by Curran
Nobody knew where the virus came from, not really, but there were lots of theories. Most claimed it had more than a little to do with the BIOCOM-13 satellite which had been sampling the upper atmosphere for alien microbes, was cored by a meteorite, and crashed outside Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis was the first city in the world to become a graveyard. But after that, they all went.
As it turned out, a great many people were immune to the virus. And one by one they began showing up in Carbon County. Doc and his boys gathered up as many as they could. Maria came from Pittsburgh and Shacks from Philly; Sonny came from Newark and Murph drifted in from Delaware. Earl had been one of the first and he was still there. Me, I barely escaped Buffalo. And they kept coming: New England, the Midwest, even the deep South. Some died, some were killed, some went by disease, and others were taken by the Wormboys. And still others won the lottery and were culled. But more always came. Always.
There were nearly forty people in the shelter now…what was six to save the lot?
What was six?
Yeah, that Doc was really something.
He gathered his flock, he tended them, fed and fattened them, kept them safe and sound. Then somewhere along the way he made a deal with the Devil and the Devil’s name was Dragna. Nobody seemed to know shit about Dragna other than the fact that he or it had wielded together dozens and dozens of zombie tribes into a single cohesive unit that was about as close to an army as you were going to get this side of the global holocaust. He was to the Wormboys and Wormgirls what Dracula was to bloodsuckers, more or less.
Somehow, someway, Doc had struck a bargain of sorts with this monster.
So every few months, Dragna demanded his payment, his protection money, like a good little extortionist from hell. And as long as Doc and his people played ball, there was safety. But the day we didn’t, Dragna would send his troops in by the thousands.
Yeah, Doc. Good old Doc. Father, therapist, priest, general, saint and prophet to those of us in the shelter. He was essentially good, essentially kind. He took care of everything from keeping his people busy to feeding and clothing them and delivering their babies and even presiding over makeshift weddings now and again. Everyone looked up to him. Everyone loved him. Everyone respected him. They did what he said and obeyed his rules and he kept them alive and somewhat sane.
With the good he did it was easy to forget he also created the lottery.
And in my mind that made him flawed, less than human. He was the farmer and we were the livestock. He raised us like pigs and brought us to slaughter come season.
And because of that, I hated him as much as I loved him.
4
That night-the night before the lottery-I came out of a very thin, nightmare-haunted sleep to the sound of a crash and a blaring car horn. Two minutes later, still dragging on my clothes, my mind fuzzy with some dream of absolute darkness and absolute death, I found Sonny up in the tower watching the action out in the parking lot through the observation port. The tower rose up thirty feet above the lot and it was the only part of the shelter that still had a window-shatter-proof and bullet-proof-but still a window.
“Hell’s going on?” I said.
“See for yourself.”
Sonny had the parking lot lit but I almost wished he hadn’t bothered. Apparently, a few more had decided to make a run for the shelter. This time it looked to be four people in a little minivan. What the circumstances were, I didn’t know, but they must have panicked when they saw all the Wormboys and Wormgirls hanging around the perimeter in drooling wolf packs. That must’ve been what made them drive at the shelter itself. Unfortunately for them and very fortunately for us, Doc with his infinite foresight had had a series of concrete barriers erected around the shelter so no one could ever breach it in such a way.
That minivan slammed right into one of them and it must have been putting out some speed when it did because the front end was smashed-in, the hood crumpled into a V. I could see spiderwebbed sheets of glass and spilled fluids on the pavement. As it was, the minivan looked like a cracked open egg and what had crawled out were four people. A saw a guy with shattered legs crawling towards the shelter, leaving a trail of something dark behind him. A woman was screaming nearby, holding her face in her hands. She was reaching out towards a cluster of the walking dead as if there was mercy in those cold, reptilian brains. One of them, a woman in a pink dress, took her down. Even from the tower I could see the clouds of flies rising from her.
“We have to do something,” I said.
Sonny pulled off his cigarette. “Doc and Earl are at the front door. Any of ‘em make it that far they’ll bring ‘em in.”
“Yeah, but-”
“No, Tommy. Use your fucking head for once. Wormboys are everywhere. Anybody that goes out there is meat, nothing but meat.”
He was right, of course. I knew he was right but even at that point I simply was not as hard and cold as Sonny and the rest of them. God knows I should have been after some of the awful shit I had seen, but even through it all there was hope and humanity and pity still flowering in me like sweet green shoots rising from the cracked, blackened soil of a graveyard.
I ran downstairs and found Doc and Earl waiting for survivors to make the door, but none had. They just looked at me, said nothing. They knew what I was thinking and Earl had his shotgun up. If I tried to throw the deadbolts and locks he would have killed me without a second thought.
I knew it.
He knew it.
Doc knew it.
I looked out the gunport slit and I could see the action just fine. The Wormboys were coming from every direction, waxy faces like melting goat curds or rippling papier-mache. A hot steam of rot rose from them in a sickening, churning mist. Some of them were walking, but others had crawled from ditches and pockets of shadow and many of them were missing limbs. I saw headless trunks. Severed hands. What looked like a rolling head. A woman whose flesh looked like it had been boiled saw me watching her and turned, shambling over towards the door. Her eyes were slimy rotten eggs bulging from raw red sockets, her face a worm carnival. She thrust her backside at me and lifted the ragged remains of her dress. Something like a gushing stream of rice pissed out from between her legs.
I turned away, barely able to keep my stomach down.
“You don’t need to be here, Tommy,” Doc said. “Why don’t you go back to your room?”
“Those people need help.”
“Yes, they do. And if it’s at all possible, we’ll help them.”
“Mister Bleeding fucking Heart,” Earl said.
I ignored him. Out there the zombies were feeding on the injured, but one guy was still pretty spry. He must have slipped out of the van after the crash but ran off in the wrong direction. Now he was coming back. He came vaulting across the lot. Two Wormboys made a grab for him but they weren’t fast enough. He darted past another and jumped over a couple crawlers.
In my mind I was with him, pumped with excitement at the idea that he would make it. It was like the good old days, watching Earl Campbell charging into the flak, flattening defenders, jumping, spinning, ducking, whirling around, but never, ever losing his consistent forward momentum.
He was no more than twenty feet from the door when three Wormboys got in his way and he broke to the right, tripped over a crawling husk, and went down. They converged on him from every side, literally covering him in their numbers. I heard him scream with a brilliant, piercing cry of absolute defilement.
But it wasn’t him at all.
It was the woman. The Wormboys had her and they were killing her a bit at a time, tearing out handfuls of flesh, biting into her, nibbling and nipping. I saw her face before it sank away in that carrion ocean. The pain, the horror…it had driven her mad. She clawed her eyes out with bloody fingers.
I turned away and got up real close and personal with Doc. “We could have saved that guy. We could have charged out there and dropped some of them, cut him a path to the door.”
“Not with
out endangering our community,” Doc said.
I glared at him. “You’re a fucking asshole,” I said and then went back to my room, helpless, hopeless, desperate. I was filled with a black concrete weight that was sinking me day by day.
5
The lottery.
Doc gathered us up in the dining hall because it was the only place big enough to hold us all. Everyone was there, of course. All of us except the children. There were fourteen kids in the shelter ranging from teenagers to infants. But thank God Doc left them out of this sordid mess. This was a party for adults and you should have seen them-eyes staring, faces sweating, hands trembling. Some chain-smoking until the air fumed over in a blue haze and others mumbling prayers over and over again until you wanted to kick their teeth out. Jesus. What a scene.
Then Doc showed up, smiling that plastic smile of his that made me bleed inside. “This isn’t anything we enjoy,” he said. “But it’s something we have to do and I think we all know that.”
Nobody agreed or disagreed with that and I couldn’t even look at that prim, proper, fatherly butcher because the sight of him made my skin crawl. Maria and I sat side by side, holding hands. Shacks was with us. Sonny, too. Murph was there…only he was scared white and he couldn’t even muster a pale shiteating grin or a nasty remark.
Doc held out a cigar box. “There are twenty-three slips of paper in here, folded. One for each adult here in the shelter. Six of these papers have an ‘X’ on them and you all know what those mean. Now, one by one-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Doc,” some guy named Corey said. “We know the drill. Just get to it already. I’m about to have fucking kittens here.”
A woman next to him who’d come in with Shipman made a sound that was somewhere between laughter and sobbing, a brittle sort of sound like something had just shattered in her throat.
“Well, then,” Doc said. “Well.”
Earl and two other guys-Jerome Conroy, an ex-cop, and Ape, an ex-biker-stood by the exit with shotguns. Both of them had seen their share of violence before the dead started rising and plenty since. But neither liked the job Doc had given them: security. It was human nature to bolt and run when you were handed a death sentence and they were there to see that no one did.
Doc, smiling like a tentshow preacher, all teeth and gums, walked around with his cigar box. He took out his slip of paper first. Then one by one we all dipped into that Pandora’s Box. The paper was heavy vellum and you couldn’t see through it. Couldn’t know until you unfolded it.
Corey was the first to say, “I’m staying! You hear that? I’m fucking staying!”
He was joined by three others, including Shacks, who could make the same boast. The woman who was sitting by Corey unfolded hers and stood straight up like something hot had just been jabbed up her ass. She held out her paper and there was an X on it. She was trembling so badly she nearly fell over.
She was chosen.
Corey and the others moved away from her like she had something catchy.
Only Doc went to her, put an arm around her, said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pearson.” She fell limp into his arms.
Then everybody was unfolding their papers and looking at them. Some, like Sonny, jumped up and danced for joy. “Knew it wouldn’t be me. Shit, yes.” Others cried out. One guy fainted dead away. And another guy shook his paper in the air, saying, “Praise the Lord, I have been chosen. Praise the lord.” Then he fell to his knees and began sobbing uncontrollably. It was a nightmare. People dancing. People hugging and kissing, others on the floor, moaning and whimpering. People came and went at the shelter and I did not know all of them that well. But I knew what all of them thought every day: if I can just get through the lottery one more time, I’ll make plans to get out. I won’t flirt with death twice. Yes, that’s what they told themselves because I told myself something very similar. If I can just get through it this one time, then I’ll get out. I won’t do it again. This was my first one. But many of them had played this sick game several times. People like Murph and Earl and Doc himself. And human optimism being as deluding as it is, they all told themselves that this would be their last time, that they would get through it and leave.
But very few of them did.
What took place in that room during the next fifteen minutes was more horrible than anything I had ever witnessed up to that point and I’d seen plenty. For the zombies are monsters, ghouls, predatory things like starving dogs that will use every ounce of instinct, subterfuge, and animal cunning to get the flesh they need to fill their empty bellies. They have an excuse for their savagery. We, however, did not. We were normal, uninfected, rational human beings and yet we were willing to play that perverse game, to sacrifice our own, anything to get a few more weeks of life.
The lottery was the greatest evil I had ever known.
Five sacrifices had been chosen.
One more.
Sighing, I unfolded my paper and as I did so some fatalistic urge within me hoped there would be an X on it so this nightmare would end and I wouldn’t have to live with myself, with the guilt that would come unfettered and sharp-toothed when I knew I had lived at the expense of others. Because it would come for me. There was no doubt of that. Like an unquiet ghost it would visit me in the dead of night, wrap its icy hands around my throat and throttle me awake, sweating and shaking, and there in the darkness I would have to face myself: all the evils I had done coming home to brood in my soul there in the midnight hour.
My slip of paper was blank.
I didn’t jump for joy. I felt…neutral, not happy and not sad, just… nothing. I felt like an empty can, to tell you the truth. A vessel, I guess, that every drop had been poured from. There was nothing left in me.
At that moment, as I tried to get a grip on what I was feeling, Murph rose up from his seat like he had suddenly been inflated. He did not stand up, he rose like a column of hot air. We all turned and looked at him and we all knew, of course. “I got picked,” he said in a flat voice. “You hear me, you assholes? I got picked. Me.”
He fumbled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tearing at the cellophane with clawing, fumbling, apelike fingers. He dropped two cigarettes, then a third, got the fourth between his lips and lit it. His face was oval like a moon, speckled in sweat, his eyes darting wildly in their sockets. He started laughing and he couldn’t seem to stop. Smoke drifted from his mouth and nostrils in a halo that enveloped his perspiring, bright red face and made him look like a cartoon devil.
“ AHH-HA-HA-HA,” he went at the top of his voice. “AH-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAH!”
“ Murph,” Doc said, coming over to him, wanting to smother him in empathy and goodwill, give him the speech about sacrificing for the good of all. He even reached out his arms right before Murph-not laughing now, his face hooked in a snarl of animal hate-bunched his fist into a ball and gave old Doc a shot right in the belly that folded him up to the floor.
Doc’s goons, Sonny and Earl and Conroy and that monkey-grinning slab of shit Ape, charged in and beat Murph to the ground and he took it. He did not even try to fend off the blows that came for him. He accepted them like they were his inheritance. He lay there on the floor, sobbing and trembling, curled up in the fetal position. The goons had to drag him out the door and by then nobody was saying a goddamn thing. You should have seen the self-satisfied, greedy fuck-you-I got-mine looks in their eyes like fat-bellied rats that had found another crumb to gnaw on that would keep them safe one more day.
This is what it had come to.
The germ had taken the good people and many of them were wandering around outside the shelter looking for food. What remained behind were the people in that room-writhing human worms squirming in the smelly dungball of the world.
They made me sick.
And the sad part was, I was one of them.
6
Doc’s sacrifices-his selections of juicy pink meat for the Wormboys-were set to be marched out the next night. They were separated from the ge
neral population… put in isolation, as Doc called it. Why? I don’t know. Did they pose a threat to us? Did we pose a threat to them? Or was Doc just afraid that if we had to look on them and see what was in their eyes, that depthless pain and desperation, that we might start acting like human beings again? That we might feel some intrusive, obstructive things like pity and remorse and remember that culture, true culture, was built upon morality, ethics, and compassion?
In order for civilization to function, you see, people must act civilized.
Doc was nothing if not a student of human psychology by that point. He was probably worried that the whole cloth of his little disenfranchised community might start to unravel thread by thread once we stopped worrying about our own skins and realized exactly what we were doing to those poor people.
I had it out with him as he knew I would, being the bleeding heart goody two-shoes that I am. Basically, I argued that if we were condemning those people to a horrible death, the least we could do is let them be human beings with all that entails for the last day or so of their lives.
“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” he said, as if he were addressing a particularly stupid child. “Do you have any idea the trouble that would cause?”
“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
He smiled thinly at that: paternal, patient, a just and loving god. “Tommy, these people need to face this together. I feel as you do for them, but misguided pity at this point will only make it harder on them and us. Nobody forced them to play the lottery. They did it of their own free will.”
“They did it out of fear,” I said. “Fear that you’d throw them out to the living dead if they didn’t.”
“We have to have rules or we have no society.”
“This isn’t a society,” I said, “it’s a fucking zoo.”
Doc just smiled patiently at me. “No, it’s a community, Tommy. We survive by working towards a common goal and thinking as one. When we lose that, it’s all over. Now…this isn’t a prison or a cult. If you’re unhappy, feel free to leave. We’ll give you a rifle, food, you can even take one of the vehicles out there.” Then he leaned in close so I could see that beyond the fatherly warmth in his eyes there was something fierce and steel-gray as a gathering storm. “But if you walk out of here, Tommy, don’t ever think you can come back. You won’t be welcome.”