I brought the meat. Considering the nature of the jobs I typically took to keep busy, skimming a little extra was generally pretty easy. But this I had actually paid for, and it showed.
It was a good cut—from a specimen that was neither emaciated nor too fatty. People who had fattened themselves on fast food before the zombie era began typically tasted absolutely terrible—tasteless, greasy, tough, full of gristle, and frequently riddled with tumors. It was rare that you got a hold of healthy, lean human meat. I don’t know, maybe that was because those were typically the people who were still alive.
Jack said that this meat came from a young man in his twenties who was found hobbling around on a severely injured leg. A bounty runner had taken him out before zombies took him down or the infection in his leg spread and spoiled the rest of him. The story was probably a lie; it was standard practice to dole lies out liberally with meat purchases to help alleviate diner’s guilt. Still, I appreciated the story. I try to maintain moral standards, or at least tell myself that I do. It’s just important to set personal boundaries, however arbitrary they might seem, in order to maintain a sense of sanity, order, decency... those with no personal code become monsters very easily. So, when it comes to the living, my rule is no women, no kids, and nobody who doesn’t obviously have blood on their hands. I’ve never had much trouble justifying ridding the world of one less bastard. With any person that is already dead, or soon to be dead, all bets were off, of course—anyone is fair game under those circumstances.
I had grilled up a little of the meat ahead of time and tasted it. It was so tender that I wouldn’t have been surprised if person it came from had been a vegetarian before the zombie era began. Now, of course, nobody had the luxury of being a vegetarian. You took protein whenever, and wherever, you could find it.
Nathan brought vegetables, as he had promised—a beautiful carrot and spinach salad and fresh steamed broccoli. In my previous life, I’d never really liked the smell of broccoli, but now even the tiniest whiff of it was making my mouth water like crazy.
Ron brought an unopened package of Oreos, some powdered mashed potatoes, and the Sanka. Oreos! Like divine sandwich cookie manna from heaven—I couldn’t believe he had managed to find a whole package of them.
Gabe brought cans of beets, beans, and fruit cocktail. And, I have no idea how Dave did it, but he made a damned pie for the occasion. Cherry.
Maggie, of course, brought her entire kitchen cabinet plus, bizarrely enough, elegant linen napkins. It’s the end of the world, and Maggie still uses cloth napkins. It blows my mind. While setting up, she also found for us a couple of enormous cans of applesauce that were left in the cafeteria storeroom. One of them wasn’t even puffy.
Dave ushered in what he dubbed our “Survivors’ Thanksgiving,” and we all seated ourselves around the table.
I have to say, even though I didn’t know them too well, the dinner was a moving experience—a rare tender moment between a group of human beings. In this callous, unfeeling world, I had forgotten that moments like these could even happen anymore.
Smiling, laughing faces glowed around that cafeteria table as we all enjoyed the biggest feast in which any of us had partaken in years. It was terribly corny, but we went around the table saying for what each of us was thankful. I think we all were in agreement that we were thankful for the amazing meal, for each other’s company, and for being alive.
After we ate, we all embraced. Nathan approached and wrapped his arms around me, brushing his scruffy cheek against mine.
Sensing my receptiveness, he said “I thought that you thought I was a psycho freak.” , still squeezing me.
“We all have our foibles. I figure it doesn’t pay to be too picky during an apocalypse.” I replied, squeezing back.
We all hugged each other after the meal. When Tempest approached me, she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
I said, “I thought you thought I was nuts.”
“Nah,” she said. “We all have our quirks. I figure it doesn’t pay to be too picky during the apocalypse.” Then she squeezed me tightly.
After dinner and a period of lethargic digestion, we held a short group session. Tempest actually told her story, or part of it anyway. I won’t repeat what she said. It was heart-wrenching, and I feel like now I kind of understand why she is so tough.
But Maggie grew uncharacteristically hard and unsympathetic. Tempest’s story obviously had hit a nerve for her.
“It could have been worse.” she said, her lips pursed as though she had just tasted something bitter.
“Oh?” Tempest said incredulously.
Maggie was glaring at her, staring her down.
Trying to keep her calm, Tempest said “I know that everyone has shocking horror stories in this world in which we are forced to live, but I still can’t help bristling at having my own treated so dismissively. It’s rude to brush aside anyone’s pain as a lesser trauma, and I wouldn’t do that to you, Maggie.”
“It could have been much worse.” Maggie said with unusual conviction. “My daughter had a baby shortly before the outbreak—one that lived.”
Tempest said nothing, regarding Maggie stonily but waiting for her to continue.
“He was sick—just a cold, we thought—a little cough and a runny nose. But after the outbreak, my daughter and I were constantly on the run with her children. It was an added stress to his system.”
“Our food supply was poor; my daughter, like most people at that time, wasn’t getting a lot of nutrients. Trevor, her baby, just wasn’t getting better. He had gotten pale and was sleeping more than usual, but neither of us realized how sick he really was.”
“My daughter was nursing him. The infant had become...” Maggie paused and then corrected herself. “My grandson,” she said, emphasizing the words, “had become listless.”
It was clear to everyone that Maggie was still engaged in a long-running internal battle to keep distance between herself and the events she was describing.
“Trevor had become uninterested in nursing, so my daughter was initially excited when he actually latched on with gusto to feed.”
Maggie looked at the floor, the wrinkles in her face overlapping each other as her expression briefly contorted.
“Of course, the joy turned to horror quickly.” she continued, recomposing herself, consciously reassembling her facial expression.
“Trevor had died in my daughter June’s arms while still making faint attempts at suckling; he faded away just as though he were falling asleep. Then he returned—reanimated—and chewed off half of her breast before she was able to get him loose.
“How?” Tempest asked, her brows knit. “How did he bite?”
“He was teething.” Maggie responded sharply.
“Once June threw him on the floor, the baby was no longer really a threat. Just being dropped probably broke quite a few of his little bones. All he could do was try to crawl pathetically toward our ankles. I just used a broom to push him into another room and then latched the door.”
“My daughter was on her knees, writhing in agony. I dressed the wound and tended her as best I could. June, of course, was hysterical, completely inconsolable. But I wasn’t there the moment she died. I was... Well, June died and returned, and she was eating Abigail’s face by the time I came out of the restroom.” Maggie concluded, looking away.
Abigail was Maggie’s granddaughter—the granddaughter that Maggie still kept.
Having previously noticed that Maggie goes to the bathroom frequently during even our brief meetings, I have suspected for some time that she has bladder control issues. I could not have guessed that she might blame herself for the death of her granddaughter let alone that herfrequent need to pee might have been responsible for the loss of the child.
“I had to take June out to save myself.” Maggie said, her voice monotone. “After that, I stomped the baby to death in a fit of fury.”
Her eyes were trained on the floor.
&n
bsp; “But I preserved Abigail.” she said in a small voice.
So now Maggie was preserving her granddaughter as the last shred of her legacy.
Maggie abruptly got up from where she was seated, turned on her heels, and hurried out of the cafeteria.
“Is she coming back?” Dave asked.
“She left all her china.” Tempest observed.
We waited five minutes or so, but she didn’t come back.
“I guess we should go after her?” Tempest suggested, although she didn’t sound overly concerned.
We gathered up our things as quickly as we could and, as a group, went to find Maggie. She had a head start, so there was a chance we wouldn’t catch up to her. I wish that had been the case.
I guess the high school must have had a groundskeeper that lived on the premises. Or maybe it was just a wandering zombie that had gotten in through a hole in the fence. I don’t know. I only know that it had torn Maggie apart. Her upper body was at the northern end of the sidewalk outside of the gym, her lower body was at the southern end, and her entrails were strewn all the way between the two.
The zombie was hunched over Maggie’s torso gorging itself. Tex knocked it to the ground in short order. Then Ron decapitated it, and that was that.
Maggie’s death was so stupid, senseless, and avoidable. And, just like that, our group begins to dwindle once again. Deflated, we all quietly took a portion of Maggie for later consumption, told each other goodbye, and parted.
Chapter 9
Letting Mother Go
OF COURSE, BEING AN OLD woman, my mother had already lost a good deal of her muscle tone before she died. Whatever discernible musculature she had left disappeared almost immediately after she expired. Unfortunately, the degradation of her body by no means ended with the loss of muscle tone. The flesh soon became unnaturally soft, like excessively puffy marshmallow, and later still, the meat began to visibly separate, dangling loosely from her.
I suppose what has happened now is the next logical step in the process. I just hadn’t let myself consider the natural progression of her body’s physical decline. As far as I’d previously observed, zombies typically remain in the bloat or early stages of active decay almost indefinitely. But something seems to have changed. I don’t know if Mother is an isolated case, or if all zombies have a similar shelf life, so to speak, but she is deep into what I can only describe as accelerated decomposition now and is rapidly approaching a state of advanced decay; soon very little of her is going to be left.
Like over-cooked chicken, her meat has begun to fall away from the bone. The muscles of her right leg came completely loose from the bone today—hamstrings, quadriceps, calf muscles—all of it just slid off, at most hanging fast here and there by bits of tendon.
I’ve tried to clean up as best I can. The meat is slimy, and the smell is unbearable. I’ve had to vomit so many times that I’ve lost count. And the whole time, as I try to clean around her, Mother writhes on the bed and tries to claw at me. It’s a miracle that she hasn’t broken my skin. Still, it will be a bigger miracle if just handling such volatile, bacteria-laden refuse doesn’t kill me anyway.
As horrible as this has all been, I have the ominous sinking feeling that it could get much worse at any moment. I’m worried that, if the flesh continues to fall off of Mother like this, she may shed enough of her hands and feet to slip out of her bonds.
But that’s something I will save to worry about tomorrow. My stomach muscles are sore from retching, and it’s time for me to sleep.
I slept on it, and came to an unpleasant but inevitable conclusion. Living with Mother as I have been is no longer a workable arrangement. I was willing to accept an element of danger as long as our lifestyle together was sustainable, but it no longer is. It is rapidly hurtling toward a disastrous conclusion.
I smashed in her head. It didn’t put up a lot of resistance—I think it was organically more than ready to be mush.
I buried her in the garden. She’s fertilizer now. “From death comes life.” The earthworms shall inherit the earth, I guess.
I thought I would be overwrought afterwards, but I actually experienced an eerie sense of calm. I hate to admit it, but I felt relieved that it was over.
I guess what I honestly miss most is just sitting in the room and knowing that she was there next to me. As I read, I always took comfort in being reminded of her presence by the little sounds of her throat rattling and the gentle rustling of the fabric of her faded housedress as she struggled against her bonds.
I had boarded up all of the windows in the house when the End Time began, of course, but after Mother died, I removed the boards from the window in her bedroom. I figured that she could use the sunlight, I guess, and it wasn’t like a zombie wandering through would find her enticing if it noticed her. I kept Mother’s bedroom door locked, so I figured that the danger to me was minimal.
Alright, in retrospect, maybe that wasn’t a great idea. I’ve never had a swarm descend upon my property, but I know that doesn’t mean it could never happen. If hundreds of the dead piled into my mother’s room, I doubt that the lock on the door would hold them out of the rest of the house for very long. Still, I get so few stragglers near my yard these days, and I really did like having natural light by which to read... Candlelight strains my eyes, and candles are a limited commodity.
Anyway, I boarded up the window again. I couldn’t bear to sit in there now. The room is far too empty. Besides, it smells really bad.
Chapter 10
So It Goes
JACK WAS MURDERED. ANOTHER RUNNER I know stopped by my apartment to let me know. I guess it was inevitable. If you’re at the top of the heap, someone beneath you is bound to make a stab at gaining what you have. In this case, a group of young thugs involved in the sex trade slit Jack’s throat. Then they apparently roasted him and threw a little party for their buddies. Now they’ve taken over his warehouse, his stockpile of goods, and his client list. Runners and delivery guys still retain their jobs, but I’m done. My contractual jobs for the black market have finally come to an end.
It’s just no longer a workable arrangement. I was willing to accept an element of danger along with my missions—hell, I even embraced it—as long as I had a reasonable chance at succeeding, but that is no longer the case. Even if I kept my eyes glued to the floor, said “yes sir” to that bunch of snot-nosed kids, and took every god-awful job they gave me, my days would still be numbered. My employment is rapidly hurtling toward a disastrous conclusion, and when I’m “terminated,” I won’t just get fired. Besides, It’s not that I was so attached to Jack, but I just can’t work for these assholes. Compared to them, Jack was highly principled. I can’t in good conscience directly work for these sex trade fuckers.
Rather than slink away, I decided to face them. Fucking kids. Kids with way too much power.
It didn’t go over so well.
“Well, that’s just fine, Sister. You can be a lot more useful to us in other ways anyway.” Bobby said as he advanced toward me, unsheathing a long hunting knife. Thank god he was a slimy bastard who liked to get personal when he killed. I’d be dead if he had just pulled a gun.
I turned and ran, bolting through his office door and startling several of his lackeys. Fortunately, none of them processed the situation very quickly. It didn’t occur to them to chase after me until Bobby ran out of the office and yelled at them to catch me.
I worked for Jack a long time, and apparently I knew the warehouse’s layout better than its new owners did. I was able to put some additional distance between myself and my pursuers by zigzagging through areas of the warehouse. I shot through a side door, ran down a corridor, ducked into a store room, and was out through a back stairwell before they could catch up.
The fact is, though, that I barely made it out of there. And I can never go back now, especially since I kind of wrecked one of their store rooms by kicking over a few full floor-to-ceiling shelves to slow them down.
Hopefully, Bobby won’t bother to put a bounty out for me.
I returned home and consoled myself with a meal of meat left over from our last Survivors meeting. It was still good because I salted it. We salt the meat to make it last. After all, who has refrigeration these days? Eating meat that has started to spoil is a mistake most survivors have made, I would wager. Meat is too tempting, and it’s never easy to gauge how long is too long for it to sit out. But nothing sucks quite like having to run from zombies when you have explosive diarrhea.
Even with a hearty dose of protein, I couldn’t shake the troubled feeling I had. It’s not like I really cared about that job. It was something to do. And it’s certainly not like I really cared about my employers. They were Machiavellian scumbags whose loyalty and kindness was predicated upon my usefulness. Even Jack had probably just been waiting to double-cross me the first time it was advantageous for him to do so.
I don’t really think I’m worth paying a bounty to Bobby. Besides, I can move again in a heartbeat. I’m not so easy to locate. So why do I feel deflated, vaguely sad, and empty? I guess it’s just a result of seeing one more thing come to its inevitable end.
Chapter 11
Meeting Adjourned
THE SURVIVORS ALL LOOKED DECIDEDLY less cheerful as we began this month’s meeting. We were all still reeling a bit from the sudden gory conclusion to our last gathering.
Nathan arrived a few minutes after I did.
“Hey.” I said, waving.
He came over to where I was standing, hugged me, and asked “How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know, I’m still trudging along. I’m only dead on the inside.” I said, proffering my best ironic smile.
Making the Best of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 6