by Jay Wilburn
Loose Ends
by
Jay Wilburn
Copyright 2012 by Jay Wilburn
Published by Hazardous Press
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Day We Lost Our Appetites
Chapter 2: The Week We Tried to Make Due with Old Ingredients
Chapter 3: The Day We Almost Had Two Buffets
Chapter 4: The Week We Worked on Our Recipes
Chapter 5: The Day We Buried the Pasta
Chapter 6: The Morning We Lost the Shopping Spree
Chapter 7: The Week We Pushed the Limits of Shelf Life
Chapter 8: The Day We Made the Best Burger of Our Lives
Chapter 9: The Week We Went Fishing
Chapter 10: The Day We Served up Our Best
Chapter 11: The Night We Applied Heat
Chapter 12: The Hour It Boiled Over
Chapter 13: The Year I Opened My Own Kitchen
About the Author
Chapter 1: The Day We Lost Our Appetites
The day everyone died I was looking under the door of the pantry at dead feet. I could see under its toenails. The nails were curled away from the toes and were broken. The yellow-white fungus under them had pushed them away from the flesh. Even the fungus was dead. The dead owner of the feet was still hungry and waited outside the pantry for something to eat.
He waited for me.
I wanted to start this story back before I lost the people outside the pantry. I wanted to explain how their lives mattered and how deep my loss was after I hid from the creature. I tried, but I was too close to them and I couldn’t tell their story. So, my story starts on the day everyone died while I looked at one set of feet in the light under the pantry door.
I couldn’t see much once I closed myself inside. They were already in the buildings by the time I got to the kitchen, so I panicked and hid in the storage room instead of getting to one of the panic rooms.
I hid there two days. It might have been three, but I think it was two. I could only see light under the door because there was no light in the pantry without a window and with the generator not running. I kept waiting for someone to give the “all clear” and for life to go back to normal, but it never did.
We were all cowards and that’s why we survived. That may also be why we decided to do what we did later.
I could see his feet and hear him clawing. Then, he would leave for a while. It was hard to fix food in the dark and even harder to pee down a floor drain.
The others finally came out and started the process of cleaning up the buildings. I couldn’t see from where I was, my visitor was back scratching at my door, and I just didn’t want to come outside. I wasn’t out there and they only talked about it in snippets, but I can guess what happened from what I pieced together and from how it went the first two times the Complex was attacked.
The notes from which I’m writing this are pretty good, but memory has a way of betraying me.
I do know that before the cooks went in the panic room, the raiders got in the front door. We didn’t have fences in the Complex, so they just had to get through a door.
The other two times it happened we did the same thing. We armed up. We exchanged fire until they got inside. We held them off falling back slowly until the zombies came to the noise of humans fighting. We used the zombies to discourage the raiders from staying too long and then we got rid of the zombies once the raiders fled taking a few of the walking dead with them. The same group of raiders had never returned and we just rebuilt once it was over.
The Riding Dead were different for a number of reasons.
We always lost some people before we got back to the panic rooms, but nothing like this time. It all went wrong this time. It was over fast and then there was the long wait. I think it was two days before the others came out again. They were waiting for the “all clear” too.
The others were surprised and ashamed when they emerged from their hiding place. They would have checked the other panic rooms first and found them all empty. They probably exchanged looks, but had the discipline not to say anything. Doc would have been tempted, but he would have stayed quiet.
There were a few weapons in the panic rooms, but Doc would have gone down to get his skinny, aluminum bar from its spot in a cabinet in the garage. It was the only weapon he liked to use for killing zombies. It was sitting in the garage because it had been that long since he needed to keep it handy.
That had changed.
It was then that they saw the scout and work vehicles were still there because the raiders missed the garage. That would prove important later.
Chef probably went with him to get it while Short Order stood guard on the stairs by the armory closet. The raiders had busted in and took most of the guns this time, but not all. They had taken the time to draw pictures on the walls in the armory. Most were of people having sex with zombies. Others were boasts about the Riding Dead. One said, Tell the Shy We Said Hi!
It upset the cooks that the raiders had time to draw as they destroyed our home.
Once Doc had his aluminum bar, he and Chef closed the front door and sealed us inside with all the moving corpses. RD done! was scrawled across the outside of it. Chef picked up a loose piece of iron pipe from the garage.
Short Order fired twice taking the heads off of two zombies. They were old ones from the outside and not people we knew nor the raiders that had killed us.
Chef and Doc came running. My visitor wandered after the noise, but came back to my pantry again. He squared his dirty feet in my shaft of light because he was hungry and he knew there was something in the pantry he wanted to eat.
The three survivors then moved through the passages and blind corners of the Complex. By this point, we had connected fourteen buildings on this block and this was now a maze of hungry cadavers and dead friends. Sometimes these were one and the same.
It was Doc that came upon Kelly. She was a young girl that Doc was sweet toward. I don’t think anything came of it. Doc was an older man and she was in her teens just a little older than me. It was just some harmless flirting, I guess.
She was dragging herself along the wall on her knees because a lot of her muscle tissue had been gnawed away. When she looked up at Doc for the last time, one eye was milky white and the other was blown out and completely dilated out to the edges of her eyeball.
I imagine that Chef saw it and put his hand on Doc’s shoulder. He said to Doc, “John, I’ll do it.”
Doc answered back, “No, David, it’s the last mercy I get to show her.”
Chef would have backed up pushing Short Order out of the range of Doc’s back swing. Short Order was looking back the other way to guard their backs and would have been confused at first.
Before Short Order had a chance to ask what was going on, Doc would have been done with it. There was a gash in the opposite wall of the narrow hall between buildings and Kelly’s brains were running down the wall. Doc would stare at the gore running down toward the back of her open skull as he smoothed his white hair straight back and flat the way he always kept it in the two years I had apprenticed under him in the kitchen.
That would be the only female body they would find left in the Complex that day.
Chef David would have said, “Let’s get this done, gentlemen.”
Doc and Short Order would have answered, “Yes, Chef,” out of reflex from years of working the Complex’s kitchen. That is pronounced “Chef” as in the head cook and not “Chief” as in the leader of Indians, but I suppose either would have worked fine in our situation.
The next group of dead were strangers, which made it better, but not easier. They caught them in an intersection and managed to get a little fighting room. They bludgeoned the skulls until the hungry corpses were still. Short Order used the butt of the shotgun he carried instead of wasting the shells.
One of the fresher bodies wore a leather jacket with The Riding Dead sewn on the back. In the picture, a stringy skeleton rode a Harley with a green, bloody pinup riding cross-legged on the back. I still don’t know where raiders get their stencil work done in a world full of zombies. On the side of the dead rider’s bike in the picture, All These Loose Ends was written in blood. It was very detailed artwork for a group of post apocalyptic, murdering thugs.
On the sleeve of the jacket was a sewn bar that read, RD New Portown Chapter.
Short Order aimed his gun down at the raider’s mashed skull to take a single blast.
Chef pushed the barrel aside with the end of his grimy pipe and said, “It won’t make it better, Shaw. Let’s keep going.”
Short Order didn’t say, “Yes, Chef,” but he rested his gun back on his shoulder holding it high on the barrel to avoid the muck on the stock.
There was a can of spray paint on the floor. On the wall of the corridor was, The Shy Be in the Sky. Tell him we say goodbye. – The Ri. It looked like someone had been interrupted in writing.
“What the hell?” Doc said kicking the spray can aside.
They had to retreat twice clobbering the zombies trapped in the twisted hallways of the Complex as they backed away from their advance. Chef’s iron pipe bent and then broke in the process. Once, they were pinned in on both sides and had to fight for the middle ground. They started over to try to pick up the hidden spots they missed the first time through the halls.
Chef stopped and yanked a handrail loose on one of the staircases.
They entered one of the quarters to find Mark Christopher dead on his couch. His newborn son lay on his chest. Chef groaned as Short Order watched the door and Doc searched the backrooms.
Chef begged the empty room, “Please, let the baby be dead. Please, let the baby be dead.”
He breathed easy once he felt no pulse in the baby’s thigh and saw the tiny skull crushed in on itself. The dead father’s hands fell away.
Doc spoke softly, “Marion and the girls are missing. The apartment is empty.”
“Was Mark eaten? The baby?” Short Order asked from the doorway.
“Gunshot,” Chef answered, “and worse for the baby. The zombies were never in here.”
“What were they looking for?” Short Order asked.
Doc answered, “They all look for the same thing. They want weapons and food. Then, they run.”
“Where are the girls?” Short Order pressed.
Chef answered, “Sometimes they want more than guns and food.”
Short Order would have welled up at that point. He probably rubbed his right shoulder unconsciously and then looked away so the others wouldn’t see him.
Doc leaned his aluminum shaft against a set of pencil marks on the wallpaper next to the bedroom doorpost. Chef sat on the couch next to the bodies and looked down at the modest puddle of blood and tissue that had run off the cushion into the carpet. Doc stared at the spot also as he ran his hands back through his hair after wiping them clean on his own pants.
Short Order broke the silence. “More are coming. We need to go.”
By the last building of the Complex, Chef had splintered the handrail. He picked up Michael’s Razor scooter. He disconnected the base and wheels and dropped them on the floor next to the seven-year-old’s severed arm.
They continued on to finish the job.
They didn’t find Michael’s body which would never truly turn eight. It wasn’t because he was up and walking. None of them would have said it out loud, I’m guessing, but zombies tended to drag smaller bodies. When they sank their teeth or fingers into a child, they sometimes kept walking as they ate or backed away from other zombies trying to feast. We had seen it in the other two breeches after raider attacks. It wasn’t a calculated choice by the dead brain of the walkers, but an animalistic reaction to the hunger that never left them until their brains were splattered, ending their animation. If they didn’t find Michael, then his feeder might well have backed right out the front door with its seven-year-old prize.
I’m only guessing this is how it happened up to the point that they came into the kitchen. My visitor turned to greet them. They grabbed it and hustled it back into the corridors beyond the kitchen to keep from fouling the workspace. Its toenails scraped the tile as it vanished from my sight and then its brains painted the floor of the back hall.
I watched and listened under the door as I had done for days.
***
Short Order sat at the counter slicing fruit. He said, “Not a one. There is no one left. It is the cooks and a fortress full of bodies.”
Doc took a slice from Short Order’s apple and said, “We’ll need to clear out the bodies before the place is full of disease.”
Chef leaned over the stove with his back to the other men. He asked, “What is the point of cleaning fourteen empty buildings for three old men?”
“You checking out on us, Chef?” Doc asked. “You going to walk out and let them have you like old Brady did?”
“Easy, Doc,” Short Order said over a jaw full of apple flesh.
Short Order’s given name was Shaw Porter. He was five feet tall exactly. I was a few inches taller than Shaw even though he was an adult. I think I was fifteen at that point, but I don’t know exactly. I think I was five when the zombies came, but I don’t remember. People thought it was weird that I didn’t remember. They thought lots of things were weird about me.
I could only see the shadows of Shaw’s feet trailing off away from the front windows.
Doc walked around the counter and leaned against the wall with his back to the sunset blazing through the dining area and over the stovetops where Chef hunched. Chef stood up straight and flipped on a battery lantern that hung above the big hood in front of the tiles that spelled out Fourth Floor Bistro.
Chef said, “I just don’t know what we’re doing next.”
“We need to eat,” Doc said.
Chef turned to face Doc in the pallid, lantern light that we usually cleaned under rather than cooked or killed under.
After a good bit of silence, Doc shouted, “What do you want me to say, David? This shit sucks. We lost everybody. It sucks. I had to bash in the skulls of friends. Once we eat, I’ll have to drag bloody, diseased bodies to the roof and drop them off. We’ll spend days scrubbing floors and walls. Then we’ll probably find more we have to clean up. We’ll have to do the funerals too, along with an army’s share of chores for three people. Our other choice is to stop surviving. So, what do you want to do, Chef?”
Chef asked, “How do we know which funerals to do?”
Chef’s taken name was David Sharp. He was older than Doc and taller than Doc, but he looked younger. I think it was because he kept his hair cut so close. The grey didn’t show as much until after this night and after we left the Complex.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Short Order asked, “What do you mean, which funerals, Chef?”
Chef answered, “How do we tell who is dead, Short? How do we know who is missing, who shambled out, and who got kidnapped? Do we do funerals for the ones that got taken?”
Short Order asked, “You saying you want to go after them?”
There was a long silence again.
Doc cleared his throat, “We lost a lot of people whether they were ate or took. We could go running off in some random direction looking for revenge, but they outnumbered us before the slaughter and we’d might as well just lay down in the street, if we’re looking to commit suicide.”
Chef said, “I never said we run out the front door like regulators, but …”
“But what, boss?” Doc asked after Chef trailed off.
Short Order’s stool squealed on the tile as he scooted back and stepped down where I could see his feet again.
Short Order said, “Some of them were girls and it isn’t any good to know we can’t do anything about it, Chef.”
“Yeah, it ain’t,” Doc agreed.
Doc’s taken name was John Brown. The nickname came from some movie I had never seen. He was Sous Chef and technically I was apprenticing under him, but I learned from all of them.
“I just don’t know what we’re doing here anymore,” Chef said. “I don’t feel like cleaning up empty halls and I don’t feel like cooking for tables full of ghosts.”
“Well, I do want to cook something,” Doc said. “I spent hours bashing skulls and my back hurts, so I want to cook and feel normal again for a little while. We can do the funerals tomorrow.”
Short Order added, “It’s your kitchen, Chef. We may think clearer, if we eat and going through the motions can’t hurt anything right now.”
“I guess,” Chef said, “We’ve been going through the motions for years. Why stop now, right?”
Short Order cracked his knuckles and asked, “What’s the challenge then, Chef? What sort of task fits the end of the world all over again?”
Chef coughed and cleared his throat. “I don’t know. The kitchen smells like death. I think that zombie left the place stinking like piss hanging out by the pantry there.”
Doc agreed, “Yeah, he was sure focused on something.”
There was a silence and then a shuffle as they approached my hiding place from around the counter. I didn’t say anything, but I moved back from the door to avoid being hit in the face. They heard me move and whispered something I couldn’t make out from the other side of the door.