Eaters (16 page)

She bolted upright and inched backwards, slamming her head into the base of the fountain. “Stop!”

“Ooh! She speaks. She lives.” He kept the gun trained on her, the muzzle just inches from her face. “What’s a pretty gal like you doing out here? Not exactly the best place to do your laundry and take a nap.”

Her heart pounded with her efforts to snap back into reality and study her sarcastic inquisitor. He wore a leather motorcycle jacket and jeans, and had a tattered canvas backpack over his back. He looked a few years older than her and was not altogether unhandsome in a rough sort of way. His Harley was parked a few feet behind him. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t woken when it approached, and she had no idea if he was friend or foe.

“I wasn’t doing laundry…” She didn’t want to tell him that she’d felt sick and passed out. He might decide to do her a favor and save her the misery of turning into an Eater if he thought she was sick. “I was just exhausted. I must have dozed off.”

“Out here in the open? You’re lucky you didn’t wake up to find a Dead Dog gnawing off your leg.”

“Dead Dog?”

“Zombie. Walking Dead. Whatever the hell you want to call them.”

“Eaters.”

He shrugged. “I guess that’ll do. Devil’s Minions might be more accurate. Trash Compacters. How about Recyclers?” He took a step backwards and cocked his head to the right. “You infected? You got blood all over you.”

“The blood’s not mine.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

She figured that she looked sick, even if she wasn’t. Any benefit of the brief shower was surely gone. Dried blood splatters covered her from head to toe, mottling her skin and making her look like a walking germ fest. Her hair was a rats’ nest of tangles, and her fingernails were crusty black, probably from holding the lamp base when it had been slick with Barry’s mother’s blood. “I’d ask you if I look infected, but I doubt I’d win any sort of beauty contest right now.”

She watched him study her. There were fine crinkles around his eyes, and she guessed he was in his early thirties. He held the gun in his left hand, and on that forearm there was a tattoo of a skull on top of an open book. There was a sharp edge to him, but it was tempered by weariness. She figured the slight tremor in his hand could be from stress or too many caffeine-filled nights on watch duty or fighting for his life.

“I guess you might be alright. Dead Dogs usually don’t take the time to wash their clothes. They’d be too busy looking for the next brain buffet.”

She glanced back at the shirt floating in the water, a ghostly thing, like a half a man who’d lost his will to live, then all of his substance. She choked off the memory of Mark and turned to look at the motorcycle man again.

“What about you? Are you infected? The only thing that would scare me more than an Eater, is a man about to turn into one, holding a gun.”

He rubbed his hand across his mouth then over his cheek. “Not last time I checked.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“Honestly? Your pretty mop of blonde hair caught my eye, but I figured you were dead. Then I saw your bag and wondered what was in it. I’m heading for the mountains and looking for supplies in case I don’t make it to my cabin tonight. I’ve been trying to stay out of the buildings. It’s just too easy to get cornered in them.”

“So, you were going to steal from me?”

“Look,” he said, lowering the gun and throwing the other hand up into the air, “right now, old rules don’t apply. Finders-keepers is the lay of the law. Besides, I thought you were dead.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said folding her arms over her chest, realizing that she was embarrassed about the oversized t-shirt and the filth encrusted all over her.

“What are you doing out here by yourself?”

She told him that she’d been on the run since she had to leave the church shelter and her temporary lodging with Barry had gone sour. “Now I’m just…I don’t know…” She couldn’t say that she was headed home, or to find her family. She really didn’t know
what
she was doing beyond just surviving at this point.

She was about to ask him some questions when a loud rumbling noise sounded from behind a hill up the street. The long narrow barrel of a massive gun appeared, followed by a huge tank.

He quickly lowered his gun to the ground and raised his hands in the air. “Put your hands up.”

“Why?” she asked, complying nonetheless.

“Because if you don’t, they might shoot. There doesn’t seem to be much left of the law around here, but they’ve still got some patrols doing sweeps, knocking out any infected they see.”

“We’re not infected.”

“They don’t know that. Smile and wave to them. They need to see that we’ve got some brains left and haven’t gone over to the dark side.”

They stood there like grinning idiots as the tank rolled up within fifteen yards, swiveled its gun towards them and paused. Cheryl felt her teeth clenching together.
Please don’t shoot.

The tank sat there like some gargantuan alien creature, deciding their fate. After a few seconds, it pointed its gun forward again and continued up the street.

They lowered their hands.

Cheryl knew that in some alternate universe, Mark would be alive and helping out the National Guard. He could have been in that tank and would have jumped out and rescued her. She wondered if the soldiers who had been in it had any sense of empathy for those they had shot, or for any of the survivors that they encountered and abandoned while doing their duty.

“Why didn’t they stop and try to help us?”

“Are you kidding? Over ninety percent of the country’s population was wiped out,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. More than half were infected and died, and the other half were killed by the infected. A nuclear bomb couldn’t have done that kind of damage so quickly.”

“Ninety percent?” She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Jesus!”

“It’s more than anyone was prepared to deal with, and they certainly weren’t prepared to handle this sort of epidemic. Now, what’s left of the government doesn’t have the resources to re-establish control, and they trust no one. You’re considered infected until proven otherwise. They’re doing the only thing they can, and that’s try to get rid of as many infected as possible.”

She realized that made sense, no matter how much she wished she could have crawled into that tank and gone someplace safe. She imagined herself running after it and clinging to its top, begging them to take her with them, then the soldiers flicking her off like a tick and blasting her to smithereens.

“Whose blood is all over you?”

Cheryl had to think for a second. She’d changed clothes since falling in some stranger’s blood when the panic started a few days ago. “Some guy named Barry…and his mother.”

“You took them out?”

“I had to. They were infected…they attacked me.”

“That’s a lot of blood. How do you—”

Cheryl tuned him out and held a hand up over her eyes, shading them from the bright sunlight. At the top of the hill from which the tank had come, there was a strange alignment of black bowling balls wavering in the mirage of heat waves radiating from the pavement. They grew larger, misshapen, and finally emerged as tens upon tens of people, loping towards them at a slow, but steady pace.
Not people,
she realized.
Eaters
.

All the blood drained from her head down to her feet, rendering her vocal chords inoperable. Her hand rose and pointed over the motorcycle man’s shoulder. He turned to look.

“Shit. Time to go.”

She stood there watching, her mouth hanging open, still unable to speak.

He hopped onto his bike then turned around and pulled a second helmet off the back and held it out to her. “You coming or what?”

The Eaters were a block and a half away now. She could hear their moans, and make out the taller adults and the smattering of children among them. She could tell that some of them were missing limbs or parts of their faces, and all of them looked like they had been doused in vats of blood. It was a traveling horror show, a carnival of the undead.

Mark’s breathy voice whispered in her ear.
Hold it together, Cheryl.

The stranger turned the key, pressed a button, and his motorcycle rumbled to life. “Last chance, sweetheart.”

Her arm felt like it was made of ripples of water when she reached for her gun and her bag. It seemed detached, like it was someone else’s arm in a dream, moving in slow motion. She tried to snap herself out of her daze as she threw the bag over her shoulder, then swung a leg over the back of the motorcycle, put the helmet on her head, and her arms around the stranger’s waist.

He revved the engine and was about to take off when she said, “Wait!”

“What?” he yelled.

They were so close now, she could smell them. It was the stench of rotting flesh, more fetid than the spoiling meat in the sandwich shop where she’d been cloistered for a couple of days. She could see their white dead eyes. Even worse than that, some of them didn’t even
have
eyes—they had two empty black holes in their rotting faces like their orbs had been plucked out by ravens.

With her heart beating so hard that if felt like it was smacking against her ribs, she hopped off the motorcycle, ran back to the fountain, scooped the shirt out of the water, threw it on, and ran back. She was barely on when he took off, the wheels screeching over the bricks.

The volume of the moans behind them seemed to increase as they roared through the plaza. It was a discordant unified wailing, like the sound of a herd of dying animals. She likened it to the anguished laments of addicts deprived of their precious drug. The infection made rotten things and flesh such a necessity for them; it was like they thought they were dying without it. It was still a mystery to her why they didn’t know they were dead, and why they wouldn’t stay dead without catastrophic brain trauma.

They went over a speed bump in a path that merged the pedestrian area to the road, and she was literally jolted back to the reality that she was riding on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle. This was only the second time that she’d ever been on one. The first was when a buddy of Mark’s had taken her for a spin. He did a wheelie on the highway with her on the back that had nearly turned her hair white. She’d vowed to never get on one again. But of course, circumstances dictated life.
Never say never…

“My name’s Aidan, by the way.”

“Cheryl,” she yelled back over his shoulder. “Where are we going?”

“I got a place up near Genesee. I figure if I can make it up there, it’s a good place to retreat for a while. There’s a lot of infected in the city. The further we get away, hopefully the safer it will be.”

She caught most of what he said, but it was hard to hear over the growl of the engine and the wind whipping past the helmet that covered her ears. She held on tightly to his waist, feeling odd about riding with this stranger, but thankful that he’d taken her with him, instead of just leaving her there.

About five minutes down the road, he pulled into a gas station.

“I need gas,” he said after parking near a pump. “I’m not sure we have enough to make it all the way up.”

She looked around as he swiped a credit card into the machine. The place was eerily vacant, but at least didn’t have any dead patrons littering the lot.

While he pumped gas into his tank, she gave him a quick recap of how she’d gotten into her solitary plight. Then he reciprocated.

“I was at work when this all started, hammering cross beams near the roof of a house. This mob came up the street. They were like a pack of wild animals. They came straight for us, surrounded the house, and started attacking. I saw half my buddies, the ones on the ground, get their heads and limbs ripped off. Me, Ricky, and Antonio were up high out of their reach. We started throwing things at them. You could hit one with a hammer, dead on, and it wouldn’t even flinch. A nail gun was pretty useless too, unless you hit them in the head. I’ve never seen anything so gruesome in all my life. It was like a battlefield…blood everywhere.”

“How did you escape?”

“I have to thank some strangers for that. There were some vigilantes that drove by, guys with semi-automatic rifles, hanging out the windows of a low-rider. They looked like gang members, just cruising around and shooting for sport. They killed more than a dozen of those monsters that were clawing at the beams, trying to get to us, then they rode off, hootin’ and hollerin’ with their guns up in the air like they’d just scored a big one for the team.”

“Wow,” she said. “What’d you do after that?”

“Well, we didn’t know what the hell was going on. We just kind of hung out on the roof for a while with all this carnage on the ground below us. Obviously, we didn’t have a television. There was a radio on the ground, but it had been destroyed. So, we weren’t able to hear any news reports to find out if this was just an isolated thing or if there could be more coming. We expected police to come, or a fire truck…something. But there was nobody. The street was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a new neighborhood, so there wasn’t any normal traffic. Finally, after the road stayed clear for a few more minutes, Ricky said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here’. So, we jumped down and took off. A few blocks away, I came across some guy that had crashed his car into a light pole. He was definitely dead, so there was nothing I could do to help. I took the rifle from the passenger seat then drove straight to—”