Ravenous

by John Inman

  He wondered if they were on their way to feed. Were they homing in on the scent of blood, or had they already fed, their hunger slaked for the time being?

  The creatures flew so swiftly that in a matter of seconds they were out of sight, lost in the treetops. They left a sense of dread behind, almost like a film of radioactive dust, eating away at everything wholesome inside Terry’s head. When he was a kid, he would have called the way he felt the heebie-jeebies. After all, it was the first time he had seen any of the creatures in the sky for a while. Had he been secretly hoping they had run out the clock on their little attack on humanity? Had they turned on one another and devoured themselves instead, leaving mankind at peace?

  Clearly that little exercise in wishful thinking was a bust. Because there they were. Still on the prowl. If anything, by the numbers he had just seen, they might even be moving in greater swarms than they had before.

  His heart weighed down with foreboding, Terry eased out the clutch and toed the gas pedal, prodding the Jeep forward, gradually picking up speed. The dust began to billow up behind him again as he followed the winding dirt lane down the side of his little mountain toward the tiny, nearly deserted, blood-spattered town of Spangle.

  His first stop was a mom-and-pop gas station he had frequented back in the days when this rustic little neck of the woods had still been operational. Mom and pop were gone now, of course. Gone, as in split, but not eaten, or so Terry hoped. They didn’t bother leaving a note on the door when they left. Nor did they lock up the gas pumps before they hightailed it out of town. He knew because he had been stealing gas from them every time he ran low.

  He did so again now, topping off the Jeep’s gas tank, then filling two five-gallon gas cans and heaving them up against the seat backs where they wouldn’t topple over on the bumpy ride home. He and Bruce then headed for what he and Bobby used to laughingly call the commercial center of Spangle. In other words, where a few scattered businesses used to languish in the heat, or the cold, depending on the season. A barbershop straight out of Mayberry R.F.D., where the best you could hope for was to still have two ears when you left the barber chair. Molly’s Beauty Emporium, where the latest fashions posted out front were twenty years behind the times anywhere else in the country. A dress shop that catered mostly to old ladies. A thrift store that catered to everyone. Various storefronts touting insurance salesmen, banking outlets, pharmacy supplies. An abandoned factory where nutritional supplements had once been developed but stood vacant now after going bankrupt back in the ’80s, or so the story went. There was even a funeral home, whose business one might reasonably expect to be booming, but at this point in the game, it looked as abandoned as the factory. Toss in a handful of other establishments that had been barely eking out a living even before the apocalypse hit, and you had downtown Spangle.

  Terry refused to return to the roadside market where Bobby had been killed. He knew he would never go back there again. But there were other sites for him to pillage. Other places to ransack, looking for food. Private homes. An elementary school cafeteria on the outskirts of town where they stored a lot of canned goods, although most of the cans were huge. Various small markets that used to cater to the tourists who passed through Spangle (as quickly as they could) to get to Julian, a true tourist destination, farther up the mountain pass. Julian, Terry knew, was beyond the quarantine zone, so he couldn’t go there for supplies. If he left where he was, the authorities would never let him back in.

  At the Spangle Hardware Store in the center of town, Terry gathered up a few things he needed for the metal fence posts he was working with—nuts, bolts, nasty-looking metal staples, the biggest nails he could find. While he was at it, he grabbed a new hammer and saw as well as a few other odd tools that might come in handy. These he tossed into the back of the Jeep with a clatter.

  At the Target Express next door, Terry walked through the punched-out front windows like he owned the place. He had not caused the damage personally, but he saw no reason not to take advantage of it while he was out and about.

  Inside, he browsed up and down the abandoned aisles with one of their handbaskets, collecting this and that. Dry dog food. Chew toys. A couple of extra blankets from the bedding section. Tins of sardines and Spam and Styrofoam cups of instant mashed potatoes, which he loved. On a whim he acquired a two-liter bottle of scotch as well. Bruce padded along at his heels, awkwardly dragging a large teddy bear he had plucked off some shelf or other and claimed for his own when Terry wasn’t looking. Seemed they both had their whimsical needs.

  When neither he nor the dog could carry any more, they headed back toward the punched-out front windows. Before they got there, they stumbled onto a fresh pool of blood puddled beside the checkout counter at the front of the store. Resting in the blood lay a backpack—used, not new—stuffed with newly gathered food items and ripped to shreds. Alongside the backpack lay a human finger, apparently all that remained of the backpack’s owner.

  The blood wasn’t exactly moist, but it had not congealed to the consistency of tar yet either. The kill was probably less than two days old. A hiker, maybe. Or someone who had finally decided to abandon the town and thought their best hope of doing so was to leave on foot as soon as they stocked up on a few supplies.

  Snatching Bruce into his arms, Terry sidestepped the blood and hurried through the broken window to escape the reek of rotting blood. There were memories in that smell he didn’t want to contemplate.

  He took a last look back at the shattered store window and tossed up a silent prayer to whoever might be listening that the person with the backpack hadn’t suffered much. Knowing the creatures were not attracted to sound, Terry still cranked up the engine without too much acceleration and pulled slowly away, keeping his noise to a minimum.

  Finding the backpack had rattled him. He thought most of the town’s residents had split long before this. And actually, maybe they had. Maybe the backpacker was simply traveling through. He could have bypassed the police cordons at the edge of town by hiking through the woods. Maybe the guy was a thrill-seeker. An adventurer. A nutcase. Who knows? Well, whatever he was, he wasn’t one now.

  Trying to put the dead backpacker out of his mind, Terry headed for the final place he wanted to hit before heading home. On the very edge of town, secluded off by itself in a copse of Japanese pines, he pulled up next to an unpainted clapboard house that looked about ready to collapse in upon itself. The owner, an ancient character whom everyone in Spangle just called Old Ned, had opted to stay, Terry knew, as he himself had opted to stay.

  Unfortunately, Old Ned hadn’t stayed long. The creatures got him first. Terry had found his remains weeks ago.

  Now, knowing Ned was out of the picture, Terry pulled around to the back of the sagging farmhouse and bumped to a stop next to a head-high stack of firewood Ned had chopped for the masses, as long as the masses were willing to pay for it. Which they always were.

  Now, of course, with Ned permanently retired, the wood was free. Terry’s for the taking. In fact, he was probably the only customer—or looter—in a twenty-mile radius. Terry was still gentleman enough to feel guilty about it, but not so guilty that he didn’t fill every square inch of space left in the Jeep with firewood.

  Satisfied he wouldn’t have to come back to Spangle for a month or more, Terry positioned Bruce, and Bruce’s bear, in his lap, since the passenger seat was now filled with firewood, and headed home.

  That evening he sat on his front porch nursing a tall scotch and water. Bruce lay at his feet gnawing on the new teddy bear’s ears while Terry dug his bare toes through the dog’s coat and watched the sky for streams of shadow. Which, happily, didn’t come.

  He let the night settle around him, and when the air grew cold and damp and he was just about to go inside and go to bed, he spotted what he had been dreading. A landslide of deeper darkness moving swiftly across the night sky—black against black—blocking out the stars as it went. In the soundless dark, Terry could hear
the percussive flutter of countless wings, drumming across the heavens. Bruce, too, lifted his head and gazed skyward. A tiny shiver of fear wrinkled his back. His ears drooped. He tore his eyes from the sky and looked to Terry for comfort. Terry offered it by bending down and laying his hand across the dog’s warm back.

  “Hush,” Terry whispered. “It’s okay. They aren’t coming here.”

  He gazed back to the heavens. All the stars were twinkling again. The swarm of creatures had passed. Even the thudding communal beat of their great wings no longer whumped on the night air.

  But where have they gone? he wondered. And when will they return?

  He carefully scooped Bruce and the stuffed bear into his arms and carried them into the house. He locked the doors and windows and climbed the stairs to his bedroom loft. Once there, he stared out through the window, watching the treetops in the moonlight, swaying in the wind.

  A shudder of familiar loneliness swept through him. He blinked back a longing ache that had Bobby written all over it and turned to get ready for bed.

  Thanks to the scotch, which he wasn’t used to, his nightmares were horrific. Even worse than they usually were.

  Through the long night, Bruce and the bear never left his side. They were a solace, but not enough to silence his dreams. To Terry, the night was endless and empty and screamed constantly of Bobby’s absence.

  When he woke in the morning, there were tears on his cheeks, and the pillow was damp beneath his head.

  Chapter Five

  THE BOY and girl were respectively seventeen and sixteen. Their names were Dominic and Grace. The motorcycle they shared as they sneaked onto the mountain was a Suzuki 250cc. Big enough for two people to ride double on, but not big enough to be scary or make an undue amount of noise.

  Dominic was a lanky dark-haired boy with what Grace considered to be the sexiest eyes she had ever seen. The rest of him was pretty sexy too. Dominic had taken her virginity only six months earlier. She still considered it to have been the greatest moment of her young life. When she tried—and she didn’t have to try very hard—she could still remember how it felt the first time his long cock slid deep inside her, plumbing her depths. Stroking her to orgasm before she could even cry out in ecstatic shame. The gentle way he did it, and the relentless way he did it, easing himself deeper and deeper into her very core as she gasped and clutched and pleaded for him not to stop, still made Grace’s breath catch thinking about it.

  From Dominic’s perspective, it wasn’t just sex he had found with Grace. It was love. He fully intended to marry her as soon as the school year was over and he graduated from high school. Both their parents would shit bricks, but neither of them cared about that. They only cared about each other.

  Grace wore her blond hair long. It framed her face like a flaxen cloud and was only slightly tweaked with bleach to make it just a smidgeon lighter than the color nature had supplied, or so she had told Dominic. Not that he cared. Every time he buried his face in that mane of golden softness, it was all he could do not to shoot his rocks even before he got Grace’s panties off.

  And, oh, how Grace loved it when he did get them off.

  Neither of them could quite remember who came up with the idea first. The idea of sneaking into the quarantine zone to catch a glimpse of the creatures everyone was talking about. Grace thought it was Dominic’s idea. Dominic thought it was Grace’s.

  But whoever had the idea first, here they finally were.

  They had arrived close to sunset. They knew they weren’t alone on the mountain because they heard an automobile not too far away shortly after they arrived. Dominic said it sounded like a Jeep bouncing up one of the mountain paths.

  They set up camp below a little knoll blanketed with California poppies. The orange poppies weren’t in bloom at this time of year, but the plants were still lush and green and seemed to grow wild everywhere on the mountain. Grace thought it would really be pretty in the spring. Dominic thought it would be a nice place to spend the night screwing. Exploring the mountain for the creatures could wait until tomorrow.

  They hadn’t brought a tent because neither of them owned one, but they did have a sleeping bag they could share. The sleeping bag zipped up tight to keep the bugs and snakes out, not that there were many bugs or snakes around at this time of year. Still, even with the nights as cold as they were, with their body heat and all the other activities they planned on pursuing, sex being the most anticipated, they knew being cold would be the least of their worries.

  And so it turned out.

  Bundled up naked in each other’s arms with the sleeping bag zipped up tight above their heads, they didn’t notice the moon rising over the mountain. The stars came out unwitnessed by them as well. Night fell around them, but they didn’t care. Even the cold mountain air did not touch them.

  Grace was blissfully aware of only one thing: Dominic’s lean body pressed naked to hers. His hardness against her softness. The bristle of his leg hair against the smoothness of her shins. The way he squirmed in low and slid his lips across her belly made her chew on her bottom lip, it felt so good. The heaviness of his long cock pushing against her thigh, inches from where she really wanted it to be, was perhaps the best part of cuddling naked with a boy in a sleeping bag made for one.

  She gasped as he took her nipple into his mouth. The pain was so exquisite she had to gently push him away.

  “I-I’m sorry. It’s too sensitive,” she murmured.

  Dominic lifted his head to gaze at her through the inky darkness inside the bag. Even without seeing him, she knew he was smiling in disbelief. “You always liked it before,” he breathed, his voice weak with need. As he whispered, he slid his cock a little higher up her thigh. Teasing her. Teasing her because he knew how much she really wanted it.

  Grace’s fingers played through the little patch of hair at the base of Dominic’s spine, right where the rise of his ass began.

  When he stooped to take her nipple into his mouth again, she bucked hard, and pushed him away with more determination this time.

  He huffed in annoyance and gazed up at her again. “What the hell is wrong with you? You only act like this when you’re starting your period. Sensitive, cranky, first you want it, and then you don’t want it. What’s going on?”

  She snuggled closer to him, even as he tried to edge away, annoyed. She wrapped her warm fingers around his penis. It was still as hard as stone, and it twitched and swelled in her hand when she gripped it. A rush of desire crashed through her that almost took her breath away.

  She lifted one leg and straddled him, rising up and settling over his chest, her mouth at his throat. With her fingers, she guided him inside her.

  He wasn’t fighting anymore, but she heard him chuckling beneath her as his cock slid deep.

  “You’ve never been this wet before. Holy shit, you’re really turned on!”

  Grace cried out when the first waves of orgasm took her. She clutched Dominic against her and pulled him in as far as he would go. She felt hot liquid spill down over her perineum. It surprised her. My God, did I come that much? Did Dominic come?

  She slipped her hand between them and dragged her fingertips over the tender skin beneath her vulva. The liquid was everywhere. Hot and sticky.

  She smelled it in the darkness and instantly knew the truth.

  “Oh no,” she hissed. “It’s my period.”

  Dominic stopped pumping, his cock stood stiff inside her, piercingly deep, buried to the hilt, filling her every crevice.

  For the first time, she heard honest-to-God fear in his voice. “You can’t have your period here. We talked about this! The monsters are drawn to the smell of blood. You know that.”

  She fought to speak, the tears already welling up. Fear rose up too, even while desire still clamored around inside her. “I must be early! It’s never happened before!” But still she didn’t want him to stop.

  She clutched at his thighs and pulled him ever deeper inside herself. Somethi
ng about her period, and the fear too—something about how it sensitized her body—made her beg him not to stop.

  “Please, oh please,” she pleaded, arching her back, dragging him closer. “Don’t stop. Finish it, Dom. Finish it! We’re sealed up inside this bag. The creatures won’t know about the blood.”

  Dominic had begun to respond in spite of himself—in spite of his fears—when he heard the first of the sounds.

  The percussive hwump of wingbeats on the air. The cracking of tree limbs as something large crashed through the pines looming over them. The whisper and thud of needles and pine cones sprinkling the earth and peppering the sleeping bag above their heads.

  “Listen!” she gasped, freezing in spite of herself.

  “Oh no,” he muttered, wrapping his arms tightly around Grace’s slim body, burying his face between her breasts, listening hard to the terrified pounding of Grace’s heart. And to his own. His cock shrinking and his hunger for her drifting away even as she continued to tremble beneath him. Not with need now, but with a growing, mindless terror.

  They both sensed—they both knew—they were no longer alone.

  Dominic opened his mouth to hiss, “Lie still. Don’t move.”

  But the words never came because the creatures came first.

  In a haze of tattered nylon and white cotton batting, the sleeping bag exploded around them, pulled apart by grabbing claws and scissor-like teeth. A thundering heartbeat later, the creatures tore through the flesh beneath.

  Dominic and Grace were dead before the moonlight touched them.

  Chapter Six

  THE DAY was warmer than the days before. A hint of coming summer, maybe. Terry sweltered under the biker’s jacket and the heavy gloves while he spent the morning nailing more fence posts to the inner walls of the cabin. The windows and doors were already covered, but he knew that would do little more than slow the creatures if they took it into their heads to attack. To really protect himself and Bruce, he needed to fully shield the entire structure.