“Good night.”
He made use of the toilet, the metal pail stowed behind the shelving unit, then walked to the door of the butcher’s station. Paranoia overwhelmed him as he approached the door, and he hesitated before pushing inside. He imagined the three of them waiting for him just on the other side of the door, ready to jump him, beat him, perhaps even try to murder him. He was a threat to all three of them. And then it occurred to him: Jamie’s offer of an alliance might have been a diversionary tactic, a ploy intended to fool him into a false sense of security, trick him into lowering his guard.
He inclined his ear to the gap around the door, listening intently. Of course, if they were lying in wait for him inside they were probably trying to be quiet.
He imagined them in there, crouched down in the dark, their hands fisted, their jaws clenched. Ready to spring at him. Wrestle him down. Punch him. Choke him.
Vickers was snoring. The other two were breathing loudly but steadily.
Brent relaxed.
Then again, he might just be pretending to snore. They might be simulating those sounds to fool him.
“You’re going to go nuts if you keep thinking things like that,” Ghost-Harold said. He sounded slightly amused, and more than a little concerned.
“I’m already nuts,” Brent murmured. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
But his imaginary friend was right.
Brent pushed through the door, made his way to his lumpy, stinking mattress, and lay down on it.
He lay on his back staring at the ceiling for a long time, listening to the other roosters snoring and talking in their sleep and thinking he would never doze off, couldn’t afford to, he had to stay awake in case one of them moved against him during the night.
But despite his paranoia, he was just too exhausted to remain awake for long, and before he knew it he was dreaming. They weren’t the most pleasant of dreams, but almost anything was better than the circle of hell in which he’d come to find himself.
18. Routine
Within two weeks of his internment in the Manfried breeding facility, Brent Scarborough discovered a flaw in the religious concept of eternal punishment. Though he was raised a Baptist, attending church every Sunday until he went away to college, Brent decided Hell was not real. It couldn’t be real, because even Hell would become routine after a negligible span of time. It was the fatal flaw in the concept -- something he was sure the self-righteous men who’d crafted it had failed to take into account. How could God ever hope to punish an unrepentant soul if the horrors He assigned to the damned grew tedious with repetition?
He imagined two long-timers in hell.
The first man says, “Boy, it’s hot today,” to which the second replies, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.”
The only solution to the paradox that he could imagine was for God to devote Himself to an ever-changing and escalatingly painful succession of tortures, and he simply did not believe a loving and merciful deity would commit to such an endeavor. Certainly no god that he would want to worship.
Of course, in light of the events that had occurred in the last ten years or so, it wasn’t too hard to imagine that God, at some point, had gone stark raving mad. But that was an idea that was just a little too terrible to contemplate.
By the end of his second day at the human meat farm, Brent had begun to grow accustomed to his surroundings—the murmur of the women imprisoned in the supermarket with them, the overpowering stench of unwashed flesh and waste, the crying, the screams, the snarling, inhuman voices of their captors. By the evening of the third day, he barely even noticed the smell anymore, and he only took notice of the voices around him if they were particularly shrill. In the middle of his fourth day of captivity, one of the female internees went into labor. Vickers went to the wall and asked who was delivering, and a woman on the other side of the partition said it was Hannah. Vickers looked somberly at Ian. Ian, Brent guessed, was the one who had impregnated the woman. It was his child she was delivering.
Her labor was long and hard. She was still yelling when darkness fell, and the news came back to them that the baby was not turned right. Maudelle was trying to deliver it, but she was not equipped to handle a breech birth. The woman was still screaming when the door of their quarters rattled open and their partners for the night sloped in. “One hour,” the guard snarled, and Brent waited for one of the women to approach him.
When they were finished, as they all sat around the table waiting for the guard to summon them, Muriel came to the wall and said that Hannah had died.
“What!” Vickers exclaimed. “What happened?” And Muriel said that the woman had hemorrhaged delivering the baby.
“I’m so sorry, Ian,” Muriel said. “There wasn’t anything we could do.”
That night, as they prepared to go to sleep, another woman went into labor. The second birth went quickly and without incident, and the zombies removed the squalling infant from the supermarket, leaving the mother to mourn in a deferential hush.
By the end of the second week of his confinement, Brent paid little attention to the births. It was just another aspect of his environment, as routine as his sexual duties.
Horrible as it might seem, he found certain aspects of his captivity pleasant. Even though he couldn’t trust them, Brent was comforted by the company of his fellow male inmates. Their presence insulated him from his own interior dialogue, brought him out of himself, gave him a break from the tedium of his own morbid ruminations. Their presence stimulated a component of his psyche that had atrophied over the years, that part of the human soul that took sustenance from social interaction. Ian inspired in him a kind of paternal protectiveness. He couldn’t help but laugh at Vickers’ dirty jokes. He even came to respect Jamie’s shrewdness. In the presence of the roosters, Ghost-Harold spoke up in his mind more and more infrequently. The voices of the living had all but silenced the ghost.
Brent was surprised just how much of a relief it was. He had really begun to worry that he was losing his mind.
At night he talked to Muriel. Her living space was near the wall that segregated the men from the women. He need only whisper her name through the crack in the wall for her to respond. He would ask her how her pregnancy was coming along and what the latest gossip was among the female population. She would complain about her pregnancy, and what was happening on the other side of the wall—who was getting ready to deliver, who was feuding with who and what the guards had been up to. They were like an old married couple, just sitting together and bitching about their daily irritations.
They talked about their families more than anything. Muriel talked about her sons. Brent talked about his parents and his fiancé. Sometimes he held his cigarette up to the crack in the wall and let her smoke a fag or two. The deadheads provided the roosters with all the smokes they wanted, alcohol too sometimes—to keep them pacified, he assumed-- but they did not allow the women to smoke or drink. It would make the babies smaller.
They compared notes about the epidemic, shared what information they knew about the outbreak. It was old news, but it was enjoyable to trade war stories, and they both learned a few things they didn’t know before. For instance, they quickly realized they shared a common experience: they had both dreamed about angels in the early days of the outbreak.
“They were beautiful, but strange, and a little bit frightening,” Muriel said. “But I suppose if angels really did exist, we would find them frightening. They called me by name in my dreams, as if we were on intimate terms, and they always told me to hold on, that they were coming to save me, but there were just so many people who needed their help.”
“I had the same dream,” Brent said. “Only sometimes in my dreams, they weren’t angels. They were monsters. Vampires or something, with long sharp teeth and black eyes.”
“Lots of the women over here say they dreamed about angels,” Muriel said. “Maudelle heard from another survivor that they were rescuing people and taking them to live
in FEMA camps. This was when the Phage first broke out. But no one has dreamed about them in years. When the Phage mutated, and the zombies reawakened, the dreams just sort of faded away.”
“Archons,” Brent murmured.
“What?” Muriel said sharply.
“That’s what they were called in my dreams,” he said. “That’s what they called themselves. I thought they were real for a while, that they were coming to rescue me. I was raised Baptist. I thought the outbreak was the Rapture. The dead come back to life, you know. My parents thought we got left behind! But the archons never came for me, and then I quit dreaming about them. I was disappointed, but there was a part of me that was relieved, too. There was a part of me that didn’t want anything to do with them.”
Sometimes they just talked about the little things they missed. Brent missed video games, fast food, Sunday football with his father. Sunday football was their weekly ritual, he said. He and his father would watch the game and try to outstink one another with junk food farts. About halfway through the game, his old man would fall asleep in his recliner, especially if his mother had served a heavy lunch that day, and the top plate of his dentures would sort of slide out over his bottom lip. Brent had called it his cash drawer. When his old man’s teeth slid out of his mouth, Brent would declare, “Cha-ching! No sale!” and his mother would scold him, smiling out the side of her mouth.
Muriel missed teaching, of course, but she also missed internet cat videos, the tawdry romance novels she read on the sly (she read them like a fat girl ate chocolate chip cookies) and shoes. “Oh, my god, I had so many shoes,” she enthused. “I loved high heel shoes. They made me feel sexy. I’m not your typical blond bombshell. I know that, but when I strapped on a pair of stilettos I felt like Heidi Klum. And Steve loved them, too, because, you know, I’d wear them when we fooled around. Of course, high heels aren’t practical when you’re running away from zombies. I miss my shoes. I had a closet full of them.”
Brent even came, after a couple of weeks, to look forward to the nightly visits of the women. It never left his mind that he was being bred like an animal, that any child he might make with his visitors would be food for their insatiable captors, but the women were always kind, and it was a great comfort to forget his cares for half an hour or so.
He never relaxed his guard around the other men, however. That was the one thing he never allowed himself to do. He might have warmed to his cellmates—even Jamie, who was always watching, always making some incomprehensible hand signal at him, as if Brent were taking part in some secret plot-- but he never forgot that he was their rival, that his very presence among them was a threat, and that they would inevitably move to eliminate that threat.
He slept lightly, and was mindful of where he was in relation to them. He did not let them stand behind him or allow himself to be caught in between them. He always moved to put himself at a distance from them, and he always positioned his body so that he could keep them all in his field of vision.
Finally, one afternoon, as rain splattered the big skylights in the roof, Vickers said something about Brent’s caginess. They were sitting at the card table, playing rummy, just the two of them. Ian and Jamie were both taking a nap. Thunder farted somewhere off in the distance as Brent shuffled. Cocking his head to one side, Vickers said, “I know you think I’m going to shiv you or something one of these days.”
“Why would I think that?” Brent asked, dealing them both five cards. He set the deck face down between them and flipped the top card over.
“Because the deadheads are going to retire me as soon as they know you’re fertile,” he said. Brent started to object, but Vickers held up his free hand, smiling tiredly. “Don’t bother trying to deny it. The women know. They overheard a couple of the guards talking about it. Maudelle told me the other night.”
Brent didn’t speak. He checked his cards. He had a pair of aces, a pair of queens and a four of clubs. Both the queens were black. He waited for Vickers to draw.
“I just want you to know I ain’t gonna do that. I’m not planning to take you out,” Vickers said. He laughed at Brent’s dubious expression. “Your poker face is shit, buddy. I’m being straight with you. I’m not going to fight you for my life. There ain’t any need for it. I’m already dying.” He rearranged his hand and discarded.
“What do you mean?” Brent asked, lowering his cards in surprise.
“I’ve got lung cancer,” Vickers said. Smiling sardonically, he took out a cigarette and lit it. “I’ve had pain in my lungs for the last couple of months. Always the same spot, and it keeps getting worse. It’s right here, like a knife in the chest. I’ve been coughing up blood the last couple weeks.”
Brent had noticed Vickers coughing, but everyone had been coughing lately. Some bug was making the rounds. He drew a 3 of diamonds and discarded it.
“It’s just a little blood right now, but I know,” Vickers said, drawing. “My dad died of lung cancer when I was twenty, and I’ve been feeling everything he talked about when he was sick. I’ve been so fucking tired. I don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes it feels like lead weights are attached to my arms and legs. And I can feel it inside me. I can feel it growing.”
“Jesus, Vickers, I’m sorry,” Brent said, and he meant it. He liked the man, even if they were rivals.
“I just wanted you to know that, so you can stop looking over your shoulder all the time.” Vickers chuckled. “You must have a hellacious crick in your neck!”
Brent shrugged, but he grinned a little in response.
“If I wasn’t already dying, I’d probably take you out,” Vickers said thoughtfully. “I’m not a bad guy, but I’m not a sucker either. But there ain’t no point in killing you now. Even if I eliminated you, I’d be dead before summer. When Cooley’s butchers come to check me out of this roach motel, I’m just going to ask them to make it quick. I ain’t begging for my life. I saw what my dad went through when he had cancer. I’d rather not suffer like that.”
“Have you told Ian and Jamie?” Brent asked.
“Not yet,” Vickers said. “Ian’s too sensitive, and Jamie doesn’t care. But I’m not going to pretend that it’s just bronchitis or something. Not after this morning. I thought I was going to cough up a lung this morning. And there was blood. More blood than there’s ever been. I just thought I’d tell you. You’re a good guy. I hate to see you walking on eggshells all the time.”
Thinking of the alliance that Jamie had proposed, Brent said, “You should tell Jamie. He wanted us to team up against you. Punch your time card before you punched one of ours.”
“That right?” Vickers said, and he laughed contemptuously. “I’d take that as a compliment if he wasn’t such a weasle.”
Brent cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a big guy.”
“The only person Jamie ever worried about was Jamie. He’d feed his own mama to the chompers if he thought it’d help him live one more minute. I don’t blame him for looking out for himself, though. That’s just human nature, but don’t ever trust him. Don’t ever trust anybody but yourself. You’d be a fool if you did.”
Brent nodded. He felt he should thank the man, but he didn’t know quite how to phrase his gratitude. Thanks for dying of cancer? That didn’t seem very political.
“Something else I need to tell you,” Vickers said, and he grinned when Brent looked questioningly at him. “Rummy,” he said, fanning his cards out on the table.
19. Yard
That numbing routine ended the following morning, when the door of their sleeping quarters banged open and half a dozen deadheads marched in, all of them bearing firearms. All four of the roosters—for Brent had come to include himself in their number—paddled out of their dreams in surprise. They retreated from the door of the butcher’s station as the zombies invaded their inner sanctum, jostling with one another to be furthest from the Resurrects. Brent found himself pressed against the wall behind Vickers, with Ian and Jamie to either side of h
im.
“You! Come with us!” the leader of the ghouls snarled at the men.
“Who?” Vickers demanded, thinking they meant him specifically, that the time had come for him to be put down.
“All of you!” the deadhead croaked, gesturing with a withered claw. “There’s work to do! Work outside!”
It was quite a surprise. Brent had asked if they ever got to go outside, and Vickers had answered, “Not very often.” When the weather was nice they took the women out in small groups, he’d said, but not the men. They were afraid the men would try to escape.
They were right to be afraid. Escape was the first thing Brent thought of when he learned he was going outside.
They marched all four of the men to the front of the building. Barking at them, as always, to “Hurry! Go! Quickly!” For creatures that could no longer die, barring catastrophic brain injury, zombies were terribly impatient.
The women took note of their passage as the roosters traversed the guard walk. They didn’t know the men were being put to task, and their features were writ with fear and concern. Someone suggested they were being taken out to slaughter, and a little cry went out. Several women pleaded with the guards, “No! Let them go! Don’t hurt them!” A handful of the women approached the guard walk, their concern pushing them to uncharacteristic boldness. Many of them held some affection for one or another of the roosters, or at the very least felt some gratitude towards them. They called out to Brent and the others, asking where they were being taken, what was being done to them, but the guards shouted at them to be silent and pressed the roosters along. They didn’t give the men time to answer.
They were commanded to halt in the vestibule by the outer doors. They stood waiting tensely while the clerk who manned the desk retreated into the supervisor’s office. When it returned, the clerk distributed clothing among the roosters, ordering them to get dressed. Apart from their original shoes, the garments it passed to them were new.
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