This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  So it was with earplugs that Nina slumbered at night. She could still feel the bass from time to time, but feeling bass wasn’t nearly as irritating as actually having to listen to it. When Nina raised her head off the pillow that morning to greet the sunshine, she had slept through the gunfire, the explosions, and the screaming. As far as Nina knew, today was just a regular day.

  She wasn’t looking forward to going to her secretary job, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She yawned as she padded barefoot through her apartment, showering, and putting her clothes on. She brewed herself a cup of coffee, threw it in a cup to go, and walked down the flight of stairs to her car. She marveled at the amount of garbage on the landing. Spare bottles littered the stairs, a garbage bag sat ripped and ownerless at the top of the landing, and what was that? Bullet casings? Once again, Nina thanked the lord for whoever had invented earplugs.

  The windshield of her car was still wet from the night’s rain. She unlocked the door, swung it open, and tossed her briefcase in the passenger seat. Nina started the engine of her Toyota Prius, unaware that the engine, which was considered quiet for a car, was more than enough to bring the dead out of the woodwork.

  From a third-floor landing, a body tumbled through the sky to land on her windshield, shattering it. Nina flinched and screamed. As she extricated herself from the Prius, she kept expecting people to run and help her. That’s how it worked in the movies. A woman screamed, and then everyone scrambled to help her. Only this time, no one came to her aid.

  Instead, she watched in horror as the man who had shattered her windshield reached out to her with a gray arm. His face was shattered and misshapen, but the man could still see her for what she was. Food.

  From other places, she could finally see help in the form of her neighbors… only they weren’t her neighbors, not anymore. There was the patriarch of the noisy family downstairs. His button-up western t-shirt was torn at the abdomen, and blood caked his brown skin. His face was blank and expressionless. But the most revolting sight was when Nina saw two of the man’s five children come stumbling out of the apartment doorway in much the same shape.

  Nina screamed nonstop, unable to comprehend what was happening. Her first instinct was to get away, so that’s exactly what she did. Her voice cracking with every scream, she hopped back into her car and threw it in reverse. She could see out the back windshield, but driving in reverse was not one of her strengths.

  The man who had landed on her windshield began tearing through the broken glass, his hands and arms shredding in the process. With her head turned, she didn’t notice him get his pale arm through the windshield until he had a handful of her hair. Despite the three story fall, the man still had quite a bit of strength, and he wrenched Nina's head to the side, causing her to back into a large oak tree on the side of the road. Her head banged against the headrest of her car, and the deployment of her airbag broke the gray man's arm in half. She would have been safe if it weren't for the handful of monsters that were advancing on her unconscious form. The first bite woke her. The second, third, and fourth made her wish she were dead. The fifth granted her wish.

  ****

  Gianni Grimaldi had it all. The car, the acting career, the house on the hill. The only thing he didn't have was much time. He was late for the first day of shooting Marked for Vengeance, a medium-range-budget horror flick with theatrical aspirations. It was one of his first starring gigs, and he was kicking himself for going out the night before. But what are you going to do? It's your first night in a new town, you and your acting buddies are stuck in a hotel with nothing to do, and you've got money and a modicum of fame waiting to spread the locals' legs if you play your cards right. Of course, he was going to go out on the town.

  He wondered if Spindly Jackson, ex-futbol star turned actor, felt the same way he did this morning. His head ached, and he wondered if makeup was going to be able to do anything about the bags underneath his eyes. With his hair gelled up just right, he stumbled down to the lobby of the Hotel Plush and set out on a quest for some coffee. It was 6:30 in the morning, and no one was around, not even the desk clerk was at their station.

  On a metal cart, he spied two coffee containers next to a stack of Styrofoam cups. Ah, just what the doctor ordered. There was nothing like a good dose of caffeine in the morning to kick-start the old liver into functionality.

  The sunlight streaming in through the front doors made his eyes hurt, so he turned his back to them. Gianni grabbed a cup, filled it with coffee, and then added a teaspoon of sugar. With his back to the lobby, he didn't notice the bellhop shambling towards him, his eye missing from its socket and the left sleeve torn off of his once pristine bellhop uniform.

  The bellhop grabbed him from behind and took a bite out of Gianni's neck. They tumbled to the ground, and the last coherent thought that Gianni Grimaldi ever formed was, Not the face! The world would weep at his death... or at least the twenty or thirty movie reviewers who had appreciated him in bit roles.

  ****

  Anan Abdullahi woke up in the morning to find that her mother was not there. This was normal. Her mother frequently stayed out all night, especially when she had a new boyfriend, which seemed to happen once or twice a month.

  Anan lay in bed, wishing to close her eyes and fall back asleep, but it wasn’t meant to be. She could hear her little sister up to something in the other room. When her own stomach gurgled, she decided to get up and see if Emanna could use some food as well.

  She stumbled out into the living room, across the stained, toy-littered carpet, and found Emanna jumping up and down on the couch, not wearing a stitch of clothing except for a dirty diaper. Anan’s morning was already starting out shitty.

  She pulled Emanna into the bathroom and helped her get into a new diaper, she threw the old, stinky one into the garbage. They were down to their last diaper. She hoped that Mom brought home more or else Emanna would be walking around pooping wherever she went. She would probably get blamed, and then she would get the closet. She didn't want the closet. It was dark in there.

  Hand in hand, Anan and Emanna walked into the kitchen to make themselves some breakfast. The kitchen looked just like it usually did. The sink was piled high with unwashed dishes, flies buzzed around the mess, laying clutches of tiny eggs in the week-old, rotten milk left in the bottom of a cereal bowl. Old fruit went to rot in a fruit dish on top of the microwave. It was all normal, and Anan and Emanna paid it no mind.

  Emanna walked to the table, her toddler body desiring to sit in a big people chair instead of her highchair, while Anan walked to the fridge and looked inside. Old lunch meat, a few cheese slices, and no milk… it was the absence of milk that really depressed her. She slammed the door closed, and pulled a couple of bowls from the cupboards. They were the last clean ones. She eyed the sink suspiciously, staring at the tower of dirty dishes. Someone would have to clean them, but she decided that thought could wait.

  Instead, she climbed up on the one clean spot on the counter, the one spot where beer bottles and old juice spills had not destroyed the tacky laminated surface. She opened the cupboard and pulled down a box of cereal, a giant blue box of Rice Krispies, three freakish elves smiling back at her, giant spoons dipping into the bowl on the box.

  She dumped the cereal into a bowl, not caring about the stray Krispie or two that bounced off the counter and onto the floor. Then it was time to do it… time to put the water on. Anan hated the taste of water and Rice Krispies, but her options were limited. It was either a bowl of Rice Krispies with water, or pieces of questionable lunch meat or rotten fruit.

  “Where is mom?” Anan asked plaintively as she set the bowl of Rice Krispies in front of Emanna, along with a spoon that seemed relatively clean. Emanna looked at her with questioning eyes; she had not yet started to speak. Anan didn’t know if that was normal or not, but she was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t. “Don’t worry; I’m sure she’ll be here soon,” she told Emanna more to reassure herself than Em
anna.

  Anan poured herself her own bowl of cereal and plopped down at the kitchen table. The first spoonful wasn’t so bad. The cereal was still crunchy, but she wished that they still had sugar. Rice Krispies were always better with sugar, but as with most things, they had run out weeks ago. Emanna was done with her bowl, so she hopped off of the chair and tossed the bowl in the sink, adding to the festering pile of dirty dishes.

  Anan looked at the pile with dread in her eyes. So many dishes. She finished the last bite of her cereal, and walked over to the sink. Hesitantly, she began pulling the dishes out of the sink, trying to avoid getting her hands wet or getting any of the really nasty moldy bits on her fingers. She dry-heaved throughout the process.

  In the other room, she could hear Emmana turning on the TV. They only received a few channels, and it didn’t sound like anything that Anan wanted to watch, so she resigned herself to finishing the dishes.

  After she had cleared out the sink, she looked at the bottom of it. Mold and old food were plastered to the bottom of the sink, and with disgust in her chest, she picked up the old lump of steel wool that would do the scraping and cleaning. She leaned over the edge of the sink, grinding away with the steel wool, her shirt getting wet in the process.

  Her mind wandered as she scrubbed, thinking of better times and better places. She remembered her father, his brown skin and the way he would always smile with his missing teeth. She missed him. Anan spent most of her daydreaming minutes fantasizing about her dad walking through the door. She would run to him, leap into the air, and he would catch her in one smooth motion and hug her tight in his arms. But she knew that wasn’t going to happen. She knew that people just didn’t come back from being dead, and if they did, well, it wouldn’t be anything that she would want to hug.

  She shook the water off of the bowl that she had just cleaned and placed it on the counter to drip dry. She grabbed an old pot, covered in radioactive orange filth. What was this? Oh yeah, her mom had made macaroni and cheese last week. It was good… but this was just nasty. The parts of the pot where water had been sitting were covered in soggy and cold orange muck.

  Anan turned the water on to get it as hot as possible, but still the stubborn soggy bits wouldn’t separate from the sides of the pot. It was time for more steel wool. She held the semi-rusty blob up to the window; bits of food and filth dangled from the swoops and loops that composed the soggy bundle. She tried not to look at it too hard, and she began scrubbing the pot.

  Her mom had never told her what had happened to her dad. When she had asked her about it, her mom had seemed sad and almost embarrassed, then she had told Anan to never speak of it again. One night, when she was supposed to be sleeping in her room, Anan had snuck into the hallway to listen to her mom and her new boyfriend talk. She heard her mom sobbing. She had been talking about Anan’s father, and she overheard the word "overdosed," but her 7-year-old mind had no idea what that meant. The man with his arms around his mother held up an object to her mother’s lips, ran his hand through her hair, and told her that everything was going to be ok. Then he pulled out a lighter, held it to the object, and Anan watched from around the corner as her mother blew smoke into the air, acrid, stinging smoke. Anan didn’t like the smell of it, so she went back to her bed, wondering what the word “overdose” meant.

  From the other room, Anan heard Emanna yell, “Mama!” Anan dropped the steel wool in the sink, and she ran to the living room with a smile plastered to her face. Emanna had finally spoken her first word! She skidded to a stop in the living room as her mother stood in the doorway of her bedroom, her shirt off and vomit running down her bare chest. Her eyes were swollen and puffy. A needle hung from her arm, and her black hair hung down over her face, tangled and speckled with more bits of vomit.

  Emanna didn’t know better, so she ran to hug her mother. Anan did the same. Anan never had to wash another dish again.

  Chapter 40: On the Road

  Dustin's studio apartment wasn't much to look at. It was good enough for him. The rent was cheap, it was fine for a one-night fling, and he was on the top floor, so he didn't have to hear his neighbors for the most part. The one exception was the guy next door, a recovering alcoholic who spent more time drinking than recovering.

  As he stepped from the apartment's cramped bathroom, he toweled himself off. Not even the scalding hot water of the shower could make him feel clean after everything he had seen that night.

  The woman was asleep on his couch, which also served as his bed. She had said her name was Suzy before she curled up on his couch and drifted off to sleep. He didn't mind. It gave him a chance to freshen up and get his mind straight.

  The random crack of gunfire in the morning also had a hand in helping him figure things out. After sliding on a clean, white T-shirt, Dustin padded across the living room to turn the TV on. He sat down in the apartment's only chair with the remote in his hand. What he saw only served to steel his resolve to get the hell out of town.

  Things were bad all over. As the visions of violence danced across the screen, Dustin couldn't help but feel the nervousness build in his body. It started in his chest, and five minutes after he had first felt it, his body was trembling with tension. Just then Suzy woke up.

  She sat up, her hair in a tangled mess, rubbing her eyes and yawning. Then she slowly laid back down on the couch and said, "I was hoping it was all just a dream."

  Dustin didn't know what to say, so he just remained quiet.

  "He was a nice guy, you know."

  "Who?"

  "My brother, the man in the car." Suzy looked off into the distance. Dustin tried to ascertain if she was merely sad or suffering from some sort of mental breakdown. "Pete was always a good guy. Last night, he called me up and said that he wasn't feeling so well. He had gotten into some sort of bar fight with a man. The man bit him, but he didn't think anything of it. I was taking him to the hospital when we got into the accident."

  Dustin watched as realization dawned on her face. "The other driver. Did they..."

  He interrupted her with a negative shake of his head. She buried her face in his sofa/bed, and sobbed softly. Dustin began gathering his things, unable to comfort the woman. How do you comfort someone who had inadvertently killed someone when their brother had turned into a monster? Someone else might have the words for that, but not him.

  "Listen. We have to go. The city is waking up. Things are bad."

  Suzy, her head still buried in the couch, said, "How bad?"

  Dustin took a deep breath. "It's not just happening here. It's happening all over. The best thing we can do is to get away from here, get away from people as much as we can."

  Suzy didn't offer any argument, so he continued to pack some things into his lone suitcase. "Do you have any family here? Besides your brother?" He felt like an ass mentioning him so soon, so he stuffed an extra pair of socks into the suitcase angrily.

  "No, my parents retired to Florida last year. I was going to move down there, but I finally got hired as a teacher here. We were planning to take a vacation this August, but well... I guess that's all just a pipedream now."

  Dustin pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser and pulled out a few T-shirts, mostly old, faded T-shirts with band names printed across them, most of them black. After plopping four of them in the suitcase, he threw in a couple pairs of jeans and some underwear. He would give anything for a gun, and he almost felt like an idiot for being so anti-gun for most of his adult life. This was the reason the 2nd Amendment existed. Instead, he walked over to the closet and pulled out an old aluminum bat with the words "Easton" emblazoned across the barrel in red lettering.

  "Even if you had the money, they've shut down all air traffic to try and prevent the spread of whatever this is. I heard it on the news." It was as if Suzy had just realized that there was a TV on in the room. She finally pulled her head out of the couch long enough to watch. Then she slowly sat up, sucked into the vortex of carnage that careened across the sc
reen.

  Dustin closed his suitcase and rested the baseball bat on top of it. Then he walked to the kitchen and began stuffing canned goods into paper bags. He was never so happy that he always had a pantry stocked with soup. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to keep them from starving for a couple of weeks.

  He walked out of his tiny kitchen and into the main room of his studio apartment to find Suzy staring at the TV, her mouth wide open and panic etched on her face. He placed the bags of food on the ground next to his suitcase and then walked over to Suzy. He placed his hands on her upper arms, and stared her directly in the face to make sure he had her attention.

  "We have to go. We have to get out of the city."

  Suzy shook her head in disbelief. "We can't go out there. People are dying. We'll be murdered."

  Dustin shook his head and tried to speak as clearly as he could. "We have to leave. If we wait here, there will be more of those things. It's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better. If we sit here and wait, we may not make it out alive. I'm going. With or without you. I've got an old car, not much to look at, but it runs just fine. I'm ready to go. You can stay here or you can come with me, but you've got to make up your mind. Make it up right now. If we stick together, there's a chance. If you want to stay here, you're welcome to it, but in 30 seconds, I'm walking right out that door and you're on your own."

  She sat there thinking about it. Dustin wanted to slap her across the face to make her see reason, but that's not the type of guy he was. When it had been well over thirty seconds and she still hadn't said anything, he walked over to the floor, and picked up his baseball bat in one hand and his suitcase in the other. She just sat there. He'd just have to make another trip to get the food.