by J M Lassen
Then he was gone and all the lights blinked out, and it was dawn. My brother and I stood before a ruined mansion in the morning twilight. Birds were singing raucously.
“We’d better get home,” Albert said, “or we’ll get in trouble.”
“Yeah,” I said.
V
That autumn, I began junior high school. Because I hadn’t been very successful as a bad boy, and my grades were still a lot higher, I wasn’t in any of Luke Bradley’s classes. But he caught up with me in the locker room after school, several weeks into the term. All he said was, “I know what you did,” and beat me so badly that he broke several of my ribs and one arm, and smashed in the whole side of my face, and cracked the socket around my right eye. He stuffed me into a locker and left me there to die, and I spent the whole night in the darkness, in great pain, amid horrible smells, calling out for the dead kid to come and save me as I’d saved him. I made bleating, clicking sounds.
But he didn’t come. The janitor found me in the morning. The smell was merely that I’d crapped in my pants.
I spent several weeks in the hospital, and afterwards Stepdad Steve and Mom decided to move out of the state. They put both me and Albert in a prep school.
It was only after I got out of college that I went back to Radnor Township in Pennsylvania, where I’d grown up. Everything was changed. There was a Sears headquarters where the golf course used to be. Our old house had vanished beneath an apartment parking lot. Most of Cabbage Creek Woods had been cut down to make room for an Altman’s department store, and the Grant Estate was gone too, to make room for an office complex.
I didn’t go into the remaining woods to see if the fort was still there.
I imagine it is. I imagine other kids own it now.
Later someone told me that Luke Bradley (who turned out to have really been three years older than me) had been expelled from high school, committed several robberies in the company of his three goons, and then all of them were killed in a shootout with the police.
What Luke Bradley inadvertently showed me was that I could have been with the gang all the way to their violent and pointless end, if Albert and the dead kid, whose name was Jonathan, hadn’t saved me.
;:{}
SEVEN
BRAINS,
TEN
MINUTES
MARIE ATKINS
The brain was in front of me, pink-gray and pulsing in the sun.
I could see the edge of the skull, sheared off so neatly by the cranial saw. The bony rim of nature’s bowl, with its contents bulging up out of it like an extra-large scoop of ice cream. Or maybe gelatin. Hadn’t they even, in the dim and gone days before the world ended, made gelatin molds shaped like brains?
If I pretended that’s what this was…
No. It might quiver. It might shimmer. It might have the same gelatinous quality. But I knew better. I knew that the temperature would be all wrong. Warm. Body temperature, it’d be.
Of course it would. And why not? The body was still alive.
The guy the brain belonged to was in shock. He’d be dead—and probably glad of it—within minutes. Sooner, if I did what I was up here to do. What I had to do.
I couldn’t.
Not even for Val.
Did she even know? Did she even recognize me? Or had fear taken her beyond all that?
The sun beat down. A rusty haze of dust filled the air. I could hear the flap of canvas and the sounds of the crowd. I could hear the Fat Man’s laughter from above and behind me.
That’s where Val would be. Up there in the bed of the customized pickup truck. With the Fat Man. Naked. Chained. A blue ribbon wrapped around her waist.
The others in the line to either side of me were straining against the iron bar, teeth bared, foamy drool on what was left of their lips. We had our hands tied behind us and number placards strung on ropes around our necks.
The bell rang.
The bar dropped.
“And theeeeeyyyyyy’re off!” the Fat Man bellowed.
%~<>
We picked up Patty just outside of Bakersfield.
I didn’t want to. I would have roared on past and left her in a whirl of grit and soot. But when Patty waved, Jess said we should stop.
“We can’t take care of everybody,” I said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
“Don’t be a jerk, Scotty,” Val said. “Stop the car.”
“Don’t call me ‘Scotty.’ You know I hate it.”
“Scotty, Scotty, Scotty,” she sneered.
The end of the world hadn’t done a thing to Val’s looks or her attitude. It hadn’t put a shake in her hands or purple circles under her eyes or anything.
Gorgeous. But a bitch.
“I think we should stop,” Rick said as he checked out the thin blonde. He was Val’s brother but didn’t have any of her good looks. Skinny, pimply, a loser from the word go.
Two of a kind, that was me and Rick.
“We are a girl short,” Jess said, putting his arm around Sharon. She only rocked in her seat and hugged the dog. “Us, you and Val, and poor Rick left over.”
“Oh, puh-lease.” Val’s laugh was a snort. “Me and Scotty? Don’t make me sick.”
I hated her.
I wanted her so much it burned.
When everything started, with the deadies and all, Rick and I were the first ones to figure out what would happen, how it would all go down. We read comic books and horror novels and watched all those old movies. We knew.
Everyone else went around in denial. First they said it was nothing but rumors, urban legends, hoaxes. Then, when the stories were proved real, they said it would blow over. Then that the government would take care of it. Then that scientists would find a cure. Then…
And by then, well, there wasn’t much of anyone left who wasn’t taking bites out of people.
%~<>
The crowd roared. Deadies lunged with jaws gaping and putrescent tongues snaking out. They went face-first into the opened domes of the skulls and commenced a smacking, slurping, munching feast.
I shook so hard my teeth clattered. Someone threw a crumpled-up aluminum can at me. It bounced off the filthy rags I’d draped over my chest.
Couldn’t do it.
Wouldn’t do it.
They’d kill me, though, if I didn’t. If they found out.
It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
No, that’s a lie. It had seemed a stupid, gross, inhuman idea from the get-go. But the only idea. The only way to get out of this hell, let alone the only way to save Val.
I turned my head. The mud and gunk with which I’d coated my face cracked and flaked off in places, but that was okay. It made me look authentic, like I was losing skin in the dry, desert heat. My disguise fooled the livies, and somehow it fooled the deadies, too.
That was the part I’d been most worried about. Rick said that they could sense us, that they homed in on the signals our brains gave off or something. I didn’t know if the ones in the contest were decomposed beyond that, or if the Fat Man just had them so well-trained that the only time they’d chow on a livie was when it was part of a competition or a prize.
Either way, my ruse had gotten me in. Fooling the livies had turned out to be the easy part. Whenever a livie died, rather than burn the corpse, the guards moved it over to the corral before it could reanimate. They weren’t exactly diligent about checking for vital signs, either. I’d made like I had been hiding a wound all along, played dead, and voila. In among the deadies penned up for the contest.
Maneuvering to be one of the contestants had been a little trickier, but it had worked. Here I was, competing for a tempting prize.
I could see Val in the flabby circle of the Fat Man’s arm. He was feeling her up, squashing her against his blubbery side.
Val looked on the verge of tears and that decided me. I had to do it no matter how sick it was. For her. Then she’d finally look at me and see me—see and appreciate the real Scott Drisc
oll.
The deadie beside me was gnawing on the side of a hollowed-out head, trying to peel off a flap of scalp. One of the handlers was there to inspect the empty hole of the cranium. “Done!” the handler shouted, thrusting his fist in the air. More people hustled forward. With movements born of practice and efficiency, the contest wranglers unlatched the empty, popped in the refill, and scrambled out of the way as the deadie dove in for the next course.
The stock of a gun rammed into my back. I barely stifled a cry. They didn’t feel pain. I had to remember not to react.
“What’s the matter with you?” the gun-wielder snarled. “Eat up.”
“Done down here!” came another cry.
The crowd was clapping rhythmically. On my right, the female deadie struggled to get the last tasty morsels from the bottom. The deadie popped up, triumphant, with the medulla oblongata hanging out of its mouth, and jerked its head like a bird, gulping it down.
I was losing. I wasn’t even on the board yet.
Liver. I’d eaten liver before. Once, on a hunting trip, I’d even had deer liver raw and dripping from the carcass.
If I’d done that, I could do this. For Val.
The handler jabbed me in the back again, and this time I bent forward, toward the rippled folds of brain tissue.
%~<>
My dad had given me the crappy old family station wagon for graduation. When the deadies started ambling, we stashed guns and other supplies in the wagon. Canned food, camping gear, blankets.
Everybody laughed at us, you bet they did. Even Val had, at first. But she’d stopped in a hurry when her mom came home from the beauty shop one day and tried to open her head with freshly manicured acrylic nails.
No one was laughing now. There weren’t enough people left to laugh.
The station wagon had held up like a trooper during our entire crazy escape and flight south. Now, as I pulled over to the side of the road, its engine let out a sort of weary rattle. The tires sent up a huge plume of dust and soot.
The girl came running up to the car. “Thank you, oh, thank you, I thought you were going to drive by and leave me. Thank God you stopped.”
She was giving me big, adoring, “my hero” eyes. I thought for a minute she was going to hug me, maybe even give me a big “my hero” kiss to go with that look. If she’d been a babe, enough to make Val jealous, I would have been all for it.
The others had climbed out of the car and were looking around nervously. Jess had the shotgun, and pushed his glasses up, squinting. Sharon clung to the bandanna collar on her dog. The girl introduced herself as Patty.
“You’ll be safe with us,” Rick told Patty, puffing up his chest.
It was kind of funny to see him trying to act all manly. I mean, he’s been my friend since grade school, but I’d never had any delusions about either of us. Smart, okay. Jocks, we were not.
“Let’s not stand around all day,” Jess called. “I don’t see anything moving, but…”
“Yeah, ‘but.’ Back in the car,” I said.
%~<>
The smell was acrid and meaty and awful. I hadn’t been aware of it before, not with the stale stink rising off the deadies and the rancid sweat of the crowd.
I could even smell the fine-ground bone dust and the charred, cauterized skin left by the bone saw. The inner membrane—I hadn’t even known there was such a thing, but I’d seen them snip through it with kitchen shears—was peeled to the sides in neat folds.
Drying blood streaked the surface of the exposed brain. It had been wet, glistening, when they first clamped the livie into place before me. The desert sun was baking it.
If I waited too long, it would get tough to chew.
My eyes closed. My mouth opened.
I thought of liver. Of oysters. And, of course, I thought of gelatin. “There’s always room for Jell-O!” Wasn’t that how the old ads went?
A curved, quaking surface touched my lips. I skinned them back from my teeth, which had never needed fillings or braces. That had to give me an edge on the average deadie, whose teeth were chipped or broken from chewing on bone.
For Val.
I took a big, slippery bite.
%~<>
I steered in and out of traffic jams, cars and trucks that had been abandoned, overturned, smashed into scrap. Heaps of rotting food spilled from produce trucks dotted the sides of the highway. The only movement besides ours was that of countless scavenger birds and animals, feasting with impunity.
That, and the windfarms. Talk about creepy. Miles and miles of posts with spinning pinwheel blades, whirring around and around. Generating electricity for a dead world.
The station wagon labored as it chugged up to the pass. I wasn’t the only one to heave a sigh of relief when we made it over the top and started downhill.
High desert country. Home to military bases and shuttle landings, Joshua trees and borax mines. In the twilight, the desert valley was a brownish purple smear cut by the rulerstraight line of Highway 14.
We descended toward Mojave, hoping there might be something worth finding in that strip of gas stations and burger joints. Thinking about food, lulled by the hazy scenery, I didn’t see the pile-up until Patty squealed a warning.
I stood on the brakes. The only reason none of us were thrown into the dashboard was because we were packed in so tight.
Two semis had jackknifed and five cars had rammed into them, entirely blocking the road. The station wagon shuddered to a halt less than a foot from the bumper of a VW van. “Is everybody okay?” I asked, my voice embarrassingly unsteady.
Various replies of assent reached me. I saw a turnoff to the left and a BB-pocked sign reading Joshua Flats, 6 miles, with an arrow.
“Can we get around?” Jess asked from the back. “Shoulder’s too soft,” I said. “We’d get stuck.”
“Well, think of something, brainiac,” Val sneered.
%~<>
It squelched between my teeth. The texture was hideous, like soft-boiled eggs with striations of chewy gristle. The taste was bad, too, but the texture…
The man clamped into the wooden frame went stiff, then began to jitter and twitch. A fresh stink of voided bladder and bowels wafted up. I could hear his jaw clenching until bone cracked.
I took another bite. Determination drove me on. Once the initial deed was done, the first step taken, the revolting sin committed, it got easier. Don’t ask me why or how. All I knew was that I’d gone this far and continuing wasn’t going to make things worse. Instead, quitting would. If I quit and it was all for nothing, that would be really losing.
The noise of the crowd was louder than ever, but I ignored it. I ignored the sporadic cries of “Done!” from the handlers. None of that mattered.
Blood pooled in the bottom of the man’s skull. I thrust my face in to reach the rest of his brain and wolfed it down. Something in my own brain, some switch or fuse, had blown with a snap and a sizzle.
“Done!” someone near me cried.
I straightened up, chin smeared with blood and cerebrospinal fluid and other assorted goo. They switched victims with the professional speed of an Indy 500 pit crew, and a fresh one was locked into place. I dove in, tearing out ragged, dripping chunks.
Thoughts shut off. I was an animal, a machine. I bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, barely bothering to chew. My throat worked. My stomach hitched once, in shock maybe, then settled down.
I had the advantage, and not just because of my teeth. I had tendons that weren’t withered and stretched. I had functional salivary glands. I had a whole tongue, an esophagus that wasn’t riddled with decay.
Most of all, I had the motivation. I wasn’t doing this out of hunger or habit. I was in this to win.
%~<>
We were able to push the VW van out of the way, but it didn’t make quite enough room for the station wagon to get by.
Jess turned to me with a questioning look—maybe he was about to ask which car we should try to move next—and that
was when the deadie reached out through the broken windshield of one of the semis and clawed the side of his face clear down to the bone.
He stood stock-still for a second, his questioning look transforming to a gape. Blood poured onto his shoulder and rained onto the blacktop.
The deadie’s sticklike arms shot out again, seized Jess, and yanked. He flew backward through the shard-ringed gap and into the truck’s cab. He dropped the shotgun. Sharon shrieked.
Deadies swarmed over the wrecked vehicles, and the girls screamed and the dog barked. Jess’ despairing howls echoed from inside the truck.
I had time to notice how weird they were, the deadies, how different from the ones we’d seen up north. Those had been green, moldy. If you hit them in the middle, they’d belch out clouds of gas. These deadies were dry, their flesh shrunken, their skin leathery. They looked like mummies. Scarecrows. Beef jerky. The arid heat did that, I realized numbly, and then they were on us.
‘‘The guns!” I yelled at Val. “The other guns are in the back!”
Rick panicked and went tearing off into the desert with two deadies in pursuit. The movies always showed them all shambling and slow, but these suckers were quick. Rick was moving faster than I’d ever seen him move in my life, running like he’d made the track team. Didn’t matter. They caught up with him, knocked him down, started eating him alive.
A deadie woman with brittle, peroxide hair leaped on Sharon. Another lunged at me, and I danced back, tripped, and almost went down. If I had, that would have been the end. I kept my footing, though, cracked my crazybone on the sideview mirror of the station wagon, and kicked out. My foot struck the deadie in the hip and drove it back.
“The guns!” I yelled again.
