Eaten Alive

Brain Food by Katherine Tomlinson

2012-02-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

BRAIN FOOD - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

They say when you die that hearing is the last sense to go. With me, it was smell. The last thing I remembered was the aroma of the blood gushing from my torn throat.

It smelled delicious.

When I woke up everyone in the lab was milling around like groupies backstage at a rock concert with no real objective except being there.

The researcher who’d killed me was chowing down on Dr. Lowenthal, whose field of research was schizophrenia.

I’d never liked Dr. Lowenthal. He didn’t really think that anyone who didn’t have a degree from Princeton belonged here doing research. My degrees from Duke and Stanford did not impress him.

I wondered if his brain was tastier than mine or if taste was even an issue to zombies.

The researcher who’d bitten me was a stranger; probably one of the Canadians who was doing research in the main hospital.

He wasn’t interested in anything but the man-meal he was enjoying.

I looked around to see if anyone was still alive.

They weren’t.

Trevor Pippen lurched by me, mouth agape, eyes vacant. He gave a grunt of what might have been recognition but it was hard to tell.

Poor Trevor. He’d been doing promising work; was on the verge of some important discoveries into the origins of autism spectrum.

There was a lot of grunting going on in the lab, which surprised me. Twenty minutes ago the combined brain power in the room had been equal to the entire faculty of a state university; now everyone but me seemed to have regressed to Neanderthal-level cognition.

I attributed my continued brain function to the Goji-berry smoothies I had every afternoon while everyone else was getting their Starbucks fix. You are what you eat.

And I was ravenous.

I left the lab and went looking for dinner.

The hallway was lined with shambling figures, most of them disfigured by bite marks and open wounds where eyes and ears and skin used to be.

Some grunted as I went by but none tried to stop me.

Once I got into the hospital proper, I saw it was mostly deserted.

I could see smears of blood on the otherwise pristine walls, and there was a pile of gently steaming viscera next to the entrance.

I hate to see people waste food.

I was still hungry after polishing off my snack, so I kept moving.

Somewhere alarms were going off.

I wondered if anyone would come in response.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, I hummed. And I feel fine.

Fine, but still hungry.

Have you ever had a hankering for something and only that something will satisfy? And if you don’t eat that particular thing, you’ll never feel full? Like if you want a Mrs. Field’s semi-sweet chocolate chip cookie but you have a handful of animal crackers instead? And then another handful. And then finally you go get the damn cookie you wanted in the first place. Like that?

That’s how I felt.

The viscera had dulled my appetite but I craved brain.

And not just any brain.

Like everyone else who worked in neuroscience study at Princeton, I’d paid a visit to a locked room to gawk at the two jars filled with neatly cubed pieces of what looked for all the world like gefilte fish floating in formaldehyde.

I’d been revolted by the sight at the time, but now those yummy morsels called to me. I could smell their savory succulence through the glass of their containers and through two closed doors.

Those doors had been torn open by the time I got to the room.

I could see a figure in a lab coat was hunched over one of the jars, his fingers deep inside, clutching a handful of cubes but unable to pull his hand and the brains out at the same time.

He turned around when he heard me come through the door and gave a ferocious, feral grunt.

His hand still trapped in the jar, he clutched it to his chest like a football.

I recognized him as a “brainiac,” one of the many post-grads who migrated to the campus every year to study Einstein’s brain.

I guess he was really into his research.

“Get out of here,” I said and he drew back, frightened by my voice.

“Go on,” I insisted and he shuffled toward the door. Slowly.

“Leave the brain,” I said.

He grunted and shook his head.

I ripped his head off and threw it into a corner, grabbing the jar before the rest of his body collapsed on the floor.

Slow zombies…they’re at an evolutionary disadvantage.

I reached into the jar and plucked out a bite-sized morsel and popped it in my mouth like a cheese cube at a cocktail party. The texture reminded me of semi-firm tofu. I’d been a vegetarian in my former life but that was no longer a lifestyle option.

Albert Einstein once said, “Hunger, love, pain, and fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.”

I was going to have to work on “love.”

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson is a journalist-turned-fictionista. Her most recent collection of short fiction is Toxic Reality. A group of stories set in her paranormal Los Angeles, L.A. Nocturne II, will be published this spring.

Zomboid Spark by Richard Godwin

2012-01-08T06:01:00.000-08:00

ZOMBOID SPARK - RICHARD GODWIN

‘She always said necrophilia would be the death of her,’ Larry said. He paused to flick his Ronson lighter and held it smouldering to his Cuban. ‘And you know what? I agree. She liked a jump and she did it with all sorts. That was her joke. She was getting into some strange areas, bit like a junky needs a bigger hit.’

‘So what happened to her?’

They were sitting in Larry’s restaurant. Lovers Crumble appealed to everyone with its versatile menu, but it appealed particularly to those who loved deserts, especially crumbles. Mick was sitting with Larry at his private table and his eyes wandered around the immaculate shining venue in admiration.

‘Tracy is no more,’ Larry said, blowing smoke upward with a look of satisfaction.

‘Why do I think there’s something you’re not telling me?’

‘Because there is, and I will,’ Larry said.

He took a deep swig of cognac and motioned Mick towards him, watching as he slid his chair forward.

‘How come you gave up the lab?’ Mick said.

‘Tracy always liked a fuck. From the day I knew her she had this thing for waiters, her sparks she called them. The first time she screwed one I ignored it, hired a hooker, but I got madder each time she did it. She said they were a flame that kept her ignited, kept her pretty, well I can tell you she wasn’t too pretty when she fell apart and I mean fell apart.’

‘I figured something was going on with her. I thought she liked your money.’

‘I engineered the serum as you know, I could have retired on that.’

‘The new flesh serum?’

Larry nodded and took another drag.

‘I took Tracy away on a holiday to the Caribbean and hoped she would settle down and stop with her sparks. But there was this one waiter she liked and I found her in bed with him. He was tall and dark, he had the look, women used to turn and look at him. You know the type.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’ll tell you what happened. I shot him full of serum. I turned him into an android.’

‘So that’s how you made those extra millions.’

Larry leant forward and winked at Mick.

‘All the droids you see, they’re down to me.’

A waitress came over and filled Mick’s glass. He eyed her full figure wrapped inside her skirt and said, ‘She one?’

‘Yeah, she’s a gynoid.’

‘So what happened to this waiter?’

‘I thought I’d take control, see. Let Tracy have her fuck but use the fact that she was screwing an android to curb her dalliances.’

‘So she was fucking a robot.’

‘Not a robot, my droids have human skin, makes them appealing. Touch her.’

Mick reached out and ran his hand down the waitress’s arm.

‘I’d never know,’ he said.

Larry nodded.

‘And they’re good in bed. So I got it all set up, Tracy could get screwed by him but he’s just a machine, except I made one small error.’

‘What?’

‘I’d had too much whisky that night and I mixed the serum with another one I’d taken out there to develop. I created the first Zomboid.’

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘It’s a mixture of a Zombie and an Android.’

‘No shit.’

‘And what happened wasn’t pretty. You see the way it works is the Zomboid can infect a human and that human becomes a regular Zombie.’

‘Which can’t be destroyed?’

‘Oh, no, it can. No brains, no action. Tracy’s getting screwed by the Zomboid one night, I hear her screaming out into the midnight and the next morning she loses a finger in her breakfast bowl. That’s when I figure it out.’

‘So what did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her anything. I let her get screwed again. I always said fucking would kill her in the end but she never listened to me. She was dancing one night, wearing this low cut dress and showing it off, and one of her legs flew off, raced through the air like a prosthetic limb and landed in someone’s desert, a most embarrassing moment. One minute she’s doing a salsa, the next she’s licking the floor. The final scene was tragic-comic, I saw her lying under the Zomboid and he was giving her the action and she was doing that scream she did aah hu aah hu, and, well, let’s just say the mouldy cunt split on us both.’

‘What did you do to her?’

‘I removed her brains, scooped ’em out of her hollow skull like stale scrambled eggs. No more Zombie Tracy.’

‘And what happened to the Zomboid?’

Larry pointed.

‘See that guy front of house?’

‘The good looking dude with the hair?’

‘Yeah. That’s him.’

‘No shit?’

‘Yup. Pulls all the women in.’

‘So you sold the lab?’

‘What do I need to work for now? I got hookers and gynoids.’

Mick stared at the Zomboid as he admitted more customers, shook his head and laughed. Larry flicked his Ronson and watched the sparks rise from his Cuban while he heard the sound of bones cracking beneath a Caribbean sun.

BIO: Richard Godwin is the author of crime novel Apostle Rising, in which a serial killer is crucifying politicians and recreating the murder scenes of an original case. The novel has received great reviews.

It has just sold foreign rights to the largest publisher in Hungary.

He is widely published in many magazines and anthologies and also writes horror and Bizarro as well as literary fiction and poetry. You can find out more about him here. His Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse are popular and penetrating interviews he conducts with other authors at his Blog.

His second crime novel will be published in April of this year by Black Jackal Books as a paperback.

Review: Quarantined By Michael Moreci

2011-10-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

My initial reaction to the ending of Quarantined was Noooooooo!

If you’ve read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I’m going to try and do this review without spoiling it for those of you haven’t had the chance, in the hopes that you’ll get your hands on a copy and give it a whirl.

As I told Michael, two seconds after my initial reaction, my second reaction was, Always leave them wanting more.

And Michael does that in spades (and, fortunately, he has assured me that Book One is just the beginning).

The situation that the town finds itself in at the outset of the story is a typical zombie outbreak situation. No one is quite sure what’s going on and why there are these people that are into eating the flesh of the living.

By the time we meet a character by the name of Cormac, we are in a completely different story. We are in a world within a world, a noir world within a zombie world.

It was at this point that Michael revealed why it must be that noir/crime and zombie fiction are my two favorite genres.

As James Ellroy likes to boil down noir, that is to say, You’re Fucked, the same can be applied to zombie fiction. No matter how long or how far you run, eventually you have to face the horde.

The two genres are so very close in what they ultimately are about that this revelation really smacked me upside the head to the point of saying, Duh!

I was extremely happy to see the noir angle be played up in Quarantined.

But Michael wasn’t even close to being finished with the roller coaster effect. And the rug would be pulled out from under us when we learned the real reason behind why some people are eating other people.

I won’t give it away but I will say that I can’t recall this being used as a plot device before in any of the zombie fiction that I’ve read, comics or otherwise, or any zombie flick I’ve ever seen.

I’ve been a big fan of zombie fiction ever since a friend of mine (hey, Jeff!) turned me on to The Walking Dead.

And, for a while there, I loved The Walking Dead like it was a family member.

But somewhere along the way (I contend that it was issue 68 where the train left the rails), The Walking Dead went into the toilet.

Let me be clear about this:

Quarantined is not The Walking Dead.

Quarantined kicks The Walking Dead’s ass sixteen different ways.

At The Zombie Trailer-Park by Kenneth James Crist

2011-09-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

AT THE ZOMBIE TRAILER-PARK - KENNETH JAMES CRIST

Clark Simpson and Verna McBride—Derby, Kansas

The road was half-covered by blow-sand. That’s what they call it in Kansas. Ever since the dust-bowl era, when drought brought most of the Midwest and plains states to ruin, it’s been a term common to hear and easy on the ear whenever it gets dry enough. Blow-sand. Fine sand and grit that drifts and piles up and gets into everything, sneaks through cracks in siding and BB-gun holes in plate glass windows. Sneaks right up the crack of yer ass, if yer not careful...

I figured I was about to see some major blow-flies, too. I don’t know who invented that term, but I know what they are. And I’m very familiar with the term fly-blown, as in carcass.

There was nothing on this road but a trailer park. The sand ended there, at a turn-around where the land-lord’s trailer sat. I didn’t know if anyone lived here anymore, much less she whom I sought.

Verna had been atypical trailer trash, meaning she was, in fact, trailer trash, but not of the typical variety. She didn’t have the normal dirty-faced kids hanging all over her, as Keith used to say, “Two on the ramp, one at the pump and one in the hangar.” Keith had been Air Force before the shit went down and it definitely warped him. Napalming whole American towns after the shit went down finished the job, and he ate his Beretta one night after we tried to get through two cases of Mickey’s, holed up in a haybarn…but that’s another story and a sad one at that.

Back to Verna…She wasn’t fat and sloppy, far from it. And she wasn’t married to some over-the-road trucker and fucking around on him all the time.

She had been Keith’s for a while, then she was mine for a while longer, then…probably someone else’s, but I’m not sure. Verna was not the type to be without a man for long and her looks and body pulled ‘em outta the woodwork pretty regular. Hell, when she was all tarted up, she could pull ‘em off the I-135 doin’ 95 miles an hour…she was smooth, stacked and pretty, in a slightly grubby, careless and clueless way that fit the trailer park perfectly. She musta had three or four closets fulla whore-clothes, ‘cause that’s all she seemed to ever wear. No shoes that didn’t have at minimum four-inch heels, no jeans that didn’t hang so low that she had to shave her pubes or risk someone’s cigarette setting her on fire down there…no tops that didn’t show a mile of cleavage and I don’t think her belly-button had ever seen shade…plus rings, ankle bracelets, bangles, beads and just the right amount of makeup to get smeared when she was balling some dude…and it got smeared a lot.

She would never smoke because it would make her breath nasty, never eat anything that might put an extra pound on her frame, never drink to excess, because she might miss an opportunity to meet some really cute guy. Her one vice was sex and that was why I was here now. To see if Verna survived and to take her away if she still lived and if she would go.

I killed the engine a hundred yards out and shoved in the clutch, clicking the gearshift into neutral and letting the old Dakota pickup coast silently to a halt. I quietly clicked the door latch and slid out, taking the key and the shotgun. It was a Remington model 870 pump gun in 12 gauge, commonly called a “riot gun” even though it had been a good many years since the damn things had actually been used to quell riots, at least in the USA. I’d stolen it from an abandoned cop car after things started winding down. It was the only thing in the car that didn’t burn up and I took that as an omen.

Double-ought buckshot really does a great job on zombies. Pretty much sprays their heads all over and solves their problems permanently. Keith used to say there were few problems that couldn’t be solved through the proper use of high explosives…that was before, when he still had a sense of humor.

I made my approach, if you could call it that, as stealthily as possible, using the shelter belt to the north for cover. Shelter belt. That’s another Kansas term. They were rows of trees, planted to break up the incessant wind and to mark property boundaries. Consisting of “hedge” trees, really Osage Orange and in some cases cedars, most were left to grow rampantly and this one was no exception. The wind was from the south, so that was good. You wouldn’t think they could smell anything, as rank as they themselves smell, but it’s not so. They can smell fresh meat, as in people who are still alive and walking around. Maybe it’s because we still bathe…

When I got directly north of the trailer park, I could hear a radio playing, the sound drifting in and out on the slight breeze. I wondered if the power was still on here. Most places, it had failed a long time ago. No dogs barked and, other than the creaking of a door left ajar somewhere, the radio was all I heard.

I slipped quietly between the two trailers at the back and stood still for a full minute, turning only my head, using all my senses to see if I was alone, or about to die. One thing about this new world we live in—if you live for very long, you become sharp-witted.

Nothing moved. I looked at the tin box to my left, where the door had been ripped off and was lying on the ground. I made my decision to start there and I quickly moved up and stepped inside. It took me about two minutes to check the place. Finding nothing of note, I moved to the one on the right. Again, nothing to note except that someone had left a fan on and it was still running, mindlessly sweeping back and forth, cooling no one.

As I stepped out of the second trailer, I heard a woman scream. I froze in place, waiting to see if it would come again. Some of them had learned to do that, to suck you in so they could jump you. Most could only make low, strangling, guttural sounds, but some…

When the scream came again, it had a shrill, gasping quality that made it all too human and it was repeated over and over for at least a full minute. During that time, I made up my mind. It was human, it was alive, it was female and it was in pain. I moved my ass, shotgun at the ready.

Charging in like Batman is never a good idea, especially when you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. I credit combat experience, quick reflexes and my own willingness to shoot, ruthlessly, anything that threatened me, with saving my life that day. As I ran south between the old, scabrous trailers, I was on high alert, every nerve fiber screaming, “Trap! Trap! You stupid bastard, it’s a trap!”

I didn’t care. By that time, the screaming had stopped, but I was sure of one thing. The voice I heard had been Verna’s and she was not one to scream just because a roach crawled across her toe.

When the first lurching, shambling form stepped out from between a trailer and an old, tin lawn building, I swung and fired, not even raising the shotgun to aim. I had done this enough I was becoming quite the cowboy hip-shooter. I had just a flash of a rotting face and black, syrupy stuff drooling from its mouth before the buckshot removed its face and blew its skull apart. Stinking brownish brains slid down the pocked wall of the lawn building. Just then a hand clamped on my shoulder and I smelled rotten breath from behind me. I dropped and rolled, firing as soon as I could bring the gun to bear, and while on my back, I cycled the action and fired again. The first shot was too low, catching the old dead woman in the breasts. Spectacular, but not effective. The second shot cleaned her off from the eyes up and I mentally congratulated myself. Two down—another million or so to go.

There were more coming and I would soon run low on ammo if I stayed there and merely killed zombies. I rolled again, this time up onto my feet and continued my run, now yelling, calling Verna’s name over and over. The time for stealth had definitely passed. Faintly, from my right, much deeper into the squalor of abandoned tin homes, I heard her feeble voice. She wasn’t screaming now. What I heard was a monotonous repetition… “Help me…somebody help me… please…help me…”

I zeroed in on the sound and at last determined that it was coming from inside the oldest and nastiest unit in the park. Through a broken window, I could now hear her clearly, though the window was above me and I was unable to see her. As I stepped up to the door, zombies were turning the corner less than fifteen feet away. Then another one came out the door, almost bowling me over. I stepped aside and he stumbled by. I cracked him across the back of his neck with the shotgun barrel and then fired two more rounds at the ones closing in.

Fishing in my vest pockets for more shells, I rolled in the door, looking in the gloom for Verna and at the same time shoving shells into the magazine of the gun. In a few seconds the five-shot magazine was full again and a round chambered.

I followed the sounds of whimpering toward the back of the trailer, down a hallway barely wide enough for my shoulders, conscious the entire time that I was now trapped back here—in a few seconds I would be cut off from any way out. In the semidarkness I stepped on something relatively soft and I kicked it ahead of me until it slid into a beam of sunlight coming through a crack in the wall. It was a human foot, size eight, toenails painted a lovely shade of lavender.

I heard myself begin to giggle, starting to lose it, and I clamped down mentally, something I’d learned to do early on, when all this crap started. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for whatever was coming next, then I stepped into the back bedroom.

Verna was bound to the bed. Which one of them still had enough smarts to tie knots, I was never able to determine. Her leg was bleeding from where the zombie I met coming out had cut off her foot. Getting himself a little snack, I reckoned. Her foot had been the last appendage she had left. For the immediate future, they would continue cutting off pieces and staunching her bleeding, saving her for food as live humans became more and more scarce.

The stench in the room was pretty incredible. Not everything that they had cut off her had been eaten and rotting flesh was everywhere. Apparently, she was not the only one they’d been stockpiling. Combined with the smell of urine and fecal matter on the bed, the odor was indescribable.

I reached behind me and quickly slammed the door and slid a dresser across to barricade it. I knew it wouldn’t hold them for long, but I didn’t need a lot of time. Verna wasn’t going anywhere.

The really wondrous part was that Verna’s face was as lovely as ever. Even in her pain, which must have been unbearable, she managed a weak smile and she whispered, “Hey, Sailor…where ya been all my life?”

“Looking for you, Dollface…” It was a greeting we’d used many times when we were still an item. When we’d spent our nights drinking Bud longnecks and humping each other’s brains out. Now, I looked at her and my heart broke as she said, “Do me a favor…lover…”

“Anything, Sugar…you name it…”

“Kill me?…kill me quick? Kill me good…so I can’t come back…”

I smiled at her, a totally false smile of camaraderie, as if we shared some great secret. And maybe we did. I bent down and, in spite of her awful breath, I kissed her one last time. Then I put the shotgun to the side of her head. She didn’t even close her eyes…she stared right at me as I popped her, nothing but love in her eyes…

Took me a while to fight my way outta there. I wound up kicking my way through a flimsy-ass wall and expending the rest of my ammo killing every walking dead piece of garbage I could. I did it through a veil of tears that made my vision swim and my usual deadly aim just a bit off. Once I managed to fight my way clear, I ran like hell for the truck and got away from there.

Back at my compound, I took a long shower while my three Bull Mastiffs stood guard, and while supper was cooking, I hoisted a long-necked Bud in a toast to my old lover.

There is something to be said for finishing things right and to honor. I toasted both as I toasted Verna…

“At the Zombie Trailer Park” was previously published in Yellow Mama, an online magazine from Fossil Publications. It will be one of the stories in a forthcoming book of similar sickening prose, called “Groaning for Burial, The Carrion Men Chronicles.” Kenneth James Crist is Editor Emeritus of Black Petals Horror/Science Fiction Magazine. He has published over 100 short stories in the small press and online in venues raging from Skin and Bones to The Edge, to Kudzu Monthly. He has published two books of short stories, Dreaming of Mirages and The Gazing Ball, both still available from Fossil Publications. Kenny is very active with the American Legion Riders and the Patriot Guard. He is an avid motorcyclist and a competition handgun shooter. He is also a retired Wichita, Kansas police officer. Email comments are welcomed at blkptls@yahoo.com and his website is at www.blackpetals.net.

The Scent Of Rotting Leaves by Chris Rhatigan

2011-08-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

THE SCENT OF ROTTING LEAVES - CHRIS RHATIGAN

That only three people were in the audience was testament to Jansen’s skill as chairman. Over the years he took pains to ensure the city council’s meetings were so opaque and meaningless that even the community activists and reporters quit attending.

He put on his glasses, glanced at the night’s agenda and spoke the only name on the list.

“Calvin Motts.”

Dressed in a gray wool suit with a plaid bow tie and hush puppies worn without irony, Motts approached the podium.

As he passed them, the council members murmured to themselves.

Was that dreadful sound his joints creaking? And that odor -- like leaves plastered to the bottom of a pool filter -- was that coming from him?

“Good evening.” He paused as if he were catching his breath. “Myself and the two other senior members of the reanimated community have urgent matters to discuss with this council.”

The murmuring from the council grew louder verging on cat calls and jeers – everyone knew they were out there, but to reveal themselves in public like this? Jansen brought down the gavel. “Silence, silence, silence! Please continue, Mr. Motts.”

“As you may be aware, a fully functioning reanimated community has been established about ten miles outside of city limits.” Motts blinked very, very slowly, eyelids like parchment paper. “We do not, contrary to popular opinion, sustain ourselves on human flesh. We are respectful of all others. Yet we have not been treated with respect. Our members have been murdered, tortured, kidnapped, harassed, even raped.”

The council rose as one, their voices strident.

Councilwoman Lambert said, “To listen to this, this thing is absurd. I know for a fact that we don’t have necrophiliacs here in Pine Valley.”

Councilman Bukis said, “And the accusation of murder? That isn’t even possible. Aren’t they already dead?”

Laughter and shouting erupted from the council. What do these corpses want? We give into them and soon enough they’ll take over the town!

The council was unsettlingly energized by this new development. Jansen gaveled repeatedly.

The Mayor chimed in, soothing Jansen’s irritation, “Might I remind the council that there is no action item on tonight’s agenda regarding the, uh, reanimated community. All the council need do is listen to Mr. Motts.”

“All we want,” Motts said before taking another eerie pause, “is for you to leave the reanimated community alone. To this end, we implore you to consider rewriting the laws so that they respect our fundamental rights.”

The rest of the meeting went by in a fog, Jansen’s mind exploring each permutation of where this new information might lead.

Many of these permutations were dissatisfactory.

Often the best strategy, Jansen found, was acquiescence. Make a series of meaningless concessions until the opponent grew weary.

But this case posed unique problems. If the council even placed such laws on its agenda, it would be a public admission that zombies were among them. The effect on property values alone would be catastrophic. Not to mention the inevitable demand for more police and firefighters and the hundreds of angry, stupid residents who would show up at every council meeting.

For more than a decade, Jansen and the Mayor had, with the utmost care and skill, constructed a machine that, above all else, was silent. The machine’s lubricated gears spun and locked and distributed its product without so much as a whir or a clink. Fifty years into the future – perhaps a hundred! – the machine would reign supreme. Pine Valley would be the same community it had always been, without crime or chain stores, without traffic or undesirable persons. The machine’s power, Jansen and the Mayor understood, was beyond mere legacy.

But now it was in jeopardy.

So immediately after Jansen said “Meeting adjourned,” he rushed to the Mayor’s office.

The Mayor closed the door and pulled the chain on a desk lamp. He spoke first. “Who can we trust?”

Jansen had discovered that the Mayor’s political instincts were stronger than his own. While Jansen fretted about the potential results of this calamity, the Mayor was already searching for allies. “Police Chief Myerson?”

The Mayor steepled his fingers. “This problem is too complex for him.”

“State Senator Mooney?”

“The incentives are inadequate. Pine Valley is less than a third of his district.”

Jansen smiled for the first and last time that evening. The one man with connections, discretion, and no official title restraining him. “Robert Ford.”

The Mayor said nothing. Picked up the phone and dialed.

*

Early the next morning, Jansen stood on a ridge ten miles outside of Pine Valley. He watched state workers in protective yellow suits use driptorches to set the woods and fields ablaze. Ford had called this a “controlled burn.” Other towns had this zombie problem in the past, and this was the method Ford (and, for that matter, the state) considered the most efficient solution.

Crude mud huts and structures made of trash and scrap plywood crackled, flickers of the intense heat nipping at Jansen’s cuffs. He looked left and then right, half expecting to see them swarming, sharp teeth posed to tear apart flesh.

But he saw nothing, just the flames in the distance. He tugged at his sport coat, shook away the sudden wave of emotion. The reanimated community apparently didn’t even want to live – or whatever it was they did – none of them bothered trying to escape the blaze.

Satisfied that things were under control, Jansen walked the trail back to his car. The sun was pushing away wisps of clouds, but darkness still reigned in the forest.

Jansen called the Mayor.

“It’s done.”

“You’ve seen it for yourself?”

Somewhere, a twig snapped. Jansen accelerated his pace. “Yes. Exactly as Mr. Ford described.”

“Good. Meet me in my office.”

Jansen reached a clearing. Bent over, rested with his hands on his knees, chest expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting. Not a young man anymore. Should see Dr. Phillips more often, like his wife told him to.

He pressed the button to unlock his Buick when an icy hand reached out, clamped over his bony wrist, blood in his veins screaming like a child locked in a closet.

Calvin Motts said, “We tried to be civil, Mr. Chairman. But that’s not the game we’re playing, is it?”

Behind Motts, in the growing dark, hundreds of translucent eyelids blinked slowly. Very, very slowly. And the scent of rotting leaves.

Behind Closed Doors: A Quarantined Story by Michael Moreci

2011-08-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: A QUARANTINED STORY - MICHAEL MORECI

*The following is taken from the notes of journalist Edward Walker

The doors to the furniture warehouse were not only locked, but they had been chained from the outside. I approached with extreme caution when I heard them banging—it was the slamming sound I heard first, not the screams. I figured there was infected within, pounding to get out, though I proceeded nonetheless, disregarding my judgment. It would have been better had I chose to stay away, assumed the worst, and kept moving. Because what I encountered within gave new meaning to what the worst could be.

I parked a good twenty yards away, thinking I could reach the doors undetected. Every banging caused me to jump, as if it was an unexpected sound bursting through an otherwise normal, peaceful night. It wasn’t until I got closer that I heard the screams—the articulated yells, cries for help. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past sixty hours, it’s that the infected have no control over language. They don’t communicate in any way I could see, and they certainly don’t plead to be saved.

Still, I was hesitant to make my presence known. There was a scaffold running alongside the building that allowed a view inside, through the windows that ran along the very top of the wall. I scaled the scaffold, my chest pounding; I hoped there were people within, but I feared it as well. My means of survival—alone, always on the move—had become, to me, a vital routine, and I trembled at the thought of interrupting it.

But then I saw. Through the smoky glass, I looked down to the source of the relentless, desperate, pounding, a pounding that had become so intense it was bound to shatter the hands and feet of those causing it. It was a group of teenagers, maybe fifteen of them, and they were trapped.

The chain around the door, I assumed, must have been a precautionary measure taken by the warehouse owner—an extra bit of protection in a time of chaos. At least, that’s what I hoped was the case, that people were being locked out, not in. As I approached the doors, instinct still told me to turn away, to run and not look back. The struggle between conscience and survival instinct is a contentious one; I’ve learned there’s no telling what a person will do when backed against a wall.

I fought the urge to flee and approached the doors.

“Hey,” I yelled, “you okay in there?”

The response was a unified burst of elation and ecstatic relief. One of the kids from the group, a stocky defensive linesman type who had been pounding the door, spoke above the cacophony.

“Get us out of here! We’ve been trapped inside for like three days. None of our cell phones work; we have no idea what’s happening.”

As much as I wanted to race off into the night with the singular task of rescuing this imprisoned lot, there was still a lingering something. A hesitation that, despite my best motivations, held me back from doing the noble thing without question.

“How did you get locked in there? I mean, why are you guys in a furniture warehouse to begin with?” I asked.

“What? We, um…”

In that moment of hesitation, my mind told me to run. It convinced me this was a trap, an elaborate set-up that I was playing directly into. As I backed away, the kid on the other side of the door must have felt me receding, because his next words rushed out of his mouth.

“We broke in, okay? We broke in three nights ago to party. That’s all we did. And when we went to leave, all the doors were, like, bolted shut.”

I was silent, weighing my options—help or turn away.

“Hello?” the kid called out, almost pleading. “Please, you have to get us out. We’re starving, we’re thirsty; we just want to go home.”

The word, the idea of ‘home,’ made me flinch—these kids had no idea, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them. Not yet.

“Look, I need to go get some bolt cutters,” I said. “All of you sit tight; I’ll be back soon.”

“No!” a girl yelled from within. “Don’t—don’t leave us!”

“Listen,” I said, trying to buttress the group’s frayed nerves, “I’m coming back. Stay calm and stop pounding on the door—you don’t want attract any attention.”

“What does that mean?” the kid, the leader, asked.

I stammered. “Nothing. Just…keep it down.”

As I turned away, the kid called out one more time. “Hey!” he said. “You don’t happen to have any matches or a lighter or something, do you? Something you can slide under the door?”

I wasn’t thinking—my mind was too focused on my already building sense that, somehow, I betrayed myself. Helping these kids was a mistake, going out into the night to find bolt cutters a complete lack of better judgment. And for that, I was going to pay. I was busy silencing these ugly doubts as I slipped a half-used book of matches underneath the door, never considering what they’d be used for.

The thumping had grown louder. I carried a rhythmic pulse in my mind the entire trip to the abandoned farmhouse—looted for the needed tools—and back. It was a knocking, a call, a temptation; only this temptation wasn’t to enter, it was to leave. Thoom thoom thoom it went, a tell-tale heart in reverse. Not revealing what I’d done, but pushing me to what I was capable of doing—abandoning people in need, placing my survival above anyone else.

The actual sound coming from within the warehouse was different from before—it was a drilling, violent thud, louder, and more forceful.

I parked closer this time, and left the keys in the ignition.

“Hey,” I called out, standing five feet away from the door, which shook beneath every blow. “You kids in there?”

No one answered.

I took a step back even my feet were beginning to feel numb; I took in a deep breath and felt it quiver in my chest. Something, I knew, had gone terribly wrong behind that door. Everything become quiet, the thumping subdued as the world began to dim—and that’s when I heard. Heard the sound of water sprinkling of glass. I looked up and saw droplets raining onto the warehouse windows.

It immediately came to me: the matches were used to set off the sprinkler system, which in turn drenched the virus on the entire group.

Something took hold of me—fear, real, palatable fear clouded my thoughts. I climbed up the scaffold, trying to get a look inside. What I was looking for, I couldn’t say—there was no way I would ever open those doors, yet I was compelled to see inside nonetheless.

Not everyone had turned yet—two remained—a boy and a girl, a couple I assumed—two who evidently didn’t use the sprinkler system to quench their thirst. They were surrounded, backs against the wall. The last thing I saw were their hands joined together, fingers interlaced.

Quarantined is copyright Michael Moreci, Monty Borror, and Markosia Publications

Bagging Some Zs by Katherine Tomlinson

2011-08-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

BAGGING SOME Zs - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

Ike Hackett had been unemployed for two years before signing on with the county as a Z-catcher. The work wasn’t hard but it was dangerous and most of Ike’s colleagues had been as desperate for an income as he was. The hazard pay was generous but the life expectancy of a Z-catcher was only slightly longer than patients with stage IV pancreatic cancer.

At first, Ike had been shit-scared every minute of every shift. His training officer was so careless about following protocol that Ike was convinced he was trying to get himself killed and Ike along with him.

Ironically, his training officer did have stage IV pancreatic cancer and was hoping to die on the job so his wife would inherit a fat insurance payout.

He got his wish but Ike barely escaped without being bitten.

After Brian’s death, Ike was assigned a new partner, Randy.

Things were better after that.

Ike admired Randy. He never asked Ike to do something he wouldn’t do and there was nothing he couldn’t do better.

He taught Ike the best way of checking the zombie traps on their route and the safest way to deliver them to the euthanasia centers (known as the House of Zzzs because it was where they put the Zees to sleep).

The delivery was the most dangerous part of the job. Zees weren’t smart but they could sure as hell smell the stench coming from the crematorium at the back of the facility. They knew that nothing good happened there.

Randy was a popular guy and the alpha of a group of catchers who called themselves Z-Dawgs.

Once he teamed up with Randy, Ike became an honorary member of the Z-Dawgs and started hanging out with them on their time off.

It was Randy who introduced him to the Zee Fights. One of the Z-Dawgs had built a holding pen in his basement and after hours and on weekends, the guys would get together to hold Zee Fights, death matches between undead contenders fought in a backyard sand pit.

Ike had seen the videos on YouTube but nothing prepared him for the thrill of the real thing. It was the bloodiest of blood sports and best of all—unlike fighting dogs or fighting cocks—you couldn’t kill a fighting Zee just by wounding him or her.

Even the winning zombies were only good for a couple of fights though, because after that, the minute they started fighting, limbs started falling off and they just stood there as their opponents chopped them up like the Black Knight in the old Monty Python routine.

So there was always a need for fresh meat, so to speak. No one could build up a stable of fighters to gain an advantage.
On the other hand, some of the Zees were natural-born fighters, and not the ones you might think.

A lot of the former athletes were crap in the pit, for instance. Ex-military were often pussies. Given his druthers, Ike always bet on the housewives. The zombiefied soccer moms were fierce competitors, ferocious and wily.

Ike found that playing recordings of a distressed baby’s cry was all he needed to do to get their blood up before a match. It was too bad you couldn’t breed the Zees to fight, to pass those competitive genes on.

The fights brought in big money.

You had to know somebody who knew somebody to get invited to them, but word got out and the crowds grew.
The Z-Dawgs shared out the profits even-steven and they were all rolling in cash.

Ike invited his brother Mitch to a fight and he was so upset Ike had to talk him out of calling the police.

Randy wasn’t too happy about that.

Randy was big on rules and he had a whole series of protocols they were supposed to follow when they were alone with their fighters before and after matches. No one wanted the gravy train to come to a screeching halt, so the Z-Dawgs followed his rules.

But accidents happen.

It was absolutely not his fault that Ike got bitten by a victorious Zee who had been a gym teacher in her former life. She’d come lurching out of the pit and thrown her arms around him. Ike was so surprised by the human moment that he stood there a second too long—long enough for her to bite half his cheek away.

Randy shot her in the head and then turned the shotgun on Ike.

Ike had grabbed the gun out of Randy’s hand and used it like a baseball bat to lay his friend out.

Well, ex-friend.

Zees don’t have friends and Ike was a Zee-to-be now.

He knew Randy would be coming for him.

He knew he should just turn himself in at a sleep center.

But before that, he was going to get himself a good meal.

Mitch looked like he’d be some good eating.

BIO: Katherine Tomlinson used to be a reporter but prefers to make things up. Her zombie story “Z-Cruise” will appear in the Hersham Horror anthology Alt-Dead this fall. Her story “A Dream of Blood and Fire” will be published by Trestle Press as part of Paul Brazill’s Drunk on the Moon anthology. She writes the serial novel NoHo Noir for the local news site patch.com.

The End Of Our Zombie Days by AJ Hayes

2011-08-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

THE END OF OUR ZOMBIE DAYS - AJ HAYES

I’m washing dishes when Davey comes crashing into the kitchen. “Dad,” he yells. “There’s a Zombie on the corner.”

I drop the dishrag, grab the rifle and head for the door, the kid following close behind. Sure enough, there it is at the end of the block. It’s just standing there, not moving.

“Me’n and Lester saw it when we came out to play ball,” Davey says. “I got pretty close and--”

“Davey!” He looks sheepish and toes the lawn.

“Wull,” he says. “Me ’n Lester watched it for a long time and it didn’t move, so--”

“So you decided to disobey a direct order? Decided to get close enough to let it make a move?”

“No, Dad,” he says. “I’m not stupid.”

“Sometimes, son, I wonder.” I’m not too hard on him. He didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done when I was his age, but still.

“It never looked at me,” he says. “It was just staring at our yard. At the house. I don’t think it even noticed me.”

I bring the rifle up and take a look through the scope. Center the cross hairs on its face.

“That’s the first one in a long time, Dad.”

I agree. Last two years we haven’t seen but a couple of shamblers. The new radio network says the same about the rest of the world. The Zees are just disappearing. No one knows why. There’s some thought that the epidemic has run its course. Most of us hope for that, but keep our rifles handy all the same.

“I think it’s a female, Dad.”

I drop the scope. See the breasts. The remains of a yellow housecoat.

“Yes, it is,” I say.

“There’s something wrong with her eyes, too,” Davey says. “It looks like she’s crying.”

I lift the scope and look at her face.

“Yes, she is, son.”

I pull the trigger and watch her head explode.

I’ll try not to think about her eyes again. But I know I will.

Her Smile by Michael J. Solender

2011-08-19T08:35:00.000-07:00

HER SMILE - MICHAEL J. SOLENDER

“Her smile, that’s what her Ma and I most want to remember, her wonderful, glorious smile,” Mr. Sandy was speaking directly to Janes, the Funeral Director and didn’t even see me in the corner.

I couldn’t help but see him, though. A small ashen man, he was practically crumpled into himself, barely able to stand and blankly staring upon his child. His very dead daughter was in a heap, like yesterday’s laundry atop a gurney brought by the morgue to our small mortuary and funeral home. Even from the corner, I could see she was beautiful. Like a perfect rose, preserved in death with a haunting glow, his young twenty year old daughter radiated grace and a quiet calm in death. True, I felt that way about many I’d seen, but this one appeared special.

“Can you fix it so she’ll be smiling?” He began to sob, his heavy frame brushing the wall he leaned upon in order to prevent falling.

“Of course we can, Mr. Sandy, our man Rigger is one of the finest. He was schooled by Mr. Angelique, our late founder.” Janes referred to my nickname as if it were my proper name, a practice I hated. He loved the “inside joke” naming me after the stiff state the body achieves after death.

Most of the grieved were too distraught to notice, but it never failed to leave me cold. Angelique had shown me the ropes, took me in after my accident, gave me a trade, I was humbled and honored to work with him.

I approached our new client and extended my condolences. “It will be my pleasure to restore your daughter’s smile to what you knew so well in life. May I ask, what is her name?”

Sandy tried to compose himself; he was now looking at me like a friend. He knew I would do my best to make his little girl presentable for her mother. “Gayle, her name is Gayle, I used to call her my little nightingale. She always was singing or humming in the evening.”

“Well, Mr. Sandy, rest assured she’ll receive our most loving and respectful care. If you have a special dress you’d like to bring, that may be best.” I paused to gauge his reaction. Gayle had been hit broadside by a speeding car running a red-light as she walked through a crosswalk. Her head was completely intact yet her body was badly mangled with her clothes practically torn off her delicate body.

He nodded gently and mustered, “Yes, I’ll bring one later.”

Janes escorted Sandy into the office and I wheeled his daughter back into my studio.

Peering over her, I told Gayle I would make her beautiful again. I always show respect for those who have moved beyond. As I moved to get my chemicals, I thought I detected the soft tonal notes of a lullaby.

Lullaby and goodnight la la la la la.. de de de.

It was her. Gayle. Mellifluous soft humming. It was unmistakable. I moved back closer to the table and she sat up, color returning to her face, her crushed body twisted and mangled beneath her. Dried blood was at each nostril and in the corners of her eyes, yet she sat there watching me and sang softly in the most delicate and beautiful voice I’d ever heard.

“You’re quite handsome,” she said, flirting with me as her father was signing papers regarding her burial in the room that shared a wall with ours.

“And you are quite the beauty yourself,” I responded. I learned long ago to not fear death or any aberrations that may be associated with tragic demise. I’d had some close calls myself as a matter of fact.

“I’ve actually been able to observe it all with remarkable detachment.” She was clearly interested in engaging me. “Yes, after he struck me, the paramedics were quite quick to the scene, but I had slipped by before they even arrived. The police called daddy and on the way here, I heard that other man telling me it would be all right, that you would help me.”

“That other man?” I was puzzled.

“He didn’t say his name but he said he knew you. He said he’d helped you once a couple of years back and that you’d fix me up for the viewing but after they all left, you’d bury an empty casket and I could stay with you, we could stay together, like we were married.”

“Like we were married? Bury an empty casket? What are you talking about?” She was beautiful and I could see where she had been a lovely girl. I was awfully lonely but this was turning into something too very strange for me.

“He said you’d understand. He told you once he’d find some for you, he said, you’d know it was right for us to be together.”

“Who is he? How can we live together? How can you live at all, you’re dead Gayle, you’re dead!”

“I know, silly, but so are you. Don’t you remember Mr. Angelique? Don’t you remember how he gave you back your life after they brought you here after your accident? He said you would, he said you’d remember if I gave you this.” With her crushed hand, she gave me a small St. Christopher’s medallion on a gold chain.

It all rushed back in an instant. It was my medallion. I was wearing it when I was struck by the truck outside of my house that fall some years back. In a torrent of memories, I recalled it was Angelique who restored me, who brought me back in this very same studio I now worked in. He told me I had a purpose. That I could carry on for him. That he would find me a soulmate.

My heart became both sick and crazy, pounding to this new elation.

I would know love once again in her smile.

The Bumpy Road by R.S. Bohn

2011-08-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

THE BUMPY ROAD - R.S. BOHN

I had just turned ten, and I stood crying and dripping snot over my Uncle Mike’s casket. “I wish you weren’t dead,” I blubbered. My dad led me away after putting an orange lily on top of the rest of the flowers.

Twenty-two days later, Uncle Mike stood in our backyard, chewing the stump of somebody’s hand in his rotting mouth until the last finger went in. Then, with nothing left to chew, he picked up Jenny, our old beagle, and began chewing on her until his jaw fell off and hit the ground with a thunk. My dad finally came into the kitchen to see what all the racket was about, and why wasn’t that damned dog shutting up. He took one long look at my uncle, went and got the shotgun he keeps in his bedroom closet, and told me to step aside. I stood at the screen door, gaping and with pancake syrup on my chin, and watched him blow Uncle Mike’s head clean off. Well, not clean off. It sort of exploded, bits plunked into the above-ground pool that is now gone and is an oval, obviously-pool-shaped rose garden, and then the rest of him fell forward. Dad, not satisfied, shot until he ran out of shells and all parts of Uncle Mike had stopped moving.

Later on that day, we heard more shots. The commie, no nukes, Greenpeace, grass-eating hippies, Sheldon and Louise, had no gun, and therefore, were killed in their driveway while they attempted to prise up dandelions with trowels. Dad said that we were not to take pleasure in their deaths, even if they got what they deserved because they should’ve just sprayed the lawn in the first place and then there wouldn’t have been any dandelions to remove. He did, however, show the first outward sign of respect ever for Louise, that Birkenstock-wearing llama-hugger, when she repeatedly slammed her trowel into the head and shoulders of the zombie that was eating her husband and which shortly turned to eating her. “Hm,” was all he said, but he’d made that same “hm” when my big brother Danny had hit his first Grand Slam the previous summer.

I asked him why he didn’t take his gun and go shoot the zombie when it was attacking Sheldon and Louise, and he said that it was because we needed to conserve bullets. I thought immediately of the cupboard over the toaster, which has two shelves, one for ammunition and one for cereal and cookies. There were a lot of bullets in there; surely we could spare one to save Sheldon and Louise, or any other neighbors who fell under unfortunate attack because they weren’t prepared and had been just asking for it? But Dad said no, and told me to keep nailing boards over the door to the sunroom.

He was already mightily pissed off about that sunroom before the zombies came. It had been Mom’s dream to have a sunroom, a room full of windows so that it felt like she was sitting outside when she was, in fact, sitting inside. Dad said it would cost less to put up a tent, one of those ones with zippered, roll-up windows and screens that folks who don’t know nothing about real camping buy at El-El-Beansquat. But Mom wanted a sunroom, so Dad got a few buddies to build one for all the beer they could drink, and he bought the supplies. It looked only slightly better than an added-on room built by guys who got paid in beer, but Mom had sat out there all the time, drinking tea with the bag in it and watching the birds fly around and the laundry dry. There was still a cup sitting out there with a bag in the bottom, withered and nearly attached. There was still laundry on the line, but no one to watch it.

Now, in addition to not being as cost-effective as a tent, the sunroom had the additional bonus of being highly unsafe in case of zombie attack, which case looked more and more likely as the day wore on. From the basement, we brought up all the wood, broke down packing crates, and used up most of the galvanized nails.

Danny wouldn’t take a step without his Louisville Slugger, which made it hard for him to carry boards, and Dad got testy with him a few times, but let him keep the bat. We worked listening to the radio until about two, when the last station shut off in mid-sentence. Two guys laughing, sounding tinny on account of their station working off generators, talking about how when this was all over, we’d find out it – nothing. That was it. Dad reached over, clicked it off, and went back to cleaning his revolver.

Since we’d boarded up the house as well as we could, he had us on phase two of survive and repel the zombie invasion. One person, me, counting supplies and writing everything down on notebook paper. Two other people going from window to window throughout the house, looking out through the carefully placed holes drilled in the boards. The house was a tiny two-bedroom with a basement, so there wasn’t any need for the walkie-talkies, but those, among other helpful items, sat on the kitchen table. An assortment of knives, one machete, a variety of hammers, a first aid kit, a quart of hydrogen peroxide, a hand-crank emergency radio/flashlight combination, candles, and all the bottled Gatorade previously stored next to the washing machine. Also on hand were three guns, loaded, and a saw.

At about one, the phone rang. We all froze. Dad stared at it through five rings before finally picking it gently up off the hook, as if it was a bomb that might go off.

“Charles, you no good for nothing piece of shit.” Grandma. She was loud. In person, it could knock you over if you weren’t ready.

“Jessie.”

“Hi, Grandma!” Danny and I called.

“You tell those boys I love them more than anything in the world, you goddamn bastard.”

Dad held up the phone, more than twice as pissed off as he was about the sunroom and maybe four times as pissed as he was about the zombies in general.

“We love you, too, Grandma!” Danny and I shouted.

“Charles, I got a problem.”

“We’ve all got a problem, Jessie. Probably the same problem, I reckon.”

“You reckon, do you, you ignorant chicken shit?” She huffed. “I don’t know how you manage to wipe yourself and not fall off the toilet at the same time.”

“Jessie, if you got dead people in your yard, I’m sorry, but we ain’t coming over. We got the house all boarded up, matter of fact.”

“Matter of fact, eh?”

“You’re just gonna have to take care of them yourself. Maybe when this dies down some, we’ll get in the truck and come over. Till then, I’m very sorry, but you’re on your own.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Charles. I’m not really alone. I got Roseanna here.”

Up until that moment, the world had seemed full of noises. Gunshot far off, intermittent screaming, the normal creaks of the house, the coffee pot that had been going pretty much all day.

In an instant, all that faded away, as if giant earmuffs had been clapped over our house. A nail on the table that I’d been playing with rolled off onto the linoleum. It sounded like a tiny, tinkling bomb.

“What do you mean--”

“I mean what I said, you monkey’s ass. Roseanna’s here. I got her in the sunroom.” That’s where Mom had got the idea for our sunroom. It occurred to me that maybe it was another reason for Dad to despise it so much.

“You got the door shut?”

“No, I just asked her nicely to please stay out there while I make some zucchini bread. What do you think? Yes, I got the door shut.”

“Is that going to hold her?”

“Charles, she is in no condition to be breaking down doors, let me tell you.”

Dad was silent for a long time, it seemed. Finally, he said, “Are you sure it’s her?”

Grandma sighed, even her sigh amplified by her massive bosoms tenfold. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I’ll come over. Meantime, anything gets in the house, you shoot it in the head. Anything.” He hung up.

I picked up the nail that had rolled off the table when I’d stopped paying attention to it, and I took it to the cupboard where the cereal and bullets were, and I stuck it in the top flap of a box of raisin bran and left it. After that, I got my notebook paper and pen and started counting the cans of tuna fish. I had forgotten to differentiate them into the jumbo cans and the normal-sized cans, so I had to start over. I thought maybe I should write down the weight of every item I’d counted. One box of spaghetti, sixteen ounces. Another box was mostly used up, and even though I hadn’t done very well at fractions in school, I tried figuring out how much was left. I couldn’t. I thought maybe four or five ounces, but what if it was three, and what if that wasn’t enough pasta when food started running out?

My breath got choked, and I began hyperventilating, and Danny didn’t even call me a pussy. Dad came up behind me, real quiet, like he was stalking a deer, and he put a hand on my shoulder. I realized then that we were in deep trouble, and this wasn’t just a drill, no sir, and worst of all, that I had cried at my Uncle Mike’s funeral but not at my mom’s.

“You do what you have to do,” Dad said a few times. Through a blur of tears, I saw Danny standing by the sink, staring down at the empty plate from that morning’s pancakes. Dad reached out a long arm to him, too, and put it on his shoulder, and we were connected, my brother and me, by our father’s hands on our shoulders. And then Danny walked off.

There is a time limit on blubbering. When it was reached, Dad squeezed my shoulder. “That’s enough.” And just like that, I stopped.

He left me in the kitchen, and when he came back a few minutes later, he had on his old Navy jacket, faded black and slightly scuffed but still tough. From the peg by the sunroom, he took his cap with the embroidered stag and jammed it down on his head. Pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, he sat down and tucked his jeans into his boots, relacing the boots so they were tight. Danny had come out and stood watching him from the hall, leaning against the wall, baseball bat dangling from his hand. He wore his camouflage hunting jacket. His jeans were already tucked into his boots. Dad looked up.

“What you got on there, son?”

“My hunting jacket.”

“I see that. And why are you wearing it?” Dad had an elbow on the table, and he took a sip of orange Gatorade, leaning back as if they were having a casual conversation about what time they’d be getting up in the morning for the first day of doe season.

“You’re going to Grandma’s.” Danny’s face, blotchy red beneath his own cap, didn’t quiver or tremble. “I’m coming with you.”

“Yeah? And who here’s gonna take care of your brother?” His eyes never left Danny’s, even as he nodded to me.

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“He can take care of himself,” Danny repeated, his blue eyes never leaving Dad’s. They looked so much alike in that moment, only Danny was like the baby bird version of Dad, complete with downy yellow fluff on his upper lip and the bottoms of his cheeks. “Richie, hide in the dryer if they get in. See? He’ll be fine.”

“That boy tripped over his own feet taking out the garbage last week and I almost had to stitch up his knee.”

This was true. Both parts. I had tripped, because our driveway has so many holes you could take your pick of fishing when it downpoured, and I’d split my knee right across. Dad had taken one look and went and fetched Mom’s old sewing kit. The only reason I wasn’t sporting black or red thread on my knee was that I’d screamed bloody murder until Dad had sighed, heavily resigned to the fact that his youngest was a fragile flower, and just put butterfly bandages on it. And a lot of hydrogen peroxide.

Danny was not thinking about my knee or me. He probably didn’t really care if a zombie that broke its way through the boarded-up windows ate me. All that would mean was that no one would bug him while he was trying to get to level sixteen on whatever stupid game he was playing, and that he could have all the ice cream in the house since my dad was, to his great shame, deeply lactose intolerant.

Neither of them cared what happened to me. They just cared about their stupid staring contest, and Danny cared about being a man now that his voice was just starting to change and he had the razors all ready for when the peach fuzz on his chin had grown enough to shave. Neither of them cared about me being left alone in the house, and neither of them thought I could help on the ride over to Grandma’s house. I could already picture it: Dad’s hand on Danny’s shoulder, right before they hoisted guns and took out a whole brigade of zombies together, and how they’d be all solemn and heroic. Meanwhile, I’d be here, listening to every little noise from where I was holed up in the dryer, hoping no zombie would come along and decide he’d like his dinner warmed up a bit first. The disposable kid.

Dad’s middle finger tapped softly on the table. “Well, Daniel…”

Daniel! I knew it!

“I’m going, too!” I dropped the notebook and chose, at random and without really looking, a hammer from the table.

“Neither of you are going!” Dad thundered, smacking his palm on the table.

“Dad!” Danny advanced a quick step.

“Yes, we are!” I’m not really sure what I was intending to do with that hammer, but slamming it down on the table was not it. Purely an accident. Knee-jerk response. Making a point.

Shattering the bones in my dad’s left hand.

I’d heard that sort of bellow once before. Dale Green, friend of Dad, had called up asking if my dad would help with the castrating of his big mean bull, Blackie. Blackie had caused just about enough trouble in a five mile radius, ripping fence posts like they were toothpicks when he decided to have at a cow a few farms over. Fences, gardens, and one Subaru all fell victim to Blackie’s lust-induced rages. Mr. Green couldn’t part with ol’ Blackie, not just yet, so he’d decided that castrating would solve things.

So there we were, two boys that Blackie could’ve easily stepped on, stamping our pitiful lives out, sitting on a rock wall, watching the proceedings. Mr. Green and Dad and the vet, who was holding a big needle, all seemed relaxed, even though they had the devil himself by a rope. The vet put that needle in Blackie and said that he’d calm right down. Blackie continued snorting steam, a locomotive of a bull, all engine. And he did, in fact, calm right down.

Right up until the vet put a knife to his giant bull balls. As if he’d been just waiting for that moment, Blackie took a deep breath, bared his teeth, his eyes wild and white, and he swung around, flipping my dad like he was a tadpole on a fishing line. And one of those massive black hooves, a hoof that could kill a boy easy, cannoned into Mr. Green’s midsection.

To his eternal credit, Mr. Green put off the sizeable amount of pain he was feeling and came up from the dirt immediately, bellowing, one of God’s own angels, set on revenge.

Castration fattened Blackie up nicely. We were the lucky recipients of some good steaks and roasts. Mr. Green, it is rumored, ate almost all of that bull himself in one winter.

As my father rose up from his chair, I saw the same pain and rage in his eyes. And unlike Blackie, I took a step back. Unlike Blackie, I know when my time is up.

I fell to the floor, dropping the hammer and covering my head. “I don’t want to be a zombie!” I shrieked.

He bent over me, panting coffee breath in my hair. “Boy.”

It was a miracle I didn’t piss my pants.

“Boy,” he said again. “Get up.”

It took forever to stand, but when I did, I resolved to take it like a man. Whatever it was I had coming.

My dad’s face was red as a tomato, his eyebrows and lips a bizarre white. He stared at me for a minute, and then he walked by and into the bathroom, holding the wrist of his damaged hand.

“Somebody get me the hydrogen peroxide!”

Danny grabbed the bottle. I sank into the chair and waited for my vision to clear. And a little while later, they came out, my dad’s left hand a big bandage. The two of them looked at me, sitting there, sick as a dog.

“Well?” my dad said. “Why don’t you have your boots on yet?”

*

We had exactly one vehicle to our name, a ’78 brown and white Ford Bronco. It sat in what was fondly known as the Garage, a place where a man’s dreams of peace and quiet and a twelve-pack of Bud could come true. It was also the final resting place of a borrowed weed-whacker and assorted other tools that required gas, and it was overrun with mice. I liked playing in there, unless my dad was in there, in which case I’d play elsewhere. Dad was big on Don’t Touch Nothin’ with an added side of Or I’ll Bust Every Finger On Your Hand. And there was a whole lot of stuff in there that just begged to be touched.

We stared at the Garage through the window over the sink. The kitchen door only had a couple of boards nailed over it; we could pry those off and make a run for it. Danny had a rifle over his shoulder, but he hadn’t yet given up on the Slugger. My guess is that he was envisioning himself taking a zombie head clean off with that bat, and I wondered why Dad hadn’t yet told him to leave it. I may have been a kid, but even I could see that if you had one zombie and two choices of weapon, it was always gun over baseball bat.

Dad had a pistol in a holster on his right hip and a rifle slung over his shoulder, and me, I had another hammer. We all had on heavy jackets, despite the humid heat of late August, and our jeans tucked into our boots. Ticks seemed to be the least of our problems at the moment, I thought, but Dad had taken one look at the bottom of my jeans hanging over my boots and said, “You tuck those pants in, son.”

Now he looked at us both, said, “Zip up those jackets. Got gloves? Good. All right. You boys get the boards off the kitchen door, then I’m going out first. When I signal, you come out, too. We go to the Garage, I go in first, and then you. Get in the Bronco. Don’t mess around. You hear me? I said don’t mess around.”

We nodded solemnly. And then Danny and I went to work prying off the boards that we’d just nailed up that morning.

I started to get afraid, because what if the zombies heard all that noise? But Dad stood behind us with his rifle, looking deceptively casual, and anyway, the ruckus seemed to have died down. We hadn’t heard a scream in two hours.

We slipped out the door, Black Ops style, and Dad, who never once locked a door in his life, paused to lock the kitchen door.

I was in such a hurry to get in the car, that I took the most sensible route: straight to the front of the garage, where I grasped the handle and lifted.

“No!” Dad hissed, but it was too late. The garage door screeched like a cat in heat, teetering for ten long seconds before slamming up, the loudest sound for a mile. My heart dropped into my boots and I stood frozen, like a deer. Danny shone a flashlight around the garage.

“All clear,” he said, and then turned towards me. “Idiot.”

I clambered into the Bronco. The back seat smelled reassuringly like hay and mud, and I lay down, breathing it in to calm my nerves.

“Richie.” Good hand on the wheel, bandaged hand in his lap, he turned to peer down at his substandard issue second son. “Listen to me. You do as I say, and not a single goddamned thing else. You got it? You don’t act on your own. What I say.”

“Yes, Dad.” I curled the hammer to my chest.

“Good. Now sit up.” He waited for me to sit, and I pulled myself up and took a deep breath. Mouth tight, he started the car.

I’d never before noticed what a throaty rumble the Bronco had, how loud it sounded when there was nothing else to distract from it. Danny played with the radio dial, as if we’d get something in the car that we couldn’t get in the house, and Dad drove slowly down the driveway, bumping through potholes. We pulled onto our street and slowly began the drive to Grandma’s.

A plethora of amazing sights greeted us before we’d got halfway there. First we saw Sheldon, who had been mostly eaten and therefore, although zombified, lacked the ability to get up and move around. What was left of him lay facedown in his yard, making feeble breaststroke movements but going nowhere amongst all those dandelions he never got to yank. I could see not wasting a bullet on a zombie that you could skip circles around, but further down the street, we saw Mrs. Marge and her fat son, Kyle, banging against the picture window in their living room, arms raised, unable to figure out how to get out of their own house. They seemed contained, so we drove past them, too, even though the Bronco incited them to flail even more.

The Jackson’s cockapoo, Andrew, hobbled onto the road, missing a leg and looking horribly confused and saddened. Dad stopped the Bronco and rolled down the window and shot him, because you don’t let a dog suffer. At the entrance to our sub, two kids ran by, one holding a basketball. Dad slammed on the brakes and yelled out the window for them to get in the truck, and then the one kid holding the basketball saw us and stopped and the other kid caught up and ripped his ear off with his teeth, thus proving that looks can be deceiving. I could see this was a conundrum for Dad, but within seconds, he’d put kids with dogs and shot them both.

We swerved past pick-up trucks flipped over in the road, tried to avoid broken glass, and did not, on any account, stop for people trying to flag us down. Dad was stoic, Danny grim, with fingers like spiders on his rifle, and me, I was simply scared shitless. I saw danger around every turn, every shadowy area, and even behind telephone poles.

Which did not prevent me, when we were midway across our town’s biggest bridge, from shouting, out of long habit, “Bumpy road!”

To my surprise, Danny twisted in his seat and said, “Yeah! Bumpy road!”

Dad’s eyes jerked to Danny and then to me in the rearview. Instead of condemnation, I saw consideration. At the end of the bridge, he could cut across the heart of town, to the left, or he could veer right and take a twisting, dipping, barely two-laned street on the other side of the river. A street which was separated from the river a hundred feet below by only those shanty-houses built half-hanging over the edge, clinging to the edge of the road. Both routes came out at roughly the same place.

“Bumpy road! Bumpy road! Bumpy road!” we chanted and shouted.

Dad turned to glare at both of us, and I thought all hope was lost, when with a swift yank of the steering wheel, we went swinging right. He gunned it, the Bronco roaring along the narrow twists, gaining speed. Danny and I yelled, “All right!” and “Whooo-hoooo!” I put up my hands so that when we hit the biggest dip of them all, halfway through, we’d catch air and my stomach would swoop and maybe – because nobody wore a seat belt in those days, not even little kids – I’d float to the top of the Bronco for a second, which had nice beige padding on the ceiling just for times such as this. Hey, this was as close to a rollercoaster as I was likely to get.

He knew that particular dip was coming up. He gripped the wheel harder with his good hand and leaned forward, foot pressing the gas. He didn’t have to say, “Get ready!” Danny and I were already bouncing like uncontrollable jacks, open-mouthed and practically salivating for that single moment of airborne ecstasy. And for one instant of pure joy, a split-second of happiness, we were transported beyond our meager lives, beyond the world of rust-bottomed trucks and counted cans of tuna, beyond dead mothers and uncles and silent radios, and into outer space. Into euphoria. We were three men lifting off from our seats and flying into glory.

And then the Bronco hit down, rocked, and I caught my father’s eye in the mirror. He was smiling. And by taking his eyes off the road for that nanosecond, he missed the zombie bolting into the street, arms out.

Slam.

A blur of denim and flesh flew into the windshield with a crack. I shrieked, “Dad!” and Danny hollered and his gun blasted through his window. The Bronco swerved, barely missing a rock wall on the hill side of the street, and made a hard left onto the other side, clipping the corner of a house and tearing wood siding off before smashing into some garbage cans and riding onto the front porch. We came to a stop in front of the door, “Portuguese-American Club” painted on a plaque nailed to it.

I had flung forward, grabbing both their seats, and now I hung there, breathing heavily.

“You boys all right?” My dad’s voice seemed huskier than usual. I nodded. Danny, pale and trembling, looked at the gun in his death grip and gently set it to rest against the dash. He nodded.

Dad put it in reverse, the clanging trash cans and creaking, splintered wood no match for the Bronco. Slowly, he angled it back onto the road. He was nearly there when a hand reached down from above and grabbed the side of Danny’s face.

The rest of the girl came sliding down – well, it may not be fair to say “the rest of her,” as a good portion of her had been left behind in the road, or maybe was stewing in some other zombie’s stomach. But there was certainly enough left of her to fall to the ground and spring up again, snarling and spitting and snatching at my brother, who apparently forgot he had a gun right in front of him as he screeched and punched.

Dad stomped the gas, but our new friend had a good hold of Danny’s ear with one bony, bloodied hand, and she would’ve tore it clean off before she let go of him. In perhaps the only span of real clarity in my short life, I saw exactly what needed to be done.

I rolled down my window with lightning speed, skinny arm pumping, and leaned out of the quickly accelerating vehicle. I lifted it behind me and then brought the hammer down with astounding power, right on that bitch’s arm. I mean, that hammer went through bones, crushed cartilage, and with a second and then a third blow, I’d nearly taken it off. One more, right to the side of her skull as she turned to roar at me, and she fluttered away like a wounded moth.

“My ear! My ear!” Danny shouted, cupping the side of his head.

I slid back into my seat, rolled up my window, and sat straight up, holding my weapon on my lap. The Bronco continued its winding, breakneck path down the bumpy road, and with a grunt, hit the proper four-lane street that was Highland and rumbled to a stop.

Danny wailed, rocking back and forth.

“Let’s see,” said Dad. Danny turned his head, sniffling. He was crying. I felt sort of numb, so I couldn’t take proper pleasure in my big brother sniveling like a baby, though I tried to memorize it for later. I looked at the hammer, saw what amounted to bits of bone and gristle on the dark metal head of the thing. I did not feel like I was going to throw up, which surprised me.

“Did she bite you?” he asked, fingers brushing through damp hair on Danny’s head.

“I don’t think so.”

“Good.” Dad eased back into his seat. “Good.” He stared out the windshield and took a deep breath, wiping the sweat from under the brow of his cap.

“Yeah, ’cause if she had, we’d have to shoot you.”

Both their heads whipped around to look at me.

“Well, it’s true,” I said weakly. “If she had--”

“Richie,” my dad warned. I shut up.

The tears dried up on Danny’s face as he looked at me, blue eyes unblinking. And then he turned in his seat and adjusted the gun subtly in his hands. Readying it. The jagged edge of the glass window caught sunlight with a cruel glint amongst the bits of red and brown. Danny swept the window with a jacketed arm. We drove on.

Other cars and trucks, for a short time, passed us or nearly sideswiped us, and then we were on the road out of town, a straight shot to Grandma’s.

It seemed like a funny time of year for a zombie invasion. School started in a few days, and some people already had baskets of mums on their porches, flags hanging with pictures of red barns and pumpkins. They were all set for fall. Our house never had any flag but the American one, with a spotlight on it at night. I wondered what time it was, and if we would be back in time to turn on the light. You weren’t supposed to fly it at night without a light on it. Mr. Gutowski next door complained that the light shone in his bedroom at night, so he wouldn’t do it, assuming he had survived this far. A lot of our neighbors, as far as I could tell, were currently zombified, and thus in no state to consider the sanctity of the U.S. flag.

I thought about asking Dad if we would be back in time to turn on the light. We passed a yard with a sprinkler going, back and forth, the ground being turned to mud. A towel lie sodden at the edge of the water’s reach. A yellow flip-flop caught my eye. I think there were toes in it, maybe half a foot. A small one. I forgot about the flag.

We got to Grandma’s road in record time. It occurred to me that Dad had never driven out here so fast before. I figured it must be because there were hardly any other vehicles on the road.

Her house backed to woodlands, a squat ranch with faded green siding and darker green shutters, white storm door with a plastic flower wreath on it. A freshly sealcoated drive led up to it, lined by bird feeders on tilting poles. In truth, it wasn’t too far removed in appearance from our house, minus the flag. I loved coming here, and I bounced in my seat, ready to bolt out the door. Dad saw me in the mirror as he pulled in.

“Richie. Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t get out until I tell you to. Got it?” He looked at Danny, rifle to his eye like he was a sniper, scanning the yard. “You, too.”

The Bronco idled to a stop, and he turned his head in every direction, searching for trouble. My right knee shook up and down; my tongue poked out the side of my mouth.

The front door slammed open. “Well, what the hell are you doing, just sitting there? Get in here! There’s dead folk running around, you know.”

Danny and I were already out of the car.

“Boys!” he shouted, but it was too late. I ran to her, arms open, hammer up.

“Grandma!”

She grabbed me and hugged me briefly before pushing me through the door. “Go on, Richie. Hello, Danny. Kiss your grandma. That’s a good boy.” She looked up at my dad. “Charles. How nice of you to come.”

“Jessie.” He shut the door behind him, locked it, and pulled the sofa in front of it. There was an enormous picture window that had been bleaching the hell out of the green and pink flowers of the sofa for a good twenty years, and he yanked the curtains closed over it.

“What happened to your hand? Don’t tell me you let yourself get bit by one of those things?”

Dad had the same look that Danny had given me in the car.

“I did it! It was me. With my hammer.” Breathless, I held it up in front of me. “And I saved Danny with it. And then he cried.”

“Well that just proves that you are a heroic little boy. And your brother is very grateful, I’m sure.” She smoothed my hair back as she looked at my father. “And why did you bring the boys, Charles? Couldn’t have left them in a house that’s all boarded up and safe?”

“We’re like the Three Musketeers,” I said. “We stick together.”

“I see,” she said, eyes never leaving my father’s.

“Yes, Jessie. We stick together, us boys.” Dad’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. I smiled up at him. I’d beaten off a zombie, saved my brother, and now my Dad was patting my shoulder as if I was just as satisfactory a son as Danny. It couldn’t get much better at that moment.

“Better late than never, eh, Charles?”

Dad’s face bloomed red. Quietly, he said, “These last two years have been hard enough, Jessie. Why don’t you just let it go?”

“I’d like to, but the past keeps turning up. Like a bad penny. You know what I mean, Charles?”

“I sure do, Jessie. Matter of fact, Mike turned up in our yard this morning.”

Grandma blinked. “Mi—Michael?”

Dad nodded. “Yep.”

“And he’s…”

“I took care of it.”

Grandma’s chin bunched up, and I thought she might cry. She wouldn’t stop staring at my dad, and I hadn’t seen her this furious since the day mom had died. She’d been the one to tell him. To tell us all. She’d been at the hospital; Danny and I had been in bed. I don’t know where Dad was. I remembered waking up at some point earlier that night, blue and red lights flashing on the walls of our bedroom. Danny was already sitting up in the top bunk, looking through the blinds out at the front of our house. “Go back to sleep, Richie,” he’d said, so I did. I didn’t wake until Grandma shook me, telling me to wake up, we had to wake up. Then Dad was there, and Danny slid out of bed onto the floor with a thump, not using the ladder. He never used the ladder anymore. Grandma left us in the room, in the dark, the three of us sitting cross-legged on the floor like we were going to tell ghost stories. I don’t remember what we said. I remember crying. I went back to bed and woke up when it was light, and Dad had the phone to his ear, was already smoking cigarettes, already had an ashtray full. And Grandma was gone, at her own house. Making her own phone calls.

But Dad had been the one to tell her about Uncle Mike. About the motorcycle. I’d passed the pizza place where he’d skidded and crashed a bunch of times in the last few weeks. It was by Jason Diehl’s house. I went there to play HORSE a lot. He wasn’t that good, but neither was I, so it was more fun. Well, more fun than playing with Danny, anyway. We’d looked at the asphalt. You couldn’t tell. I’d kicked pebbles and scuffed my sneaker. I’d wondered what happened to the motorcycle, where it was since that night. It had been my dad’s, originally. He’d sold it to Uncle Mike to pay some bills.

There’d been an argument about that part of things. Grandma had shown up at our house – a miracle, as she hadn’t set foot in there since the night Mom had died – and slapped down an envelope with the cash for the bike. Told my dad to leave Michael alone.

Dad had casually slit open the envelope with his ivory-handle pocket knife, counted the bills out, and said, “I believe I’ll do that, Jessie. Coffee?”

Grandma declined, which was good since my dad had been drinking the last of the pot and was obviously making no move towards making another one. She hugged both of us, told us to be good boys or she’d swat our behinds, and left. Dad waited until her car was on the street and gone before he got up and opened the can of Maxwell House to make another pot. The envelope sat on the counter for a day and then was gone. Uncle Mike crashed the bike two days later.

Three weeks later, he’d continued his spree of irresponsibility into the afterlife, or afterdeath, by eating most of our dog, Jenny, and by making one of hell of a mess of the pool. Dad seemed unsurprised, but Grandma clearly struggled with the evidence that even undead, her adored son was a delinquent. A malfeasance. Or, as my dad had said once, a little puke.

My father took no joy in this, and eventually he said, “All right. Don’t you have a basement door needs boarding up?”

I’d boarded up enough things that day. It was a fact that I could now board something up without even looking at it. I could probably watch Saturday morning cartoons while boarding up an entire foyer.

“I’m sick of boarding things up,” I whined. “Can we have cookies?”

“No,” my dad said. “Later. You help your grandmother. Now. Go on.”

I sighed and slumped my shoulders and the head of the hammer dragged across the carpet, leaving behind a trail of zombie viscera and despondency. I was at the door to the basement before I stopped and stood up straight.

“Where’s Danny? He has to help, too.”

Dad and Grandma broke off their staring contest. Their heads swiveled towards the back of the house.

Dad sprinted, but Grandma was hot on his heels, screaming for Danny.

I looked at my hammer. Remembered what we’d come for.

A wish like a pencil stab, small and hard in my throat: I should’ve stayed home. I could be in the dryer right now. I could’ve curled up in there, gone to sleep…

I jogged after them, through the dining room, into the kitchen.

Danny stood in front of the door to the sunroom, gun raised. He was shaking.

Something looked back at him. Something leaned its rotting forehead against the glass pane, knocking, knocking. Something with long brown hair, that’s all I could see. All anyone could see. All anyone could tell.

You couldn’t tell.

“Son…”

“Stay back, Dad. I’m doing this myself.”

“Danny, it might not be her. You can’t tell,” I said.

“It’s her.” The tip of the gun touched the glass. The something opened its jaws, mouthing the glass, smearing it.

“Danny, listen to me--”

“Go away, Grandma. Go away now.”

My dad made a move to grab Danny’s shoulder with his good hand. “Son--”

“STAY BACK!”

It has always been the failing of the older brother to underestimate his younger sibling. And so it was in that moment, as he focused on the thing on the other side of the door and on the two adults in the kitchen with him, that he didn’t see me come up behind him and, with one uneven swing, smack him in the back with my hammer.

He fell to the floor, the gun falling beside him, safety still on.

Twisting like an inchworm, he wheezed desperate, angry sounds before barking, “What’d you do that for?”

“You shouldn’t do that, Danny! It’s not your job.”

“It is my job, you stupid little…” He began to sob, rolling onto his stomach. “It is my job.”

Everyone ignored the thing in the sunroom, which resumed knocking and swaying. Grandma was right. It wasn’t going to be busting down any doors anytime soon.

Grandma helped him to sit up, telling my dad to get the boy something to drink, he was probably crazed with dehydration.

She rubbed his shoulders. “Why, Danny? Your father can do this. You don’t have to.”

“Because,” he sniffled. “Because…”

“Well, spit it out,” said my dad, handing him a juice box from the fridge.

Hands trembling, Danny finally got the little straw into the hole. He sucked down half that box before looking up, tears drying on his face.

“Because I’m gonna be one of them soon anyway.”

“The fuck you are,” growled my dad.

“Language, Charles,” Grandma snapped. “Honey, you ain’t gonna die for a long time, if that’s what you mean. We’re here to see to that, don’t you worry. And you, too, Richie.”

“No. I will be. Look.”

Richie pulled down the collar of his coat. There, low on his neck under the ear that the zombie had been yanking on, were two red scrapes, dried blood beading along the edges.

“It could be any time,” he whispered. “I feel it already. It’s happening. I got to… I got to do it, I got to shoot her, and then myself.”

“Uh-huh,” said my dad. “Richie, give me that goddamned hammer.”

I handed it over, immediately feeling strange and unprotected without it. In a matter of only hours, it had become part of me. An extension of my hand. I wanted it back.

Dad put the claw of the hammer against the scrapes. A perfect match. He sighed, pushed his cap back and rubbed his arm across his forehead.

“You weren’t bitten, son. Your fool of a brother almost scalped you, that’s what happened.”

It’s amazing how fast the feeling of being a beloved son can seep away, like the last snowman on the first warm day in spring.

“I didn’t mean to!” I squeaked.

“Now, Charles, he was saving Danny’s life.”

“I was!” Those blows, each of them, I could see in my mind: the purpling flesh of the zombie taking them, the head of the hammer burying itself again and again. I’d been leaning out the window of a speeding car; it was all blurry, but I hadn’t meant to hit Danny.

Dad stood up, supporting Danny for a minute.

“He almost killed me? You little prick!”

“Hey!” Grandma slapped his face so fast that I felt the wind on my own face. “I said, language. The only one who gets to cuss around here is me. We all clear on that? Good. Now the way I see it, your brother saved your life from one of those dead folks. You got a scratch in the process. It appears you will live. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe you have said thank you to your brother, have you?”

I almost said, “No, he didn’t,” but then wisely kept that to myself.

“Have you?”

Danny touched the scrapes and winced. “Thanks, Richie.”

“All right. Now listen here. Me and the boys are going into the basement so they can board up the cellar door. When we come up, I expect that the sunroom will be empty. And then we can have something to eat.”

We all nodded, even Dad. Richie left behind the gun, taking his Slugger, and I got my hammer back. I used it to put boards over the door in the basement to the outside, though that door was metal and had, I remembered, a padlocked chain on it. Still, we hammered and Grandma watched and told us what good grandsons she had, she couldn’t believe her luck. We all pretended not to hear the gunshot, and some time was spent going through the boxes of old toys before we finally went back up.

The electricity finally went out around nine, but we’d made the house a nice little fort while Grandma cooked a chicken, and with bellies stuffed, we lay in the dark in sleeping bags on the floor. Danny and I took turns scaring each other with increasingly bizarre stories, until we were both laughing so hard that we forgot what we were laughing at. Dad yelled for us to keep it down out there, and we muffled giggles in our pillows until we fell asleep.

When we were older, Dan and I would laugh again, recalling the time I’d tried to scalp him with a hammer. He’d remind me of the time Dad had tried to stitch up my knee himself, and I’d grab my knee and take another swig of my beer, trying to not spit it out because of my laughter. We put our arms around each other as we stood over Grandma’s coffin, and we whispered so that no one else could hear that she’d been a good ol’ broad, but that Grandpa had died first for good reason. We stood at Dad’s bedside and let him tell us that the visiting nurse was a fine piece of ass, and we agreed when our wives were out of earshot. We also all agreed that she talked too much. And sometimes, looking at Dan’s beagle, Sadie, we’d say how good Jenny was, and it was too bad that Uncle Mike had been such a jerk like that, and then we’d laugh and raise a toast to Jenny, and to Sheldon and Louise, and a whole lot of other folks now long gone. We dedicated the rose garden that used to be the pool to them; there’s a gnome in the center of it, and the kids like to take him out and put him other places. I found him in my shower one morning. No one has ever fessed up, because they all know better.

We didn’t ever, none of us, speak of Mom again. Dan and I say that if we didn’t laugh, we’d cry, and that’s become sort of our family motto. We holed up in Grandma’s house for two months, occasionally making forays back to our old house for supplies. The Bronco mowed down more than its fair share of walking dead, and it has now been retired to a junkyard outside of town, another steel zombie, rusting itself into obscurity. I am a gin rummy champ, and Dan could take the head right off a person with his Louisville Slugger if said person was zombified, but thankfully, that talent isn’t called for these days.

So, no, we don’t talk about her. I’m not even sure it was her in the sunroom that day, but Grandma believed so, and if anyone else did, well, they are welcome to believe what they want. I believe that she was my mother, and she died, and that my father and my brother and I made up the Three Musketeers after that. And when my time finally came to cry for her, it was many long years after that day. And I don’t believe she minded.

Supper Time by Col Bury

2011-07-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

SUPPER TIME - COL BURY

Things began to look a bit grim the day me cock fell off.

I knew my festered state made it likely that this kinda thing would happen, having lost an ear one particularly windy night. But fuck me, please, not my old purple-headed warrior for pity’s sake! To be fair, I’m kinda twirling you saying, ‘purple’, cos it’s been edging toward greeny-brown recently. But, hey, a cock’s a cock, and mine was a belter, even if I do say so me-self. And things just ain’t the same without it.

Am supposing you may wanna hear how it happened. Well, okay, then.

Me an’ a few friends were scouring the streets for fresh flesh, when we sees this tasty piece of stuff running across the road, screaming. Like flies round shit, we’re onto her. But she’s fast, and makes it into this decrepit looking barn.

I admit, we just, stereotypically, bang on the locked wooden door, all wide-eyed, grunting, groaning and drooling. Pathetic really, looking back. Then, in the moonlight, this madman steams round the corner and starts swinging a fuckin’ samurai sword. Before I could even say, “Supper time,” there’s black blood everywhere, an’ two of me buddies’ heads are rolling past me on the floor. It was quite a shock.

This maniac goes through us like there’s no tomorrow. He’s bang out of order, in my humble opinion. So, it’s just me an’ Gwendolyn left. I sees him swinging for her, as his smirking bitch peers down from the barn’s window.

I’m thinking, “If I can’t have your bird, then you’re not havin’ mine.” So I jumps in front of Gwendolyn. That’s when the sword hits me square in the dick. It wasn’t that painful, but I sensed summat was wrong when I felt a gush running down me leg. Yep, me cock was hanging by a bloody thread.

Anyway, the fucker’s still swinging and I ducks down an’ he’s off balance. Bingo! We’re onto him like hyenas on a carcass. As we tears into each sinew, I looks at the bitch upstairs. She ain’t smirking now. But I am, as I chews an eyeball until it pops.

Now, I knows how Gwendolyn likes a bit a cock, but just as she goes to bite this guy’s, I shout, “NO!”

Being the lady that she is, Gwendolyn recoils an’ leaves it for me, and I uses the sword to do the necessary.

I’m pretty pleased with Gwendolyn really, cos she knows I does the dirt on her with some of the other ladies, and she could ‘ve got me back there an’ then. But I did save her death, didn’t I?

Okay, now, Gwendolyn’s no embroiderer, but she’s better than me cos I’m a bloke. So later on, we searches the many empty houses around these parts and finally finds a needle an’ cotton. It’s fair to say, the maniac’s cock wasn’t exactly sufficient to replace mine, but, like I says, a cock’s a cock. An’ at least this one was a bit of a looker - all pink an’ new looking. Result! I feels like a man again.

Or so I thought.

The fact that Gwendolyn sowed it on upside-fookin-down hasn’t affected our relationship too much. But she smirks at me now an’ then, which kinda pisses me off a bit. The bitch.

Food Is Other People by Jimmy Callaway

2011-07-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

FOOD IS OTHER PEOPLE - JIMMY CALLAWAY

Chuck had just woken me up, firing his rifle out the window and cussing, when I trip over Carny’s body in the kitchen.

“Hey,” I say to Chuck, “you’d better come see this.”

Chuck’s eyes are kinda pissed under his hunting cap, but they kinda brighten a little when they see Carny’s body laying in a pool of blood. He switches his camping lantern over to his other hand, the one with the rifle. “Sucks for Carny,” is all he says, his breath hanging in front of his face.

“Yeah,” I say, the electric warmth of the lantern against my sleeve, “he musta just done—”

Chuck puts a bullet in Carny’s forehead. Carny’s body gives a little jump, and in the glow of the lantern, the blood spatter on the fridge is black.

“Better him than me,” Chuck says. He puts his pistol back in his jacket pocket and turns away.

“Wait, wait,” I say, “gimme the light, will ya?”

He hands it over and rushes back to the window, where it’ll be Crack! and then either, “Shit!” as in he got one, or “Shit,” as in missed again.

Crack!

“Shit.”

I hold the lantern over Carny’s body. He had stripped down to nothing but a T-shirt, socks, and tighty whiteys. A steak knife is in his left hand. His opened wrists gape up at me. I try and keep the light away from his face.

He’s wearing his Misfits T-shirt, the one with the cover to the “Earth A.D.” album. I always liked that shirt, with the dungeon or whatever, and all the undead and shit like that. Carny would never let me borrow it. Figures he’d kill himself while wearing it.

Something’s weird, though. The shirt’s kinda bunched up at the top of Carny’s stomach, and it looks sticky too, like he’s spilled Hershey’s syrup on it or something. I squat down and peel it back some. Carny’s still stomach is still warm. A big fart escapes from under him.

“Hey, Chuck,” I say, “come lookit this.”

Crack!

“Shit. What?” Chuck tromps back in thick boots.

“Lookit this,” I say.

Chuck reads out loud the words carved in Carny’s chest. “‘Abandon all hop,’” he says. “Abandon all hop? The hell’s that mean?”

I shrug.

“Look, man, our pal Mr. Carnahan’s in the past tense now. So who cares what freaky shit he did to himself before he died. At least now there’ll be a little more food to go around.” Back to the window he goes.

“Yeah,” I say. Something itches at the back of my mind. Something we were supposed to have done if Carny hadn’t bought the farm on his own. About what we were supposed to do after the little to go around went around. It itches, but I don’t scratch.

Abandon all hop.

“Hey,” Chuck calls from the window, “you gotta come see this.”

I go over to the window, pulling my watch cap, the only thing of my dad’s that I ever kept, down over my ears a little more and blowing uselessly into my hands. My stomach gnarls itself in my gut, but I’m used to that by now. Well, sorta.

I look out the window and there they are, a whole bunch of ‘em down on the street two floors below us. Most of ‘em lay crumpled on the ground like rotting fruit where Chuck had shot ‘em. Some still wander around, groaning, moaning, shuffling in that hinky way they have when they’re not chasing somebody. Them things.

They’re not human. They can’t be. They’re not alive. They’re not really dead. Even after Chuck wastes one, and its head’ll explode and the rest of its body’ll hang there, still standing for a second before collapsing under its own weight, even then, I still expect it to get up and start shuffling around again.

It seems harder for them to walk in the snow. They trip over shit more often, especially on a day like this when the snow—goddammit, it’s cold—the snow covers everything, the remains of Chuck’s previous days’ hits, the cars at the curb, the overturned truck in the middle of the street. Everything is topped by a crushing gray sky, and the buildings across the street, the hollowed-out apartments and storefronts, sag under the pressure. Even the footprints—if you can even call them that, more like dragmarks—even the footprints them things leave behind are just gray smears on the slightly less gray snow.

We only saw them get ahold of a live person one time. Me and Carny and Chuck watched as the fat girl across the way climbed down her fire escape. It was about noon on a clear day, cold, but nowhere near like today. There weren’t many of them things out on the street, and Chuck figured out loud that she was making a break for her car, a little new model VW Bug, typical fat girl’s car. But then three or four of them appeared outta the alley next to the Pizza Hut.

The fat girl screamed and fell off the fire escape, her jacket rippling up in the wind. We could hear her leg crack when she landed on it. Help, help, she yelled, and I could hear the hoarseness in her throat, and then her words turned into—into…I dunno what, not another scream exactly, but then they were on top of her. Them things can move pretty damn fast when there’s food on the table like that. They’d never moved as fast before, I’d bet, not before the shit hit the fan, before they all started jumping outta their graves like a buncha fuckin’ Pop-Tarts.

Anyways, then Carny barfed all over himself. He told me later that the fat girl was looking right at him as them things tore at her.

What Chuck wants me to see now is pretty obvious: Audrey Appleby. Or at least what used to be Audrey Appleby. She’s still wearing her Vons smock, but it’s torn at one shoulder and flaps around as she shuffles up the other side of the street. Her yellow hair is ratty and hangs in her eyes, and it looks like she’s having a hard time keeping her head up. Could be because her throat’s ripped out, blood all down her front.

As we watch, she bumps into another one of them, a guy in a business suit with half his scalp and one eye missing. This one goes, “Uhn,” and falls over, squirming around, making a fucked-up snow angel. Audrey keeps going. I mean, it isn’t Audrey, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“You wanna take her out?” Chuck says, offering me the rifle.

“No,” I say, “Why would I wanna do that? No.”

“Seymour,” Chuck says, “there are so few benefits to all this shit. But when else would you’ve had the chance to put a bullet in the head of the bitch that got you fired? Huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, “but it still seems kinda…I dunno. Boucher walks in and sees us like that, who’s to say I wouldn’a done the same—and hey, y’know, if I hadn’t got fired, I wouldn’a been home when you boarded up the door. I’d be one’a…y’know, right?” I blow into my hands some more.

Chuck shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, and puts his eye to the rifle’s sight. Audrey is just shuffling past the Pizza Hut, smock flip-flapping, when Chuck pulls the trigger.

Crack!

The shot musta just glanced off her temple, because instead of exploding, her head whips to the right so hard that it tears off of what’s left of her neck and smashes through the big Pizza Hut plate glass window. The glass smashes and shards cling to the pane, so it looks like a big mouth fulla jagged teeth. The rest of Audrey is kinda pulled to the right too by her head being ripped off and it leans all the way over and impales itself on several giant shards of window. Her feet kick a few times and stop.

“Shit!” Chuck yells, “Shit yeah, ya fuckin’ cunt!” Spit flecks the barrel of his rifle. “Ya fuckin’ pile’a shit, ya!”

My stomach growls. “Maybe we should go look for food,” I say.

“Maybe we should just both eat the barrel’a this fuckin’ thing,” Chuck says, “Go out like your pussy buddy in the kitchen. Go outside? Wind up one’a them things?”

“We’ll end up that way anyway if we starve to death,” I say.

Chuck shakes his head. “Look, man,” he says, “by tonight, tomorrow night at the latest, I’ll have wasted every one’a them things near here.” He pats the boxes and boxes of ammunition that he sits on. “Then we can go out and get all the Spaghetti-O’s you can stand.”

“Chuck—”

“Seymour, you go out there before I give the all-clear, you ain’t gettin’ back in.” He wipes at the frozen snot in his mustache. “I’m just as hungry as you are,” he says, “but I ain’t gonna end up one’a them things. Understand?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say and get up to walk around, get my blood flowin’. It seems like these last few days I can’t stay in one place for two minutes before I start to lose the feeling in my toes. I dunno how Chuck can just sit on those boxes all day, all night.

“Can we have some crackers at least?” I say. Chuck sits on those too, what’s left of a carton of Saltines. As long as I’ve known Chuck, he’s been preparing for the end of the world. Leave it to him to store more ammo than rations.

Chuck moves his sleeve to look at his watch. “‘Nother hour,” he says.

“Man,” I say.

“Hey, it woulda been an hour and a half if Carny hadn’t carved himself up,” he says, “So shut up.”

Crack!

“Shit.”

“I’m gonna go jerk off,” I say.

“Yeah,” Chuck says.

I’ve been jerking off a lot lately, way more so than usual. Anything to keep my mind off of food, if only for a little while. But it’s really hard today. Or should I say, it’s not hard at all. Back in my room, I’ve got a stack of porn as high as an elephant’s eye—all magazines, fortunately. Videos don’t do me much good since the power went out. But then as I kneel there, I gotta keep my gloves on, since my frozen hands make for a pretty limp noodle, no matter how fast I rub it. Then, on top of that…I dunno, y’know, the usual stuff just ain’t doing it for me today.

This one Hustler I got, it’s practically falling apart, and it’s got a spread called “Baked Alaska”—“Nina, the naughty naturalist, gets more than just photos from immense Inuit Ikuk and his eight-incher!” That usually gets me right off, but nothin’ doin’ today. There’s this other spread in Penthouse called “Hot Dogs and Donuts” about a hot dog cart guy fucking this hot-ass yellow-haired chick working at a donut shop, but still zilch, nada. A big, fat goose egg.

I try other stuff. I think about this video I used to have where these two chicks ride opposite ends of a cucumber. I reach under my balls and try to recreate the feeling of that time Marcia Baker tossed my salad for me.

Crack!

“Shit.”

Thinking of Audrey is what finally does it. Not that time, the time when I got fired, but there was this one other time we shared a joint out by the dumpster on our lunch break, and she got the munchies real bad and snaked an apple outta Produce, and I watched her eat it in the break room. I slow down the film in my head so I can watch it again.

Her little white teeth sink into it, her head jerks back ever so slightly as she pulls the bite out, a wet crunch. She licks the juice from her pink lips. My dick gets hard before her teeth, now speckled red with tiny flecks of apple skin, sink back into the fruit. She doesn’t even notice I’m watching, she closes her eyes with every bite, and I can see the little sparklies in her pale blue eye shadow. After every swallow, she goes “Mm” real deep in her throat, and I have to sit on my hands there in the break room to keep from whipping it out right then. She finishes it that way, slow and steady, then nibbles at the core, and just in time, because right then, Mr. Boucher and his haircut come in and tell us break’s over.

I rewind the film back a little to before Boucher comes in, and watch her nibble at the ends of the core, the rounded part, watch her tongue flicker over the white apple meat already starting to darken, and she finishes just as I, in my bedroom, in the freezing cold, finish.

Crack!

“Ooooh, shit!”

I reach for my come-rag, this crusty old sock I keep handy, and start to clean myself off when I notice the sock’s covered in ants. I drop it like a hot potato, and I have to flick a couple ants off my dick. I lean over the sock on the floor, my pants still down, and look at it. Man, it is fucking crawling with ants. The sock is stiff and pretty much yellowed out with ancient jizzum, and those ants are having a smorgasbord on my sperm. Lucky bastards.

I get so fucking hungry kneeling here, just watching those lucky bastards go, that I decide the hell with it. I reach behind my stack of porn, under some dirty underwear, and pull out a can of Chef Boyardee X-Men in tomato and cheese sauce.

I hold the can, feel its weight in my hand. I look at the label starting to tear at the bottom, at Wolverine and Cyclops and Storm jumping out at me from a bowl of fun pasta shapes. I wrap my fingers around the can, grip it a little tighter, trying to memorize how it feels to hold a full can of food.

I lift the tab and peel back the lid, slowly so Chuck won’t hear, slowly to draw this out, slowly to make it last. The lid warns, Caution: Sharp Edges. My stomach cramps and my asshole starts to sorta pucker.

The lid is back and that cold smell punches me, like copper and limes. The sauce is orange and thick-looking, probably half-frozen. I bring my nose closer and inhale deeply. I stick my fingers in and lift out a couple of the shapes, slowly so they won’t break. Shapes. I think that’s a Wolverine. Could be Professor X, I dunno. They don’t look like people.

I don’t realize what a ridiculous figure I must cut until Chuck’s standing over me. Kneeling, pants down, limp noodle flapping in the breeze, fingers deep into a can of unshared food.

I don’t say anything.

He cracks me in the face with butt of his rifle.

I once read that prisoners of war usually hallucinate either food or the fiery pits of Hell. I, in turn, hallucinate my dad.

For a second, I think he’s one’a them things, but he killed himself over thirty years ago. I mean, he wouldn’t have any flesh left on him now, right? But here he is, looking younger than I do. He’s sitting at the dinner table in the little dining nook we have off the living room, next to the kitchen. This is when I realize I’m not in my bedroom. I’m fully clothed. My head is killing me.

Crack!

“Shit.”

“Hey, Chuck, my dad’s here.” Chuck ignores me. Or he doesn’t hear me, I dunno. My dad sits there at the table in his boxers and T-shirt, just staring off. The outline of him is kinda blurry, y’know, like a bad blue-screen effect. I reach up and touch my watch cap.

In front of my dad is a heaping plate of chicken parmesan. My mouth gushes with spit, like it’ll do right before you puke. My stomach clenches a fist and punches me in the colon. The red of the marinara, the brown breading gasping for air in an ocean of sauce, the fine spots of blonde pasta. My dad picks up the plate, holding it carefully by its underside with the tips of his fingers. He brings the plate to his face and his eyeballs seem to steam over. He bites into the plate, food and all, like a tostada. I have to turn away. I can still hear the crunch of ceramic as he chews, like it’s in my own head, my own mouth. “Chuck,” I say, “Chuck, my dad’s here.”

Crack!

“Shit.”

“Chuck,” I say. “Chuck,” I say, “I’m sorry, I—”

“Yeah, I’d be, too.”

Crack!

“Shit.”

I turn back to the table. My dad’s gone. “I,” I say, “I think I’m hallucinating.”

“Yeah, I’d be, too.” And then Chuck eats his rifle, tearing at it from the barrel down like it’s a foot-long, with relish, sucking little bits of iron from his teeth between bites. I pass out, or something, before he gets to the stock.

My dad was a POW, from 1967 until he came home in 1972. I always knew which conversations to eavesdrop on because my mom would always send me to my room to play. “Seymour, go to your room and play.” Short men in olive green uniforms would come around, and from what I could piece together from the upstairs hallway, my dad was in someplace called The Zoo, or How Loo maybe, I dunno, and then it was the Hanoi Hilton. It was like he was on vacation. I remember being jealous.

There’s no boards on the door.

“There’s no boards on the door, Chuck,” I say.

Crack!

“Shit.”

They bust down the door like cops, like a buncha pigs. One of ‘em, it looks like, was a cop, a motorcycle cop. His helmet’s half-gone and so are half his mirrorshades. The air flows in behind them, cold and sweet.

“Chuck! They’re in here!” A hershey squirt shoots into my pants.

“Yeah, I’d be, too.”

Crack!

“Shit.”

He’s still firing out the window. There’s three or four of them things in here now, all going, “Urh” or “Gnng” or “Gray.” The cop and a black dude and some lady. I go for the hallway and can barely put my hands up before I hit the two-by-fours with my face. Blood starts to leak from my nose and I try yanking on the boards, but they’re nailed tight.

I plaster my back to the boards, trying to push myself through them, atom by atom, but still wanting to watch my own death. The air coming in is so cold and I start shivering so much that my goddamn teeth start falling out. They go right by me.

Jesus Christ, they go right by me. The cop and the black dude and the lady and the bald kid, twenty years old or so and already losing his hair. All around the coat rack, through the dining nook, into the kitchen. They all go, “Urh!” and “Gnng!” again, more excited. And then there’s a big tearing sound, and they kinda hunker down, and Jesus, Carny’s body.

They’re fuckin’ eating Carny’s body.

I peek over the counter a little. Two of them, the bald kid and the EMT, are fighting over a big chunk of Carny, the bald kid with Carny’s right shoulder, the EMT with his left arm. Carny’s head lolls around and then he opens his eyes and looks at me. Looking me right in the eye. Something itches.

“Chuck, I’m hallucinating.”

Crack!

“Shit.”

“Chuck, I’m hallucinating. Carny. Carny’s dead.” Something itches at the back of my mind.

“Yeah, I’d be, too.”

I barf all over myself.

First thing when my dad came home, he gave me his watch cap. He just put it on my head and then hugged my mom for a long time. But he wouldn’t look at me. He looked at my mom, but not at me, that I remember anyway. He didn’t talk really either, not beyond “No,” or “Maybe,” or “I dunno.” But mostly he just stared off.

He ate like a demon, every meal: breakfast, brunch, lunch, linner, dinner, midnight snack. He would tear whole steaming chickens apart with his hands, the gizzards, the necks, suck out the marrow. My mom would have to make another one for me and her. He never gained any weight that I remember. He was always pale. His neck cords always stood out and his cheeks sunk in. His first night home, at dinner, my mom, all shaky, said, “Bet you missed eating like this, huh, Frank?” My father just looked at her. She never tried making dinner conversation again. I always made sure to clean my plate.

We went to The Lemon Tree one night for dinner and it was the same routine: less talk, more eat. Halfway through the soup, this big, fat businessman-lookin’ guy at the next table belched and got up, picking his teeth in his loud suit. He balled up the napkin from his collar and tossed it on his table, turned and stopped. My father was standing in front of him.

“Uh, excuse me, friend,” the fat man said.

My dad didn’t move.

“Y’seem to be, uh...”

My dad pointed at the fat man’s plate. A big chunk of meat, liver it looked like, lay congealing in its own juices. Onions, some split by the fat man’s steak knife, lay stinking on top of it. A cigarette butt poked from the left-over mashed potatoes.

The fat man followed my dad’s finger, then retraced his steps to my dad’s face. I touched my watch cap. I had no idea what was going on. My mom neither, but she didn’t say, just pushed a stray strand of yellow hair back behind her ear. The fat man seemed to grasp it right away.

“Now see here, friend—”

My dad grabbed the fat man’s pointing finger and twisted the whole arm around the fat man’s back. “Gaa!” the fat man said. With his free hand, my dad grabbed the back of the fat man’s head, palmed it like a basketball, and shoved the fat man’s face into the plate. He let go of the fat man’s arm and grabbed the half a liver, shoved it into the fat man’s face. “Gnng,” the fat man said. Mashed potatoes, butt and all, were next. Two busboys tried to break it up, but they weren’t ex-Marine Corps and they got swatted like flies at a picnic. The fat man said, “Gnng,” again, and “Urh.” My dad took the fat man’s water glass, nothing but ice left, and dumped it out on him. As he turned back to our table, the glass fell from his hand. It rolled away from him, like the whole restaurant was doing now, and I felt it come to a stop at my feet. And then my dad looked at me. Looking me right in the eye.

Two weeks later, he blew his head off.

At the funeral, I overheard some of his Marine buddies say my dad ate his gun. “Frankie ate his gun, just like Romaine last month.” He ate his gun, my dad.

When I wake up, it feels like I’ve grown a goatee. When I feel my chin, I realize it’s just dried barf. The boards are back on the front door. My head is killing me. I haven’t heard Chuck fire a shot.

“Chuck.”

“Don’t talk to me.”

I sit there. A long time. Something itches at the back of my mind. My stomach feels like it’s being inflated by an asthmatic.

The little to go around has gone around.

I get up and walk into the kitchen. The blood spatter on the fridge is black. I open the silverware drawer and find that big roasting fork we got. I kneel down and take the steak knife outta Carny’s hand, get a firm grip on its handle.

Abandon all hop.

Crotchless Waltz by Richard Godwin

2011-07-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

CROTCHLESS WALTZ - RICHARD GODWIN

Every year they came there and partied. They wore the latest gear and stared at themselves in mirrors that stretched in a line of narcissism along the walls of the house that stood on the hill staring down into the valley. Sally and her friends, the beautiful young things, pliant and ready, perfumed and effervescent like a cheap drink. They’d arrive in their boyfriends’ cars and stand fixing their make up in the pale twilight that edged too quickly into blackness, entering the house with smudged lipstick they fixed while their boyfriends got ready for the action.

Sally had bought the house and made it as disrespectful as she could to the small community of labouring farmers that lay below her dreaming of her death with resentment etched into the lines of their hands. They tilled the soil and raised the crops that the crowd on the hill showed little interest in, bringing their own food and drinks.

That summer, Sally turned up with Des, her new fellow, who screeched to a halt in a Porsche and stood scratching his dick while she and her friends went inside.

‘Great place, Sally,’ Mandy said.

‘Yeah, I bought it for nothing.’

‘Place like this costs money.’

‘Nah, something to do with the previous owner disappearing and the bank needing the dough, you know how it goes.’

‘What is this, some hick community?’

‘Don’t know, I only been down there once.’

‘Yeah, tell Mandy what they have in the single shop this place boasts,’ Des said.

Sally laughed.

‘There’s this sign over the door that says “this community looks after itself and always has”. The shop looks about a hundred years old.’

‘What does it sell?’ Mandy said.

‘I have no idea, all I could see was rotten meat.’

Mandy stood knee deep in boots and looked at Des’s friend Eddy. They were eyeing her and tittering as they fixed the girls some drinks.

‘What does her makeup say to you?’ Des said.

‘It says she likes getting fucked in the john,’ Eddy said.

Before long the music blasted out of the house as the others turned up.

The woods were black below them and the faint rustling of leaves troubled some of the animals which headed into the branches. The rhythm was not the rhythm of the usual nocturnal wanderers. The sound from the house boomed down into the trees and between the beats of the music a low breathing like a snarl could be heard in the woods.

In the house, someone stuck on Ice T, and as ‘I Must Stand’ blasted the dormant farmhouses into a sudden eruption of lights and fury, Sally blew Des in a back room.

She leaned over him in her tight skirt and took off her bra as she unzipped him and rubbed him to hardness.

In the woods, he stared out at the night with black eyes that saw spectral shapes and the waves of music rippling down to him as if beckoning him in. He smelt their perfume and felt nauseous.

The party was getting rowdier by the time the visitor arrived. He stood outside in rags and listened to the sounds, smelling flesh and sex in the still night air. He registered the strange incomprehensible sounds of laughter and excitement and wondered what strange breed of animals these were.

It was his smell that hit Eddy as he stepped through the door. The lights were low and he had his hand up Mandy’s skirt and, as he parted her lips, the stench of rotten flesh engulfed him.

‘Fuck me,’ he said, snapping his head back.

Then the screaming started. Some of the partygoers ran, but he held them at the door, ripping their flesh to ribbons with claws that curved like talons. The rest tried to run for the stairs, but he moved too fast and tore them to the bone.

In the back room, Sally had her mouth round Des’s cock.

The playlist moved to Lou Reed’s ‘Sally Can’t Dance’ as she stood up and took off her skirt.

‘I got my new crotchless panties on, honey,’ she said.

Des started to pull her towards him as he heard the screaming.

They raced out of there to see Mandy bleeding. Her top was ripped open and she was pumping blood onto the floor.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Des said, staring at the decayed flesh and rags that walked towards him.

As he got close to him Des began to retch, bending and contracting as he tried to swallow bile.

He reached out a hand and touching Sally with his talons said: ‘Did you dance with Picasso’s illegitimate mistress?’

‘What?’ Sally said.

And he led her across the floor in a macabre waltz.

And as Lou Reed intoned ‘Sally is losing her face’, Sally briefly made the last dance steps of her life, hopping and moving in her new panties before he opened her up from crotch to neck and watched her wobble to a legless halt. He pulled Mandy’s heart out and slung it against the wall. Then he turned and cut open Eddy’s neck in a neat arc, and tore Des to pieces by the door.

It was black outside as he stepped into the night and entered the woods. And below him the lights went off as the farmers went to sleep.

Princesa by R.S. Bohn

2011-06-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

PRINCESA - R.S. BOHN

She wore a three thousand dollar necklace and nothing more. In the gloom by the closed curtains, she stood surrounded by vase after vase of white flowers: lilies and roses and drooping, heavy bunches of lilac. Their scent filled the room, but despite their apparent freshness, they must have been nearly finished: underneath, the scent of fetid water, rotting petals, softened stems. She was as pale as the flowers sent by her suitors.

The door clicked shut behind me -- the maid, who had not entered, who had not said a word to me when I had arrived, announcing myself, politely, as the doctor. I assumed the woman only knew Spanish, but when I had spoken to her in our shared language, she only stared at me, mute. And now I was alone with her mistress, in a closed room that smelled of decaying flowers.

“I am the doctor, Princesa,” I said. “Senor Morales.”

In the shadows of the enormous bed, with its twisting posts thick as horses’ legs beneath a canopy of lace, she was lithe and dark-haired and with a belly only a little too plump for her frame. I wondered if I had been called here to dispose of a minor social problem. It happens. I always carried the necessary tools with me.

“May I put my bag here?” When she did not answer, I put the bag on a settee. I opened it, listening closely for sounds of breathing problems, or of physical pain, but I heard nothing in that closed room. I took out my stethoscope and approached her, slowly.

“Stop.” Her voice emerged gin-bruised and jolting.

“I must examine you, Princesa. My apologies.”

“That. That will not be necessary.” She gestured to my chest, and I held up the end of the stethoscope. Respectfully, I took it off and replaced it in the bag.

“What bothers you, Princesa? I must know if I am to help you.”

She pulled a rope of hair from behind her ear and turned her face slightly, chewing on it. I fancied I could hear the soft, crunching noise. At length, she said, hair still in her mouth, “What bothers me is that I am afraid you cannot help me.”

“Let me decide that. Let me examine you. Tell me what is wrong.”

“What is wrong?” She pushed away from the bedpost, stepping across the carpet on small, narrow feet, deliberate and slow. “So much is wrong, doctor. The sun and the ocean. And me. I am wrong.”

Ah, homesickness. Mentally, I composed soothing words designed to encourage her to return to her home and family in Spain, and I calculated the number of pills from my bag that would alleviate her symptoms until then. The naked princess approached, her nipples purple in the strange half-light, the dark line from her navel disappearing between the cleft of her sex. She followed my gaze, dipped a hand there, smiled.

I stammered, “Princesa, I am sorry.”

“No need,” she murmured. Her eyes lit in a way that I had not seen in a good twenty years, at least. Or forty, since the days I walked the streets in Barcelona a new doctor, thin and black-haired myself, the money in my pockets almost unnecessary when I talked to the young girls in the bars. That light, glowing with hunger, fringed in eyelashes that I dreamt of having dragged over my cheeks.

One pale hand reached for me, paused, wavering in the air between us. A gulf of no more than two feet, if that. Close enough to see the map of blue veins, delicate, too visible against the white of her skin. Covering her. Marbling her. Her lips were as purple as her nipples, and just as hard and dry. I shrank back.

“Princesa,” I whispered, “what has happened to you?”

Her hand darted away, a startled bird, at her mouth, her breast, and finally, held by the wrist by her other hand. She trembled.

“Three days ago,” she said, “I was here. In my room.”

“What were you doing?”

A palpable moment. “I was with friends.”

The sensitive nuances of her echelon, how I had come to navigate them with skill, though I could never properly enter their circle, never. Gently, I asked, “What did you take? Do you recall?”

“Yes, of course,” she said impatiently. That hand again, frail, lifted to her nose. “And then there was this.”

A pointed chin, raised so that I could now see the marks around her neck. Also purple, and black. The edges still ragged. She shrugged. “He preferred it like that.”

My mind reeled through possibilities. Bad cocaine? Perhaps drugs on the cord he’d used? Something else, some other chemical ingested unknowingly? Nothing made sense.

“I am unsure,” I said at last. “I might have to send out blood for tests. I do not know what to prescribe for your… condition.”

“No tests,” she said firmly. “You must give me something. Now.”

“I cannot. Whatever I give you may react badly with whatever is in your system. I suggest the hospital.”

“No!” She stepped closer, too close. The scent of rot issued from her. I recoiled, reaching down for my bag.

“You are ill, Princesa. Your maid can call someone to take you--”

“She did call someone. You. Now you must help me. Give me whatever you have with you; it won’t hurt me, trust me.” She reached for the necklace around her neck. “Here. Take this as part of your payment. It’s worth--”

“I know how much it is worth.”

“Then take it.” She fumbled with the clasp, and I did not offer to help. Touching her frightened me. Her touching me frightened me more.

The necklace at last lay in her outstretched palm, large square links, gleaming silver, set with diamonds. “Take it,” she said again.

I took the necklace, my fingertips barely sliding across her skin. She shivered and moaned. I pocketed the necklace, helplessly staring.

“Give me whatever is in your bag. Whatever will let me walk again amongst people.”

I opened the bag, careful not to have my back to her, digging out vials and bottles. I tossed them all onto a chair.

“I do not know what they will do for you.”

“I will find out,” she said, ignoring everything I had thrown down. “What is your name, Doctor?”

“Morales…”

“Your first name.”

“Alberto.”

She reached for me. “Alberto Morales. I want to touch you.”

“No, Princesa.” But I did not move.

“Alberto Morales.” She reached up, cold, cold hands cradling my face. “Let me kiss you. Before you leave.”

“No, Princesa.” My whisper was weak. She smelled like spoiled meat. Her nakedness, so close that I could trace that dark line from her navel with my fingertips. Spoiled meat, clotting on my tongue, in my throat. I closed my eyes. “No, Princesa. Please, no.”

“Then,” she said, trembling, “get out.”

Her hands were gone, leaving behind a lingering coolness on my skin. Groping, I found the handles of my bag, and I stumbled to the door. I heard retching, and over my shoulder, in the shadows, I could barely make out her sleek form, bent over, dark liquid splashing onto the expensive carpet. She wiped her mouth and looked at me.

“Maria will pay you more. Leave.”

I hesitated. I wished to help her, even though I knew I could not. For a dizzy moment, I imagined her gratefulness, her white skin, the coolness of it.

She screamed, guttural, animal, angry, and flew at me.

I fled, ungracefully, and the sound of her slamming her fists against the door followed me down the curving staircase.

“I hate you, Alberto Morales! I hate you!”

The maid waited, quiet and still, at the bottom. Silently, she handed me an envelope, stuffed fat. I took it, barely nodding goodbye before I was gone, out those magnificent double doors and into my car.

Miami grew too hot after that. Everything began to smell like decaying flowers, sweet and cloying. I expected piles of rotting blooms in every alleyway, and found instead the pale people, standing in the shadows, hardly dressed but for their shining jewels.

I left. I had overstayed my welcome in America anyway, and home beckoned. I left behind many things: my professional title, my gambling friends, my silver Mercedes. I took with me my best suits and hats, and my alligator shoes.

And her necklace.

Sitting at a bar in the shade, I read the papers. Sometimes, there are small articles on Miami. The Scene. They are called Glitterati, these stylish people half naked who disdain the beach, preferring the salons and clubs, the private rooms. Dark-eyed inhabitants who spend exorbitant amounts on dangerous combinations of drugs, they scream over the music, spill onto the streets at night. Young people go missing. Old ones, too, I am sure, but no one notices. Everyone talks of the new Scene in Miami. Everyone wants in.

Yesterday, I walked home to my tiny apartment with a bottle of Rioja for dinner. I was thinking of nothing, enjoying the Spanish heat. From an open doorway, I smelled flowers far spent. The curtains were all drawn. Someone had vomited on the doorstep.

I hurried home and opened my bottle but made no dinner. I drank my wine without tasting it, holding the Princesa’s necklace in my shaking hand.

I am without medications of any kind these days except for one, and it is hidden in the necklace case, beneath the velvet lining. If I should take it, burn me. Do with the necklace whatever you will, but burn me until there is nothing left to rise again.

Dead Letter by Katherine Tomlinson

2011-06-15T05:36:00.000-07:00

DEAD LETTER - KATHERINE TOMLINSON

The first inkling Beatrice had that something was wrong was the sound of her dog’s agonized yelping.

Suzie-Q was a barkie little dog, a soft-coated Wheatan terrier, who patrolled her fenced-in domain with the intensity of a Blackwater contractor, but her yapping was usually of the happy, “Hi, howya doing?” variety. This was fear and pain and it brought Bea on a run from the kitchen to the front yard.

By the time she reached the door, the dog had limped up the steps to the porch where she stood trembling and shaking and holding her front paw, which looked shredded.

Beatrice scanned the area for another dog but the only thing moving on the street was the postman, who was shambling up the sidewalk with his usual lack of awareness for things going on around him.

Beatrice had often wondered if his personality fell somewhere along the autistic spectrum. He never made eye contact and he rarely spoke. She had given up trying to be nice to him and lately it was hard even to be civil because she was convinced he was stealing her Netflix movies.

The company’s e-mails had started to get a little testy the third time a movie disappeared on its way back, so she’d started mailing the red envelopes from a post office box near where she shopped for groceries. It was inconvenient, but worth it not to have her account cancelled.

Bea brought Suzie-Q into the house and gently washed her paw with soap and water. The dog squirmed and thrashed and nipped at Bea’s hand hard enough to draw blood before Bea was able to see what had caused the injury.

Is that a bite mark?

Bea sponged away a little more blood and was horrified when the margins of the wound were revealed. Instead of the punctures she’d expected, the tooth marks looked like they had been made...

...by a human?

Bea’s thoughts immediately went to her postman.

He didn’t like dogs and had once threatened to stop delivering mail to a family across the street after their dog had growled at him.

He was strange, no doubt about it, but strange enough to bite a dog?

After she’d wrapped Suzie-Q’s paw and given her a piece of chicken as a treat, Bea decided to call her post office.

The phone rang and rang and rang before it was finally picked up.

“Arrgghhh,” someone mumbled into the phone.

“Hello?” Bea said. “Hello?”

“Mmmmrgggh,” said the person on the other end.

“Yes, I’m calling to...”

“Mmmrggargggh.”

“I’d like to speak to a supervisor.”

The phone went dead in Bea’s hand.

Oh, for God’s sake, she thought, absently rubbing her hand. It was starting to throb where Suzie-Q had bitten it. She started to dial again and then put her phone down with a sigh. Talking to the guy’s supervisor probably wouldn’t do any good. He was a bureaucrat and would probably just brush her off with some sort of civil servant speak.

No, the best thing to do would be to confront him directly and demand an explanation from him. If he couldn’t explain himself, then she would call the police. Or maybe a lawyer. If she had to take Suzie-Q to a vet, she wasn’t going to pay the bill.

And if she needed a doctor to treat her hand, well...she wasn’t going to pay that bill, either.

Bea couldn’t find Suzie-Q the next morning, so by the time she saw the mail truck lurch to a stop across the street, she was itching to give the postman a piece of her mind. It didn’t help that she’d been up almost all night. Her bitten hand had gotten infected and was red and swollen and pain was pulsing through it in synch with every beat of her heart.

Bea was across the street before the postman had even turned off the engine.

He saw her coming and lunged at her, biting at her face.

Instinctively, she bit back, crunching through bone and gristle.

Bea had intended to give him a piece of her mind but he’d ended up giving her a piece of his instead.

It was quite tasty.

Gangrene by R.S. Bohn

2011-06-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

GANGRENE - R.S. BOHN

His penis looked like an olive with the pimento sucked out.

“Perhaps gangrene, Mr. Shaw,” I said. Judging by the smell, I wasn’t far off.

“Look, just give me something, would ya?”

I took a bottle from my bag. “It won’t help. I should send you for tests.”

He unscrewed the top and shook out two, swallowing them. “Have you ever met my wife, doc?”

Shimmying into trousers, he led me to a closed door. The smell upon opening knocked me back. Inside, his wife lie chained to the bed, struggling and gnashing her teeth.

“She died three weeks ago.” He slapped my shoulder. “And things ain’t never been better.”

Eaten Alive Has A New Home

2011-03-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

For those of you looking for Eaten Alive elsewhere, this is its new and permanent home.

New stories will be appearing shortly.