In less than a minute, I had consumed Bill’s entire brain. Trying to go back to his mere flesh after that delicacy was suddenly unthinkable. Besides, he was already starting to seem less appetizing to me. While still a warm new kill, he was suddenly unappealing now. It was like pancakes — the first bite was divine, but each additional bite was less and less appealing, until it just made you retch.
But then there was the brain. Sweet Mary and Joseph, there was that divine brain. I cannot ever begin to emphasize the otherworldly ecstasy of chomping down into that pulpy mass. It was like an orgasm for the soul, like a religious experience bathed in gory bliss.
I stood up then and stared down at Bill’s hollowed-out skull. I remember thinking to myself:Betcha can’t eat just one. I laughed at this, snorting, sending shards of Bill trickling out of my nostrils. Crawling into the dumpster, I closed the lid over me, letting it rest on top of my head. This left just enough room for me to see and for the business end of my rifle to pass through. The dumpster was half-full of garbage that was months old, and the stench of it was now like a botanical garden to my blood-encrusted sinuses. As I crouched there in the filth, circling through my head like a song you cannot shake was the sound of that little ghoulie girl, just yap-yap-yapping like a brain-dead pup.
* * * * *
They tried calling us on the walkie-talkies first, but I wasn’t answering, and Bill was in no condition to. So I steadied my rifle, knowing they’d be coming around the bend shortly. My hands shook, as did my whole body. Even my teeth ground together as I smiled at the thought of more skulls to split. The impulse to catapult myself out of the dumpster and just lunge at them was hard to fight. But I was still cognizant enough to know that Ed would have blasted me to bits before I could peel off his face with my incisors. My stomach played Twister with itself and bile danced at the back of my throat, the hunger pulsing harder now with each minute I went without human flesh. But I held fast to my resolve, like any good foot soldier would have. With Bill, I had just pounced, with no thoughts of tools or strategy. But now that I had eaten, the compulsion that came with the hunger wasn’t as overpowering. I had regained a bit of self-control, no matter how small.
Expecting the worst after getting no reply from us, Ed and David crept around the edge of the building with guns drawn. The sheen of Ed’s police issue was like a diamond in the relentless sunlight. His eyes went right to Bill, of course, ignoring the dumpster. That was all the time I needed to plant a bullet in his chest. The crack of my rifle echoed several times in the still of the afternoon, and Ed fell backward into David, who screamed and dropped his pistol as he, too, fell. David paged for backup assistance on his walkie-talkie, whereas Ed was much more gung-ho in his self-defense. I had aimed for his heart, but my tremors had thrown off my aim, and there was still some life in the old lawman. He began to fill the dumpster with rounds, and I felt a hot slug enter my right shoulder and another skim my thigh, tearing the skin without going in. I bolted upright at the shock, lifting the lid and exposing myself. When Ed saw me, he became disoriented by it, not expecting a member of his team to be the attacker. This second of hesitation was all the advantage I needed to shoot him right through the neck. His jugular burst open like a geyser.
David was screeching his location to the dispatcher when I fell on him. His soft, young flesh was like a freshly powdered baby. I remember wondering if his high IQ would make his brain sweeter than Bill’s. I cracked his skull like a walnut with the butt of my rifle, and then fell into his scrambled brains as if they were a lover’s arms.
* * * * *
The backup unit found me with all three of my team members’ carcasses stacked around me like a human buffet. I had made a temple of their savory corpses, each of them propped up against a different side of me, with myself in the middle, caked in their blood and festooned in their innards, feasting in a frenzy that escalated with every bite.
It was mere luck that saved me. The team leader of this particular squadron was one of those liberals bent on reconstructing humanity. She’d rather let a raving zombie escape than shoot a part-time cannibal. Had it been someone like Ed, he would have turned me into soup with the amount of lead he would have pumped into me. He was by the book, but he valued safety overall. This team leader, though, was on some kind of crusade, and so she had me zapped with a taser and then netted so that a proper test could be administered.
The test came back negative. I had reached the height of the sickness but my cells were already showing signs of recovery. The medic noted that my skin tone hadn’t gone gray. He said my fever was bound to break by nightfall, and that after two days in confinement he’d expect me to realize what I had done, and then the true therapy would begin, because the remorse of a part-time cannibal was known to be one of mankind’s most terrible burdens.
But I, like all of you, beg to differ.
I spent several months in a crowded rehab facility and made a full recovery. Once they deemed me as being no threat to others, they pulled me from the crowded cells and put me into the ward. There, in those warm and fuzzy group sessions, I slowly came forward with the story I have just shared, and made sure to have my own signature breakthrough where I accepted that because of the virus, I was a victim. I abandoned all ownership of the horrible things I had done, and found forgiveness among my peers, within myself, and in the eyes of Christ.
Or so I told the counselors, because I knew what they wanted to hear.
Many of you in this gathering tonight, I met in the ward. Others I met in those hellish holding cells. The rest of you are friends of those friends, and I can see tonight that our group is growing. We aren’t zombies, but we aren’t part-time cannibals either, now, are we?
Each of us here tonight has walked upon the tightrope that hangs taut over the chasm of death, and we have each stared lovingly into it and felt its heavenly embrace. We all know the salvation that lies within the flesh, and we alone have felt the kiss of God on our lips when we have feasted, andonly when we have feasted.
Ours is a religion founded upon that glimpse of the borderland between our world and the world beyond. We areThe Great Eaters. This zombie virus has given birth to a new era — not the Armageddon so many viewed it as, but rather a long Last Supper. The bodies are indeed temples, and they welcome us in the most Christian manner of all, crying out to us, saying: “This is my body, given for you.” It is not bread, but the actual body. It is not wine, but the blood itself. There is notransubstantiation, but rather atransmutation that we all must experience to compel us to first taste the divinity found in human devourment. We did not succumb to the plague, nor did we shy away from its teachings, unable to handle the burden of sacrifice like the part-timers. We, my brethren, are the chosen ones.
I have no doubt that you’ve noticed the pine box behind me as I have given you my confession and this sermon. Brothers Larry and Daniel have brought us this offering of communion rite. This vessel was but a girl of 14 when she died, and she was exhumed from the cemetery the very night of her burial, which was only last night. She has not been tainted by the devil’s embalming fluid, but frozen before her burial instead. She’s been thawed now, and I have used my slaughterhouse learning to prep her for mass.
May we all gather around this blessing now, and humble ourselves before we once again glimpse the threshold of Heaven. Bow your heads, my beloved brethren. It is time to say grace.
Growing Dark
Beyond the rusting fence, the fallow land looked ashen to Billy. This barren soil, which Pa had decided to let rest from cropping, wore the same gray death mask as the sky that sulked above the farm like a swollen pustule. He found it hard not to lose himself in Halloween daydreams when autumn fell to gloom like this, but there was little that didn’t distract Billy from his chores. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work — far from it. There was nothing he desired more than to prove himself to his old man. But no matter the task at hand, farm work was never engaging enough to keep his mind from floating off
into fantasies. Pa had scolded him about it many times: Billy was 11 years old now and needed to quit his head-tripping if he was ever going to become a man.
Remembering this, he got back to the sheep. He sat on the stool behind Holly, one of their ewes, and used scissors to clip the dags from around her anus. These were clumps of fur that had been stitched together with shit, forming rank pendants that Billy thought looked like the tears of a giant. If the dags weren’t clipped, they could lure maggots. Holly could get infested, and if she did, Billy knew Pa would send him marching into the sugarcane to cut a switch to be beaten with. His behind was still sore from when he’d let Rosey, one of the junker cows, mix in with the good ones during a milking. He hadn’t even caught the auger before the old man had started whooping his hide for that goof.
He’d been daydreaming then too, he had to admit to himself.
He continued clipping the smaller dags, doing all he could to stay focused even as he felt the first drops of rain. He didn’t care if he got drenched and his wranglers grew as heavy as a throw rug — he was going to finish tending to the sheep, and Pa would be proud, he just knew it.
With Holly taken care of, he herded some of the other ewes that bore what Pa calledlove stains on their backsides. They’d raddled the big ram, Buck, and now when he mounted one of the ewes, the harness on him marked the ewe with red paint so they knew which of them still needed time with the ram. Pa had been grumbling about how Buck was shooting duds of late, but Billy didn’t know what that meant, and he knew better than to question the old man. He just herded the sheep and was happy to be trusted with that, or anything else on the farm. It helped convince him that he wasn’t totally hated.
Spooked by sudden thunder, the Clydesdales in the stable bucked. They were always restless when they didn’t have to drag a chain hallow. Billy’s initial reaction to this was to play with them a little and maybe break up a carrot. He loved all the animals on the farm, but he felt that he had a special kinship with the horses and the cattle. He wanted them to have peace in their hearts; if not serenity, than at least the soft calm that Billy himself so longed for. But he fought the urge to coddle them, knowing it to be just the sort of thing that would distract a woman but should never keep a man from his work.
Atop the barn, a murder of crows burst into a fluttering tornado at the approaching rain. The sheep’s ears spun on their skulls like crippled butterflies. Behind the chicken wire, a fat hog belched a horrid squeal. The whole of the livestock began to twitch with their convoluted emotions.
Billy Joe became too curious to restrain himself anymore. He looked up at the growing clouds, and then at his animal friends.
“Ya’ll know somethin’, dontcha?” Billy asked them, smirking.
He sprinted to the fence where the hog frothed.
“What is it, boy?” he asked. “Werewolves, goblins, Martians?”
His mind bloated with images, visions based on monsters he remembered from a comic that one of the laborers had given him. He’d hidden it under his mattress in his herder’s shed, and by now had memorized every line. Even as he wandered deeper into his right-brained escapades, he began to pet the swine, which snorted in reply. He began to daydream of being a shining knight, the kind that Momma used to tell him fairy stories about. He envisioned himself with all the muscular definition of one of the Clydesdales, but shrouded in shimmering chain mail. He could see himself on top of one of those very horses, galloping after some shape-shifting villain in the light of a phantom moon. He began to rap his hands upon the hog’s snout, creating the sounds of the trotting steed in his fantasy.
Later, alone in his shed, he would wonder how Pa always managed to catch him at these moments, no matter how few or far between.
“Where is that boy that looks after the sheep?” he heard the gravel voice bark from behind him.
It was Pa, cruelly reciting that rancid rhyme, the one that Momma used to sing to him at bedtime when he was little. The sweetness of it was long gone, though, for Pa used it now to point out just how little Billy still was. It was a mocking, ridiculing poem in the old man’s mouth, and he spat it out like a cobra hissing venom.
“Under a haystack,” Pa continued, “fast asleep.”
* * * * *
Judson had fetched his boy because the rain was coming down harder now, and he didn’t need Billy Joe falling ill after working in it, or at least farting around with the goddamned pigs. One sickly mouth was more than enough for his house, especially since he’d been forced to cut back on the day laborers. The doctor bills had become like a vise, and he needed what little kin he had to be healthy if the blasted farm was to meet quota, especially now that it was harvest time.
“I took care of all the dags, Pa,” the boy told him.
“There’s more to herding than plucking dingleberries, boy.”
Judson clanked the plates so the noise echoed throughout the tiny kitchen, driving home his aggravation.Damned kid.
“Yes, sir, but I sorted the herd too. Buck’s mounted a few of the ewes since we raddled him.”
Judson threw a full plate on the table between them. He pointed at Billy with a mean closeness to his nose.
“Listen to me, boy,” he croaked. “When I came out there, all I saw was your monkey hands playing a hog’s head like a bongo. I don’t need no dillydallying on my farm, and I don’t take kindly to no goldbricking leeches living on it. You need to pull your head out of Fairyland and start earning your keep, sonny.”
The boy lowered his gaze, the shame weighing on him. He went to sit at the table, pulling the plate full of cornbread and cold cutlets toward him as if it was his own. Judson slapped his son’s wrist and winced with disgust as he saw the boy pull his paw away like a frightened pup.
“That ain’t your grub, boy!” he barked. “Hell’s bells, don’t you know better by now?”
“Sorry, Pa. I just forgot.”
“That’s ’cause you don’t pay no attention. Now bring Momma her lunch before you go eatin’ your own.”
* * * * *
The floorboards seemed to bend more and more whenever he climbed the steps. Billy stopped and checked over his shoulder for Pa. The old man wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs, so he thought it would be okay to take a second to inspect them. He placed the plate at the top of the stairs and bent down to get a better look at the rotting wood. There was black fuzz hiding between the cracks. He’d been noticing it in the folds of the farmhouse. He scratched some away and watched a small trickle of black liquid release, like blood from a torn scab. But that quiet scraping was just enough to wake her.
He heard moaning from behind the doorway. It was a sound so horrible to him that it made the hog’s braying sound like bluegrass. A phlegmy hacking that chilled him followed the cry. And although he couldn’t see it, he knew that the phlegm would be pink with blood when he went inside.
Picking up the plate, he made his way to the door and opened it. From the smell, he knew there was something in the bedpan for him. The light was always kept dim because of her sensitive eyes, but with the storm outside banishing all sunshine, the room was now a catacomb. He moved forward slowly, putting the plate on the table beside her bed.
She turned to him, and even in the muted light he could make out the sunken pits of her eyes. She’d grown so thin that her cheeks looked like two perfect eggshells. A small sliver of gray light knifed through the parted curtain and reflected off of the long row of stitches that ran from her forehead to her collar. What little hair she had left could no longer cloak it.
“Billy Boy,” she whimpered, reaching out to him.
These days, whenever Momma spoke, it sounded like crying. He didn’t know how to put it into words, but he wished she couldfake it in front of him. He wished she could force herself to sound less like she was dying when he was around. If anything, he felt like she fed off his pity, and then he hated himself for thinking something so rotten about his momma. He often scolded himself, unknowingly using his father’s vo
ice to tell himself he was just making excuses not to take care of her. But that wasn’t true. The truth was simple, and sad enough: He didn’t like seeing her this way. It was abhorrent. In all honesty, he hardly even recognized her as the warm woman who had raised him.
The sickness had taken no time at all to transform her from a caring matriarch into this disintegrating alien, and Billy had been rushed through stages of grief that he didn’t understand, his empathetic nature turning on him. All he knew now for sure was that he needed to be a man about this. That meant that he wasn’t supposed to cry, so when he had to, he did it alone, curled up on the hay-stuffed mattress in his shed.
“My sweet Billy Boy,” she said, stroking his cheek. He reached up to hold her withered hand. It had once been so plump, and now it was just like a sheet of moth-eaten silk draped over a skeleton. He stroked it carefully, afraid of tearing a vein. In this gentle moment, they remained so silent that they could hear the old house settling. Billy Joe heard the creaks and pops within the walls and thought again of the black moss, wondering if it lay somewhere beneath, hiding behind the world he could not see, bleeding blackly as it started swallowing his family like so much sunshine.
* * * * *
The early light was still pale, and his fatback had not yet settled in his belly, but Billy was already toiling in the field. The hairs of some of the corn had turned brown, and so Pa had shucked one just to be sure, poking the kernels with his toothpick. It looked to Billy as if the corn was giving up milk. Pa had told him the row was ripe for plucking, and so they’d gone to work.
Billy had harvested enough to fill a wheelbarrow before he tripped over the thorny vines of the acorn squash Pa’d planted to keep the varmints away. He broke his fall with both hands, skidding across the pricks and skinning his palms. The pain brought tears to his eyes. It wasn’t an emotional reaction, just a physical one, but he was nonetheless terrified. Pa was only a few feet away.
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