Eaters (13 page)

Barry didn’t respond. She knew that he could just be asleep, floating in some dreamy land where he was a rock star with swarms of girls fainting at his feet. But it was more likely that the virus had circulated through his blood stream and finally infected his brain, rendering him temporarily dead.

How much time did she have? She thought about Paul. He’d been the first person she’d seen turn from a living, breathing human being into a garbage and flesh eating abomination. One minute he was stumbling in the conference room door, looking like something the cat had dragged in and a few minutes later, he was stone cold dead. A few minutes after that—

She didn’t have much time.

There were three choices: She could run now, barreling into the night with nothing but the bloody clothes on her body; she could try to gather some survival supplies then run as soon as she heard him stir; or she could take her time and plan on beating his head in until it was the consistency of mashed potatoes if he rose up and hope that he didn’t manage to take a bite out of her first.

She decided on the second option. Tucking the lamp under her arm, she ran into the kitchen and grabbed a plastic grocery sack off the floor, then started looking around for anything that might be helpful if she found herself on the run for long or holed up somewhere for a while. She grabbed a bottle of water, a couple of beers, a pack of matches, and a box of crackers.

What about a weapon?

She still had the lamp base and the knife in her pocket, but she knew they would probably be useless against an assault by multiple Eaters. Only a gun was going to keep her alive.

The back room was mostly clear of smoke now, so she decided to search it for the guns. After rummaging through a few piles of trash, she found a cell phone on the floor and a dent in the wall above it where it had obviously hit when someone had thrown it. She turned it on and wasn’t surprised to find that it didn’t have a signal, but she threw it in her bag anyway.

A deep groan coming from the living room startled her. Clutching the lamp with white knuckles, she moved to investigate.

She was relieved to see that it was Barry instead of an intruder. He had reanimated and was now crawling on the carpet on his hands and knees, picking up crumbs from the crispy burgers.

His face and skin had already changed dramatically. Drool trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He seemed so intent on his quest to find every last charcoal speck on the beige carpet that he ignored her, for the moment at least.

Stage one…before he decides that a serving of human brains might be tastier.

She didn’t know how long that took. When Paul became infected and was at that point, he’d looked her over like a side of meat just before running out of the building. She liked to think that he’d had one last ember of himself left inside, preventing him from harming her out of compassion. But then again, it may have just been luck that he’d passed on having her for lunch. And actually, the fact that she was even still alive at all at this point was the sum of a lot of bizarre luck.

She watched Barry intently, trying to decide if she was ready to leave. She rubbed a hand over her cheek, half expecting to find peeling skin, but it was smooth and just sticky with flecks of Barry’s mother’s blood. Thankfully, she didn’t feel any fever or other symptoms of an illness coming on.
Crazy lucky so far…

Barry suddenly paused from working the carpet and let out a soft grunt. He looked up towards her with filmy eyes.

Her heart raced, and she took a step backwards. In that same instant, she noticed a peculiar shape on the couch where he had been sitting. It was the barrel of a gun—
her gun—
sticking up from between the cushions where he’d hidden it.

She took a slow step to the right, then another. Barry returned to foraging in the filthy carpet fibers. She arced around him and inched her way towards the couch, dodging pieces of trash, then quickly wove in and out of the debris, like a horse running barrels.

When she reached the couch, she flung the cushion over and found both her gun and Barry’s shotgun. Underneath them was a shimmering sea of shotgun shells and magazines.
Jackpot!

She set the lamp down and started scooping them into the grocery bag. She’d only gotten about half of them when a foul odor assaulted her nose. She tried to keep going, but had to stop and cover her mouth, gagging from the brutal smell, a nauseating vapor of decay.

Goosebumps covered her flesh as she craned her neck around.

Barry was right behind her.

His sudden transformation was even more remarkable up close. The gangrenous cloud around him was an aura of death and disease; his eyes were rimmed in raccoon-like purplish black circles, and the little piece of curled skin near his ear that she’d seen earlier had multiplied into dozens of white flakes peeling back to reveal the gray flesh underneath, like an old weathered picket fence. He grimaced, baring his peppered teeth and gritting them together like he was in pain, his hands balled into fists.

“Hey, Barry. Not feeling so good, are you?” Not taking her eyes off of him, she reached down and grabbed the lamp base.

He growled at her. It was a guttural sound, like a dog makes at a stranger.

Just let me leave. I don’t want to bash your head in.

She wasn’t completely cornered, but she had the couch behind her and figured that if she attempted a quick dart to his left, he might simply grab her arm as she tried to pass and take his first bite.

Without warning, he lunged towards her with his mouth open like a dark cave. There was no time to think of plan B or raise the lamp for a strike. No thought process was required as her knee instinctively came up in a quick defensive thrust and landed in his groin, a move that Mark had taught her.

He curled up and stumbled backwards from the impact, but he didn’t seem to feel any pain, as he rebounded and came straight back.

No time to grab a gun and shoot.

She raised the lamp above her head and swung it down, connecting with his skull. His head shook for a moment like a ringing bell, and she imagined his infected brain inside sloshing back and forth, like a bowl full of black jelly—something she really didn’t want to see sprayed all over her and the living room.

He came at her again with outstretched grasping claws and a desperate look of hunger. She swung again, this time from the side, smashing the lamp into the left side of his head. The blow scraped away his cheek, exposing a bloody jawbone, and made him totter for a second. He came forward again, groaning and snarling. He hissed like a snake and shook his head from side to side with spittle flying from his lips.

Just like with Mama Sting, she found herself swinging and smashing again and again, but she stopped short of the devastation that she had inflicted on the creature that had been his mother. Barry was someone she had known. Even if their acquaintance had been brief, and he was one peanut short of a nuthouse candidate, it felt wrong to go any further than needed to put him out of his misery.

Still, it took almost a dozen blows to topple him. When he fell, his head cracked into the edge of the coffee table, bounced off, then landed sideways on the floor. Dark blood seeped into the carpet, staining it a deep burgundy in a circle around his head. She thought it looked like some sort of anti-halo, a symbol of the unholy sickness within.

The assault would have killed any normal person, but she knew it wasn’t enough to permanently put him to rest. With a sigh, she grabbed her gun, aimed, looked away, and winced as she fired a few rounds into his head.

She watched his body for a few seconds to ensure that it remained still. She remembered his cocky attitude when he’d first been
gracious
enough to let her in. “Guess it’s not your house anymore, Barry.”

The sound of her voice seemed loud against the rat-a-tat-tat shots coming from the video game on the television. She stood there for a couple of minutes, feeling like she was a character in some bad video game. Just a few days ago, she’d been sitting at her desk at her job at the insurance agency, wearing a pretty powder blue suit and high heels. Now, she was standing in a stranger’s house with two corpses, wearing bloody fatigues that had belonged to her dead fiancé, and truly had no plan, no destination.

Where was she going to go? It was certain that there was no one at the office anymore. That afternoon when she’d gone out for lunch, and this had all begun, the rest of the employees had probably either fled or were now dead. Her apartment was seven to eight miles away. Not far if she had a car, but there was no guarantee that the roads would be clear enough for her to get there even if she did. If she couldn’t go home, where would she go? The answer was obvious, if not practical. She had family in Arizona, hundreds of miles away, but she knew that she had to find out if her father and her aunt there were okay. Since Mark was dead, what else could she do? She’d keep heading southwest, knowing that every step took her in that direction, and hope to eventually find a ride going that way.

With Barry dead, she had a little more time to prepare for the journey. Back in the kitchen, she rummaged around until she found a tote bag. Then, she traded the flimsy plastic grocery sack for it and tossed her supplies into it. The lamp, now a blood encrusted club that looked like some ancient relic, went into it along with some toilet paper, a can of chili, a can opener, and a spoon.

Further down the hallway, she found Barry’s room. It was a worse disaster than the rest of the house. Trash covered the floor six inches deep, and the walls were papered with layers of posters: pro wrestlers, bikini models, and crazed painted faces from a band called Insane Clown Posse. Ironically, there wasn’t a single image of Sting.

Something shiny and metallic caught her eye on the far side of the room. It was a Japanese throwing star. She had only heard of them and didn’t have a clue how to throw them, but she knew they could be lethal weapons. Reluctantly, she waded through the sea of rubbish to add it her supplies.

On the way back through, she saw a clock on the wall above the doorway. It was after five a.m.
Really?
That created an even greater sense of urgency. She had no idea if the Eaters slept, but she realized now that she would be more of a walking target in broad daylight. With that in mind, it seemed prudent to travel with the cover of darkness on her side.

A couple of minutes later when she peeked out the back patio door, the sky was still a purplish-black, and she couldn’t see anything past a mesh lawn chair tipped over on its side. Outdoors looked dark and uninviting. What was she thinking? How could she venture out there all by herself without a clue where she was going? She knew there had to be other shelters or houses with kind people who might take her in, but after the horrible experience at the church shelter, she really didn’t want to go to another place like that. And as for kindly strangers, it felt like she’d just played a life or death game of musical chairs and had been the odd woman out. No one who didn’t know her was going to let her into their home, and even if they did, the crisis might have strained their psyche, making them even more dangerous than Barry. She could imagine the spectrum of survivors out there—altruistic angels who wanted to rebuild a safe and peaceful society and anarchic demons that saw this apocalypse as a license to indulge their dark side without consequences. Everyone else probably fell somewhere in between.

Back in the living room, she looked around at the mess, including Barry’s dead body. For the very first time since the epidemic ended life as she knew it, she began to cry. She dropped the bag, wrapped her arms around herself, and let out a wail that came from the pit of her soul. She was hungry, tired, and scared for her life. But most of all, she was lonely. She missed Mark…and she missed her coworkers, her family, and her friends. Where were they all now? Were any of them still alive? She didn’t want to imagine them dead or changed into Eaters, roaming the streets in search of rotten meat or human flesh.

Her coworker, Lanny, lived the closest, but his house was east on Colfax. She’d been there once to deliver a client’s file to him, so he could work from home with his killer sinus infection last winter. It wasn’t an experience that she cared to repeat, because it wasn’t the best area of town. There were kitschy boutiques and tattoo parlors that made it more hip than it had been in the past, but the area crawled with hookers, gangs, and drug dealers. Now, it was probably a den of Eaters and living predators that were even more dangerous. Her chest heaved up and down with sobs at the realization that Lanny probably hadn’t ever made it back to his home anyway. He’d left the insurance office on foot for lunch that day just as she had. Right now, he was either in some sort of shelter like she had been for a few days, or what was left of him was splattered all over a sidewalk.

She allowed herself a few more minutes of self-pity then tried to recompose and think. As tempting as it was to stay put in Barry’s house, the walls and the roof provided a false sense of security, because the windows were vulnerable. And holing up with two disease-laden bodies didn’t seem like a good idea. Even if she couldn’t catch the virus from them, it wouldn’t be good to stay here with the stench of their decaying bodies.

There was a voice again in her head, deep and resonant, like Mark’s.
Stop crying and standing around doing nothing. You’re just stalling…you’ve got to get going.