Tyler sighed and ran into the kitchen. Before he could pull open the cupboards and fish for sustenance, he came upon Gram. She was staring at the oven, moaning beneath her breath, touching the smooth white surface and the burner coils with puzzled fingertips. She hesitated when Tyler entered the room. He froze where he stood, only three feet away from his mother's decomposing mother. She stood between him and the pantry, which was to the left of the stove. “Gram?” he asked. He sensed defeat in her eyes as she looked upon him. She groaned again, trying to say something that was not there. Looking back to the stove, realization snapped back into play in her head, jerking her head to the side and looking at Tyler again, this time with hunger. She reached out for him, but he gave her no opportunity.
He was back in his bedroom in a dizzy frenzy that he could not label or recall. He had passed Susie, but she was too slow. They were both so docile, but deadly once they had you in their grips. Their strength was unbelievable, though their mobility was hindered by the misfiring synapses in their damaged minds.
Tyler pushed his bed back into place, locking the bolt again, placing his butt on the floor, his back flush against his brightly painted walls. He looked down at his stomach. It started to grumble and protest. Why had he not at least tried to get around Gram, to retrieve the cupcakes in the cupboard? He regretted his snap decision.
Why couldn't they just leave him be?
His stomach turned and flipped and screamed bloody murder.
Tyler couldn't keep his eyes focused. He expended as little energy as possible, using his bevy of toys to keep his mind sharp. The hunger that had possessed his whole being was taking its toll. When he napped, he dreamed of roast beef sandwiches and Gram's oatmeal cookies. He dreamed of his parents, as well. And Susie, the way they had once been, and not the monsters they had all become. He dreamed of ice cream and even foods that he would have normally thought to be deplorable, tofu and green beans included. How he would ravage a big wet block of squishy tofu right now. It would have made his mother proud, just to see him eating the stuff.
His Mega Monster toys had started to talk to him. Frankie Deadbolt, a cartoon character loosely based upon Frankenstein's monster, was more vocal than the rest, though he said nothing. He only groaned, and this reminded Tyler of the zombies, and so he avoided Frankie Deadbolt at all costs. “Shut up, Frankie,” he would warn, holding the toy up to his face, watching as Frankie's plasticized expression would contort into one of shame.
Vlad the Mad (a modern day Dracula character, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt) would pipe up, “Don't think nothing of that bubble brain. He's only trying to scare you. You can trust us, even with all his pissing and moaning.”
“What should I do?” Tyler asked Vlad, bouts of tears trickling down his cheek.
“You're starving, Ty. I can see you withering away to nothing. You need to get those cupcakes. You need to leave this damn building. You need to go shopping, but you also need to be careful,” Vlad suggested, all of his advice falling on Tyler's deaf ears. He knew this, all of it. Vlad was no help.
Fish Fingers chuckled at Vlad and Tyler. He was a bulbous eyed, grinning version of the Creature From The Black Lagoon, adapted for children into the whacky goofball of the Mega Monster troupe. “He needs to chop their heads off with a butter knife. That's what he needs to do. Gram and Susie, they're nothing but bad news, and they're not going anywhere. You need to poop on their dead bodies, Tyler! Do it for us! Do it for your friends!” Fish Fingers shouted, cackling in delight as he rubbed his tiny webbed hands together.
“But I can't hurt them. And I can't poop on them. That's gross and it makes my tummy hurt,” Tyler reasoned, slumping his head and rolling on the floor, his toys surrounding him like Japanese in a Godzilla movie.
Frankie groaned, a slight grin seeping into his face now.
Vlad shook his head from side to side. “You're starving, kid. You don't eat soon, you're gonna be talking to more than just your toys. You're gonna be talking to God himself. You don't want to die, do you?” Vlad asked.
“No,” Tyler replied with a tremble in his voice. It was true. He didn't want to die, even though everybody he loved had already gone that way. There were still joys to be had, though he could not think of them yet. Once he found other survivors, things would start looking up, or so he hoped. If there were other survivors out there.
“Kill them. Kill them all, you bozo,” Fish Fingers suggested, his comedic wit turning more sinister.
“I can't. I can't do it.”
Fish Fingers threw his green plastic arms in the air, protesting Tyler's obtuse disagreement, “Kill them all, you little shit!”
The grumbling intensified on what felt to Tyler like the millionth (though he knew the word, he could not count that high yet) day of his exile. His mother had never sent him to his room while she was still alive- and not trying to eat people's brain matter- but his father had done so on one occasion. Tyler had accidentally destroyed one of Susie's favourite toys, a doll named Gabby. She had taken an epic ride down the garbage shoot. His father had gone into the basement, in that same place that his children would one day hide in fear of him, and retrieved the doll, but her head had broken off, forevermore. Her doll resembled what Susie now looked like, a mangled dirty mess of inhuman flesh. And for that treachery against her favourite plaything, his father had sent him to his room for an entire Saturday night. To rub salt in the boy's wounds, Susie and his parents had rented a stack of movies from the video store, and had consumed massive amounts of popcorn and peanut butter candy, his fondest sugar fix.
That had felt horrible, but not nearly as bad as this. How Tyler yearned for having his family with him again, if only through the door, in the next room, enjoying themselves while he wallowed in misery. Just to know that they were there for him, ready to step in and defend him from the harsh realities of the world. Six years old! He wanted to scream this, and then made that inkling of blurry thought a reality, biting his lip and screaming at his Mega Monsters, “I'm six years old!” They looked up at him, shrugging as if age did not matter, which it did not, when faced with the apocalypse.
He had not heard Susie or Gram stirring outside for several hours, but Tyler could not build up his nerve again. He could not face them, not even for the danger that they presented to him, but for their ghastly appearances. The smell of their disintegrating flesh. They were not the people he knew and loved, and that troubled him deeply.
Tyler put on his last set of clean pyjamas, scanning himself in the mirror. He was as thin as a rail. Tyler, like his undead family, was unrecognizable from his former self. “You don't eat soon,” Fish Fingers announced, with Vlad nodding in agreement, “And you're going to die. Do you know that, Tyler? Do you even know what death is yet?”
The boy nodded. He knew the word, but could not quite grasp what he saw in his parents' face when a family member – like his Aunt Ginny when he was four – perished. Their pain, where did it come from? He was starting to realize it. “A devastating event like a zombie infestation tends to do that to you, no matter how old you are,” Vlad said. Frankie grunted, nodding his head. “My boy, you're about to grow up really fast,” Vlad added.
Fish Fingers readied his next campaign of persuasion, but decided against it. The child was so emaciated that he could barely understand them anymore. They were screaming for notice, but his attention span was dwindling with every quake of his belly. He needed food, and soon.
Tyler awoke with a start.
That smell. He knew that smell.
Sunday mornings during the summer. Tradition, wafting back through the air. While his mother and father ate breakfast, during their vacation at the beach house, his Gram had other plans. “Who needs eggs and toast on a beautiful day like today?” she had once asked Tyler. Her smile had warmed him, and the magnificent odour had pounded that joyous nail home. Susie and he had looked back and forth at each other, wiping away the sleepy disbelief from their eyes.
“I disapprove of
this,” they had heard their father say to their mother from the dining room.
“We're on vacation. Don't sweat it,” their mother had replied, and though they could not see her, they could detect that glowing smile upon her face. She knew exactly what Gram was up to, because she had often done the same thing with her when she was a child.
“Cookies for breakfast?” Susie had asked of her Gram, studying the woman with a face that could not reconcile the absurdity of her suggestion.
Tyler whiffed the air. “Oatmeal!”
“That's right, Ty. Your mom used to eat them when they first came out, when they were still hot. And then she'd start stuffing them into her pockets, for safe keeping she would say. Oh, I tell you. That made her brothers awful mad,” Gram explained, a casual glance out the window, as if she could still see that particular day, in her mind, and it was just as pleasant as she remembered it. And now, she was revisiting those rituals with a new generation. “Oatmeal cookies for breakfast. The excuse is in the oatmeal!” she said then, patting their heads and giggling. Their father would not approve, which he had already expressed, but all rules were out the window when Gram was on the scene.
“They make us eat bran flakes,” Susie noted with disgust, thumbing her nose towards the dining room, where their parents were having a silent argument about their intrusive grandmother. The crazy old bat!
“I would never do such a horrible thing to you, my sweet,” Gram said to Susie, winking and offering a loose hug.
Tyler inhaled again, and drifted back to reality, to the here and now.
The smell was identical. The same hints of cinnamon and touch of nutmeg. The ground walnuts, sugared and crunchy. The plump raisins, so big that it made you wonder how fat the original grape may have been. Likewise, Gram had been a grape at one time. But now she was a raisin … a raisin with strong hands and violent hunger.
Tyler could hardly control himself.
“Don't do it!” Vlad blasted.
Fish Fingers piped up next, “Cut their heads off!”
With a sickly feeling pervading his empty stomach, Tyler pulled his bed away from the door and exited his room. The first thing he saw was Susie, standing in the corner of their den, groaning and biting at the drywall. She had clawed away huge chunks of the wall, and was now trying to eat the dusty material. Dust and chips of paint covered her mouth and lips. She stopped, looking to Tyler, the realization drifting into her head that he was that boy who had cracked her in the head with the flower pot.
Tyler did not linger.
He could only think of that smell. Of oatmeal cookies.
Tyler drifted into the kitchen, his eyes growing heavy at the sight of his grandmother. The oven was wide open and the heat emanated the entire kitchen. Tyler started to sweat.
Sitting himself at the table, he stared at Gram. The cookies weren't quite done yet, but it was time, all the same.
Reaching into the open oven, Gram grasped at the black tray of cookies. Half of the cookies were almost finished, but the other half were raw due to a burned out coil. Her hand sizzled as she gripped the pan, turning and trying to smile at her grandson. She wasn't sure what a smile was anymore, but she knew that she simply had to do it, that you could not serve oatmeal cookies without smiling.
Sliding the pan across the table, Gram grunted.
Tyler plucked an almost finished cookie from the wax paper. He shoved the first cookie into his mouth while Gram trundled to the refrigerator, where a spoiled carton of milk awaited. You couldn't have cookies without milk.
With a voracious series of chomps and grunts, Tyler worked his way through half the pan, groaning in delight. They tasted simply magical. Though it was not the best batch his Gram had ever made, it was something special, all the same. He had never felt so gratified in all his life. He smiled at Gram.
Gram dumped a splash of curdled, thickened milk on to the table next to Tyler and he slurped at it.
Silly Gram.
She put her hands on his shoulders, studying the back of his dirty scalp.
He ate his oatmeal cookies.
THE END
IN THE END
By
R. M. Cochran
Independence Day never meant as much as it did over a year later, after the plague had reduced humanity to near nothingness. Only a few ragtag groups were left to defend what was left of civilization, forced to live out their days in compounds haphazardly built, thrown together in the last ditch effort to save what was left of mankind.
Held together by any means possible, the fencing around Donovan’s Wake was a series of patchwork, composed of debris left behind by the onslaught of the dead. Doors, refrigerators, trash bins; anything that could be welded or strung together was used to defend the compound. A few cargo containers were upended, used as watchtowers, manned by the few who were skilled enough, or lucky enough to have survived. The loud, idling trucks did little to distract the marksmen, poised on the cargo containers and rooftop, firing into the crowd of creatures who fell, one after the other as their skulls splintered, exploding from the barrage of bullets.
Bolted to two massive pillars that remained from the original fence, the main gate stood constructed out of rod iron, sealed on the outside by sheets of plywood. The monstrosity slid easily on a set of wheels that were salvaged from a compact car, just outside of the compound. Atop the pillars, a set of concrete gargoyles sat poised like watch dogs, looking out at the undead who were gathering in number, waiting for an easy meal.
Having pre-planned a 4th of July celebration for later that night, they coupled the idea with the need for supplies. If there was any time left after the group returned, the party would ensue. They were running painfully low on everything, and the necessity to restock outweighed the much needed reprieve from the seriousness of their situation. In an existence amongst the undead, survival always came first.
Brae looks over the compound wall, his dreadlocks sway in the breeze like the tattered American flag above his head. He stares out at the ocean of bodies spread out in every direction. They all seem to be following him, eyes locked on his every move. No matter how many of the undead were eradicated, there were always more over the horizon to take their place.
The few survivors that were left at Donovan's Wake were barely holding on, and the growing numbers of the undead only made their hopes fade like the civilization they were trying to hold on to.
Brae didn't know who Donovan was, or why this place was his namesake, and it really didn't matter. All that he cared about now was helping the others so they could get a convoy out, past the gates and into the city to search for supplies.
The engines of the trucks rev in unison as the front gate is opened unleashing the city plough out into the mounds of the undead that litter the streets. Bodies deflect from the thick steel blades on the front of the truck, pushed to the side like so much waste. Popping body parts fill the air with a stench both vile and unrelenting as the trucks flatten flesh and bone on their way out of the compound.
Brae climbs down from the wall and jumps into the passenger seat of one of the big rigs, rifle in tow.
"Took ya long enough," Mitch smiles at Brae through the heavy moustache that covers most of his upper lip.
"Yeah, yeah … just drive," Brae raises an eyebrow, returning the smile in his own way.
Mitch hits the throttle, catching up to the other two trucks as they jerk wildly, bouncing over fallen bodies, slowly crushing them beneath the tread of their tires.
"Now that's music to my ears," Mitch laughs as if he's finally getting to enjoy himself.
"You know man, you’re a little sick in the head," Brae comments.
"I know," Mitch laughs again, lighting a cigar with the lighter from the dash.
The engine whines as Mitch floats the gears of the old Kenworth, gaining speed as the tires send bloody gore out of the fender wells, misting the windows with a light film.
"Damn, these bastards sure are messy," Mitch pulls deeply on the
cigar, filling the air with smoke from his methodical exhale.
The convoy takes a tight, right hand turn into the warehouse district, speeding up once the corner is made.
A gravelly voice comes through the radio, "It's going to be three stop signs on the right, don't bother with the gate, just run it through."
Brae replies, "Were right behind you, Mark."
Most of the lettering has fallen off the face of the building, revealing W** *art **per S*ore in between scorch marks.
The walkie-talkie squawks to life, "Brae and Mitch back into bay 4, Ed, back into bay 2. We'll get in and open the doors. Make sure the trailers are tight against the building, we don't want any repeats of last time."
"Roger," Brae replies.
"And stop calling me Roger," comes the response, causing Mitch to cough out a cloud of smoke, unable to hold back his laughter.
The snow plough stops in front of one of the side entrances to the warehouse and Mark jumps out, shotgun raised, salt and pepper hair reflecting in the sun. Taking aim at the door, he pulls the trigger, blasting a hole the size of a fist through the metal surface. From behind him, the parking brake of the plough is engaged, sending out a rush of air behind the cab, accompanied by a puff of dust.
Ed has already made contact with the loading bay as Mitch begins backing the truck into position. The trailer slams hard against the bumpers fastened to the wall, startling Brae with the sound of twisting steel and screeching rubber.
Holiday of the Dead Page 14
