Darlings of Decay

by Chrissy Peebles

  Sebastian didn’t say anything, he just flipped the channel. They were all breaking news and bulletins. The Nevermore drug had been taken by what officials were estimating was close to ninety percent of the North American population over the last two months—street versions and FDA approved versions—both of which were having the same effect.

  We watched in stunned silence for over an hour, the reports coming hard and fast at first, but then slowing as people were cautioned to stay within their homes and avoid all contact with the outside world while the outbreak was taken care of.

  “I never thought I’d see the day a zombie apocalypse would happen,” I said as Sebastian turned the TV off.

  “They aren’t zombies,” he snapped at me as he rubbed his left arm. “They can’t bite you and turn you into one of them. The doctors on TV said that already.”

  “I didn’t say that they could bite you, I just said that they were zombies,” I said, confused by his sudden turn of mood.

  “No, you didn’t. I’m sorry; this has just really freaked me out,” he said and pulled me into his arms, Nero squirming in between us.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said, “We’ve got each other and the farm. We should be good for a while, right? It won’t take long. Someone will have this straightened out in no time.”

  Sebastian untangled himself from me and strode to the kitchen. “We have to be ready.”

  I followed him. “For what?”

  “I think we’re going to be on our own for a while,” he said as a loud thumping footstep echoed through our little house.

  My adrenaline soared as I thought about the scene on the TV. The reporter hadn’t had a chance. I could still hear her screams and the peeling of her flesh from his bite . . .I swallowed hard and put Nero in the bathroom on a makeshift towel-bed, shut the door, and headed back into the kitchen. I didn’t want to believe that we were already going to face down one of the Nevermores, but it was all too likely. I stepped to my knife drawer, pulled out the biggest blade I had, and gripped it tight. Sebastian nodded and pulled out a knife of his own. Together we crept through the house to the front door, reaching it as another thump rumbled through the floorboards. What the hell was out there? I didn’t want to know, really I didn’t.

  Sebastian held up his hand and with his fingers counted to three. I nodded, and he held up one finger, two, and as he held up the third, he gripped the doorknob and snapped the door open.

  5

  We both stumbled back in relief, Dan staring at us with bushy grey eyebrows lifted high. He had his gun slung over his shoulder and a strap across his chest that was full of ammunition, long gold and silver cartridges. They looked big enough to drop an elephant.

  “You two need some lessons in surviving. First off, don’t go investigating a strange noise without some serious firepower. This is not a horror movie, there’s no hero going to come rescue you. You want to survive this outbreak of idiots who took some new drug and turned into animals, you’re gonna have to do it on your own.”

  He stepped across the threshold and sauntered into our house, casual like, as if he belonged here. I lifted an eyebrow at Sebastian who shrugged and said, “Dan, what’re you doing here?”

  “Don’t you listen, boy? You need a lesson or two before I go and lock myself in the bunker.” He paced around the living room, peering out the curtains of the bay window.

  “Dan, they’ll have an antidote in no time and this will go down as one of the greatest blunders in history and everything will go back to normal,” I said, desperately wanting to believe my own words.

  “You really believe that, girl?” He turned his steely eyes on me.

  I froze, my mouth dry as he made me face the reality with a single look. I shook my head ever so slowly.

  He mimicked me. “Didn’t think so.” He flopped himself onto our couch. With a sharp motion of his hand, he beckoned us to come closer. Sebastian obeyed, but I stayed where I was, near to the open door.

  “Second thing.” Dan leaned forward, elbows on his knees and lowered his voice. “Food and water. Next is weapons. Then you got to have a way to keep them out.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, my fear making me surly. “There isn’t going to be any horde or pack or whatever you think there’s going to be.” A breeze blew in and I spun to close the door, gasping at the person standing on the edge of the doorstep. I vaguely recognized him as the portly clerk from Tom’s Grocery. But he was no longer chubby. He was lean, the excess flesh hanging off his arms and face, the skin a sickly yellow like the man on the TV. Worst was the way his pupils had become a horizontal slit that stole his humanity from him.

  “Hungry,” was all he said as he launched himself at me. I stumbled backwards with a grunt, striking out with my knife and getting nothing but air. We hit the ground and I rolled, trying to remember my distant Judo lessons, failing miserably. The clerk ended up on top of me, but didn’t pin my knife hand; I suppose he was too focused on eating me. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my left hand wrapped around his throat, keeping his snapping teeth off me, and I slammed the knife upwards into his heart, blood spurting out around the blade and down the handle.

  I blinked and his body was suddenly gone; yanked off me with a growl. Sebastian stared down at me with a look of horror across his face.

  Dan stepped up next to him. “She’s got a good survival drive. That’ll serve you well. If she were a screamer, you’d be dead in no time.”

  I lay on the floor staring up at them, my brain trying to process what just happened. I’d been attacked, and I’d killed a man. In a less time than it took to take a breath of air, my life had twisted itself inside out. My hands were slick with his blood, and as I stood, a wave of vertigo washed over me.

  “She’s gonna puke.”

  Hands were suddenly on me, guiding me outside where I did indeed puke, heaving till my stomach was empty and sweat beaded on my forehead. Dan turned the hose on and I washed my hands clean and sprayed the cool water over my face. I had killed a man. My stomach clenched again and I dry heaved.

  “Oh shit,” Sebastian said, his voice off to my right, his hands tightening on my arms.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  “Not you, babe.” He turned me to the front of our property and the open gate. “Them.”

  Maybe it wasn’t a horde, but there was close to twenty people walking our way, the distinct yellow of their skin visible even from here.

  Sebastian let me go and ran for the gate.

  “Bastian, don’t!” As a unit, every single one of the Nevermore’s heads snapped up, their slitted eyes focusing on the source of the scream. Me.

  “Damn it, girl, I told you no noise,” Dan growled as he walked past me, putting his gun to his shoulder and taking aim at the running horde, though he didn’t pull the trigger. Sebastian reached the gate the same time as the first of the Nevermores and he flung the heavy panels shut, slamming the lock into place as they hammered their bodies up against it, screaming and howling, their eyes wild and hands reaching for Sebastian.

  I ran down the porch, jumped across the flowerbeds, and ran to where Sebastian stood panting, staring at the horde in front of us. “Why aren’t they trying to climb the gate?” I whispered.

  Sebastian shook his head, breathing hard. That had been a quick sprint for a man of his size, faster than I’d seen him move in years.

  Dan strolled up next to us, casually, like he was out for a Sunday visit, and except for the gun slung over his shoulder and the horde of Nevermores at our gate, he could have been.

  “Interesting, that. They don’t seem to be able to figure it out. Like animals penned up.” But even as he spoke, one of the Nevermores pushed his way through to the front of the group and began to fiddle with the gate, his fingers clumsy and far from dexterous. He didn’t seem to be able to use the finer points of motor skills, which was better for us. All the same, he was still trying to open the gate.

  “We’ve got to get out o
f here,” Sebastian said, pulling me with him as he backed away from the gate.

  I didn’t need a lot of encouragement. I was not interested in facing down that horde anytime soon. Thank God our place was fully fenced.

  “We’re stuck here for a while, boy. Might as well get used to the idea, unless you’ve got a tank in that shed over there.” Dan pointed to the dilapidated chicken coop we’d partially knocked down in preparation for a garden.

  “We don’t need a tank.” I surprised myself by speaking my thoughts out loud to a virtual stranger. “We’ll just take the car. They can’t stop us, and we’ll just run them over.”

  I could barely believe the words that came out of my mouth and apparently neither could Sebastian.

  “You’re kidding me, right? Those things out there are people underneath it all, and you want to run them over?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, they want to EAT us, not play Parcheesi,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. A sharp rattle snapped all three of our heads toward the gate in unison. The horde was leaning into the steel gates, the hinges groaning. Every last one of them had their mouths open, teeth showing, saliva dripping and hanging from loose lips.

  “We need to get out of sight,” Dan said, walking back to the house.

  “We need to get out of here!” Hysteria bubbled up. I’d just killed a man and we had a horde of drug-induced zombies on our doorstep. I clapped my hands over my face and tried to block out the moment. The sights were gone, but the groan of the gates, the growling of the horde, still reached me, denying me my moment of escape.

  A hand on my arm snapped my eyes open. Sebastian dragged me toward the house. “We’ll talk about what we’re going to do inside. The last thing we need is to go off half-cocked and get ourselves killed.”

  I let him direct my body, but I couldn’t help but stare over my shoulder at the writhing mass of things that had until very recently been human. “This can’t be happening.”

  A sharp shake brought my eyes up to Sebastian, fear and the denial of that fear making his eyes those of a person I barely recognized. “It is happening, Mara, and you need to get used to the idea,” he said, his mouth a thin hard line. I jerked my arm out of his hands.

  “You’re an ass, you know that, don’t you?” I stomped toward the front door, slamming it behind me. All I wanted was a little comfort, a white lie or two to get me through the initial shock. After that, I could come to terms with what was going on.

  The living room was dim, the flickering of the TV the only light, as the curtains and blinds were drawn down. Dan sat on the couch, his feet propped up on the hand-carved coffee table we’d bought for our first place.

  “Feet off,” I said, shoving his feet off before he could remove them himself. “I don’t care if this is the end of the world, I don’t want your feet on my coffee table.”

  The door opened behind me and shut with a soft click. I kept my back turned to Sebastian, my spine rigid, my breathing slow and deliberate as I tried to rein in my anger. A whine came from the bathroom, and I stomped down the hallway and swung the door open. Nero tried to scamper between my legs, but I scooped him up and held him tight. A minute passed and the anger started to drain out of me. Taking one last deep breath, I carried Nero into the living room. I stared at the TV and came to a sudden stop, unable to take my eyes off the screen.

  Dan leaned forward. “I’d hoped they’d have gotten it under control in the bigger cities, at least.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case,” I said, my hands trembling as I stroked Nero. Lists of major cities that had been overrun and were considered uninhabitable flashed on the screen in no particular order: Toronto, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Edmonton, Brisbane, New York, Atlanta, Ottawa, London, Perth, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Glasgow, Mexico City, Venice, Lima; the list went on and on, scrolling for a solid two minutes.

  “Every continent has been hit by this catastrophe, though some obviously worse than others.” The male announcer’s voice blared to life on the screen, and I jumped involuntarily. Nero gave a squeak. I kissed him on the top of his head.

  The camera panned to a reporter in what looked like a bare-bones room, cement walls, and shelves of strange scientific-looking paraphernalia.

  “Dr. Josephson, what can you tell us about the events? Will the drug wear off? What can we do about this situation?” the reporter asked, turning to the camera every few words, as if to gain permission from the viewing audience to ask the questions.

  “It’s simple, even for a nincompoop like you, Blaine,” Dr. Josephson said.

  “It’s Bruce.”

  “Whatever. The drug was skipped through the FDA testing as well as Health Canada; money greased the wheels to hurry it to market. In the two months since it’s been out, it made over 1.6 trillion dollars. You can imagine how that would make a company eager to get it to the public.”

  Bruce leaned in. “Those numbers can’t be right.”

  Dr. Josephson snorted. “337 million people, give or take a few thousand, get the shot through legal means. That’s in North America alone. Five thousand dollars per shot, one hundred people a day per clinic. You should do your research before you go on air, Bruno.”

  The doctor sat down on a ratty old stool and looked up into the camera, as if Bruce were no longer worth speaking to.

  “There is no cure. There is no chance it will go away. It won’t wear off, it is designed to link permanently to the molecular structure of human bones, organs, and most importantly, brain. It cannot be transferred by a bite, as the modern movie culture would have you believe. These are not zombies, these are people gone feral, wild. They are acting as packs, not unlike a pack of wolves with an Alpha male and female, and the rest working as a group for food and protection.” His pale blue eyes bore into me and I shivered with the intensity. “To the public who have not taken Nevermore, I will say only one thing,” He paused, dropped his head and shook it slightly before looking back up into the camera.

  “Survive.”

  6

  With that, the TV went blank, and the screen turned into a warning system of striped colours. The silence in our little home was overwhelming and I wanted to say something to break it, but didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would mean anything, and since screaming hysterically was out of the question, I was out of options.

  Dan stood, drawing our attention. “That’s it then, I’m headed back to my place.”

  “What?” Sebastian asked. “You can’t get out of here alive, there’s no way you’ll make it.”

  He strolled to the back door, ignoring Sebastian’s assessment, glancing over his shoulder at us. “There’s a back trail, goes up and around, it’s a great view of the ocean at the top. I think these things—”

  “Nevermores,” I said softly.

  Dan nodded at me. “These Nevermores seem to be sticking to the main routes right now, so if you come to my place, come the back way. I’ll put a red flag next to it. Other than that, plant a garden, grow yourself some food, mend your fences, and keep quiet.”

  He put his hand on the door and I grabbed the back of his grubby shirt. “Hey, you can’t just leave us here.”

  Dan laughed and half-turned back to me. “You city folk are going to be the first to die off—not prepared, no survival instinct.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “You might make it; you got some good reflexes on you.”

  Sebastian stepped up and I didn’t let go of Dan. “You could help us. At least we could be working together,” I said.

  Again Dan laughed. “I don’t work with anybody, it ain’t my style. Too much drama when you get more than one person in a room.”

  “So,” Sebastian said. “We’re supposed to be grateful you showed up for a belated house warming, and you didn’t even bring us a gift? You happen to visit in the middle of a crisis where you don’t even help? I don’t know why you bothered at all.”

  I let go of Dan’s coat, feeling my own ange
r build. What the hell was Dan’s reasoning, or was he truly just as crazy as we’d heard?

  Dan straightened his coat and lifted an eyebrow at us, then nodded slowly. “If you can make it to my place, I’ll let you have a weapon, but this is Mother Nature’s way of weeding out the weak. Only the strong will survive this, and that’s how it should be. To tell you the truth, I came here to take what you had and add it to my stores. But you were still here, still alive. Mores the pity.”

  We stared at him in disbelief, the reality of the situation hitting us both at the same time.

  The door clicked softly as he left without even saying goodbye, or better, good luck. I wondered if he meant for us to mend our fences around the property, or the proverbial ones between us. I looked over to Sebastian, took in his drawn face and worried eyes. My heart gave a thump and I put Nero down before I all but threw myself into Sebastian’s arms.

  Between sobs and ‘I’m sorry’ on both sides, our lips met and we caught the edge of a mania that perhaps other survivors were feeling. Glad to be alive we stripped each other out of our clothes and stumbled upstairs to the bathroom. The water still ran, we hadn’t lost power yet, and we drained the hot water tank showering off the sweat and remnants of blood, wrapping ourselves around each other, washing the fear away for a moment or two.

  We made love in the shower and then again in the bedroom, our frantic need to touch and feel overwhelming any common sense—like locking the doors.

  Lying in each other’s arms, we dozed off, dreaming perhaps that this was all a nightmare, a shared fear come to life in the night, but gone when the light of day streamed through the windows. Not so much.

  The bedroom door creaked, the knob clicking against something; perhaps nails, or perhaps what we later learned was skin hardening into a hide like leather. I woke, chills rippling over my body, the sensation of being watched heightened by a disorientation of time and place.