If they came into the restroom and saw her, they might notice that the food smeared on her feet was still moist.
She pushed open the door of one of the stalls to get toilet paper, but the dispenser was broken open. There was no paper in it. She checked the others. They were similarly spent. She heard voices, laughter, sounded like they were coming inside the building now. She cleaned between her toes with her index finger, flicked the gunk away and then lay down beside the dead woman. A moment later, the bathroom door swung inwards.
It swooped open with enough force to bang against the wall. Soma had no time to shut her eyes and was forced to keep them open as two men rushed into the room, guns drawn. One of them was looking right at her.
He was a stocky man of average height, heavily muscled. He was wearing military pants and a white t-shirt -- the kind they called a “wife-beater” back in the day – dog tags swinging from his thick neck, tattoo of a skull on one bicep, tattoo of a pinup girl on the other. He had a square, bearded face with close-set features.
“Fuckin’ stinks in here,” he said, nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Deaders,” the man standing behind him said, and he nodded in Soma’s direction. He was tall, thin, young, redheaded. He was clean-shaven, dressed in camo.
“I see the fuckin’ deaders,” the bearded man said. He sounded annoyed.
The bearded man advanced cautiously, watching the two dead women on the floor. “Yoo-hoo, ladies?” he called in a girlish falsetto. His pistol did not waver from Soma’s face.
Soma stared fixedly at a speck on the wall, thinking, Don’t blink don’t breathe don’t move your eyes… She expected her eyes to burn, to begin weeping, but they did not. She was holding her breath but her lungs did not burn. Zombies, she supposed, did not have to blink or breathe. It made it much easier to play possum, but it was dismaying. It drove home her situation even further. If she survived this confrontation, she was going to have to explore the attributes of her undead body, figure out what it could and could not do.
“They dead-dead?” the younger man asked.
“You don’t see them moving, do you?” the bearded man replied. He pushed open the stall doors with the barrel of his gun, one at a time, and then lowered his weapon. He cocked his head back and yelled “CLEAR!”
He had a loud, carrying voice. It almost made Soma jump.
The skinny guy did jump. He leaned through the open doorway and echoed the older man: “All clear in here!”
She could hear the other men ransacking the convenience store. Excited voices. Laughter. Something fell over with a crash. Glass broke.
The bearded man turned and regarded the blonde next to Soma. He tilted his head to one side, scowling. “Shame,” he said, squinting one eye.
“What’s a shame?” the kid asked.
“It’s a shame to waste good pussy like that,” the bearded man said, nodding toward the blonde woman’s corpse. “I always liked blondes.”
The kid laughed uncertainly. He looked like he wanted to leave but didn’t quite dare without the other man’s permission. “We ought to go up front and help the others,” the kid suggested.
“You go ahead,” the bearded man said. “I gotta piss.”
“Oh,” the boy said. He blinked. “Okay.”
The redheaded young man withdrew from the ladies’ room, letting the door swing shut with a pneumatic whoosh.
“Yeah,” the bearded man said, speaking to himself now. “Sure is a shame.” He shrugged and walked forward, holstering his pistol. Once the pistol was holstered, he started on the buttons of his fly. He approached until he was standing directly overtop the blonde. He wrangled out his penis and began to urinate, whistling tunelessly as his urine pattered on the dead blonde woman’s body.
Soma lay very still, eyes wide open, as the bearded man relieved himself. She tried not to flinch as his piss splattered on her, but it was hard not to react. The man was pissing on the dead woman’s privates. It was disgusting, and disrespectful of the dead. She imagined leaping up at him, fingers curled into claws, snarling like some monster in a B-grade horror movie, and her lips almost twitched in amusement. He’d probably go Number 2 in his pants along with the Number 1!
“You like that, honey?” the bearded man murmured as he relieved himself. “Gotcha all warm and wet now, don’t I?”
She saw herself jumping up at him, saw it in her mind’s eye with all the clarity of true reality, saw herself flying up at him, howling, fingers hooked. She could take him completely by surprise. His gun was holstered. Easy pickin’s, as her father would have said. And then she would bite him. Bite him. Kill him. EAT him!
NO!
She must have moved, twitched, did something, because the man cut his stream off and looked at her, eyes narrowed.
Soma lay very still, fighting the impulse to attack. It was taking all her willpower to resist the urge to feed. It was the smell, the hot corporeal smell of him. She could smell his sweat and his piss and the cheesy odor of his unwashed cock. She could smell his flesh, his hot living flesh, and her body ached with the need for sustenance. Her stomach was a ball of fire in her guts.
But she couldn’t. She might manage to kill him, might get a few bites of his succulent flesh, but then his friends would come and they would kill her and that would be the end of her. The final death.
The worst thing was it was almost worth it in her hunger-hazed mind. The need buzzed in her brain, demanding that she do it, tempting her with memories of previous feedings, the glorious pleasure of filling her belly with warm living flesh, the taste of it, better than the most expensive New York strip steak, better than lobster dipped in hot butter, better than hot apple pie with ice cream. Better even than chocolate! She almost gave in. Almost surrendered to the red haze, could feel it swirling down around her thoughts, throbbing like a heartbeat, like the hard cock of an ardent love, urging her on, clouding her reason.
But she held onto herself, her new thinking self. It was just by her fingernails but she managed to hold on.
The bearded man turned back to the blonde. He resumed pissing, lifted a leg to fart. Guy just kept pissing and pissing. Must have drank a two-liter of pop earlier that day! He finally finished and shook himself off. For a minute, he stood playing idly with himself, staring at the dead woman with a thoughtful pout on his lips, pressing Soma to the very limits of her endurance. Just as she was ready to leap at him, bite a plug from his leg, he tucked himself away and sauntered from the restroom.
Soma closed her eyes once the door had swung shut behind him. She didn’t move her body, afraid the man would return, or someone else might come into the restroom, but she closed her eyes and let out a little sigh of relief.
No one else came in.
She lay in the bearded man’s cooling puddle until the crashing and voices faded from the front. A little while later, the vehicles outside started with a roar, one after another. The caravan circled the building, the sound of their engines like a swarm of angry hornets. The roar swelled, and then slowly diminished into the distance.
The piss had gone cold. Soma sat up, dripping, then clambered to her feet.
“Disgusting,” she whispered, flicking the cold liquid from her right arm. She could feel it trickling down the back of her legs.
She exited the ladies’ room.
6
Soma peeked timidly from the room before venturing out. She knew the survivors had gone. She had heard their vehicles depart. Nevertheless, she could not help being cautious. She felt that she had narrowly avoided a second much more permanent demise.
The convenience store was even more disorderly than it had been before, if that was possible. It did not look as if the survivors had gotten much from the truck stop -- it had been pretty thoroughly looted when she initially arrived -- and they had trashed the place out of frustration, turning over some of the gondolas and breaking out the windows of the coolers before moving on.
She picked her way across the sales floor, be
ing careful of all the broken glass, then ducked through the door. She peered back and forth, just to make sure there was no one else around, and then stepped out.
She was all alone now.
The members of her herd lay sprawled across the parking lot, every last one of them. They were dead. Not just dead but dead-dead, as the redheaded young man had said. The final death. Total brain destruction. Soma went to them and looked down at their bodies, a confused mélange of feelings swirling through her mind. She felt liberated but at the same time lost, relieved but strangely mournful, as if she had lost people who were important to her. But these men and women were nobody special. They were not friends or loved ones. They were just a handful of unlucky souls with whom she’d chanced to walk a while through purgatory. She shouldn’t feel anything for them. Yet she was touched by their passing. Each of the fallen was a tragedy, if only to the men and women they once were. So she went from body to body, standing by each of them for a moment. It was the only thing she could offer them. She stood beside the fat man, the old woman, the girl, the handsome man, the tall man, the dark man… pausing to look down at each one of them, to etch their faces in her memory.
“I hope you’ve moved on to a better place,” she murmured.
The little boy, the bird-eater, was not quite dead. He gurgled and reached out to her foot.
“Oh, God,” Soma moaned.
“Mom,” he breathed, eyes rolling in their sockets. He was trying to look up at her, trying to see her face. He was lying prone, his head turned to one side. There was a bullet hole in his temple from which tarry black blood trickled sluggishly. The exit wound was at his nape. One of his eyes was black and swollen to a slit. “Mom… where am I?” he groaned, and his left leg flailed weakly.
“Oh, God!” Soma cried again, stumbling back from him. Her hand flew to her mouth.
“Mom… Mommy, it hurts…” the child whimpered.
“Oh, no no no no no,” Soma sobbed. Her eyes stung but no tears fell. She wiped her cheeks anyway.
“Mom? Mommy?”
Like her, the child had regained his intellect. He could think again, speak again, only to suffer the final death, here on this sunbaked parking lot, far away from home.
This is hell, Soma thought. We have died and gone to hell.
“Mom… please…. Make it stop hurting.”
“All right,” Soma said. She took her hand away from her mouth and smiled, nodding down at him sympathetically. “All right, baby. Just hang on. I’ll… mommy will make it stop hurting.”
She turned away, hurried back inside the truck stop. In the ladies’ room, she bent down and removed the cinderblock from the woman’s crushed head. It came away with a horrid tearing sound, blonde hair and chunks of dried flesh stuck to its porous surface. She did not look at the woman’s face. There wasn’t really a face to look at anyway. She carried the block to the bird-eater.
“Mommy?” the boy choked.
“Mommy’s here,” she grunted, hefting the block over the child’s head.
“It hurts,” the boy said. “I can’t get up.”
“I know. Close your eyes, baby. Mommy will make it better.”
The child closed his eyes.
Soma made the pain go away.
After that, she left.
She had a vague idea she was walking toward the interstate exchange. She wanted to see the signs down there. She wanted to know where she was. However, the journey there was a blur. It was as though she was in a deep pit, and she could only see out, could only see the path ahead, if she leapt with all of her might.
It was exhausting.
She could not stop thinking about the boy, the bird-eater. He had regained his mind. He had awakened, just as she had done. It didn’t do him any good, but it meant she was not the only one, and if they had both awakened, two members of a small and unremarkable group of reanimated corpses, then perhaps there were others.
The poor, poor baby!
If only he had awakened sooner! Perhaps she could have taken him under her wing. Perhaps she could have kept him safe. But he had emerged from the waters of Lethe too late. A stillborn child.
Then again, maybe it was the trauma of the gunshot to the temple that had awakened him.
Soma stopped for a moment to consider that. There was a wound at her temple, too. Not a gunshot. It looked like blunt trauma. She could not remember what it was from, but it had ripped a good chunk of skin and hair away from her skull. Perhaps that was what had brought her back to her senses. She had heard of people cured of amnesia by a blow to the head. It was very rare, she knew, more of a Hollywood conceit than a medical phenomenon but it had been known to happen. Perhaps a non-fatal blow to the head would awaken other zombies.
It was an interesting theory, but it didn’t really help her now.
You need to pull yourself together if you plan to find Nandi and Aishani.
Yes. The confrontation with the survivalists had been a shock, and the boy’s awakening had shocked her further still, but if she wanted to find her husband and daughter before she died (again) she was going to have to stuff all of those trivialities into a mental closet and apply herself fully to her current predicament.
First, she needed to find out where she was. Second, she needed to find some form of transportation. Neither should prove too challenging. There were several abandoned vehicles on this stretch of highway alone. Surely one of them was operable, and any one of them might contain a clue to her whereabouts.
She continued up the freeway, walking near the shoulder of the road. It was mid-afternoon now and her shadow trailed up the fissured pavement ahead of her, spindly arms and legs stretching and shrinking as she moved her limbs. It looked like the shadow of a walking scarecrow.
The first sign she came to was a blue shield. It said JCT INTERSTATE 20. She tried to recall if she had ever traveled on Interstate 20, but if she had, she had no recollection of it. It could be an interstate in Maine or an interstate in California.
“No help at all,” she sighed.
She continued on, not quite able to read the big green signs a quarter mile ahead. After a few minutes of walking, she stopped to investigate an abandoned vehicle.
It was an ugly orange hatchback with patches of gray primer on the side panels. The vehicle had Illinois plates, but that was no guarantee she was in Illinois. There was no telling how far the car had traveled before the driver abandoned it. In 21st Century America, everyone was a Gypsy.
The door was hanging open so of course the battery was dead. She slid into the driver’s seat, absently noting the distinctive scent of sun-crisped upholstery, a smell she had always found pleasant for some strange reason. She checked the gages. Out of fuel, too.
Soma flipped open the glove compartment. Inside were several CDs (mostly country music), a couple of tools, registration and insurance forms, and a pair of brown jersey gloves.
She closed the glove box, then leaned over and scooped up the newspapers and magazines jumbled in the passenger floorboard. The periodicals were stiff and bloated, their pages faded to near illegibility. There were sales circulars dated right around the time of the pandemic. Beef $1.39 a pound. Buy two get one free on Del Monte canned vegetables. One newspaper was a Southern Illinoisan, dated about a year before her first death. The ghostly headline brayed IS THIS THE END? Below that, in slightly smaller text: CDC Scrambles To Contain The Phage. Most of the stories in the papers concerned the Phage. CHINA CLOSES BORDERS. RUSSIA ACCUSES U.S. OF GERM WARFARE. DEATH TOLL MOUNTS. MILLIONS AFFLICTED.
Nothing like screaming “fire!” in the middle of a burn ward, she thought with a scowl.
The rest of the magazines were hobby and sports periodicals. Field & Stream. Quilting Quarterly.
Frustrated, she threw down the papers and clambered from the driver’s seat. She levered the seat forward and dragged out the contents of the backseat. A patchwork quilt. A pair of tennis shoes. There were a couple of garments wadded in the backseat. Old lady stretc
h pants. A flowery blouse. She stood on one foot and tried on a shoe. It fit! Smiling, she put on the other shoe and then held up the pants, stretching them out at the waistband. They were about 10 sizes too big. She could wear the blouse, though. Didn’t matter how big it was. She yanked at the rags draped across her shoulders, tearing them from her upper body, and then slipped the flowery blouse over her head. She folded the quilt and tucked it under her arm. Might need that, too.
Feeling a little better, feeling a little more human, Soma closed the door and continued.
7
The interstate signs said Bolinger 7 with an arrow pointing south and Van Meyer 23 with an arrow pointing north. There was a sign that identified the numerical designation of the exchange, Exit 32, but no suggestion as to where exactly it was, not even what state it was in. Abandoned vehicles littered the long empty lanes running north and south. The median, the band of unpaved earth dividing the opposing roads, was a ribbon of wild greenery that almost completely obscured the northbound lane.
Soma was so frustrated she could have wept.
She stood in the middle of the road, trying to decide what to do now. Behind her, the sun had bled out, its vermillion light soaking into the wind-worried clouds and making bloody rags of them. It would be night soon. Already, crickets had begun to herald the coming dark.
Further east, just on the other side of the interstate exchange, was a collection of small houses and mobile homes. The houses were clustered in a narrow valley between the interstate and a broad swathe of forest, looked like they were about two miles away. She decided to head that way, checking the abandoned cars along the road as she went. She would have to be careful. There could be armed survivors in some of those dwellings, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 5