us a bigger high than anything that crap ever gave you.” She smiled wanly. “Our senses are way ramped up. We see in the dark, we can detect odors a mile away. Or more. No drug does that.”

“Gilbert, you never said anything about… substance abuse?” Byron said.

Gil looked uneasily at his boss. “It was just between me and my pastor,” he said.

Toni grinned. “Not anymore!”

“Listen, you, you—”

A dull chonk brought Gil back to awareness of his surroundings. Byron toppled over, the fire axe protruding from his back. Behind him stood Tommy, impassive, a ragged unbleeding wound in his chest where he’d torn the axe free after Byron’s attack. Toni had been deliberately distracting them while Tommy recovered.

Gil saw at once that the boy had somehow passed into another stage of the illness. His face had gone lifeless and dull, and his lower jaw hung slightly open.

“Tommy! Help me!” Toni struggled against the tape. Turning his eyes to her, Tommy stepped over Byron’s lifeless form and reached out to assist his sister.

Gil moved without really thinking what he was doing. He seized the axe handle and wrenched it free of Byron’s corpse. Standing and swinging in one move, he aimed a blow at Tommy’s back. At Toni’s warning shriek Tommy started to turn and the descending blade caught him in the upper part of his thin arm. It sliced in and ripped through. The severed arm fell to the floor with an indescribable sound.

Insanity exploded in Gil Pevney. He aimed blow after blow at the mumbling young zombie while the girl screamed in horror and rage. It was, a distant part of his mind told itself, as easy and as hard as chopping wood, though wood didn’t move while it was being cut.

In moments it was over. There was blood, but surprisingly little. Gil wasn’t sure if that was because Tommy was small and didn’t have that much blood in him in the first place, or if the zombie disease somehow diminished the amount in a person.

Poor Byron, lying there, oozed far more blood than Tommy. Clearly there was some sort of difference.

But Gil found it all but impossible to think through Toni’s wailing and shrieking. Understanding that it would be useless to try to talk to her, he set the axe down on the table and checked the tape holding her, decided it was still secure, and set about the most distasteful and revolting task of his life: clearing Tommy’s body parts from the room.

His first burden was the youth’s trunk. One arm and the head were still attached. Gil managed to lift the mutilated segment, was surprised at how light it was, and got it outside the station’s back door before vomiting. He leaned his head against the rough stucco outside wall, letting the rain spatter down on him, keeping his thoughts as clear as he could by muttering a prayer for forgiveness.

It had never occurred to him that he could kill another human being. Never in his worst nightmares had he thought that he would have to kill someone. But, in a way, he was obscurely pleased that when the crunch came, he had been equal to the task.

Recovering some of his poise, he wiped the moisture from his eyes and went back in. After all, Tommy had attacked and murdered Byron, and would obviously have attacked him next had he not done something to protect himself.

He finished the rest of the disgusting chore more easily and was back inside without having gotten sick again. Come daylight there’d have to be something done about the dismembered corpse outside and Byron’s body in the common room, but for now Gil felt he had done his best. He covered Byron’s corpse with a tarp from the utility shed.

Toni had fallen silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on the mound under the tarp, with a strange light in her eyes. Gil wanted no hint of what hideous thoughts might be passing through her mind. He slumped down into a chair and lit a cigarette. There wasn’t supposed to be any smoking inside the station, but he muttered a curse at the rule. Let ‘em reprimand him. He’d been through enough tonight; he’d earned the smoke.

He was exhaling the first big plume of smoke when the girl spoke.

“You think you’ve won.”

He sighed through another lungful of bitter vapor. “Won? Why, was this a game? All I know is, I was trying to do you a good turn, you and your brother. You repaid that by assaulting me and killing Byron. And you’re complaining because I defended myself?” He snorted and took a deep drag on the cigarette. “You can bitch about it to the cops.”

She looked at him and smiled, and a chill rippled up his spine. The light of madness shone in her pretty eyes. “I don’t expect it’ll come to that.”

He opened his mouth to respond when the station’s front door crashed inward in an explosion of broken glass. Shocked, Gil whipped around in time to see the trash can that normally sat by the door roll to a stop just outside the common room. Someone had thrown it through the glass!

He leaped to his feet but before he could take more than a step he heard a horrible blubbering moan grind through the humid air. It was wordless, furious.

“Mom! Daddy!” shouted Toni. “In here! Help me!”

Dad? Mom? The implications slammed together in Gil’s head.

Growling, muttering, Toni’s parents stumbled into the room, preceded by a graveyard stench such as Gil had never experienced in his life. If he had had anything left in his stomach he would have vomited again. Toni’s mother fumbled at the girl’s bonds while her father turned to Gil. What was left of the man’s face contorted in rage.

Gil snatched up the axe from the table and brandished it. The adult zombie took an uncertain step back, clearly wary of the bloodstained blade.

“No, Daddy! He’ll get away!”

Alerted, Toni’s mother turned away from her fumbling efforts to free her daughter and advanced on Gil from the other side of the room. Desperate, Gil swung at the male and it stepped back again, allowing Gil to duck out the door. With the zombies in pursuit, he raced for the back door. Once outside he knew he could easily outdistance the slow-paced monstrosities.

He threw open the door and dashed outside, only to trip over something on the threshold and fall headlong onto the walkway. His hands took his weight when he landed and searing pain lanced up his arms. Looking up he found himself peering directly into Tommy’s glazed, staring eyes. The boy’s dismembered torso had dragged itself forward by its one remaining arm. The other one, and the legs, had been piled against the steps to form a barrier.

Gil shrieked as Tommy’s severed arm snaked around his neck. Tommy’s legs levered themselves up onto his back. Tommy seized Gil with his attached arm and yanked himself forward, fastening his discolored teeth in the bleeding hand Gil raised to shield himself. Tommy bit down hard and Gil felt bones snap.

Something heavy landed on his back. Slimy talons dug into him.

Lightning flashed overhead, allowing Gil a final glimpse of his attackers. His screams were lost in thunder.

He did look a bit like a homeless person, but he was not.  He was so “not homeless” that it pissed me off when he was regarded as such.  He was old, weathered, educated, alive.  “Helooooo, Ryaaaaaan, how are you?, are you getting good maaarks in your school?”, he dragged every word out, each syllable passing through its own accent, French, Jamaican, English, erudite, academic, compelling.  This man could read the phone book to me and I would sit, glassy eyed and cross legged in front of him until the birds stopped singing.

He said the most amazing things whenever we spoke.  Things that I had wished I could write down and remember.  I never had a pen, but his words found a way into me, forgotten until they would be released at the most perfect moment.  The guy was liquid inspiration.

A hitman wandered by, mumbling to himself, dragging one foot, the other kicking up dry leaves on his way in to murder the guy who lives above me.

Pete thought I was a student.  I never had the heart to tell him I had just graduated and moved here to start working.  I told him I was doing well, and asked him how he was, taking great care to enunciate my words and hold my shoulders straight.

“Well you seeee, I’ve just come from the doctor, and my eyes, they have been fixed”, he dropped the word ‘fixed’ about three octaves, ten years of emphasis in one word. “My cataracts, seeee.  This doctor has helped me. This street, I haven’t seen it in ten years, all of you look so much younger nowwwww, the trees, they are bloooooming, and I can see so much in the light.”

He smiled.  He had the most fantastic smile.  12 minutes had passed since I came in.  Pete hadn’t seen anything clearly in 10 years.  Ten years and everything was milky to him, and today, he started seeing everything that we take for granted.

I suddenly hated everyone in my building.  I hated them for being so caught up in their own minor dramas; getting their mail from the doorman, staying glued to the TV’s latest crisis, signing in their visiting boyfriends, getting stabbed in the neck, quibbling over details.  Here we had something actually magical, and they all still treated him like he was a beggar.

I shook hands with Pete and wished him well.  I’d see him again.

Night came and I was on the roof with a bottle of cheap wine.  The city looked hazy from my perch in Brooklyn, the lights looked like everything I’d pictured from home.  I still had the eyes of someone from David’s “Big Country”.  I still saw it all as a teeming pile of smelly opportunity.  I knew I could barge my way into that beast and write my name all over its insides.

I chose music for the moment, but who knows where I would end up.  I wanted greatness, and my eyes were wide enough to look for it.    For now though, I was sitting on top of the stairwell to the roof.  I was sitting on the door-high cement structure called a “Steve”, as my friend Cliff and I had once named it in a fit of hallucinogenic giggles.

The Steve swayed a little as the door opened.  Someone else was on the roof.  I didn’t want company, so I crossed my digits, hoping that they didn’t climb up here too.  This was my Steve, damnit.  I looked over the edge and recognized him.  It was the walk.  He had a limp, an old injury that never healed right.  I recognized him from the lobby earlier, I wonder if Pete saw him too.

He didn’t know I was there as he shuffled to the edge of the roof.  He was facing the side of the building that looked over nothing really…no street, no other roof, just a small gap between the buildings that was full of junk and stagnant water.  He threw something into the gap.  It glinted in the spare light as it went down.  He then pulled out a rag, wiped his hands, and threw the rag into the gap.

I was frozen and worried.  I couldn’t move or he would see me, and something told me that I did not want this guy to see me.  I looked up and there were so many planes in the sky, bringing people like me here to join the chase.  Someone had their window open and I recognized the song…

“Up on cripple creek, she sent me….”

I looked back and he was vomiting.  Retching and coughing and dumping so much dark fluid onto the ground, over the side.  He held his head as he did it, as if he was trying to resist the force coming out of his mouth.  Then he was screaming, making terrible pained noises through the liquid, through his teeth.  He threw up for a long time, the noises got worse and worse until he stopped.

Now he was crying, holding his head, now he was punching himself in the head, teeth, eyes.  Crying and screaming, he came apart right there in front of me.  I’ve never seen a person betray their composure so completely, not when my father died, not when the bridge in my hometown collapsed and the wife of the man who was trapped, fused into his burning car, was caught on film.  It was a destruction so complete that I knew this man would never be made whole again.   He knew this, and instead of coming apart figuratively, he chose to physically dismantle himself.

I was horrified.  I didn’t move for what seemed like hours.  He eventually took himself up, wiped his mouth, barely removing the mess he had made of his face, and shuffled towards me.  Towards the Steve, towards the door.  I pulled back from the edge.  I laid as flat as I could.  I didn’t move.

The air stayed cool.  The city shuddered.  It was built on so much granite, and just to remind everyone of its charge, the granite shrugged, just as confused as everyone it was carrying.  Support girders cracked, but not enough for anyone to notice yet.  The veins running through the island spit their blood all over the streets.  The streets spit blood back into the veins.  Nowhere was a heart.  Every liquid cranked into alcohol and grease, every molecule saw itself in a mirror and was scared.

A star came down, didn’t crash, but came closer, just to make sure it was real.  The divine left in disbelief, muttering nothing under its breath.   Rock became soil, human became soil, soil became nothing but a novelty.  Something for people to take pictures of and send home.

The wind blew and the air above me smelled sweet and human.  It smelled like the inside of something.  I felt dirt and gravel grinding beneath my shoulder, hurting, almost tickling.  I turned my head and realized. I had fallen asleep.  The wind blew a little more and it was another song I recognized…

“Doctor my eyes have seen the years…”

I was glad, and it was still night.  I must have been out for an hour or so.  The wine must have gotten me, oddly, but I was thankful for the bottle that was rolling around near my feet.  What a terrible dream.  The wind blew again, and there was that smell again, human, pungent, sickly and sweet.  Again, and it wasn’t sweet anymore, it smelled like bile and bad breath.

“YOU WERE DREAMING. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAM”, belched a huge, wet, ragged voice, just inches away from my face.  Something dripped onto my nose.

It was him, fuck me, it was him.  Adrenaline shot through me and my heart flipped and jumped up to meet my face.  I ratcheted around and scooted on my butt as far away as I could.  I hit the back ledge of the Steve hard, bruising my tailbone, almost falling off.  There he was, just far enough up the ladder that he could see over the edge.  I looked him dead in the face.  His dead, mess covered face twisting, “well, what happened in your dream?”, he choked and wiped bile and snot from his lips.

“I, I….”

“Ack.  Eye?”, he grinned as he pointed to his wide right eye.  It was crisscrossed with thousands of burst blood vessels from all of his retching.  He kept pointing though, until he was touching it.  He touched his eye harder than anyone should touch their eye, pushing stomach acid and dead skin cells right up under his eyelid.

“I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see you.”

“Neither did I” he said, staring.  “Come with me you little shit.”

He grabbed my leg and dragged me off the Steve, my head hitting the rail ladder on the way down, knocking me into a daze as I landed flat on my back on the roof.  “Get up”, he spat, as he hauled me to my feet.  Into the stairwell.

He walked me down to the room right above mine, room 523.

He showed me the man he had murdered.  He showed me where the blade went in, right underneath the Adam’s apple.  He showed me where he extracted his pound of flesh.  He showed me the money he received to murder him.  It was a lot of money.  He showed me the pictures of the man’s family and friends, now with no precedent or reason to be in the room.  He showed me what his blood would look like when they found him.

He took me outside and walked me through the streets, he took me past happy restaurants and bars, full of happy people and friends.  He smashed my face against their windows and made it clear that none of them could help me.  He pulled me by my arm until my collarbone broke.  He dragged me underground.  He showed me where the rats lived.  He showed me how to lie down with them and listen.  He showed me how to wait there for him to come back.  They crawled over me and left their waste in my mouth.  Stopping in back alleys he made me watch as he used a broken beer bottle to remove living things beneath the skin of his arms, legs, hand, calves, eye.  He vomited and spewed, he pulled chunks of his hair out and showed them to me.

He took me to the freeway and showed me what the car looked like after 52 bullets went through it, before the cops put their guns away, before the driver stopped twitching, before they called it in.  He showed me my idols, rock stars, in the privacy of their lush homes as they beat their wives and snarled at their children.  He showed me the foam under the pier, the foam in the mouth of an army of rabid dogs, neglected and staring me right in the eyes.

He showed me the girl I would fall in love with.  He let me feel the love.  She was so beautiful.  He showed me everything as he murdered her right in front of me.  He slowed down time so the loss crept through me molecule by molecule, so I could feel every millimeter of pain and sadness as the light left her eyes.

He never obscured anything.  He wasn’t capable of metaphor or any other mechanism.  He wasn’t capable of anything that wasn’t literal.  He laughed at me when I broke, when he laughed he lost teeth.  When I cried he lost more teeth and they dropped all around me.  He disintegrated and pulled himself apart.  His clothes became only an idea as his bones showed, splintering when he needed to pick me up, to make me see whatever it was he had to show me.

He showed me a man.  This man had a name sort of like mine, and a face that was another sort of like mine.  He showed me how dark this man was, how consumed by his own greed and sapped of creativity.  He was so sad as he wept into his last dose of some drug whose name he could not pronounce.  As this man kicked his legs and foamed at the mouth he kicked up regret, only pieces of his own horrid history.  Pictures of mistakes.  Signed documents that proved his lies.  One by one.  This man was weeping and dying and he wouldn’t let me look away.  I felt his horrid fingers break against my chin, breathed his skin flaking off as he struggled to keep my head up and seeing.

I crouched and hoped for darkness, hoped for nothing.  He was on my back screaming into my ear.  All awful breath and dried out gums.

He showed me nothing.  He told me everything.  His hate came out of him in the most vile voice imaginable, each syllable more putrid and hateful than the one before it.  His was the language of metal on metal, of bones breaking in echo chambers, of frequencies beyond hearing, wavelengths that made me deaf to everything except his voice.

He told me of civilizations devouring each other alive for no reason.  He told me, in detail, about the deaths of everyone I had ever known.  He told me every secret I have ever failed to keep.  Called me every name anyone ever called me behind my back.  He took all the pity and mercy I have ever given and turned it into a vicious rant, condemnation, spraying the opposite of love deep into my ear.  His hate went deep and infected me.  It turned my whole being as black and deep as the center of his eye.

“YOU WERE DREAMING.  TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAM!”, he screamed.  I didn’t think he could get louder, I prayed he wouldn’t.  But he did.

My eardrums buckled under the bulk of his words.  There was a wind now.  It howled out of him, screaming and ripping his now frail body into twisted jerky poses.  His hands still held me, and as they broke and snapped they only got stronger.  His grip grew tough, like a closing vice with no ‘off’ switch.  There was no mercy in his grip.  I felt my jaw collapse.  My screams now mixed in with the roar around me.  He vomited dust and bad ideas, his last two fingers crushing together until there were only teeth between them, then dust.  I choked on my own teeth and swallowed my tongue just as his final finger broke.

He was unable to hold me anymore so he just lay on my back, his mouth still licking horribly at my ear, beating his handless bones against my ribs, cracking them, frustrating his scream to an even higher pitch.  I beat my hands, started pounding them on whatever I could, screaming as the blackness screamed back, loud as a train falling down a set of stairs.

The more I pounded the more my hands hurt; I beat them until they were raw.  I beat them on the ground until I could finally see them in the storm raging around me.  I beat them one more time and….light….

My eyes started to clear a little in the sunlight.  They felt dry, wasted.  The light hurt.  All around me the world was tearing itself apart.  There was noise, sirens, and chaos.  I could hear fire burning, smell smoke.  People were screaming everywhere.  The wind blew and I felt wet. My clothes were sticking to me.  I was covered in blood and my mouth was full of something vile, something…substantial.  The smell was awful.

What had I done?  I took a step forward as the contents of my mouth fell out and slapped my chest and I almost slipped…the ground at my feet was slick with something…hands, teeth, hair, insides, all wiggling about.  My eyes were so dry, I blinked, but they did not focus the dark figure in front of me.  One step closer and I saw.   It was Pete!  I was so thankful, “Pete, what happened?  What have I done?”  I was so terrified, but I knew Pete could help me.  As I tried to speak though…I couldn’t…nothing came out but a dry croak from the back of my throat.  No words, no communication.

“Please help me, Please”, but he could not hear me.  I only dragged my vocal chords into a horrible moan.  This made me angry, and the hate He had spattered so carelessly all over my insides started to make itself known.  “Destroy him.  Negate him”, His words echoed from a dream that did not end.  As the wind kissed the blood on my arms I saw Pete’s face, and he raised one arm.

“Help me”, I said one last time.

“I can seeeee you now, my friend”, he said.

A click, and the hammer came down….

“Dis guy in a yellow hoody, he da one that tore out my liver with his bare hands. It took me almost an hour to die, scweaming and spitting and sprayin’ blood all over the place. He just stood there watchin’ me, chewing on my liver like it was the Colonel. Musta been finger-lickin’ good. Man, I know it was. I know, Trevor.

“It ain’t all like they says it is, like they shows on the CNN and Fox. The dead gots feelings. We knows what is going on. We just ..”

There are more slurping noises, as if someone were sucking thick ice cream through a straw.

“Uh, yeah. It is a miscon- … miscon-… misconception that the dead don’t know no fear. We know lots of fear. We jus’ can’t do nothing about it.

“But eat. That’s all that drives away the fear, and that only for a little while.

“I guess you wonderin’ why I left you this tape, and how, cause you know I wasn’t home when the shit went down and the world ended and all.

“After the yellow hoody guy, I went dark, don’t remember a thing until comin’ too sometimes later. I was still at the laundromat, spread out on the floor next to clothes and rags splattered red. My side was torn open, and the red stuff had stopped leakin’ out and had turned black.

“When I pushed myself up off the floor, I found I could not move real well, but bad, like drunk or high on crank. My eyes still work, though, but a little blurry.

“I look ’round for yellow hoody man so I can kick his ass, but he gone.

“Then I look outside. I see the new world for the first time.

“There is dead peoples all over the place. Some of them are actin’ dead, like they supposed to, layin’ still and all in pools of blood. Most of them look like they been attacked by wild dogs. Big chunks of them are missing, ripped away.

“And then there’s the other kind of dead folk. They up walkin’ around. And I see real quick they is the ones doing the chomping. Most times they only stopped if one of the layin’-down dead peoples is still twitchin’. Then the walkin’ dead grabs the twitchin’ dead and puts bite on them real hard.”

There are grumbling noises.

“I think the whole world gone crazy. Then I ‘member the TV news shows, talkin’ about the dead coming back to life and how they’s pissed off. You and me, we laughed at it. Said it was just a bunch of folks stoned off their noggins.

“But now I know it true.

“There weren’t nothing left for me to do but go out in the streets. I wasn’t feared of the walking dead people ’cause they didn’t seem to pay me no mind. So I walked out with dem.

“We walked and walked, shufflin’ around, me seeing store windows busted all over the place. There were wrecked cars too, and more bodies (the unmovin’ ones) than I thought was people in the world. Fires and smoke there was too, and for a while there were alarms from I guess cars and banks and places.

“Then after a long walk, the sun went down and I rested on a bench in the park. I would not say I was sleepin’, but more like relaxin’ with my eyes open.

“After it had been dark for a long time, other people came walkin’ along.

“These was live folks. I could tell right away. I could smell them. They smelt like bacon, and my stomach felt like it had not eaten in ten thousand years.

“I jumped up off my bench and started after these folks, and one of them had a gun and shot at me.

“The bullets just hit my chest like they was slammin’ into raw meat, which lookin’ back I guess is what I was by then. I didn’t feel no pain. I didn’t feel nothin’ but hungry, hungry, hunger.

“The man with the gun kept shooting until his gun went click, click, click, then I grabbed him and ripped out his throat with my teeth.

“It was like nothin’ you have ever experienced before, Trevor. It is like better than sex. Better than H. It was raw meat goin’ down my throat and it tasted like I seen Jesus.

“After that, the rest of the living people all ranned away.”

Coughing fills the recorder’s speaker.

“I apologize. You knows I can talks better than this. It is just that my voice don’t work too good.”

More coughing. Spitting.

“My mind don’t work too good too.”

Another cough, followed by more growling and tearing noises.

“The sun comes up pretty soon after that, and I see the deads man I been eatin’ on all night is a cop. Which suit me fine ’cause I never like the boys in blue. But it dawn on me I have killt someone and I have eaten parts of the body, and it does not bother me. I would do it again to get that Jesus feeling.

“Then I start thinkin’ about the Jesus feeling, and I start think about Janine.

“So I decide I have to go find Janine. I had not seen her since the world gone crazy. I loves her so much…”

Crying.

“I loves her, Trevor. I still loves her. I will always loves her.”

The crying grows louder, harsher, and becomes full sobs. The noise ends abruptly with a shout.

“I walk all the ways home, and I think it take me most of the day since I had been on other end of town when doing the laundromat and the yellow hoody kill me, and I no walk real good no more.

“When I get to apartment, I find the door is open and there is dead folk (layin’ down dead folk) piled up in the doorway. I climb over the dead folk and find more of dem in the livin’ room.

“I get kind of nervous and yell out, ‘Janine! Janine! It your hubby come home!’

“At first there is nothin’, then I hear cryin’ in the back of the house. I make my way there and I yell for her some more.

“Then I hear her yell back, ‘Lonnie, is that you?’

“I yell back that yes it is, and she comes runnin’ out of the back bedroom.

“She is a shock to see, my pretty Janine girl. Her face covered in blood, red and black and bad colors, and bruises. She carryin’ a pistol in one hand and over her shoulder I see more dead peoples in the bedroom.

“Before I can ask where she got gun she cries out and rushes to me, droppin’ her gun and yellin’ my name and telling me how glad she is to see me.

“Then she is on me, putting her arms aroun’ me and squeezing and all I can think of is she smells like Big Mac and my stomach is churning and by God I’m hungry and I don’t want to do this but oh sweet Lord please don’t let me do this I have to do this I have to I have to I have to …”

Silence. Crying. When the voice returns, it is barely above a whisper.

“I eats her, Trevor. I starts with her face, my sweet little angel girl Janine. She the only one who made me feel like I was in heaven and I eats her. I bites into her cheek and blood comes out all over us and she screams and shoves me, but I hold on to her real good and she tried to grab up the gun she just dropped but I bite into her neck and more blood sprays my face.

“I keep goin’ on and on, biting and biting, and each little bite makes me feel like I’m with Jesus on the Mount or someplace.

“She put up a fight, but it weren’t nothin’. Soon she one of the not moving dead people and my stomach not hungry no more so I drop her.

“I cry. I cry like I never cry before. It worse even than when pops die, Trevor, because I know I done a bad thing here eating Janine.

“She was love of my life. The only one. The only one. And I eat her up like she was pork and beans at county fair.”

Sniffling.

“So I know what I have to do. I has to warn any one else I love, and Trevor you are my brother and my last family.

“I takes the gun Janine dropped and I march out of the house. I remember you live on east side next to new baseball stadum, so I walk over there.

“It take me ‘nother day or more, and when I get to yer house I glad you and Katie and kids are gone because I don’t want you to smell like bacon and fill my stomach.

“I want to end this and warn you because I love you like I used to love Jesus before I became one of the bad ones like yellow hoody.

“So I break into your house and find this old Sears tape player we had when we was kids at Christmas, and I find old tape and batteries and I leave you message.

“This is message.”

An explosion booms, jarring the recorder. Then the hiss of empty, white noise.

A gurgle.

“Aim for head, little brother. Aim for head.”

A second explosion reverberates from the speaker.