by Hilden, Josh
Apparently the winds of the night before had ripped one of the doors off of its hinges exposing the interior to the elements. Inside the gloom he saw the shape of the person bent over the struggling body of a chicken. There was blood and feathers all over the muddy ground and the animal, which had to already be dead, was twitching uncontrollably. In the darkness of the interior he could hear the agitate cries of the other animals as they attempted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their unwanted visitor.
Billy began to back up but in his fear he forgot about the mud. He was unable to cleanly pull his boots free of the molasses like ground and fell backwards into the morass. The creature raised its head and appeared to be sniffing the air before turning its head to look directly at Billy.
It loosed an evil moan and rose to its feet.
Billy was shocked to see that he did indeed know the person the zombie had been. Erin Kelly lived five miles away with her husband. They raised and boarded horses. It had been Miss Erin who taught Billy how to ride and care for a horse. Now she was walking slowly and methodically toward him, her jaw working up and down.
“Miss Erin, what happened to you?” Billy asked as he attempted to free himself from the quagmire. He could see what appeared to be a massive wound on her right shoulder and a large splash of red brown blood covering her blouse.
Instead of answering the thing that had been his friend and teacher exited the barn and advanced through the mud toward him. She was already moving so slowly and methodically that the mud seemed to affect her much less than it had affected him.
He was now scrambling backwards through the mud. Tears ran down his young face and mixed with the rain water as he attempted to simultaneously rise and flee. He accomplished neither of these actions and the relatively slow zombie cleared the space between them.
“Please Miss Erin, NO!” he cried as she reached for his feet.
She grabbed hold of his ankle and began to pull him toward her. If Billy had stopped to think he probably would have been dead. Instead he switched over to a type of panicked autopilot and began to kick and scream wildly. He was like a penned and wounded animal and every time he made contact with her dead sodden form he felt a primal jolt of pleasure. After the fourth or fifth kick made contact with her face the zombie Miss Erin fell backwards and her grip on his ankle was broken.
Adrenaline buzzing through his system Billy sprang to his feet and raced to the bat he’d dropped at the barn entrance. He could hear the Erin thing struggling to its feet behind him but he paid it little mind. He needed to get to the weapon. Heart pounding and the smell of rot, mud, and warm rain filling his nose Billy retrieved the aluminum club and whirled around.
She was advancing again.
He set his feet firmly in the mud and raised the implement over his shoulder. He knew all he needed was one good swing. All he needed to do was make contact with the small woman’s head and he could drop her. All he had to do was kill someone who’d been like an older sister to him his entire life.
“Erin, please stop,” he whispered and the tears that had never stopped flowing picked up in intensity.
She advanced.
“Please don’t make me do this,” he begged
She growled.
“Please just go away,” he begged.
She reached for him
“I’M SORRY!” he screamed, and then he swung the bat as hard as he could.
She dropped to the ground.
It was hard for Billy to say how long he stood in front of the barn and cried over the body of his friend. It may have been minutes and it may have been days. In that moment time meant nothing. But the Billy who eventually returned to the house was not the one who’d left it.
That Billy was as dead as Miss Erin.
He decided he would make some dinner and eat it on the massive covered porch. His father had a shotgun in the basement and Billy would take it with him. The rain showed no signs of letting up and the water was getting higher and higher in the fields and on the lone road. Soon it would reach the porch.
He would wait for the water to stop rising. And then he would go find his parents.
It Was The Corn
Jack was not feeling so good. Ever since he ate that donut and coffee this morning he’d been feeling dizzy and having sharp pains under his rib cage. At first he thought that it was just a really bad case of gas. He’d been using that new sweetener, unisweet, for the last week and one of the possible side effects that was listed on the box was gas. Jack had already been seeing massive results from the usage of unisweet. He’d not changed his eating and drinking patterns in the slightest but dropped almost fifteen pounds.
Unisweet, a substitute sweetener made from genetically engineered corn, had been released onto the market almost thirty days ago and was touted as the answer to the world’s weight problems. Not only did unisweet have zero calories it also encouraged the body to not absorb the calories from other foods and beverages.
A massive cramp jumped from the pit of Jack’s stomach to the center of his chest. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the hallway and the papers that he’d been taking to the accounting department scattered across the floor in a white fanning arc.
“Jack, are you ok?” Marie asked. She was the attractive administrator from the research department. Jack always perked up when she spoke to him. Now she seemed very worried as she knelt beside him and took his hand in hers.
Jack always liked Marie, her caramel colored skin and dark eyes usually had the power to send his heart fluttering and to tie his tongue in knots. But at the moment all he could do was hope that his bladder didn’t release from the pain. Instead of answering her he groaned loudly and rolled onto his side drawing his knees up to his chest.
“Somebody call 911” Marie yelled, “I think he’s having a heart attack!”
If he’d been feeling a little better Jack might have smiled at the real concern he heard in her voice. But his vision was fading and he was beginning to hear things as if he were at the bottom of a pool. There was a rushing in his ears and his breath was coming in short painful gasps. He vaguely realized that his pants had become warm and wet but it really didn’t matter because his pulse was racing and the room was spinning.
“OH MY GOD!” Marie screamed as Jack began to spasm and convulse. For thirty seconds Jack Meyer, Junior Partner at the Law Firm of Goldman & Stern, whipped across the floor and released his bowels. Then he went still and quiet.
The crowd of people that had gathered around Jack stood shocked and silent. Blood poured from his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes. Nobody approached closer than ten feet and the air was still and quiet.
“Is he dead?” someone in the crowd asked but Marie couldn’t answer.
She shook her head slightly, visibly steeled herself, and knelt down next to Jack and said, “Jack … Jack are you ok?”
There was no response and the crowd began to murmur.
Marie reached out to touch Jack’s shoulder. Before she made contact Jack’s body shook. She drew her hand back and the group gasped. He began to roll over and Marie smiled.
“Oh thank god” she said and reached out to help him up.
As soon as her hand touched him she knew something was wrong but she never had a chance to do anything about it. Jacks head whipped around and she saw the cloudy red pall over his eyes and the bloody grimace on his open mouth.
“Jack …” she began.
His hand flashed out and grabbed her arm. It was painful but she never had time to cry out as Jack’s entire body sprung forward like a coiled spring and his teeth clamped down on her shoulder. Blood streamed from the bite and then Jack ripped a huge chunk from her body. She screamed and attempted to fight her way free of him but his hands were like steel vices.
All around them the people in the office began to run and scream. Nobody looked back at Marie as Jack’s teeth ripped another chunk of her flesh out and her blood flowed onto the expensive carpeted floor.
On other floors in the building the same scene was playing out.
All across the city, the state, the country … all across the world the same scene was playing itself out.
A very tiny fraction of the population was allergic to the active genetically modified ingredients in unisweet. Once those people reached a certain level of saturation a cascade effect took place. Those with the allergy died and then the brain was restarted by the genetically changed sweetener. The people that got up were then ravenously hungry and the prey they craved was the flesh of their fellow humans. To make matters worse the genetic coding was transferred in the fluids of the infected to their victims.
All efforts at containment failed within hours as the infection spread.
***
The group had been moving hard throughout the night and had been on the march for almost a week. Six days before, the pack of dead besieging their hiding place had finally gotten through the defenses they’d been reinforcing for more than a month. If it’d happened a few weeks earlier it would have been tragic but they had been at the end of their food stocks and the debate about whether or not to make a move to someplace better had been becoming heated.
The numbers of the dead on the streets were light and they’d been making good time. Even the children hadn’t had any real problem keeping up with the rest of the group. There were three main goals. First they had to acquire some transportation, then they needed to secure a new and hopefully an easier defended place to live, and finally they needed food. These things were easier said than done, in the weeks since the rising of the dead. Most of the trappings of civilization had deteriorated faster than anyone could have guessed.
Most of the vehicles readily available were either damaged or they lacked something necessary such as tires, batteries, and gas making them useless. A lot of the more suitable buildings were either taken by the living or more often the dead. Or they’d been damaged in some way that made them uninhabitable without a serious amount of work. All of this was bothersome but it could be worked around, the real problem was the lack of readily available food.
In the days of chaos when the crisis began people scoured the stores and restaurants for all food they could lay their hands on. The survivors had stopped at more than a dozen locations since escaping their former home and the most they’d found was a few bags of crackers and stale bread. They’d been on the move without any food for more than a day.
It was the little Asian kid who saw the truck.
Overturned in the middle of the road was a delivery truck with the graphics of cakes, cookies, and pies plastered to the sides. It had apparently taken a turn way to quickly during the rising and had overturned and rolled into the ditch on the side of the road. The doors were still closed, the widows were cracked but intact, and the truck had not caught fire.
“Hold up,” the leader of the group said and then motioned for three of the members to check it out.
They were all experienced in the ways of the new world. When they pried the glass out of the front wind shield nobody was surprised when the broken form of the driver pulled itself out of the truck, groaning and reaching. The creature was quickly dispatched. Then the trio moved to the back of the truck where they pried the rusted rolling door open.
“It’s good,” one of them called out. The glee heard in his voice was infectious.
“Alright folks,” the leader said. “Let’s get down there and have a bite to eat.” He grinned and then led his group of survivors to the sugary bounty that awaited them.
The group, all twenty three of them, fell upon the goodies in the back of the truck. The last cargo it had carried were snack cakes and pies for convenience stores and gas stations. The survivors gorged themselves on fatty sugary goodness until they were stuffed and satiated. It was decided the area behind the truck was a good place to set up camp and rest for a few hours.
None of the survivors paid any attention to the stickers on all of the cakes and pies which read “Made with Unisweet”.
In less than six hours all of the survivors were dead and walking. The weeks of heat had caused the modified genes in the sweetener to grow in potency. Seven of the survivors quickly succumbed to the allergic reaction while the others slept or paid attention to the area outside the camp.
And the world kept dying.
One Foot In Front Of The Other
Swing and a miss!
That was the first reaction which stomped through Dana’s mind when she saw the kid with the club. He was carrying a club, probably a pre-plague baseball bat, heavily modified with rebar and leather reinforcement over the last twenty years. She watched him swing for the head of the groaning mess trying to get a grip on his young and juicy body.
She had to give the kid credit for guts, even though as he missed with his first clumsy attack he simply backed up a few paces and tried again. This time the weapon connected with the right shoulder of the monster trundling toward the boy. The full motion reminded her of Zane back in the early days.
Dana winced as she heard the snap and crack of bones being held together by skin that was more leather than flesh break under the force of the impact. The sound was one she was intimately acquainted with. The creature had once been a human being. Dana studied the shreds of clothing still clinging to the gaunt form and realized this one had been a soldier at one time. The fatigues were still identifiable under the layers of dried mud and gore. It stumbled under the blow but did not go down.
“Shit!” the kid cried in frustration, his voice was a little high and had the slight breaking of someone just beginning to enter his manhood. He stepped back three more steps and readied to swing again. She could see the runnels of sweat gleaming on his heavily tanned skin and his long brown hair blowing in the gentle breeze gave him a slightly ethereal quality. She was painfully reminded of Zane as she watched the kid refuse to give up and flee the zombie before him.
“Boy has guts,” Dana said to herself. She never took her eyes off of him as she unslung the rifle from her back and worked the lever action driving a round into the chamber. A voice in the back of her mind gave a tusking noise when she realized that the kid had not heard the snacking of the lever and bolt. He was brave but not nearly observant enough for her liking. Zane would have smacked her on the back of her head for having so little situational awareness.
She was surprised when she realized the boy was not preparing to swing for the head which was a good six inches higher than his own this time. The angle of his stance showed he was aiming somewhere a good deal south of the creature’s skull. He swung and connected solidly with the knee of the zombie. There was a loud popping noise as the lower leg was dislocated from the upper leg and the creature, that should have been dead maybe twenty years ago but was not, fell to the ground leaving the dislocated section flopping and useless. The thing was persistent though and it began to crawl toward the boy. Its skeletal fingers were digging into the cracked and busted asphalt that was once the parking lot of a burned out shopping complex, moaning and reaching.
Dana shivered.
No matter how many times she heard it, the hunting moan all zombies employed to call their brethren to the feast never failed to give her the creeps. She began to scan the tree line for movement, if they were lucky there wouldn’t be too many of the things within easy hearing distance, but then she heard the answering moans and knew luck was not with her today.
The boy did hear the moans of the dead and his head shot up as he spun around looking in all directions to see if any of the former residents of Wayne, Michigan were about to put in an appearance. As his eyes scanned the over turned semi trailer Dana was leaning against, he jumped back half a step in surprise. He looked at the rifle braced across her forearm and cocked his head in a silent question. “Is that gonna be used on me?”
Dana shook her head and nodded toward the former soldier now less than five feet from the kids cracked and faded engineer’s boots. He looked down, raised his war club, and swun
g it down into the withered skull. There was the sound of a pumpkin splitting open and the creature stopped moving for good this time.
He started to walk toward Dana when motion in the old shopping center caught both of their eyes. Three figures were heading toward them reaching and moaning in anticipation of a warm meal.
“Come on kid,” Dana called out abandoning the noise discipline that had served her so well for the majority of her life. Now that they’d been made by the locals speed was more important than stealth. Zane would not have approved of this, she thought to herself as she raised the carefully maintained rifle and took aim on the closest zombie.
CRACK!
The head of the first zombie exploded and the creature dropped to the ground.
She worked the lever, ejecting the spent round and chambering the next… CRACK!
And the next one fell.
One more time she manipulated the weapon Zane had carried for fifteen years, beginning in Vancouver, British Columbia and ending in a nameless little town in West Virginia… CRACK!
And the final one was dispatched.
“Wow,” the kid breathed as he closed the last dozen yards between them. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Dana was uncomfortable with the worshipful look she saw in his bright green eyes. She thought Zane may have seen the same thing when he found her trapped in the RV outside of Calgary.
“A friend taught me,” she replied slinging the weapon over her shoulder. For a full minute neither spoke as they scanned the area for more visitors. To anyone living in the post plague world it was an action which had become second nature over the years.
“What were you doing out here?” Dana asked after she was relatively sure they were safe for the moment. You were never a hundred percent safe in the open and on the ground, but it had been more than a year since Dana had encountered a real horde.