Dead Meat

by Joseph M. Monks

  Beeb had seen a lot of bad things in her life, albeit mostly from afar. Nuclear power plants melting down. Earthquakes that had turned entire cities to rubble. A tsunami that had killed over a hundred thousand people and washed countless others out to sea. Men who’d flown airplanes into buildings in the name of their god.

  But what she’d seen in the past few weeks… Well, it was almost unimaginable. Unthinkable, really, unless you were into horror movies and creepy old comic books. Sure enough, though, the imaginary horrors had become reality, and she’d witnessed too much, first-hand, to deny the truth of it.

  Sunset was approaching; she could tell by the way the light was retreating across the floorboards. Somewhere, maybe on the next street, somebody screamed. It might have been a woman, Beeb couldn’t be sure. She hoped so. Not long ago, such a thought would have made her cringe. Would have made her furious with herself. But things were different now. A scream meant death had come to pay a visit. And if it wasn’t a woman’s scream, then it was probably a child. Between a woman and a child being ripped apart? There was no contest.

  Beeb blocked it out. She was used to it by now, although she was having to do it less and less as the days passed. She supposed that was good, regardless of what it meant for the rest of the world. It had taken a while, but she’d finally given up on worrying about things like that. Things she couldn’t control, and didn’t feel a part of any more. If she did survive, if she made it through what was coming, she might have to rethink that. For now, though, it was of no consequence to her.

  She dipped her hand into the Ziploc, careful not to look at what she was touching. She cupped a small handful and brought it to her mouth, closing her eyes.

  Fuel, she told herself, it was nothing but fuel. She needed to keep the engine going, to keep herself sharp. Because it wouldn’t be long now. It could happen at any moment.

  An almond dropped to the floor, startling her. Her eyes flew open, her hand settling on the stock of her Mossie. But she wasn’t in the attic now. She was downstairs, the afternoon’s fading light slanting in through the living room windows. Windows that hadn’t yet been boarded over. And a front door that still opened, because the WELCOME mat wasn’t yet a false promise.

  Jimmy Knorr was racing up the block, running for all he was worth. Behind him, five year old Hannah was shrieking her head off, riding in a red plastic wagon. Her older brother was doing his best, but an eight year old boy’s best wasn’t nearly good enough the day the world started coming apart.

  Beeb tried to shut out the memories, knowing the effort was futile. The little room in her mind where she imprisoned the horrors wasn’t going to hold them. Not this time. Her meditative techniques and decades of self-discipline were only good enough to keep them at bay for so long. Eventually, they found a way out. They always did.

  So Jimmy Knorr kept running, and Hannah Knorr kept screaming, and when the little girl turned to look back at what was chasing them, the wagon tipped over, spilling her onto the sidewalk. There was no time to brace herself. The awkward face-plant flattened her nose, her forehead shredded like she’d been run through a cheese grater.

  With the wagon no longer slowing him down, Jimmy flew forward, unbalanced, sprawling headlong into Rory Darden’s juniper bushes. Despite having the wind knocked out of him, the kid refused to give up. Showing more guts than Rory Darden ever would, Jimmy managed to get onto his hands and knees, and began crawling back to his sister.

  What Jimmy didn’t understand, though, was that Hannah was already beyond saving. The rotting carcass that had followed them from the cemetery held her fast. Her kicking and squirming hadn’t prevented him from gnawing off one of her eyebrows, or slurping up the blood from her badly skinned face. Jimmy found his feet, staggered over, and started pounding on the creature, demanding it let go.

  A second corpse shambled toward them, unnoticed. It dragged itself forward on a broken ankle, stabbing its tibia and fibula into the dirt to help it along. By the time it reached the trio, the first gutbag was sucking Hannah’s right eye from its socket. She’d stopped screaming by then, thank God.

  Jimmy, however, had not. He was still pulling on his sister’s limp arm, trying to wrest her from the thing devouring her alive, when the second zombie took him down from behind.

  In truth, it was over quickly. But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. The not-quite-dead thing rolled Jimmy onto his back, tearing into the boy’s soft belly with rotten, yellow teeth. Standing in her doorway, Beeb had watched the scene unfold, aghast. She hadn’t thought of the rifles, or the handgun. Shooting the damned things didn’t occur to her until later, when the initial shock wore off. It didn’t matter what she and her neighbors had seen on the news, because it still seemed too fantastic to be real. Not until Jimmy Knorr. And Jimmy… Well, it took him an awful long time to stop screaming. A hell of a lot longer than his sister, that was for damn sure.

  Beeb gnashed her teeth, worked to get her breathing under control. Flashed back to Jimmy’s intestines, strung out across the sidewalk, one end clamped in the undead thing’s jaw. On Randy Mott, storming down his driveway, eyes ablaze and face contorted with rage, snarling something incoherent as he sighted down the barrel of his pump-action and squeezed the trigger.

  “God rest their souls,” she said, making the sign of the cross. There wasn’t much left to believe in any more, particularly a God, but old habits died hard, just like little children. If there was a God out there, Beeb was sure pissed off at him. And if she wound up standing before him one day, she intended to tell him so.

  She thought of Bonnie, her own little sister. How was she doing? Was she all right? Was she even still alive? Beeb had tried desperately to contact her the night the Knorr children had been slaughtered, even though the two hadn’t spoken in years. She’d called everyone she could think of who might have a line on her, but no one did. No one who was willing to help her, anyway. Not even now, with the world crashing down around them.

  Could she blame them? She didn’t know. Ruminating on it didn’t produce any answers. Sometimes she was angry—furious with them for keeping her sister’s secret. Other times…other times she couldn’t bring herself to feel hurt by their betrayal, even though she was left with that terrible uncertainty. Left to sit in the dark and wonder...

  The gulf between them had widened after their father’s death, eventually growing too great to bridge. Beeb understood that. Had come, reluctantly, to accept it. Bonnie left home at 17, registering at a community college in another state and hitchhiking her way out of town. Beeb hadn’t joined her, despite Bonnie’s pleas.

  “You just can’t live without it, can you?” she’d spat, slipping out the back door and disappearing into the night. The words were as brutal as any sucker punch. They hurt, much more than Beeb was willing to admit. Worse, they were all she had to remember her by. They were the last words Bonnie had ever spoken to her.

  Beeb caressed her cheek, feeling the phantom heat of a palm that had never reached her face. Bonnie had pulled back, recoiling, too disgusted to touch her. The burn came from within. From deep down in her soul. Fueled by embarrassment and shame. A tear escaped before she could blink it away, finding the ugly white track that ran down her face.

  Grandpa had died three months later. He’d been the last of them. Her father, uncle and grandfather were all finally gone. She had put the word out. Used every one of their mutual friends. And though she was certain Bonnie knew what had happened, still, she had not broken her silence. Beeb had driven to the college, explaining to the student resources director the need for her to reach her sister. But Bonnie had never actually enrolled, and that was where the trail ended.

  She rechecked the long guns. Fingered the butt of the .357. Felt her heart catch as she stifled a sob. What had gone through Bonnie’s mind when things had begun to unravel? Had she spared a thought for her sister? Had she considered picking up the phone, only to find that it was too late, that good ol’ Ma Bell had bitten the dust?
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  It was near dark. Twilight was fading. The dim glow in the attic window had turned bruise-purple. Soon, the stars would come out, and a three quarter moon would look down on a dying planet. Was Bonnie out there, somewhere, looking at the same patch of sky? Was she—?

  Another squeal carried through the night. Beeb heard it, but couldn’t make sense of it. A long time had passed since she’d heard the first one—too long for anyone bitten not to have been turned. So, what did that mean? Was there someone nearby, like Beeb, bunkered down in some boarded up home? It was possible, she guessed, although she found it unlikely. Why hadn’t she heard this woman’s cries before? Why hadn’t she made her presence known? Beeb had. For the first week, she’d fired off a single shot every three hours. Then two. After that she’d decided to stop wasting the bullets, and turned a bed sheet into a banner, using old house paint she’d found in the basement. She’d used her hand to spell out the word ALIVE, and the following day, when the paint was dry, crawled out onto the widow’s walk to put it on display.

  That had been three weeks ago. Either no one had come down her street, or there was no one left to come down her street. Six of one, half dozen of the other, she thought. But now, that woman’s screams…

  A slick tendril of dread wound through her chest. What if it wasn’t someone who’d been holed up since the beginning? What if it was a newcomer? Someone who’d come here after the initial wave of zombies had wreaked their havoc. Someone who had a reason to be here…

  Bonnie? The cold pragmatist in her, the Beeb that had kept her alive this long, denied it. Said it was impossible. That Bonnie never would have come back. Not to this place. Not even for her. It was foolishness to hold out hope for such a thing.

  But the heart found hope even where there was room for none, and Beeb dragged her .308 Mossie with her to the attic window, where the binoculars hung from a rusty nail.

  The window was clean enough, but she spat on the pane and rubbed an oval spotless with her palm anyway. She glassed her surroundings, looking for any sign of movement. She panned to the extent the window allowed, and then did it all over again, this time in the opposite direction. Nothing. She held her breath, waiting for the woman to cry out again. If only she would make some noise, Beeb could pinpoint her location. Then…

  Then what? What could she do? She was a decent marksman, and the scope on the Mossberg bolt-action was truer than the gospel, but unless the woman was in one of the homes close enough to offer her a clean shot, well, there wasn’t much she could offer. Not without leaving the house.

  Could she? If it came down to it, would she be willing to step outside? Just a few days ago, the thought wouldn’t even have crossed her mind. But Beeb had been keeping her vigil for going on three weeks now, and for the past six days she hadn’t once left the attic. But a survivor… If there was a survivor out there, after all this time, she’d have to help, wouldn’t she?

  The street remained silent. From her vantage point, Beeb could see all the way to the corner on the North side. The South end of the block was longer though, stretching beyond the point where she could angle the binoculars to view the intersection. Try though she might, in the encroaching darkness she could see nothing. She made up her mind. She was staying put, at least until morning. The dead didn’t like full daylight, although it wouldn’t slow them down any if they got wind of fresh meat. It would be even better if tomorrow was a warm day, though that seemed like wishful thinking. They were in the full grip of Fall now, the trees shedding their leaves, spreading tapestries of umber and orange and brown across unraked yards. Beeb wondered if the dead rotted faster in the heat, the way roadkill did in the summertime. She was toying with the idea when she heard something that sounded like a door being slammed. It had a funny echo to it. Hollow, almost, the way sounds sometimes got when they came from someplace far away. It was strange, hearing something like that now that the block was abandoned. Or, nearly abandoned. Some nights, she could hear the houses on either side settling, breaking the night’s suffocating stillness. It was a disquieting noise, too. The kind of thing you never would have heard before. Stealthy noises. Things that went unnoticed when the TV was on, or a CD was playing, or the radiator was kicking out a little steam. Now? Those were things of the past. Silence dominated the night. The expansion and contraction of beams and boards, the soundtrack of every haunted house movie she’d ever seen, played without interruption from dusk ‘til daybreak, in honest-to-goodness surround sound.

  No, she decided, she wouldn’t leave the house. Not for some stranger, survivor or not. She couldn’t go back. Couldn’t help the Knorr children. Couldn’t make up for her failings.

  What about for Bonnie, though? What if her sole living relative was the survivor who needed her help? Beeb wrestled with the dilemma. A question arose which troubled her deeply. Would Bonnie be any less a stranger after all this time?

  She raised the binoculars, but it was no use. The street was all but invisible to her now. Shadows against shadows, like folds in a black velvet cloth. If Bonnie was near, she reasoned, she would know to identify herself. She would know, if she was trying to get Beeb’s attention, that—

  Or would she? Beeb stroked her cheek, trying to decide. There was only one reason for Beeb to remain here, when everyone else had fled, or been killed trying to hold out. Bonnie would know why. And that meant…

  “She’d never let them know she was here,” Beeb whispered, training the binoculars on the upper stories of the homes across the street. How would she do it? A candle, maybe? That would be the best way, assuming she could find one. Or a flashlight. Even just opening a window and waving a pillow case would be enough.

  Another moan. Bonnie tossed aside the binoculars and unlatched the window. It was small, but she could get through it if she had to. She’d tried it once, the day she’d finished boarding up all the first and second floor entry points. She could shinny out onto the widow’s walk and signal. That wouldn’t be too risky.

  A cry. Like one she’d heard years earlier, shrill enough to make the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Bonnie, the day she’d come home from the playground and found her older sister on the porch, bleeding from the jagged slice that snaked down her cheek. The wound Beeb had blamed on a piece of metal from the swingset. But Bonnie knew better. The cut was too clean, too precise. Ugly, but not haphazard. Just enough to forever mar her once-angelic face. To spoil the beauty that had so captivated her father. And uncle. And grandfather. A beauty that the girls would never again hold in common.

  A beauty that only one of them now possessed.

  The wail opened up the floodgates. The memories, most of them vile, came rushing back. Her father’s breath, hot on her face and sour with whiskey. Her uncle’s rough, callused hands and ratty, stained boxers. Her grandfather, refusing to let her go, pulling her onto his lap and probing her ear with his tongue. She shivered, remembering the tobacco-brown spittle he left on her neck. And other places. Bonnie, screaming at Beeb’s mutilated face, not for a sibling’s injury, but what it meant for her.

  The trap door crashed open, the smack of wood against wood like a cherry bomb going off. Beeb spun, reaching for the Mossie, operating entirely on instinct.

  They fought to be first, her uncle outmuscling her father, just as he’d done when both had been human. Grandpa brought up the rear, the familiar gap-toothed leer twisting his desiccated face. Distorting it. Making it worse, somehow, than it had ever been when she was young.

  Her uncle tumbled in, crawling toward the trunk where Beeb had hidden as a child. Her father—who’d come out of the ground in better shape—shoved his brother aside and rose to his feet. He’d only taken a single, shaky step before striking his head on a rafter, slowing him down. Beeb leveled the gun, exhaled, and pulled the trigger.

  Guns had been a fixture in the house when she and Bonnie were growing up. Beeb had learned to shoot when she was only nine, Grandpa taking her out into the woods, where they’d used squirrels as targets. H
er uncle had shown her how to gut the poor things for stewing, rewarding her with a sharp backhand if she dared to cry. She’d fired plenty of rounds in her life, and by ten, she’d spent most nights dreaming about turning one of the long guns on her family. Maybe the Mossie 4x4, which held five cartridges. That would be plenty of gun for the three men in the house. Or maybe the thirty-ought-six.

  But she hadn’t had the courage. In death, however, shooting her father felt just as fulfilling as she’d imagined it would. Seeing his brain splattered across the beams and watching him drop to the floor like a squirrel knocked out of a tree sent adrenaline pumping through her veins.

  Her uncle scuttled around like a cockroach, low to the ground and glaring at her. Beeb was ready. She’d waited for him to get close to the trunk before blowing her father’s head off, which left plenty of time to line up the second shot. She saw the dismay on his face as he recognized that it was the Mossberg—his favorite hunting rifle—that was trained on him. He put a hand up, as if it might ward off the inevitable. Beeb cackled with glee as he shrank back, having nowhere left to go. A dime-sized hole appeared in his palm. A split-second later, its twin blossomed in the center of his forehead. The round punched a fist-sized crater in the back of his skull, emptying it against the far wall.

  Grandpa closed the distance between them surprisingly fast. He got hold of one of her legs, clawing at the tight denim. Beeb jammed the Mossie’s smoking barrel into his crooked mouth, forcing him back. A smell not unlike burning paper filled the attic. Bested for the moment, the old codger strained to back down the ladder, trying to pry his blackened lips from the muzzle. Beeb howled in triumph as she pulled the trigger a third time.