The Inhuman Chronicles (Book 1): Inhuman

by Feren, Todd C.

  I backed myself all the way to the very edge of my very short runway and tried to visualize my leap.

  “Wish me luck,” I said to Rex, who still stood at the edge looking down and across, trying to piece together my plan. I only had enough room for two good steps before I launched through the air. Had I thought about it at the time, I might have tried Rex’s technique of blasting a fart to give me that extra boost. It turns out I needed it. I saw the top shelf getting closer and closer as I sank lower and lower. I threw both hands up and caught hold of the unfinished wood of a pallet with bags of fertilized soil. As I scrambled up onto the shelf that I was aiming for, I accidentally pulled a large bag down. It dropped onto the only zombie with the sense to look up at the sound of me struggling to pull myself up. Before he had the chance to moan and alert his cohorts, a forty pound sack of dirt drove his skull down between his shoulder blades. I turned back to see Rex still staring at me like I was wearing a clown suit and had a dildo strapped to my forehead.

  I looked around my new aisle, and luck was on my side. I found boxes of exactly what I needed. As stealthily as possible, I lowered myself to the next shelf down. I was maybe six inches above the heads of these fuckers, and believe me, the smell only got worse the closer I got.

  My prize was within reach. I could see the small cardboard packages I was after. The only problem was that the boxes were right around the mouth level of the zombies. I was going to have to reach down into the horde to get what I was after.

  I really should have had Jack do this. I thought.

  So, I watched for what felt like forever to see if there was any discernible pattern in the zombie’s movements. It turns out, not so much. They move like a Roomba. You know, the robot vacuum? They just shuffle along and bounce off of something then go in a different direction. Maybe if I moved slowly, they wouldn’t see me as food. Just so long as none of them really looked at me.

  So I slowly laid down onto my belly and scooted as close to the edge of the shelf as I could. I could feel my throat preparing for the vomit that was sure to come if I didn’t get away from this smell soon. I clenched my jaw and swallowed hard to let my stomach know that nothing would be coming up from there today. Then, I slowly lowered my hand into the danger zone. If one of them saw me, they could grab my arm and take half a dozen bites before I could do anything to stop it.

  Then what would life be like? Turning into a zombie…Not a care in the world. Maybe zombie-ism is the way to go? They don’t worry about all the small things. They live the American dream. They consume everything they can without giving a single shit about who they have to step on to get it. They don’t care that their resources are running dangerously low. There’s no zombie protests about the plight of the ‘endangered living.’

  Shit, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that zombies had it pretty sweet. I don’t think we’ll ever see a zombie dying of a heart attack because he worked too hard.

  My fingertips could feel the cardboard box I was reaching for, but I couldn’t quite get a hold of it. I could feel wet hair brush up against my forearm, and my stomach instantly prepared an all out assault.

  Vomit at the ready!

  I pushed through it and stretched my arms a little further…Jackpot! I had the box by my fingertips, and as I gently pulled it up, a thought hit me. Better if we had a few. What if there is something wrong with this one?

  Damn my practical thinking.

  I reached back down and grabbed two more of my desired packages. Each time, a zombie would brush up against me with god only knows what fluid leaking out onto me. Once I made it back to the top shelf, it was time to prepare for another death defying leap over the aisle of the undead. I ripped open the small boxes I had just acquired and pulled out what I hoped would be our ultimate solution. I stuffed all three into the back of my pants as best as I could. I tried the pockets first, but they wouldn’t fit. This would have to do.

  I took my two giant steps before attempting an impossible leap for the second time today. As I flew through the air, I could feel a light tingle from my ass. That tingle was followed by a low bass-heavy ripping sound as flatulence shot from my ass. Now, I wasn’t intentionally trying Rex’s technique; this was just a happy coincidence. I fully understand that one man’s fart is not enough propellant to move him even a fraction of an inch. However, I couldn’t explain how I made it all the way across the aisle this time when I was a good three feet short on my first attempt. I stood up feeling like a super hero, having made a jump that I don’t think I could have made in my twenties. I looked victoriously at Jack and Sara who stared back at me with frozen disgust.

  “Did you just fart?” Sara asked with a look of horror on her face.

  “What?” I said pulling my classic ‘general confusion’ look out of storage and quickly putting it on. Then I sniffed the air like I was trying to see what they were talking about. Honestly, all anyone could smell was rotting flesh, but I pretended to smell something and then I looked shocked. “Oh!” I gasped and pointed an accusatory finger at the dog. “It was Rex!”

  Sara crossed her arms and gave me a ‘sure it was’ shake of her head. “Men.” She sighed as she tossed the batteries to me.

  “Really! It had to have been him. I would admit it if it was me!”

  “Yeah. Just make sure you didn’t crap your pants,” she said as Jack snorted.

  I shoved my hand down my pants to fish out the goods I had risked my life for when Jack whispered harshly.

  “What the hell are you doing? She was joking about checking for crap!”

  I didn’t say anything, but I stared hard at Jack as I pulled the three plastic items I stuffed there for safety.

  “Oh,” he said. “Good call.”

  I ripped open the batteries and loaded one nine volt into each of the three off white plastic circular devices. A little red light flashed on each to let me know that they were good to go.

  “Get ready to run for the door.” I whispered.

  “What are you going to do?” Sara asked with caution creeping into her voice, which was unusual because she almost always seemed so calm and collected. I held up the three devices and smiled as realization settled into her beautiful icy blue eyes.

  “Smoke detectors?” she asked trying to be certain of my half assed idea.

  “You’ve never had a fire drill?” I asked in return. Then I jammed the test button down until the high pitched squawking started and almost made my ears bleed. I ran down my shelf to the back of the store and threw the home safety device into a crowd of zombies. I jammed down the test button on another one and threw it like a frisbee towards the farthest corner. Within minutes, the floor was, pardon the pun, alive with activity. The zombies were practically stepping over each other to try and make it to the sound that was surely screaming food.

  We ran up our separate shelves towards the front of the store that was pretty much cleared out by this point. Jack dropped off the front of his aisle, spun around in mid air, and caught the top shelf with his fingertips to slow his fall. Then he dropped the rest of the way and looked up waiting for Sara to shimmy herself off the ledge and into the waiting arms of one of the biggest people on the planet. Part of me wanted Jack to catch me in the same way, but pride wouldn’t allow me to ask. So I did the next best thing; I jumped feet first into a destroyed paper towel display. I wish they had been Bounty, or some other name brand paper towel. Maybe then it wouldn’t have hurt quite so much. But nothing was broken, and I was alive, so there was that.

  “What about Rex?” Jack asked pointing up at the dog who was looking at drop equivalent of a ten story building for us. But before I could answer, Rex leaned over and placed his front two paws on the front side of the shelf. Then, he slid down a ninety degree drop about ten full feet before pushing off and flying through the air right towards me. Again, my reactions acted faster than my brain, and I caught him square in my chest. Without missing a beat, he licked my mouth, sprang from my arms, and bounced to th
e ground.

  “Mother fucker…” I mumbled wiping cockroach flavored dog slobber from my face.

  Jack pulled open the front doors, and Sara was the first one out. Once I made it out, Jack and I each grabbed one of the electric sliding doors and started to push them closed. Just before they closed completely, a small white blur shot through wagging his tail wildly. Once we got them closed, a wet decomposing hand slapped against the glass and nearly made me shit my pants.

  There would be no blaming THAT on the dog. I thought.

  Then I looked through the glass and saw the zombie that was chasing after Rex. He was in his thirties and had dirty blonde hair and a goatee that was encrusted with blood and strips of flesh. His name was Patrick Bean. I know his name because I knew him.

  When I was married, Patrick’s wife and my wife were best friends. Therefore, we were forced acquaintances. We would do movie nights at our house and have big spaghetti dinners. I remember not hating the guy. He was always quiet, and every time his wife would nag him or tell him something that he was doing wrong, he would always wait until she was out of earshot before saying something truly hilarious. I remember one time, he was helping me put dishes away, and his wife, Lisa, yelled at him for mixing the big spoons with the smaller spoons. I’m OCD, and it didn’t even bother me, but his wife acted like he was pouring rat poison into the baby food.

  “Ones big and ones small!! Can’t you tell the difference?!” She screeched as she left the room.

  Once she was safely out of ear shot, he said, “Yeah, your ass is big and your tits are small.”

  I laughed so hard at that. Not just the line, but the fact that he would always wait until she was out of earshot to say it.

  He was cheating on her. I could tell. I always suspected he was, but I actually saw him once. He was in a Starbucks in the back corner with a woman. I saw them when I went in for a white chocolate Frappuccino. She was smiling, laughing, and clinging to his every word. He seemed genuinely happy with his secret woman. I guess everyone has some sort of secret they keep that makes them happy. Patrick fucked this other woman because she made him feel happy when his wife constantly made him feel stupid and small. This other woman made him feel desired and powerful. I couldn’t blame him for that.

  But as I looked at him now on the other side of this glass, I couldn’t help but wonder if he ever told Lisa how he really felt about her bitching and belittling ways. Hell, maybe she was the strips of meat hanging off of his goatee. Who knows? I tapped the glass as my own goodbye to him, and then turned to walk away. Rex came bounding up to me, happily squeaking his T-rex.

  “Really?” I asked him. “We were running for our lives, and you took the time to go back for your toy?”

  He wiggled his butt and squeaked his prized possession in response.

  “Where to now?” Jack asked.

  I turned around to take another look at Patrick. I didn’t have any real friends that I knew of, or that I thought might take us in. There was only one other person who I was even aware of who lived close by, but I didn’t really feel like going down that proverbial road. After a long moment of trying to think of an alternative, I let out a sigh and resigned myself to the unfortunate idea.

  “Let’s go to my ex-wife’s house.”

  Chapter 20

  After we got our guns from the hiding place where we left them, we walked around the back side of the home depot towards my ex-wife’s house. Once we got to the back side of the garden center, what we saw was shocking to say the least. There were bodies along the chain link fence that enclosed the garden center. At first I thought these were just a few stragglers who never made it into the store during our escape. But these bodies along the fence weren’t zombies. Well, almost all of them weren’t zombies. All of them were secured to the fence using cable ties.

  That old bitch and her cable ties.

  We could see inside the enclosure to a support beam that had the sparse remains of three people also fastened to it by the plastic restraints. The image of what those two elderly kooks did was becoming clearer and clearer.

  The parking lot must have been swarming with the undead ghouls, and what better way to prevent unwanted guests from entering the store than to trap them all just outside the store. They took the whole ‘keep your enemies close’ to a whole other level. So they used human bait to lure them into the enclosed space, and had enough food to keep them busy while they went around and secured the exit, trapping them all there. But why stay once you had them trapped? Maybe the smell of all of the zombies was enough to keep other zombies away. I’ll make a mental note of that theory to test out later. It could come in handy.

  “Why do you think they were only planning to kill me?” I asked out loud.

  “I don’t know,” Sara answered flatly. “Maybe they wanted to use you as an example…What would happen to us if we didn’t do what they said.”

  “Then what did they want from you?”

  Jack, who was further up the path than us came running back looking like he had just seen a ghost. Sure, in a world filled with flesh eating zombies, why not throw in some ghosts too? What the hell?

  “They…they were going to eat us,” he spat out.

  “They’re zombies, Jack. That’s what they do.”

  “Not the zombies.” He said. Then he turned away and ran back to where he came from in hopes that we would follow, which we did. He led us to the ditch where we saw Jonathan dump the zombie body before we had even approached the store. The ditch was full of shopping carts and bloody remains. It only took a few seconds to see that these bodies were not those of reanimated corpses. These were living people who were killed and stripped down naked. From a distance, it was easy to assume they were zombies because they looked like they had been rotting, but we were wrong. They weren’t rotting or decomposing. They had been carved up. Their skin was removed, and chunks were neatly removed in similar sections on each of them.

  “They stripped the meat like these people were deer,” Jack said, holding back vomit till the very end of his sentence.

  “Are you kidding me?!” I asked.

  Jack stopped his spew of vomit just long enough to get a few more words out. “She kept telling me how big I was…”

  I remembered seeing Jonathan for the first time, sitting there next to his barbecue set up. I thought it was just a display that the store had put up, but now I could see it was set up for more practical purposes.

  “Awesome,” I said sarcastically. “If the zombies don’t eat us, elderly cannibals will. Isn’t there an early bird special somewhere for them?”

  Sara went over to Jack who was still heaving his innards all over the side of the road to try and comfort him. I sat down and looked out over Jonathan and Amanda’s left overs. I could hear Rex squeak his toy as he approached, but I never turned to look at him. I could feel him sit down next to me and lean his slight body weight against me.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to him without once turning to see him. When he heard my voice, he leaned in a little harder against me, and his tail began to softly flop against my lower back. “If you hadn’t picked that moment to…well, you know what you did,” I said remembering the dog chomping into the old man and saving my life.

  Did he know? I thought. The minute we got inside the Home Depot, Rex immediately buddied up to the old bastard. I thought he jumped ship in deference to a new captain.

  Did he manipulate the old man in a way I couldn’t?

  I turned to look at the dog, and he was looking nowhere but into my eyes. His long pink tongue hung out of the side of his mouth, and his eyes twinkled with a happiness I would never, and could never, know. “Why did you pick my yard to hide in?” I asked him. His expression never changed, and he never turned his gaze.

  “We should get going,” Sara said interrupting our moment. “It’s gonna be dark soon.”

  I stood up and let out that groan that often comes with age. “It’s about four blocks this way,” I said leading the s
mall group down the side of the road.

  Jack wiped away yellowish colored bile from the corners of his mouth. “Why are we going to your ex wife’s house?”

  “She was the only person I knew in the area. I know where her spare key is.”

  “She’s dead?” Sara asked. The reality was, I didn’t care if she was or not. Her new beau, the zombified head of Carl, was still in my front lawn chewing away at any debris my burning house left behind. If Carl was dead, I was pretty sure Joy was too.