The stock of a gun rammed into my back. I barely stifled a cry. Had to remember not to react. They didn't feel pain.
"What's the matter with you?" the gun-wielder snarled. "Eat up."
"Done down here!" came another cry.
The crowd was clapping rhythmically. On my right, the female deadie was trying to get the last tasty morsels from the bottom. She popped up, triumphant, with the medulla oblongata hanging out of her mouth, and jerked her head in quick succession like a bird, gulping it down.
I was losing. I wasn't even on the board yet.
Liver. I'd eaten liver before. Once, on a hunting trip, even deer liver, raw and dripping from the carcass.
If I'd done that, I could do this. For Val.
The handler jabbed me in the back again and this time I bent forward, toward the rippled folds of brain tissue.
*
My dad had given me the crappy old family station wagon for graduation. When the deadies started ambling, we stashed guns and other supplies in the wagon. Canned food, camping gear, blankets.
Everybody laughed at us, you bet they did. Even Val had, at first. But she'd stopped in a hurry when her mom came home from the beauty shop one day and tried to open her head with freshly-manicured acrylic nails.
No one was laughing now. There weren't enough people left to laugh.
The station wagon had held up like a trooper during our entire crazy escape and flight south. Now, as I pulled over to the side of the road, its engine let out a sort of weary rattle. The tires sent up a huge plume of dust and soot.
The girl came running up to the car. "Thank you, oh, thank you, I thought you were going to drive by and leave me, thank God you stopped," she said.
She was giving me big adoring my-hero eyes. I thought for a minute she was going to hug me, maybe even give me a big my-hero kiss to go with it. If she'd been a babe, enough to make Val jealous, I would have been all for it.
The others had climbed out of the car and were looking around nervously. Jess had the shotgun and pushed his glasses up, squinting. Sharon clung to the dog's bandanna. The girl introduced herself as Patty.
"You'll be safe with us," Rick told Patty, puffing up his chest.
It was kind of funny to see him trying to act all manly. I mean, he's been my friend since grade school, but I'd never had any delusions about either of us. Smart, okay. Jocks, we were not.
"Let's not stand around all day," Jess called. "I don't see anything moving, but …"
"But yeah. Back in the car," I said.
*
The smell was acrid and meaty and awful. I hadn't been aware of it before, not with the stale stink rising off the deadies and the rancid sweat of the crowd.
I could even smell the fine-ground bone dust and the charred, cauterized skin left by the bone saw. The inner membrane – I hadn't even known there was such a thing, but I'd seen them snip through it with kitchen shears – was peeled to the sides in neat folds.
Streaks of blood were drying on the surface of the exposed brain. It had been wet, glistening, when they first clamped the livie into place before me.
The desert sun was baking it. If I waited too long it would get tough to chew.
My eyes closed. My mouth opened.
I thought of liver. Of oysters. And, of course, of gelatin. Always room for it, wasn't that how the ads went?
A curved, quaking surface touched my lips. I skinned them back from my teeth, which had never needed fillings or braces. That had to give me an edge on the average deadie, whose teeth were chipped or broken out from chewing on bone.
For Val.
I took a big, slippery bite.
*
I steered in and out of traffic jams, cars and trucks that had been abandoned, overturned, smashed into scrap. Heaps of rotting food strewed the sides of the highway, spilled from produce trucks. The only movement besides ours was that of countless scavenger birds and animals, feasting with impunity.
That, and the windfarms. Talk about creepy. Miles and miles of posts with spinning pinwheel blades, whirring around and around. Generating electricity for a dead world.
The station wagon labored as it chugged up to the pass. I wasn't the only one to heave a sigh of relief when we made it over, and started downhill.
High desert country. Home of military bases and Shuttle landings, Joshua trees and borax mines. In the twilight, the desert valley was a brownish-purple smear cut by the ruler-straight line of Highway 14.
We descended toward Mojave, hoping there might be something worth finding in that strip of gas stations and burger joints. Thinking about food, lulled by the hazy scenery, I didn't see the pileup until Patty squealed a warning.
I stood on the brakes. The only reason none of us were thrown into the dashboard was because we were packed in so tight.
Two semis had jackknifed, and another few cars had rammed into them, entirely blocking the road. The station wagon shuddered to a halt less than a foot from the bumper of a VW van.
"Everybody okay?" I asked, my voice embarrassingly unsteady.
Various replies of assent reached me. I saw a turnoff to the left, and a BB-pocked sign reading 'Joshua Flats, 6 miles,' with an arrow.
"Can we get around?" Jess asked from the back.
"Shoulder's too soft," I said. "We'd get stuck."
"Well, think of something, brainiac," Val said.
*
It squelched between my teeth. The texture was hideous, like soft-boiled eggs with striations of chewy gristle. The taste was bad, too, but the texture …
The man clamped into the wooden frame went stiff, then began to jitter and twitch. A fresh stink of voided bladder and bowels wafted up. I could hear his jaw clenching until bone cracked.
I took another bite. Determination drove me onward. Once the initial deed was done, the first step taken, the revolting sin committed, it got easier. Don't ask me why or how. All I knew was that I'd gone this far, and continuing wasn't going to make things worse. Instead, quitting would. If I quit and it was all for nothing, that would be really losing.
The noise of the crowd was louder than ever but I ignored it. I ignored the sporadic cries of "Done!" from the handlers. I was in this to the end, and I was going to win it.
Blood pooled in the bottom of the man's skull. I thrust my face in to reach the rest of his brain and wolfed it down. Something in my own brain, some switch or fuse, had blown with a snap and a sizzle.
"Done!" someone near me cried.
I straightened up, chin smeared with blood and cerebrospinal fluid and other assorted goo. They switched victims with the professional speed of an Indy 500 pit crew and a fresh one was locked into place. I dove in, tearing out ragged, dripping chunks.
Thoughts shut off. I was an animal, a machine. I bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, barely bothering to chew. My throat worked. My stomach hitched once, in shock maybe, and settled down.
I had the advantage, and not just for my teeth. I had tendons that weren't withered and stretched. I had functional salivary glands. I had a whole tongue, an esophagus that wasn't riddled with decay.
Most of all, I had the motivation. I wasn't doing this out of hunger or habit. I was in this to win.
*
We were able to push the VW van out of the way, but it didn't make quite enough room for the station wagon to get by.
Jess turned to me with a questioning look, maybe about to ask which one we should try next, and that was when the deadie reached out through the broken windshield of one of the semis and clawed the side of his face clear down to the bone.
He stood stock-still for a second, his questioning look turning into a gape. His blood was pouring onto his shoulder, raining onto the blacktop.
The deadie's sticklike arms shot out again, seized Jess, and yanked. He flew backwards through the glass-ringed gap and into the truck's cab. He dropped the shotgun. Sharon shrieked.
Deadies swarmed over the wrecked vehicles and the girls were screaming and the dog wa
s barking. Jess's despairing howls echoed from inside the truck.
I had time to notice how weird they were, the deadies, how different from the ones we'd seen up north. Those ones had been green, moldy. If you hit them in the middle, they'd belch out clouds of dead gas. These deadies were dry, their flesh shrunken, their skin leathery. They looked like mummies. Scarecrows. Beef jerky. The arid heat did that, I realized, and then they were on us.
"The guns!" I yelled at Val. "The other guns are in the back!"
Rick panicked and went tearing off into the desert with two deadies in pursuit. The movies always showed them all shambling and slow, but these ones were fast. Rick was moving faster than I'd ever seen him move in my life, running like he'd made the track team. Didn't matter. They caught up with him, bore him down, started eating him alive.
A deadie woman with brittle peroxide hair leapt on Sharon. Another lunged at me and I danced back, tripped, and almost went down. If I had, that would have been the end. I kept my footing, cracked my crazybone on the side-view mirror of the station wagon, and kicked out. My foot struck the deadie in the hip and spun it around.
"The guns!" I yelled again.
Val looked at me, all big blue eyes and wide, surprised mouth. She dove into the car.
She slammed the doors, and locked them.
I couldn't believe it.
"Here!" Patty cried. She shoved a stick into my hands.
A deadie in a California Highway Patrolman's uniform came at me, still wearing his mirrored cop-shades. His mouth opened and closed in vicious snaps. I swung that stick like I was in the World Series, and missed by a mile. The effort spun me around.
I pulled Patty with me, our backs to the car. I hammered on the window.
"Open up! Open up, Val!"
The CHP snagged Patty's sleeve. She batted at his hand and yodeled a high-pitched cry. I brought the stick down across the deadie's forearm. Both stick and arm broke in half.
"Val, goddammit!"
Deadies were fighting over the bodies of Sharon and the dog. Others were converging on Patty and me. One snared a handful of Patty's hair. She flailed as if a bat was caught in it. Dry fingers splintered off, caught in her hair like grotesque barrettes. Another deadie darted at her with gaping jaws.
A little-kid deadie bit my leg. I yelled and punched down, the broken-off end of the stick still in my grasp. It punched through the top of the kid's head. Frantic, I probed at my leg and found the heavy denim of my jeans undamaged.
Through the dirty window, I could see Val. She wasn't doing anything useful, like maybe getting the other guns and saving our asses.
The deadies pulled Patty away from me. She was reaching out, begging for me to save her. But others were rocking the car, trying to flip it, trying to get at Val. I shook off Patty's trailing, grasping hands and wielded my broken stick like a truncheon.
A riflecrack split the air. A deadie pitched over, skull bursting apart to reveal a brain like a deflated football. The others froze, shoulders tucking up defensively. Patty, gasping and sobbing, scrambled to my side.
More guns went off, a chattering fusillade of them. Puffs of grit kicked up from the ground. Deadies went down in ruins of desiccated flesh.
I stared incredulously as a bastardized vehicle roared into view like some sort of escapee from The Road Warrior. It was painted a mottled brown, desert camo, and guys – livies – in camo jackets and helmets stood in the turret, blasting away at the deadies.
When they had dealt with the deadies, they leveled their guns on Patty and me.
*
An astonished hush fell as I ate, ate, ate. Gorged.
The handlers struck at the deadies with batons, urged them to keep up. The one on my right succeeded in swallowing down another half a brain and then paused, mummified face taking on a queer look. A moment later, the leathery skin of its belly parted and its overstuffed stomach flopped out through the slit, tore free, hit the planks of the platform, and popped.
Masticated grey matter and deadie digestive acid sprayed the front row of the crowd. A split-second later, the same thing happened to the deadie at the end of the line.
I ate. Blood and brain-pulp covered me to the hairline, to the ears. My own stomach felt hugely bloated, smooth, and strained. Busted a gut, funny how you heard that term all the time but never quite like this.
"Done!" my handler shouted. "What's the score?"
"That's five," the Fat Man proclaimed from on high, where he had Val crushed against his sweaty folds. "A new record!"
"Sev-en, sev-en!" the crowd chanted. That was my number, the one that they'd hung around my neck when I shuffled onto the platform with the others.
"How much time left?" my handler asked.
"Still two minutes."
"What do you say, dead boy? Got room for more?"
He didn't wait for an answer. A fresh victim was secured, the exposed brain not so neatly prepped this time. They'd run out of pre-made meals. They were grabbing people out of the crowd, doping them, and sawing off the tops of their heads just to keep up with the demand.
*
Before I could make sense of it, the guys in the armor-plated SUV had grabbed me and stuffed me in back. Two soldiers stood watch on Patty and me while the rest broke the windows and dragged Val out of the station wagon.
We tried to talk to them. Livie to livie and all, how we were all on the same side and should stick together and all that good stuff. Nothing helped.
They took us to the town, which had been ringed with walls and barbed wire and booby traps. At first I thought it was to keep the deadies out. But the defenses were there to keep us in.
The deadies were kept in some sort of old barn. They gravitated to the fence of their corral, not touching it after they'd gotten a couple of zaps from the electrified wires, and stared vacantly through.
The town was full of livies, most of them prisoners. Some were from town, others had been nabbed off the highway. The men and women were kept separate. I hadn't seen Val or Patty since we arrived.
I got the lowdown from a local. Big Joe Callup, also known as the Fat Man, had been Joshua Flats' chief of police until his compulsive overeating, and subsequent weight gain, had forced him onto disability. Fat? He was beyond obese, circus-freak fat. He couldn't even get around on his own, but rode instead in the back of his customized pick-up. Sort of a post-apocalyptic sedan chair.
When the world ended, he took the town hostage. He set up his own little kingdom, with hand-picked soldiers and weapons from the National Guard armory. Raiding parties brought in supplies, more prisoners, and enough deadies to keep them entertained.
"Entertained how?" I asked, not really wanting to hear.
"All sorts of ways," my new acquaintance said. "He has them fight each other. He maims them and races them. Sets them on fire. Bull-riding. Rodeos. Football games. He's the emperor, they're his gladiators, and this is his private Coliseum."
"What about us? How do we figure in?"
"Us?" He smiled bitterly. "We're the prizes."
*
The final buzzer sounded its harsh bray a millisecond after I gagged down the final hunk of my seventh brain. Seven for lucky number seven.
"The winnah!" Big Joe exclaimed.
The livies were cheering like they meant it. Anybody who didn't make a sufficient show of enthusiasm was liable to be put on the auction block for the next event.
I wasn't concerned about the next event. All that mattered to me was getting through it, getting Val, and getting out of here.
The guards had spread the news that she would be the next prize. The juicy ones were usually chosen early because a shapely or muscular bod inspired the slavering deadies to a better effort.
I'd already witnessed one of the events of 'entertainment,' and I'd seen what had happened to the prize, a steroid-type fitness junkie. He'd been torn to pieces by the winning deadie soccer team.
That couldn't happen to Val. I couldn't let it.
I knew
I'd only have one chance to save her. And escape, before it was my turn to have a ribbon around my waist.
The deadie competitors struggled as the bar came back up, but listlessly. They were full, and trained enough to know what came next. Those that were still mobile would go back to their stable. The ones who'd exploded their overstuffed guts would be taken to the edge of town, and burned.
I tried to act just like them. I let my shoulders slump, my head loll, my stare go vacant. Inside, though, my pulse was skyrocketing.
I'd won. The prize – Val – was mine.
She was enough to make any deadie feel lively again, all that rosy, lush, firm flesh jiggling about.
The handlers led me toward the Fat Man's pick-up truck. Just like they'd led the deadie soccer team up to claim their reward.
I tried not to let my excitement show. This was it. This was my chance.
Big Joe lolled in the truck bed like a sultan, on a bed of old sofa cushions and futons. The rig had all the comforts of home. A tarp on metal poles kept out the worst of the sun. A cord snaked through the cab's rear window, plugging the mini-fridge into the cigarette lighter. The area around him was littered with crumpled pop cans, candy wrappers, and half-empty bags of salty snacks.
He was a human behemoth in sweat pants that could have housed a family of four, and a ship's sail of a tee shirt with a beer company logo on it. Nearly lost amid the bulges and jowls was a hard, mean face that might have once been handsome.
His arm was still around Val, his greasy hand squeezing whatever he could reach. The up-close sight of him touching her almost made me lose it.
"You won a pretty piece of prime cut, here, boy," he boomed down. It was more for the benefit of the crowd than for me, I hadn't a doubt. His eyes were bright and merry, demented Santa Claus eyes.
I snatched a glance at the pick-up's cab. The engine was idling to keep the battery from running down, lest the Fat Man have to suffer the misery of warm soda. The windows were down.
Dawn of the Living-Impaired Page 3