by Raymond Lee
“Shit!” He covered his nose with his arm, but couldn’t look away as dark blood spilled out of the man’s chest. It didn’t gush as he imagined blood would do from a fresh body and it seemed darker than what he’d expected as well. Still covering his nose with his arm, he used his free hand to poke his blade around inside the gash he’d created.
Peel back the layers. See inside. Feel the power of holding a heart in your hand.
In the back of his mind he knew something was wrong, but Cruz did as the voice instructed, drawn to the horror of what the infected man’s body held inside. He made more cuts with the knife, widening the gap until he saw organs and ribs. Everything was shriveled and rotten, almost purple in color. He could see the heart. He imagined it pulsating in his hand, imagined crushing it in his hand and drinking the juices. He imagined the power from it and felt the rush of adrenaline.
Find her secrets. Drink her soul and hold her inside you forever. It’s what you want. You can keep her forever.
“It’s what I want.”
“Cruz,” Raven said as she looked at him from where she lay naked below him, a wide gash between her breasts running from her throat to naval. Her flesh peeled away from the wound, revealing her organs marinating in bright red blood. Red teardrops spilled from the corners of her horrified, pain-filled eyes to drip down her porcelain white cheeks. “Why?”
“Fuck!” Cruz jumped back, scurrying away from the body until his back connected with a tree. He bent at the waist and hurled, the voice laughing in his head and taunting his weakness. “Leave me alone,” he pleaded as the last of the bile left him and he crouched down at the base of the tree, hitting the back of his head against it to shut off the noise. When that didn’t stop the laughing he started hitting himself, slapping at his head. “Shut up! Leave me alone! Go away!”
He looked back at the body, relieved to see it was just the infected man, that he hadn’t hurt Raven. Tears sprang forth from his eyes as the image of her looking up at him with such betrayal and confusion on her face flooded his mind and he started to sob uncontrollably. He’d stopped crying when he was little, after being beaten for it. He’d learned to hold his pain inside where no one could find it and punish him, but he couldn’t stop crying as he recalled how much he’d liked the image of Raven cut open under him, until she spoke and brought him back to his right mind.
“No. No, I didn’t,” he argued with himself, shaking his head and punching himself in the temple. “It’s not me. It’s the monster. It’s the thing inside me. It’s not me. It’s not me!” he screamed, causing the voice in his head to laugh harder.
I am only what you allow me to be, the monster inside him whispered in its slithery, snake-like hiss of a voice. I am just suggestion. You are the power, the reality. You are the monster.
“Fuck you,” Cruz growled. “I won’t hurt her. I won’t hurt anyone so fuck you right in your fucking face.” He heard the snap of a twig behind him and looked around the tree to see an infected woman creeping toward him. He looked back to the off ramp and saw a small group of them coming down it, drawn by his voice. “Fuck all of you!” He picked up the branch he’d discarded earlier when the runner went down and swung around, knocking the lone woman off her feet. He raised the branch over his head and brought it down as she hit the ground, ramming its ragged end through her eyes, under her skull to effectively destroy her brain. He pulled it free and turned in time to see a dark-skinned man in decent condition for a zombie running at him full-speed, milky white eyes locked onto his target and mouth already salivating for flesh.
“Bring it on you undead son-of-a-mother-fucking-whore,” Cruz growled as he raised the branch and crouched, prepared to swing. He kept the man in sight, aware of the group approaching him from the off ramp but they appeared to all be walkers. The running man was his biggest threat. “That’s a good rotten boy,” he said as the man neared him.
He stepped aside and swung the branch as hard as he could once the man was almost on him. He heard the crack of bone as the man’s neck snapped and the zombie fell to the ground, his head hanging awkwardly, only connected to its body by the flesh it was encased in. Brain intact, it continued to make garbled noises and roll its eyes while chomping at him, but its body lay on the ground completely useless.
Cruz spun the branch in his hands as he walked to meet the approaching group. There were ten of them which was a dangerous number, even if they were slow and stupid. Especially when he didn’t have back-up. As annoying as he could be at times, he wouldn’t mind having Damian with him. He was relieved to see none of the approaching zombies resembled the people he’d been traveling with when Raven had been bitten.
“Did any of you ugly fuckers eat my friends?” he asked as he studied them, looking for the best way to wipe out the predators without getting bitten in the process. He’d gotten damned lucky with the neck-snapping swing on the runner. He didn’t think he could get lucky ten more times. He could shoot a few to thin them out, but then he would draw more, not to mention he had no idea when he’d be able to replace the spent bullets. He glanced down at the first runner as he passed its fallen body and got an idea.
“All right, you smelly bastards. Let’s do this.” He took off at a diagonal run and swung the branch low, knocking a female zombie on the end’s legs out from under her. She fell forward and two zombies behind her tumbled like dominoes.
He placed himself before the center of the pile they’d created and taunted the rest of the group as they changed direction, turning toward their right to go after him. “Come and get me, assholes.”
The group moved toward him, arms stretched out to grab, mouths open and ready to eat. Too stupid to watch where they were walking, they tripped over their fallen comrades and down they went in a heap. Cruz surged forward, bashing in one skull and then the next, jumping away when one of the infected managed to get up. He kicked the thin man in his exposed ribs, knocking him back down onto the pile before continuing to play Whack-A-Mole with their heads.
By the time he’d finished bashing in every skull, stomping on some instead of using the branch, his arms were tired and he was covered in blood splatter. But the voice in his head had quieted, calmed by the release of violence.
Cruz’s hand throbbed and he looked down to see where he’d cut it on the rough branch. He tossed the bloody weapon aside and grabbed his blade from where he’d dropped it near the first runner’s body. Blood had already started to dry on it. Already disgusting, he wiped the blade against his pant leg, getting as much of the caked blood off of it as he could, and started walking toward the off ramp.
Mindful of the time that had passed since he’d left Raven alone and now aware there were definitely more infected people roaming the woods he quickened his step as he ascended the off ramp and walked out onto the interstate. There were still vehicles abandoned on the interstate, but the only evidence his friends had been there was the damaged divider where Hal had wrecked the truck.
“Damn it!” he snapped as he kept walking toward the spot he’d last seen the truck. Dead bodies of the infected littered the road, including the three who’d attacked Raven. He kicked the head of the one who’d bit her as he passed it, and noted its eyes were gone. He looked at the large vultures still working on several of the others and recognized it as their work. They’d turned the interstate into their personal buffet but first someone had laid out the food for them.
Cruz walked to the divider and turned to examine the area. The bodies were riddled with bullet holes and some of the abandoned vehicles appeared to have taken some gunfire as well.
“We didn’t have this many bullets and there’s no way my people took out all of these infected ghouls,” he thought out loud as he surveyed the aftermath. “Someone helped them.”
He glanced up the interstate, wondering who had helped and why? He remembered the people they’d barely escaped from that same morning and hoped like hell his people hadn’t been rescued only to have gotten caught up with some other
lunatics. “You could have at least left my pack!” he yelled up the road in anger. “But why the hell would you? You thought Raven was dead and I would be soon enough. Fuck.” He kicked at the head of a nearby zombie who had been shot down and gritted his teeth together against the tears threatening to fall. He’d already had a crying fit earlier and wouldn’t allow himself another. He’d known there was a chance he’d find nothing before he’d set out for the interstate but he’d still had to check.
“Now what do I do?” he asked himself as he crouched down on his haunches and lowered his head into his hands. “I have very few pills left. I can’t leave her all alone, but I can’t stay with her if the thing inside me takes over. It’s getting stronger, or I’m getting weaker. What do I do?”
The raspy, hiss-like sound of the vultures around him intensified and he looked up to see a pair fighting over a body. The bigger one won and went back to picking out the dead man’s intestines while the smaller, dejected vulture huffed away to scavenge for its meal elsewhere.
“That’s it. I keep scavenging.” He looked at the abandoned vehicles. Maybe he’d find something useful in one of them, or better yet, maybe one would still run and he could find a pharmacy. If not a pharmacy then maybe he could find Hal and Damian, and deliver Raven to them before he took a long walk somewhere he could safely lose the rest of his mind without hurting the woman he loved.
He carefully stepped over the bodies littering the interstate, avoiding confrontation with the large birds feasting on their innards and checked out the vehicle closest to him, a dusty Ford Taurus that may have been gray before it got covered in all manner of debris and filth. Blood on the passenger seat and the seat in back showed evidence of things going horribly wrong for the owner, but no body had been left behind. One of the back doors was cracked open and although he wasn’t an expert when it came to the mechanics of cars, Cruz knew if the door had been left open since the outbreak the battery would definitely be dead. He opened the driver’s side door anyway and ducked inside to see if he could find something useful, hoping the vehicles hadn’t been completely picked over by others who had traveled through the area since the virus began. He hated the thought of leaving Raven just to come back with a great big bucket of nothing.
He didn’t find anything under or between the seats, but a bottle of pills fell out when he opened the glove compartment. He scooped up the bottle and read the tiny print, pumping his fist in the air as he realized he’d found Tylenol #3, a mixture of acetaminophen and codeine that would help Raven far more than the regular Tylenol he’d found for her in one of the cabins. He popped the trunk and found suitcases crammed inside. He unzipped them to find suits and dresses. “Who the hell packs this shit when escaping the zombie apocalypse?” he asked in disgust as he opened the second suitcase to find dress shoes and high heels. “Idiots.”
He turned and tripped over a vulture, quickly righting himself to find the thing staring him down. “Bite me and I’ll drop-kick you over into the next state,” he warned the ugly thing, holding its gaze until it finally turned away and started working on a hole in an infected woman’s forehead.
The next vehicle was a dirty white van with a sliding side door, the kind commonly used by pedophiles and rapists to abduct their prey. The front end was folded in like an accordion and the left front tire was completely flat marking it off the list as a possible form of transportation. Cruz eyed it warily as he passed the side, noting the front appeared empty. He walked to the back and grabbed his knife before opening the back doors. He jumped back in case anything jumped out at him, but found the van devoid of life. He climbed inside to search through the contents, finding a box of canned goods smeared with blood and several cans of paint along with brushes and ladders. The van had clearly belonged to someone with a painting business. He searched for a bag to put the canned goods in and came up empty, only finding the box they’d been stored in and a bunch of blankets in the back with dried blood. He imagined someone lying in the back of the van bleeding out as they raced from whatever hot zone they’d been in before deciding to try the interstate for an escape route. It didn’t take much to imagine why they were bleeding or what had happened to cause the wreck and death of whomever had been driving.
A cacophony of noise outside the van caught Cruz’s attention, the vultures clearly stirred up by something. “It sounds like freaking Jurassic Park out there,” Cruz muttered. “They’re going to attract shit with all that damn noise.”
As if hearing him and taking his complaint as a dare, the vultures’ volume turned up. “What the hell are they doing now?”
Cruz jumped down from the van and looked around it to see two runners chasing after the large birds. Clearly humans weren’t their only means of sustenance. However, as the taller of the two pale men locked onto him, the vultures instantly became second choice. The man dashed straight for him.
“Shit.” He’d left his branch behind after it had cut into his hand and cursed himself for doing so as the man rushed at him, moving far better than a dead man should. He turned and searched frantically for something to use other than the small blade that wasn’t much help against the faster monsters. The dead man’s footfalls thudded heavily four feet away and he knew he was out of time. Cruz grabbed a pail of paint and turned, swinging the metal can as he did. It connected with the zombie’s face, knocking out its top row of teeth as its head snapped back. The lid popped off and red paint sloshed out of the can.
“I hope you have a good dental plan,” he quipped as the zombie regained its footing and lunged for him again.
He swung the pail, bringing it down in the center of the man’s forehead, raining red paint everywhere. The zombie crashed to its knees but it kept coming for Cruz, reaching out with its gnarled, dirt-encrusted fingers, chomping its half-toothless jaws. Cruz sidestepped its grasp, shoved it against the back of the van and slammed one of the doors against its head, cracking the skull and smashing the brain inside. He opened his mouth to let out a whoop of celebration but was silenced by the other infected man plowing into him.
“Fuck! Get off of me you fuck-faced fucker, this Mexican isn’t on the fucking menu,” he growled as he fell onto his back, his arms braced to hold the smelly bastard away from him as it snapped its rotting, gunk-covered teeth at him, spittle flying out of its mouth.
“Ugh, your breath smells like Satan’s asshole,” Cruz growled as he tightened his grip on the man’s shoulders and rolled so he was on top. He placed his knee in the man’s stomach, gagging when he felt bones crush and his knee sank inside the man’s belly. The man continued trying to pull him closer as he snapped viciously, determined to take a bite out of whatever body part he could get to. Cruz moved one of his hands from the thing’s shoulder to grip its neck and hold its snapping head down. With the creature pinned to the ground he removed his other hand from its other shoulder, grabbed his knife out of its sheath and shoved it through the infected man’s ear, twisting it until he saw the life blink out of his eyes.
“One of these days you disgusting fuckers are going to learn not to fuck with me,” he said as he stood, wiped his blade on a spot of his pants not covered in red paint and stepped over the zombie’s body. He looked down at the red paint coating his clothes and shoes and at the mess of it that had splashed over the ground and the zombies as he’d tussled with them. “It looks like a freaking bloodbath, and I’m pretty sure I rolled all around in it. If I can’t get this shit out of my hair I’m going to come back up here and kill you again.” He kicked at the second zombie’s head, slipped in the paint and fell, hitting his temple along the back of the van as he went down.
“I’m not doing it,” Damian said for the twentieth time as they continued toward the hospital. His arms were folded over his chest as he stomped along like a child who’d been told he was going to school whether he felt bad or not.
“If we can’t find it you’re going to have to,” Hal told him.
“Why do I have to be the gay guy that gets taken
to the place they’re holding Leah? Why can’t you be the gay guy?”
“Damian, you are the gay guy.”
“I’m a gay guy. That doesn’t mean I have to be the gay guy in this scenario.”
Hal stopped walking and turned to face the younger man, debating whether to strangle him or just punch him in the nose. “You’re exasperating, you know that? You’re the only one of us who is gay. You know how to be gay. We don’t know how to be gay.”
“Everybody knows how to be gay. You just like people with the same junk as you.” Damian eyed his attire. “Of course we generally dress better, but there’s an apocalypse going on so everybody gets a pass on fashion.”
Hal released a frustrated sigh as he scrubbed his hand down his face and silently did a ten-count. “Damian… I can appreciate the fact that what they are doing to Leah is scary to you, but if we can’t find her and we need someone to be taken to the same place where they are keeping the gay people so that we can find her it makes logical sense that the gay person in the group be that person. We don’t want them knowing that we’re aware they are doing conversion therapy here so we can’t look as if we are trying to get taken back there on purpose. It has to be authentic. You have to do it.”
“I’ll be gay if you two will stop arguing about it,” Elijah said.
Damian eyed the teen. “They’d never buy it.”
Elijah frowned. “Why? All I gotta do is say I like other dudes, right?”
Damian chuckled. “Honey, no offense but you are about the most boring, straightest, whitest-looking teenaged boy I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m Mexican.”
“I know.”
The teenager’s frown intensified as he turned confused eyes to Hal, seeking explanation. Hal just shrugged. Damian was a trial sometimes.
“Also,” Damian said, turning back toward Hal, “have you considered the fact that she’s a woman and I’m a man? They have their whole people-of-opposite-sex-can’t-stay-together-unless-they’re-married-or-related issues here. They probably wouldn’t even put me where she’s at so I’d just be getting myself busted for no damn good reason. Then there’d be two of us to rescue. You would rescue me too, wouldn’t you?”
