Eaters: The Resistance
By Michelle DePaepe
Copyright 2015 Michelle DePaepe
Amazon Edition
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PART I
Chapter 1
Underneath a topaz sky, the desert sand reflected the brilliance of the Tucson sun like an infinite amount of diamond dust. Cheryl Malone watched the robin perched on the stone ledge of Fort San Manuel. It chirped at her, begging for any scraps she could spare. Before she could reach into the pocket on her cargo shorts to find some crumbs leftover from the biscuit she'd brought to her post for breakfast, the bird took flight. She saw it soar high above the prickly landscape as the ear-piercing wail of sirens screamed out from one of the baiting stations on the outskirts of the compound.
"Malone!" Private Kelly yelled from his post a few yards away, pointing at the gathering cloud on the northern horizon.
She grabbed the AK-47 leaning against the wall and jumped to her feet. With one hand on the stock and a finger curled around the trigger, she gripped the warm metal and scanned the perimeter of the compound. Her instinct was to start firing at the first hint of motion outside the safety of the fort, but she knew that the targets wouldn't be in range until they reached the tall chain link fence, topped with a snarl of razor wire. Cheryl remembered that a soldier had once told the new patrol recruits not to fire until they saw the proverbial whites of their eyes. That directive was met with a round of laughter, because if any of the oncoming infected still had eyes, they certainly weren't white anymore.
She was used to the horrific appearance of the Eaters or N.E.U.s—Necrophagous Eating Units—as the military affectionately called them—many so decomposed that they were little more than skeletons with wispy flaps of leathery skin dangling from their bones. They came in hordes of tens, hundreds, and occasionally even more…and they were looking for food. Any sort of human flesh would do.
They could only be stopped by a direct hit to the head; it had to be a bull's-eye to the brain pan to destroy the infected tissue inside their skull. If you weren't successful in inflicting that kind of trauma, like an automaton they just kept coming and coming until they reached their target and consumed it.
Figures began to emerge from the amorphous sand cloud. Cheryl sucked in her breath as her finger tightened on the trigger. This wasn't the usual onslaught of stick figures with gnashing teeth, desiccated by weeks of wandering under the desert sun. This crop included a menagerie of short and tall, fat and thin, and the young and the old in various states of decomposition. They didn’t look like the normal band of corpses that had been wandering the desert in search of food as they baked in the hot sun. Many of these Eaters were fresh—if one could use such an amusing word to describe them. They had been infected more recently. It was bad news, because it could mean they had come from breeched shelters, pockets of civilian holdouts in Tucson, Phoenix, or the surrounding areas.
As their individual forms became more distinct, Cheryl knew that it was best not to look too closely at their faces. Though every one of them had once been someone's mother, brother, sister, friend; it was important to remember that they weren't human anymore. They were ragtag compilations of bone, sinew, and hair with no heart beating inside them. No rational thought process—just walking eating machines.
Sergeant Cruz raised a hand from the watchtower. "Hold!"
Cheryl steadied her grip, resisting the urge to start shooting, but someone, probably one of the newest recruits to the combined military/civilian patrol unit, ignored the command and panicked. Before the first wave of Eaters reached the fence line, there was the rat-a-tat-tat sound of gunfire.
Having almost six months of experience of defending the fort, she wasn't so trigger-happy. She knew it was stupid to waste ammunition by firing randomly into the air or sand. Her lip curled up as she aimed and remained patient, waiting to fire into the fast approaching group.
Private Kelly shouted again. "Cheryl…see that fat, bald dude in the sleeveless shirt?" He nudged his rifle to the right side of the horde.
Cheryl followed his gaze to the stumbling man in the torn, checkered top. He had a long beard, coated in a gory slime of red muck, and there was an inch-long silver barbell dangling from the torn skin above one eyebrow.
"He's mine."
Whatever gets his rocks off, Cheryl thought. She took no pleasure in dispatching any of them. If she narrowed her eyes to blur the images, she could mow them down like bowling pins, making it an adrenaline-filled task, but not a sport.
A second before the sergeant yelled, "Fire!", Private Kelly changed his mind and aimed for the walking corpse of a young girl. Her wheat-colored pigtails looked like they'd been dipped in ink, but it was more likely that they'd been dragged in the blood of her last victim. Cheryl averted her gaze to the group as a whole, trying to shake away that disturbing visual.
When the group slammed into the chain link fence, clawing and snarling like rabid animals, she and the rest of the patrol on this side of the fort opened fire. Some targets were direct hits, heads jolting back from the impact of the bullets before they tumbled backwards. Others recoiled then recovered quickly, commencing their onward movement then crawling on top of the fallen bodies. One of them mounted the torso of another then climbed onto his shoulders. It wasn't a calculated, coordinated effort, because there was no rational thought process to their gymnastics other than onward towards the food source. Eventually, with the process repeated, pyramids formed, with those near the top able to reach the razor wire. Many were stopped at that point, because their flesh or remaining clothing snagged on the sharp blades, halting their advance. That made their heads easy targets for the marksmen on top of the fort roof, but, as usual, some managed to make it over the top of the fence, falling into the pit of rebar spikes where they were impaled.
Most of them.
"Kelly! Malone!" Sergeant Cruz yelled. "Moat!"
They turned their guns towards the pit.
Not all of the invaders had been skewered, because so many were falling at once. The lower ones landed on spikes while the others higher up bounced off of them and tumbled ten feet down into the concrete moat. Too dead to feel any pain even with snapped bones, they stumbled to their feet (or knees if those didn't work). Then, the rogues ran back and forth like tigers trapped in a cage. In the past, this system had worked like a carefully designed drill, because it was easy to pick them off one by one, but today there were so many Eaters in the moat, it was pandemonium.
"Oh my God…" Cheryl said under her breath, not sure where to aim.
Kelly didn't hesitate. He panicked and started spraying a shower of bullets in a wide swath. It was a clear violation of their training rules. Every bullet that hit the concrete blasted a hole in the moat, weakening its structure. The damage worried her. It wasn't inconceivable to her that someday the Eaters would start tunneling in the sand, making their way in from underground via the cracks in the barricade.
Many of them were pressing up against the wall now, reaching up with mottled, veiny hands and staring at her with their dead, filmy eyes. The sight of so many so close made her freeze for a moment. In this week's rotation, she was on the lower level of the building. It was usually just as safe as the rest of the positions higher up, but when the rebar failed to stop the onslaught, it was definitely a more hazardous spot. Not wanting to be reported for a failure to defend violation, she sucked in her bre
ath and took aim at a man just below her. With his un-tucked, pinstripe shirt covered in blood stains, he looked like someone who had once been an accountant. Cheryl guessed that he had just stepped out for lunch one day at the beginning of the infection and had been attacked. Now, his upper palate and nasal cavity were missing, probably chewed off by another Eater during a squabble over a meal. No longer interested in crunching numbers, now all he wanted to do was strip off her flesh, crunch on her bones and suck the marrow out of them.
She fired and hit him between the eyes. He fell backwards, and she aimed for the next one, a young woman in a filthy dress who crawled on top of his body, trying to claw her way up the wall. After knocking her down, Cheryl aimed for the next…and the next…
She was still panting with her warm gun held tightly in her hands, watching the piles of bodies below for any sign of movement when Sergeant Cruz called the cease fire command. With sweat dripping down her flushed cheeks, it was a moment before she conceded that it was okay to lower her weapon. Two hours had passed since the invasion began. Her body was still tensed in full-adrenaline mode, but her arms felt like jelly as she put the gun down, noticing that she'd gone through an amazing number of rounds.
She gathered her water bottle and other supplies, and headed back inside. Another patrol member was waiting just inside the door. He was just a kid, a new recruit, probably seventeen or eighteen. From the look on his eager, pimpled face, she deduced that he was disappointed that he hadn't been allowed to join in the fight.
She elbowed past him, too drained to warn him about the carnage he was about to witness once he stepped through the door. However cool he might think his new job was, he was likely to lose his breakfast when he saw the quantity of corpses and the messy clean-up process. The sanitation crew would already be on their way. As far as she was concerned, there was only one job worse than being a "Sticker" in a baiting station, and that was being a "Remover". When an Eater made it over the fort wall and landed on the forest of rebar pikes, they often were impaled but not killed. If their head was still intact, they were a writhing, moaning, piece of rotting meat. Even when they appeared to be completely dead it was dangerous work for a Remover to get close enough to put them out of service without getting bit by another one nearby. Then came the messy work of removal. So many had come over the wall today, it would take until nightfall to finish the job. During the kid's afternoon shift, the decaying bodies would cook in desert sun in temperatures that could exceed a hundred degrees. Removers wore Hazmat suits for their work to protect themselves from blood, bloating intestines falling out of bodies like messes of black snakes, and gaseous yellow and green fluids. The worst Cheryl had ever witnessed was an impaled body that had exploded—not from the corpse's putrification, but from the remains of a dead dog in its stomach.
Good luck kid. You won't be eating for a few days after today's shift.
Down the hall, she saw a line of Removers preparing to go out and do their disgusting job that wouldn't end until all the bodies were piled into trucks, taken out to the desert far away from the fort, and burned in huge, stinking piles. Cheryl doubted that world had witnessed such hellish bonfires since the Black Plague.
Private Kelly slid his work card in a vending machine and grabbed the Snickers bar that dropped out. "You all right?" he asked, keeping step with her a second later.
"Just tired."
"Shit…we all are. That was a hell of an attack."
"Their numbers are increasing. Fresher corpses too."
"Makes you wonder where they're all coming from. Fallen shelters? Other states? "
She didn’t want to dwell on their origins at the moment. Some quiet meditation followed by a nap sounded like a better idea. "I don't know. I'm just glad we survived this round."
Kelly took a bite of his candy bar and smiled. "You can't beat the perks of being on patrol, though. At least we aren't one of the starving slobs down in the squatters section. We pull our own weight."
"Yeah," she said, continuing to walk, but not sure where she was headed. "But it's not the extra rations that keep me going. I'd rather know what's going on out there than be one of the oblivious sheep inside the fort that don't have a clue."
"And that helps you sleep better?"
"No."
"I bet I could give you some sweet dreams."
She gave a sideways glance to the lanky soldier at least five years her junior whose bravado seemed to be enhanced by the cover of his black sunglasses. "Keep talking like that and Mark will kick your ass." Or, she'd do it herself. Since arriving at the fort, she'd killed hundreds of the walking dead. And before that, one freshly-turned potential rapist, the size of a Mac truck, in a skanky restroom stall. Private Kelly had no idea what she could do to a simple, cocky young man, even without a loaded weapon in her hands.
He gave her a smirk followed by a wink before detouring towards the cafeteria.
She sighed as she continued down the hall. A lot of guys had come on to her since she'd sought refuge in the fort six months ago. She didn't know if they were really attracted to her, if it was the amped up testosterone from living in a constant state of danger, or if it was just the survival instinct kicking in. Whatever the cause, dozens of women in the fort were pregnant. That meant there was an imminent baby boom in the next few months—which meant more mouths to feed.
Food had been plentiful when she first arrived, but now supplies were intermittent, and it didn't help that the winter growing season had been challenging. Cool crops like lettuce, broccoli, and spinach usually grew well in the fort's garden during the cooler months, but water supplies for irrigation had been unreliable. Some days, nothing flowed out of the pipes. Other days, it was a mucky reddish-brown water that couldn't be used for anything until it had been filtered and boiled. Even then, some people refused to drink it, because they were afraid it carried bacteria from the dead or the agent that caused the infection. "I'd rather sift my piss through a napkin and drink it," one man told her in the cafeteria when he looked at the recycled bottles of water tinged with the color of rust. From the looks of the ropey blue veins underneath his thin, translucent skin, she figured he probably better bring a glass with him every time he went to the bathroom, because he wasn't going to last long without getting more moisture.
She stopped in the hall in front of the silent, black screen mounted to the wall. Until recently, televisions throughout the complex had blared jaw-dropping scenes of heroic military rescues and news from shelters scattered around the country, but most of the screens were dark now, supposedly because they had been unplugged to conserve electricity. There were a few still running, but someone in the hierarchy had decided that no news was better than broadcasting more of the chaos and bleakness around the world, so they simply showed nature films—twittering birds, rabbits hopping through the brush, a lizard sunning itself on a rock.
Where to go now? She had another patrol shift starting at ten p.m.—quite a few hours away. She could go to the cafeteria and try to eat some lunch while there was food left. Or…she could visit her dad in the ICU. She decided on the latter, because after such an adrenaline-pumping attack and seeing the various states of all of those bodies, she really wasn't hungry.
"S'up, Cheryl?" the guard asked at the door.
"Just visiting my dad."
"He any better?"
"The same."
"Chin up, kid."
"You say that every day, Frank."
He shrugged. "Just doing my job as the happy greeter. You know like the old dudes who used to work at Walmart."
"Those old dudes didn't pack a loaded AR-15."
"Point taken," he said with a grin. Then, he tipped his cap to her and opened the door.
She made her way to her father's bed towards the back of the room. When she got to the curtain partition, she paused, looking in on the sleeping form with tubes coming out of his wrist and nose. He looked like a wax dummy, some shrunken image of the boisterous man she used to know—the one th
at she'd traveled hundreds of miles from Colorado to find and save.
"Creepy."
A young nurse appeared from the other side of the curtain. "What?"
"I meant…crepey," Cheryl whispered to her. "His skin is so thin and papery, like a mummy. I just don't get it. Why can't he gain any weight?"
After checking her father's pulse, the dark-haired girl with a pony tail and purple half-moons underneath her eyes pulled her aside.
"With some of them, it's nothing medical. It's more like PTSD. They just can't snap back after going through what they did."
"But, the IV…it should be helping his body with water and nutrients, right?"
"Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be helping much. He's so severely dehydrated; it's like he just can't absorb anything." Not having anything more encouraging to say, the nurse gave her a sympathetic smile and a quick squeeze on her shoulder then went to check on a patient in the next bed.
Oh, Daddy. Please get better. He'd been in the ICU now for months and was still so frail, just leather and bones. She'd started sneaking some of her rations in for him, worried that he wasn’t getting a fair share, but even though there were some days when he was sitting upright and able to eat, it didn't seem to help. On one of those rare occasions that he was awake when she visited, his eyes stared at her, unblinking—a testament to the horrors he'd witnessed. He'd only spoken raspy fragments about how he'd survived hidden in his Tucson home, living on nothing but beetles and dust after seeing his neighbors torn to pieces and devoured by Eaters.
Cheryl jumped as her father gripped her hand with fingers that felt like crab claws. He's still listening. Still here in some way.
She stayed, holding his hand for almost half an hour, talking to him and trying to say any positive thing she could think of without any mention of the attack that the fort had just undergone. Then, feeling pain in her back from hunching over, she said, "I've got to go, Dad. I've got duty." She squeezed his hand and pulled away, feeling the inevitable pang of guilt, the payment for her lie. His rapidly shifting eyeballs under his closed lids seemed to be dreaming of the unspeakable things had brought him to this state. I know, Dad. Really. I know…
Eaters (Book 2): The Resistance Page 1