by Paul Bishop
If this is not your thing, please consider this your WARNING to tread carefully—there are some nasty creatures and images in this one you might prefer to avoid. If you enjoy this genre, however, you’re in luck.
1
Walking is hard with only one leg, and I still had a long way to go.
Now, normally, I wouldn’t steal. Even after the laws went away after the Collapse, I’ve tried my best to stay civilized—although sometimes, it seems like I’m the only one who’s making the effort. When I found the little store—like a mini-mart kind of thing, y’know, the kind that used to be attached to gas stations?—I went in looking for sustenance to get me to where I was going, not to take advantage.
The outside of the place which had only two rows of former gas pumps was a black scar on a landscape of blacker scars. The pumps were gone and replaced by smears of charred concrete where the tanks must’ve blown. But the food mart still stood, another empty concrete shell. We all live in a world of bunkers now, some that held and some that didn’t.
I didn’t have high hopes when I first went in. Almost everything's been looted by now. Thin blinds were drawn over the windows, but they were rusty and many slats were missing. The glass was long gone, probably in the blast. A filmy yellow glow filtered in from the dying daylight in patches and slim lines, enough that I could see to get around without having to waste the batteries on my flashlight. I made a mental note to look for more double-A's.
The aisles were cluttered ankle-deep with debris—fallen shelves, broken glass, and pieces of ruined ceiling tiles. But the shelves inside were not picked fully clean and I stood and stared at bags of chips, cans of warm soda, and even a packet or two of beef jerky. It truly felt like I’d reached Nirvana—or at least the shitty market on the outskirts of Nirvana.
I stepped over a stain on the floor I didn’t want to know the origin of and reached for a bag of nacho chips, but I soon realized I hadn’t been first in the door. I had competition for the food. The rat immediately hissed at me, which transitioned into a high-pitched screech. I wasn’t sure if it tried to warn me off or summon his friends. Both worked.
A half-dozen of the creatures crowded the shelf, drawn out of some hiding place by their brother’s screams. I yanked my good hand away from the bag of chips.
It had come to this, fighting rats for a single serving of junk food.
When the Collapse first began, like almost everyone else, we soldiered on like it would be temporary. My fiancé, Ryan, would talk me down whenever I suggested postponing the wedding.
“Janet,” he’d say, “Even the end of the world couldn’t keep me from marrying you.”
So, okay, it wasn’t the end of the world, but I’m still not married.
The economy went first and soon after, the rule of law broke down in a slow roll that picked up momentum like a mudslide and obliterated everything in its path. The military attempted a coup, the banks collapsed, and the power went out. Still, we kept the date.
About an hour before “I do,” the Collapse came to our door.
It would be easier to say a bomb fell from the sky and to blame North Korea or Iran. But we were invaded by a mob of our fellow citizens, one of the panicked masses that really did things in. In the end, what brought us all the way down was ourselves.
Looters and gangs came in forty or fifty strong. Some were bikers and some cops or former military. This was before anyone got really organized.
A banquet hall of people in tuxedos and fancy dresses—as much as we were only faking it in the face of what we knew was happening outside our bubble— must have been too much for them to resist. They came to take everything. They demanded wallets, jewels, and food. They flew in like locusts with the intention to pick clean anything green in their way.
Ryan fought back and my dad did too. They died first.
I didn’t see what happened to Dad. Ryan caught a big, rusty blade across his throat. I’ve replayed the moment in my head so many times and I’ve decided it was a lawnmower blade. The whole world became a weapon during the Collapse. If you could wrap your hands around it and swing, it turned into a sword or a club, an implement of killing or defending yourself. Even now, two years later, I guess that’s still true.
Ryan went down and I heard his last scream cut off. He started the sound deep in his gut, but the blade severed anything and everything in his neck and the sound had nowhere to go. If the lawnmower the guy had ripped it from hadn’t been so dull and rusty, it would have taken his head off, I’m sure. Instead, he sank to the rented dance floor and bled more than I knew a man could bleed.
It sounds crazy, but luckily—yeah, luckily—the explosion knocked me out so I could no longer see him.
I woke in a hospital bed to screams all around me. Other patients tried to run to escape from something I couldn’t see. I watched a guy stand from his bed, make it ten paces across the floor, and pop his stitches so his abdomen opened. A long line of entrails and guts slithered down his leg and he stepped—he tripped!—on his own insides.
When I tried to sit up, it didn’t go well. I looked down at myself. My right leg was gone above the knee. My left arm ended at my elbow. Both had gauze with rusty stains bound around the ends. I felt my face with my right hand and grimaced when my fingers found cuts, bruises, and swelling. Half my hair was gone. I traced my fingers over a bumpy scar and froze. What the hell did I feel? It was cold and hard—metal, I realized. A thick metal plate held my brain inside. I passed out.
When I woke again, the floor was empty. The guy with the split sides was gone and only a dark smear moving with tiny maggots remained.
I stood shakily and found a set of crutches and a fake leg beside my bed. I took them and left.
Like I said, it’s hard walking on one leg. My fake leg must have been all they had left. It’s too big and was probably made for a man. The strap doesn’t sit tightly so it’s more like I balance on the thing rather than wear it. When I have it on, it’s easier on my arms than the crutches—not easy to do with only one and a half arms—but I walk with a hitch in my step like I broke a stiletto heel.
Life since the Collapse wasn’t easy. But until that moment, I hadn’t had to fight rats for food.
I stood in the aisle as the light faded away and spoke my daily mantra. “For shit’s sake, what next?”
As always, I shook it off as best I could. Rats I could deal with, even though these looked like mean little bastards. And little is misleading. I’ve had cats smaller than these guys. Rats and roaches were my absolute worst. All that shit they used to say about how they could thrive even after the worst of times was all true.
This beats the gangs, at least. Or the bikers. The MP’s and ex-military who run the streets like they are the only law—a law they make up as they go.
Or the worst—the cannibals. I shuddered at the thought. Then, I stiffened at my next thought. Shit. Of course.
I was the rat. This was the trap.
You idiot, Janet. Why wouldn’t the shelves have been picked clean? Why would the doors be open, the shades be drawn, and the food still be on display? They wanted you to come inside.
I spun hastily and left the chips and the rats behind, but my response came too late. A hunched, foul-smelling man stood in the doorway already. The worst thing about cannibals was that where there was one, there were more.
With food a scarcity, this particular aberration maybe shouldn’t have been the most unexpected fallout of the Collapse. The way they multiplied, though—like so many damn people had simply waited to release their inner flesh-eater and only needed the green light—was what surprised me the most.
My heart sped up in my chest, less like a beat and more like it took hold of a hammer and tried to bang its way out of my ribcage.
I had a knife, which was something. All my possessions lived in my backpack or on my body. To get it, though, I’d have to let go of a crutch and make myself unstable. I waited to see what he would do. Maybe it wasn’t even a—
The figu
re lunged and hissed like a larger, hairier rat. Behind me, I felt heat and an orange glow filled the room. Torches.
I could see the man attack in the firelight. Yep. Cannibals, all right. He had the filed-down teeth they all did. Apparently, they were able to tear the meat off the bone better.
I lifted my right crutch and stabbed him in the face. The rubber tip had worn away ages before so I struck him with the aluminum end. Like I said, everything is a weapon. It wasn’t exactly a samurai sword, but it stopped the meat-eater in his tracks and let me spin away from him to confront the torchbearers behind me.
There were three and two of them held flaming branches wrapped in gas-soaked cloths. There must have been some fuel left at the bottom of those tanks.
Two were women, the one in front and the other held a torch. They wore rags and had wild cavewoman hair and stain-streaked faces. I’d heard innumerable stories about cannibals and had even seen a few bands of them from a distance. This was my first close encounter. Most people only get one.
At first, all I could think was, hell’s teeth, it’s only been two years. How did we come to this so damn fast? Eating each other? Seriously, what the hell? But I didn’t have time to contemplate society’s downfall in the aisle of a mini-mart.
“All I want is something to eat,” I said. It came out a little more desperate than I wanted.
The woman out front spoke with a raspy crackle, her face lit by the torch so her skin seemed to glow with fire from within. “So do we,” she said. They began to march toward me.
One thing I’ve gotten good at after two years of the crutches is using them as fourth and fifth appendages. The bloodsuckers with the torches were still too far away for me to poke with my crutch, though, and I didn’t particularly want them close enough. Instead, I lifted my right extension again, placed the tip on the shelf with the nacho chips, and flung a rat in their direction. You’d have thought I’d practiced rat-flinging for years.
The angry, football-size creature squealed across the gap between us, bounced off a torch, and caught fire before it fell into the hair of the middle cannibal, the girl who had spoken.
The rat screamed, the girl screamed, and the other rats squealed in response. Screw it. I swept my crutch along the shelf, lifted seven others off their scrabbly little feet, and made them missiles against my enemies. I turned to the door I had entered through.
The man I’d poked in the face pushed slowly to his feet now, a fresh trickle of blood down his forehead and spreading across his face. I saw him lick his lips clean of the blood like he was a dog lapping the juice from a steak. He howled when he saw me turn toward him. I didn’t like the way some of them didn’t speak. The caveman sounds they made creeped me out.
My fake foot slipped on what I assumed were shards of glass and my leg began to give away. I looked down to try to catch it before it fell, but I missed. I bent hastily and fumbled for my prosthetic as he swung something heavy over my head. Instead of my limb, I put a hand on something long and hard but too thin. It was a bone, I realized, and noticed that much of the debris scattering the floor were bones, most of them stained with dried blood or charred black from heat. And they definitely weren't rat bones.
I found my leg barely in time. The cannibal stood over me, his pointed teeth visible in a snarl and glinting in the fire growing behind me. I pushed up with my fake leg and hit him in the stomach. He wasn’t ready for it and he groaned when I knocked the breath out of him. I hoped he would be out of breath long enough for me to get to my feet—foot—again, something that took me a little longer when I was tired.
When I glanced over my shoulder, the back of the market had become a flaming carnival of burning rats that skittered over the floor, two cannibals attempting to extinguish their friend’s blazing hair, and one dropped torch rolling in the aisle to ignite bags of nacho chips and cardboard Pop-Tart packages. Oh, man, I could go for a Pop-Tart. I honestly was sorry to see that one get away.
I made it onto my one good leg and knew I had to eliminate this monster once and for all. There would be no more hasty opportunities with him. My gaze registered the mean-looking machete in his hand. All I could see was a lawnmower blade, though.
The fire growing inside the tiny market suited how I felt inside.
The sick, flesh-eating bastard in front of me became the men who killed Ryan, my dad, my mom, and thirty-five other wedding guests. I don’t doubt we would all have ended up in some similar situation, even if that day hadn’t happened. Most of the world did. But I could take this post-Collapse world a hell of a lot better with Ryan at my side. And in my mind, this meat-eater took him away from me.
I brought my fake leg down on his head. He stumbled and I hit him again and he fell. My rage ignited by the inferno behind me, I kicked him with a leg I held in my hand until I could no longer recognize his face.
The past two years of anger, fear, and desperation coursed through me as I beat a man to death. It was probably the first time in those two years that I felt like I could really survive this. I could become one of them—not one of the cannibals but one of the survivors.
The heat on my back began to scorch my skin through my backpack. The backs of my legs were already seared.
I turned to see the two cannibals—a man and a woman—who weren’t on fire dragging the woman with the burning hair away. As they did so, the man was already taking bites of her arm. Normally, they ate raw, but I wondered if he enjoyed a little barbeque.
The heat and the smell of burning hair—human and rat—almost overwhelmed me and I lunged toward the door. I held my leg in my right hand, pinched the crutches under my armpits, and hop-stepped to the exit.
Near the door, a rotating rack contained three individually packaged beef jerky strips. I leaned down, grasped them with my teeth, and left.
2
All I wanted was a job, which was why I walked all this way, in the first place. I’d heard that a club called Moon Sammy’s was hiring girls to be dancers and strippers. Girls like me, apparently—damaged girls, victims of the Collapse. I didn’t question it. Work was hard enough to come by. If some guy wanted to watch me take off my shirt, my bra, and my leg and that helped him get off, it was fine by me.
Money had begun to make a comeback. Since the Collapse, social structures stuck around like weeds. The rules were different, but we all knew the way a society worked so we all adapted in one way or another.
All in all, Center City was a model of post-Collapse entrepreneurship.
Maybe that was overselling it. You still didn’t want to be on the street after dark and you didn’t really want to be alone—like I was—much during the daytime either. But in tiny pockets, a structure began to take hold again. I only hoped Moon Sammy’s would be such a pocket.
Center City had fallen faster than most. We sit on a peninsula so the ways in and out of the city are limited. It didn’t take long for that to go from limited to nonexistent. The tunnel fell first, then the bridge went down and we were cut off. Things spiraled fast after that.
Surrounded by water on three sides, if you looked at Center City on a map, it resembled a thumb sticking out. Like the whole city was trying to hitch a ride the hell off this continent. Perversely, it got its wish. Now, the population of a once-thriving city is trapped here. We used to be over half a million but I’d bet that was down to thirty or forty thousand now. There was no way to tell, really.
Moon Sammy’s perched out near the tip of the thumb and wasn’t a super-long walk to someone with two good legs. For me, I’d been at it for two days already. I stuck to the daylight hours only and I moved cautiously. I’d let my guard down for a second and walked into that mini-mart, and that reminded me why I’d been diligent. That diligence had kept me alive for two years.
I spent the night after my run-in with the cannibals in an office building. It wasn’t easy, but I took the stairs to the fourteenth floor. The higher up you were, the safer you were. That was the conventional wisdom and it worked that night
anyway. The floor was empty, and I slept hard.
The memory of killing a man fresh on my mind, I woke with a start. Then I remembered it wasn’t a man at all. It was a cannibal. He’d already cashed out his manhood and chosen a different path. Once you go meat-eater, you can’t ever come back.
Back on the street, I ate the one beef jerky I’d saved from the night before, which wasn’t easy. I knew I had to be fairly close to the club. Damn, I sure as hell hoped they had a job for me when I arrived. A rumor like that could be weeks old. I could be walking all this way to a boarded window and an OUT OF BUSINESS sign.
I passed a cart selling kabobs. The only food for sale anywhere came on the carts and it usually comprised suspicious-looking meat sticks, rotten fruit, and watered-down stews and soups. People desperate to make a buck sold to people desperate to put anything in their bellies. It kinda reminded me of the American spirit—as if all we did was reverse things a few hundred years and we were one foot at the start line of a new industrial revolution or something.
Despite the fact that I didn’t know what the hell was burning on those sticks, I wanted it. I had no money, though, so I had to survive on the smell. Rat and pigeon meat never smelled so good.
I kept a wide berth around the cart vendor. He eyed me warily from across the street. His skin was dark-brown and his clothes dirty, but that really went without saying those days. He watched me hobble past.
A half-block up, I heard growling. I halted my crutches and turned my head and the growl took physical form as a dog.
One astonishing thing about Center City since the Collapse was that the birds all vanished while rats and dogs stayed behind. It was noticeable, and I’ve never heard an explanation for it. The birds seemed to have gotten wind of something none of us knew and all took off. I don’t know if they moved somewhere better, but they left town in a damn hurry—except the pigeons, mostly, and they’re in the rat category. Rats with wings.