“I gotcha,” Ian said, and he tore a strip from the bottom edge of his blanket.
“Thanks,” Brent said, and the young man shrugged and went to bed.
“Oh, my God!” Brent said, when he returned to Jamie’s side. He tucked his chin against his shoulder, wrinkling his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie croaked, tears welling in his eyes. “I couldn’t help it. It just came out.”
“It’s okay,” Brent said, trying to breathe through his mouth, which was not really any better. “Let me help you…”
It was all he could do to keep his own supper down as he cleaned the mutilated man. Jamie had soiled himself, a runny, foul-smelling mess that had spread from mid-thigh to the middle of his shoulder blades. It did not escape Brent that he was paying penance, psychologically, that the guilt he was trying to absolve was a neurosis, some species of survivor’s guilt, and yet it felt good to do it. It relieved the pressure of that psychic defect, which was always filling up inside him like some febrile abscess. Billions had died, the whole world had fallen to ruin, and here he was, healthy as a horse and pulling stud service at a baby farm for monsters. He scrubbed like Lady Macbeth until Jamie laughed and told him to leave some skin.
“I’m—“
“Sorry, yeah, I know,” Jamie said. “Make sure you wash my wiener. It’s so dirty.”
“I think you can do that part yourself,” Brent chuckled.
Jamie laughed, then cried out, then laid there moaning as Brent rolled him back and forth, cleaning beneath him.
When he had finished bathing his cellmate, Brent contemplated removing the man’s bandages. They were brown and stiff with blood, but he didn’t have any material to replace the soiled bandages with, and he didn’t think either of them was up to the task even if he did. He covered the man in his blankets, washed his shorts out as best he could, and then cleaned himself with the last of the drinking water they could spare. He felt just as soiled as Jamie had been.
“I hate to leave you laying on that wet mattress,” Brent called from the deli counter. “But I don’t think I can move you and flip it over by myself, and Ian won’t help.”
“It’s okay,” Jamie said. “I’m just happy I don’t have to sleep in my own shit tonight. Although… it was pleasantly warm at first.”
“Dude,” Brent chuckled, shaking his head.
Did men in Hell crack jokes about their suffering? If he believed in Hell, Brent might have said that they did. Jamie had just had his legs chopped off, shit on himself like a baby, and still had the wherewithal to joke about it. If that wasn’t proof of the resilience of humor, Brent didn’t know what was. You couldn’t get any closer to hell than what that man was going through right now.
“You wanna know something funny?” Brent asked.
“What?”
“I just finished wiping your butt and I don’t even know your last name,” Brent said.
Jamie grinned. He was drifting, his eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused. Checking out again, his strength used up. “It’s Curcio,” he said. “Jamie Curcio.”
Brent nodded. “Good night, Jamie Curcio. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night… buddy.”
23. Fever
Ian screamed like a girl in a B-rated horror movie the instant Jamie dragged himself through the swinging doors.
Brent lunged up from sleep. One look at the legless horror crawling toward them and he knew: Jamie had died during the night, and the Phage had reanimated him. The signs were unmistakable: the pale, bluish tinted skin, the mechanically chomping teeth, the grinding, ceaseless snarling. Jamie’s eyes were white and featureless, like snake eggs, and viscous green fluid streaked with bile oozed from his mouth, swinging pendulously from his chin.
Brent scrambled to his feet, heart racing, and pressed himself into the corner of the room. “Ian, run!” he yelled, but Ian was too frightened to move. He just laid there, screaming, as the zombie crawled through the door like some hellish crab, hands splatting on the tiled floor with each step, the stumps of his legs leaving twin trails of dark dead blood behind him.
“I told you we should have let him die!” Ian cried, and then he resumed his screaming.
With a snarl that sounded eerily like laughter, the Jamie-Zombie used its arms to launch itself at Ian. It flew across the bunkroom, bringing its hands around in mid-flight, fingers curled, to latch onto the screaming lad.
The naked, legless zombie landed on Ian and started snapping at his face. Still screaming, Ian rose and began to spin around with the monster, struggling to hold its champing jaws at bay.
When Brent saw that the Jamie-Zombie had become a floppy stuffed dummy—also like something out of a cheap monster flick—Brent realized he was dreaming and willed himself to wake up.
Ian’s frenetic dance with the stuffed Jamie-Zombie stuttered and faded away. Brent opened his eyes to the ceiling of the butcher’s station. He turned his head and saw Ian sleeping peacefully just a couple feet away. Ian was snoring softly, lying on his back with his legs cocked open and the front of his boxers tented by some impressive morning wood.
Brent chuckled and sat up.
Low budget nightmare.
He rose and walked out into the common area. It was early morning, the light wan and slanted. The clouds drifting past the skylights were pale blue and salmon pink. He drank some water, leaving the last cupful for Ian, then checked on Jamie.
He kneeled, placed his hand lightly on Jamie’s brow. He expected fever, but the man’s forehead was cool. His breathing was slow and even.
If this was really a low budget horror movie, Brent thought, this is where his eyelids would fly up, revealing eyes like milky gray marbles, and he would snarl and sink his teeth into my arm. The old dream-within-a-dream bit.
Jamie’s eyes cracked open. His normal slate blue eyes. “Still alive,” he murmured with a smile.
“Just checking,” Brent said.
“I’m just… as surprised as you,” Jamie said, drifting.
“You need anything?” Brent asked.
Jamie shook his head.
Brent rose, went to the bathroom, then sat at the table and lit a cigarette. The stale tobacco tickled his throat and he went into a coughing fit. When it passed, he resumed smoking. Once upon a time, when the world was still the world, if someone had suggested he would ever take up smoking, he would have said that person was crazy. Now, he couldn’t imagine getting through the day without smoking. Of course, it had taken a zombie apocalypse to make a smoker of him, so that was something, right? Compared to Stabby No Legs over there, smoking wasn’t that bad.
“Brent?” Muriel whispered through the wall. “Is that you?”
Brent smiled. He grabbed his smokes and ashtray and went to sit beside the wall. “You’re up early,” he whispered. “You want a smoke?”
“I shouldn’t. I think I’m going into labor. It’s either that or I’m going to have a hell of a case of diarrhea later this morning. I’m cramping pretty bad. Water hasn’t broken yet, though.”
“Ew,” Brent scowled.
“Aw, hell. Give me a drag,” Muriel said.
He held his cigarette up to the chink in the wall and a pair of lips clamped onto the filter. The ash at the end glowed and crackled. Her lips brushed his fingers as she inhaled. For some reason, he found that very erotic, and then he felt ashamed of himself.
Muriel exhaled. “Ahhh… that’s the ticket,” she sighed.
“So who’s the father?” Jamie asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Who’s the dad?”
“Oh. Well, I’m not really too sure this time. It could be Vickers, or it could be Jamie. I slept with both of them.”
“Not Ian?”
“No. Not this time. The last one was Ian’s.”
“How did you know?”
Muriel was quiet a moment, and Brent chuckled.
“Oh, yeah. Dumb question.”
“Tres dumb,” Muriel agreed, laughing gently.
&n
bsp; “Well, I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That you’re having it here. That you didn’t escape.”
“Yes. That would have been nice. They might let me keep it, though. You never know what Boss Hogg is going to do.”
“Who?”
“Cooley. Some of us older gals call him Boss Hogg. From The Dukes of Hazzard? No? Before your time, I guess.”
“You’re talking about that movie with Johnny Knoxville, right?” Brent said, and Muriel went, “Ugh.”
“Before the zombie apocalypse, I was only ever with one man,” Muriel went on. “My husband. We were high school sweethearts, and then we were college sweethearts, and then we got married. We even got hired at the same school. I taught history. He taught science. Now my tootsie’s like a rusty old bike. It’s been ridden ‘til the wheels are falling off.”
Brent laughed. “What do you mean?”
“There was a lot of raping going on during the outbreak,” Muriel said. “Feminism was one of the first victims of the Phage. I don’t mean to offend you, Brent, but your gender gets pretty rapey during a crisis. After my husband died, I got nabbed by a band of survivalists. They kept us locked in a van. They never let us out. Just came in to, you know, use us.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“Well… It could have been worse. They didn’t beat us or anything. They protected us. Fed us. A woman will compromise a lot when it comes to survival. Her freedom. Her dignity. It’s how we’re wired. You ever get raped, Brent? Men will rape other men, too, even if they’re straight. I think it’s the stress. It’s like a survival mechanism. Evolution has programmed your gender to spread its DNA as quickly and as widely as possible in traumatic situations. It’s probably why there’s so much rape during wars… and in prisons. Those men, the ones that kept us in the van, they were like stags in rut. Some of them would come in two, maybe three times a day for sex. Sometimes even more than that. And they were always so… urgent. Frantic, almost. Until it was over, and then they were a lot calmer. So have you?”
“What?”
“Ever been raped?”
“No!”
He almost had, once. It was a guy he had traveled with early on during the outbreak, right after Naomi died. He had lit out for the territories, looking for a safe place to live. Too many deadheads in his hometown and too many bad memories in the apartment they had lived in together. The guy’s name was Kelly Debase. He was a take-no-shit-from-nobody redneck, an ex-Marine (or so he claimed), tall, muscular, lanky. One night, while they were sitting around their campfire passing a bottle of Jack Daniels back and forth, Kelly had said, matter-of-factly, “Guess what I’m going to do tonight, Brent old buddy?” and when Brent asked what, Mr. Kelly “All-American” Debase informed Brent that he was going to fuck him in the ass. Brent had laughed, thinking his companion was joking, but Kelly wasn’t joking, and when he came around the fire and tried to manhandle Brent, they had gotten into a fist fight. Brent had bashed him in the head with the Jack Daniels bottle and run away, otherwise he probably would have ended up Kelly’s bitch that evening. He still remembered the fear that had lanced through him when he realized the ex-marine was physically stronger than him, that he was going to lose the fight unless he did something drastic, that he would have to hurt the man or surrender his dignity, and he almost did, he almost surrendered, weighing his self-respect against injuring Kelly, whom he had liked. But in the end, Brent had taken the fight to the next level, bashing the bottle over Kelly’s head and laying open his scalp, and then he had beat a hasty retreat, pulling up the pants the ex-marine had wrestled halfway down his thighs. Thankfully, he’d never seen the ex-marine again.
“Well, except for here,” Muriel said. “What you’re doing here… it’s a kind of rape, you know. You’re being forced against your will here.”
“I suppose,” Brent said. “But what I’m doing here is a conscious choice. I choose to do it versus the consequences. No one’s holding me down or anything.”
“Honey, that’s all rape is. If there are unpleasant consequences, it’s rape. No one has to hold you down.”
Brent didn’t reply.
“Hold on a minute,” Muriel murmured. “I think I’m having another contraction.”
Brent waited, lighting another cigarette, while Muriel grunted and panted on the other side of the partition. When it had passed, she put her lips to the chink in the wall and said, “Give me another drag.”
He did.
“I’ll have to let Maudelle know I’m going into labor,” she said on the exhale. “The guards, too. We’re supposed to tell them so they can inform Hinkle.”
“Who’s Hinkle.”
“The little one at the desk. Cooley’s… I don’t know what you’d call him. Secretary? Chief of staff? Majordomo?”
“Ah.”
“Roo wants to watch the delivery,” Muriel said. “I guess she wants to see how it all works, now that she’s pregnant. I don’t think she’ll be too excited.”
“I imagine not.”
“Give me another puff.”
She blew the smoke back through the crack.
“I’m getting way too old for this,” Muriel sighed.
Brent sat and smoked and talked to Muriel until she announced she needed to go. “I have a baby to deliver!” she trilled. She tried to sound frivolous, but he could hear the tension in her voice, the pain beneath the playacting. “Wish me luck.”
“Break a placenta.”
“Ha ha! But thanks. Thanks for talking to me this morning. I needed that.”
“No problem.”
Brent rose and, for lack of anything better to do, sat at the table. He considered doing some exercises—push-ups, sit-ups, jogging in place. It would probably be wise to stay in shape, should the opportunity to escape ever present itself. It would be a crying shame if he got loose one day and found he couldn’t haul his fat butt over the fence. Wise though it might be, however, he just couldn’t summon the energy for calisthenics. The worse thing about imprisonment, besides the flesh-eating zombies, was the sheer tedium. It ground a man’s spirit to meal.
His high school coach used to quote Newton to get his players motivated: “A body at rest tends to stay at rest. Now get off your asses and move!” It was Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion. What was the scientific word for it? Oh, yeah, inertia.
We’ll blame it on inertia, he thought. Can’t buck the laws of physics!
Ian finally woke up. After taking a couple of steps out of their bunkroom, he wrinkled his nose and waved his hand in front of his face. “What is that smell?” he asked.
“Jamie,” Brent replied, smiling ruefully. “I tried to clean him up last night, but…”
“You cleaned his shit?”
“Yeah.”
Ian’s eyes went wide. “You’re a better man than me, Brent Scarborough.”
Brent chuckled. “I guess.”
Around noon, Jamie seemed to have a surge of vitality. He awoke, talked animatedly, said he was feeling much better. “I think I’m on the mends,” he said, his face shining like the faces of women glow when they’re pregnant. They helped him go to the bathroom—even Ian, reluctantly, pitched in to help—and afterwards Jamie asked for something to eat. Brent helped the man sit up, held the slop bucket so Jamie could pick through the swill, then laid him back down when he had eaten his fill and covered him with his blankets.
“You good?” Brent asked.
Jamie smiled and nodded. “Fine as summer rain.”
A couple of hours after that, Ian called out, “Hey, what’s wrong with Jamie?”
Brent went to the man, who was shivering and sweating on his mattress now, and felt his brow. “He’s burning up,” Brent said. Brent tugged at his beard in dismay. “He must have gotten an infection.”
“What do we do?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know. He probably needs antibiotics or something, but I doubt we’ll get anything like that from the monster squad.”<
br />
Ian looked anxious for a moment, then realized who he was anxious about. An annoyed look spread across his face. He waved his hand dismissively in Jamie’s direction. “Oh, well. Too bad for him,” he said, walking away from the sick man. “He deserves whatever he gets.”
Brent didn’t reply. Ian was right.
Brent looked down at Jamie. The man moaned softly, sweat beaded on his forehead and cheeks. Brent came to a decision. He rose and walked to the cell door. “Excuse me,” he said to the guard.
It was a different zombie on duty this time. The creature turned to him without speaking. It was missing an eye, like an old tom cat that had been in a few too many scraps.
“Jamie’s got a fever,” Brent said. “He needs medicine.”
The zombie leaned to the side, peered at the sick man through the chain link.
“I was hoping I could get some aspirin. Maybe some antibiotics. Anything would help.”
The zombie looked at Brent. Its singular eye was filmy and gray. Its lips peeled back from chipped and yellow teeth. “Ain’t got no aspirin,” it said in a gravelly voice. “Ain’t got no antibiotics neither, I don’t think.”
“Maybe you could go and get some. Ask Cooley if he would allow us to have some medicine for our friend.”
The zombie picked a bit of rotten skin from its nose and put it into its mouth. It chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll ask,” it said, and it started up the guard walk toward the front of the building. It moved its body awkwardly, compensating for injuries hidden beneath its clothing.
“What’d he say?” Ian asked from the table.
“He said he’d go ask,” Brent answered in surprise. He hadn’t thought the guard would be so accommodating.
Brent sat at the card table with Ian, smoking a cigarette while they waited. After about twenty minutes, the guard returned. He unlocked the door of their cell and lurched inside. Two other guards followed. Brent rose from the table, thinking they’d come with medicine, but one of the guards leveled a rifle at him and told him to sit his ass back down.
Brent sat his ass back down.
“What are you--?” Brent started to say, and then he saw the hammer. The zombie he’d talked to several minutes ago was clutching the handle of a large ballpeen hammer.
Cattle (The Fearlanders) Page 14