Eaters: Resurrection

by Michelle DePaepe

  They were led down another hall and past an open-air center courtyard, and she realized that it was the source of the smell. It had probably once been a shady area for policemen and staff to take their breaks. Now, the outdoor room adorned with a dwarf pine tree, agave, yucca, and perennial flowers around its border had been repurposed. The flagstone patio was strewn with cigarette butts and trash. In the center, there was a depression in the soil, possibly where the fountain had been that was now lying in two pieces over to one side. That hole in the ground had been turned into a fire pit. Inside, there were charred pieces of wood and large bones—bones that were too large to have come from the creatures at any normal barbecue. They could be legs from a cow or a horse, but the cold, paralyzing feeling she got when she looked at them made her wonder if they were actually thigh bones…femurs? Bones from humans? She tried to calm her anxiety. That’s where they were burning the Eaters before the townspeople made them stop. It’s nothing else…

  Deeper into the building, there were no windows. The only light came from lanterns and candles placed every few yards down the hallways. The darkness and flickering shadows were eerie enough, but the sounds made it seem even more like they were headed into a dungeon. From somewhere in the building, there were distant screams like someone was being beaten or tortured. That was bad enough, but it was the closer muffled moans from either prisoners in agony or Eaters echoing around them that made the hair on the back of Cheryl’s neck stand up.

  Diego pleaded with one of Camacho’s men to tell him why there were here. No explanation was given. Their captors were quieter and more serious now like it was back to work after enjoying the diversion of corralling and moving Eaters.

  They were led to the jail in the rear of the buildng, a series of six holding cells behind a heavy steel door that had wide deadbolts on it as a backup to an electronic access system that used to be functional.

  Déjà vu. The last time Cheryl remembered being in confinement was in Fort San Manuel east of Tucson during her initial quarantine there. Those seemed like the good old days compared to their current plight.

  The acrid scent from the courtyard was lessened back here, but the jail area stunk too. A few of the toilets were clogged and the scent of urine was thick enough to make their noses wrinkle before they covered them with their hands, but that wasn’t the worst of it. All of the cells except one were already occupied by dozens of moaning, stinking Eaters.

  “Why?” Diego asked again. “Why are you putting us in here?”

  Instead of answering, the man behind him shoved him forward.

  Vinnie put the brakes on stopping in his tracks. “I’m not going in no stinking cell! I’m not going to stay in this hell—”

  The man closest to him fired at the ground, causing Vinnie to hop on one foot as a piece of leather from his shoe flew across the room. “Okay…okay. Geez man. Take it easy!” Then, he cursed as he was shoved forward.

  The door to the empty cell was opened, and they were instructed to get in.

  In the sweetest voice she could muster, Cheryl took her plea directly to Camacho. “Could you…please…at least take the cuffs off before you put us in there?”

  He wrinkled his nose and his dark brown eyes glanced up to the left. “Okay. I guess…that’s okay.” He nodded to his youngest henchman. “Uno por uno!”

  One by one, their hands were cut free with a knife and they were shoved into the cell, an old-fashioned kind of cell with a lock and a key. When the door slammed shut and the key clicked the bolt into place, Cheryl and her friends moaned in unison. They pleaded again with their captors.

  Diego and Zach begged in Spanish.

  Aidan tried his best. “Come on guys. Just let us go. We won’t give you any trouble. You’ll never see us again…”

  It was Vinnie who sounded the most pathetic. “Anything you want guys. Please. Please. Just don’t leave us in here!”

  Their pleas were in vain as Camacho and his men turned their backs and headed for the door. There was one brief second of hope when Camacho stopped, paused for a moment, and turned around…but then he flashed his trademark grin with the ostentatious gold tooth and went on his way.

  Slam!

  With the closing of the heavy steel door that secured the room, they were officially prisoners, doomed it seemed to whatever horrible fate Camacho and the man in the cowboy hat had in store for them.

  While Diego and Zach chittered away about something in heated voices, and Vinnie sat down on the edge of a cot, Cheryl and Aidan stood where they were, watching the decrepit cellmates in the other cells around them. They were male, female, and all ages. Some appeared to have been dead for many months, their skin, mottled and discolored, having peeled, rotted away, or sloughed off in places. While others still seemed juicy and almost human like they’d just turned hours ago. They all stretched their arms through the bars, moaning guttural complaints about their inability to reach the new food source that had entered their space. Cheryl averted her eyes away from the children and the young women whose natural lives had been taken far too soon. She found it easier to focus her gaze on the men, at least the older ones who had lived out a good part of their lives before the epidemic. One question lingered in her mind about all of them, though. She wondered whether these Eaters had been placed in the jail after they had turned, or if they had started out in these cells as petrified live humans and had turned during their captivity. Fearing contagion from their close proximity, she hoped it was the former.

  Aidan went to the small barred window on the back wall and looked out. Cheryl joined him and was glad to see sunlight streaming in through the glass, because it made the place feel less like a dungeon and allowed them to have a view of what was going on outside.

  She realized she’d been wrong as they’d walked through the building. It seemed they had been led to the back of it, but she could see the driveway in the front. Somehow, they’d walked full circle through the building without knowing it. She surmised that the police station had been designed that way so any prisoner would have to make a long journey through the building to make an escape.

  They watched the van driver finish luring his ghouls into the cattle trailer. When they were all in, he, the man in the cowboy hat, and Camacho talked for a few minutes. There were handshakes and a few hearty back slaps. Then, the van driver left, and Camacho and his men departed in the cattle truck that now had numerous, writhing hands sticking out through the air holes in its sides.

  “Where do you think they’re taking them?” Aidan asked.

  “I don’t really care,” Cheryl said. “I just hope when we’re let out of here, we’re not one of the dead going to the same place.”

  For the next few hours, they waited. They took turns looking out the window, lying on one of the two cots, sitting on the floor, or pacing. The Eaters in the other cells eventually quieted down a little as if they were conserving their energy for the right opportunity to make a meal out them.

  No one came.

  No one checked on them, not even once.

  The shadows grew long outside, and eventually they were bathed in the darkness of night. Having nothing else to do but wait for the manner of their death sentences to be announced, they slept.

  Cheryl allowed Aidan to curl up behind her on a cot. His arms around her were comforting, but she almost wished she was in a corner of the cell alone, so she could let loose the torrent of tears that were threatening to burst through the dam of her resolve.

  Vinnie had no such restraint. On the adjacent cot, he bawled himself to sleep.

  ###

  Early the next morning as pinkish light streamed through the window, they were awakened by the sound of the heavy metal door to the jail room opening and a chorus of moans coming from the other cells. Cheryl and the others hopped to their feet as a woman entered. Her graying hair was pulled back in a bun and she carried a large blue plastic bucket. When she entered, she purposely averted her gaze as they cried out to her for help.
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  So did the others behind her. One was a teenaged boy with a shaved head and a red and black Lobos football t-shirt with a snarling wolf on the front. The other was a woman in her mid-forties with shoulder-length blonde-streaked hair and long dark roots. Cheryl thought she might have once been quite pretty, but now she looked weary and vacant.

  Grandmother, mother, and son?

  Cheryl pressed her face through the bars, begging them for help. “Please…we haven’t done anything wrong. Can you help get us out of here?”

  The visitors ignored her pleas and the even more desperate sounding ones that came from Vinnie. They went straight to the cell at the far end of the block. The agitated Eaters inside grew louder, straining to escape through the narrow bars as they reached towards the visitors with desperate outstretched hands.

  Calmly, as if this was part of her everyday routine, the older woman reached into a pocket in her skirt and took out some latex gloves. She passed a pair to the younger woman and the boy. After they all had gloves on, she began to search the mob inside the cell with her eyes and called out, “Ronnie. Come on, Ronnie. We got something for you...”

  The Eaters whipped into a frenzy, snarling and moaning as they tried to grab the visitors and the bucket.

  “There he is!” the boy said, pointing towards one of the lumbering corpses who had a receding hairline, a handlebar mustache caked with dried blood, and eyes that looked filmy like they were covered in some sort of whitish slime.

  Standing back a few feet, the older woman reached into the bucket, pulled out a gloppy red mass of flesh and tossed it towards the thing that used to be her Ronnie. It landed near his feet, but it was quickly snatched up by the groping hands around him before he thought to look down.

  “Let me try,” the teenaged boy said. He reached into the bucket, pulled out something that looked like a small animal organ and tossed it through the bars and over the heads of the group. When they turned around and dashed for it, he quickly tossed another piece towards Ronnie.

  The Eater caught it as it splashed on the front of his crusty shirt and quickly stuffed it into his mouth, masticating the bloody thing with loud slurping noises. When he finished, the three of them took turns, throwing more goopy looking pieces of flesh. Most of the objects looked like animal organs while others were pieces of flesh that were unidentifiable.

  Cheryl turned away, not wanting to watch anymore.

  “They feed the dead and leave us here to rot?” Aidan said to her. “This town has all gone nuts.”

  “What if they’re saving us to feed them?” Vinnie asked with a trembling voice. “What if that’s the only reason we’re here?”

  The idea left them all speechless. It was just too horrible to discuss.

  Cheryl wondered what had happened to the Vinnie she’d known back in Sedona. He’d certainly had his boisterous personality when he arrived at Divine Sundaes. Now, he was just a sniveling whiner. She chided herself for thinking it…but truth was…he was just making things worse for them with all his panicking. They needed to put their heads together and come up with some sort of plan to get out of this mess.

  After those visitors left, more came in waves of twos, threes, and fours. Like the first ones, they carried buckets or plastic tubs filled with what looked like chicken hearts, livers, and gizzards. With gloved hands or with tongs, they tossed them into the cells, all the while cooing the names their loved ones had before they were infected and transformed into this miserable existence.

  “Aaron’s not looking too bad. Still got all the skin on his face. Ohh…but looky here at Susie. She looks like she got in a tussle with some of them. Her arm’s all mangled.”

  “It’s all right, honey. Mama’s here…”

  “Sure wish we could get Jared a new shirt. He’s getting so filthy.”

  All of them ignored Cheryl and the rest of her cellmates as if they were non-existent. After several snubs, Diego and Zach grew irate and began yelling curses. It didn’t do any good, but the two men seemed to feel a little better after letting off some steam.

  “These people are out of their minds,” Aidan told Cheryl after the last group left. “If we can’t get any sympathy from the locals, I don’t see how the hell we’re going to get the hell out of here.” He sat down on the edge of a cot and buried his head in his hands.

  Cheryl wished there was something she could say to give him and the others hope, but she was drawing a blank. They had gone over every inch of the jail cell looking for a crumbly spot in the cement walls or floor that could be tunneled through, or any give in the welds on the bars, and found no area of weakness. The cell might as well be their tomb six feet underground, because it seemed to be inescapable.

  Vinnie became more withdrawn. Instead of bombarding them with his screeching insecurities, he sat in the corner, rocking back and forth as he recited the Rosary and fingered an invisible strand of beads.

  As she watched him retreat into himself, she thought how odd it was to be both sick from the smells in the jail and hungry at the same time. She wrapped her arms around her torso and went to the window, wishing that there wasn’t glass on the other side of the bars, so she could have a whiff of fresh air to relieve her tortured stomach. She looked towards the empty police station driveway, watching the shredded flags waving in the wind and the backs of the motionless speared skulls. The door to the jail creaked open. She almost didn’t turn around and look, assuming it was just more visitors who’d be oblivious to their cries, but she heard Diego say, ‘Hey…’ under his breath and she swiveled around.

  It wasn’t Camacho, the man in the cowboy hat, or the typical visitor they’d seen before. It was a woman, a very beautiful woman, with long, black hair and large, soft brown eyes. She wore curve-hugging jeans and a red v-neck blouse with a satin bow nestled right at the convergence of her ample bosoms. She carried a platter of biscuits and a plastic jug filled with water into the room and shut the door behind her. Instead of jumping up and pleading their case as they’d done with every other visitor, the men were silent, staring.

  “We don’t belong here,” Cheryl said, trying to keep the desperation from cracking through her voice as she came closer to the bars. “Can you help us?”

  The woman gave her a faint smile then shook her head. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said with a heavy accent. “If you’re in here…you done something bad that got you here. The Sheriff just told me to bring you some food and water.”

  “The Sheriff?” Cheryl asked. “Who’s the Sheriff?”

  She laughed. “You been living under a rock? Frank Heitman. He’s been the Sheriff of Quimera since…” Her eyes drifted down to the floor. “If you’re in here, I’m sure you’ve met him at least once. The guy in the cowboy hat?”

  Wheels began to turn in Cheryl’s head. Sheriff? If they could just see him and talk to him, so they could make him understand that they hadn’t committed any crime, maybe they could persuade him to see their side of things despite whatever Camacho had told them. “We haven’t done anything wrong. Can you ask him to come in here, so we can talk to him?”

  The woman shook her head. “Sheriff doesn’t like coming in here. Says it stinks too bad. He made it worth my while to help out. That’s why I came.”

  She held the tray out, showing them the flat, hard disks that looked like pancakes. “I’ve got some cookies for you. Made them myself in a solar oven.”

  Diego was at the bars next to her. The woman handed the first one to him, staring up at this eyes as she placed it in his outstretched hand.

  “Thank you,” he said as he took it. “What’s your name?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, snatching her hand back.

  “I’d just like to thank the nice lady that gave me a cookie.”

  “I’m not supposed to be talking to you...” she said, tearing her eyes away.

  “Who’s going to know?” he asked. “None of those creeps are going to tell on you.” He pointed to the moaning prisoners in the othe
r cells who seemed to be complaining that someone else was getting fed but they weren’t.

  “It’s Maria,” she said quickly as she glanced up at his eyes again then bent down to slide the whole tray of cookies underneath the bars.

  Cheryl glanced at Aidan and wasn’t surprised to see him stiffen. Maria had been the name of his girlfriend who’d been killed last year during the early days of the infection. He’d talked about her very little since she’d met him.

  Maria walked away, and Cheryl feared she was leaving. To her relief, she took some plastic cups from a shelf near an empty water cooler across from their cell, poured water into them then came back and slid them underneath the bars.

  “Thank you,” Cheryl said. Trying to emphasize her gratitude, she bent down and took a cookie from the plate. It was dense and greasy, but smelled good. She took a bite and coughed, almost choking as an unexpected spiciness tickled her throat. The cookie that tasted like it had been made with way too much cinnamon, cloves, and ginger, far too much of the spices to make it palatable. As Diego tried to talk with Maria to glean any more information from her about why they had been put in the jail, Cheryl continued to nibble, taking small bites. She noticed dark green flecks of something herbal in the cookie, and wondered if she should stop eating. Were they like pigs being drugged, seasoned, and fattened for the slaughter?

  “What’s the Sheriff going to do with us?” Diego asked. “I need to know if there’s any chance of getting out of here, or if I should be on my knees praying right now.”