His stench was familiar.
“We’re not food,” she whispered.
The boy shifted nervously in his hoodie and sneakers. “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Pam reached one finger up to her face and drew a single line down her cheek. The foundation that was caked there piled up against her fingertip and left a bluish-white line of dead skin underneath.
“No way,” gasped the boy.
“Ya, way,” snipped Rubin. Hunger was definitely wearing him thin and Pam knew it. They had to eat and they had to put on more makeup soon, or someone was going to notice.
The boy stepped forward. Even in the dim light underneath the underpass, Pam could see his pale skin and blue lips. How he had managed for the past few months looking like that was a miracle.
“Will you show me?” he asked. “You know, how you do that?”
Rubin curled his fist into a hammer. The boy shrunk back against the cold cement.
Meanwhile, Pam saw movement out of the corner of her eye. The little girl who had been trying to slip closer to the older boys around their fire barrel had started talking to one of them. The others looked on, smiling like sharks, and listening to their friend make terms with her.
Pam knew what was happening and she felt sick and disgusted. Even though the world had started to fall apart, and the dead had started to eat the living, predators like those boys around the barrel were an even worse kind of monster.
She squeezed Rubin’s arm until he was forced to look down into her gray eyes. “Look,” she whispered and jutted her chin toward the little girl and the boy who was talking to her. They watched them as they slowly walked toward the railroad tracks and the heavy bushes beyond.
The boy in the shadows issued a low growl, both feral and hungry. Rubin turned and hissed at him. “Shut up, will ya, or I’ll pike you in the head and be done with you.”
“I . . . ,” the dead boy stammered. “I’m just so hungry. Can I please . . . can I please eat with you?”
Pam watched the little girl and the boy disappear into the bushes. “She’s small and he deserves it,” she said to Rubin. “Besides, look around. No one even knows we’re here.”
“Can I?” mewled the dead boy again. “I’ll be quiet. I promise.”
Rubin turned to Pam. “We don’t need a tag-along. He’ll get us killed, you know.”
“I won’t,” cried the boy. “I’ll cover up like you. Please. I’m just so hungry.”
Pam licked her painted lips. She no longer cared if the boy followed them or not. All she cared about was the food behind the bushes and how the warm flesh and brains would taste sliding down her decaying throat.
“Just be quiet and don’t let anyone see your face,” she snipped at the boy. Then she slowly began walking along the edge of the firelight towards where the little girl and the boy had evaporated into the bushes.
Rubin followed Pam and the dead boy followed him.
At the train tracks, the three of them stopped and quickly looked back to see if anyone had noticed them, but the lost and the downtrodden were too busy planning out the next ten minutes of their lives and how they were going to manage to live them.
“You take the girl,” Rubin said to Pam so quietly that his words almost died as they left his mouth. He turned to the dead boy. “You help her. I’ll get the guy.”
The dead boy nodded and the three of them crossed the tracks and merged into the black foliage.
Twenty feet in they found the two of them, but what they found was far from what they expected. The big boy who had gone with the little girl into the woods was sprawled out on the ground, his work boot twitching as his life drained out of him. The little girl was bent over the boy, slurping, and sucking, and drinking her fill.
Pam, Rubin and the dead boy watched her for almost thirty seconds before Pam cleared her throat.
Immediately, the little girl whipped her head around, her sharp fangs momentarily glinting in the half moonlight and her eyes blazing with fire. “What?” she growled at the three of them. “You think you’re the only monsters in town?”
“I . . . ,” stammered Pam. “Um . . . ,”
The little girl growled and returned to suckling the big boy’s neck.
Seconds later the dead boy hesitantly stepped forward. “Do you think you could, um, you know, leave him alive when you’re through?”
The little girl didn’t turn around. She continued sucking and slurping mouthfuls of red hot life. Finally, she leaned backed on her haunches and drew her hand across her mouth.
“Freakin’ zombies,” she muttered as blood dripped down her tiny chin. “There goes the neighborhood.”
Q is for Quinn
Who’s an Animal Lover
SHE HURT PIGS.
That’s the only thing that nine-year-old Quinn Potter cared about. Mrs. Birmingham, the wheel-chair bound woman down the road with the braided hair, goggle glasses and perpetual purple wardrobe, hurt pigs.
Quinn’s mother told her that Mrs. Birmingham didn’t mean to cause any harm. She just had too many animals.
“Why?” Quinn asked.
“I don’t know, honey,” her mother shook her head as she turned the pages of her new book club assignment about a deadly family secret and a ridiculous love story all wrapped into a neat sandwich. “Sometimes people just keep collecting and collecting until they can’t stop.”
Quinn thought for a moment. “You mean like that show on TV where people won’t get rid of their garbage and store their own pee in jars?”
Her mother lifted her gaze from her book and raised one eyebrow. “What’s that Briana Levin letting you watch when she’s babysitting you?”
Quinn stared at the floor. “Nothing,” she murmured, but the truth was Briana Levin spent every second that she was babysitting Quinn sucking face with her boyfriend on the living room couch.
Smack, slurp, uggghhhh.
Gross, Quinn thought, but the upside was, no one monitored what she watched. Besides, Quinn’s father was an avid slug and channel surfer. Every television in the house was equipped with a wide array of entertainment, including programming that would make even the truck drivers who maneuvered their eighteen wheelers up the Mohawk Trail on Route 2 blush like little girls.
At the moment though, Quinn wasn’t concerned with any of that. She was concerned with Mrs. Birmingham down the road and the undeniable fact that she hurt pigs.
“Hello,” cooed Manuel, their one-winged rescue Macaw. He shifted from one foot to another atop his perch next to the huge picture window that looked out over Mrs. Birmingham’s farm. Beside him was a wrought iron cage that housed a naked and possibly mentally ill cockatoo named Booby who her mother saved from the shelter down in Greenfield Center. Manuel spent his days talking, and chortling, and trying to be welcoming to the featherless bird.
All the rescues in Quinn’s household were kind like Manuel, from her blind cat, Oprah, to the three-legged kitten that Oprah adopted as her own. Even Toby was kind, although if anyone had a reason not to be kind, it would be him.
“I’m going to take Toby for a walk,” Quinn informed her mother, who had returned to the book she was reading while lounging on the couch that was probably still sticky with whatever Briana Levin and her boyfriend had been doing there the night before.
“Please don’t leave the end of the street,” her mother murmured, but didn’t pull her eyes away from the words.
“Okay,” she said. Quinn had no intention of leaving the end of the street. She didn’t need to go that far.
After pulling on a light blue windbreaker and yellow sneakers, Quinn walked into the kitchen and kneeled down in front of the old Westie who was lying on his doggie bed next to the refrigerator, snorting, dreaming, and farting.
“Wake up, Toby,” she whispered to the little dog. “Wanna go for a walk?” Even in his sleep, the ‘walk’ word jolted him awake and he began to thump his tattered, white tail. He yawned, stretched, and yawn
ed again. Meanwhile, Quinn went into the pantry and retrieved his cart, came back to Toby, whose back legs were withered into sticks, and gingerly lifted the seventeen pound dog into his wheels.
Toby wagged his tail some more as Quinn tightened the Velcro strap that kept him from slipping out of the deceptively simple apparatus, inspected the pins to make sure they were tight, then said, “Let’s go.”
Together, the crippled dog and the little girl rolled and walked to the front door where Quinn let them both outside. Toby ran ahead, now accustomed to the wooden ramp that was just for him. He quickly maneuvered his cart down the slope and over to a clump of grass. Even though he could no longer lift his leg, he peed like a trooper.
“Come on,” said Quinn, after she waited for the crippled dog to finish his number one. “Mrs. Birmingham hurts pigs.” Toby yipped, went another ten feet, then took a dump on the driveway while still rolling because that’s how he took a dump since he lost the use of his legs. When he was finished, he slowed down and waited for Quinn to catch up.
“You’re gross,” she said.
“Yip,” barked Toby. In dog, that probably meant, “Yep”.
At the end of the driveway, Quinn took a right. Her family’s home was on a cul-de-sac at the end of Fort Dempsey Road. There were just three other homes on the cul-de-sac. The rest of the neighborhood belonged to Mrs. Birmingham, with her huge barn, decaying apple orchard, and her pigs—lots and lots of pigs.
As Quinn and Toby left their gravel driveway and hit pavement, Toby ran ahead a few feet, happy that his wheels rolled smoothly and excited by the stench of pig feces that permeated the air.
More than once, Quinn’s father had almost called Animal Control about the smell. Mrs. Birmingham raised pot-bellied pigs, and at last count had over one hundred and seventy on her property. Sure, she sold babies to rich families in the suburbs who wanted to be unique and elite, but more often than not, after a year’s time they inevitably brought their pets back. After all, New England towns like Meadowfield or Littleham, where everyone wore alligators on their shirts and owned poodles or golden retrievers, were not the proper places to raise pigs.
Mrs. Birmingham eagerly took the little porkers back without offering any sort of refund, bred them, updated her ads on Craigslist, and sold the babies to unsuspecting and ill-informed yuppies desperate to be original. Meanwhile, the returned ended up in vast pens of mud and waste, rutting, squealing, and developing all sorts of diseases.
When one died, its carcass was thrown on top of a heap of manure filled with red worms, and left to compost. Those were the lucky pigs. The weak and the small were often attacked and eaten by the larger ones.
Pigs have always been like that—omnivores to the end, leaving nary a scrap behind.
As Toby waddled along the road, his withered legs in a sling and his rubber wheels rolling easily, Quinn thought about what she would do if she owned a pot-bellied pig farm. First, she wouldn’t—own one, that is—because no matter how cute they looked as babies, touching one was like rubbing a Brillo Pad. Second, If Quinn did own a farm, she would most likely have only a few animals and lavish love and attention upon them.
Quinn’s eyes burned with injustice. Mrs. Birmingham didn’t love one hundred and seventy pigs. If she did, she had a funny way of showing it.
As the road gently sloped downward, Quinn and Toby came to the ramshackle fence that marked the edge of Mrs. Birmingham’s property. The crippled woman’s apple orchard had grown unchecked. Mashed and rotted Cortlands, rife with decay, littered the ground.
Quinn wrinkled her nose. The putrid, pungent perfume of pig was starting to make her eyes water. She could taste excrement in her mouth and smell the foul urine creeping up her delicate nostrils.
If Mrs. Birmingham was a different person, one who didn’t hurt pigs, Quinn would still be at home, playing with Manuel or trying to make friends with Booby so he wouldn’t keep pulling out his plumage. Quinn, however, was nothing if not righteous, especially when it came to animals. No one had the right to hurt pigs, least of all Mrs. Birmingham.
Once, when Quinn was just eight, which seemed like a lifetime ago, Mrs. Birmingham stopped the little girl as she was walking Toby to the top of the street. Quinn and Toby were on the return trip when Mrs. Birmingham in her electric wheel chair, wearing weird purple pants and braids down her back, was putting a piece of post into her mail box.
“Why do you make that poor dog suffer?” asked the pig lady. Her eyes looked three times too large behind her oversized glasses.
“I don’t know,” Quinn murmured, because she was only eight and didn’t have the words.
“Well make sure he doesn’t crap along my fence.” Mrs. Birmingham snipped then rolled away.
As Quinn walked along the fence toward Mrs. Birmingham’s house, she thought about that day and all the things she could have said to the weird lady. Things like, ‘Well at least we love our pets at our house’, or ‘who are you to talk, because you have wheels, too,’ but she didn’t say either of those things.
Now that she was a little older, a bit wiser, and a dash more sure of herself, maybe she might give Mrs. Birmingham a piece of her mind about the conditions on her farm.
Maybe she’d be able to stop her from hurting pigs.
As Quinn and Toby neared the end of the fence, she saw movement in front of Mrs. Birmingham’s red barn. A zillion little pigs, more than Quinn could count, some big and some small, were milling around the open door, and in the middle of them all was Mrs. Birmingham in her electric chair.
At the top of the driveway, Quinn and Toby stopped. Mrs. Birmingham had slung a large bag over her shoulder, filled with grain, slop, and rotted food, and was preparing to roll around the yard to feed her pigs. They grunted and squealed around her. Of course, the biggest pigs and the boars were behind fencing, but the fencing seemed precarious at best, and some of the pigs had piled up against the rotting wood, desperate to get a mouthful as Mrs. Birmingham rolled by.
“Stay,” said Quinn to Toby and he dutifully wagged his tail and stopped rolling.
Quinn took a deep breath, which was completely filled with the taste of pig, and stepped onto Mrs. Birmingham’s driveway. Immediately, her right sneaker sunk into a pile of gooey brown. Undeterred, with her chin held high, Quinn kept going, even though every three or four steps, she found herself ankle deep in another pile of muck.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Birmingham didn’t even notice she had a visitor. She was too busy trying to arrange the large grain bag over her shoulder while pushing away dozens of snouts, tusks, and hungry incisors, all clamoring for a mouthful.
“Get back or you’ll get nothing,” Quinn heard Mrs. Birmingham growl.
For a moment, Quinn thought that the weird lady was talking to her so she stopped where she was. Brown goo squished around her toes but she didn’t care. She had something to say to Mrs. Birmingham and nothing was going to stop her.
“Get back,” Mrs. Birmingham squealed again, but this time there was fear in her voice. One of the smaller pigs had climbed up onto her lap and was shoving his little, bristled face into the feed bag. Mrs. Birmingham tried to throw him off, but in doing so, the little pig chomped down on her arm and pulled back a red snout.
Mrs. Birmingham screamed and Quinn’s breath caught in her throat. All of a sudden another pig jumped onto the pig lady’s lap, then another and another. In short order, Mrs. Birmingham was buried in a pile of pigs and the motorized wheel chair she was sitting in started to list to one side.
Out of desperation, stupidity or both, Mrs. Birmingham’s hand fell on the little control that moved her motorized chair, and she, the pigs, and all, lurched forward a good several feet before plowing into the rotted fence where the big boys were held.
Although she wasn’t even going fast, the fence was in such a state of disrepair that it practically crumbled right before Quinn’s eyes. Seconds later, the big boys were out, jumping on Mrs. Birmingham, the bag of grain, and the chair that she sat on.
In seconds they all toppled sideways and came crashing to the ground.
There are words for what happened next, but Quinn didn’t have them in her nine-year-old brain. Everything was moving so quickly. One moment, Mrs. Birmingham was getting ready to feed her pigs and the next, they were all eating their fill, and it wasn’t just grain they were eating. Terrible, shredding, shrieking sounds filled the air as dozens upon dozens of pigs converged on the best pig slop smorgasbord ever served up.
With nary a though of dashing back home to get her mother, Quinn watched, fascinated, vindicated, and somehow infused with the knowledge that Mrs. Birmingham wasn’t going to hurt pigs anymore.
And as she watched, she suddenly felt something nudging her poo filled sneakers. It was a tiny piglet, much smaller than all the others. The poor, petite porker had one eye swollen shut and one bloodied leg where it looked like one of the larger beasts had bitten it.
Quinn immediately forgot about the pile of pigs pigging out, reached down, and scooped up the frail, little beast.
“You’re funny feeling,” she whispered to it as she lifted the piglet inside her light blue windbreaker, turned around and headed back up the driveway to where Toby was waiting in his wheels. “I think I’ll call you Birmingham,” she said.
Quinn thought about it for a moment as the little pig quivered inside her jacket, never realizing how very lucky it was to be saved by someone who felt so strongly about animal care.
“Then again,” she whispered to the tiny snout. “Maybe not.”
R is for Rae
Sent Away to Recover
DEATH IS NO WORSE than detox. I should know. I’ve gone through both.
Sure, detox was painful, but nothing worse than having the flu. I spent a couple of days huddled in a ball and shivering like the wind chill factor was less than zero, and I may have held back my hair once or twice while praying to the porcelain God, but then it was over.
Lucky for me, I wasn’t an addict.
Little Killer A to Z Page 13