Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  He gave them a two by four with the sharp end of the nails sticking out before they bid him farewell. Cheryl carried it, but it was an unspoken agreement that she’d keep the gun and the lamp base, and the fancy new Eater-killing-device was Aidan’s.

  * * *

  As they traveled, they became experienced looters. Before entering a grocery store or convenience store, they rode up and down a few of the nearby streets to gauge the numbers of Eaters in the area. If the town didn’t seem to be crawling with them and no one fired warning shots to shoo them off, they felt safe enough to commence a raid.

  By this time, most stores had been ransacked, either by the living or the walking dead. Power was on in some and out in others, but the more time passed, it became more and more rare to find a store that still had juice. That meant that there was a lot of rotting food inside. The darkened coolers were filled with roast beef and tuna salad sandwiches that were nothing but brown and green slime inside their plastic wrappers and milk that had curdled into solids then started to decompose and leak out of the paper carton. The only safe foods were in cans and aseptic pouches or the dried goods like chips and crackers. They couldn’t carry much with them on the motorcycle, so they kept provisions to a minimum, figuring that they could find more along the route.

  They found a gun shop in Parachute, Colorado but it had been mostly cleaned out. They carted off a few boxes of 12-gauge shells, thinking that they might be useful as a swap in these days when money wasn’t as useful as ammo, food, water, or medicine.

  Sometimes, gas was scarce. Other survivors had apparently also decided to siphon gas from abandoned cars. Once, when they had found a good supply, they decided to try an experiment with Molotov cocktails as weapons. They found that the flaming bottles slowed an attacker down, but since they didn’t feel pain, it didn’t stop them. So they eventually ditched the idea, deciding that the world was in bad enough shape without them setting it on fire.

  There were long periods of time when Aidan was quiet and seemed to be battling some internal demons that he didn’t want to talk about. She tried to give him mental space, as well as one could when they were back-to-chest on a motorcycle.

  Later that day, they saw a round shape that looked like a boulder up ahead just off to the right side of the road. As they got closer, they realized that it wasn’t a rock; it was an Eater with skin so gray and tattered that it no longer looked like flesh. It was squatting and hunched over in a perfectly round shape. There was a chunk of road kill in its gnarled hands, a dead skunk from the look of the black and white tuft of fur. As they rode by it, the man-creature turned and stared at them with its gelatinous white orbs. Aidan kicked at it spitefully, knocking it upside the head and backwards onto the road. It seemed spiteful and was unnecessary since it wasn’t coming at them, but Cheryl didn’t mind if it helped him to vent some of his frustrations on a subject who could feel no pain.

  Smashed peaches and watermelons covered the town square in Palisade. Yellow Jackets flitted over the sweet mess, flying in wobbly flight patterns like they were drunk on the fermented fruit. A wood sign next to an overturned fruit cart said Happy 4th of July!, a cheerful sentiment, but it was speckled with bullet holes. How many days had it been since then? Cheryl didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  In Grand Junction, the weather turned abysmally hot. Heat waves rippled off the pavement, making it look like rivers covered the road up ahead. Miles back, she had ripped the sleeves off of the Ladies Gym shirt and slit the neckline into a “v” to make it into a tank top and tied Mark’s camouflage shirt tied around her waist. The tops of her shoulders were freckled and burnt now, and flaking in a few spots where blisters had burst then started to peel. Aidan was in similar shape. He was already tanned from his days of working construction, but his arms were the color of well-done steak now, almost black. He wore a bandana tied around his forehead to keep off the sweat.

  Her gun was empty, but she hung on to it anyway, figuring that un-sick humans might take pause at the mere sight of it.

  As hot as it had been in western Colorado, when they hit Utah it seemed like they were heading straight into hell. Temperatures had to be somewhere around a hundred and ten. No matter how fast they rode, the sweat didn’t evaporate off their skin. They took frequent shade breaks during the day and re-soaked their bandanas whenever they encountered a stream, and filled up their water bottles or pilfered new ones when they could.

  That night, after the sun went down, the temperature cooled a few degrees, turning from abysmally hot to just slightly unbearable. They made it to southern Utah and slept in a canyon where they saw nothing more threatening than a few coyotes and a herd of elk. They decided to make a fire and heated up some canned beans to go with a loaf of bread.

  After they finished, they leaned back on rolled sleeping bags. She thought Aidan was asleep when he mumbled, “What would you be doing tonight if all this shit hadn’t happened?”

  “That depends. I don’t know really know what day it is. If it was a weeknight, not much. Probably hanging out with Mark.” In an alternate universe where things had gone as planned, she probably would have been kicked back on the couch, perusing a bride’s magazine. She’d have been daydreaming about quitting her stupid job at the insurance agency, buying a yellow house with a picket fence, and putting in a little garden with lots of juicy tomatoes and fresh greens. On that imaginary trip, she would have fast-forwarded to a future where she was baking cupcakes for Mark Junior’s Cub Scout pack. None of that was ever possible now, and she knew that Aidan wouldn’t want to hear a bunch of Pollyanna crap. “If it was the weekend, we liked to go line dancing.”

  “Country music?” he scoffed, with his eyes still closed. “Spend some more time with me, and I’ll cure you of that. I had a good collection of vinyl back at the cabin. AC/DC, Bad Company, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen…”

  She glanced around the darkness bordering the circle of light from the campfire. “Shhh…”

  He popped up, hearing the same rustling sound. Cheryl grabbed her gun, and Aidan held up his spiked board (they’d bypassed several other potential weapons that they’d run across, figuring that nothing beat its simplicity and effectiveness).

  After creeping around like paranoid fools, they shared an exhausted laugh when they saw a long-tailed lizard skittering away in the brush.

  A few minutes later, Cheryl agreed to take the first watch while Aidan snoozed on top of his sleeping bag. Her promise didn’t last long though. She kept a finger on the trigger of her gun as her eyelids struggled with gravity and lowered a little further with each second that passed. Before long, she was snoring right beside him.

  The dream started out innocently enough; she was walking through the desert, meandering through stands of tall cacti. The sky was psychedelic shades of hot pink, orange, and blue, and the sun was a blazing ball of fire, lurching towards the west, causing shadows from the cacti to anthropomorphize into human-like figures with narrow heads and upright arms. Instead of wearing Mark’s bloody and torn fatigues, she had on a cowboy hat, jeans, and boots. She knew that she was filming a scene for a Western, but if there was a camera crew, they were nowhere in sight.

  She stopped and covered her mouth and eyes with a blood red bandana as a howling wind came up and tossed sand into her face. Then, it was over as quickly as it began. She opened her eyes and saw that the sun was gone, and the moon was in its place. Seeing motion over a dune in the distance, she shielded her eyes from the moon’s unnatural radiance and looked in that direction.

  A long line of tumbleweeds fell down the near side of the dune and came rolling towards her. Instead of moving in a random, natural pattern, they zigzagged, crisscrossing paths in a serpentine pattern. She thought she could hold still as they tumbled past her, but once they were a little closer she realized that they weren’t dead plants, they were sun-bleached skulls with snapping jaws, searching for scraps of flesh. She reached for her revolver, hoping that this was the scene in the
movie where she shot them one by one, like bottles from a fencepost.

  But the holster was empty.

  She didn’t bother running. There was nowhere to hide in the desert. There was nothing but sand, cactus, and scrub as far as the eye could see. As the skulls circled her, they piled on top of each other, surrounding her in a wall of teeth. They began to slice into her like hundreds of razors, and she woke, bolting upright with a silent scream caught in her throat.

  Her heart raced as she sat there, enveloped in the darkness and slowly remembered where she was. Though the nightmare was preferable to the one that she was really living, she didn’t like it. It was a bad omen.

  She’d always shared her dreams with Mark. They’d gotten a good chuckle from a few of them, but as she heard Aidan’s rumbling snore, she knew that this was one that she’d keep to herself. There was no point in burdening him with her fears about where they were going.

  She lay back down, knowing that by morning, the nightmare would be a distant memory.

  * * *

  Dawn bled in a reddish-pink stain over the treetops. Once they were back on the road, the cheerful sky made it easy to imagine that they were a couple out for a Sunday drive, but Cheryl’s inner movie changed from a Disney tale to something dark conjured by the mind of George Romero or Quentin Tarantino when they came upon something that looked like road kill in the middle of the road. It wasn’t a dead raccoon or some other wild animal, it was the flattened remains of a human head.

  Aidan slowed down and they approached it cautiously to get a better look.

  The skull was crushed; the disintegrating eyeballs dangled from the sockets, and the tattered neck looked like it had been literally ripped off the shoulders of the person that it used to belong to. It disturbed her to think that the Eaters could have some sort of superhuman strength.

  Like the other corpses or body parts they’d run across, there were always plenty of flies, though it seemed that the wildlife mostly left the offal alone (which blew the ranger’s theory that nature would take care of the remains.) The only exception had been the raccoon that had carried off a hand at the JLM Mart. Cheryl wondered if it had rabies and was too out of its mind to know better.

  It didn’t seem right to leave the head in the middle of the road for some future passerby to find, but neither of them wanted to touch it even to give it a good soccer ball kick off to the side, so they left it.

  As they rode, they occasionally encountered more pockets of Eaters wandering like gangs. There was very little that looked human about them anymore. They looked like monsters, because their decay was more advanced. If it had been easy to kill them without remorse before, it was even easier now.

  They passed over a ridge and saw a small nameless mountain town down below. Eaters swarmed the streets, puttering around like ants on an endless mission. Her attention was so wrapped up in the scene that she didn’t notice the walking corpse wandering back and forth beside the road with his head hanging low and swinging from side to side. There was a gash across his neck and what looked to be tire tracks across the side of his torso.

  Aidan slowed the motorcycle and came to a stop.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Let’s put this one out of his misery. You still got that throwing star?”

  She’d forgotten about it. After a few seconds of fumbling, she fished it out of one of her pockets.

  He aimed and threw in one swift motion. It imbedded in the top of the man’s skull.

  “You threw that thing like it was a Frisbee. Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “Not a Frisbee. More like a knife. When I was a kid, I used to play magician with my kid brother. I’d make him stand against a tree while I threw clothespins at him, pretending they were knives. Got grounded for two weeks. Later, I practiced with real weapons.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother. Where is he?”

  Aidan looked up at a passing cloud. “Sniper got him in Iraq.”

  Iraq. Cheryl winced. Any mention of war or the military made her think of Mark. He’d survived a couple of tours in Afghanistan just to be taken down by this stupid epidemic in his home country. She shook the image of his face out of her head, and wished she could shake the pained look on Aidan’s face away at the same time. “I’m sorry…”

  “Yeah. It was seven years ago. Still sucks.” He kicked at a weed in the gravel beside the road. “We’d better get going.”

  Later that afternoon when the sun was a fierce glowing ember, they heard a rumble on the road behind them. After seeing so few traveling cars, they were both surprised to see a caravan of military trucks and Jeeps approaching.

  They pulled over and waved their arms back and forth so hard that Cheryl was surprised that the friction didn’t cause flames to shoot out. Despite their efforts, vehicle after vehicle flew by without slowing down. They didn’t even see a head turn to look at them as they passed.

  Aidan threw an imaginary rock towards the caboose of the caravan, a tarp-covered Jeep with soldiers sitting in the back holding their rifles upright. “See ya, assholes!”

  “It’s just like with the tank we saw the other day, right? Their current mission isn’t to save civilians.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Where do you think they’re going? Should we follow them?”

  “It looks like they’re headed the same way we are.” He pointed as the last few vehicles turned left at a crossroads up ahead. “If they stop, maybe we’ll catch up with them, and we can have a little chat.”

  The edge was still in Aidan’s voice. She watched him stare at the puff of dust they’d left behind, hanging over the road like brown fog.

  They hadn’t gone much farther when they came upon a sign that read: “Welcome to Arizona: The Grand Canyon State”. Only it didn’t exactly say that—someone had altered the sign with black spray paint.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  “Come to zona?” Cheryl said. “Does that mean something?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it could. Come to Zone A?”

  “Zone A? What does that mean?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “On the radio back at the shop, they were saying something about zones.”

  Aidan shrugged. “Well, we don’t know, so I guess we just keep going and watch for more signs.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. There was no Zone A on the map, and it was probably a stretch, trying to read meaning into the graffiti. She looked ahead at the road. It was a long narrow ribbon with the far end rippling in a mirage like it stopped in the middle of a giant lake. Sweat trickled out of her helmet and down the sides of her neck. When they were moving, the temperature was comfortable, but when they were stopped, there was no doubt that it was well over a hundred degrees.

  Although the terrain had been rough for some time, the fact that they were officially in Arizona made Cheryl queasy. First there was the fact that they were headed toward a serious desert. That meant even more abysmal heat, scorpions, rattlesnakes, prickly cactus, vultures, coyotes, and no water for miles and miles. It also meant that she was getting closer to finding out if she had any family left on the planet. What if there was nothing but a wasteland of death and smoke in Phoenix and Tucson? Nobody left alive?

  Aidan seemed to sense her unease and turned around to look at her. “You alright?”

  “I don’t know…”

  He leaned back and gave her a wet, prickly kiss on the mouth.

  It stunned her for a second. “What was that?”

  “If I’d have asked, you might not have let me.”

  Her hands balled up in fists. “Do that again, and I’ll knock your head off.”

  “Liar.”

  With a smirk, he turned back around and started driving.

  Cheryl felt sick. Really…what was that? She’d been so wrapped up in Mark’s memory and trying to survive that she hadn’t given Aidan much thought. She hesitated before wrapping her arms around him again, but once she
did, it seemed to feel okay. A few minutes later, she rested her head on his shoulder. Was it possible that she’d only known this man for days? Was anything impossible anymore?

  * * *

  The first Eaters they ran across in Arizona were not like those she’d seen back in Utah and Colorado. These creatures were completely desiccated. Their rotten skin seemed to have baked in the hot sun and peeled away from their bones. They looked like ancient mummies. Some were even worse, nothing but walking skeletons.

  When they saw the first skull rising over a sand dune, it was déjà vu from the nightmare Cheryl had the night before. The skeletal figure crawled on its hands and knees into the road and tried to grab at the motorcycle as they passed. These Eaters were no faster than the Eaters they’d encountered before, but they were just as tenacious.

  As Cheryl and Aidan rode on, they found it easy to predict where the Eaters were (or where they recently had been) because of the circling vultures. They attacked scraps of road kill—human or animal—and didn’t seem to be leery of infected remains. Eventually, they saw so many of the ugly birds up above that they ceased to become any true indicator of where the dangers lay ahead.

  The trek through Arizona was just as tough as she feared. They had to make a lot of stops just to take a break from the sun, and the inhospitable land seemed ready to swallow them up. There was some relief from the heat near Flagstaff, but during the rest of the journey, it seemed like they might be cooked, even if they didn’t get eaten.