Cattle (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Here, tut thessse on,” a deadhead growled.

  Brent turned to the zombie that had spoken. It was the same one that had taken him captive. The lipless ghoul was holding a pair of handcuffs through the wall of the cage, grinning. Of course, it would always look like it was grinning.

  Brent just stared at the cuffs. He didn’t move.

  “Do it, honey,” Muriel whispered.

  He glanced at her doubtfully.

  “Don’t fight them. It’ll just make it worse,” she said, and then she put out her cigarette.

  Brent sighed. He reached out and took the handcuffs from the deadhead. He put the bracelets on his wrists and ratcheted them closed.

  “Hold out your handsss,” the zombie said.

  Brent extended his arms through the wires of the cage and the zombie tightened the cuffs, then turned to Muriel. “You, too,” it said, holding out a second pair of cuffs.

  As Muriel fumbled her handcuffs on, Brent looked around for Harold. Muriel had said there was a redheaded zombie in their party, a deadhead who had argued in his defense while Brent was unconscious. She said the creature had acted as if it knew Brent. He didn’t know how Harold could have come back after he was killed, but Brent supposed it was possible. Maybe the Irishman was a carrier or something. The truck he and Muriel were caged in looked like the same red Ford that had caught them exiting the service station several days ago.

  If Harold was in the group, however, he had departed before the tarp was removed from the cage. Perhaps he had gone inside the supermarket or the silver travel trailer on the side. Brent didn’t see any zombies with red hair in the parking lot.

  The Ford’s tailgate dropped with a bang. One of the zombies unlocked the cage. It pulled the chain from the frame of the door and yanked it open. “Out,” it snapped. The male ghoul had a bony, withered body, eyes and cheeks sunk in, but a shocking mass of fine blond hair, parted down the middle and feathered. Its clothes were fine, too: clean, well made. Vanity must have accompanied its reason from the dark place the Phage had temporarily imprisoned it.

  Muriel moved to obey the creature, shifting around in the bed of the truck and then scooting toward the tailgate.

  “Now, quick, move!” the zombie said impatiently.

  “Hold your horses, god damn you,” Muriel said, sounding only slightly annoyed.

  “Now, quick!” the zombie snarled.

  The door of the silver travel trailer swung open. An enormously fat zombie limped out onto the wooden deck. It climbed ponderously down the steps and headed toward the meat wagon as Muriel slid her legs over the end of the tailgate and prepared to drop down. The fat zombie was dressed in khaki overalls and a searing orange work vest. Two smaller deadheads accompanied the rotund zombie. They trailed after the fat one like lamprey after a shark. The zombies surrounding the truck stood a little straighter as the fat one approached, tightening their grips on their weapons.

  “Muriel!” the fat zombie called in a jocular voice. It favored its left leg as it walked.

  Muriel hopped down with a grunt, holding her swollen tummy. “Cooley,” she said.

  “How far did you get this time, dear?” the deadhead asked.

  “Not far enough,” Muriel replied.

  “Out, now, quick, quick!” the feather-haired zombie snarled at Brent.

  The fat one had drawn within grabbing distance of Muriel, which is exactly what it did now. Its arm shot out with shocking speed and it latched onto her face. Squeezing Muriel’s cheeks between its sausage-like fingers, it shoved her back against the tailgate. Muriel cried out, clutching at its wrist.

  Brent lunged forward instinctively, but froze as the deadheads trained their weapons on him.

  “I warned you about trying to escape again!” the fat zombie snarled at her. “As soon as you squeeze out that tasty little piglet, I’m having you hobbled! We’ll see how good you run with your toes chopped off.”

  Muriel hawked and spat. The fat creature laughed. It released her cheeks and scooped her spittle from its face, licking its fingers with a savorous expression. “You have a few more years of breeding left in you, I figure,” it said, opening its eyes slowly. “After you’re done, though, I’m slitting your throat myself.”

  “What about this one, boss?” the vain zombie asked. It nodded toward Brent. “You want us to butcher him now, or you got something else in mind for him?”

  The fat zombie eyed Brent appraisingly, rubbing its bulbous chin. “I don’t know… not much meat on his bones.”

  “He is kind of skinny,” the feather-haired zombie agreed.

  “Did he put up much of a fight?” Cooley asked.

  The blond zombie shook its head. “He’s been pretty cooperative. He fought us when we busted in on him, but he hasn’t given us any trouble since.”

  “Get him down. Let’s have a look at him,” Cooley said. “It’s been a while since you guys brought in a runner.”

  Brent tried to restrain himself as the zombies hurried forward and snatched at him. His instinct was to pull away, to kick at them, to punch and scream and fight, but Muriel had told him not to struggle, that it would be easier for him if he did as he was told, so he did his best to control his terror, to curb his instinct to resist.

  They yanked him down from the back of the truck, and at the fat one’s instructions, ripped at his clothes, tearing them away from his body. Brent tried to cover himself as they tugged down his pants, but one of them grabbed his wrists and held his arms aloft.

  The fat zombie, the one Muriel had called Cooley, curled its lips back from its teeth. “Just skin and bones,” it sneered in disdain, “hardly fit to eat. Just look at those ribs.” Addressing Brent directly, it asked, “You like girls, meat?”

  Brent said, “Huh?”

  The fat one leered. “Girls! You like girls or boys?”

  Brent couldn’t quite process what the thing was asking him. His shirt hung in tatters from his shoulders. They had jerked his pants down to his knees, exposing his genitals. He stood there shivering in the frigid winter wind, wrists cuffed together, and tried very hard to puzzle out the meaning of the monster’s words. Why would the thing ask him if he liked girl meat? He wasn’t a zombie!

  “He’s a dummy, I think,” the vain one laughed.

  “No, he’s just withdrawn,” the fat creature said. “All he can see is his death here right now.” The obese zombie took a limping step toward Brent, leered down at him like a window peeper. It spoke loudly, as if volume would impress the meaning of its words on Brent, and it actually did, sort of. “Do you like to fuck girls or boys?” it demanded.

  “Guh-girls,” Brent said, blinking up at the monster.

  Cooley snickered and grabbed his balls.

  Brent whimpered as it squeezed his testicles, rolling them around in its cold, slimy hand.

  “He’s all there,” the fat creature said. “One dick, two balls. That’s all he needs to get the job done.”

  A couple of the zombies nearby laughed at that. Muriel stared off at the clouds, her face unreadable. The gusting wind whipped loose strands of hair around her head. They looked like tentacles snapping at the windblown snow.

  Cooley released him, started away. “Put him in the coop with the rest of the roosters,” it said with a dismissive wave. “We’ll let him peck a couple of the hens. If he works out, we’ll butcher Vickers. We’ll get more meat out of him. He’s getting old and lazy.”

  “Yessir,” the zombie with the feathered hair said, watching the fat one limp back to its trailer. “You just won the lottery, meat,” it said as it tugged Brent’s pants back up. “But if I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open tonight.”

  14. Roosters

  The smell struck him like a slap on the face.

  As soon as he passed through the door of the supermarket—a door that would have opened automatically back in the good old days of electric lights and high speed internet -- Brent swayed back with a cry of disgust. It was a smell of unwashed human fl
esh and waste so powerful it seemed it should be visible, a greenish-brown cloud of human effluence. The deadhead standing behind him gave him a prod with the barrel of its rifle, and Brent pressed forward, feeling as though he were physically pushing into that fog of human contamination. He could feel it on his skin, moist and corrupt. He could taste it in his mouth. It almost made him gag.

  He had entered a sort of vestibule. To his right was a desk, manned by a skeletal creature that looked more dead than alive. Behind the desk was an office with a plate glass window. It had probably been the manager’s office when the building was still an actual supermarket. The walls of this makeshift lobby were shoddily constructed from mismatched building materials: planks, beams, pieces of gypsum and wooden paneling. Through chinks in the clumsily built walls, Brent could see women moving around in the chamber beyond. They were like ghosts, these women, in their thin white garments. Their murmuring voices drifted to him like penitential prayers. From somewhere came the monotonous squall of an unhappy baby. A zombie guard barked at some unseen internee, and a woman responded in an appeasing voice, “I’m trying!”

  “Ah, home sweet home,” Muriel said. One of her escorts snatched her cigarettes from her breast pocket then. “Hey!” she yelled. “Give those back, god damn you!”

  “Go to your fucking cubicle, meat!” the zombie snarled, raising a fist as if to strike her.

  “Go ahead and do it,” Muriel said defiantly, raising her face to the blow. “I’ll fall on my stomach. What will you do for Christmas dinner then?”

  “I said go to your cubicle!” the zombie repeated.

  She glanced at Brent. “Don’t tell Vickers you’re going to replace him,” she said. “He’ll kill you if you do.”

  Brent nodded.

  She smiled at him sympathetically and her guards pushed her forward. They passed through a heavy metal door that hung slightly askew. Brent heard a gate rattle open. “They got me!” she announced mockingly. Her escort snarled at her, but she just laughed. A moment later, he saw her pass through one of the gaps in the wall-- walking to her quarters, he supposed.

  “And why is this one here?” the zombie at the desk asked Brent’s guards. It had hair like frayed rope and liver-colored, crinkled skin. Spectacles perched on its shriveled nose, an incongruent adornment. Its eyes were gray and baleful.

  “Cooley said to put him in with the roosters,” the ghoul standing directly behind him said. “He’s going to replace Vickers, unless he’s shooting blanks.”

  “Vickers has been a good breeder,” the desk clerk said, looking at Brent appraisingly. “He is getting a little old, though. Ah, well, Cooley knows what he’s doing. What’s your name, meat?”

  “Brent Scarborough,” Brent said.

  “Not anymore,” the desk clerk grinned. “Now you’re number 404.” It passed a fat laundry marker to one of Brent’s guards, then rose and tottered into the manager’s office.

  “404,” Brent’s escort said, and it scrawled the number on Brent’s chest, just about his left nipple. It had to step close to do it, pushing Brent’s arms over his head. As it wrote, the ripe stench of its decaying flesh fought the smell of the building’s interior to a stalemate. Brent tried to breathe through his mouth, but that only made it worse. The zombie raised its head and grinned at him, and Brent could see mites swarming in the hollows beneath its bony brow, tiny gray bugs crawling busily around its filmy eyeballs, scurrying over them.

  He averted his head in disgust.

  The clerk returned. It held out a pair of flimsy white boxer shorts. “Put this on, 404,” it said. “Meat don’t wear clothes here.” The boxers looked as if they had been laundered, but there were several brown stains in the material-- at the waistband, down the right leg. Blood stains, most likely.

  “Hold out your wrists,” the deadhead who had marked him commanded.

  Brent held out his cuffed wrists.

  “Just try something stupid,” the zombie said, unlocking the bracelets. “I haven’t had fresh meat in two weeks.”

  Brent didn’t reply. He didn’t try anything stupid either. He massaged his wrists after the handcuffs had been removed.

  “Take off your clothes and put the shorts on,” the clerk said, gesturing to him absently. It flipped through some sort of logbook and made an annotation. Its flesh looked like the casing of a Slim Jim.

  “Age?” it said.

  “Thirty,” Brent said, shrugging off his tattered shirt. He toed off his boots one at a time, bent and stripped off his socks, then took a deep breath and shoved down his pants and underwear. He stepped out of them, yanked the boxers out of the zombie’s hands and slipped them on.

  “Medical conditions?”

  “Nope.”

  “Children?” the clerk asked.

  “None.”

  It glared at him a moment, then rolled its eyes and wrote in its logbook some more.

  “Now what?” Brent asked. The clerk seemed to have dismissed him.

  “Follow me,” his guard answered.

  Brent followed the zombie through the crooked door. On the other side was a long corridor that ran nearly the entire length of the supermarket. One side of the corridor was the outer wall of the building, bare cinderblock with water stains running down from the ceiling. The other side was chain link fencing. The panels of the chain link fence were attached to the columns that supported the roof. Armed deadheads were spaced at intervals along the passage. There was one gate just inside the corridor, and two more at the far end.

  Beyond the chain link fence, occupying the majority of the supermarket’s interior, was the women’s quarters. Office cubicle panels and pieces of the supermarket’s original shelving units divvied up the space. What light there was slanted in through a series of skylights in the center of the roof.

  Women of various ages drifted among the maze-like compartments. Most were in their twenties and thirties, though a few were older or younger. There were no elderly women and very few children. They were all dressed in white boxers and thin white undershirts. There were forty, maybe fifty women that he could see. Many of them turned or stood up to look at him, their eyes dulled by captivity.

  Nearly all of them were pregnant.

  From somewhere came an electric whirring sound, some kind of industrial space heater maybe. He could hear a rattling engine, too. It sounded like a gas-powered generator.

  “Come on,” Brent’s guard growled, and it prodded him forward.

  Brent walked. Each time he passed one of the guards, the zombie grinned at him and croaked, “Fresh meat!” The women repeated this taunt, minus the contempt. They repeated it quietly, their voices a sibilant susurration: “Fresh meat! Fresh meat!” Announcing his arrival.

  It was an eerie sound, their hopeless whispering; it raised goosebumps on Brent’s arms.

  Halfway down the corridor he encountered a young black girl. She was standing beside the fence, her skinny fingers curled around its diamond-shaped links. “Please, have you seen my dad?” she questioned him rapidly. 398 was written across her forehead in black ink. “They separated us when they brought us here. Have you seen him? He said that he’d come back for me!”

  “Shut up!” Brent’s escort growled. It struck at her fingers with the butt of its rifle.

  The teenager jerked her hands back with a squeal. A couple older women scurried forward to corral the girl. They guided her away as she continued to babble about her father.

  The hysteria in her voice made Brent’s heart race. He could feel his own terror tugging at its reigns. It was all he could do to maintain his control, to continue forward without his legs giving out on him, without screaming and trying to escape.

  What if this is a trick, he thought. What if this is where they take you when they butcher you? The meat department is always at the back of the supermarket, isn’t it? Maybe that’s where they’re taking you, so they can chop you up and run you through the slicer? So they can process you. Turn you into cutlets and burger. Make sausag
es out of your guts.

  Terror came over him so powerfully then he was afraid that he would piss himself. He felt a hot surge in his groin and had to squeeze down with his PC muscle to hold in his urine. He ground his teeth, fighting the urge. If he was going to die, he didn’t want his last act to be pissing himself like a frightened puppy. If he was going to die, he wanted to die like a man.

  I hope I give them diarrhea, he thought.

  He continued down the passage. The tile floor was chilly under his feet, although the ambient temperature of the building was warm enough. It was certainly warmer inside the supermarket than it was outside.

  He passed beneath a hanging sign that said PRODUCE. The sign was festooned with cobwebs, like it had been decorated for Halloween. Who knows? Maybe it had been. If he remembered correctly, the pandemic had begun shortly before Halloween. He remembered because he was planning to attend a costume party at a friend’s house. He was going as Shaggy. Naomi was going as Velma. He had bought a stuffed Scooby Doo to take to the party with them. They never went to that party, though. It was cancelled when the governor declared martial law.

  “He’s going in with the roosters,” Brent’s escort said to the zombie guarding the two end gates. That zombie nodded and turned to unlock the farther of the two gates. It keyed the padlock open, uncoiled the chain, pulled the door open.

  “Inside,” his escort said.

  Brent passed through the doorway, and they shut and locked the gate behind him. He turned and saw three men sitting around a table playing cards. They stared back at him like goldfish in an aquarium, eyes wide, mouths hanging open.

  “Oh, shit,” one of them said.

  The men occupied what had once been the deli area of the supermarket. There were stainless steel counters behind them and an enclosed section with a swinging door and several plate glass windows-- the meat department, now the bunkroom of the breeding facility’s male inmates. The door of the butcher’s station was propped open. Brent could see cubicles inside, and mattresses lying on the floor. All three men were dressed like him, naked but for a pair of plain white boxers.