by Anthology
On good days, when Julie moans, I close my eyes and remember the times when such sounds came from other primal desires.
On bad days, I lean forward. Ever closer. Waiting for her hot breath to splash across my throat.
Working Man's Burden
DAVID C. PINNT
Harold knew things were about to go cock-eyed when Betty 248 stuffed the chicken guts in her mouth.
He sat up on his stool and flicked off the Mossberg's safety. The rest of the Z-crew, Betties and Barneys they called them in the break room, continued to work the eviscerating carousel, shoulders slumped and jumpsuits sagging, hands moving slowly but efficiently as the chicken carcasses rotated on the hooks. Grabbing the breast with the left hand, right plunging into the gut slit and a quick pull and tug, dropping the offal to the stainless steel mesh. Heart, gizzard, and liver, onto the conveyor and the rest down the trough to the waste bins. The regulators implanted in the backs of their skulls, leads burrowing into their shriveling limbic systems, winked green, a slow happy cadence to a shift boss like Harold.
But Betty 248, he'd been watching her close anyway. So new she hardly looked dead, flesh sagging just a bit on her face, deep circles under her eyes. She'd been in the line three, four days? Soon enough her skin would take on a gray, waxy sheen and eventually, despite the hosing down with chlorine each night, it would break open. Dark, dry tissue, the blood long clotted. The sores opened at the knuckles first, then the elbows. Harold knew the repetitive motion---hour after hour gutting the chickens---was just too much for the dead flesh to bear.
Harold swung off the stool and edged around the carousel to see her face. The other crew kept at their jobs, jaws slack, weight tilting from side to side, their various numbers stenciled large across their backs and small over the left breast. The chickens, gleaming white skin still oozing droplets of blood from the defeatherer, swayed on the carousel. Emaciated fingers in rubber gloves grabbed, twisted, pulled, and separated.
On the far side of the carousel Harold stooped, a ratcheting pop sounding off in his left knee. Sure as shit, Betty 248 had a crimson smear across her cheek where she'd crammed the guts into her mouth. The other Z-crew stared straight at the carcasses or worked with eyes closed, but 248's sunken orbs rolled left and right and Harold fancied he could hear a high keening rising from her smeared lips.
He jacked a shell into the Mossberg and thumbed open his radio. "This is Harold in EVR-4... I've got a situation. Send a crew down." Maybe his voice tipped her over or the chewed entrails hitting the desiccated, empty stomach, but Betty 248's regulator failed for certain. She yanked a carcass off its hook, ripped out a mouthful of pearlescent flesh, and turned on the Barney next to her, yellowed teeth gnawing the side of his face, latex-tipped fingers raking his cheap cotton jumpsuit.
Holy shit," Harold flicked the radio open again. "Right now! I need a crew right now!"
The Barney, 109 on his chest, shuffled sideways his regulator working fine, still trying to gut the chicken before him, as Betty 248---shrieks rising in her throat---slavered and chewed at his neck. Harold crab-walked under the carousel, keeping one eye on the Z-crew, not knowing if the fracas would overload their regulators too. His boots squelched on the wet floor, stray clumps of feathers and gobbets of meat in the treads.
Betty 248 ripped off Barney 109's ear, shriveled gray flesh on a zombie so old. The wound lay purple black under the harsh fluorescents.
With one economical step Harold slipped behind the pair, socketed the Mossberg's barrel at the base of the Betty's skull, just below her regulator---now amber---and pulled the trigger. The top of Betty 248's skull vaporized, bone, hair and brain splattering across the carousel, the Z-crew and the chickens. Her body dropped to ground, head gone from the nose up, jumpsuit collar smoldering. Barney 109 turned back to the carousel, left hand twitching for the next chicken.
Levi and two rustlers banged into the evisceration room. The rustlers held lollysticks, steel tubes six feet long, a wire loop at the far end and a shank handle at the other to pull the loop tight. Pistol-gripped Mossbergs hung over their shoulders, barrel down.
Levi took in the scene, Barney 109's gaping head, Betty 248's still lump on the floor, and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. One of the rustlers slapped the red kill switch by the door, shutting down the assembly line, chickens jerked and swayed on their hooks and the Z-crew stopped, limp.
"Goddamnit Harold, you shot her? Protocol is to wait on the rustlers. We just got her last week. Five thousand dollars! She had a good six months in her. Jesus Christ!"
Harold bit back his first reply. Still cradling the Mossberg he tipped its barrel toward Barney 109's ragged head. "Her regulator failed all the way, Levi. Look at that one. She'd taken him down, the whole bunch might've tripped over." He cocked his head toward the rest of the Z-crew, now complacently shifting from foot to foot, staring at the denuded chickens. "They could have all tripped over, you know? Every one. You want that happening?" Harold felt a thick muscle swell in his neck, veins bulging out along his temples---Christ, he'd been working the evisceration room for a dozen years before this ass-wipe was hired and now here he stood riding him on protocol. "They trip over and you got two dozen rampaging around the plant, who knows what happens. I'd be dead, the rustlers you send down dead, who else? A hell of lot more than five thousand dollars I can tell you that, hell of a lot more."
Levi opened his mouth, red flush creeping into his ears, and then seemed to think better of it. He pulled the radio from his belt. "I need status check on the regulator for F-248. Variances for the last twenty-four hours."
While Levi waited for answer the rustlers moved closer to Harold. One held his lollystick in a two handed grip.
"Any contact?" the second asked peering at Harold's bare arms, his neck.
"Contact? Christ no. Only contact was with the Barney there." They continued examining him, made him open his hands, show them his knuckles. Harold felt the post-adrenal surge working from his body. He needed to sit down. Even one scratch, Harold knew, and the loop would be over his head, dragging him into a quarantine room, waiting for the infection to surface.
Levi's radio crackled and he held it to his ear, nodded as if the speaker could see him "A bad regulator, dipped 15 minutes ago and went off-line."
Harold had been in the control room before. A technician monitoring all five hundred Z-crew in the plant, watching the output from the regulators, making sure the urge, the overriding urge that moved them, stayed dampened, the creatures docile.
Harold spit between his feet, prodded at Betty 248's flaccid corpse. "Tell you what, Levi. This'll happen again, the company going on the cheap like this. An approved regulator won't drop completely in 15 minutes with no stimuli. Half this crew's up from Nogales, ain't it? Undocumented. What's the cost now to slip in under the CDC?"
Levi's tongue probed at his back teeth, lips parted. His ears stayed red. "You want to watch what you're asking there, Harold. Two, three years to pick up your pension? Wouldn't be right for man your age to be turned out this late in the game."
When Harold didn't reply Levi allowed himself a small, self-satisfied smirk and clipped the radio to his belt. He beckoned the rustlers "Move this crew out and get the room sanitized. Get this mess cleaned up." He prodded Betty 248's corpse. "And the chickens, shit, those four are gone. Run the rest back through the baths." Barking orders now, the flush left his face. A rich pall of cordite and the yeasty smell of the Betty's brains hung in the air, fighting through the ever-present chlorine, through the chicken offal's briny scent.
"Harold, head up to H.R. Fill out your incident report and clock out. Take the afternoon off."
~
Traffic on the drive home was light early in the afternoon, giving Harold time to ponder. At Federal and 12th panhandlers stood four abreast, some made eye contact, others kept their heads lowered, shuffling alongside the cars trapped at the stoplight. WILL WORK FOR FOOD---HARDWORKING DISABLED VETERAN---ANYTHING HELPS---and the last---ZOMBIES TOOK
MY JOB.
Harold did his best to ignore them and fight the guilt at the same time... there but for the grace of God and such. He caught the left turn signal at 17th as it flipped to amber. These blocks had taken it hard during the Epidemic, lot after vacant lot, the burned foundations poking through the weeds. There'd been talk of rebuilding, townhouses or something, but there were too many empty houses now. Why build more?
Though fifteen years had passed since the Epidemic began, since the first corpses clawed their way from their black rubberized body bags in Houston, Harold still marveled at the way society slipped back into normalcy.
The first dark days were right there if he closed his eyes----the world in chaos, round-the clock coverage on all channels, the cities burning with soldiers rattling through the streets in their Humvees. He and Val had worked hard and furious when the reports first started, screwing plywood over the windows, double nailing closet doors horizontally over the front and back entrances, listening to the relentless thump, thump against the wood.
The tanks and APC's at last roaring into the city to restore some semblance of order, of safety.
And then Stephen had come home.
Harold rubbed at his dry eyes, willing the memory away. He knew the Z's must have some vestigial intelligence down there under their all-consuming hunger. Maybe that's what had brought Stephen north from Colorado Springs, to their doorstep.
All the blood and terror of those first days boiled down to mere seconds on his front porch.
"And look now," he muttered as he made the wide arc around Custer Park. A Z-crew shambled about the grounds, running push mowers back and forth, their overalls spattered green to the knees. Two city foremen and three Rustlers watched them. Another bent over his transponder board, eyeing the regulators' discharge.
One foreman turned his head as Harold's truck rattled by, a shotgun propped on his hip and the sunlight winking from mirrored sunglasses. The city crew looked in bad shape, skin sloughing and lips pulled back in rictus grins. At the plant, after the second shift, all the zombies were herded downstairs and into the safe room, where the day's offal bins were rolled. They were locked up and the control boards shut down, letting them come alive, plunge into the viscera, gobbling it down. Harold had watched a time or two on the security monitors. The technicians waited until the offal was gone, until the first Barney tried to take a bite from his neighbor, and then flipped the regulators back on, leaving them all shuffling aimlessly, stupid, staring at the cement walls.
Such quick and loose use of the regulators was prohibited if a company was using Z-workers. The CDC would shut them down in a blink if they caught wind of it, but Levi and the management thought it worth the risk. The workers lasted longer if they could feed. Still, maybe flipping the regulators on and off weakened them, the way taking too many pain pills eventually stopped helping with the arthritic grinding in his knee.
~
"You're early today."
Harold twisted the bolts on both locks and dropped the counterweighted bar, snugging it against the steel sheathed front door. Val sprawled on the couch, one hand working the remote and other rubbing her bare foot. In the back room the swamp cooler thrummed, pushing damp air through their little rambler. She had unzipped the front of her polyester cleaning blouse, and few strands of hair hung loose at her temples. Sweat beaded on her neck and the bags under her eyes were so dark they seemed purple.
"Had one the Betties flip over today," he rummaged a beer from the refrigerator. Recounting the afternoon's events between swallows, he tried to sound casual, not mentioning how the flesh crept along his scalp as he slid under the carousel, how his guts sloshed as he thought the others were going to flip over, or the dry crumbling of the Betty's brains spraying across the chickens.
"Levi threatened your job? Really said that to you?"
"I tell you Val, they're cutting costs across the board. Bring in those Z-crews on the cheap. I know they couldn't have been certified. They're setting themselves up for one big mess."
Val thumbed the mute button, sighed, and rubbed the inside of her wrist across her forehead. "Well, it's a hell of a day for us, I'll tell you that." She looked off in the distance as she always had when bringing up bad news. "I lost the Chavez Building account today. They came at me with a bid---well damn---so low I would've had to clean the whole place myself to make any money. It was my biggest account. I had to let Esmeralda go. She's got kids, too, you know---it was hard. Said I'd bring her back if business picked up, but there's not much out there."
"Cheap," Harold ran his finger around the bottle top, moisture rippling up in a tiny wave. "Were they---"
"Yep, some outfit out of Greely. I guess they can make 'em push a mop, empty trash cans. Can't think they'll do a decent job." She was silent for a moment and when she spoke again her voice quavered. "Those... things. Those goddamned fucking things." She tossed the remote on the coffee table. "You know, it seemed the world went to hell overnight and then we pulled it back up, but it's just sinking again, in a different way."
Harold glanced at the mantle, at the picture of Stephen in his cadet uniform, so bright and earnest, the world at his feet. He wished, not for the first time, Val had been the one to look through the peephole that night. Would she have only seen her son? Would she have turned a mother's blind eye to the twigs in his hair, the dirt rimmed lips and nostrils, the dried bloody tendrils snaking from his scalp and ears. Maybe it would have been better than all this, better if she had opened the door wide and let him lurch into the house, better to have had it all end then.
On the television two talking heads shared a screen, below them the words---A Shifting Economy?---crawled. Harold turned up the volume. "This has the potential to skyrocket the GDP, vault us over Asia and Europe----"
The blow-dried head's adversary cut him off---"But isn't it just slavery under another name? Aunt Mildred kicks the bucket and her family gets a quick thousand to ship her off for processing, regulator implanted in her skull and the next day she's making widgets, free labor."
"Well certainly there will be some birth pains---they are all but taking over the unskilled job market. Ultimately it will bring us all a higher standard of living. People are going to have to become better educated, more skilled workers." He leaned back and chuckled. "I know no zombie could do my job, though I'm not so sure about Chet here."
Harold clicked the television off before Chet could reply.
He sat the empty bottle on the table. "You know it wouldn't be so bad if the controls were followed. They're supposed to be burning ninety percent of the bodies, strict protocol for the regulators, but---"
"But they're greedy," Val finished his sentence.
Harold nodded. It was an old topic for them "Trucking them up from the border. Who knows how cheap their circuits are. Business, it's greedy, and the government's turning a blind eye to it. I guess you can't blame them down south for selling the bodies off---even if they get five hundred dollars each, it's more than most of those folks see in a year."
Val let her hair loose, rubbing her neck.
Harold felt a small hitch in his chest when he realized her brown eyes were shiny with tears.
"I can blame them. Look what we've become," her mouth softened. "We're sinking into hell and all anyone cares about is 'can I make another dollar on this?'" She slumped, "There was a time when you would just work. You could go to work and care for your family. If you were willing to work hard, it was enough. You could raise your family and have a decent life."
"Well, we did that. We had a decent life before..." He lost steam, fumbling over the right words. "I'm sorry," Harold said and he hoped she knew what he meant.
"I just don't know" her voice hiccupped, "I just don't know how it can keep moving. The world. I don't know how we can keep moving."
"I don't see we have a choice. I know Stephen---"
Her voice rose, cutting him off, "Don't."
~
Later, in bed, he splayed a han
d across the swell of her hip, her nightgown cool beneath his fingers. Her breath caught and he knew she wasn't asleep, but she kept her eyes closed and turned her back to him, burrowing her head into the pillow. Harold's hand dropped.
He knew better than to say their son's name in front of her. She would spiral down for days, breakfasts and dinners with a palpable wall of silence separating them. Her eyes glossy and staring past him, mouth, cheeks and forehead creased with hard shadows.
He was already gone, Harold thought. He knew it. The dried blood, the dirt and twigs, yet still that part of his mind which took such sadistic delight in waking him deep in the night, asked the question again and again. Was he? Was he really? How fast did you bring the shotgun up Harold? Didn't you see a glint, just a flash of awareness in his eyes?
He'd buried Stephen in the soft ground of the garden along the back fence. Zipped his near headless corpse into a day-glow orange mummy bag and shoveled dirt over him, blocking out Val's wailing from the house, letting her anguish blend with the braying sirens, the clattering Strykers and staccato bark of AR-15s filling those first days of the Epidemic.
No man should have to bury his son with his own hands.
Harold turned over. Outside a low warbling siren grew closer. Revolving red and blue light seeped through the cracks of the heavy plantation shutters bolted to their windows.
He rose and levered the shutters open, filling the room with muted moonlight and the oscillating flash of an emergency vehicle. A sheriff's SUV, blue and white, stopped at an angle across his street. The virus, the infection---whatever had caused the dead to walk was still in the air, weaker, but enough to keep the crematoriums busy.
About every third corpse now became infected and sometimes people died alone in their homes, no one to strap them down or phone their death into the CDC.
