by Brian Hodge
Swallowing a dry lump, he stepped back to the front of the diner and peered outside toward the mini-van. Bryan, still in the front seat staring back at him, white fingertips pressed against the window. Jack’s thoughts were torturesome, tears moistening his dry eyes, his once beautiful little-leaguer now a poor nine year-old pushing forty. The remnants of his mother’s features long vanished, resigned to two years of torment, of suffering, of pain. Jack held up an index finger, mouthed I’ll be right there.
The boy stared, unanswering.
Jack turned and entered the kitchen.
The place was destroyed, glass and garbage everywhere. He pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket, kept it in hand; soon, he would need it as only one small window in the rear provided light. Pans, empty cans, dishes littered the floor, doors ripped free from ovens, an open freezer revealing a barren interior. A microwave lay shattered on the floor near the sink. Shelves, emptied of all canned goods. Everything, coated in sand.
Again Jack wondered if Las Vegas might be the town successfully harboring individuals outlasting the scourge. After finding nothing in Phoenix, he imagined that here in the City of Sin people of great importance, those holding high seats in the social stature court had retained the influence to put themselves in touch with the select crowd collaborating to seek shelter, the smart people who knew where to hide when it all ended.
Now, thirteen days free from his own sanctuary, there had been no signs of life. Nothing in Dallas, nothing in Phoenix and all the small towns in between. Dead or alive.
Jack peeked out the kitchen door, across the counter and beyond the empty window frame. Bryan’s fingers moved from the window to his mouth, jagged nails driven to the spaces between his rotting teeth. Jack wondered, what could be easier than taking the gun, putting Bryan out of his misery, then doing the same to myself? A single clean shot to the temporal lobe, ensuring paralysis of after-death brain activity. But would it definitely work? He’d seen corpses rise up with their heads nearly lopped off, half-moon craters leaving just a single eye for sight, a gaping void where the lower jaw once existed—signs of unsuccessful suicide attempts. They walked the land for nearly two years, spreading disease, famine, their numbers increasing too fast for those humans still alive and protected to make heads or tails of the plague. They’d fed on living flesh, an instinctual response triggered deep in the still-active subconscious mind, eating eating eating until there were no more living human beings left to eat. All the animals, the dogs, cats, birds—perhaps even fish but Jack hadn’t yet an opportunity to test the waters—died through the struggles of starvation, cannibalism, ultimate subjects to insect-borne disease. With everyone and everything dead—people, animals—the swarming carcasses could no longer nurture their sparked intuitions and suddenly ceased to walk, as if some higher authority had pulled the plug. What if Bryan and I die, only to return to the same unyielding quest for nourishment?
Jack sifted through a foot-high drift of sand. Found an unopened can of beets. He used his hunting knife to strip the lid, speared three juicy purple disks and sucked them down. They were hot, sour. He searched on, found nothing of value but considered taking a handful of green fuzzy things that might have once been potatoes. He ate half the can of beets then exited the diner, leaving the green things behind. He smiled halfheartedly at his son as he approached the van. Bryan pressed a palm against the window, face looking weird, doll-like: drawn without emotion. Jack slid the side door open, placed the shotgun on the seat, then reached over and handed Bryan the beets. He watched as the boy plucked them with his soiled fingers, opening his mouth just enough to suck them in. Jack closed the door from the inside and climbed over into the front seat. Bryan’s cracked lips had beet juice all over them and Jack couldn’t help but think how much it looked like blood. How the boy looked more dead than alive.
How easy would it be to simply end the suffering with a pull of a trigger?
He started the car, noting the need for fuel. Before driving away he looked over at Bryan and the gun nestled between the boy’s delicate thighs. The boy sipped some beet juice, then offered the can back to Jack. Jack downed the rest in one gulp, taking the car across Sands Ave back towards Las Vegas Blvd.
The night had been dark, thirsting for Jack, Sharon, and Bryan, the family of three going about their evening, unaware of the unconventional circumstances taking place around them. Not an hour prior, every dead and not yet buried thing—man and animal alike—had animated itself and at once pursued warm flesh for consumption. Dead people ate living dogs; dead dogs ate living people. No prejudices existed. If it was dead then it wanted to eat you: man, woman, child, animal.
Jack owned three 24-hour convenience stores. Sharon picked up Bryan from little league, met Jack at six as he made the rounds collecting the day’s receipts. The first stop proved to show no great day of business, the take nearly half the usual fare. The second stop, his largest store, was unattended, the on-duty clerk seemingly making himself off-duty. He checked the schedule, ‘David’ written in for the five-to-ten shift. Damn the new guy. “David?” he called.
And then he saw: a young woman rising up from behind the counter, blood and gristle masking her face. Sharon screamed. Bryan’s jaw clenched in shock. Jack tried to yell but was unable to understand the unconscionable events taking place in his store. The girl held up what must have been David’s arm, jammed it to her mouth, tearing the bicep with her teeth. The fear-hesitation succumbed to mortal terror and Jack, Bryan, and Sharon began screaming, unable to tear their sights away from the bouyant-chewing woman in front of them, the woman reaching down and ripping something else free from the unseen body, something wet and gut-wrenching, rising back up with steaming organs slipping through her fingers, slapping the floor, the meager pieces in her grasp finding their way toward the enthusiastic gnaw of her teeth.
Jack picked up his son, Sharon frantically grasping the sweat-soaked polyester of the boy’s baseball jersey, stumbling over her husband’s feet as they careened outside away from the horror inside. The door of the mini-mart slammed shut behind them, leaving them basking in the moonglow of the night where the living dead gathered in the parking lot, more than twenty bodies staggering aimlessly about, moaning incoherently in return to the threesome’s hysterical cries, all of a sudden running after them, arms outstretched, mouths gaping, tongues lolling, the whites of their eyes moving in instinctual jerks like moths fluttering about a bright light.
The family screamed, uncontrollable. They returned inside the store, Jack locking the door, one then two then suddenly ten or more ashen people slapping the glass-front, staring in, banging aimlessly into each other like eager piranha eying a meal on the non-water side of the fishtank. Heavy breathing and crying filled the store, pounding hearts pressuring their ears. They stood there, Jack, Sharon, Bryan, all of them staring in awe at the clawing cluster of insane people pressing their wounded, colorless faces against the glass.
A scream filled the air, Sharon’s terrified voice wrenching Jack’s soul, the sight of the flesh-eating woman tearing a hunk from Sharon’s trapezoid with a swift lock of the jaws. The most influential woman of their lives fell to the floor in unfathomable pain, her shoulder gushing blood in mad spurts as the flesh-eating woman chewed her prize, gazing at Jack and Bryan. It then dropped the half-eaten lump and came for them, mouth gaping, arms outstretched, eager to collect more warm flesh.
Jack grabbed Bryan and carried him down the aisle to the coolers that stocked beer and milk and soft drinks. He released his son, grabbed a can of insect repellent and sprayed it at the oncoming ghoul, at the same time retrieving a cigarette lighter from his pocket. He flicked it. The flame emerged. He raised it to meet the spray of the repellent. Flames shot out, four, five feet, and then more as the woman caught fire, howling as if rats were stuck in her throat, arms flailing wildly, blazing body knocking into the counter, sending blistering candies to the floor in a shower of color. Jack screamed for Sharon, she limping beside Bryan who h
elped her into the back room. They locked the door behind them, went down into the basement, locked that door behind them too, and fell together into a familial heap at the center of the room, crying, trembling, wondering what would happen next.
Unlike Treasure Island, or The Stardust, the entrance to The Mirage hotel allowed for the mini-van to pass through its canopied entrance.
“Come with me,” said Jack, stopping behind a stripped taxicab.
Bryan’s eyes still had clouds in them, Jack saw, but it felt good to see him moving. Jack reached into the back seat, grabbed the rifle; Bryan brought the pistol he held in his lap. They stepped over bones and mummified bodies, the green felt mat with white Mirage script out front rotting and stained with blood. The glass doors at the entrance were shattered, the shards still scattered across the marble flooring inside. Shriveled bodies lay everywhere, many missing limbs. The trees inside lived on, the branches growing above and beyond the smashed greenhouse dome. The huge fishtank behind the check-in desk remained intact, the water long evaporated, the fish turned to bone. The slot machines and gaming tables were utterly destroyed, casualties of war.
“We go to the top floor,” Jack said. “That’s where the important people would’ve gone.”
They found the steps and climbed and climbed and climbed, taking breaks every three or four floors to catch their breath. On the twenty-first floor they rested longer, and Jack used this time to think of Sharon and their time in the basement of the mini-mart, his mind’s-eye watching her get sicker and sicker as the wound in her shoulder festered, spreading its unstoppable infection; how she stopped eating and how he and Bryan had to tie her to the pipes in the basement so she wouldn’t hurt them for she’d lost all recollection of who she was, had become an animal with no thoughts, only instincts, instincts that offered no help to her as she grew weaker and weaker until she could no longer breathe, her body withering to a fraction of what it once was.
Jack shook away the bubbling memories, didn’t want to but could not help recollect what happened a few minutes later when she came back to life with the desire to eat upon her again. How they sat there watching her moan and wail and reach for them, how she gnawed through her own limbs like a captured shrew, intent on devouring her husband and son.
He also didn’t want to remember how he used a baseball bat to beat her head into a bloody pulp until only her body remained, twitching for hours until all afterlife seeped completely free of its uncanny grasp. How they stared at her body for days, then bagged it and put it on the highest shelf in the stockroom, away from the cans of food that lasted them nearly two years.
Reaching the thirtieth floor, it appeared the entrance had been barricaded at one time, shafts of splintered wood just beyond the ajar door. Nails jutted from the jamb like thorns, hundreds seemingly inefficient in their commitment to restrain the enemy. Just beyond the entrance, Jack saw withered bodies, those full of limb and riddled with ancient gunfire. The gruesome stench here had intensified, even after the whole world had gone to rot and it seemed impossible for anything more offensive to assault his nose. They managed to squeeze through the available space—just as the flesheaters had done years ago. Dozens of motionless bodies lay twisted throughout the lengthy corridor, casualties of war, skin like leather and taught against crumbling bones and shattered skulls.
“This way,” Jack said, pointing to the left. He eyed a massive doorway at the end of the hall, a suite once fit for presidents and kings. “What do you think?”
Bryan nodded.
“Hello!” Jack called, knowing that if people were still alive here, they would assume them to be the enemy and shoot them just as they did the flesheaters. They climbed over and around the head-wrecked corpses, some fallen three high, unmoved since meeting their second fates.
They reached the door. Jack tried the knob. Locked. He knocked. “Hello! Is there anybody here?”
Silence. At first. Then, a faint, painful cry.
“Stand back.” Jack placed a hand on Bryan’s chest. The boy staggered back, staring at the door. Jack raised the rifle and blew away the lock, making a head-sized hole. The door inched open. In a cautious way, Jack pressed his fingers on the warm door and pushed forward, slowly revealing the suite’s interior.
At first he saw nothing, a room stripped of furniture, a shattered floor-to-ceiling window with tattered curtains billowing in a strong whistling breeze, grey dusk-light seeping through, illuminating the room in wavering grey strips. Metal shelves lining the walls held a handful of empty cans and jars, remnants of a food supply long exhausted.
The soft cry he heard moments earlier had gained strength and volume with no door to block its reach. Once a whimper, it had become a moan rife with anguish. With hunger.
Its source appeared.
On all fours, an unclothed ghoul, skin green and craggy, crawling in from a doorway leading into another room. Its left eye was a dark gaping socket, fresh blood running down and dousing its lower jaw. It tried to stand but failed in its attempt to do so, both feet worthlessly reduced to shredded stumps and exposed ankle-bone.
Thoughts flew through Jack’s burnt out mind as if charged with outside power. When there’s no more food, then everything dies. Even the dead. If this one’s still alive, then there must be—must’ve been—someone alive here to feed it.
He raised the rifle in a jerk, blew the demon’s head away. Bryan didn’t so much as flinch. “Let’s see if there’s anyone here.” He stepped over the lifeless ghoul and peered into the room.
What must have been a master bedroom suite for the rich and famous had become a playground for the devil’s work. Perhaps twenty people had hid here two years ago when the dead took over the earth. And here they remained in their shelter that once provided adequate sanctuary from the hell thriving thirty floors below, co-existing until their food supply ran out and they starved to death and started coming back to life, first one and then another, the strong killing the ghouls off and tossing them into the hallway, attracting even more ghouls that blocked their only means for gathering further sustenance until they could no longer escape, until the dead outnumbered the living and made food out of them. Until only one remained, this last one that ate the warm dying remnants of the last human being in this hotel, abandoning the mangled stew of body parts to investigate the warm living human beings entering its domain.
“Bryan,” Jack said staring at the festering mass before them. “We should try another hotel. What do you say? The MGM?”
Jack turned to face his son.
This time, the nine year-old answered his father.
He shoved the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The desert never seemed so alive. Nothing had ever been so hard than leaving it all behind. Jack drove in silence, blistered lips gently parting as though to say something. Nothing came forth. Jack knew better than to get his hopes up by now.
The sign for Denver Colorado came into view and Jack took the pick-up across the unmarked drift of soil hiding the road. The wheels kicked up clouds of dust, as though in effort to cloak his entrance.
Once, long ago, he read about a bomb shelter hidden deep in the mountains of Colorado, a place that would shield those inside from an atomic bomb, or nuclear missile.
Surely there would be people there? No?
He saw the Rocky Mountains in the distance. He prayed to no one in particular with the hope of finding sanctuary there, all the while eying the rifle on the seat next to him, promising himself that Denver would be his last resort.
And Yet, Still He Screams
The walls of the cell stood coated in slime, the concrete ground, rough and pitted with depressions, chafing madly against Roberto’s thighs. He gazed forward through heavy-lidded eyes at the motionless body lying in a puddle of muck not six feet away, its stinking bulk dim beneath the cast of a single bulb protruding from the gutted ceiling.
His eyes are gone, his lips gone. And my sanity…it is gone too.
The man had stopped moving days ago. But his screams…they continued on and on, attacking Roberto’s ears like a mutating virus. Even his clothes have withered beneath time’s cruel hand, the swastika emblazoned on his chest fading into a pale shapeless form.
And yet, still he screams.
He struggled to reposition himself as far away from the corpse as possible, the rear corner of the cell proving his only choice of refuge. The short passage there had delivered great pains into his arms, his legs, his muscles nearly atrophied from a lack of food and water: a small price to pay for the semblance of protection provided, away from the splay of pallid light.
He is dead, I can see his rot, I can smell his rot. And yet, his cries of torture echo across the bare cinder walls of the prison like ricocheting bullets.
The pain! The Agony! Evil governs the people! WE ARE ALL DOOMED!
The screams, the horrors, the stench of human decay; Roberto swam in a bottomless pool of conditions capable of drowning any man before his time. Like the nameless man whose body rots before me. Still, the will to survive had flushed its way deep into the hindered flow of his bloodstream—a happenstance as much a blessing as it was a curse.
From the sheath of his bruised arms, he drew his head up and gazed into the darkness beyond the bars of the cell. Here, like uncountable times in the past, he searched for a glint of hope intimating his release, a pinpoint of promise allowing him to roam unprotected through Germany’s tattered remains and beyond.
None ever came.
So he remained, bounded by cold, wet, fetid, screaming darkness.
The pain in his head milled its fury against his skull, inflamed by a strike from the strong arm of the guard. Its dire poison ran deep into his brain, keeping a mad tempo with the undying shriek of the dead man in his cell, and the distant wails of those future ghosts awaiting their demises.
