Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  “Piss off!”

  Cheryl’s hand shot up and knocked the cigarette to the ground. The next thing she knew, the woman’s bony hands were around her throat, and she was falling hard on the tile floor.

  “Hey! Get offa her!” It was Mark. He pulled the woman off and sent her flying into a group of chairs. The sound was like a bowling ball hitting a strike.

  Cheryl tried to sit up and breathe, but found herself gasping for air.

  “Are you alright?” Mark asked along with the concerned group hunching over her.

  It was another minute before she could speak. “I…think so,” she said as her chest heaved in painful gulps of air, and she considered that it might not have been a good idea to stand up to a cranky pit bull wearing lipstick.

  Once she could breathe again, Mark helped her to her feet. She glanced nervously around, worried that the woman might come back again to retaliate, but the store was so dark, she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length away. She hobbled as he guided her over to a booth and sat down next to her.

  She melded into the cool plastic and leaned her head on the brick wall. Her voice came out in a raspy whisper. “What’s wrong with those people out there?”

  Mark leaned in closer and whispered back. “They’re sick.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anyone sick like that. They’re eating garbage…and people. They’re eating people!”

  “Keep it down, Cheryl. Everyone in here is already on edge.”

  “Of course they are. I’m on edge, too! What’s happening? You knew. Somehow, you knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? You were so quiet when we heard the news on the radio this morning.”

  He was silent for a moment then he wrapped his arms around her, hugged her, and kissed her on the cheek. She could feel wetness coming from his eyes.

  “You were erasing footsteps in the dirt outside the tent this morning, weren’t you?”

  She felt his head nod on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t. I was worried they were here.”

  “Who was here?”

  “The Eaters. I didn’t know then…I just—”

  “You didn’t know what?”

  Mark took a deep breath then began pouring a strange story out to her. “I think it started with the dogs. We got these shepherds at the base near Kabul, and they’d been trained to sniff out bombs. They brought them to us to do some more work with them, because they’d started acting strange…avoiding their food…and going for the slop in the garbage cans instead. We’d only had them for a few days when they got really sick and started attacking people. They just went crazy, like they had rabies or something. We had to shoot them—there was no other choice.

  “Dogs? But—”

  “It didn’t end there. One night after that, some of our regiment was attacked. We were asleep in our tents when we heard footsteps outside. Thinking it was Taliban, we started shooting, but the sick-looking bastards just kept coming. There were dozens of them, walking straight towards the gunfire. You couldn’t stop them—unless you scored a head shot. The attacks went on for days and some of my buddies were killed. But the odd thing was, when one of them slipped past the guards into camp, they left most of us alone. They were usually just after the garbage…or the wounded. My buddy, Jeff, had shrapnel in his leg. They couldn’t get it all out, and it got gangrene. One night, an Eater came in…and…and ate his leg.”

  Cheryl shuddered, knowing that it would be a long time before she got some of the gruesome images out of her head that she had seen and heard today. This was all so much to digest. She tried to wrap her mind around what Mark was telling her and make some sense out of all of it. “So you think whatever the dogs had, it somehow jumped species and spread to humans?”

  “What else could it be? There’s more…I found out later that those dogs weren’t normal to begin with. They’d started out in a lab, some type of genetic experiment. They’d originally been created to sniff out cancer.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Yeah. Think about it. Bred to search for something rotten…”

  Cheryl thought again about Paul. He’d devoured that putrid burger like he was a starving animal, and it was a delicacy plucked from the Queen’s table. Just before that, he’d been so cold. He’d been dead. She knew it. There hadn’t been a pulse.

  “…but what no one knows is how this disease, or whatever it is, transferred from the dogs to people. And, it seems to have mutated, turning people into these rotting eating machines.”

  “Why weren’t they quarantined when it started?”

  “It happened too fast. You probably heard on the news a few months ago that a whole village was bombed. They were all infected, wandering the streets, just eating, eating, eating…any rotten thing or creature they could get their mouths on. Whatever this virus was, we tried to contain it, tried to keep it from spreading to the rest of the world. But from the looks of things here, apparently we failed.”

  She let that statement sink down to the pit of her stomach and was silent for a moment, taking in the hushed jumble of voices around her, and the backdrop of the shrieks outside. She squeezed his hand, hoping for some kind of hope to come out of him next. “What are we going to do? We can’t stay here forever…”

  “Well…we got food. We got water. I say we stay put for now. Try to find out what’s going on. Maybe someone will come restore order. Maybe the Guard.”

  “The Guard? You’re the Guard. And, you’re here with me instead of out there.”

  “I had to find you, Cheryl. If I’d reported like they wanted me to, where would you be right now? Splattered all over the sidewalk out there?”

  She winced. He was right. If he had gotten there even just a few seconds later, she would have been trampled by that crowd...then maybe eaten by one of the infected. She shuddered at the thought. There was no doubt that Mark had saved her life by going AWOL from his duty.

  Suddenly, the darkness retreated as a fluorescent light popped on in the back of the store.

  Mark jumped to his feet. “I thought I said no lights!”

  All twenty plus people turned and looked at the silhouette of a person standing in the back hallway among the shelves of bread loaves and gallons of mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, and pickles, backlit by the rectangular glow of sunlight coming in from the open back door.

  Mark grabbed his rifle and yelled, “There’s a back door! Nobody locked the damn back door!”

  Chapter Five

  The heavyset middle-aged woman had on a pink cotton nightgown with a matching terrycloth robe, and fuzzy slippers that had once been white. Her graying hair was done up in tiny bristled curlers, and her entire front side, from her chin down to her feet, was mottled with dirt and blood. The most disturbing things were her gray, peeling and welted skin, and her vacant, coal black eyes. She shuffled forward with slow, dragging steps, and Cheryl thought she looked like a corpse that had been plucked from a bin at the city morgue and reanimated with batteries and cables.

  The crowd in the store parted down the middle as Mark aimed and fired. The bullet hit her square in the chest, knocking her flat on her back.

  “Mark!” Cheryl screamed. “How could you? She was sick! She was—”

  “Already dead.”

  But was she? The woman’s upper body lifted straight up, then she came to her knees. One hand was outstretched, the fingers curled up like claws, as she began crawling towards them.

  Mark aimed again.

  “No!” Cheryl grabbed the barrel of the rifle just before he fired, knocking it a few inches off course.

  The woman’s right shoulder was blown away. She wobbled back and forth on her knees then fell face forward onto the floor.

  “Why did you do that?” Mark asked, shaking the rifle at her like it was a club.

  “She was an old woman. She looked like my grandmother…”

  “I don’t care if it had been your grandmother. Don’t ever do that again!
” He walked over to the woman’s body. It was quivering and jerking, flopping around like a fish in a frying pan. He put his boot on her back and fired a second time, straight into her head.

  Cheryl screamed and buried her face in her hands as blood and other detritus splattered around the room. When she looked up, Mark was staring down at the still body as if he expected it to move again.

  A man with blood-soaked cowboy boots standing near him shouted and pointed towards the back door.

  Another figure stood there—this one a young man wearing a yellow polo shirt with a logo from the pizza store next door. He snarled, baring a mouthful of teeth as Mark rushed towards him and slammed the door in his face. He held his back to it, and yelled, “Where’s the manager? Somebody lock this door…now!”

  The man with the Mario Bros. mustache rushed to the back. Mark held the door against kicks and pounds from the other side while the man fumbled to get the key in the lock. When it was secured, they walked back towards the others.

  Cheryl watched them, not enjoying seeing Mark in soldier mode, but thankful all the same.

  The manager, Gary, according to his nametag, turned to Mark. “Why didn’t you shoot him too?”

  “I don’t want to waste any bullets. I don’t know how long they need to last us.”

  “I knew him. He was a good kid. I’m glad I didn’t have to see him die.”

  “How many employees do you have here?”

  “Two. Justin and Steve.”

  “Tell them their new job duties include body removal. You got a cooler to put that in?” he asked, pointing to the woman’s sprawled body.

  “Yeah…it’s—”

  The fluorescent light that had come on when the woman had walked past the motion sensor suddenly snapped off, throwing them back into darkness. The shop was instantly quieter without the hum of the computers, refrigerator, and ovens. Then, with a whoosh, they all came back on.

  “Generator?” Mark asked.

  Gary nodded. “Yes.”

  “How long can it run?”

  “I dunno. A few hours? We’ve never needed it longer than that.”

  “Does it keep the meat cold?”

  Cheryl couldn’t see it, but she knew the store’s assembly line included bins of sliced turkey, chicken, salami, bologna, and other cold cuts. It was hard to believe that she’d been starving for a Turkey Jack just a short time ago. Now, even though she hadn’t eaten since the marshmallows last night, the thought of food made her stomach turn.

  “Yeah, sure,” Gary snorted. “Why? You need to break for a sandwich?”

  “No, smartass. I’m just concerned about the smell if it starts to go bad. There’s a lot of meat here to spoil if the power is off for too long.”

  Mark came back over to her while Gary shouted to his crew to get some trash bags to use as a tarp to move the woman’s body and some rags to clean up the floor, so no one would slip in the blood. He started to guide her back to the booth where they’d been before, but stopped and grabbed his cell phone out of a shirt pocket. She saw that there was no signal before he snapped it closed.

  “Has anyone here gotten through to 911? To the police? To any authorities?”

  There was a round of groans.

  “I heard a lady in the corner talking on her phone to someone. Maybe she’s found out something.” Cheryl pointed him towards where she’d heard the voice then followed him over.

  “Ma’am?” he said to the woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. “You able to get through to anyone?”

  She was sobbing. It took a moment for her to stop crying and talk in a warbled voice. “My mother. She’s got my kids. They’re trapped in the house…”

  Cheryl didn’t have any family close by. She thought about her father, and her aunt, many miles away in Arizona. She could only hope that everything was all right in that part of the country. She leaned down and put a hand on the woman’s arm. “Has she heard anything on the news? What part of town is she in?”

  “She’s on the east side. She hasn’t heard anything. There’s no TV. There was radio until just now. Some DJ was holed up downtown, still broadcasting from a barricaded office, but he stopped talking about an hour ago.”

  “What about a shelter?” Mark asked. “Have any shelters been set up?”

  “For the sick?”

  “No. For us…”

  “I haven’t heard nothing.”

  Her sobs returned full force, and it was obvious that the interrogation was over. There would be no more news forthcoming. Cheryl and Mark retreated back to the booth. They leaned on each other, trying to take a mental and emotional break, even though that wasn’t really possible.

  After a moment she said, “We should have let more people in. We could have saved some others maybe.”

  “No. We barely made it in here ourselves. You saw the other stores. They locked the doors. They were so scared…they weren’t letting anyone in. We were lucky to get in here.”

  “Yes, but…” she trailed off, and sat up. “Listen…it’s quieter outside.”

  “You’re right.”

  She followed him to the window.

  It seemed like just a few minutes had passed since she was outside walking on her lunch break, but it had actually been a few hours. The shadows were long and thin on the sidewalk, giving it a zebra striped effect. And amongst the patterns of shimmering light and bands of purple shadow, there were bodies—lots of bodies. She couldn’t believe that just a short time ago the motionless lumps had been people, walking, talking and going about their day.

  “Look at all of them…” Cheryl watched, wide-eyed at the number of Eaters still roaming and shuffling about. They didn’t outnumber the dead, but there were a lot of them. She guessed there were dozens within her view that stretched from the shop to the park across the street, but given the wall of figures that she’d seen in the park just before they ran into the shop, there was probably an army of them out there.

  “Yeah…not good. What we can see from here is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

  She pulled him away from the window, but kept him close enough to cup a hand over his ear and whisper. “Mark, how do we know that some of the people in here aren’t infected? I mean, remember that guy at work? Paul, the jerk I told you about before? Well, one minute, he looked a little…off. Then it was like he was dead, and then, like a lightning bolt, he just went nuts. It happened so fast. If there’s a virus causing this, what’s the incubation period?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was always villagers that got it. None of my squad got sick. But we were popping a lot of vitamins, smoking a lot of weed, even doing some herbal stuff like ginseng and ephedra to keep our energy and immune system up. I don’t know if that had anything to do with keeping us well.”

  So many questions…so few answers as to how this epidemic had spread so quickly and why some got sick and others didn’t.

  The generator did not power the air conditioning. Cheryl realized that she was sweating, and the heat made her tired. She fumbled her way across the room to get a bottle of water from the counter then returned to her spot and leaned back in the booth while Mark started chatting with a man nearby.

  As she sipped her water, she looked around the room. The light was even dimmer than before, but she could tell that there was quite a diverse lot of people holed up with them. There were more men than women, but the split was close, probably sixty-forty. She saw the woman with the young girl that they’d let in earlier lying in a booth with her daughter asleep in her arms; the store manager and his employees huddled together like a three-man football team; and there was an assortment of men and women, young and old, in business and casual dress. The one person she didn’t see was the obnoxious woman who’d been smoking earlier. Maybe, she was in the bathroom. With a mischievous grin, Cheryl figured they should consider locking her in there if she got out of hand again.

  She thought that it would be easier to see the people better—
inspect them—in brighter light. Then they might have some warning if someone started to show signs of infection. If it happened, she hoped it wouldn’t be someone sitting close to her, and that Mark would be able to stop them before anyone got hurt.

  She nodded off for a few minutes and when she woke, water was spilled on her lap and she could hear Mark in a heated conversation.

  “How about you just listen to the man with the gun?”

  Cheryl was appalled. Was this her Mark?

  He wasn’t talking to the bald guy in the plaid golf shorts anymore; it was Gary, the manager.

  “We don’t want any more trouble in here. Why don’t you just put the gun away?”

  Mark shook his head. “You don’t get it. This isn’t a movie. This is real. There’s a virus going around. Once it infects, it kills people, but they don’t exactly die—they just turn into rotten, flesh-eating monsters. If I hadn’t shot that woman, there might be several of us lying on the floor right now. I saved your ass. A thank you might be more appropriate.”

  The argument abruptly ceased when red and blue lights began strobing on the other side of the blinds. The man closest to the window went over and looked out.

  “Hey! There’s a police car out there! We’ve got to let him know we’re here.” Before anyone could stop him, he grabbed the cord, raised the blinds, waved his arms, and started pounding on the window.

  Now that she could see out, Cheryl could tell that he was wasting his time. The policeman leaning out of his car door with a handgun was young—probably a rookie in his first year. He began shooting randomly at Eaters like it was some crazed sport. Trying to get his attention was about as useless as waving at a jet pilot 30,000 feet up in the air, because his mind—whatever might be left of it after so much trauma—was beyond reaching, and he was very focused on his futile task.

  They all watched as the worst-case scenario eventually happened. The gun ran out of bullets, and the Eaters closed in on him. They scrambled over the top of his car, beating on the windows with their fists, the protruding bones of their arms or legs, even with large rocks and the broken wood slats from park benches, a terrifying sign that they truly weren’t all just mindless zombies. Some of them still had some violent intelligence at work propelling them towards their goal.