Tales of the Decay

by James Barton

  He began to crawl out from under the porch and as he turned his head forward, he came face to face with Mandy. Or at least, what was left of her. She was sprawled half under the porch, her bottom half sticking strangely out in the sunlight. Her face was intact, but the back of her head, well, it was just fucking gone. She was covered in bites and nearly unrecognizable, except for her face. She seemed to smile at Wesley, saying that she would never leave him. Wesley quickly turned and crawled away from her and the monster below.

  Shaking himself, he scanned his surroundings. Nothing seemed changed – except, this time, Bob was scratching away at his bunker hatch from the other side.

  Little had changed since he had gone down in the bunker. Except for his orangeade, which had collected a handful of gnats as it sat abandoned on his porch, there was no sign that he had been trapped below for so long. Where were the clouds of smoke, why were there no sirens? Where was … the apocalypse? Nothing looked like it was the end. He stumbled to his back door and opened it with ease. “You didn’t even lock it?” he asked himself.

  “It wasn’t like I had a lot of warning,” he replied.

  As he entered his small home, he noticed that the power was off. At least there was that. Otherwise, as he hobbled to the bathroom, it appeared that his home was untouched. He frantically rooted through his medicine cabinet and began to pour hydrogen peroxide directly into his wound. Normally something like that would burn like fire, but today he felt no pain. Wesley’s mind raced at the various theories of infection and contagion. He could only pray that he somehow was not infected. He didn’t even pretend to have the willpower to amputate his leg.

  Wesley fell into his bed and it felt wrong. He had grown accustomed to sleeping on the bunker floor and this just didn’t seem like home anymore. The open space made him feel uneasy. He lay on the fluffy pillowtop padding and sank into a deep sleep, something he hadn’t done in a long time.

  When he came to, there was a burning in his head that he had never felt before. He got out of the bed, his legs feeling like jelly, wobbled to the bathroom and clumsily rooted through his medicine cabinet. He accidentally knocked nearly a dozen bottles of medicines that were of no use to him onto the floor. He grabbed a white bottle and twisted the cap off and swallowed a handful of pills. Aspirin probably wouldn’t help much, but it was all he had.

  He walked to the window and snatched the curtains aside. Outside, the sun was nearly setting and he could see vehicles moving in the distance, which, from where he stood, looked like tiny toys. The port was only a mile from his house. He had gotten a better deal on the place due to its proximity to heavy industrial work. The port must still be working. Wesley hobbled back toward the bathroom to get more pills.

  “When the sun goes down, those beetles could get in the house,” a voice whispered.

  “Huh?” Wesley looked up in surprise, but saw only his own face in the mirror. He barely recognized himself. He had grown haggard and was showing just a little too much white around the eyes, but he would know his own voice when he heard it, and this wasn’t it. Ironically, this time it seemed to come from inside himself, yet it definitely wasn’t his own. The “other” Wesley, who had kept him company during the dark underground hours and days, remained silent. The other Wesley, it appeared, was dead and gone. Replaced, apparently, by someone who knew what he was talking about.

  “We need to get to that port. It has lights and, if you’re lucky, you can catch a ride away from this disease-ridden countryside. It even has more shipping containers,” the voice explained. If Wesley had still been in full control of his senses, the idea of more shipping containers might have been the last thing he wanted to face, but, somehow, the voice made them sound strangely … attractive. Wesley stared at the mirror dumbly and smiled. The voice filled his thoughts and yet, he no longer moved his mouth.

  “Mmhmm,” Wesley hummed.

  Wesley stepped out into the front yard and stared at his car. He uselessly pawed at the door handle. He stood there dumbfounded as he tried to remember how to get inside. He slapped at the glass in frustration and eventually began to walk away.

  As he trudged through the muddy field, the sun began to rest on the horizon. Wesley’s steps became more and more difficult, through the thick mud and the waning of his motor functions. He struggled to stay on his feet and the cool breeze combined with the wet mud made his skin feel frozen. Soon, he lost feeling in most of his body. Despite his cold limbs, his head was still on fire and his mouth had gone incredibly dry. The edges of his vision began to dance with colored circles as darkness enclosed his sight. Wesley knew that if he didn’t make it to those lights, the flesh-eating beetles would tear him apart.

  “There it is,” the voice said.

  “Huh?” Wesley grunted.

  “I can see the fence.”

  Wesley trudged closer and closer as the sun began to hide behind the hills. As he neared the fence, he could just make out that he was approaching an empty guard shack with a vehicle arm extended across the road. With the building being strangely empty, Wesley’s attention was drawn to a group of individuals circled around something in the distance. He was suddenly hit with hunger pains and he tried to think back to his last meal. It was difficult to remember what he ate, let alone when. In the middle of the cargo yard was a steel storage container, nearly identical to the one he built his bunker out of. There was a forklift idling near it.

  “Those people are really distracted by something over there. I think now is your chance to catch a ride in that cargo container.”

  Wesley simply moaned in frustration.

  “Catch a ride, nothing can hurt you in there. Once you get far enough from the port make some noise and they will let you out. They might be mad, but you’ll be able to escape this contagion.”

  Wesley slowly nodded. He made a clumsy dash for the storage crate and ended up tripping under the vehicle arm. It made an audible beep as he passed by the sensor, but the crowd didn’t seem to notice. Whatever was on the ground seemed to have them in a panic. Wesley pulled himself along the ground before regaining his focus. He stood up and wobbled over to the storage container. He passed through a spotlight and vaguely feared that he would be seen, but the crowd was busy pulling someone in the other direction. Many of them were messing with their cell phones and holding them up seeking better reception.

  With a drunken lunge, Wesley flung himself into the shipping container. It had been hastily loaded with pallets of dull brown boxes. Something toward the back glimmered and caught Wesley’s eye. He slowly and clumsily squeezed himself through the cardboard maze. He fell to his knees and the shiny object was merely a metallic wrapper to a granola bar. A box in the back had been punctured and dozens of the chocolate nut bars had spilled onto the floor.

  Even though he had originally come here for safety and shelter, his brain now only told him to eat. Wesley felt a cold throbbing sensation that seemed to run from his head down to his toes. He began to get weak and dizzy. He pawed at the small pile of silvery treats and raised one to his mouth. His fingers pinched at the wrapper, but he couldn’t quite get a handle on it. He was so hungry, hungrier than he had ever been in his entire life. He finally gave up and bit through the wrapper, chewing oats and packaging alike. He devoured the small granola bar in no time. There in the back of the shipping container, hunched over a pile of snacks, he waited for some sort of relief. Without warning, his stomach suddenly wretched and he began to vomit a stream of sticky black and red liquid, which, even in his current state, he knew was never a good sign. Just as he was wiping his mouth and nose with his sleeve, he heard the steel doors of the container slam shut, plunging him again into complete darkness. He should have been afraid, but, instead, he just settled down on the container’s floor and let himself fall into a deep, dark sleep.

  That night the dock workers subdued their supervisor who, after his lunch break, had returned agitated and sickly. By the time sunset began, he attacked another worker, biting him on t
he arm and scratching three other people. After finally getting him tied down, they tried to call for an ambulance, but failed to get a response. The foreman decided to take the injured personnel to the hospital himself and strapped their boss into the back seat of his work van. The dock workers for Freighter 6421 finished loading the ship and watched as it left the harbor.

  Wesley succumbed to his wounds and died in the cargo container, much like the one he had prepared to live in for months after a catastrophe. He thought he had prepared the living environment to keep his body running in top shape for months. What he hadn’t prepared for was the mental stress of isolation and constant fear of death. As his sanity crumbled, so did his chances of survival. Ever since he was bitten, the echoing of his own voice had transformed into something … new. It was a powerful booming that seemed to originate from inside his head. Wesley had successfully escaped a single cricket, but at the cost of becoming infected. But, as he slipped into the black abyss of death, parts of this new intelligence survived.

  When the thing that had been Wesley awoke in its new, dark prison, he wasn’t sure who he was, where he was, or even how he had gotten there. Wrapped in darkness, accompanied only by a deep, steady thrumming sound that was almost felt more than heard, he was experiencing a whole new sensation … he, and his world around him, were moving.

  The Wesley thing smiled. It seemed … he was going on a journey.

  This Wesley knew no fear, no panic. He lay back in his dark nest and relaxed. Instinctively, he knew that traveling to a new place was a dream that he had coveted and caressed for a very, very long time.

  The slow passage of time meant nothing to him. With every passing hour, he became more aware of his surroundings as other sounds made their way into his small, metal-wrapped world. The sound of wind sighing between other containers stacked around his own. The small echoes of people walking and talking throughout the larger metal vessel on which his container rested. He listened to water whispering by the steel sides of the ship and the steady heartbeat of its engines trailing in its foamy wake. He could even tell that it was nighttime by the smell of the air that slowly seeped into his lair, and by the way distant thunder sounded skipping across the great body of water that lay before them. As more time passed, he tilted his smiling face upward, sensing even the stars that were staring down on him with steely cold eyes. And so, swaddled in the hope of a great new world, he began to develop a plan.

  After all, he had so much to share with everyone. If even the slightest vestige of Wesley had remained within this body, he might have been proud to realize that, finally, he did have something to offer the world.

  If only he could get that little bitch in the bloody pink blouse to just … shut … up.

  Nautical Nightmares

  Cargo Freighter 6421 was the last ship to leave the port before all hell broke loose. The rest of the world was oblivious to how quickly Ashbury was becoming a ghost town. Twelve hours after the freighter left port, the military began stopping all movement to and from the city, including sea and air travel. If the port bookkeeper hadn’t gotten into a fight with his wife and abruptly abandoned his shift, there might have been a record of the freighter’s departure. Therefore, when the military confiscated the logs, they had no idea a ship was headed for South Carolina, USA.

  Kevin Dawson had never shipped out on a container ship with so little cargo onboard – in fact, it was beyond his comprehension. But the hurried loading of the 800-foot Zephyr Sea (CF 6421) and sudden departure from port seemed to fit the strange feeling that had been building in him for the past several days. Loaded fully or not, the experienced deckhand was inexplicably relieved once the lights of the British port were fading off the stern of the gigantic ship. Next stop, the U. S. of A., a place he hadn’t called home for a long time, not since the ugly falling out he’d had with his family when he first went to sea six years ago.

  His dad had insisted that he choose the Navy or even the Marines, a tradition that had survived at least four generations before him. But although Kevin loved the sea, he had never wanted to be a hero. Everyone had a place where they were supposed to be in life, and his was right here. The able-bodied seaman loved everything about this life – the long cruises to many foreign ports, the gentle sway of the huge ships under his feet, the regimented lifestyle of shipboard life, and the unhindered view of the stars overhead during dark night watches, especially when he was taking his turn at the helm of the massive leviathans. He was always amazed at how quickly camaraderie grew amongst the many crews that were thrown together on these long voyages. It was here, among his family of seagoing adventurers, that he felt most at home.

  And although this trip seemed to be starting off somewhat differently than most of his past voyages, he was ready to go. He had probably spent a little too much time goofing off in England this time, and deep in his gut, he was anxious to get out to sea again. And for the first time in a long while, he wanted to see his old home. Maybe there was a chance to patch up a few holes in the leaky boat of his original family life.

  Kevin was built like many typical construction workers. He had strong muscles poorly hidden under a thin layer of shitty fast food. His thick, shaggy beard connected to his oily black hair, which he wore short and wavy, sprouting multiple cow licks of shiny black tufts. He wore a brown leather jacket over his crew-issue coveralls, which, despite his otherwise unruly appearance, he kept meticulously clean, at least as much as one could in his steel, paint and oil work environment. He had learned early on in his career that the captains expected it and the crews respected it.

  This was Kevin’s second cruise on the Zephyr, which ran with a crew of twenty. He was confident that he would get to know most of the other seamen and women soon enough – the ship was big, but it would feel pretty small by the time they crossed the pond back to the states.

  “Fargus, what do you need me to do?” Kevin asked.

  Fargus was a mountain of a man with a lion’s mane of red hair. Like Kevin’s, his beard was thick and full. His coveralls seemed baggy everywhere except around his bulging belly. His Scottish warrior appearance was only contrasted by his small gold-rimmed glasses that rested on the edge of his nose. He ran his pen across a clipboard, making the final checks on their cargo.

  “Eh?” he grunted.

  “Kevin Dawson here, just came aboard. What do you need me to do?”

  “Oh, yeah. Too bad I didn’t have you around earlier, maybe we coulda loaded more containers, but something came up.”

  The boat engines began to hum loudly and the deck beneath Kevin’s feet shifted slightly as the huge metal beast lurched forward in the water. Fargus, unmoved, watched with approval as Kevin unconsciously shifted his balance against the movement on the deck.

  With a small grunt and a raised eyebrow, he said, “I’m stuck with you now, huh?”

  Kevin grinned, already liking the big Scot. “Looks that way.”

  “You know what, I have a job for you. With the rushed loading, I’d like you to check to make sure all the containers are locked. Might have been missed in the hustle.”

  “Can do.”

  “Check the locks on all the containers and make sure everything is secured properly. Don’t want one getting missed and spilling the contents into the ocean.”

  “It’ll be a short inspection with a light load like this one,” Kevin said, hinting at his surprise at the shortness of the stacks behind him.

  Fargus ignored the implied question. “Yeah. We’ll see you in the kitchen fer dinner,” he said and slapped Kevin firmly on the back. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but it still packed more of a punch than Kevin had expected. Fargus made one final deliberate check on his clipboard and nodded to Kevin before walking off toward an entrance to the ship.

  Kevin looked up at the night sky. Peeking through the clouds was a sliver of moonlight, its glow melding with the yellow flood lights that poured from posts and mounts along the ship. Kevin pulled out his small flashlight and b
egan to leisurely walk about the deck of the ship, focusing the beam on each lock. He felt a gust of sea air and it reminded him that he was finally headed home. He felt good about his decision. It wasn’t like he expected to reconcile with his family, but who knows, time had a way of healing old wounds.

  The ship picked up speed as it entered open waters and the motion itself was barely noticeable. He looked out across the deck and took in a deep breath of cool ocean air. The deck had been loaded in a rushed and haphazard manner that he had never seen before. These ships were normally loaded to a level of efficiency that was almost an artform. This was sloppy and thus carried a fraction of the normal amount of containers. It was strange and he couldn’t understand what would cause such a hurried departure.

  He walked along, casually tugging at the locks on each container to ensure they were on properly. After some time meandering about, he was about to head down to the galley for some late-night dinner. Kevin was finishing up his sweep and leaned up against the side of one of the containers, when he was sure he heard a muffled thump from inside. For a moment he swore he could hear shuffling or whispering coming from inside the red container. He leaned in, pressing his ear against the metal. He waited … and heard nothing.

  “Kevin!” a voice suddenly barked from out of nowhere, causing him to nearly jump out of his skin.

  He stepped away from the container and looked around before rolling his eyes in embarrassment. Kevin reached down to his belt and grabbed the small black radio they had issued him earlier.

  “This is Kevin.”

  “Hey man, this is Cal. Looks like we’ll be getting some weather tonight, now would be a good time to come down and get some grub before Dee shuts down the kitchen for the night,” the voice said over the radio.

  Stepping away from the now-silent metal container, Kevin glanced toward the darkening sky off the ship’s bow. “Thanks, Cal, I’ll be right down.”