Would they try to kill her? Eat her?
She suspected that they might.
Soon, she decided, she would leave off on her own.
4
She saw the sign before she saw the subject-- a large green and white panel, hazed by the elements but still legible. It perched upon a metal pole fifty feet in the sky, swaying imperceptibly in the wind. TRAVELLERS TRUCK STOP, it read, with the logo for British Petroleum underneath, and beneath that, the price per gallon for regular unleaded and diesel fuel: $8.49 and $9.09, respectively.
The price of gas, she recalled, had skyrocketed during the pandemic, before the government instituted martial law and restricted travel. Nandi had cursed the attendant over the price gouging when they stopped for gas on their way to her parents’ home, but he had paid it. They had waited an hour just to fill up, and they had passed a good number of stations with OUT OF GAS signs taped to their pumps along the way.
“We’re lucky we were able to fill up at all,” Nandi admitted after they pulled away from the station. He felt bad for rebuking the attendant, who had no more control over the prices than he did, but he was scared. They were all scared. People had guns. They were fighting over bottled water and canned food in the aisles. The parking lot was jammed with vehicles, like a huge and disorganized used car lot, everyone jockeying for position at the pumps, honking, yelling, waving their fists out their windows. Soma had wanted to close her eyes and cover her ears, to insulate herself from the madness, but she couldn’t. She had to be brave for Aishani. And she was, for Aishani.
The road ahead curved gently around a hill of tall grass and then she saw the station. It was derelict, the windows shattered, the parking lot empty. The canopy over the pumps had partially collapsed and leaned crookedly, one side propped on the roof of the truck stop, the other end crumpled on the pavement. It had fallen so that it formed a sort of lean-to, and there were signs that someone had used it for just that purpose recently: scattered garbage, the remnants of a campfire.
She was surprised when the herd headed for the station. There was nothing there to attract the attention of the group, nothing to draw them in, looking for sustenance, but the alpha headed for it anyway.
A small hotel and an adult bookstore sat on the other side of the parking lot, similarly abandoned. The hotel was a Hampton Inn. The adult bookstore was named Romantixxx! A two-lane street serviced the two businesses and the truck stop before joining Parkway Road, which ended at a lighted intersection just a little further on. The main road was a four-lane highway that connected to an interstate cloverleaf in the distance. There were several large signs down by the cloverleaf, but they were too far away for Soma to read.
At last! Now she could figure out where she was!
But first she wanted a look inside the truck stop.
The herd trudged into the shadow of the canopy. The tall man made a groaning sound and stopped. The group bunched up behind him, shifting restlessly as he stared up at the busted canopy lights, working his jaw and making a low rumbling sound in his throat. Perhaps he desired a respite from the sun, which was bright and hot overhead. He would not rest long, however. They never rested long. The hunger was a relentless taskmaster.
Soma broke away from the group, headed for the door. It was one of those electric eye doors that slid open automatically when someone approached. The glass had been completely busted out of it. It lay on the ground in front of the doorframe in twinkling shards, like a welcome mat made of diamonds.
It struck her odd that the glass was shattered outwards. Looters would have broken the windows in to plunder the building, but a lot of crazy things had gone down during the epidemic.
She was hesitant to walk on the glass, being barefoot, but trod forward anyway. The shards crunched underfoot as she passed over them. She could feel them gouging into the soles of her feet, slicing into the flesh. There was pain, but it was distant, disconnected from her psyche, like a long distance telephone call with a bad connection. The pain of the hunger was much more strident.
She ducked under the hand bar and into the store’s interior.
Birds fluttered about the gas station, squawking in outrage at her intrusion. The station was dark, the shelves knocked out of alignment, the floor covered in food items and drink bottles and decorative displays. She stepped across a cardboard standup of some nameless NASCAR driver advertising motor oil. There was a rakish grin on his faded face and he was giving the world a big thumbs-up. CHANGE YOUR OIL, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! The food packages scattered across the floor were mostly perishable items, snack cakes and bread, things that would have spoiled quickly. Some were squashed open where panicked looters had trodden them while ransacking the station.
The smell inside the station was bad. There was the dank odor of stagnant water, the earthy smell of animal feces, the cheesy tang of spoiled milk and another smell, one she could not identify at first but which she realized later was the vile aroma of spoiled soda.
She headed toward the ladies’ room, not because she needed to eliminate -- the dead did not expel waste as their living counterparts did; it just kind of oozed out of them as they shuffled around -- but because she wanted to see herself in a mirror.
She wanted to, and yet the thought terrified her.
She had a good idea, judging from the body she saw when she looked down, what she would find staring back at her from the mirror. She had never been a great beauty. She was a short woman and had always been just the slightest bit chubby, but she always felt she had a very pretty face. To be completely honest, she had been slightly vain of her face, protective of it, feeling that it was her only really good feature. Did she truly want to see the ghoulish creature she had become?
The answer to that was a resounding NO!
Nevertheless, she had to.
The corridor leading to the women’s room was dark. The door of the ladies’ room was embellished with what looked like an old bloody handprint, long dried, as if someone, a woman most likely, wounded and running from an attacker, had fled to the restroom, knocking the door open with a hand.
Soma pushed the door open.
The woman was lying on the far side of the room.
She was on her back, clothes torn off and scattered around her body, legs spread wide, genitals exposed. Soma could not see her face as her head had been crushed beneath a cinderblock. All she could make of the woman’s features was a corona of blonde hair frizzling around the edges of the concrete block her attacker (or attackers) had murdered her with. There were several deep wounds to her breasts and stomach. Blood everywhere, old, dried. Even the woman looked old and dried, her flesh leathered by the passage of time.
Poor thing, Soma thought, gazing at the woman for a moment.
Then she turned and looked at herself in the mirror.
And screamed.
She was a monster! Her hair was a witch’s wild mane, with leaves and sticks tangled in its coils. Her eyes gleamed like snake eggs in the darkened pits of their sockets. The skin around them had shriveled to jerky, giving her an almost comical pop-eyed look. Her flesh was as gray and lifeless as ancient parchment and her lips had withered to a pair of wormy black wrinkles beneath a beak-like nose. Framed in the bloodless wound of her mouth were bright white teeth, some of them chipped from biting into bone. Her teeth looked much too large for her mouth now. They looked like jagged monster fangs. She was a monster, a horrible ugly monster!
“Oh, no no no no,” she moaned.
Leaning over the sink, she ran her fingertips over her face, hands trembling. There was a bare spot on the left side of her brow where the bone showed through. She could not remember how that injury had occurred, but it had ripped a four-inch plug of skin and hair from her skull. Flakes of dead flesh fell away as her fingers trailed down her cheeks.
“No no no no…” she sobbed.
The clothes Nandi had dressed her so carefully in when she was dying -- white blouse, black silk pants -- were just scraps with delusions of
grandeur now. She could see her breasts, shriveled to acorns on her chest. There were bullet holes in her left shoulder and sternum.
She remembered those!
A man, shooting wildly at the herd as they ran him down. They had trapped him in an industrial worksite, cornered him in some open storage building with cinderblock walls and heaps of gravel and sand inside. He had turned around and started shooting wildly into the group as they closed on him, hitting her twice, the wounds like bee stings. She had barely registered the injuries in the red heat of the feeding frenzy.
“Die, you fuckers! Die!” he had bellowed, spit flying from his contorted lips.
And then they had ripped him apart.
She turned from the mirror with a little sob. Leaned against the sink with her face in her hands. Her monstrous face.
I was dead, she thought miserably. I am dead. I should end it now while I can still think.
For some inexplicable reason, she had awakened to herself, she had recovered her memories, her identity, but who knew how long that awareness would last? She might slip back into that terrible fugue state at any moment. She could feel it there, at the back of her mind, a soothing blankness, the waters of Lethe, so seductive in her agony. Would it not be better to kill herself now, while she had the will to do it? There was no telling how many people she might harm if she slipped back into the animalistic state that had claimed her when she succumbed to the Phage. She had already killed. Many, many times.
She looked at the woman lying by the stalls. Perhaps she could use the cinderblock the woman’s attacker had killed her with, crush her own head with it. Massive brain trauma was the only way she could be killed now. That was how they had killed the zombies when she hiding out on her parents’ farm. She had done it herself, after her father taught her how to shoot his hunting rifle.
“Right between the eyes, honey,” her father had said, helping her to aim the rifle.
You have to destroy the brain.
But could she? Could she hit herself in the head hard enough to do it? She could take the cinderblock that had crushed the blonde woman’s head, lie down on her back and lift it over her own head, but would she have the strength to crush her own skull with it?
She was not certain, and she could not bear the thought that she might merely cripple herself, lie there beside the dead woman, aware but unable to move, for years and years and years. She had been a registered nurse when she was alive, had cared for men and women in vegetative states, and she could not think of a more horrifying fate.
I can find a gun, she thought. Shoot myself in the brain.
That was certainly a surer way to do it. Not one hundred percent, but pretty dang close!
There must be plenty of guns lying around. Just have to go and find one.
The thought cheered her, morbid as it was. Even if she could not go through with it, even if she was too afraid to do the deed, she would feel safer if she had a gun, especially after she broke away from the herd.
As it turned out, she wouldn’t have to go in search of a gun. The guns came to her.
As Soma leaned against the cold porcelain bowl of the sink, contemplating her second (and hopefully ultimate) demise, she heard the distant rumble of engines, a bees-in-a-hive hum.
Vehicles!
Several of them!
5
If her heart still beat, it would have raced in her breast. But her heart lay inert inside of her chest, as cold and lifeless as a lump of coal. Still, the sound of the engines startled her, and she made her way to the front of the truck stop, leaving the woman in her mausoleum of white tile and porcelain.
Soma peered out the rear doors, then crossed the sales floor to peek out the doors that faced the gas pumps. Beneath the angled canopy, the herd had noticed the distant hum and was stirring in agitation. The tall man was twisting his head back and forth, lips peeled back from his teeth, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. The others were doing much the same, growling quietly.
Soma couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from, but it was definitely getting louder. Sounded like a convoy. Three vehicles at least, maybe more. In the vast, still world outside, the sound was as loud as thunder. It echoed across the blue cavern of the heavens, waxing and waning. The echoing rumble reminded her of a bowling alley.
Survivors! Had to be! And if they had survived this long, they had to be armed. She might not have to kill herself after all. If they stopped here at the gas station, all she’d have to do is jump out at them, do a little snarling and clawing at the air, and they’d do the job for her.
The thought frightened her. Frightened her terribly.
She realized she was ambivalent about dying. Yes, she wanted to die. She felt she was morally obliged to kill herself, but today? This very hour? She had wandered the world in a thoughtless fugue for years. That was what it was like for her as a zombie – or a “deadhead”, as they had called the creatures when she was alive. Her undead existence had been an endless, unthinking dream, marked only by pain and hunger, rage and terror. Now that she was herself again, did she really mean to cast herself once more into the abyss? What about Nandi? What about her daughter? Her mother and father?
She looked at her hands, her withered, grotesque hands.
Do you want to die? she asked herself.
No, she answered. Not yet.
She wanted to find her family. She needed to know if they still lived. She yearned to see her daughter’s face one last time before she ended it.
You can end it whenever you want, she said to herself. When you cannot bear it anymore. When there’s nothing left to live for.
Nothing left to live for… That was a joke.
What would her loved ones do if she showed up at their doorstep? She had asked Nandi, as she lay dying in their bed, to make sure he destroyed her brain so she did not come back. “Promise me,” she had insisted, and he had agreed. He had nodded, sobbing and squeezing her hands in his. But he had reneged on his promise. She did not know what he had done, if he had tried and failed or just couldn’t bring himself to do it. That was her final sentient memory before she awakened in the field: telling him to make sure she didn’t come back, and his tearful acquiescence. How would he react if she returned to him now, a hideous reminder of his broken vow to her? Would he even recognize her? He might shoot her before she even had a chance to speak to him, let him know that she wasn’t a mindless zombie anymore, that she’d come back. Yet even that would be a victory over the caprices of fate. To see him one last time. To die by his hand.
Lost in thought, it was a moment before Soma realized the herd was on the move. The tall man had bolted from beneath the canopy. The others followed suit. The herd stampeded south, headed toward the street. Some of them had begun to howl. It was the howl all zombies voice when they have spotted their prey, when they are moving in for the kill.
Something quickened in Soma at the sound, some reflex, primal and overriding, and she scrambled toward the door, growling deep in her chest. A red haze had engulfed her thoughts at the sound, pulsating in her brain like a heartbeat. For a moment, all she could think was KILL-KILL-EAT-EAT!
An olive colored military jeep jounced across the parking lot, moving at a high rate of speed, but it did not register on her consciousness as a vehicle, a conveyance of men and women. All she saw was movement, a blur of colors, the enticing scent of hot living flesh.
Food!
Two men in the front seat, a third standing up in the back. The man in back was hanging onto the roll bar with one hand and his cap with the other. The jeep squealed to a stop as another vehicle roared onto the parking lot behind it. The man standing in the back of the jeep swayed forward over the roll bar and then swung a large black rifle into his hands. He was grinning, eyes hidden behind reflective sunglasses, face sunburnt. He brought the rifle up and sighted down its scope, still smiling as the herd scrambled toward him.
Soma was about to duck through the door when a gunshot rang out with a fl
at cracking sound, like someone banging two planks together. The sound startled her, and her instinct to attack evaporated almost instantly from her mind. She saw the tall man’s head burst, brains and blood and bone flying outwards in a fatal mandala. The herd’s alpha collapsed onto his belly, arms and legs sprawling. A second gunshot rang out, and one of the females in the herd fell sideways.
Soma heard the living men laughing as she retreated from the door. Several more gunshots followed, a quick volley of them, like a string of firecrackers.
“Get the fat one!” someone shouted.
BANG!
“Headshot!” someone else cried out.
“Like hell!” the first man yelled. “You got him in the neck! See? He’s still moving!”
She did not know if they had seen her. She retreated into the truck stop, looking for somewhere to hide. If they found her, they would gun her down just like they were gunning down her herd. They would do it even if she spoke, showed them that she was not like the others. She was certain of it. She could tell by their voices that they enjoyed the killing. They would toy with her a bit, maybe even experiment on her, but her ultimate fate would be death, a final death, and she had already decided she wanted to live.
For Aishani.
She stumbled over the spoiled snack cakes and candy bars littering the floor, smashing some of the packages open with her feet and smearing moldy cake and icing across the tiles. She slipped, almost fell. The gunfire outside was slackening. Someone yelled cease-fire.
“Is that all of ‘em?”
“Honk your horn and see if there’s any inside. It always brings ‘em running.”
The ladies’ room, Soma thought desperately.
She ran down the brief corridor and shoved through the door into the women’s restroom (just as, some time ago, the anonymous woman in the bathroom had done in the hopes of eluding her killer). The vehicles outside began to bleat their horns as the door swung shut behind her. They were hoping to tempt out any lurking deadheads before entering the building. She crossed the room to the dead woman and started to lie down beside her, then noticed the junk food squished between her toes.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 4