“Yes,” Soma agreed. “I don’t think I’ll be reading scary books anymore. Maybe something romantic. Or a fantasy novel, so I can forget my troubles.”
“Oh, I’ve got some of those! Fantasy novels, I mean. Lord of the Rings. Game of Thrones. I ain’t much for romance.”
“Perry, I can’t stay,” Soma said. “I’m going to look for my family. I want to be upfront about that.”
“I know that, but you can stay for a couple of days, can’t ya? You really need to. You need to look after yourself a bit. You look like a bundle of dry sticks. You need to eat and let your body heal a bit before you go and look for your kinfolk. You need supplies, too, new clothes, food, a running car…”
“Well, maybe…”
“I can help you with all that, just… just stay with me a couple days.” He smiled, absently caressing the ledge of the counter. If he were a schoolgirl he would probably be curling a lock of hair around his finger right then. “I’m lonely. It’s been a long time since I’ve had company.”
“Are you trying to appeal to my sympathy?”
“Is it working?”
“A little,” she said.
“You need clothes,” Perry said, pushing away from the counter. “I don’t have any women’s clothes here. And Old man MacDonnell never had a woman. Not that I heard tell of, anyway. But I got some women’s clothes at my old place. A closet full of them. They’re my wife’s clothes. You’re a little shorter than she was, but there should be plenty to fit you. I’ll walk over to the trailer park and fetch ‘em back for you. I bet they’re still in pretty good condition.”
“All right,” she said, looking down at herself with a scowl. Except for the oversized blouse she had scavenged along the way, she was dressed in rags.
“You stay here. You can wash up in the bathroom, if you want. The faucets don’t work, but there’s a bucket of water in there you can use. I’ll be right back.” He headed toward the living room, calling over his shoulder: “Follow me. I’ll show you where the bathroom is.”
Soma rose, followed him down the corridor. He pushed open a door, revealing a small but very clean bathroom. There was a metal pail sitting on the counter beside the sink.
“There are clean washcloths and towels in the closet. Soap. Toothbrush and toothpaste. Make yourself at home. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
She watched him stride to the front door.
“Be careful,” she called.
He nodded at her, scooped up his rifle. “Always am,” he said, and then he clomped outside.
Soma walked into the bathroom and shut the door. She locked it, opened the linen closet, helped herself to towels and soap. Carrying them to the sink, she winced at her reflection. She wondered how her host could look at her without flinching. But then he’d said most of the Resurrects in town looked just like her. Even as a zombie, she was average. Story of her life.
She undressed, stuffed her ragged garments in the wastebasket, then lathered a hand towel and began to scrub her face. Three swipes and the rag was black.
She was still scrubbing when her host returned. He knuckled the door softly. “I’m back,” he said.
Soma pulled the oversized blouse back on and went to the door. She unlocked it, pulled it open. Perry was standing there with a large clothes basket full of women’s garments.
“Should be something here you can wear,” he said, a helpful smile on his face. “Might be a little musty, but everything’s clean.”
“Thank you, Perry,” she said, taking the basket from his hands. “Really. I mean that.”
He grinned at her modestly and ducked his head. “Ah, well. Ain’t nothing. Maybe, after you get dressed, you can help me feed the rabbits.”
“Okay. I’d like that.”
“Okay then,” he said, then nodded and withdrew awkwardly from the doorway.
Soma closed the door and finished cleaning herself.
13
She found to her surprise that she was not half as hideous as she appeared to be once she had scrubbed the five years of accumulated filth and gore from her body. (Five years! Roughly 1,700 days!) For five years, the only showers she had taken were the kind that fell from the sky… and it showed. In trying to clean herself, she was reminded of an archeologist carefully exhuming an ancient artifact, unearthing it steadily with brush and pick, removing layer after dusty layer until it stood revealed. When she had transformed Perry’s bucket of clean water into tarry sludge, she stood revealed as well, and she did not look nearly as terrible as she had originally believed.
Her flesh hugged tight to the bone, leathery and discolored, but it was not peeling off in great chunks, as she had at first believed. That was merely the filth, fissured by her movements and flaking off. Beneath the accumulated grime of half a decade’s worth of mindless wandering, her skin was withered and creased, but the striations had a strange beauty, like some exotic form of tribal scarring. The lines radiated out from her eye sockets, ran vertically across her brow and chin, and horizontally across her throat. The flesh of her torso was surprisingly unmarred but for the bullet holes. Her breasts had shrunk, but they were still relatively full; she had always been a busty woman. Her ribs showed like the corrugations of a washboard, and her stomach was abnormally sunken. Her upper arms and thighs were comparatively whole as well, though her limbs, from the elbows and knees down, were crinkled like her face.
She sorted through the basket of clothes Perry had brought to her, selecting a flowery sundress. The woman’s bras were too small for her, but the panties fit. She put on the panties and a pair of ankle socks and shimmied into the sundress. She combed her hair straight back from her brow, careful not to pull any more of it from her scalp, then tied it at her nape with a pastel pink scrunchy and exited the bathroom.
Perry was in the living room, sitting in an armchair beside the window. He had propped open the curtain an inch or two and was reading from a large, hardbound book. He saved his page with a bookmark and set the book aside when Soma stepped into the living room.
“How do I look?” she asked as he stood up. She felt strangely excited, as if her new acquaintance were a suitor. She stamped down on that emotion sternly, though her expression did not change. Vulnerable as she was, it would be easy to confuse gratitude with something more.
She would have to be careful with her emotions. Perry Clark was kind and generous and handsome. (He was also tall. So very tall!) He had saved her from that hungry dog, but he was not Nandi. They could never be anything more than friends.
All that shot through her head in half a second, like a shooting star tracking across the night sky, flashing brilliantly for an instant and then gone.
“Much better,” he grinned, sliding his hands into his pocket. “You clean up pretty good, Mrs. Lashari.”
“Thank you, Mr. Clark,” she said. “And I really mean that. Thank you. For everything.”
“Ah, don’t mention it. I’m enjoying the company.”
“I’m afraid I made a mess in the bathroom. I was pretty dirty.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up later. I need to feed and water the rabbits before it gets any later. Would you like to join me?”
“Sure.”
She followed him through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. It had gotten warm, and cicadas were whirring in the trees. It looked to be around noon. The sun was directly overhead, their shadows dark puddles at their feet.
The back yard was overgrown, the lawn as high as her waist. The privacy fence came on around from the front and enclosed the back yard. A long string with chimes ran across the top of the fence, stirring and tinkling in the breeze. His burglar alarm. On the other side of the fence was woodland. The land behind the house rose to a steep ridge, reminding her of her father’s farm.
Perry apologized about the grass as he started across the back yard.
“I used to keep a neat lawn, but fuel is much too precious now to waste on mowing grass. It drives me crazy, bu
t what’s a fella to do?” Even if he had the fuel, Perry said, it would not be safe to mow the lawn. “Might as well hang a sign saying ‘come and rob me,’ ” he said. “Unless you live in town, the smart thing to do is keep a low profile. And plenty of ammo on hand.”
There was a large garage in the back, and a smaller enclosed shed. The garage was open in the front and housed a red truck and a dark gray Ford Taurus. The Taurus was dusty and had two flat tires, looked like it had not been driven in a while. The big truck, however, was clean and well maintained.
“Does the truck run?” Soma asked.
“Oh, yeah. Once a month or so I drive into town to trade for supplies. And get new books. That’s about the extent of the driving I do, though. Gas is just too hard to come by nowadays.”
“What do you trade with?”
“My rabbits, mainly. I do a little hunting, too. Fresh meat is cash money now, as you can imagine. I hunt deer, wild hogs, whatever I can kill.”
“People?”
Perry stopped, scowling back at her. “No,” he said. “That’s something I would never do.”
He sounded offended, and she was glad. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
He continued on, following a narrow path of trampled grass. “We can get by just fine eating animal meat,” he said. “Don’t have to eat long pig. Not sure I would even if I had to. I think I’d off myself if it come to that.”
“Long pig?”
“People meat. Folks in town call it long pig.”
“That’s horrible.”
“They keep live folk caged up in town, breed some of ‘em and take the babies. There’s about two dozen of the sorry SOBs. It’s a crying shame.”
“Oh my god!”
“Every now and then they catch some Home Runners and butcher ‘em.”
“Home Runners?”
“Survivors. People trying to get Home. They try to sneak through here from time to time. We’re not that far from Home. The deaders in town, they keep a squad of hunters they call Catchers. Their job is just to drive around all day looking for Home Runners. Catch ‘em. Haul ‘em in to be butchered. Or bred.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I agree,” Perry said. “It’s why I refuse to live in town. I’m not like the others, and I don’t ever want to be. We might be dead, but we’re still human beings, and people ain’t supposed to eat people. It just ain’t right.”
He came to the shed, fished a key ring from his pocket and opened the padlocked door. “Step back, just in case,” he said. Soma stepped back and he squatted and unhooked a knotted cord from an eyebolt at the base of the door. “I keep it booby-trapped,” he explained. Standing to the side, he pushed open the door.
The door swung open with a screech. Inside, a shotgun stood upon a wooden gantry, aimed at the door. Perry stooped and picked up the cord that was lying loose on the ground. He wadded it up and tossed it over the shotgun.
“It’s okay now. You can come inside.”
Careful to stay away from the business end of the weapon, Soma sidled inside the shed. A potpourri of powerful odors immediately enveloped her: animal feces, damp earth, straw and the flesh of the living creatures housed inside the shed. Her entire body went rigid as the hunger quickened in her. Perry had called it the red fog and it was a very good description for the desire that suddenly overwhelmed her. For an instant, she was lost in that pulsating haze, and all she could think about was sinking her teeth into hot, living flesh, biting and tearing and swallowing, filling her belly with hot, spurting, glorious red meat.
“Soma?”
Her eyes fluttered and she put her hand to her brow. “Yes?” she said, her voice distant, slightly befuddled.
“You okay? You went away there for a second.”
“I know. I… maybe I should go outside.”
“Nah, you’ll be okay,” Perry said. “If you don’t learn to ride it now, all it’s going to do is ride you.”
“O-okay,” she stammered, and she took her hand away and looked around.
Cages lined the interior of the shed, about twenty of them of varying sizes. About half of them housed a single adult rabbit. The other half was full of juveniles. The young ones bound about anxiously, watching her with bulging, frightened eyes. The adults did not seem much disturbed by her presence. They lazed in their cages, motionless but for the twitching of their V-shaped nostrils. There were no windows. The shed was illuminated by sunlight, which angled down through three translucent roof panels. On the far wall were bags of commercial rabbit feed, stacked neatly, a couple bales of hay, farming implements, a wheelbarrow and several plastic trashcans filled with what looked to be grass.
“The hardest part,” Perry said, “is feeding them all.”
He grabbed a tin pail and walked to the corner where there was an old-fashioned water pump. Hanging the pail on a small hook on the spigot of the pump, he began to lever the handle up and down. He talked as he filled the pail with water. He had to yell to make himself heard over the squawking of the pump handle.
“During the winter I feed them the commercial rabbit food,” he said. “When I started raising them, I burned a lot of gas hitting up all the local farm supply stores. Got all the rabbit food I could. It won’t last forever, though, so I feed them grass during the warm months. I’ve been experimenting with ways to make my own rabbit food. Mulching the grass and trying to dehydrate it into wafers. They’ll eat it, but they don’t love it.”
He took the pail off the spigot and started filling the rabbits’ water dispensers. They were like gerbil water bottles, only bigger.
“The deaders in town are fools,” he said as he worked. “They’re trying to breed human beings like animals when they ought to be raising rabbits. Rabbits are super-reproducers. A female can get pregnant every thirty days, and they have litters of eight to ten kits each time. And the babies grow fast. Six weeks and they’re ready to be slaughtered. I’ve got ten females and two males. Do the math. It’s why I don’t look like an extra from a George Romero flick.” He glanced up at her. “You wanna help me feed ‘em?”
Soma was a city girl by nature, but she had plenty of experience working a farm. Her father had bought his property out on Brookville Lake when he retired from his job as an English professor. She had grown up there. After getting married, Soma and Nandi had visited often, usually staying over on the weekends. Her father had never raised rabbits, but she was sure their maintenance was the same as any other farm animal. Feed them. Water them. Clean out the poop.
“Just take the grass from one of those trash cans and stick it in the cage. Each one gets a big handful. They eat a lot. As you can tell by the droppings.”
“You ought to raise chickens, too,” Soma said. She scooped a handful of grass from one of the trashcans and walked to the nearest cage. Opened the door. Stuffed the grass in. The bunny, a plump brown one with long, floppy ears, rose and hopped over.
“Tried,” Perry said, walking back to the pump with the empty pail. “They’re too loud. They cluck and crow all day. I had deadheads clawing at the fence at least two, three times a week. If a big herd ever came through, they’d hear the squawking and flatten this place like a steamroller.”
“Ah,” Soma nodded. That made sense. “How much should I feed them?”
“Huh? Oh, another big handful for the breeders. The juveniles need about double that.”
“Okay.”
Perry filled the bucket and then continued: “I tried keeping chickens for a while. Had nothing but trouble. Finally, one morning, I was standing out here in the yard, trying to figure out what to do, and I saw a rabbit race out from under a bush. I thought, Aha! Rabbits, stupid! Not chickens! They’re easy to take care of. They breed like… well, like rabbits. And they’re quiet! So I started trapping ‘em. Set up the shed. Started breeding them.”
Soma opened another cage, stuffed in a couple wads of grass. The rabbit, a tan colored animal with black-tipped ears, hopped over and started
eating. For a moment, her hand twitched toward the creature and she visualized herself seizing it, snapping its neck and sinking her teeth into its flesh. Scowling, she yanked her hand from the cage and snapped the door shut. A tremor worked its way through her body.
“You want to hold one?” Perry asked.
“No!” she said quickly. “No, I… I’ll want to hurt them!” She whispered that last part, an anxious confession.
“No, you won’t,” he said. He opened a cage and took out a juvenile, holding it by the scruff of the neck. The beast, about the size of a small cat, kicked its oversized feet, trying to scratch him. “I know what you’re feeling. I feel the same way, too. It’s like being an alcoholic. But you can resist the urge, and the more you resist it, the easier it is to go on resisting it.” He passed the bunny to Soma, despite her protestations.
Again, the red fog descended, but she was so worried about hurting the animal she was able to push the violent images from her mind before they engulfed her thoughts completely.
“Oh, Perry, I’m going to hurt her!” she said, cradling the kicking animal in her arms.
“Don’t be silly!”
“Aww! She’s so soft,” she said, petting the creature once it (and she) had calmed.
“They’re beautiful animals,” he said, running his fingers over its silken ears. “They can be mean sometimes, though. Especially the mommas. Never mess with the mommas. They’ll bite a plug out of ya!”
“Her heart’s racing a hundred miles an hour,” Soma said.
“Here,” he said, handing her some grass. “Feed her.”
Soma offered the bunny some grass. The rabbit sniffed and then began to eat the greenery greedily. It vanished into the bunny’s wriggling jaws with machinelike efficiency, nose twitching.
“You’re hungwy, awen’t you?” she cooed. She still wanted to eat the creature, tear it apart with her teeth, but the urge was dim, easy to ignore.
“They’re always hungry. They’re like the zombies of the animal kingdom.”
“Oh, Perry!” Soma cried, but she laughed, and he chuckled with her.
Soma (The Fearlanders) Page 9
