I may have either been frozen in shock or merely under the paralyzing spell of my symptoms, but as it turned out, I wasn’t alone. One of the guests at the table that faced ours, a woman I recognized somewhat from Mom’s side of the family, shot up out of her chair, her eyes wide with horror, her throat constricting, swallowing. She, too, had been watching what was going on in the garden out there. Her panic forced an ear-piercing scream.
Before anyone could react and see what she was screaming about, what had obviously trapped my attention from the beginning, Delia, her eyes wild and round, wavered up from her seat beside Dad, her sudden movements jerking me back to look directly at her as she yanked Dad by his jacket arm, pulling him towards her.
Delia Card then bit down into the curve of Dad’s ear and, using her teeth, ripped it from the side of his head. The skin of his jaw and cheek came right off with his ear, revealing the raw, red muscle and tendons beneath. I had never heard my dad scream until that moment. The sounds coming from him were quaky and shrill, and when Delia tore into his neck, his scream caught in his throat, forming a wet gurgle of a death rattle.
And that— right then, right there—was when everything turned to blood and shit.
TEN
It didn’t take long for everyone else to explode from their seats in a chain reaction of noise, carnage, and motion, and I just stood there in the midst of it all, in a daze, unable to budge from my station at my table. I didn’t bother attempting to will my legs to get me the fuck out of the place. I didn’t even consider hunting for a place to hide it out somewhere, quite possibly the only feasible action I could consider due to the fact it seemed as if every other goddamned person there was a lunatic.
Yeah, I’ll chalk it up to shock rather than withdrawals. I think that’s reasonable, right? All things considered.
After all, how many people can say they’ve been stuck there in the middle of Utter Batshit Central, a place where quite a number of people have revealed themselves to be ravenous for human flesh?
Time broke apart.
At the far end of the table, Shay braced Mom behind her as she backed the two towards the French doors behind them, the two of them already spattered in crimson and screaming as Delia had Dad pinned to the table, tearing out his throat. Nathan was at Shay’s side as well, moving in, taking his sweet time, his smile showing off those teeth, so many teeth. How did we not see that clearly before? How did we miss that? He kept teasing them, circling, laughing, making as if to lunge any moment for her and Mom. Shay held out a hand at him, imploring him to stop, her body stiff and braced with terror.
Amidst the chaos, I didn’t see Rex anywhere there with the rest of his awful family. Emma and Bryceson weren’t among those at that end of the table either, but a quick glance around the area revealed Charlie and Nabhitha, the two of them already at the fire exit doors. If it hadn’t been for a flash of bright canary yellow there, those shoes Emma wore that were completely mismatched for an evening wedding, I wouldn’t have easily spotted her and Bryceson. I’d no idea how they managed to make a break for it in such a short amount of time. Then again, I’d no sense of time at all. Everything around me felt as if it was attempting to push through treacle. While Charlie and another groomsman, one of the burly bearded guys, hurled themselves at the doors, the red-haired hotel clerk from earlier and a couple of other guests had half-circled the little group.
Nabhitha had a hand out at the group readying to pounce, and she kept shouting something at them. I couldn’t make out the words, but her tone was firm, so it was probably a warning. It didn’t matter though. The crazies, cannibals, rabid freaks of nature—whatever they were—were too far gone to care it seemed. One of the guests among them leapt upon the bearded groomsman, jaws snapping in the guy’s face, just as Charlie forced the doors open, stumbling into the night. I looked away just as he pulled Emma and Bryceson with him, and another of the ravenous guests grabbed hold of Nabhitha’s hand and yanked her arm so sharply, it came right off in a jettison of blood. I’m not joking. Not at all. Wish I were. But, really though, Her Arm Ripped Right Off.
The screams and shouts grew watery and hollow. My headache had caused the area behind my eyes and across my forehead, all the way to the back of my neck, to tighten as if trapped there. Blood pulsed, thrumming in my ears. There was a faint ringing in one ear that just became louder in time to my breathing, which kept coming at me in sharp, painful puffs of air. I don’t know if I was becoming weak with shock, but I felt as if my body had been filled with lead from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
I could feel something there, something happening to me. It started as a slight twinge in my right arm, just a little one, barely perceptible. Almost like a tiny pinprick, a minute pinch, the kind you might feel whenever you draw blood through one of those ultra-fine baby needles. There was a pulsing pull, and I could feel something ripping from me. The colors, the smells, the noise all around came at me so forcefully, I shuddered, gasping as my lungs filled again.
And the pain, the searing burn of it on my right arm, wrenched me back to what was happening in the dining hall. My arm had been sharply twisted, and one of sisters who’d been sitting at my table, the plate-licker, had grabbed it and was tearing at the flesh of the inside of my forearm with her bloodstained teeth.
So many damned teeth.
She’d managed to chew away a chunk of my forearm, not quite to the bone, but it didn’t fucking matter. She was eating the meat of my arm. It was irrational, unbelievable, preposterously obscene. Even worse, she was watching me as she dug in, her bright green eyes glinting at me with a mischievous light, like she was daring me to do something about it.
Listen, I think one’s natural inclination, instinctive even, when faced with such a painful dilemma would be to pull the limb away from the lunatic standing there, chowing down on it. You’d be wrong, of course. Consider what would happen if you pulled on it just as I stupidly did: The arm-biter’s teeth would snag on the tendons, tearing your arm further all the way to the wrist. I was damned lucky—and I mean SERIOUSLY lucky—said arm-biter’s teeth didn’t reach an artery. I’ll chalk that up to a miracle. Even still, my forearm felt as if it had been scraped raw with a vegetable peeler and then promptly dipped in a bowl of acid. The pain sent a ripple of searing, white-hot agony all the way through my arm up to the shoulder. Tears welled in my eyes, curtaining my line of sight in a watery red glow.
Using my free hand, I felt around behind me and grasped the nearest utensil, a dessert fork, on the dining table and then promptly stabbed it into the back of one of Plate-Licker’s hands that gripped my ravaged arm. Her vice-like jaws released my wrist, and she screeched, an eardrum-spitting sound that was instantly swallowed by the mad cacophony all around us. She pried the fork from her hand and threw it aside, her focus, all her fury, on me. Just as she was about to lunge, I had her licked dinner plate in my good hand, and I smacked it down hard on her head. The force of the impact was enough to break the plate in several large pieces and bloodily wound her, knocking her out flat.
“That’s my sister, you fucking bitch!”
I heard the voice coming from behind me, and something struck my back so hard, I yelped and crumpled to the floor, falling to my hands and knees. I wanted to fold all of my body inwards inside itself, curl its hard edges against the pain, the agony of it. The sharp heel of a shoe ground into my back just between my shoulder blades, pushing me flat on the floor. My arms splayed out to the sides, my cheek firmly smooshed against the polished wood. I tried to wiggle away, but the heel dug right in, swiveling back and forth, back and forth, before it released my upper back and moved down to my lower back. The small of my back felt as if a drill was twisting a hole through all of my meaty layers, searing there, causing me to cry out. I flailed my good arm back behind me, attempting to feel a leg, skin, anything vulnerable. Had I been even just a little bit flexible enough, I might have been able to find something there and strike, but unfortunately, I wasn’t.
Natura
lly, I’d not taken any of the center’s free yoga classes. Right then, I hate to say it, I could’ve used that rubbery flexibility. I stretched my shoulder muscles as much as I could muster, but the burning, the strain of it, was as excruciating as the heel digging into my back.
McManners, no longer particularly mannerly whatsoever, keeping her heel steady and the flat of her shoe smack against me, bent over to spit in my hair and then say over the din, “If she’s dead because of you, I will drag your fat ass to the kitchen, find a meat cleaver, and then chop you in small chunks for a stew. How’s that sound?”
“Fourth meal. Sounds yummy.” I could barely manage a mumble. My left hand fumbled, and then I saw the fork there under the table, just out of reach.
She tipped her heel back, grinding so hard, I felt as if I was going to heave up that Cornish hen I’d eaten a mere hour or so earlier. My eyes went watery-wavery all over again. This time, I let the tears spill, hot and steady.
“With the right seasonings,” she said in mid-twist, causing me to gasp. “Maybe some spring greens on the side. Glass of decent Beaujolais. Now that’s a nice dinner. None of this Chateaubriand shit and the extra carbs…all the fucking carbs they insist on serving.”
My fingers skimmed the tines of the fork, so I wiggled them and then stretched them further so they were stroking rather than skimming.
“Like it’s a good substitute, Chateaubriand. Keeping us civilized,” she said with a snort. “Letting our natural instincts and needs fall by the wayside. Making us forget who we are. As-the-fuck-if.”
I finally had the fork in hand. Just needed a good moment, a steady moment, to strike. I couldn’t move much at all.
“Chateaubriand. I mean, how pretentious is that anyway?”
“You people and your paleo crap,” I muttered.
“What was that?” she said, her voice dripping with venom and ice.
“Or is Atkins still a thing? Fuck if I know. I don’t do diets,” I said just before I wrenched my body around, forcing her foot—that shoe with that goddamned heel— away, and drove the fork into her calf with as much strength behind it as I could muster.
McManners screamed in pain, gripping her leg, which, in turn, caused her to lose her balance. She went down, crashing against the table, grasping at the table and its tablecloth as she fell. The table tipped on its side as all of the fine china, wine glasses, bottles, silverware clattered to the floor, plummeting, raining over us. She had tangled herself up in the tablecloth and kept clawing at it, trying to get out from underneath it. I crawled over her writhing body, trapping her by planting a knee to either side of her. Then I bent my head over hers, and the blood rattled and whistled in my ears. I could see the outline of her face as she struggled to breathe well, taking large gasping rasps of air, sucking in the material as she did. In and out, and in and out.
I reached over for one of the empty bottles of wine from the floor, its contents having purpled the tablecloth in a Rorschach splotch. Then I turned back to McManners, who was struggling to break free from her food-stained cocoon. She kept twisting this way and that, nearly toppling me over, so I clocked her smack dab in the center of her covered face with the base of the bottle I had in hand. Her head fell back with a clunk. A tiny circle of blood began to spread from her nose, growing into a red blossom.
“Courtesy of my glorious fat ass,” I said as I rolled the bottle away.
The pain shooting up my spine from the center of my lower back was strong enough to keep me from standing too quickly. Instead, I barely managed to slide off her body and lean back on my heels. After a minor squabble over shoes and style back when we were all getting measured for our dresses, I’d been lucky that I’d been permitted to wear pumps rather than high heels. Even though Shay spent the rest of that afternoon giving me the Boone silent treatment about it (I still don’t understand why high heels are so important in the grand scheme of things), I knew it wouldn’t last long. Mom and Dad were the experts at the silent treatment, but Shay and I had long since understood the value of interaction with our family and friends. In other words, we couldn’t stay silent for long at all.
The shoes gave me an idea. It wasn’t like we all had firearms within easy reach here. Even though it was reasonable enough to assume every local at the wedding was more than likely a gun owner, for this particular event, Mom had mentioned once that everyone had been warned to keep their firearms at home. As for the rebellious ones who were arrogant about their prized possessions and their self-professed expertise in Constitutional rights, there was no doubt in my mind they would’ve been firing by that point. I hadn’t heard any gunshots, so it was probably safe to assume they’d been some of the first on the menu for the crazies, or whatever they were. My dad had apparently been one of them. As much as he and I never got on well, he damned didn’t deserve what happened to him. He was my dad. My Dad.
It was going to be a gauntlet-like challenge trying to get out of there. I twisted back around to my hands and knees, readying for a bit of a crawl, and I took off one of McManners’ high-heeled shoes, the one that had probably been digging holes into my back. Gripping it at the base of the sole, I swung the pointy heel directly down into one of her wrapped thighs. It pierced the tablecloth and her flesh, causing a ring of blood to rim the edges of the hole I’d created. I then loosened, and twisting it a little, freed the heel from the trappings of her skin and the tablecloth. That heel, good enough for me. A broken bottle would’ve been a much better weapon, sure, but I didn’t want to run the risk of accidentally shredding something—or someone— important to me.
In my state as it was, anything could happen, and my withdrawal symptoms weren’t necessarily going to be an asset to my overall well-being as I attempted to get the fuck out of there.
#
The dining hall’s residents’ screams and shouts coupled with the tinkling explosions of glass and china breaking, wood pieces thunking, splintering, had long simmered. However, the wet grunts, the lip smacking, the tearing apart of shreds of whatever physical existence remained, still echoed. The sounds of it brought me back to the situation I was in. Add in a splitting headache that refused to go away and a bad case of the runny sweats, and you’d have my experience there in a nutshell. I cautiously peeked around the makeshift barricade of the dining table on its side, its legs offering some stability.
The lengthy room looked as if bears had ransacked it. I couldn’t see where much of the noises were coming from, but from my angle, I could just make out a couple of small groups of wedding guests huddled around corpses, their dresses and suits drenched in gore. Mouths ringed with it. Hands busying themselves prying, tearing, ripping into fabric and flesh.
One group had Aunt Lil splayed out not far from where I hid, her bloodied face directly facing me. She had her eyes squeezed shut, and every so often, she’d emit a puff of air, a tiny sigh or moan. One of the guests who was enjoying his meal of my aunt had his wide back turned to me and was sitting crossed-legged at her side. He adjusted himself a bit, his suit jacket bottom trailing bloody streaks, sliding just enough that I could see what he was doing to her. Her satin emerald sheath dress, probably picked carefully to complement her copper curls, had been torn away from her torso. Her entire ribcage was exposed, the meat dangling from it in ribbons and strings. A cold shudder coursed straight down my spine as she opened her eyes, and her gaze met mine. My heartbeat thrummed a timpani symphony in my ears. She formed the words “Get help” right at me with her crimson lips just before she let out a piercing cry that could’ve shattered the night. The crossed-legged man had been toying with and tweaking the nipple of a breast dangling there, barely attached by a strand of meaty tendon, and he tore right into it, sliding closer to her as he ate, blocking my view of her face all over again.
A surge of bile burbled in my throat, and I turned away from the sight, ducking back around my makeshift wall and scooting back to the sisters’ prone bodies and my own little arts and crafts project. My breath kept coming i
n tight hitches, so I sat there for a moment, working at the recesses of my mind to form a peaceful image, something calm and soothing. That’s when my arm spasmed, the open wound there stinging, startling me back, reminding me I had other things to do as quickly as I could manage, all things considered.
Using the heel and the occasional assistance of a dinner knife, I ripped away several thick strands of tablecloth, taking care to keep my actions quiet and steady. I figured the clusters of crazies out there were too focused on their improvised meals that they wouldn’t hear the tearing sounds coming from one corner end of the panel of tables. While I worked at tearing strips, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye coming from the sister who’d bitten my arm. She had come to from the hit I’d given her over the head with the dish and had rolled on her back, her fingers examining her skull, wincing at what she felt there.
Using her elbows braced on the floor, she was just about to sit up when I quickly set down the raggedy strip I was working on and slid myself towards her. Before she could react, I grabbed a handful of her hair from the top of her head, sticky with blood, and slammed her head down as hard as I could against the floorboards. The sound of it echoed throughout the dining hall, and I smacked a palm over her mouth just as she was about to yell.
I sat there, so still, feeling the cold edges of panic running its icy fingers through my chest, the back of my neck, up into my brain. I figured the worst that could happen was the obvious: I’d be discovered by one of the crazies who’d promptly rip out my throat, and I’d then be a late dessert, with a side of vanilla ice cream, for the rest of them. Ansley a la mode. Fuck that. Didn’t even sound right on a menu. Still, I just sat there, waiting for the worst, hoping for, well, whatever was the second worst possibility. There was one of me versus at least a dozen of them.
Which led me to contemplate the question I ought to have been asking myself all along: What in the holy fuck were these people, and how the hell was I going to get out of there when there was one of me and, quite possibly, a horde of them?
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