“So,” she said to Will, who still stood studying the dying town, hands knitted.
He looked to her. “So?”
She batted her eyelids. “Why’d you go down there, with the freaks?”
Will unlaced his hands, walked over without making her eyes, and sat deliberately beside her. He didn’t answer.
Brenda’s skin went cold. “Will?” she asked, soliciting eye contact. “Will? You’re scaring me.”
He stared pensively at the blacktop, as if consulting it. “Remember what we talked about? How we didn’t want to...to be like them?”
Brenda nodded eagerly, looking no less grave. Following their shared infection and its onslaught of grief, they’d discussed the hard things: how long did they have, what if help didn’t come, what if help didn’t come in time. After correlating their accounts of the day, they’d pegged the infection-to-meta-morphosis period—the time it took to devolve into a bloodthirsty cannibal, in other words—as no more than five hours. In conclusion, they’d agreed they didn’t want to end up “like them,” and then gone tensely quiet. It had been over three hours since their ears had turned on the waterworks.
“Well...” Will said with some hesitation, and continued pondering the roof. Now that the time had come, he didn’t know if he could go through with it. Doubt slapped him—what if he was being hasty? What if help was just around the corner, the police and paramedics? Or the UN blue-hats, even, with helicopters and guns and bombs, and an antidote that was being mass produced even now? But...no. In the event that help existed at all, it would go to Derrick before Shepsville—first come, first served—and his and Brenda’s clocks were ticking. Fast. Also, local help was out of the question. Since his arrival to the roof, the town had only grown worse, as far as he could tell. There weren’t even any sirens.
So yes, this was right.
He dug through his jeans pocket and brought out the little bottle of liquid he’d so dangerously procured from the chemistry room. He started to say something, but the words caught in his throat, so he just handed it over.
Brenda took it anxiously, her eyes bouncing over the bottle and its printed label. Then her face scrunched. “Ether?” she said, and gave Will a perplexed look.
He nodded. “Ether.”
“The stuff we use to put frogs under before dissecting ‘em?” she asked, her voice neutral. Her puzzled expression gave way to one of suspicion, as if Will was crazy.
Will nodded again, then watched as grim comprehension spoiled Brenda’s adorable face. “Oh, oh, Will,” she said, and lowered her eyes to the bottle, now holding it slightly away from her. “No,” she said starkly, though no question had been asked.
“We have less than two hours,” Will said in a deadpan voice he hated. It was the same stale intone the vet had used when it came time to put down Will’s dog, Sharky, after it had been nailed by a car. “You think we’ll be found before then?” he added, harsher than intended. There was some anger now, at her, for being ungrateful regarding his hard-earned gift, what he’d stabbed Terry Bowls in the eye for. “And even if we are,” he went on, “you think they’ll just give us a pill and make it all go away? Face it, Brenda; we’re screwed, like the people in the gym and the people in the town, and probably everyone else.” He wanted to stop, but couldn’t. “You say you don’t wanna be like them? Well, how you gonna keep that from happening, sweetheart? You got some cyanide in your purse?”
She was crying again. “No,” she sobbed bitterly, like a child holding to a lie. Mucus streamed down her upper lip and she wiped it with her shoulder.
“No,” Will agreed brusquely, and he was crying, too, still staring that same panel of roof.
They brooded sourly, each in their own space, and then in concert found each other’s arms, bawling openly. There was more gunfire and a muted explosion from somewhere in town, but they showed no reaction.
“Two more hours?” she whispered into his ear, stuttering a little on the t.
“Two more hours,” he confirmed.
“And then you’ll, what? Put me under and...?”
“Yeah. Don’t.”
She didn’t. He held her.
***
They spent their final hours wrapped around one another over the cooling roof, the setting sun echoing their circumstance. The crying stopped as the cold certainty of demise cemented itself, the two coping with what most are allotted a lifetime to accept. They tried to make love, initiated by Brenda, but they were four hours into their disposition by then and the nameless disease was making itself felt, stripping them of the energies that would enable their sex. So they only kissed and lay together, waiting.
Later, when dusk had fallen, and their cotton-swab earplugs had at last saturated and fallen away, and their thoughts were reduced to a queer blankness and a crawling hunger, and there was still neither hide nor hair of anything that could be remotely construed as help; they kissed once more and Brenda opened the bottle, handing it to Will with the countenance of one anticipating sleep. Employing a torn length of his tee-shirt, Will soaked a gag and placed it over Brenda’s unlined face. She drew deep, and her eyes rolled slowly into whites and then closed, leaving her limp in his arms. He discarded the ether with an air of disgust, then pinched her nose and covered her mouth, holding them until the little Y in her neck stopped moving.
After confirming Brenda’s expiration, Will stood, took one last look at God’s earth, and sent himself from the roof, to the unforgiving rocks below. One mercifully found his head, and the world went away.
“Raised in a tiny Alaskan fishing village, educated at Yale College, Derek Ivan Webster is a writer that appreciates a good contrast. The freelance lifestyle would have long ago driven him mad if not for the balm of his sage wife and their three precious/precocious little conspirators. Read more at:
www.ivanhope.com/blog.”
Dating in the modern world is complicated enough without throwing in a zombie apocalypse. Just try to discuss deeper feelings while you’re running for your life, or obey the rules of attraction when you’re neck deep in rotting guts. And forget flowers and candy; in the post-apocalyptic world the best gift a lover can give is whatever will help you live a little longer. In Derek Ivan Webster’s girl-meets-boy-meets-monster tale, Something Between the Teeth, survival of the fittest takes an ironically romantic turn as we meet Lucy—a determined woman with a unique method of keeping herself alive. But time may be running out for our heroine, whose dating prospects are getting rarer by the day. And to find what she’s looking for, she’ll have to get through the zombies—who of course, only want her for her body….
Something Between the Teeth
By: Derek Ivan Webster
He was hungry. She could tell because he took the time to chew and swallow each dripping hunk he wrenched free from the body. They weren’t always hungry. She knew that. Sometimes they just tore the flesh apart with their teeth and left the gruesome viscous to seep down pale chins and glisten atop bloated lips. It was better when they were hungry. There were few things more sickening than watching a grown man play with his food.
She sat at the edge of the rock face, looking down past her dangling hiking boots. About twenty feet beneath her, the man, hunched over on all four limbs like a primate, had his head buried in the center of a bright red explosion of meat. The man pulled his face free from the corpse, producing a sloppy sort of sucking sound. His body swayed back and forth, a contented child chewing his candy. Broken bits of rib crackled like peanut brittle between his teeth. He was well dressed for a scavenger. Two of the three pieces of his suite were still intact. That meant he was young, probably only a few days old. His body would still be metabolizing. No wonder he was so hungry.
His meal had been, just a half hour before, her fiancée. Only that wasn’t quite true. Sweet Ryan had asked, and she had nodded dutifully, and that had been that. Holy matrimony was a little short on swag since the scavenging began in earnest. She hadn’t loved him, not exactly, but she h
ad hoped that he could protect her for a little while. Two weeks later and Ryan was a runny sack of bones and beef. In the grand scheme of things it was not much of a change; a horrible thought, she knew it, but also unavoidable. The world was hungry and dinner was coming up short. She watched as the banker—she had decided the man’s profession with a shrug—dove back into her boyfriend’s gaping chest. The heart was gone now and the banker began chewing away on the spongy remains of deflated lung.
By now her observations had wholly detached themselves from any sense of horror or fear. The first few times you saw a scavenger at work, assuming you even survived the experience, you lurched away convinced that such a sight could never stop haunting you. As an isolated event perhaps that was even true. It had taken her a half-dozen such brushes with human carnality to realize one death was as good, or bad, as another. At least the ones that got eaten were done with their adventure. It was the newdeads that only got ripped open a bit that had it worse. Just ask the banker. Given the option you can be sure he never would have signed up for an eternity of washing his mouth out with human offal.
She clicked her heels together and watched a few specks of grit knock loose and skitter down the face of the stone cliff. The bits of gravel tumbled end over end, like rolling dice across a slate table, before coming to rest on the dry grass a few inches from a discarded lump of flesh below. Whatever it had once been, the disembodied part was no longer recognizable; it resembled a split open link of sausage more than anything else. Ryan had meant well and for that she was sincerely sorry. They hadn’t been together long enough for him to realize the sizeable line of chivalric aspirants that had assumed his mantle before him. He had loved her with the blind, bulbous need of a horny Labrador retriever. She let him play like a hero; he let her play at being safe. The game was over now. She couldn’t summon up any tears to spill over what remained of the meat stew below but she knew she would miss him. At least for as long as it took her to find a replacement.
Within an instant of hearing the heavy scrape behind her she was up from the edge of the cliff and turned to face the intruder. She couldn’t see it at first but the movement of the thick tangle of brambles that crowned the edge of the cliff made no mistake of its proximity. Even without the twitching branches the deepening smell gave it away: an oldboy for certain. Most scavengers held a shelf life of a few months at best. They started out all vim and vigor, inhaling anything capable of losing its breath. The wear and tear of so many violent feedings invariably wore down their fibers: digits lost, tendons sprung, appendages ripped from the moorings. In less than a week they had assumed that slow, wounded shuffle the pre-scavenger world would have scoffed at as a reject from some zombie b movie. From there, slowed down and hamstrung as they were, they could look forward to being devoured by their overzealous younger siblings. Either that or simply wasting away from the inability to chase down a prey with the calorie content necessary to sustain the every churning metabolism that continued to animate long coagulated guts.
She took a careful step, skirting the edge of the cliff and moving away from the ragged movements of the brush. The oldboys were an anomaly. Slow and steady, unrelenting, they somehow moved from one banquet to the next. No wasted movements, no spasmodic frenzies; they simply sought the living, found them, and ate them. The few of them she’d come in contact with had always left her badly unsettled. It was as if there were a basic, primitive intelligence to these hyper successful scavengers. If you closed a door on them they would find a way around it. If you left a trail in the woods they would follow it to the end. Their careful, plodding movements were almost comical. You could outrun them without even trying. Only, they didn’t give up. Nor did they sleep. Or stop. Ever.
Add to that the smell of flesh allowed to bloat and decompose over months, in a few rare cases even years, and the oldboys had developed a singular reputation within the fringelands. Sometimes you could smell them from a mile away. If the smell came from more than one direction then you knew a pack was on you. Lost in the woods at night it could play out like a chess match: one controlled movement after another, carefully navigating between points of slow moving death. In the worst cases their intelligence seemed even more than primitive. This was when the oldboys took the habit of following in the wake of newdeads. Perhaps they were just drawn to pick at the leftovers of their energetic brethren but more often than not they placed themselves in just the right place to catch the breathers already corralled by the newdeads’ frenzied pursuits.
She waited until the oldboy was within thirty feet of her position to commit to a strategy. Up to that distance it might have still been possible that he wasn’t after her. Perhaps he was just drawn by what remained of Ryan at the base of the cliff. But when the trajectory of shaking branches turned up the slope, toward her, and away from any path that would have led down and around the rock face, she knew it had begun. She would trace the edge of the cliff, moving away from the oldboy but maintaining a single leap’s distance from her desperate escape route. The fall would probably kill her but that was the point. She had long ago decided she would rather die than let the scavengers pull her into their grotesque dance.
It was instinct alone that reminded her to cast a last glance down the cliff face before setting off. The intuition was rewarded with the disturbing site of Ryan’s remains. Little more than a wet smear broken by toothy fractures of bone was left behind; that was not the disturbance. It was the fact that this macabre display had been left behind that made her neck begin to twitch. The newdead was nowhere to be seen. He’d taken all he could from the corpse and moved on without leaving the least sign as to his new path. The random, mindless ambitions of a newdead could carry him anywhere, including directly in line with her escape route at the end of the tapering cliff.
She didn’t have a choice. The oldboy was all but upon her and there was only one route that kept the cliff under her control. With a decisive breath she started off, even as the oldboy emerged from the brambles behind her. She walked the very edge of the stone outcropping. At the peak of the rise she glanced down to appreciate the starkness of the seventy-foot drop. Vaguely she remembered a time in her life when she had been afraid of heights. That had been before. Back when an average teenage girl still had the luxury to choose her fears; when pre-calculus and proper contraception had been at the top of her list of anxieties. The brush began to move again behind her. She didn’t pause long to appreciate the view.
She knew something was wrong before she was halfway down the far side of the cliff. She didn’t stop again but slowed down enough to weigh her anxiety. The slow but steady rummaging continued through the brambles behind her. Then came another sound, this one off to her side away from the cliff. Something else was moving through the deeper part of the forest. It sounded careful, measured—probably another old boy. If there were two there would be more. When the old timers started getting together they tended to absorb more and more along the way. She increased her pace, accelerating as much as an unsteady path along the edge of a deadly drop would allow.
Whether two or a dozen her best chance against a pack of oldboys was to simply outrun them. She would head back east, toward the abandoned ski resort she and Ryan had been camping at a week before. With purpose it was only a three-day hike and at least two paved roads split the way. As silly as it sounded the scavengers didn’t like crossing pavement. They didn’t like anything man-made for that manner. If she could make the first of the paved roads by nightfall, and put that barrier between herself and the pack, she would be doing all right. Such obstructions proved short lived. What remained of the local road system was overgrown and crumbling apart in enough places to allow the scavengers to range freely. When it came to the oldboys, however, providing them a mile long detour was as good as a two-hour reprieve. String together a couple of those and she might even get a chance to sleep laying down this week. At the very least she could take the opportunity to scavenge out a meal for herself. As it was she hadn’t eaten
in two days. Her belly was well conditioned; it had not yet begun to complain, and her energy was still up. She knew from experience though that by tomorrow her reserves would begin to sputter if she didn’t find a way to refuel.
Perhaps it was the distraction that the thought of food always proved or maybe these last few weeks had found her relying on Ryan’s sharp eyes more than she would like to admit; either way, she didn’t see the newdead until it was too late. It was her friend the banker. Wherever he had disappeared to, some uncanny sense had brought him back. He stood rocking uncomfortably back and forth where the diminishing cliff met the flat ground below. He had noticed her in that way singular to his kind: no eyes, ears or nose belonged to the preternatural sense they all shared. As he swayed back and forth, his gnarled hands reached out toward her, broken and oozing fingers trembling with hungry anticipation, his joints began to quicken and seize in a series of jerky contractions. His only sense was the stuff of naked need.
She came to a stop, still a good fifty feet from the bottom of the slope. The cliff had shrunk to a mere ten-foot fall where she stood; no escape there, only the likelihood of an injury that would allow even an oldboy to chase her down. Behind her continued the slow tread of unwavering certainty. To her side the same consistent almost cautious movements crept nearer through the forest. These advances she only tracked with her ears. It was the banker that absorbed her heightened attention.
I’m not dead yet, she told herself. The newdead had noticed her, it was true, but whatever passed for a mind within such creatures had yet to resolve itself to action. That same uncanny sense that survived the rot of ocular nerve and the coagulation of nasal cavity would prove no less aware of the presence put off by two oldboys tracking behind its prey. Newdeads were rash and they were stupid, but they were something more than mindless. Every oldboy, after all, had begun its days with the same angry urgency that the faster and stronger newdeads possessed. And every newdead contained the first hint of an instinct and deep reserve that could one day become its surviving measure. She locked eyes with the sightless creature that now angled its trembling face up and toward her. Nearer grew the snapping and crunching of dead wood beside and behind her. The newdead continued to sway and twitch but took no step closer.
Chivalry Is Dead Page 20