She managed to shake it off, carried on by her adrenalin and rage. She drove the palm of her free hand into his chin and snapped his head back. John’s teeth smacked against one another with the impact of a car crash. He lost his balance, fell over, and Angela took advantage, scrambling to her feet. John gathered his bearings and leapt over the couch as she ran for the kitchen. He avoided Alex by inches, snapped up the hammer off the floor, and turned in time to see her reappear holding a butcher knife.
“Alright, bitch,” he said as his stare hardened. “If this is what you want, come get it.”
On cue, they ran toward one another both hollering at the top of their lungs. Angela took a swipe at him, the blade missing his mid-section by a hair. John let her hand go by and brought the hammer down as hard as he could. The metal mallet hit her wrist and the bones snapped instantly. Her face soured in the blink of an eye, as she dropped to her knees trying to cradle her arm and hold on to the knife at the same time.
She fumbled with the knife as it slipped from her hand and slid across the floor. John’s anger swelled in his chest as the furry of what she’d done fueled his actions. He grabbed a handful of hair and shoved his knee into her face. Angela gurgled like she was drowning as blood gushed from her nose. He pulled her off the ground with strength he did not know he possessed.
Eye to eye, they glared at one another, John through blinding hate and Angela from behind maddening pain. He shook her violently and her head snapped back. She tried to yell, but the blood from her broken nose drowned out the sound as it flowed down the back of her throat. Her arms swung like mangled flesh as her legs flailed.
“This is what you wanted,” he said, screaming in her face. “You want to feed the boy, don’t you?” Blood ran down over her teeth from her gapping mouth. John jammed his fist in her stomach and the impact thrust her body in the air. The blood exploded from her mouth, covering his face. He held her as she hung like dead weight, gasping for air. “You know what? I’m going to give you what you want.”
He swung her around and tossed her to the floor. She landed like a sack of bricks, slapping her head against the wood in the process. Her eyes rolled back as she desperately tried to keep herself from blacking out. It wasn’t until Alex wrapped both hands around her arm that she realized what was happening.
John’s rage quickly subsided as he watched his undead son grab a hold of his wife. Her gargled screams were buried beneath his rotting body as he pressed himself on top of her. She kicked her legs and reached for John as Alex’s mouth opened wide. John instinctively took a step forward then stopped himself. The first bite tore into her cheek and the next went into her throat.
#
It was nearly dawn. The horizon was pale blue and the night’s sky was losing its grip. The morning air was cold and gusts of wind brought shivers. There was an eerie silence across the open field beyond the Mason house and the usual morning sounds of wildlife were missing.
John watched the horizon from outside his front door. He knew the government would return, this time with enough firepower to level the house and everything in it. He planned to be long gone before it came to that. The hunting trail was still the best bet and that was where he would go. He turned away from the sunrise and went back into the house. The living room was unrecognizable, resembling a scene from an eighties slasher film. He stepped over the remains of the coffee table and headed to his bedroom.
He made one last check around the house, ending in the dining room. He pulled the cigarette lighter from his pocket and crouched down to the floor. The pile in the middle of the room consisted of the remains of the dining room table, the clothes in Alex’s closet, and whatever paper he could find in the house. He lit the paper around the edges of the pile and stood back to make sure the flames caught. He pulled a burning shirt from the center of the pile and headed for the door, dropping the shirt on the couch on the way out. A few seconds later, he was in the camper truck and the engine roared to life.
He pulled off the driveway and headed around the house and the truck shifted on the bumpy ground. The hunting trail was a narrow dirt road and most of the trip would be as turbulent or worse. He heard the pounding coming from the camper as the weight shifted. John thought about Benkelman, Nebraska. It was the first town he’d reach after he crossed the state line. Benkelman was a farming community far off the beaten path. The folks there lived on large plots of land, distant from one another. They were big families built on hard work. Big families were what John was looking for. He turned the truck toward the overgrown path behind the house and knew the big families of Benkelman were what he needed, because now he had two mouths to feed.
THE END
Read on for a free sample of Bleeding Kansas: A Zombie novel
1.
This is it, the day we’ve been looking forward to for so long, and it’s not starting well. Claire wakes up feverish and phlegmy, too sick to drive me to the airport. There’s not much to say but sorry, hope you feel better, before she crawls back into bed.
The next thing I know I‘m loading my luggage into the trunk of the cab because it turns out the cab driver should have called in sick himself. “Hey, sorry, man, you know how it goes!” he says. “Ya don’t work, ya don’t get paid!”
“Tell me about it,” I say, settling into my seat.
“Airport, huh?” The cabbie sneezes wetly, brings his hand up after the fact. “Where ya headed?”
“Kansas City.”
“Kansas City! Kansas City, here I—!” God help me, he’s trying to sing that old song but a burst of coughing cuts him short. I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and cover my nose and mouth.
He composes himself, sniffs loudly. “So what’s out there?”
“Job interview.”
“Yeah? All the way out there? I hope they’re paying for it!”
“Oh yeah.”
“Must be nice! Wish I could get a gig like that!”
“Me, too.”
“Ha! I hear ya! So whatcha been doin’ all this time?”
“Unemployed.”
“Oh. Nowhere?”
I have to wait for him to finish his latest coughing fit before I can answer. “Pretty much.”
“You don’t seem all that enthusiastic about this.”
“Lot on my mind.”
“Oh.” A short, barking cough, followed by a long, gurgling wheeze. “Yeah. It’s tough out there.”
“Yeah.”
“So how long you been outta work?”
“Long enough.” Four years, but who’s counting?
“Me, I got to work, know what I’m sayin’? I’d go crazy stayin’ at h—!“ The driver explodes into another round of coughing, his entire body bucking and convulsing behind the wheel. It’s all he can do to keep his eyes open to see the road.
After a terrifying stretch of seconds in which I wonder if he’s going to run the red light we screech to a halt, the taxi’s rear swerving with the force—“Here, you want a piece of none-of-your business to chew on?” I say. “If I don’t make this flight my house goes into foreclosure and my family is homeless as of next month! If you can’t make it to the airport, I need someone who can!”
“Whoa, man, it’s okay, it’s okay! I got this!”
“Can you do it without interrogating me like some nosy old biddy? Can you keep fucking quiet?”
“Hey, what’s with the language? I’m just making conversation!”
“Just get me to the airport! I’m running late as it is!”
“Jeez, mister, I said okay!”
The light changes and we roll. I’m embarrassed for letting the f-bomb slip. Professional class people don’t do that in front of their lessers. My problem as an old-fashioned working stiff is that, as much as most people annoy me, I don’t think of them as my lessers.
I take some satisfaction that the cabbie is keeping quiet, which, in turn, has eased his coughing. Still, I keep the handkerchief pressed to my face until he pulls up to the white zone
at the airport. He pops the trunk and I step out into the blessedly germ-free air to grab my luggage.
I don’t know what the tip scale is for cab drivers. I can barely afford to pay him, let alone tip. I give him 15 percent. It’s more than this Chatty Cathy by way of Typhoid Mary deserves. Maybe I’ll get more than I deserve.
“We good?” I ask the driver before I walk away.
“Look, good luck,” he says. “I know you must be nervous.”
“Yeah. Try and get well.”
I’d like to think that’s the end of it but I’m running a gauntlet of sneezing, coughing people all the way to the fat lady at the ticket counter. She got a red Hitler mustache of raw skin under her nose from wiping at it with her third wad of tissue.
I wish I had some tongs or latex gloves with which to take my boarding pass. For God’s sake, I can’t afford to get sick, not for the best chance for gainful employment I’ve had in years! It’s probably a matter of time, though. Turning away from the counter every other person I see is suffering from some degree of the “Mayday Malaise.”
That’s how the logo reads behind cable news queen Stefani Dunham on TVs all over the airport. “Now this is a different kind of cold bug,” she says. “Aside from the fact that one out of three people come down with it, you can actually sort of function through it! Of course, some are saying it’s because Americans with jobs are afraid to miss work for any reason, given the economic situation.” Our head cheerleader-cum-broadcast journalist makes a face to let us know what she thinks of some people.
“Whatever the case, doctors say it’s an aerosol virus, which means it’s all up in your air!” The shot cuts to a gray-haired eminence mumbling authoritatively in a plush office. Back to Stefani: “And we’re not immune here!” She coughs theatrically into a handkerchief. “All this and a runny nose! A big shout-out to my make-up people here in the News Center for keeping me presentable! Hey, we carry on, what can you do?”
With my Irish luck, that’s the strain I won’t be getting. Claire struggled to make it to the bathroom and that poor dumb cabbie I rode in with was barely functional. I call my contact at the company in Kansas City. Giselle finally picks up. “Mr. Grace! To what do we owe the honor? Aren’t you still in Colorado Springs? You’re at the airport, right?”
“Yeah, I’m right here at the gate. I just wanted to make sure the interview was still on.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“That cold that’s going around. Everybody’s sick!”
Giselle laughs. “Oh, that! We’ve had a few people call in, but that’s not enough to stop us. You’re not sick, are you?”
“Oh, no, no! I’m fine! I was…concerned.”
“Well, give me a call when you make it to KC. Hopefully you can get here before Rob leaves for the golf course. You play golf?”
“It’s been a while,” I lie. “If nothing else, I’d make him look good.” I despise golf and the kind of people who play it. But this is the world I’m trying to bluff my way into. From out of the slave market and into the world of the Professionally Overpaid.
“Sounds to me like you’ll all get along. Again, give me a call when you land.”
“Will do. Thanks, Giselle.”
“Don’t get sick!”
Right. If my wife didn’t give it to me, if the cab driver didn’t give it to me, if the lady at the counter didn’t give it to me, if half the people at the airport didn’t give it to me—now I’m ducking into a narrow aluminum tube, settling in to breathe recycled air people have been coughing and sneezing into since last week.
We’re getting fresh germs all the time, too. Barely half the seats on the plane are filled but half of those people are sick. The flight attendants sit at their seats along the fore and aft bulkheads and scowl at us over their surgical masks.
If I can just stay well for 24 more hours. Twenty-four hours. Lord, that’s all I ask.
It’s a mercifully short flight. Eventually, I find myself in another TB ward of an airport, squinting through clouds of aerosolized phlegm to get to my luggage. I call Giselle. “Welcome to KC!” she says. “You know how to find us, right?” she says.
“Oh yeah. See you soon!”
At the rental car kiosk I check my pockets for the directions I’d printed from the Internet. “Uh, hey,” I ask the guy behind the counter. “Can I get some directions printed up here? I left mine at home.”
“What do you need those for?”
“To find my way to my job interview.”
He’s looking at me vaguely horrified, like I just pissed myself.
“Your vehicle has GPS.”
“Oh.”
“Man, really?”
Walking out to my vehicle, I have to work the keychain remote several times just to be sure this magnificent black luxury SUV is really mine. The new car smell is intoxicating. Nothing is slammed; the rear hatch closes with the touch of a button. I walk around to climb into the cab. Can’t slam this door, either. It’s like burping a Tupperware lid.
I turn the key and the air conditioning blows on full. The radio plays symphonic music in full-immersive surround sound and none of this seems a strain on anything. I turn down the music and give myself a minute to familiarize myself with the GPS. Not that I need a whole minute. It works on voice command.
The traffic is light on the way into downtown, allowing me to work on my breathing and concentration. I screwed up in my first call to Giselle. The rental car clerk’s attitude towards me was also telling. Going all the way back to the cab driver, if he spoke with such annoying familiarity to me it’s because I didn’t give him the proper nonverbal cues telling him not to.
I can’t afford to be friendly. I can’t show surprise every time I come across some delightful, if appallingly expensive toy the Courtesan Class takes for granted like hot and cold running water. If it’s apparent to anyone at the company that I’m Not of Their Tribe—say, someone who’s been driving the same car for ten years, doesn’t own a smartphone, etc.—they’ll throw me right back into the stagnant, dying pond I come from. One does not get a seat at the Kool Kids table out of kindness, or even ability. It’s because you’re already a Kool Kid and that seat has belonged to you since before you were born.
With that in mind I step out of the elevator and stroll across the sumptuous lobby like I own it. I’ve never met Giselle but I know her on sight: a meticulously groomed McMansionland beauty working the Hot Librarian look in her horn-rimmed glasses and a navy blue power suit worth two or more of my mortgage payments.
She blesses me with a cinematically white, straight-toothed smile: “Thank God, something’s going right today!”
“That’s what I’m here for,” I say, dry as a bossman’s martini.
“First, I need to apologize. I thought Rob was going to be here today, but—guess what!”
I raise an eyebrow: this had better be good.
“In the four hours since we spoke this morning we’ve had people going home right and left. Rob sometimes doesn’t get here until ten so I imagined he’d at least be here to welcome you to the city. He ended up calling in.”
“Given how I left my wife this morning, I can tell you, if you’re sick, you’re really sick. And I know what I saw in both airports on my way here.”
“Yes, sir, and I do apologize! I honestly didn’t see this coming! We’ve got so many people here working through their sniffles just fine. Anyway, it seems there may be some…consequence to this.”
“Yes?”
“Assuming Rob’s among the group of the Really Sick we’ll have to postpone the interview.”
“How long are you willing to put me up here?”
“How long are you willing to stay?”
“I came to talk to Rob. If it’s not too much of a problem, I’ll wait.”
“Even with your wife sick back home?”
“My teenage children can take care of her.”
Giselle puts an envelope on the counter. “There’s a voucher in there
for a really good steakhouse in the Power and Light District. Should be enough in there for breakfast and lunch tomorrow at any number of places close to your hotel. Call me in the morning before checkout. Either I’ll have another envelope or a plane ticket.”
I smile tightly as I slip the envelope into my inside jacket pocket.
“I hope you don’t mind eating out so much!”
“Not at all. Thanks, Giselle.”
“Okay. We’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”
“You bet.” I turn and walk out of the lobby. I manage to make it inside the blessedly empty elevator car before letting out a sigh of relief to blow the doors in.
2.
I really don’t want to call. After weeks, months, years of the same old drag, day after day, I’m finally back among the living. I’m not losing my mind sitting at my laptop in my tiny basement office, my wife twiddling away at her computer just outside the door. Things are happening!
Still, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. So, after the most pretentious breakfast I’ve suffered in my entire life—a runny spinach omelet from some foo-foo yuppie bistro I wouldn’t go anywhere near if the meal wasn’t free with this voucher—I finally reach my son Jack by phone. It turns out Claire’s been bedridden since I left yesterday. She appears to be resting, though.
There’s talk of closing the schools until this blows over. He’s staying home today, regardless: “We did nothing yesterday, Dad. Nothing. It was a total waste.”
“Same here,” I say. “What can I tell you? Just look in on your Mom from time to time. Try not to get sick.”
“Dad, come on! If we were going to get sick don’t you think we would have by now? I took a regular snot-shower from all the people sneezing and coughing yesterday! I’m not going back until this crap’s over with!” He pauses. “Sorry, Dad. It just…I don’t even wanna think about it. It’s weird.”
The Hand That Feeds: A Horror Novel Page 22