Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  Luckily—if it could be called luck—she saw a couple of paper plates on top of the dusty refrigerator, then a couple of forks that didn’t look too dirty. On her way out, she found a steak knife and tucked it into her pants pocket.

  In the living room, Barry was already wired up. He had piled the burgers on top of the coffee table, popped the tops on a couple of beers, and had started his video game with the sound turned up way too loud.

  “Don’t you think you should turn that down a little?” She still had vivid memories of Eaters crashing through the glass at the sandwich shop, and the windows on this house weren’t any more secure. What if the noise attracted them?

  “You can’t play Death Masters low. It’s got to be loud!”

  She sat down on the opposite end of the couch just as a machine gun wielding robot shot Barry’s character in the head.

  “Damn! Well, time to eat anyway.” He tossed a charred burger onto each plate and handed one to her.

  She took it and sat it on her lap, not sure if she could make herself eat it, although she knew it might be the last food she’d see in some time. Maybe her reluctance to eat this gross burger was a good thing; it could mean that she wasn’t infected.

  Barry had no such qualms. He began to munch on one like it was a potato chip. “Come on, eat up…it’s the last meat.”

  She took a tiny bite and crunched it between her teeth like a piece of charcoal, trying not to think about the fact that it probably contained bits of burned fly eggs and maggots.

  “I kind of like them this way, don’t you?”

  He leaned forward, grinning like a hyena savoring a kill, with bits of blackened burger speckling his teeth. That’s when she noticed the couple of red welts near his chin and the strip of flesh peeling near one of his ears just underneath a curl of hair. He’s sick. He’s got it.

  It made sense now. Barry wasn’t a powder keg just because he wasn’t on his anti-psychotic medicine—he was infected. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? The beads of sweat on his forehead, the dark circles under his eyes. She wondered how much time she had left.

  The timetable for leaving Barry’s house had been moved up drastically. She wondered if she should try to leave now, or wait until that short window of opportunity when the disease took over and rendered him temporarily dead.

  It was an important decision. Were the infected more dangerous when they still had a little bit of mind left? Or later, when their minds were completely gone, and they were nothing but dead eating machines?

  Mark had seemed sane even though he was clearly sick when they parted. But the infected old biddy that had tried to strangle her had definitely been certifiably crazy. Cheryl decided that it depended on the person’s personality before they got sick. And Barry was psychotic to begin with…

  She glanced over at him, happily gorging on charred hockey pucks and playing his video game and suddenly realized that she hadn’t seen his shotgun or her rifle lately. Had he hidden them?

  She didn’t know if she had hours or minutes left before she had to run, but it was time to start preparing.

  “Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom again. I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay. But hurry. It’s almost your turn.”

  She went down the hallway and turned left into the bedroom. Once in the bathroom, she found the camouflage shirt still neatly folded behind the wastebasket where she’d left it. She pulled it out and thought that, even though she was sweating, putting it on was the only way she’d be sure to hang on to it if she had to leave in a hurry.

  Her jaw dropped as she unfolded the shirt and saw that the magazines were gone.

  What?

  Had he managed to sneak in there when she was in the kitchen looking for plates? The calculated theft disturbed her. It made her wonder if Barry was sharper than he let on.

  What now? Even if she found the gun, she wouldn’t have much ammunition left.

  She began a frantic search, looking through the bathroom cabinets and drawers. Then, she went into the bedroom and started looking through the dresser, tossing aside enormous undergarments, scarves, socks, and random pieces of clothing.

  Where where where where?

  She was so focused on her search, so intent on finding the bullets, that she ignored the hand pawing at her shoulder. It was just a tickle at first, then more insistent. When she felt the fingernails dig in and start to claw, she turned around. “What?!”

  It wasn’t Barry…or some rock star wannabe who called himself ‘Sting’.

  Chapter Eleven

  The creature standing behind her had a cherry red manicure that matched her toenails, a floral blouse covered in dried blood, and a gaping hole in the center of her chest. She’d been shot, Barry hadn’t lied about that. But obviously, he’d shot her because she was sick.

  Her curly dark hair was gray at the temples and pulled up into a bun, revealing little gold rose-shaped studs in her earlobes. She reminded Cheryl of one of the lunch ladies that had served cardboard-flavored soy burgers, neon gelatin, and cottage cheese in the lunchroom in grade school. Only, she couldn’t remember any of those ladies in hair nets having such sunken dead eyes and a bloated body so road-mapped with purple veins.

  The woman lurched forward with her teeth chomping and clicking, and Cheryl realized then that it hadn’t been fingernails that she’d felt on her shoulder—it had been teeth. Only the thick fabric of Mark’s shirt had kept Barry’s mother from taking a bite.

  She looked around for anything to use as a weapon, but the only thing on the dresser was piles of clothes.

  The woman lunged again. Cheryl tried to shove her back with her hands, aiming for her shoulders to avoid coming in contact with the blood. It did little good, just forcing her back a couple of steps. It was going to take more than a push from Cheryl’s thin arms to topple a tank like that. When she rebounded, coming again with clawing hands like an oversized snapping turtle, Cheryl kicked her hard in the belly, sending her crashing onto the side of the bed.

  She darted for the door, but the woman sprang up and grabbed the cargo pocket on the side of her pants. Try as she might, Cheryl couldn’t shake her loose. She grabbed the doorframe and tried to kick, but she wouldn’t let go. As the pocket began to rip, the woman grabbed her ankle with her other hand and tried to bring it closer to her mouth.

  Just as she felt the pressure of the mouth on her ankle, Cheryl grabbed the brass lamp off the nightstand, yanked the chord out of the wall, and swung it with every fiber of muscle in her arms.

  Whack!

  It connected with the woman’s head, shattering the bulb, stunning her for a second, and sending the lampshade rolling away…but she didn’t let go.

  Cheryl hit her again, but the lunch lady kept her iron grip, insistent on her mission to take a bite of her leg. She turned the lamp around, so the square base was at the far end and swung again. This time, there was a clunk as the heavy pointed end crashed into the woman’s skull.

  Blackish blood flowed out from the wound, but the woman held on like a pit bull.

  Cheryl felt the sharp teeth pressing on her ankle and knew what she had to do. When the dead woman came into the sandwich shop, Mark shot her twice, ensuring that the reanimated brain was destroyed. His voice reverberated in her ears. There’s no holding back if you want to live.

  She nodded as if Mark was right beside her then puffed herself up with her own mantra. She’s already dead…she’s already dead…

  Just a fraction of a second away from becoming worm food, Cheryl summoned the nuclear energy source within her and released it. The lamp came down again and again, hammering at the woman’s head.

  She continued the frenzied attack, until all that was left of the woman’s head was a pulpy mass on the floor, spilling out like a bright red fruity syrup…matching her toenails.

  “You’re al…ready…” out of breath, she stopped.

  There were voices nearby. Dazed, she stood there, panting, covered in blood, wondering what she
was hearing. The carnage at her feet mesmerized her, made her unable to think. Red, black, purple, squishy things. Leeches, eyeballs, bones. Soaked, matted hair. Is it time for another highlighting appointment? I wonder if the salon is open tomorrow. Skin. Blood. Fingernails. Is the grocery list still in my purse? I think I need milk…

  She shook the nonsense out of her head, and the voices came into focus.

  “…there’s only so much you can do for defense once the bullets run out. People are using machetes, shovels, baseball bats. It’s messy. But, hey, if it comes down to my life or some dead freak trying to excavate a hole in my head with his mouth, all bets are off.”

  “I hear ya, man.”

  It was the radio on the nightstand. When she grabbed the lamp, it must have gotten knocked to the floor. Radio? That meant there were still people out there. Sane people. Maybe a safe place?

  “There’s a new shelter opening on Colfax & 14th in the Anderson’s grocery store. Hopefully, this one will hold up better than the last one in that area.”

  “One can only hope, Billy D. One can only hope.”

  There was a second of optimism, a brief pinprick of white light in her mind. She wanted to take the radio with her, hold it like a talking beacon to help her find her way to somewhere safe, even though she doubted that she’d have any chance of making it to downtown Denver where the radio station was located, or to the shelter, even if she wanted to chance another miserable place like the last one she’d been.

  She lifted it up and pulled the cord to see if it had back up batteries, but when the plug came out of the wall, the voices died. She dropped the radio and took a step over the woman’s body, intent on returning to her mission of finding her gun and ammunition, so she could get out of this hell house before Barry turned into a psychopathic walking corpse.

  Cold, sticky fingers grabbed at her ankle.

  Cheryl looked down and saw the woman trying to rise up and get a hold of her. Like a proverbial headless chicken, she floundered about, reaching and grabbing at anything around her. Instead of being terrified, Cheryl found it comical. There was no mouth left on the woman to bite her. No mouth? There wasn’t even a face.

  She stepped away from the flailing arms and skirted around them to the door with the lamp still in her hands. As she shut the door to the room behind her, she heard the woman still flopping around inside.

  Where had Barry been through all this? Surely, he had enough human left in him to—

  She stepped into the living room and stopped cold. Barry was on the couch, slumped over with the video game controller dangling from his hand.

  Dammit, Barry!

  He couldn’t die yet. Where were the guns? Where were the magazines? Only he knew where they were. She raised the lamp in the air and did an angry stomping dance.

  “You little creep! How could you do this to me?”

  Barry didn’t respond. She knew that he could just be asleep, floating in some dreamy land where he was a rock star with swarms of girls fainting at his feet. But it was more likely that the virus had circulated through his blood stream and finally infected his brain, rendering him temporarily dead.

  How much time did she have? She thought about Paul. He’d been the first person she’d seen turn from a living, breathing human being into a garbage and flesh eating abomination. One minute he was stumbling in the conference room door, looking like something the cat had dragged in and a few minutes later, he was stone cold dead. A few minutes after that—

  She didn’t have much time.

  There were three choices: She could run now, barreling into the night with nothing but the bloody clothes on her body; she could try to gather some survival supplies then run as soon as she heard him stir; or she could take her time and plan on beating his head in until it was the consistency of mashed potatoes if he rose up and hope that he didn’t manage to take a bite out of her first.

  She decided on the second option. Tucking the lamp under her arm, she ran into the kitchen and grabbed a plastic grocery sack off the floor, then started looking around for anything that might be helpful if she found herself on the run for long or holed up somewhere for a while. She grabbed a bottle of water, a couple of beers, a pack of matches, and a box of crackers.

  What about a weapon?

  She still had the lamp base and the knife in her pocket, but she knew they would probably be useless against an assault by multiple Eaters. Only a gun was going to keep her alive.

  The back room was mostly clear of smoke now, so she decided to search it for the guns. After rummaging through a few piles of trash, she found a cell phone on the floor and a dent in the wall above it where it had obviously hit when someone had thrown it. She turned it on and wasn’t surprised to find that it didn’t have a signal, but she threw it in her bag anyway.

  A deep groan coming from the living room startled her. Clutching the lamp with white knuckles, she moved to investigate.

  She was relieved to see that it was Barry instead of an intruder. He had reanimated and was now crawling on the carpet on his hands and knees, picking up crumbs from the crispy burgers.

  His face and skin had already changed dramatically. Drool trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He seemed so intent on his quest to find every last charcoal speck on the beige carpet that he ignored her, for the moment at least.

  Stage one…before he decides that a serving of human brains might be tastier.

  She didn’t know how long that took. When Paul became infected and was at that point, he’d looked her over like a side of meat just before running out of the building. She liked to think that he’d had one last ember of himself left inside, preventing him from harming her out of compassion. But then again, it may have just been luck that he’d passed on having her for lunch. And actually, the fact that she was even still alive at all at this point was the sum of a lot of bizarre luck.

  She watched Barry intently, trying to decide if she was ready to leave. She rubbed a hand over her cheek, half expecting to find peeling skin, but it was smooth and just sticky with flecks of Barry’s mother’s blood. Thankfully, she didn’t feel any fever or other symptoms of an illness coming on. Crazy lucky so far…

  Barry suddenly paused from working the carpet and let out a soft grunt. He looked up towards her with filmy eyes.

  Her heart raced, and she took a step backwards. In that same instant, she noticed a peculiar shape on the couch where he had been sitting. It was the barrel of a gun—her gun—sticking up from between the cushions where he’d hidden it.

  She took a slow step to the right, then another. Barry returned to foraging in the filthy carpet fibers. She arced around him and inched her way towards the couch, dodging pieces of trash, then quickly wove in and out of the debris, like a horse running barrels.

  When she reached the couch, she flung the cushion over and found both her gun and Barry’s shotgun. Underneath them was a shimmering sea of shotgun shells and magazines. Jackpot!

  She set the lamp down and started scooping them into the grocery bag. She’d only gotten about half of them when a foul odor assaulted her nose. She tried to keep going, but had to stop and cover her mouth, gagging from the brutal smell, a nauseating vapor of decay.

  Goosebumps covered her flesh as she craned her neck around.

  Barry was right behind her.

  His sudden transformation was even more remarkable up close. The gangrenous cloud around him was an aura of death and disease; his eyes were rimmed in raccoon-like purplish black circles, and the little piece of curled skin near his ear that she’d seen earlier had multiplied into dozens of white flakes peeling back to reveal the gray flesh underneath, like an old weathered picket fence. He grimaced, baring his peppered teeth and gritting them together like he was in pain, his hands balled into fists.

  “Hey, Barry. Not feeling so good, are you?” Not taking her eyes off of him, she reached down and grabbed the lamp base.

  He growled at her. It was a guttural sound, like a dog makes at a st
ranger.

  Just let me leave. I don’t want to bash your head in.

  She wasn’t completely cornered, but she had the couch behind her and figured that if she attempted a quick dart to his left, he might simply grab her arm as she tried to pass and take his first bite.

  Without warning, he lunged towards her with his mouth open like a dark cave. There was no time to think of plan B or raise the lamp for a strike. No thought process was required as her knee instinctively came up in a quick defensive thrust and landed in his groin, a move that Mark had taught her.

  He curled up and stumbled backwards from the impact, but he didn’t seem to feel any pain, as he rebounded and came straight back.

  No time to grab a gun and shoot.

  She raised the lamp above her head and swung it down, connecting with his skull. His head shook for a moment like a ringing bell, and she imagined his infected brain inside sloshing back and forth, like a bowl full of black jelly—something she really didn’t want to see sprayed all over her and the living room.

  He came at her again with outstretched grasping claws and a desperate look of hunger. She swung again, this time from the side, smashing the lamp into the left side of his head. The blow scraped away his cheek, exposing a bloody jawbone, and made him totter for a second. He came forward again, groaning and snarling. He hissed like a snake and shook his head from side to side with spittle flying from his lips.

  Just like with Mama Sting, she found herself swinging and smashing again and again, but she stopped short of the devastation that she had inflicted on the creature that had been his mother. Barry was someone she had known. Even if their acquaintance had been brief, and he was one peanut short of a nuthouse candidate, it felt wrong to go any further than needed to put him out of his misery.

  Still, it took almost a dozen blows to topple him. When he fell, his head cracked into the edge of the coffee table, bounced off, then landed sideways on the floor. Dark blood seeped into the carpet, staining it a deep burgundy in a circle around his head. She thought it looked like some sort of anti-halo, a symbol of the unholy sickness within.