that sounded like a good idea. I pulled the blanket up over my head.
Someone shook me. Over and over, until I had no choice but to peer out from my bastion of blankets and confront the assailant. “What?” I asked drearily as I opened one eye to gaze upward. Trevor was standing over me, shaking me, a terrified look on his face.
“Something happened,” he said.
“What?” I asked again, indifferently.
“Come on,” he said.
“Why?”
“Stop asking questions,” he snapped.
“What time is it?”
“Get up!” he asserted. “Hurry!”
I slowly pulled myself out of bed. My energy was drained. My brain still felt like mush. And my arm was still stiff and difficult to move. The problem with being dead is that your body isn’t all that cooperative. It doesn’t repair itself. It doesn’t get better. I wouldn’t feel halfway decent until I got to see a tailor – if my mentor was willing to spend the credits to get me fixed up.
I needed some brains. There had been so much going on last night. My brain had been firing on all cylinders. The more you used it, the more brains you needed to eat to recharge it. My mind felt dull and empty and it was hard to concentrate. I wanted to tell Trevor that I needed another snack first, but he seemed really impatient. He was standing by his bedroom door, looking out, then glancing back in at me every few moments as if to hurry me up.
I threw my legs over the bedside and pushed myself up unsteadily. “What’s going on?” I spoke hoarsely.
“Didn’t I tell you to stop asking questions?” he demanded.
“Okay, jeez. What’s got your cadaver in such a rot?”
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He flew out of the bedroom and I stumbled listlessly after him. I examined the bandage on my arm as I went down the hall. It was caked in dried blood, but it wasn’t that much. The wound was pretty deep, but it shouldn’t cause any mobility issues once it was repaired. The damage was mostly cosmetic. At least I could be thankful for that.
Trevor bounded downstairs and I took ginger steps behind him. The least he could do is wait for me after the horrible night I had because of his Stiff-brained idea to go human tracking.
I came to the bottom of the stairway as Trevor opened the front door and gestured me forward with a few quick bounces of his hand. He vanished through the doorway as I made my way across the floor and out the door. Trevor was rushing across the field toward the barn. The sky was still dark. The sun hadn’t peeked over the horizon yet. It felt like I hadn’t slept for even a minute. I dragged myself after him, trying to will myself to move quickly, and caught up to him after he had thrown open the barn doors and entered. He was standing at the back of the barn near the humans’ stall. His hands were on top of his head, fingers strung through his curly hair. His eyes were closed and he was shaking his dipped head.
I didn’t understand. “What’s wrong?” I asked as I shuffled down the hall of the barn toward him.
Snarls and growls answered me. It was coming from inside the humans’ stall. I cocked up one eyebrow curiously as I came nearer to Trevor. I stepped around him and peered into the stall.
A thin, white, naked figure crouched over a flesh-torn body, peeling off bloody pieces of muscle and meat and shoving it into its mouth ravenously. I shook my head, confounded.
“What happened?” I cried, my voice getting high and shrieky.
“How the hell should I know?” Trevor bellowed. “I thought you would know!”
“Me? Why?”
“You were the only one with them last night,” Trevor returned. “You fed them before we left to go human tracking!”
I shook my head again, numbly. It didn’t make sense. How did the woman become a Stiff? She wasn’t even infected. And how could she be dead? She was just alive last night. I had just talked to her. Just convinced her to live.
“I don’t know,” I offered meagerly. “How could she have died? She just ate last night!”
Trevor glared at me suspiciously. “I thought you told my mentor she wasn’t eating. I got hell for that last night, you know.”
I put my hand up. “Right, she wasn’t. I mean last night, after I got back, when you went to get the bandages.”
“You spoke to the human?”
My head bobbed up and down, like a buoy on a gentle ocean’s current. “I told her,” I said. “I told her she was probably going to be used for fodder if she didn’t eat.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Trevor demanded. “You know we aren’t supposed to talk to humans! Even professional breeders don’t unless they have to! You can’t just start chatting with them like it’s high tea!”
“I know,” I sighed with exasperation. “I wasn’t thinking. My head was messed up last night. Still is. I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”
Trevor tossed my justification aside with a flip of his hand. “You know better,” he snarled.
“It doesn’t matter! That doesn’t explain why she’s dead now! Or a Stiff!”
“What else happened?” Trevor asked, his eyes blades that were cutting directly into me.
I rolled my eyes up and let my mouth hang open. “I convinced her to eat. She didn’t want to die. Even if she was going to be bred. I made her understand that it was better to live under any circumstances than to be dead.”
“She ate?”
I nodded. “I fed her. I gave her a bowl of feed. I watched her eat it. I made sure.”
“What else?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s it, I swear!”
“Well, something happened! For the love of brains, I’m gonna be in so much trouble! Two humans down the drain and we can’t even salvage their brains for rations! I have to tell my mentor.”
Trevor charged out of the barn. I stayed. I didn’t think I had the energy to go after him anyway, and my feet didn’t seem to want to obey my brain. I gazed into the humans’ stall. The woman, now a mindless Stiff, continued to greedily feed her face, peeling away the man’s flesh. He was dead. His face was gone, only shredded pieces of skin and blood left matted over his caved-in skull. His upper body was only a skeleton with loose pieces of flesh and muscle hanging off it, and the zombified woman was working on his lower half, pulling him apart and devouring his muscles and the organs within. Her bony face was red, smeared with the man’s blood, and the redness covered her entire upper-half, shoulders, arms, breasts, and stomach, so that from the top up she looked like she had laid in the sun for so long that her skin had been burned beyond recognition.
Trevor’s mentor entered a few minutes later. She was flabbergasted. Then she was furious. She gave Trevor the business, and he had no means to defend himself. I had no answers for her either. She somewhat recorded my bandaged arm, but she seemed too overwhelmed by the loss of the humans she had been entrusted with to care for to really be concerned about me. She stomped off to deliver the message to my mentor that a Stiff needed to be wrangled. It was the perfect capper to everything. My mentor, with his vigilant eye, would interrogate me about everything, from the freshly awakened Stiff to my damaged arm, and in my state, I didn’t have the wherewithal to defend myself.
I was Stiff-bait.
It was a few hours before my mentor arrived. Sending messages through Revenant was not easy. We didn’t have any working telephones. We only had couriers. The good thing was that there was at least one on every block, and a lot of them had apprentices to handle the simple message delivering. One of the kids from school probably got to carry the message to my mentor that he was wanted at the Kushner farm. He would have just gotten in from his night of tracking to find that I was not there. I wasn’t sure what he would do. He could easily have me expelled on his suspicions alone. I really didn’t know how much my mentor liked me, or how much he thought I was worth sticking his neck out for. Probably not much.
I stayed in the barn with Trevor, keeping an eye on the Stiff and the bod
y of the man. I sat down on the stool again to rest and Trevor paced up and down the barn’s hallway nervously. My mentor entered. He was dressed in his tracking gear and held a handled snare like the Advanced kids had been using last night. He marched down the barn toward us. He looked at Trevor, then he eyed me up and down. He didn’t say a word. He turned and looked into the stall.
“What a mess,” he murmured. He turned and looked to Trevor. “Open the cage.”
Trevor didn’t hesitate. He went straight toward the stall and unlocked the cage, pulling the door open for my mentor.
“Stay back,” my mentor instructed, and he slipped inside the stall.
It only took a few moments. The Stiff didn’t even look up from the body it was devouring. My mentor quietly and effortlessly slipped the loop around its neck and tightened it. He paused to crouch and pick something off the floor before he left, and just like that, he forced the Stiff to its feet and drew it out of the stall. Despite its efforts, it could not break free. It clung to the bars of the cage for a few moments, but my mentor drew out a baton belted to his side and cracked its fingers, forcing it to let go.
He held the Stiff before us for a few minutes as he analyzed it. It was weird seeing the woman as a Stiff now, when just last night she was a living, breathing, intelligent human. Her face hadn’t changed. Even her body was pretty much the same, gaunt and pale. Her stomach was a little rounder, probably because she had stuffed herself full of the man’s flesh and innards all night. It
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