Darlings of Decay

by Chrissy Peebles

  She made it up to the only open checkout lane.

  “How long did you buy for?” the nervous cashier asked.

  “Um . . . I don’t know. A week?” Isobel wasn’t good at estimation or small talk. Her cart was full with what she knew was affordable for her budget and, more importantly, what she could carry up to her second floor apartment on her own. She hadn’t been thinking about timelines.

  “That won’t be enough. The world is coming to an end.”

  “Ok. Well how long do you buy for when the world is coming to an end?” Isobel snapped at the cashier.

  “Don’t know,” the cashier shrugged. “Do you want your receipt?”

  “Sure.”

  On the way back home, the radio still reporting news from all over, documented the plague’s movement. It crept slowly closer. Isobel turned the radio up and listened.

  “Early this morning, a ferry full of people trying to get home to their families left Whidbey Island alive and well and arrived at the Edmonds ferry dock infected with the mysterious disease we’ve been seeing. They had somehow contracted the disease on the passage over the Puget Sound. Ferry officials at the Edmonds Pier heard no reports from the captain of the vessel that anything was wrong on the boat. The captain routinely steered the ship into port and the infected disembarked and started attacking people in the parking lot. It is suspected that at least twenty of the infected passengers made it out of the ferry terminal and into downtown Edmonds. Efforts to locate and apprehend them in order to contain the spread of the infection have been unsuccessful. Several injured passengers made it safely onto lifeboats before the ferry made it ashore, but they did not survive their wounds. The captain of the vessel has been detained for questioning at this time.”

  The program switched to weather and Isobel changed the station, desperate to find out just how close it had become.

  “- determined that the perpetrator of a street fight in downtown Seattle, described by witnesses as a “drunken transient”, was actually a person suffering from the infection. Police shot the man after he attempted to attack them. It is unknown how he came into contact with the disease. Attempts to identify the individual are ongoing, as his body appeared to be in a state of decomposition. The flesh of his fingertips was gone, rendering fingerprinting useless. Investigators are working with dental records-”

  Isobel changed it again, looking for another news story and its location.

  “A group of students started a riot on University Avenue in the U-District just after eleven a.m. Over fifty college students were injured in the event, four fatally. The group seemed to have no agenda and was only intent on causing destruction and harm to individuals. Sources at the scene noted that the group was not involved in looting or property damage. Most of the students fled the scene before they could be arrested and interrogated. Campus police had great difficulty dealing with the problem and are not commenting at this time. It is still unknown whether the perpetrators were rioting in response to the disease, or as a result of being infected with it.”

  Isobel’s heart beat faster.

  “A bloody scene at the Helene Madison Pool greeted Shoreline Police investigators midday today. A lifeguard interviewed said that a man had emerged from the men’s locker room at the start of Public Swim and started attacking children in the shallow end of the pool. It took two lifeguards on staff to remove the man from the water and hold him while a third employee called the police. All of the children involved suffered only minor injuries. The pool has been shut down for investigation and sanitation reasons and will remain closed until further notice.”

  “That’s just up the road,” she said to herself.

  Initial reports thought the disease spread and made people psychotic and violent; that the infected were living people with altered minds and an inability to differentiate right from wrong. Whatever the process, it only took one infected person to ruin everybody’s day.

  Approaching from all directions, the disease was soon upon Isobel’s neighborhood and suddenly it was right in front of her in the form of a traffic accident. Someone had destroyed a bicyclist with an SUV. A deep cut in his abdomen sat open, displaying his intestines. One of his legs had been almost completely severed near the hip joint. He had not survived his injuries. The driver of the vehicle, a pale young woman in hysterics and leggings, was leaning over the dead man when he sat back up, guts spilling from his body, and bit her face, taking a chunk out of her cheek as she screamed for help. Isobel wasn’t the only driver that swerved around the mess. She could still hear the woman’s yelling as she sped the last three blocks home. There was nothing I could do to help the man or the woman, she thought over and over again, trying to calm her nerves and her conscience. The world was feeling much smaller to her; the troubles of it more her own now.

  She pulled her car into the parking lot of Willow Brook and quickly lugged her two bags of groceries from the lot to the front door.

  “Whroah roah wroooah! Roah!” A giant black poodle jumped into her making her scream and drop her food.

  “Kiki, no! Get down! Bad dog, BAD DOG!” Sheila Brown from apartment 201 yelled, tugging roughly on her dog’s leash and dragging it up the stairs.

  “Oh, it’s ok. I can pick it all up myself. Really, don’t worry about it!” Isobel said to Sheila who was already out of earshot. “Thanks for the apology too, bitch.”

  Upstairs she put the groceries away with what was already in the cupboards. Her food situation looked much better to her now so for the rest of the first day she sat alone in the living room in front of the television, eyes glued to news report after bloody news report; ears listening intently to the speculation. Several times she hopped up to check that the door was locked. She was still having trouble mentally digesting what she’d seen on the road earlier. Maybe the bicyclist wasn’t dead? Perhaps he was just knocked unconscious and when he came to, in all his pain and bewilderment, he lashed out? No story she made up explained how the man could be alive after suffering wounds so horrific, nor why he would want to bite the driver who shattered and shredded his body.

  His guts were on the road, she kept coming back to this single sight, this undeniable fact. No one sits up with his guts on the road.

  S.O.S.-LESS

  Many people still had a very strong sense that things would be ok because they had no contact with the disease yet. They were viewing the plague on televisions and computer screens, not in person. Their faith in the police force, that the uniformed men and women in affected areas could get things under control, was strong. Stronger still was the idea that all of the world’s best scientists would be gathering in a sterile room at an undisclosed location, working day and night until they found the cause and then the cure. Hollywood had showed the citizens this response so this is what they demanded; what their minds had decided would happen - was happening. The population waited for quarantines and white- suited specialists with giant mobile labs but they didn’t come. Many CDC labs had already been overrun with the dead.

  As the day disappeared and night came, things were falling apart fast as the spread of the infection continued from one complacent and unprepared house to another. In Northgate strange noises filled the air, mixed with relentless emergency response sirens. Isobel turned off the television, filled the bathtub with water just in case it stopped running, cooked some pork chops and drowned out the horrible cacophony with her mp3 player.

  Slowly she fell asleep. Around one in the morning the gunshots picked up and tore her from her rest. Unable to regain unconsciousness over the noise, Isobel turned the television back on. The dead weren’t just coming back; they were definitely coming back hungry. Her mind returned to the bicyclist. He wasn’t lashing out in anger; he was trying to bite her! The confirmation was terrifying. The attacks had spread so quickly that the infection had reached uncontainable levels. With one eye open, Isobel barely slept at all the rest of the first night.

  ***

  THE SECOND DAY

&n
bsp; The second day of the plague was noisy. All this death is so much nosier than the daily grind of life, Rob Pace thought. Midday brought a motorcycle accident in the street out front of the building. He heard the bike speeding up the street, then a horn honk, some metal crashing on metal, and then yelling.

  Rob looked outside. He saw the motorcyclist lying on the ground a few yards from his bike. He was dragging himself along the ground; his legs made useless in the crash. Rob noticed he wasn’t yelling from the pain. The dead people that had appeared on the street overnight were slowly moving towards the maimed man.

  “Get away! Stay back!” Rob heard him yell. “I have a gun!” And he did. The biker pulled it from inside his jacket and started recklessly shooting into the growing crowd. He took two down easily but he realized he wouldn’t have enough bullets to kill them all. He turned the gun on himself.

  “No!” Rob yelled from his apartment balcony. The man pulled the trigger before he was killed by one of the undead.

  “What is it Dad?” Gabe, his seven-year-old son, had run to his side. Rob quickly threw a hand over his eyes.

  “Something you shouldn’t see.”

  “But I want to see it.”

  “You are only saying that because you don’t know what it is.”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “And you’ll never know.” Rob found it within himself to laugh as he pulled his son away from the window.

  ***

  TISSUE THIN

  It was easy to stay inside if you were anyone other than Jeff Brown. He hadn’t been out of the apartment for almost a week due to the combination of a nasty cold he’d caught and then the infection that everyone else was catching. His desk job, providing technical support for a major software company, always drained his energy. He should have felt rested from the time off but he was tired.

  His marriage to Sheila was crumbling; if you could call it a marriage to start with. She’d forced him into it ten years ago and he’d regretted that every day since. There was no communication and his wife loved her dog more than him. All this he was ok with though. The issue lay with being stuck inside with her for a week and for an indefinite length of time to come. He blew his nose into one of the last tissues they had in the house.

  “Do you have to blow your nose so loud? It’s disgusting!” Sheila yelled from the other room.

  He could feel his patience grow thinner with every remark she made and every tense conversation they had; thoughts tugging at his brain of leaving or asking her to go instead. She could take her untrained dog with her, he fell asleep on the couch dreaming of it, used tissues scattered across his sick body.

  ***

  THE DEVIL’S WORK

  “We just have to survive this. Please be patient, Edward. Life has thrown us more difficult things in the past,” Moira tried to comfort her husband who had been pacing their first floor apartment for two days.

  “Have you looked outside today? There’s blood on the street and people everywhere.”

  “They aren’t people anymore. Maybe you should stop looking if you don’t like what you see.”

  “Folks on the radio are saying we should try to get somewhere safe.”

  “No place is safe! The army bases started turning people away and now they are dying at the closed front gates. The mega churches asked their congregations to gather for mass prayer in order to cast out the demons that possess everyone. Then they all got trapped in the buildings with the infection. The pews are covered in blood just like the street. NPR said the best course of action is to stay inside and lock the doors.”

  “That isn’t action; that is inaction.”

  “So we don’t change a thing then. Sit down and read your book.”

  ***

  A PROMISE

  Ben had been waiting for his girlfriend since yesterday. She lived a few cities away and he’d asked her to stay with him. He waited to hear the front door buzzer all day. He heard it a lot but when he answered the phone to see if it was Anna it was someone else. Today, all he heard was growling.

  He waited without hearing from her the entire day. The sirens grew further and further apart. How many ambulances were still capable of responding? How many paramedics now needed medical help themselves? Ben imagined a lone ambulance racing from incident to incident; brave medics fighting to save lives and to stay alive themselves but eventually even that siren stopped wailing.

  He hoped Anna made it safely to him. He had insisted that she come. She had made him promise that everything would be fine. He had.

  ***

  COPING MECHANISM

  Molly Mathay was out of the program. She’d completed it and was eating healthily for almost six months. But she was still on probation in a sense. A mentor would come by once a week to check on her. Now things were getting more difficult than she’d ever imagined they could. The treatment center staff hadn’t trained her how to handle apocalyptic situations and she knew that her mentor wouldn’t be able to come by with the plague that was spreading.

  She was alone with it and the thought of losing easy access to food made her anxious. Her anxiety made her more food obsessed. She started to binge and purge again to cope.

  Her apartment wasn’t stockpiled with food; she wasn’t allowed to shop for more than one normal week at a time. She wanted to ask for help but she barely knew anyone in the building. She’d spent a small amount of time with Rob Pace and his son but that was an awkward situation for other reasons.

  It would be difficult if not impossible in the new world to find either enough support or food to settle the urge.

  ***

  THE PLAGUE IN PIXELS

  Markus was left with his mind, filled with endless questions, all of the second day. He sat around and browsed the Internet to try to distract his busy brain. The infection was everywhere though and he couldn’t escape it. YouTube had terrifying first-hand accounts:

  A father’s hands trembled as he recorded his wife eating their son in the backyard. Two minutes passed by and his wife started to come straight at the sliding glass door for him. The double-paned glass protected him and she could only paw at the slider, desperate for her next meal. The video ended with a tribute to the consumed child: “R.I.P. Elijah.” Comments showed that viewers were touched by the heartache, others disgusted that the man posted such a violent video detailing the death of his child.

  A video shot from a high window showing a street in Everett full of bodies. Someone with a sniper rifle across the street was taking out the infected as they wandered into the area. Markus watched the video until the end where he saw that the shooter didn’t discriminate between infected and uninfected people. Trigger Happy was the video’s name. A comment listed the street address of the shooter and a warning: “Don’t travel this street unless you want to die.” Comments included minute markers in the video for viewers’ favorite kills, mostly the headshots.

  One of the last videos Markus watched was of two teenage boys, both around 15 years old, looking for the infected and then messing around with them. Pouring soda on them, taunting them to chase after one of the boys, tripping them, etc . . . It was kind of funny to him - almost like a prank show he’d seen on MTV- until the taller boy recognizes his mom in a nearby group of infected and the recording ends. Comments listed request after request for more “episodes” of “They’ve Got No Brains!” (Which Markus thought was a clever title they’d given the video). Many offered suggestions for content.

  Twitter too had been infected. It was full of sad stories, told in snippets. Never before had 140 characters or less been so depressing, so full of the woes of a nation and world.

  Markus didn’t feel so lonely and he felt much better off when he read what others were tweeting.

  @Jen is Twenty: I went to class yesterday but half the kids stayed home. I wonder if anyone will come back? Should I even go in tomorrow?

  @heismine43: stay away from the hospitals. My husband contracted the infection at one and never came home.
It was a madhouse.

  @ncallaway: My dad's got a fever and his feet are numb. I looked it up on WebM.D. and it says he might have lupus. Anyone dealt with anything like that?

  @lordLover2010: Jesus will come for me and my fellow Christians. Fear the rapture, praise the Lord! Your time is now, you sinners, burn in hell!

  @margareet: I have a few extra swords and weapons if anybody needs them. I'm in McMahon Hall at the University. Safest place I know. Stay safe friends.

  @haro_kitei: Trapped in my room because my sister is trying to kill me. I don’t know what to do. Can any of you guys send help? I can pay you.

  How could anyone help? No one even knew where she lived, what her house looked like, who her sister was. And pretty soon, no one would care.

  Twitter was full of tweets with the simple words: the infection is here. With a search for ‘#infection’ one could track its spread and if you really paid attention, you could tell when someone was exposed to it. They would tweet less and less, perhaps more desperately. Some would say their goodbyes and most would say their “fuck yous”. They’d end up typing gibberish as their hands went numb and then they’d disappear. The last tweet gathering digital dust as time continued without them.

  ***

  BEN ON THE THIRD DAY

  The phone lines cut in and out on the third day or maybe, Ben thought, they were just flooded with calls. Ben had tried to reach emergency services off and on all day but he either got a busy tone or nothing.