by Paul Bishop
I handed Elon the rags and flipped the lighter open. Balanced on one crutch, I kicked the propane tank over and rolled it into the room. I planted my foot down before I fell and touched the lighter to the rags. I merely assumed I didn’t need to tell Elon when to toss them.
The fire sprang to life and he threw the rags away from him like he’d found a spider crawling on his clothes. I slid my crutch under my good arm and used it like an extra-long finger to reach into the room and retrieve the other one I’d lost. I dragged it back to me, spun my body, and slammed the door shut with my back.
“Get down,” I said and followed my own advice and let myself drop. I slithered along the floor for a few feet before we heard the explosion.
The door erupted splinters into the main room but it remained on its hinges, for the most part. I knew we had to get back to the office and put the fire out before the whole place burned down, though, so I waited and listened for sounds of movement.
When I opened the door again, it reminded me of when the neighborhood kids put a cherry bomb in a watermelon and watched it blow. The walls and ceiling were painted red. Chunks of flesh—some seared and some raw—hung from every corner. Shards of metal from the propane tank were embedded in the walls and the rear of the door.
A foot, severed from the rest of the leg, remained neatly nailed to the floor where it had withstood the blast. Tiny pockets of flame struggled for life here and there and a couple even flickered on Sammy’s desk.
Movement caught my attention. One of the cannibals moved his twisted body along the floor and his mouth opened and closed as if he chewed the air. He moved toward a leg. Whose, I didn’t know until I saw the lack of a foot. He crawled to it like a starving man and a thick blade dragged in his broken arm beside him.
I couldn’t quite move into the room because of the smell. The half-dead man who remained offered little risk, but the stench of death and bad barbeque kept me out like a locked door.
The man on the floor looked up and met my gaze. I wouldn’t normally call him a man, but I saw something— his humanity, I guess you could say. He looked at me and I felt his regret. It could have been an apology or could have been a confession, but I felt a weight of responsibility for me to acknowledge that look.
He stopped moving. I took it as his way of renouncing his cannibalistic ways. Not that I was in a position to offer forgiveness and I wouldn’t nurse him back to health.
I didn’t have to anyway. He lifted his blade with his ruined arm from which bone protruded through the skin. His expression deadpan, he delivered his own justice and his own sentence when he sliced his own throat.
The fresh flow of blood put out a flickering fire beside the leg of Sammy’s desk.
9
I’d relied on my newfound sense of family at Sammy’s to keep me sane and rooted in life but now, as I watched another family torn apart person by person, I wanted out.
“What the hell were you doing in there, Sam?” Gigi asked.
Sammy sat in a lump on the floor beside the bar. His belly hung over his junk like a flesh skirt, not pleasant to look at in the least but better than his ball sack.
“What the hell do you think?” he said. He clutched his ankle which was torn and bleeding. Several other cuts and scrapes traced red along his arms and his back from where Elon had dragged him across the floor.
“You guys were screwin’ each other?” she asked.
He immediately grew defensive. “Well, nobody else is putting out and we both believed we were gonna die.”
How could you argue with him? Shit, Charlie was right. He did die. I hoped he had a good time before the trio of cannibals ripped his stomach open.
“How the hell did they get in?” I wanted to know.
“The old cellar,” Sammy said. “It was originally used for deliveries. I haven’t used it in years.”
Elon didn’t warn him before he poured a bottle of bathtub hooch over his ankle wound. Sammy screamed obscenities through clenched teeth.
I took a glance into the office and saw the trap door in the floor. I’d never noticed it before.
“Does it lead to the street?”
He nodded.
“So they could send more?”
His expression was all the confirmation I needed.
“Or maybe we could get out,” Gigi said.
“And walk into their camp? I don’t think so. We gotta close that hatch, though.”
“I’m on it,” Elon said. He set the empty bottle of alcohol down. Damn, that had to hurt Sammy. He went to the office, slammed the trap door shut, and dragged the desk on top of it.
Chris moaned and Gigi went to his side, kind words the only balm we could offer.
I heard the cannibal king outside and moved to the barricade. Every time I looked at it, the attempt at protection seemed flimsier than before.
“You guys are good,” he said.
I peeked through a gap but stayed away from the broken glass. There was no way I wanted to suffer Rowena’s fate.
“Maybe you’re fooling us,” he said. “Maybe you’re keeping our people and feasting on them yourselves.”
He stood in a semicircle of torches. His followers, disciples, or whatever you might call them stood silently by. Their numbers were shrinking, I could tell.
His long stringy hair swung as he paced rapidly from one torch to another.
“How did they taste?” he asked and turned to face me. We made eye contact, something that was beyond creepy. He made a grumbling sound and wagged his tongue at me. It could have reached in and scooped me out, the thing was so long. He flung his head from side to side and the tongue slapped his cheeks and almost reached his ears. The wet sound rose above his guttural noises.
I looked closer. The tongue wasn’t his. He held it clamped in his teeth. It could have been Rowena’s or it could have been one he carried with him in his pocket like a pack of breath mints. Either way, I knew we wouldn’t last long inside. They were losing numbers, but so were we.
The rest of the group stood around him in a semicircle. Everyone looked skinny and I began to understand where the deep hunger came from. It still didn’t make sense how it turned to eating other people, but this crew did look malnourished.
A face stood out to me. A girl—not a woman, a girl. She looked to be around ten, maybe a little older. Her expression was fixed and even a little confused as if she had the same questions I did. How did it come to this? I assumed the people standing beside her were her parents, a man and a woman. Did they think joining up with the king was the right thing to do? That their daughter would never go hungry?
I ached for the child and the ends of my stumps tingled with tiny pinpricks. I wanted to rush outside, steal her away, and surround her with us, the civilized ones. I stared at the blankness in her eyes, the fire’s reflection the only light in them, and I wondered if it was too late.
“We need a plan,” I said as I turned away from the barricade.
I crutched over to the side of the stage where my fake leg leaned, and I strapped on.
“What can we do?” Elon asked. “Chris is too screwed to go anywhere. Sammy can’t walk very well on his ankle. I can’t fit all of you on my bike. And how do we get past them anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we need to come up with something.”
“We could throw him out and the run the other way when they start eating him,” Gigi said and pointed at Chris, mummified in his wet towel wrap.
“Hey,” Elon shouted.
“I’m just saying,” she said. “You said he ain’t gonna make it.”
“I said he’s too screwed to travel, I didn’t say he wasn’t gonna make it.”
“Then throw them one of the other ones. One from the kitchen.”
“They only like live bodies,” I said.
“Well, we could at least try,” she said and broke into tears.
From outside, the cannibal king taunted us. “Boo hoo hoo. Did someone fall down and go
boom?” Laughter issued from the band of savages. They sounded closer.
I looked at Elon. “I don’t have any better ideas.”
“How do we get away?” he asked. He looked at my fake leg. “We won’t get very far on foot.”
This really was no time to feel insulted, especially when he was right.
Fighting despair, I ran a hand through my hair and over my metal plate. Gigi continued her sobbing. Sammy straightened and leaned his back against the bar.
“You take all the money from the till, girl.” I noticed him looking at me.
“Huh?”
“Then you go into my office. In my top desk drawer is a lockbox. Take it. The combo is 1981, the year I was born. It has money and my car keys inside. You take them and you get moving.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not leaving my place.”
We held each other’s eyes for a long moment.
“No way,” Elon said. “One goes, we all go. Let’s try Gigi’s idea. I’ll drag a body out the kitchen and we’ll toss it to ʼem like a steak to a dog and then we’ll hit it.” He turned to Sammy. “Can you ride a Harley?”
“It’s been a damn long time.”
“You better hope you can. And you better hope you can do it with two strippers on the back.”
“Well, ain’t that the American dream.”
It wasn’t much of a plan. I’d already begun to prepare myself for the game of rock, paper, scissors I’d have to play with Gigi to see who sat up against Sammy’s naked body and who would have a one-stripper buffer.
I went to the office, dialed the code, and took Sammy’s money and the keys. I remembered seeing a rusty old off-white hatchback in the alley between the club and the motel, but I doubted the old heap would run.
“Here you go, Sam,” I said and handed him the stash.
“No, you keep it,” he said to me.
“It’s your money.”
He grimaced again as a jolt of pain ran through him. “Something tells me you’ll have more of a chance to spend it than I will.”
I saw the seriousness of his request in his eyes. This was his dying wish. If it wasn’t, he could always get the money back from me but until then, I was the safest place to keep his life savings. He was no genius, but right there and then, he was as close as we came. I decided to listen to him.
To avoid an argument from him if I tried to leave them behind on the bar, I dropped the keys in my pocket, folded the wad of bills, and shoved it in my front pocket, heavy against my leg. When you haven’t seen more than a dollar or two in a couple of years, even a sad stack of cash like Sammy’s felt like a million dollars riding shotgun to my pussy.
“Okay,” Elon said. “We should have made a break for it a long time ago, it’s but time to try it now.”
He made it halfway to the kitchen when the plan became pointless.
10
The barricade rattled every time they pounded on it. I felt like the little pig who built his house out of sticks. They were coming, and they would get in. There was no question about it. The tribe of flesh-eaters howled so loudly I was surprised the sound waves didn’t bring our half-assed wall of junk down.
Elon reversed course and went to Chris. He sat him up and tried to be gentle as he worked to get a shoulder under him to make him move.
Gigi was a sobbing mess as she tried to pull on Sammy’s arm to get him off the floor. He pushed with his other hand and rolled his hips, but getting two legs under him seemed a long way off.
I had a choice.
Sammy at least had his two legs, so I crutched over to help Elon.
Glass smashed, chairs toppled, and our wall of Jericho began to fall.
I took one of my crutches and shoved it under Chris’ other armpit as Elon hoisted him up on his shoulder. The wounded man bit back a scream of pain. One of the towels slumped off him and revealed the deep-red flesh across his chest. Thin strips of skin peeled away from his body. He sucked in through his teeth, the air against his raw skin more painful than his buddy humping him along.
“The DJ booth,” Elon said. We moved as one gimpy, screaming mass.
I turned as Sammy made it to one knee. Behind him and Gigi, the first arm reached through. More chairs tumbled, followed by a table. Another few arms thrust into the gap, one holding a torch.
A second later, they were in.
Gigi’s sobs turned to screams and she dropped Sammy’s hand, knowing the futility, and snatched a broken bottle off the bar. She turned and met the first cannibal through the door with a fist full of broken glass.
They came together violently, each with their mouth open and a deep, primal sound issuing from deep within. She stabbed forward with the broken bottle. The man lunged at her neck with his teeth.
She slapped at him with her free hand and managed to avoid the bites for a while. Her movements jerky and wild, she shoved the jagged bottle at the freak and blood spurted. Her screams continued unabated—I could have sworn I didn’t even hear her take a breath—and she delivered strike after strike on his neck, cheek, and collarbone. Blood sprayed and landed in her mouth and she didn’t seem to either notice or care.
The man pawed at her and it appeared that the blood from his own body had sent him into a feeding frenzy. He bit, clawed, and pulled. They were entwined and spun almost in a dance. She stabbed higher and shredded flesh on his face.
His teeth finally found her. A moment before he became too weak to attack, he bit into the soft meat of her neck.
Her screams stopped. She jammed the bottle into his face again and it raked along his forehead, sliced over his left eye, and peeled skin off his nose. The cannibal fell and slid off her like a wet tongue licking down her body.
She turned, a wild, stunned look in her eyes. Elon tugged at Chris’s body and I followed hastily when I realized I’d been caught up in watching Gigi fight.
Before I turned away, a second cannibal—a girl—leapt out of the opening in our barricade and wound herself around my friend’s shocked, motionless figure. They fell together but still, Gigi didn’t scream.
In the back of the room, Elon turned the knob on the door to the DJ booth. It would offer us shelter, but only for a while. We muscled Chris up the five homemade steps to the tiny room.
Inside, the wide window where the DJ could watch the stages offered us a movie-theater view of the invasion.
First four, then five cannibals entered, followed by the cannibal king. He strutted in like a general inspecting the battlefield.
Sammy crawled on all fours and presented his ass cheeks to the invaders.
Two of the beasts immediately joined the evisceration of Gigi. The makeshift blades and tarnished metal of their carving tools went to work.
The leader snapped his fingers and pointed at Sammy. The three other cannibals closed the distance between them and their prey in no time.
Six hands held him on his knees. Tears streaked his face but he wouldn’t open his eyes. I’d have to be the only witness.
The cannibal king stepped over to him and said something I couldn’t hear. He bent low near his face, but Sammy never unclenched his eyelids. The man drew a knife—a real one, not a repurposed fan blade or sharpened car part, but an honest-to-goodness forged steel blade.
He brought it down low under the overhang of fat, reached under, and castrated Sammy.
We heard the screams from behind the glass and closed door.
“Holy hell,” Elon said. He turned away and involuntarily moved his hand over his crotch.
All I could think was they must have been some kind of delicacy in the cannibal world. The others didn’t touch Sammy until the king had feasted first. He lifted his bloody hand high over his head, tilted his neck so his mouth aimed at the ceiling and the two dripping wads of flesh hung above it, and dropped them—one by one—into his mouth.
His overstuffed cheeks would almost have been comical if they weren’t stuffed full of Sammy’s balls.
With a
flick of his wrist, he invited the others to eat and they dove in to gorge on the abundance of meat.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“What’s above us?” Elon asked.
“I don’t know.”
“There’s gotta be something,” he said and studied the ceiling tiles through the window.
“Maybe we can get to the roof?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m thinking. My bike is in the alley next to the building. If we can get up there, we can jump down and get out of here.”
“How do we manage that with?” I looked at Chris.
“I don’t know.”
“And how do we get to the roof?”
Elon’s eyes landed on the second stage. “The pole.”
Shit. I really wished I had a better plan—or a gun or maybe a chainsaw. I had nothing but one and a half arms, a fake plastic leg, and a desire to retain my status as a survivor.
“I’ll distract them.” The voice came out weak and tortured. I turned my gaze to Chris. He swallowed before each attempt at words and after a long moment, he spoke again. “When they’re after me”—he gathered his breath and cleared his parched throat—“you get away.”
“No, no, buddy. You’re coming with us,” Elon said without looking at him—like it was something he knew he was supposed to say but didn’t expect him to believe. He didn’t want his eyes to betray him.
“No,” Chris hissed. “I’m half-dead already. You have a chance.”
His friend finally turned to him. “I’m not gonna let them eat you.”
I saw a determination in the wounded man’s red-rimmed eyes. “Neither am I.”
He sat and stifled a scream. Elon knew better than to argue. He’d done his part to stop it, but he knew it might be our only chance.
“Do you still have that lighter?” Chris asked me.
I fumbled in my pocket, pushed aside the folded bills from Sammy’s stash, and handed him the Zippo. He moved like every tiny motion hurt. I was sure it did because I’d had a few second-degree burns after my accident. Those sucked badly enough so his pain must have been through the roof.