She put a hand to her head and mumbled like she had a headache. “Craig…can you just not…”
“Ben? Ben, you fucker, are you awake? Are you the Mad Crapper? Ben!”
He kicked my foot.
“Ben! Jesus, was that you?”
The morning didn’t improve any from there.
22
8 cans of fruit. That’s how much they ate.
Thank God that’s all they ate.
Down to 155 cans total. And 148 liters of water.
77 days if I was alone.
With them here, it’s only 3 days left. Maybe 4.
4 days till we died.
It was time to say something.
“We have to go slower on the food,” I said as we walked out of the bunker. I was carrying the bucket to go empty it out in the scrub brush. I had my rifle slung over my shoulder on a strap.
It was the coolest it was going to get all day. Not exactly cool, mind you, but right at the edge of warm.
The desert can get downright fucking cold. In the winters, at night and the morning, it can get down in the 40’s. I was praying for that to come. Maybe it would slow down the bugs. Maybe they would be real sluggish. Maybe they would be easier to kill.
But right now, in the middle of the hottest summer on record before the world ended, it was still about 70 degrees at 7 in the morning.
Craig stopped walking. “What?”
“We don’t have much food. We need to go slow,” I said.
“What are you saying?” Craig asked.
“We only have those cans in there, and that’s it…we’ve just got to go easy, that’s all.”
“We were fucking starving when we got here, man,” Craig said, seriously pissed off.
“Craig, please,” Noelle said.
“No – no, I’m – look, we were fucking starving. We hadn’t eaten in two days. You have all this food, all of this food for just one guy…what, are we inconveniencing you?”
Everybody else gathered around. Kristin and Noelle were helping Violet. She looked like a zombie, shuffling along. Eyes straight forward, a thousand-yard stare out into nothing. The light was on but nobody was home. Her face was all puffy and swollen from crying.
“Craig, he’s right. He had food saved up, and we barged in, and now we’re eating it all.” Noelle turned to me. “We’re sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I mumbled.
“Ben is right,” Jon said. “We have to ration the food.”
“Or we can just leave.” Craig threw his hands up in the air. “Would you like us to do that? Just fuckin’ leave?”
You? I thought. Yeah, YOU can go.
“I’m just saying…”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I know what you’re saying,” Craig seethed.
“Look, man, we have to be careful how much we eat,” Jon said, putting one hand on Craig’s shoulder.
Craig shrugged him off. “I know that. You think I don’t know that? But we were starving, man. Starving.”
“Well, now we can start to watch how much we eat,” Jon said calmly. “I think that’s all Ben was saying. Right, Ben?”
“Right,” I said.
Although that wasn’t exactly right. I mean, that was the words I said, and I tried to be as nice about it as I could, but my real thoughts were closer to You assholes are eating all my food.
“This is just temporary,” Craig said to Jon. “This is just temporary. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“I know,” Jon agreed.
I wanted to laugh at them.
Last I heard, it sounded like you were out of gas. The nearest station is at least 4 miles away. Are you going to go walk 4 miles, with God knows how many hundreds of bugs out there? How many THOUSANDS?
“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Craig repeated. “So all your food? That’s just temporary. We’re going to get to a grocery store and stock up, and then we’ll be fine.”
The nearest grocery store is 6 miles away. You can walk to that after you get the gas, I guess. Or walk 4 miles to get the gas, then walk 4 miles back. Then you can drive to the store like everybody USED to do, before the world went to shit. If you make it back to the car. Hell, if you make it to the gas station to begin with.
“But maybe…” Craig said with a cruel smile, “…maybe we won’t have room for you. Maybe we need to watch how many people we put in the car. What do you think of that?”
“Craig, cut it out,” Noelle said. “He’s sharing his food with us, he saved our lives. Cut it out.”
“I think Ben just meant we need to ration our food,” Jon repeated.
“Yeah…we just need to ease up on it,” I mumbled in agreement.
“In case it takes us a little longer to get the gas and get out of here,” Jon said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Yeah, RIGHT, is what I thought.
I had planned on waiting out the bugs, waiting for the hero or the scientist, for 4 months. I figured if somebody was coming to get me, 4 months was enough time to give them.
Not 4 days.
Nobody was coming in 4 days.
We weren’t getting gas, we weren’t getting out of here, we weren’t getting groceries in 4 days.
We were gonna die in 4 days, is what we were gonna do.
I take that back. We had more water than food, so we might last another 3 or 4 days just on water. And then it would take us 3 days to die of thirst. Actually, in this heat, probably just 2.
So…4 plus 4 plus 2. 10 days till we were all dead.
Maybe tack on a few days if we went out drinking our own piss.
I was thinking that on day 9 or 10, my rifle was going to be looking like a pretty good way to go.
23
The whole time we were arguing, nobody was watching Violet.
I was standing there with a bucket full of everybody’s piss and shit. Craig was standing across from me, looking like he wanted to kick my face in. Jon was beside him, trying to calm him down. Noelle sort of stood in the middle, not really stepping in, but looking like she might. Kristin stood behind her, arms folded tightly across her chest.
Nobody was watching Violet as she shuffled off into the scrub brush.
Nobody paid her any attention until she started screaming.
I told you the bugs weren’t as active during the day. ‘As’ is the key word. They were still around, even in the early morning. It’s just that they almost always gave up scratching at the door by dawn, and went off into their burrows or the RVs or wherever it is they sleep during the day.
But there were always some lurking around. If you walked far enough away from camp, you were going to find them.
After it was all over, it seemed like Violet went out there looking for them.
She had to have been a hundred feet from us when it happened.
Craig was saying some more stupid shit about getting gas and leaving when this horrible scream cut through the air. Just shut us all the fuck up. Froze the blood in my veins, that’s for sure.
We whipped our heads around to look at her.
Violet had turned back towards us. She was crying again, but it was different from before. She wasn’t a zombie anymore. She had woken up. Her eyes were bright and alert. She had sleepwalked right out there into the desert, then got jolted awake. What she thought was terrible before? That was just the beginning.
There was a bug up on her thigh.
I could see its tail poking through her skin and whipping around on the other side.
Its teeth were tearing at her leg.
The entire part above her knee looked like someone had thrown a glass of red food coloring on a bunch of raw hamburger meat.
“VIOLET!” Noelle screamed.
She started to run. Craig caught her and held her back.
“NO, LET ME GO, LET ME GO!” Noelle screamed.
Craig threw her into Jon’s arms, and then he started towards Violet himself.
Three more bugs swarmed Vio
let before he even got 20 feet.
It was like a nightmare. They rose up out of the dirt, sand streaming off their black bodies, just like monsters in a movie.
One jumped up and bit clean through her left knee. You could see the bone in her thigh go one way, and the little bones from her calf go the other, as the meat ripped and she fell over to the side.
Blood gushed everywhere.
“VIOLET!” Craig screamed, then stopped. He kind of danced there, a few steps forward, then a few more back, unsure if he should go on.
I wished he had, because then he would have died himself.
But he wasn’t that stupid.
She was a goner the second she hit the ground.
The bugs on her leg clambered up her body and started taking chunks out of her. Her striped blue and white shirt turned into a striped red and purple shirt in places. In a few seconds more, that’s all it was: red and purple.
“USE YOUR GUN!” Jon yelled at me.
I had just been standing there in shock, watching. I dropped the bucket on the ground, shit and piss splattering everywhere, and tried to pull the rifle off my shoulder.
If I’d have been thinking clearly, I would have just gone back to the bunker. There wasn’t any need to watch what came next, and there was no way in hell we could save her.
One of the bugs bit clean through the side of her neck. Blood sprayed four feet in the air, then gurgled down like a garden hose dying out. I bet it would have gone on longer, but she’d probably already lost a lot of blood from them biting on her legs and belly.
She was screaming and stretching one arm out to us like PLEASE, HELP ME! PLEASE!
I got the rifle braced against my shoulder, but by then it was all over.
A thought passed through my mind. If I’d have had the balls, I should have just shot her right then and there and put her out of her misery. I don’t know if I could have lived with myself, but if it was me in her place, I would’ve wanted somebody to do me that final favor.
But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t.
Didn’t matter for too much longer, though.
A bug must have got her from the back of the skull, because a tail tore out of her mouth and through her tongue, whipping this way and that around her mouth. After a few seconds her eyes went blank and her outstretched hand dropped to the ground, but the tongue kept wiggling around like a piece of pink meat on a shish kabob stick.
Then another tail ripped through her cheek and starting flicking this way and that. Like an eel I saw once in a pet store in Los Angeles, a little skinny thing sticking up out of the sand at the bottom of a tank. Except the eel in the tank just kind of hung there in the water, all calm-like.
The spike whipping out of Violet’s cheek was like that eel if he’d been on meth, and then they fastforwarded the video of him.
Kristin was screaming. She was holding her arms up to her face and screaming and screaming and screaming.
“GET BACK IN THE BUNKER!” Craig shouted as he ran towards us. He grabbed Noelle by the elbow and hauled her along with him. “GET BACK IN THE BUNKER!”
We all went back in the bunker and slammed the door shut.
The last thing I saw was four, five, six tails splitting Violet’s face open, and pieces of her skin flapping around like little bloody flags.
24
The girls were sitting down on the ground, sobbing and holding each other.
Craig was pacing back and forth, fast and angry. It didn’t take him long to reach one end of the bunker. Then he turned around and got back to the other side in seconds, then he did it all over again.
Jon was leaning against the wall with his hands over his face. His shoulders were shaking like he might be crying.
I just stood there watching them. I don’t think my brain was working too good. It seemed to me that this was all just a movie I was watching on TV. A movie I wanted to turn off, I wanted to turn it off now, but I didn’t know where the remote was and so I was stuck there watching even though I just wanted to turn it off please make it stop.
Craig stopped pacing and turned towards me. “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?” he screamed.
I stared up at him like an idiot. After all, this was just part of the movie I couldn’t turn off please God make it stop.
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” he screamed again, and I came back to myself a little. Not much, but enough to answer.
“What?” I asked.
He grabbed for the rifle. I jerked it out of his reach at the last second.
“You have that fucking gun, but you never fucking use it!” he yelled at me. “You let Will die, and now you let Violet die! WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM?”
Now, I was feeling pretty bad. I felt bad that I had just seen a girl die in front of me. I felt bad that I basically just stood there like a bump on a log. I felt bad that, yeah, I had a gun and I hadn’t been able to do nothing for her. When it came down to it, I couldn’t even put her out of her misery so she didn’t have to feel herself getting eaten alive.
So I didn’t say nothing.
But when I came back to it later and went over what happened in my mind, I wish I would have shouted, You dumb fuck – did you forget how I shot the bugs in front of the girls when they were running for the bunker? Did you forget how I saved YOUR dumb ass, telling you to go for the bunker instead of running into the RV where the bugs woulda torn you limb from limb? Saved all your asses as you ran away from that car, that same car you think you’re going to fucking magically get gas for and ride off into the sunset with?
But I didn’t say any of that. I just stood there with my mouth open like a retard.
“It’s not his fault, Craig,” I heard Jon say. His nose was all stuffed up. He really had been crying.
“I didn’t say it was his fault – ”
“You said he let her die.”
“Well he DID.”
“He couldn’t have done anything.”
“BULLSHIT.”
“What was he going to do? He’s not Annie Oakley, or the Lone Ranger or whoever the fuck. What was he supposed to do, shoot the fucking things off her?”
“If he has the gun, he should fucking use it.”
“If we hadn’t been arguing,” Jon said, his voice suddenly angry, “we wouldn’t have let her go out there, and then he wouldn’t have had to fucking use it.”
Craig’s face flushed red. He got real quiet as he asked, “Are you saying it’s my fucking fault she’s dead?”
Noelle suddenly spoke up, half sobbing. “It’s all our faults…we all weren’t paying attention…I should have never let her go out there…she wasn’t right, not after Will died…she didn’t know what she was doing…”
Craig started pacing back and forth again. Back and forth, back and forth.
“We should have rules,” Jon said.
“What?” Craig snapped, turning around. “What did you say?”
“Rules. We should have rules. For when we go outside.”
“Like what?”
“We should check on each other…”
“Never let each other out of our sight,” Noelle sobbed.
“Like the buddy system,” Jon agreed.
Craig looked at me. “I think since there’s only one gun, somebody should hold it who knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
I held the rifle tight. “No.”
Craig stepped closer. “No?”
Finally I got my voice back. “Do you even know how to shoot a gun?”
“Yes – ”
“What is this, then? What kind of gun?”
“It’s a rifle.”
“Yeah, no shit. What kind of a rifle?”
I just meant what caliber – it was a .22, any kid who owned one would have said that – but I could see he had no idea what I was talking about. Just a big city asshole thinking he was better than everybody else. I could also see he wanted to kill me for making him look stupid.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of gun it is, if
you’re not going to use it – ”
“It’s my gun,” I snapped. “You can eat my food, and you can drink my water, but this is my gun, not yours.”
Craig squared off across from me. I knew he wanted to run up and knock me over and take the rifle away, but there was still a part of him that was afraid of doing it. That maybe I had it in me to use the rifle on him.
“Okay, new rule: when we go out, Ben’s on patrol. He makes sure the rifle is ready to go at all times in case we need it. Good enough?” Jon asked.
Craig stared at me.
“I said, good enough?” Jon repeated.
Craig looked over at him as though he was coming out of a dream, then nodded once. “If he actually shoots it.”
“I will,” I said. “When I need to, I’ll shoot it.”
“But not when it could’ve helped Will or Violet,” Craig sneered.
I stared him straight in the eye. “The next time I need to kill something…or somebody…I promise you, I’ll do it.”
That shut him up.
25
We all stayed in the bunker for a couple of hours. When we ate, we ate in silence.
5 cans of spaghetti with meatballs. 39 cans of soup. 56 cans of vegetables. 29 cans of fruit. 18 cans of tuna fish. 142 liters of water.
As I watched the cans pile up on the floor I thought, At least there’s one less mouth to feed.
I know that’s a shitty thing to say, but see what you think when your only chance at survival gets whittled away to nothing by a bunch of strangers.
Technically, I don’t think Violet ever ate anything. She drank some water and that was about it. But she would have started eating sooner or later.
I’m sorry she died, especially the way she died. But if she was gonna go, better she go early instead of after eating up a lot of my food. Because I was planning to stick around.
That got me thinking about what Noelle said about Violet: she didn’t know what she was doing.
Actually, I think she knew exactly what she was doing. She just didn’t think it would be as bad as it was, that’s all. She probably thought it would be quick, a little pain, and then it would all be over.
Well, it wasn’t like that. Not by a long shot.
I think she went out there to die, and she knew that’s what she was doing. She wanted to kill herself, and instead of a razor blade or a gun or sleeping pills, she just used the bugs to do it. She committed suicide, plain and simple. Decided she was finished and just checked out.
Bottle Full Of Scorpions Page 6
