by catt dahman
It was bad to keep people in cages, but the brain fever was dangerous, and the children might stray or be hurt.
That was one cage that would have to be washed out because Aaron and Mary weren’t able to eat politely or void their bladders and bowels in proper ways.
At the table, Daddy asked them, “Do you think Mary looked a little better this morning?” He was a handsome man, his face scrubbed clean and hands still soft, despite all the work he did. He was almost obsessively clean about his body and clothing, even now.
“Maybe a little. I thought she listened more to the evening prayer last night,” Samuel answered.
“Aaron’s eyes look more alert,” Rebecca added. She was the oldest of the children and spent many extra hours praying for her brother and sister to return to them. She also had the least tolerance for disrespect and slapped the first girl hard right across her mouth for cursing, before they rendered her.
Elizabeth knew the little girl didn’t hear or know a word of the prayer but moaned because she wanted more food; however, she, too, nodded as expected.
Rachael quickly nodded, too, for fear Rebecca would slap her for showing doubt; a doubter was like a rich man and likely would not get through the needle’s eye to Heaven. Daddy always said that rich people were doomed to hell.
Mary and Aaron only moaned for more food, voided themselves in the cage, and stared out of the metal bars without interest in anything when the curtains were pulled back.
If any one of the other children got a hand close enough, the caged children would bite. That was how Mary infected Aaron; he got too close to her teeth while watching her in the cage.
Rebecca said that Aaron allowed doubt and fear to let a demon into his mind. Elizabeth didn’t say what secrets were in her mind; she didn’t think her siblings would ever get better, and in her darkest moments, she wished that they would die like in normal times, and then they wouldn’t have caused her family to live this way.
Elizabeth didn’t understand how a demon got into the mind, but it was only after a bite to the skin that the person was infected. Maybe, it was a demon, and maybe it was a plague. Demons got into the young, the confused, and the non-believers.
Not infected. Possessed. It hurt her head, trying to make sense of it all; it was easier to believe and have faith.
Neither one looked a bit better than when he and she first were bitten and were changed from loving the family to whatever they were now.
All the prayers, songs, and stories read to the little ones didn’t change a thing, for they just hissed and stared blankly. However, Elizabeth didn’t point that out, either.
When they first fed the little ones, Elizabeth vomited, but that was okay because Momma and Daddy said it was hard to do such a thing and to make sacrifices when they never were called before.
Seeing the little girl and little boy grab at the bloody leg, tear greedily into the flesh, and pull at it with dirty teeth was sickening.
The people in the other cages watched, vomited, and cried out, sometimes cursed, sometimes prayed. The fat, skin, and muscle vanished into the hungry mouths. Mary held the food the longest, and it looked digested later. Her hair grew some, too. With Aaron, the food came back out quicker, partially the same as it went in, and he was always paler, thinner, and less animated.
Aaron and Mary became painfully thin and moaned and whined in hunger for a long time until Daddy explained the solution was to feed them. They couldn’t kill the children, and to let them sit and starve was cruel and an abomination. “Suffer the children to come unto me,” Daddy quoted. And then he said, “Eat of my flesh….” He said that meant it was okay to give the babies food to keep them alive, and when they did, the two stopped moaning, becoming much calmer once sated. But they still snapped their teeth if anyone got too close to them.
But they got hungry again. Like anyone did.
Daddy always spoke to the people first; he explained that none of them were God-fearing and likely brought on this final plague with their evil ways. “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out,” Daddy said. In time, there would be a second coming, and all would be taken in a blaze of glory, but the children’s souls needed to be cared for until that time.
It was the end of times, but it sure was dragging out. Elizabeth didn’t say that either.
“Is it feeding time tonight?” Thomas asked. Nothing got to him; he never questioned a thing and always reinforced what Daddy and Momma said. He even claimed that when the food screamed while he was helping to take a body apart for rendering, demons were leaving their bodies.
Elizabeth thought it was just pain that caused the screaming; she didn’t say that, but she didn’t really know things like Thomas did. At eighteen, he was five years older than she.
“I don’t think so. We need to save food for them until we know we can get more,” Momma said logically. Only six were left in the cage.
When Elizabeth and Samuel washed the cages, letting the spring water fill the buckets they tossed at the cage, the people inside the cages shivered and cursed. They didn’t use the soap and were scrubbed when they were pulled from the dirty cage.
One begged and cried, but the other five were always angry and said terrible things about Aaron and Mary, calling them zombies.
Elizabeth never saw a movie, but she knew what it was. She knew what television was although they didn’t have one. They owned a radio that they listened to for the music, but after things changed, there was no more music to hear.
She wasn’t sure what the word zombie meant except that Daddy said it was about a place far away called Haiti where the people practiced witchcraft and demon worship. Daddy said that the people and place had absolutely nothing to do with her little brother and sister since neither had ever been to that country.
Elizabeth used a mop handle to slide food through the bars of the cage that held the six people, for fear they would grab her.
As always, two of them tried to behave nicely and tell her how wrong this was, but she knew that without food, her brother and sister would die. It was okay not to “suffer a witch to live” which meant that those who were witches and witchlike could be rendered for food.
One man said her brother and sister were the walking dead, but Daddy laughed and was not angry like Elizabeth would have guessed.
He said, “Was Jesus Christ not the walking dead if you look at it that way?” He explained to them that he was being facetious, showing them how silly their words were when they twisted them.
“All clean?” Daddy asked.
“Somewhat clean,” Elizabeth told him, “they all needed a good scrubbing.”
“And when we get them back, we’ll scrub them until they glow.” He smiled at his children who just moaned with their blank stares. “Hello, Mary, how’s my girl? And Aaron, Daddy misses hearing your voice.” He leaned close to Elizabeth and Samuel. “I think they both look better today.”
Both still had the milky cataracts over blue eyes shadowed underneath with purple, a few smudges of blood and dirt where they never came clean, and bites on their arms that never healed, never got worse, but just smelled vile and wept pus sometimes. They were slightly thinner than they were when this began but did not grow or change much in over a year.
“Mary got some poopie in the pan, Daddy,” Elizabeth told him. It was a pure accident, of course, as they went wherever they wanted, but it happened, and it was something to cling to.
“She did?” he asked. Samuel nodded eagerly, too, “that’s fantastic.”
If Elizabeth understood more, she would have known that when her father was pleased, his eyes did take on a little shine.
But the insanity he and his wife latched onto when they lost their two children and when the virus spread to the family was always right there on his face. Neither was evil, but both were very sick in the mind.
Thomas, Rebecca, and Rachael brought down tubs and buckets, struggling with the weight. “All of it, Daddy?”
“All. I think i
t’s helping a lot.”
One of the prisoners groaned as Thomas used gloves to dig in and toss meat to his siblings: two legs, two arms, two hands, buttocks, and random flesh from the rest of a body. The torso and head were never rendered; they were deemed unclean.
“Shelly?”
“They cut up Shelly?” the prisoners questioned and complained. One cursed again. She was kept in the barn where only Daddy went, saying she was sick. A woman wailed in sorrow.
“Is she safe for them?” Elizabeth asked. Her sister was chomping on the fingers of a hand, teeth grinding against bones as she sucked at the blood greedily. Aaron ate a fatty piece of buttock.
“It was only a cold at the most; we watched her, and she was safe. She repented at the end and went quite easily,” Daddy told them.
“You’re a sick mother fucker,” one of the men yelled.
Daddy and Thomas moved as one, grabbing the cattle prod and a type of spear Thomas formed from a broom handle and a knife.
Jabbing the people, the males worked the group so they all went to one side while the man who yelled was herded to the other side close to the cage door.
Rebecca held a gun but didn’t know how to use it even as she pointed it at the people, warning them to stay back. They would have rushed the door anyway, like the two did who escaped the night before, but Thomas poked hard, drawing blood, and Daddy shocked harder.
In seconds, the yelling man was out of the cage and on the floor with the rest screaming threats and begging for freedom. Thomas gave the man a few pokes to take the starch out of him before they dragged him to the wall and then chained him to a pipe with handcuffs on both wrists and ankles.
Out of breath, Daddy pointed at the man and said, “You will not speak that way in front of my children.”
“Or what? You’ll cut me up and feed me to the zombie kids?”
Elizabeth felt the blood wash out of her face. What a terrible thing to say.
“If you are fortunate. Keep in mind men once gave the Lord burnt offerings….” Daddy’s voice was deadly serious and scary.
The man blinked a few times since that fear never entered his mind. Being burned alive was indeed a terrifying consideration, and these people would no doubt be up for such. He went quiet.
Thomas set the last bucket of body parts near the cage of people and the cuffed man. “I don’t see any reason to bring you food and water after you’ve acted like this; if you get hungry, you can eat what my brother and sister eat; you aren’t too good for that.”
Elizabeth followed her family upstairs but hesitated with a glance back at the cage of weeping people and the man who sat, bleeding on the floor of the basement: another mess that would have to be cleaned up. She resented that he caused another chore for her. In addition, Mary voided her bowels while eating, which was very disgusting, but as usual, she missed the pan.
The drain on the far side, where she washed the people’s waste, seemed to be stopped up, and it smelled very foul. “I’m not washing you down again, so if you can, you better just hold it a while. That’s disgusting,” Elizabeth told the people.
“Let us go, and you won’t have to clean anything,” a woman snapped.
Elizabeth felt anger rising. “Well, once you get eaten, I also won’t have to clean anything, so think on that.” And she slammed the door, leaving them in dim lantern light.
Chapter 4
Mall
Since zombie movies were at least part of the pop culture, no one intentionally went to the mall to shop or for security when the infected people awakened from comas and began biting and hunting for humans to feed on. When more and more became infected and hunted the streets, no one decided it was a smart idea to pop into the mall. It was accidental that anyone was there at all.
Stores and businesses closed down when warned by the CDC about the Diamond Flux or Red Plague sweeping across the globe, and most people wouldn’t have gone to work anyway for fear of being infected or bitten or fear of their own families being neglected.
Trying to get out of the city, a family of three struggled to get past the traffic that was backed up with wreckage and stalled vehicles for miles. When a hundred or more of the moaning, filthy monsters tracked and fed in a horde, the family jumped out of their car, and with many others, they ran.
Many were snagged and attacked by the faster Reds. In this type of fleeing, one only had to outrun the slowest other person to make it.
There were other small places to take refuge, but the mall was the largest and closest, and that’s where they ran, just like characters in a movie, not realizing until later that they had done something so stereotypical under the circumstances. When they got the doors secured and could take deep breaths and think, they looked at one another in disbelief: they chose a mall. It was funny but not laughable.
“Can they get us?”
“No, I don’t think, but I can’t run anymore,” the boy’s mother told him. Her name was Joyce, and she was close to passing out from total horror. The soles of her sneakers were coated with blood from rushing past those that the creatures brought down and fed on. She took the shoes off of her child and then her own, throwing both pairs as hard as she could, disgusted by the gore.
That they made it without being bitten was surprisingly good. Many ran, but children and older people quickly were caught. Fighting back did nothing, as the things felt no pain.
The eight of them talked some, introduced themselves, and then went into one of the store to find beds, food, and water.
The next day didn’t look any better since outside in the parking lot, zombies shambled and shuffled, knowing their prey ran past but unsure where the food was.
On the road, more creatures stumbled car-to-car, dragged away people, and ate them alive when they found them. Blood ran all around, and bits of flesh, intestines, and body parts lay tossed away to rot on the pavement.
Once in a while, people tried to dart for safety or fought back, but the Reds had the weight and numbers. Periodically, screams tore through the air so that those in the mall could hear the shrieks of pain.
They all slept in the same store, and without a lot of planning, they gathered make shift melee weapons, stored extra water, and gathered all the food and liquids they could find during a week of hard work.
That was plenty to keep them going for years if needed, but they, like almost everyone else, waited for someone in charge to come along, rescue everyone, and put the United States back together again.
In the time they had, they did what they could to stay occupied, sometimes looked out the upper windows, and waited for help that never came.
They finally decided that maybe help would never come and that this was all they would ever have; it was depressing in most ways to think this was their lives now, but at least they had that much.
“Did you hear that?” Tell asked.
“Gunshots, we always hear them…sometimes anyway…used to hear ‘em more…why?” Joyce asked him as she helped her son set up a golf course in the lobby. She tried always to keep something fun going on for the child and anyone else to prevent total depression; it seemed they were always one step away from suicide.
“Dunno, but it was three at once; that seemed like a signal. Anthony went to see if it were anyone.”
“I know it’s someone, but unless it’s the military who have come to help us, then I don’t care who it is.”
“It could be good,” Tell told her.
“Nothing’s been good for a long time,” Joyce whispered so that her son didn’t hear her. He was six then, and now three years later, half of his life was spent in this stupid mall, hiding from zombies. It was enough to make everyone just give up.
Anthony jogged to the open area, still calling the rest to join them. He looked both excited and perplexed.
“What?” Joyce asked. She refused to have hope again.
“You’ll think I’m done gone crazy, but it’s some people on horses….”
“Horses?�
�
“Yep. And they have guns, and I went to the roof, okay, and we made motions to talk; they want to help us and get us out of here if we want. So the zoms didn’t notice.
“Out to where?” Lacy complained, “out with the zoms so they can eat us?”
“Hey!” Joyce snapped, as Patrick looked at them wide-eyed with fear.
“She means to where…as in where is safe? Are they just passing through?”
“I didn’t have that much conversation with ‘em, but I got the impression they have a better life than we do; they’re clean, well fed, and look very happy, considering everything that’s out there,” Anthony explained. He said they were going to come in through the far entrance. He was almost dancing with excitement.
“What if they ain’t safe?” Robbin asked. “How do we know?”
“I ‘spect they wonder the same about us…I mean…is this not the total movie thing to be in a shoppin’ mall with zoms running all around us? I’m the black guy; you got the kid and over protective Momma and serious Dad.” Anthony pointed.
“You got the Gothic chick all dressed in black; and Lacy in her fancy shit; Tell, the old guy; and Robbin, the bitch. This is all just perfect to have some people come up on horses to rescue us,” he was almost yelling now.
For a second, they just stared at him.
“I’m not a bitch, you freakin’ asshole,” Robbin told him, “Lacy is the bitch.”
“Screw you.”
He held his arms out to show his point was proven.
“Stay here. I’ll go with Ant and see what’s going on,” Bart promised Joyce. After all this time and more than anything, news of what was going on outside the mall seemed precious to him. Talking with new people would be amazing.
There were a lot of gunshots and sounds of boots slapping the pavement while the people ran; then, Anthony opened the door, and five people ran inside, eyes adjusting to the dim light.
There was Kim, a tall cowboy with reddish hair under a cowboy hat, a quiet attitude, a fast grin for everyone, and an infectious calm nature. Beside him was a woman with clear green eyes, Beth who surveyed the situation and looked a little like the actress Demi Moore. She looked as sweet as sugar but yet could be ice cold when necessary.
