“Swallow your soul!” the monster snarled, over and over again.
Brent felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. His fear ebbed as the world went dim around him. I am just a piece of meat, he thought, seeing his left hand flopping bonelessly on the floor beside him. A piece of meat that feels no pain.
A pair of boots stepped into his field of view. Another deadhead had entered the room. He didn’t look up. He couldn’t turn his head. There was blood in his eyes. Blood in his nose and mouth.
“Aw, hell, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said.
11. Muriel
He was surprised when he woke up, mostly because he woke up. He had believed, as his consciousness swirled down the drain, that he would never wake up again, but he did.
He opened his eyes, or tried to—one would only come open to a slit—and realized that his head was resting on a woman’s lap. She was a pretty woman, late middle age, a bit too thin, with long brown hair salted with gray and very compassionate features. Her hair was tied behind her head in either a ponytail or a bun, he couldn’t tell which, and she was stroking his bangs away from his brow, which felt wonderful.
Above and behind her were metal panels strung with barbed wire upon which a light blue plastic tarp fluttered rapidly. It was cold, and there was a sense of swift forward motion, the rocking movement of travelling by automobile. It had been years since he rode in a car.
“Easy,” the woman said, and she smiled soothingly. “They beat you pretty badly.”
The woman’s body swayed to the right as the truck they were riding in went around a curve in the road.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked, after she had righted herself.
“Brent,” he said.
“Brent what?”
“Scarborough. I’m Brent Scarborough.”
He started to sit up, and she put her hands on his shoulders to restrain him. “You shouldn’t try to move around too much,” she said. “Not yet. Just rest a few minutes. Get your bearings.”
“I’m okay,” he said, pushing her hands away. He sat up and immediately regretted it. His head pulsed like an infected boil. He clutched his temples and groaned. The world faded out on him, then slowly came back into focus. Bright scintillating spots danced in his vision. He concentrated on his breathing, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and the dizziness abated.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
The middle-aged woman arranged the edges of the blanket that was draped across her shoulders, pulling it closed in front, but not before he saw that she was pregnant. Her breasts were full, her belly round and firm. She was dressed in filthy blue jeans and a slightly tattered denim shirt.
“You know where we’re going,” she said, fussing with the blanket, not looking at him.
There was a deer carcass in the cage with them, lying in the bed of the truck just a foot or so away. Its fur was matted with congealed blood, its eyes blank, tongue protruding. It had been partially eaten. Its thick neck and muscular chest had been thoroughly chewed. Heaped beside the deer were several smaller animals, all dead: cats, rabbits, a collie, a raccoon.
The big deadhead he’d killed yesterday was lying among them, its body naked and pale, face tucked into the corner of the truck bed like a resolute napper. Its skull gaped, a hollow gourd. Someone had had themselves a snack.
Brent examined his arms and hands, looking for bite marks.
“They didn’t bite me,” he said, not quite able to believe it. “Not even a finger!”
“They argued about it,” the woman said, smiling morbidly. “Several of them wanted to eat you, but their boss said no, said they were taking you back alive. The redheaded one defended you, too.”
“The redheaded one?” he repeated, head jerking up.
The woman nodded. “I think he knew you.”
Harold! But that wasn’t possible, was it? Harold was immune to the Phage, like him, like all of the people who had managed to survive thus far. Anyone who could catch the Phage had already caught it. That’s what Brent and Harold had believed, but maybe they were wrong. They’d never been bitten and didn’t care to be bitten to test their theory.
He shook his head. It didn’t make sense.
“You were very lucky,” the woman continued. “They ate that one’s brains, and some of the deer this morning. I think they were full. Otherwise, they probably would have munched on you a little.”
“What’s your name?” he asked the woman. The truck they were riding in jounced over a pothole and they both cried out—the woman startled, Brent from the pain in his head. He touched his face carefully. His right eye was hot and puffy. That’s why he couldn’t open it. And there was a pop knot on his forehead, near his left temple.
“Muriel,” the woman said. “My name is Muriel Jones. I’m the reason you got caught. Sorry about that.”
Brent stared at her blankly for a moment, trying to process that information. “What do you mean you’re the reason I got caught?” he asked.
“They were running me down,” she said. “I escaped from the facility a week ago. I was headed Home. They caught me early this morning. They were taking me back to Manfried when they saw blood splattered in the front yard of that farmhouse. They pulled over to investigate. About twenty minutes after pulling over, they opened the cage and tossed you in. You and Mr. No Brains over there. A zombie, I take it?”
Brent nodded. “Yeah. A chomper. I killed it yesterday. It tried to get into my hideout.”
“Bad luck,” Muriel said.
“Yeah,” he nodded glumly. “Very bad luck.”
Muriel’s hands moved beneath her blanket. She put a cigarette between her lips, ducked her head down and lit it with a plastic lighter. The smoke vanished almost instantly through the gaps in the rattling tarp. She smiled at him, the cigarette jittering between her taut lips. “Want one?” she asked. “I found them in the house I was hiding in. They’re kind of stale but…”
He was a little outraged she was smoking. Old conditioning from the days before the zombie apocalypse, when smoking was a Bad Thing, especially for pregnant women. Brent wondered if all those health nuts regretted their asceticism at the end. If Brent had known what was going to happen back then, he might have indulged a little more himself. He used to drink a little, but had never smoked.
Fuck it, he thought.
“Yeah, give me one,” he said.
Muriel lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “I saw that look in your eyes,” she said, amused. “I wouldn’t smoke if there was any chance…”
“Sorry,” he said. He took a drag of the cigarette and coughed.
“I’ve been a breeder for them for five years,” Muriel said. She pushed an errant strand of hair from her face. “In those five years, I’ve had six children. They took them all.”
“I’m sorry,” he apologized again.
“I don’t know why you’re sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s not really their fault, either. They can’t help what the Phage has turned them into. They’re as much victims of all this as we are.” She cocked her head, looking at him thoughtfully. The corner of her lips quivered, not quite a smile. “If anyone is to blame, it’s God, but I don’t think He really exists. How could He? And if He does… well, all I can say is: what an asshole!”
Brent laughed, and then immediately felt ashamed. He was raised Southern Baptist. The evangelical denomination was almost as good at instilling guilt in its adherents as the Catholics. Guilt, and a heaping helping of fear. Hell was very real for Baptists, and God a short-tempered curmudgeon. Brent wasn’t too sure God existed either, not anymore, but it was best not to take any chances.
“You seem like a nice kid,” Muriel said, smiling at him sadly. “We’ll arrive at Manfried soon, and then they’ll probably kill you. You want to come over here and sit with me before we get there?”
He thought about it a moment and then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that would be nice.”
Muriel opened
her blanket, inviting him in. “I had two boys before the zombie apocalypse,” she said as he shifted over beside her. “One of them would have been about your age if he’d survived. Well, maybe a little younger.” She lowered the blanket over the two of them and leaned her head against his shoulder, still puffing on her stale cancer stick. “His name was Billy.”
Brent moved his hand beneath the blanket, grasped her free hand and held it. Her hand was cold and bony, but it felt good to hold it. It was comforting. He hadn’t held someone’s hand since… well, it had been so long he couldn’t remember the last time he’d held someone’s hand. He used to spoon with Harold on really cold nights, but that wasn’t the same.
“I almost made it,” he said.
“Where did you start your run?” Muriel asked.
“Tennessee.”
“That’s a long way,” she said. “You did good.”
They were silent for a moment, their bodies swaying together as the truck flew down the crumbling highway.
“I don’t want to die,” he said finally, his voice low.
He felt ashamed of his weakness.
Muriel turned her head on his shoulder a little, exhaling smoke. “I know, baby,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. She put a cold hand on his cheek. “Just try not to think about it.”
12. Manfried
They arrived in Manfried shortly after. Houses and retail buildings flit past the gaps in the tarp too fast to make out any details, only that they were deserted and dilapidated, walls falling in, roofs collapsing. Every now and then, a zombie would flit past, too, walking down the sidewalk dressed in winter garb. A few of them raised a hand to wave to the drivers of the truck. Some looked like normal human beings. Others looked like ambulatory skeletons. The only thing the victims of the Phage had in common was that they were dead, and they had an uncontrollable hunger for human flesh.
“Where do they live?” Brent asked. “Do they stay in houses like regular people?”
“Most of them do,” Muriel said, lighting another smoke. “But just in the homes surrounding the supermarket. There’s not a lot of them. Maybe two, three hundred. They keep us all together in a big grocery store in the center of town. There are stalls inside, and a big fence around it. It’s a tall chain link fence with barbed wire along the top, like you’d see at a prison.”
“To keep you in.”
“Yes, but also to protect us.”
“From what?”
“From them.” Stroking his arm, Muriel said, “They breed us like animals. Take the babies and eat them. They kill and eat all the males, too. Anyone too old to breed. Infertile females. They keep a few men to… you know, impregnate the women. Oh, they keep a few children. Just enough, I suppose, to replace the breeders when we get too old to bear young. None of my babies, though. Not that I would want such a thing. It’s better they die before they know what kind of world they’ve been born into.” She looked away, lowered her voice. “That’s horrible, I know.”
“Under the circumstances…” Brent murmured.
“They all do it,” Muriel said. “The Zombie Nations, I mean. Breed us like cattle. We’re not their primary food source, though. There are too many of them and too few of us. Mostly they eat venison, anything else they can catch, but they can’t, or won’t, subsist on animal flesh alone. They need to feed on us to keep up their strength, to stave off decomposition. Perhaps it’s nutritional, I can’t say for sure. But they seem to relish human flesh more than any other food. Their demeanor is … almost orgasmic when they feed. They barely seem able to restrain themselves from attacking us, even after they’ve fed.”
“How smart are they?” Brent asked. “I’ve only seen them from a distance.”
“They’re no different from the living,” she said, settling her head back on his shoulder. “Some are smarter than others. It’s really their… emotional capacity that seems to remain impaired. They don’t feel like we feel. They’re smart, but their emotions, their morals, are just as damaged as their bodies. Most are like that. There are a few that seem to feel love. Most just seem to feel anger. Malice. Greed. They enjoy being cruel. Our suffering amuses them.”
“How did you escape?”
“One of them helped me escape. One of our guards. He was one of the deadheads I just mentioned, a zombie that could still feel love. He fell in love with me, I guess. He said I reminded him of his wife. His name was Chuck. He smuggled me out of the compound one night.”
“What happened to him?”
“They killed him,” Muriel said. “They caught up with us once. This was a couple days after he smuggled me out. Chuck held them off while I ran away. They killed him and ate him. I didn’t see it. I only know because they boasted about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You say sorry a lot.”
“Sorry,” Brent laughed.
Muriel cocked her head to one side, breathing smoke. “The Zombie Nations are organized like the North American Indian tribes. A sort of loose confederation. They keep to themselves mostly, but sometime they trade. They raid one another for food, too. Our tribe got raided last summer, but the Manfried zombies repelled the attack. It’s all very interesting, in an abstract sort of way. I used to be a history teacher, you know. What were you?”
“I was a student in college when the Phage struck,” Brent said.
“What were you studying?”
“Business... Football.”
“Girls?”
He laughed. “Just one.”
“What kind of grades were you getting with her?”
“I’d like to say A’s, but probably C’s,” he said, and she snorted.
“You were probably getting A’s,” Muriel said. “We don’t like to tell a man how well he’s doing. It gives him a big head.”
“That’s funny.”
Muriel shrugged. “Girls are funny. We don’t even know what we want until we’re forty. I like you, Brent. If we had more time, I’d send you off with a bang. A literal bang, if you know what I mean.”
“You’re spoiling that maternal vibe you’ve got going,” Brent teased her.
“Life’s too short to play games. Especially now.” She turned and looked somberly at him, her lips clamped to her cigarette. The truck was slowing, the breaks squeaking. “We’re here, sweetheart. Try to be brave.”
Brent nodded. He looked down at his trembling hands, squeezed them into fists.
“Don’t give them the satisfaction,” she said.
13. Longworths
The truck stopped. Brent heard a brief exchange, the voices rough and quick, more like the barks of angry dogs than the speech of human beings. Muriel listened with him, her cigarette quivering. There was a loud rattling sound, the gate of the chain link fence being drawn back, and then the truck eased forward again.
I’m going to die now, Brent thought.
Rather than being frightened, he felt a sense of disassociation, the same sense of disconnectedness that came over him when he was fighting the zombies at the farmhouse. It was a defense mechanism, he knew, his brain’s way of coping with terror so the rest of him could continue to function. In the face of imminent death, the human mind reacted by pretending nothing was real, that reality was an insubstantial illusion, when it was the reverse that was true. The universe was very real. It was the souls of men that were thin and all too fragile.
The truck curved around, stopped once more. The engine died with a sharp backfire. Doors creaked open. Someone complained about his sore ass. Someone else laughed. It was like listening to aliens talking. Their voices made Brent’s hackles rise. They were human… but not.
Would they converse so casually, would they joke around and laugh, as they devoured him?
The blue tarp shook.
“Lift it up, don’t drag it,” someone snapped. “The barbed wire will rip it if you try to drag it off.”
“Yeah-yeah.”
“Look, just climb up there and fold it back.”
&
nbsp; Sunlight sliced down like a guillotine’s blade as the edge of the tarp folded back. Brent and Muriel squinted into the light as a deadhead in a red flannel shirt folded the tarp again and again, peeling it off in sections. He was standing on the back wheel, gripping one of the bars of the cage’s frame as he stripped back the plastic covering. He grinned down at them, his face gray and crenelated, a cigarette jutting from the corner of his withered lips. “We’re ba-aaack!” he sang in a frog-like voice.
Muriel looked away, her face expressionless.
The zombie jumped down once the tarp had been removed, chortling to himself.
Brent moved away from Muriel, shifting onto his knees to survey his surroundings. They were in the parking lot of a grocery store. The supermarket was a low profile cinderblock construction, not substantially different from any of the thousands of grocery stores that once operated across the country. Two sets of automatic doors bracketed several tinted show windows beneath a full-length colonnade. LONGWORTHS was emblazoned across the front of the supermarket in large red plastic and aluminum letters, the kind of letters that would have lit up at night back in the old days, summoning the hungry to its halls of junk food and frozen TV dinners. The letters were faded and broken now, with bird nests tucked into the gaps. The building was filthy and swayed from neglect. The doors and windows had been reinforced with wire mesh.
The parking lot of the supermarket was surrounded by a fifteen foot tall chain link fence with barbed wire running along the top. In the side parking lot were several piles of building materials, half a dozen industrial vehicles, some wooden sheds and a small silver trailer. There were thirty or so deadheads moving about the parking lot. Half of them were armed. The rest were laboring at one project or another—not very enthusiastically, though. Only of few of them seemed interested in the meat wagon’s arrival.
Cattle (The Fearlanders) Page 6