Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  They were just past Globe, Arizona when they stopped at a rest stop and took a break on a shaded bench outside.

  “My boots are full of sand,” Aidan whined as he unlaced them and took them off, pouring the dust out in a stream. Then he took off his socks and leaned back, wiggling his toes.

  “You should probably keep them on in case we—”

  “We haven’t seen anyone for miles. I’m going to let my digits breathe for a little bit. They’re going to rot if I don’t.”

  Put that way, she thought it sounded like a good idea. She’d been wearing Mark’s combat boots way too long. After joining him and wiggling her toes in the sand below the bench for a few minutes, she almost couldn’t smell the funk on them anymore…almost. She closed her eyes and leaned back until she felt a prick of pain.

  “My foot. Something—” A thousand red hot needles seemed to have punctured her flesh, concentrating the pain into one tiny area. She’d never felt anything so intense in her entire life. The scream that followed wasn’t voluntary.

  “What’s wrong?” Aidan tried to ask over her screech.

  “I don’t know!” she cried.

  “Keep it down!” he said, looking around for any Halloween monsters that her voice might conjure up.

  “I can’t!” She kicked her foot back and forth like it was covered in flames and bit down on the cuff of her shirt, trying to muffle her agony. As she writhed in misery, she saw the culprit, a small, light brown scorpion with tiny pincers and a thin tail scuttling out from underneath the bench.

  “Oh no.” Aidan covered his mouth as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “What do I do?”

  “I don’t know.” He used the tip of his boot to fling the creature further away, then he picked up a football-sized rock and smashed it into oblivion.

  “Are you supposed to suck out the poison? You know, like a rattlesnake bite?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do we do then?”

  He paced for a couple of seconds

  She held up her foot. The pain was excruciating, but there really wasn’t much to see other than a light redness on the skin where she’d been stung. Her heart raced, and she started to sweat profusely.

  “I think you should elevate it. Lay down on the bench.”

  He propped a sleeping bag underneath her foot, and she lay there in agony for what seemed like hours. After coming this far, was this how she was going to die? From a stupid bug? She was sweating so profusely, it seemed possible that she might die from dehydration if not from the poison. Aidan gave her the last of his water after she finished hers.

  “It feels kind of numb now, and I can’t see you very well. Your face is blurry.”

  The pain returned a short time later, and it was so intense that if a group of Eaters attacked her now, she wouldn’t resist. She’d offer her foot to them and let them gnaw it off, assuming that teeth tearing into her flesh would be less painful than this.

  The sting put a halt in their travel plans because there was no possibility of moving. They spent the night at the rest stop huddled on the concrete floor of the women’s restroom. The following morning, as the pain began to lessen, there were alternating periods of numbness followed by zaps that felt like jolts of electricity.

  Late the next afternoon, when she finally told Aidan that she felt ready to move on, fate pulled another trick out of the hat labeled Cheryl’s Worst Fears: the motorcycle refused to start.

  After an hour of cursing, sand kicking, and trying everything that he could think of to get it to start, Aidan gave up. Knowing that there were no words that could soothe him, Cheryl kept silent. A low growl came out of him as they started to pack up their supplies. It got louder as the wind picked up, tossing sand into their faces. She kept what little distance she could as he paused to vent his rage on the bike, kicking it like a thug beats a deadbeat who’s late on his payment and is cocky to boot.

  She pulled him off before he killed the poor thing. In that instant, with his bear-like appearance and eyes so wild with anger, she thought he might turn on her, but he didn’t.

  A few minutes later, with their bundles on their backs, they began to trek up the next hill on foot. They were close to the top when he turned around and looked back. The motorcycle was on its side with sand already starting to pile up around it. When he started back down the hill towards it, she didn’t try to stop him. After picking it up, he dusted it off with his hand. Then, they continued south, a threesome again, as he lugged the steel beast beside him like a wounded friend that he couldn’t leave behind.

  * * *

  Towards sunset, a few cars passed them, but even when they stood in the middle of the road and tried to wave them down, no one stopped. Another convoy of army trucks rumbled by, and Aidan gave them the finger.

  By the time the sky was blood red with tinges of pink, Cheryl’s throat felt like it was coated with shards of glass, and her lips were cracked and bleeding. Her parched body was ready to collapse. It took all of her willpower to keep stumbling along beside Aidan and his wounded pet. As they walked, she kept her hand over her eyes to filter out the sting of flying sand and just watched her boots, putting one toe in front of the other. She was trying to compose the proper words to suggest a nighttime rest when something caught her eye up ahead.

  At first, it looked like a giant flapping bird—a raven with deformed wings among the scarecrow-like saguaros, silhouetted in black against the colorful sky. After making it a few yards further up the road, she could see that it was a flag flying on top of an adobe building. It was a Jolly Roger, the old pirate’s emblem, with a white skull and crossbones on a black cloth. Something about it looked ominous, making her think of the age-old fear that it had created in seafarers two hundred years back.

  “What is that?” Cheryl asked, wondering what sort of building would be out in the middle of nowhere when they hadn’t seen any other buildings for miles.

  By now, they could see a glint of sunshine bouncing off the steel and chrome, a row of what looked to be two-dozen motorcycles.

  “It looks like a bar.”

  Cheryl thought that it had to be some sort of mirage conjured by their dehydrated brains. As they neared the building, she figured that it would be best not to get her hopes up too much. Chances were, no one was alive inside and there wasn’t a drop to drink in the place.

  When they reached the building and found the front, they saw a bright blue neon sign above the door. Black Todd’s. There were windows along the front, but they were tinted too dark for them to see in.

  “Is that music?”

  After a second, she realized that he was right. It was Axle Rose’s high-pitched vocals belting out Sweet Child O’Mine. That was no guarantee of live people. Cheryl knew that it could be a jukebox stuck on auto play, playing the same song over and over again as the stench rose up from a mish-mash of sticky corpses on the floor around it.

  Neither of them moved for a couple of seconds. Cheryl gripped her lamp base tightly as she waited for gunfire or someone to burst out of the building with gnashing teeth.

  “No bodies. No blood-stained sand,” she said with a glimmer of hope. “What do you think?”

  “I say we stop in for a cold one.”

  Aidan parked his bike near the end of the line, and Cheryl noticed that most of the motorcycles were shiny and looked well maintained. A small American flag flew from a pole on the rear of one and others were tricked out with the artwork of pinup girls, skulls, and demons. She was surprised to see how many of them had keys dangling from them. Of course, she thought. No one would have the balls to steal a Harley from a biker bar in the middle of the desert. It would be suicide.

  As Aidan began to walk towards the door, she grabbed his arm, urging him to take it slow.

  The first dark notes of a Tool song floated in the air, punctuated by shouts, a loud peal of laughter, and the sound of clinking glass. Aidan yanked the handle on th
e heavy front door. Inside the entry, there was a pencil-thin man with a handlebar mustache and a patch on his grungy mechanic’s shirt that said Kevin sitting on a stool, reading a hot rod magazine. He jumped when he looked up and saw them, tipping the cup of tobacco juice by his side.

  “Hey, Kevin,” Aidan said, holding up his good hand in a half wave.

  “Name’s Earl,” the man said as he jumped to his feet. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m Aidan, and this is Cheryl. We’ve come a long way, from Denver. We’re just looking for a place to rest a while. Maybe get a couple of cold ones. My bike needs some work. Maybe someone around here has—”

  Earl leaned back behind the stool and picked up a shotgun. “You ain’t sick, are ya?”

  “No,” Cheryl said. “We’re fine.”

  Earl studied them with a cocked head and narrowed eyes. Cheryl knew that they were dirty, sunburned, had wild greasy hair, and probably looked like people who might be carrying a whole list of diseases, even if they weren’t infected with the big one.

  “Stay here.” He pulled the door behind him open and ducked inside.

  Aidan whispered. “They’re Harley guys. Just stick close and pretend you’re my girl.”

  When Earl came back, he trained the gun on them and allowed them to enter. Cheryl was amazed at the scene inside. The place wasn’t full of freaked out patrons manning a shelter against the plague; it looked like a wild Saturday night at the local biker bar. People lounged about, drinking, laughing, and dancing as ceiling fans above them whirred around at a dizzying speed, distributing the smoke and evaporating sweat.

  “Jade, we got us some new guests!”

  The bartender, who had a bald, egg-shaped head with a lightning bolt tattooed above one ear, looked up from behind the bar. His wispy beard was four inches long and tapered to a sharp “v”.

  As Cheryl and Aidan dove for the only two empty barstools, Cheryl thought she’d never been so happy. “I’d like some ice water and a glass of wi—”

  Aidan shook his head and pulled out a wadded up roll of sweaty dollar bills from his back jean pocket. “The lady’ll have a Coors Light.”

  Before she could protest, the bartender eyed them with his icy blue marbles. “Where you from?”

  “Colorado.”

  “How the hell did you get down here?”

  Aidan shrugged. “Luck of the devil, and my Hog.”

  The bartender kept wiping the bar without taking his eyes off of them. “You know, there was a fellow that showed up here a few days ago. He wouldn’t eat or drink much, and his skin looked a little sickly. We made him drink a few shots, thinking that it might clean him out if he was infected, but right after that he threw up some vile black stuff and keeled over. The dude was dead. I mean real dead, no pulse or nothing, for about twenty minutes. Before we could figure out what to do with him, he jumped up and tried to bite Susie’s head,” he nodded at a woman two seats down with a mess of blonde hair and a cigarette between her lips. “We shot him about three feet back from where you’re standing now.”

  Cheryl and Aidan turned around and saw the dark stain on the floor. When they turned back around, the bartender was gone. A second later, he popped back up from behind the bar, grinning and revealing a row of nicotine-stained pearly yellows.

  “Here’s your welcome drinks…on the house.” He slid four shot glasses over to them filled with clear liquor that had an acrid smell like turpentine.

  “What is it?” Cheryl asked.

  Jade pulled a large ceramic jug out from underneath the bar. “My daddy back in Birmingham has a still in his backyard. I pick up a few gallons every time I visit.”

  “Moonshine?” Cheryl balked. She’d only heard of such a thing in history books and really wanted to keep it that way.

  “Sweet,” Aidan said as he took his glass and downed it.

  Cheryl pushed hers away. “No thank you.”

  Jade pulled a shotgun out and cocked it. “Oh, I insist.”

  Aidan downed both glasses in two quick swallows and smacked them back down on the bar. She grimaced as she tossed her first one back. It burned like fire and made her cough. The second was even harder; she gagged and feared that she might spew it back up, causing their eviction.

  He refilled the glasses again. “One more round.”

  Her head already felt wrong. For a second, she thought the bartender’s body looked wavy like an undulating ribbon, a piece of man-sized silk held by a petite Olympic gymnast. Then she realized that he was standing still and she had begun to sway on the barstool.

  “You alright?” Aidan said in her ear.

  “Yeah…” She knew she wasn’t.

  “Just a couple more…you can do it.”

  She took the shot glasses and looked into one of them for a moment, scrying to see if some image in the clear liquid would emerge and foretell the outcome of this day. No fortune seemed forthcoming, but underneath the glass, she could see a magnified gouge in the wood bar top where someone had probably stabbed it with a knife out of anger, or boredom.

  “Come on, lady. I don’t have all day.”

  She swallowed them down in quick succession, feeling like she’d ingested liquefied glass as the potion raked down her insides. Then she coughed and felt her eyes tear up at the corners. When she looked over at Aidan, his glasses were empty, and he seemed no worse for it.

  “Alright,” Jade said. “If that don’t kill you, I might invite you to stay awhile. Since that one fellow, no one’s been here in a couple days. Being the only pit stop on the way to Tucson, we normally get a hundred or so passing through every day. I know there’s some kind of fucked-up epidemic going on, but what I want to know is how you two managed to get here all the way from Colorado. That’s a long way to stay alive.”

  Aidan gave him a snapshot of the dangers they’d escaped, and Cheryl saw the doubt in Jade’s eyes as he listened and scrubbed the same spots on the bar again and again. Other patrons leaned in with rapt attention. A man with a jagged scar down his cheek and a bare chest, except for a dirty black vest, belted out a chuckle as Aidan described the way he bludgeoned his way out of the motel room back in Silverthorne. Another woman nearby with a face like torn leather in boots and a blood-stained dress giggled as a gun bounced precariously on her lap.

  Cheryl looked around the bar thinking that these people weren’t anything like those at the JLM Mart, and yet they were. They might not be Bible toting Christians, but they were still hanging on to denial and a false sense of security. Their isolation in the desert had given them a buffer against the worst of the epidemic for now, but if bad went to worse, they were trapped out here and their supplies wouldn’t last forever. She watched them talk and drink like it was an end of the world party, noting that the room practically vibrated with bottled up fear disguised as revelry.

  When he was done with his tale and had heard enough from the doubters, Aidan hopped off his barstool and took her hand. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  “What?”

  He leaned in and whispered, “We gotta fit in, just for a little while.”

  They joined two other couples on the dance floor as an old George Strait song played on the jukebox. He put one arm around her waist and clasped her hand. His chin sunk down onto her shoulder as they swayed back and forth, not so much dancing as holding each other up. It was a pleasant diversion, and Cheryl felt her eyes grow heavy as she surrendered to the moment.

  When the music changed to Riders on the Storm by The Doors, a fat hand sliced in between them. “‘Scuse me sir, I’m cuttin’ in.”

  Cheryl’s jaw dropped when she looked up at the Mack truck with a gold tooth and tried to formulate a protest. Aidan held a hand up like a white flag and took a step back. “Just give her back when you’re done. That’s my gal.” As he walked back to the bar, he turned back and gave her a glance, urging her to play along.

  The man squeezed her like a sausage and pulled her close. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, and his dark
green shirt was damp against her. As a bonus, his body odor and the smell of stale beer on his breath made her nose wrinkle. She craned her neck to look up at him and reminded herself to play nice. Maybe he’d know someone who could stitch up an ailing bike.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Roach.”

  He didn’t ask hers.

  She tried not to breathe for half of the song as he pressed a bristly cheek into hers and danced with closed eyes.

  “You know any mechanics here?”

  He squeezed her tighter and lowered one hand to her ass. It took a few deep smelly breaths for her to fight the urge to pull away and slap him. She looked over at Aidan to see if he was watching and saw him talking to a man at the bar. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could read their lips.

  Earl says you rolled up a bike. You’re a rider? What you got?

  Sportster XL50.

  Sweet…ain’t many of them made.

  Aidan nodded in her direction, not seeming to notice the misplaced meat hook on her rear end. She gave him a grimaced smile back, before he returned to his conversation.

  As the last seconds of rain faded from the song, Roach whispered, “One more?”

  “Sorry, I need to hit the ladies room.” When she tried to pull away, he held on to her wrist.

  “I’ll catch you on the way back then.” He released her with a flick of his wide fingers.

  Fat chance, she thought, heading for a sign that said Restrooms.

  The first two stalls had clogged, disgusting toilets, so Cheryl chose the third in the corner. She didn’t really need to go. Her body was so dehydrated, she figured that it was hanging on to every drop of beer that she’d just fed it. It would be good to sit though, just to have a few minutes of rest and time alone.

  She loosened Mark’s oversized camouflage pants, squatted, then buried her head in her hands and closed her eyes. There were about seven seconds of privacy before she heard the door burst open and a woman stumble in. She peed loudly then ran out without flushing. Two seconds later, the restroom door opened again, cranking up the volume on a heart-stopping song by Five Finger Death Punch.