Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  “Yeah, I’m sure this will all be over soon.”

  Cheryl thought to remind the woman about her faith, but changed her mind. What was she going to encourage her to do? Pray away the zombies? Liz and the others had already tried that. It hadn’t worked for them and, as far as that went, had it ever worked in any movie? Besides, if this was all just some sort of Pranked by God event on the human race, the jig should have been up by now. If God had anything at all to do with this disaster, he was in it to see it to the end. What end that was, she didn’t know. When she closed her eyes for a second, an end reel flickered. It was a loop of anonymous black and white faces until the camera paused on Mark’s blank stare. Holes burned into his cellophane eyes as blood dripped over the flickering tape. She shook the miserable image from her head as she opened her eyes. The darkness was still wrapped around her like a blindfold.

  “Cheryl, is that you? Who is that?”

  Juanita’s voice sounded panicked, and Cheryl wondered if she’d briefly fallen asleep and said something out loud that had frightened her. “It’s just me. I was—”

  “Not you, down the aisle.”

  Cheryl sat up. It was so dark it was like trying to see underwater in a brackish sea. She squinted and realized that a figure was standing at the end of the aisle in between the sugar confections and salted nuts. There was something odd about the way it lurked there without speaking as if it was watching them.

  “Aidan? Jonah?”

  Someone on the next aisle flicked on a flashlight, casting a circular beam of light on the ceiling above the shelf between them. The light illuminated a space near Cheryl, but all she could see at the end of her row was the hazy image of someone standing there with clenched fists.

  The gun was in her hands when the figure came charging towards her. She fired multiple rounds, causing the human missile to slow and shudder, but it kept coming. In the split second before it closed the distance, it fell face forward into the light.

  Juanita screamed as some of the others appeared behind her, clutching blankets with wide eyes. “Mary Ann! Dios mio! You killed Mary Ann!”

  Cheryl looked down at the woman’s body and saw four exit wounds from the bullets in the back of her purple shirt. Her torso twitched, and Cheryl pointed the gun at her head, but Liz appeared and pushed the hot barrel of her gun down towards the floor, shaking her head.

  “She was infected.”

  “No,” Liz said. “She was fine. She was just in shock.”

  Mary Ann suddenly rose to her elbows. Her face wasn’t blank like it had been earlier when she’d been unconscious, there was something feral about it now. Her nose was skewed, having broken in her fall; her cheeks looked sallow and bruised, and her eyes were glazed over like they were covered in a thick cataract film. She hopped to her feet and crouched low, weaving and bobbing like a boxer as a blood-curdling moan escaped through her bared teeth.

  Cheryl knew the crowd might turn on her if she shot the woman again, but there was no time to sit and hold a debate about the emotions and morality of this new kill or be killed game.

  Wrenching the gun away from Liz’s reach, she raised it and shot Mary Ann between the eyes. Still on automatic, the quick pump blasted a swath of bullets, sending blood and parts of the woman’s scalp flying across the aisle as she crashed backwards, landing onto her back.

  The women behind her alternated between screams and howls as they stared at the carnage that looked brutal even with the dim light muting the red color of the blood splatter.

  It took a couple of seconds for Cheryl to realize that the men were shouting in the background over the noise of the women’s wails. The loud commotion was near the back of the store. There was no going through the wall of mourning women, so she hopped over Mary Ann’s body and ran down the aisle in the other direction. As she rounded the corner, Jonah slammed into her. He held his mangled glasses in one hand and had his rifle in the other. “They got in! They’re in the storeroom!”

  She ran to the back and saw Norman and Bill, who looked frail enough to be knocked over by a strong gust of wind, leaning against the storeroom door, trying to keep it shut as thumps shook it from the other side. Aidan faced them from three feet away, aiming his gun as backup in case the door didn’t hold. Norman’s chest heaved up and down as he braced his feet against the floor, trying to keep his position. “They tore out the wall.”

  Matthew burst out of the bathroom and flew past them, carrying a load of something in his arms.

  “Where you going, boy?” Jonah yelled. “Help us!”

  Cheryl glanced back and saw him rush to the front counter where he began to line up two-liter soda bottles. There was a wicked grin across his face like some mad scientist as he started to rip the tops off of boxes of baking soda. Over the din of the women’s wails and the sound of moans now coming from the storeroom, she could almost hear Matthew humming under his breath, as if he’d been waiting his entire life for an opportunity to experiment with his homemade weapons.

  She stood beside Aidan for a moment then decided it might be a better idea to see if any of the women could use a gun. Matthew continued to set up his armament, adding stacks of cans of corned beef hash, chicken noodle soup, and tomato sauce to his arsenal as she brushed past him to grab the duffel bag from behind the counter.

  She was halfway back to the women when gunfire erupted at the back of the store. The women’s screams amplified, sounding like knives slicing the air and making it bleed. Two of the oldest ladies scrambled by her with their hands waving in the air, trying to find a place to hide from the sound of the gunfire and whatever had prompted it. She ignored them, hoping that she could thrust a weapon into Liz or Juanita’s hands.

  When she reached the aisle where she’d been lying down just minutes earlier, she screeched to a halt. There was a group at the far end, but it wasn’t the ladies who’d been there before. It was a ragtag posse of corpses with outstretched arms, shuffling towards her. The nearest Eater had a long mop of matted hair and was hunched over Mary Ann’s body, holding her head with its withered claw-like hands and taking bites out of it.

  Cheryl backed up, her primal thought screeching retreat, until she realized that there wasn’t anywhere to go. The front door was locked, and Jonah had the key. Panic flipped to a bolt of revelation as she realized that she had the bag full of guns over one shoulder and her warm AK-47 in her hand.

  She opened fire, mowing down the entire group with a sparkling arc of bullets.

  As the bodies fell, the sounds of chaos still echoed around the shop, punctuated by random explosions. She rushed towards the front counter, sloshing through sticky liquid. When she reached it, she found it abandoned.

  A couple yards beyond it, there was a flashlight on the floor, casting out a wide arc of flickering light. A dozen pairs of feet shuffled into the beam. Some were bare and bloody with vines of blackened veins snaking over them, and others were shod with filthy shoes, caked with mud and congealed splatters of gore. To the side of one pair of mutilated sandals with leather straps that stretched up in the air like tiny octopus arms, something clinked to the ground. Cheryl gasped when she realized that it was a gold cross on a chain stuck to a blood-soaked swatch of Norman’s shirt.

  Matthew’s lanky shadow lurched out from behind a stack of boxes of windshield wiper fluid yelling, “Get back!”

  She held her fire and ducked into the darkened corner near the front door.

  A second later, there was a loud blast that sent the flashlight skittering away. It rolled in a circle then returned to face the same direction, revealing that Matthew’s makeshift bomb had slowed them down a little, knocking a few to the ground and taking the dangling rotten arm off of one of the others who were still standing. But the bomb wasn’t powerful enough to put any of them permanently out of commission. They regrouped and started advancing again with a capella moans, the discordant music of the dead.

  Cheryl admired Matthew’s bravado but she wasn’t going to put any faith i
n exploding Diet Coke and Sprite bottles. Hoping that Matthew didn’t suddenly step in the line of fire, she aimed her gun and pulled the trigger.

  There was a click, but nothing happened.

  The magazine was empty. She tossed the gun on the ground and fished in the bag for another one. She pulled out a .22 caliber hunting rifle—not her first choice.

  Aidan. Where was he?

  Matthew stayed hidden as she aimed and fired. The first bullet grazed the right side of the scalp of the first silhouette coming towards her. The second seemed to be a bulls-eye in the forehead, but didn’t stop the advance. The gun shook in her hands when she realized that she’d backed up against the front door.

  She started shooting blindly as a deafening roar of gunshots coming from the other side of the store drowned out her gunfire.

  Seconds later, the shots stopped, and there was a haze of smoke drifting across the flashlight beam. The acrid smell of gunpowder burned her nostrils and she watched it dissipate, revealing a multitude of lifeless forms littering the floor. There was no sign of Matthew, and Cheryl feared that he’d been slain during the crossfire.

  A figure emerged from the fog. Cheryl pointed her gun at it, and almost fired before realizing that it was Aidan.

  “There’s more behind me. Let’s get out of here!”

  Her head darted from side to side. “Where?

  “The bike.”

  “How do we get out? Jonah has the key.” She already assumed that he was dead without Aidan confirming it.

  Aidan glanced back at the hideous sound of approaching moans and shuffling feet. “Not an option. If we can’t get out the door, we’ll have to break the window.”

  She didn’t feel hopeful that they had a viable plan, but still followed him to the front of the store, knowing that the fifteen-foot steel shelf had probably been placed there with the combined strength of several of the store’s refugees. Together, they tried to move it, but only managed to skid one side a couple of inches backwards.

  “Come on!” Aidan yelled after slamming a fist against the metal.

  As the moans grew closer, they paused to shoot at the next wave of Eaters then tried again. This time, all of their heaving and straining didn’t budge it at all. On the third attempt, Cheryl imagined herself having apocalyptic superhero power surging through veins. To her amazement, the shelf started to glide back. When it was several feet away from the window, she realized that it hadn’t been moved by some magical feat of her own strength—they’d gotten help from a skinny-armed kid.

  Aidan clapped Matthew on the shoulder. “Thanks, man. You better stand back. I’m going to blow this window out.”

  “Wait a minute.” Matthew ran to the counter and ran back with a half-gallon sized gasoline container. “You’re going to need this. I heard you tell my dad earlier that you were low. You may not find a station with a working pump for a while. It was for our generator.”

  Aidan protested. “You’re going to need that.”

  “No I’m not. This place is fucked, and it looks like I’m going down with the ship.”

  Cheryl winced at the thought of him sacrificing himself for their sake. “Maybe we could take you with us. Take one of the cars—”

  “No. You’ve got a better chance on the bike. In a car, if the road’s blocked…”

  There was a sad look in Aidan’s shadowed eyes. “He’s right. We’ve got to go, just us, now.” He reached into the duffel bag, pulled out a loaded pistol, took it off of safety mode, and handed it to Matthew along with a box of bullets.

  Matthew took it without a word.

  “Alright, stand back.” Aidan fired a single shot into one large pane of glass, and it shattered into a billion tiny shards. Then he darted towards his motorcycle near the far end of the shelf.

  Cheryl stood on her toes and gave Matthew a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you.” When her heels hit the ground, she felt a tug on her pant leg. She looked down and saw a pale-faced woman with one eye gouged out reaching up towards her; she kicked her away in disgust and fired a shot into her scalp. There was no time to dwell on the abysmal fact that the woman had looked a lot like Liz, Matthew’s mother. If that was who it had been, it was a fast turn.

  Matthew pointed his gun towards the sound of more moans approaching from behind them as Cheryl flew onto the bike behind Aidan. He revved the motor, and she immediately realized why. Over his shoulder, she could see out the broken window in front of them. There was a ghostly partial moon casting a silver light over the parking lot. Tens, maybe dozens of forms ambled about, some bouncing off of each other like pinballs and others meandering towards the store with outstretched arms. Their exit was going to be another obstacle course that would best be tackled by speed. Like their past escapes, it would be better to blast through them like a torpedo, instead of trying to dodge every individual body in their way. She held tight to Aidan’s waist, preparing for the bumpy ride.

  A shot rang out beside them, followed by a thump. At first, Cheryl thought that Matthew had turned the gun on himself, but then she saw him run out the window and dart into the dark woods. She knew that he wouldn’t get very far. Even if he managed to climb a tree, it would only be a matter of time before it was felled by a hungry mob.

  Poor kid. She hoped his end would be swift and as painless as possible.

  Aidan peeled out with tires screeching on the tile floor and rammed over the low sill, bursting through the window. They hit their first obstacle immediately. It was a blur of rotten flesh, a walking corpse with a mangled torso and ribs that were covered in a mesh of dark wormlike strands like black Silly String. They flattened the creature as they rode over it, squishing it like a giant slug.

  The next obstacle didn’t go down so easily. They smacked into a bulky figure as solid as marble. For a split second, it didn’t move. Then it fell and they heard the sound of its skull crack on the pavement when they rode past it.

  Ahead there was more trouble—serious trouble. Where the first part of the parking lot had been a smattering of rooks, the area ahead was a full chessboard of hungry opponents. Cheryl didn’t know how they were going to get through the dense crowd that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere without having the speed to puncture through them like they did when they came up the mountain.

  Aidan started to slow. “Throw the gas can!”

  She tossed it ahead of them at the feet of the advancing group.

  “Shoot it!”

  The explosion created a fireball that engulfed the mass of Eaters and shot flames twenty feet up in the sky. It nearly knocked them off the motorcycle, singeing their eyebrows and blackening their faces.

  Aidan rode the bike in a quick arc around the inferno. When they hit the road, Cheryl realized that she’d lost the duffel bag from her shoulder. That meant no more guns, but they were still alive.

  Thanks to Saint Matthew.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Aidan didn’t talk to her for miles after he realized that she’d lost the bag with their guns, their carefully pilfered supplies, and the map. She suggested that they could go back, but he immediately dismissed that as stupid.

  They rode on until they reached Idaho Springs, but the dark town center street did not give them any hope that things were better there. They were searching for a gas station now, keeping an eye on the few roaming Eaters that were rummaging through trashcans and shuffling in and out of the post office and barbershop on Main Street.

  A few minutes later, they pulled up to a pump at a station on a side street and Cheryl asked, “Do you think any of them made it back there?”

  “Not likely. Somebody might have holed up in the bathroom for awhile, but once a building has been breached like that, it’s pretty much over.”

  She knew he was right and felt terrible for everyone in the store, but the sharpest pang in her heart was for Matthew. He was just a kid and would have had his whole life ahead of him.

  Aidan tried the pump, using a credit card from his pocket, and then on
e found lying on the ground, but couldn’t get it to work. He kicked the machine then walked over to the next one.

  Cheryl glanced around at the ghost town, keeping one eye on the meandering forms she saw in a field nearby, forms that were clearly not loping towards them slowly to offer a friendly welcome. “Where is everyone? Where are all the people who aren’t sick? Except for the store, we’ve hardly seen anyone. There must be more survivors somewhere.”

  “They’re probably cowering in their basements, too afraid to come out. It’s doubtful anyone comes out at night like the fools that we are. It’s just too dangerous.”

  She agreed and thought that the way healthy people seemed to have vanished was depressing, but if they could just make it through another night, find someplace safer than the woods where they’d camped last night, maybe tomorrow’s sun would hold more promise. The hopeful thought surprised her, because it had been her own voice in her head, not Mark’s. Are you still here?

  Of course, he answered. Where else would I go?

  She smiled, feeling a flash of warmth inside at the deep timbre of his voice. As Aidan stomped and cursed and tried the last pump, she wondered again if he heard his dead girlfriend’s voice in his head. She didn’t think so. He seemed too alone in his misery.

  When he came back, obviously frustrated, she put a hand on his cheek and said, “Hey, you okay?”

  He shook her off and got back on the motorcycle. “I think we can make it to Georgetown.”

  “Then what?” she asked as she joined him.

  “They’ll be more gas stations there.”

  “And?”

  “If there’s no gas? We’ll have to find a place to crash for the night and try to siphon some in the morning.”

  Something bothered her. They’d filled up in Golden and shouldn’t be anywhere near empty yet. She’d noticed a light trickle of some fluid underneath the motorcycle but wasn’t sure that it was gas and didn’t dare mention it to him. It was his motorcycle; he’d chew her head off for insinuating that something was wrong with it that he didn’t know about.