Fallocaust (The Fallocaust Series) (68 page)

“Probably,” I said instead. I wondered where their grave sites were, I wouldn’t mind adding Mrs. Massey’s skull to my collection. She can watch the detestable Reaver fuck her son.

That reminded me, I had wanted to add Perish’s... I think I’d wait for it to rot then dig it up. Hopefully Killian wouldn’t notice, or if he did I’d say it was someone else. Not sure, he was my trophy though. I didn’t get to eat the fucker’s brain, but I could keep his skull.

“Hey... why do you want Perish’s body anyways?” I asked, I took one last glance at his quiet, empty house before we walked down the last stretch of road. “Burying it
is
a waste of meat.” I hated siding with Leo but he was right. We had gone through severe meat shortages during the winter months. It was nothing to take lightly. We lost fifty of our residents once to a bad combination of shortages and disease. An adult male could feed the entire block for a day if you were on starvation rations.

It was life and death at times. Burying intact bodies had died out two hundred years ago unless they were diseased. Usually we would arrange a gathering of friends and relatives and hold a ceremony inside the town hall. After that two things would happen. Either the family and friends would have a feast for the block and the person was eaten. If it was a more sullen event like a kid dying or something their meat would be butchered and given to the family. Though that was only in times of plenty. If there was a shortage they just got sent to the Slaught House and added to the rest.

Killian was silent, he was staring at the dark pavement as we made our way home. His hair was light and silvery in the darkness, and his white skin seemed to glow under the faint moonlight. What was he thinking? Thinking up a lie? I wasn’t sure, but I knew not to enquire. I was learning him.

We were almost home when Killian finally answered. “Would you let them eat me?”

My first reaction was anger at the thought of anyone eating Killian, and I think that was his point. The problem of course was that Killian wasn’t Perish’s boyfriend. I pointed that out with a bit of ice on my voice.

“But you protect me, right? I was his protection, Reaver. I felt responsible for him, no matter how crazy he was.”
Which is why you killed him. You don’t leave your pet to starve if you can’t take it with you, you shoot it so it doesn’t suffer.

“Yeah.” That was the best response my mind would let me give him.

We got home and headed for bed. I kind of wanted to take him again, but talking about his parents and Perish had pushed that from my mind. I didn’t care, but he would.

The cushions stayed on the couch though, obviously I would have no need for them. We changed for bed and spooned.

Chapter 29

Reaver

                  It was a week, a fucking week before Greyson and Leo finally took off. A week of the both of them coming and going from Aras.

When I needed Greyson a few days previous to approve a new sentry’s apprentice hours Redmond had said they were in the bunker outside of town. That bunker had our personal supplies in it, and more importantly Leo’s science stuff. I gathered that they were probably dissecting and cutting apart Perish’s body. Just to see how he ticked, or maybe Silas had given him smart implants or something. Or perhaps just to see why he was retarded, I didn’t know. I kept my speculations from Killian, and tried to distract him whenever he brought up Leo and Greyson’s delay.

Sex was a good distraction, and we had been having a lot of it. I had lost count but there hadn’t been a day all week that we hadn’t done it at least once. Just three days ago we had gone four times that day. Killian was walking a little funny though, so I had reluctantly decided to give it a bit of a rest. My mouth still freely travelled though, and had found many new parts I had taken a liking to licking.

We had both gone back to work too. I would be on my third shift since we had come back from Donnely. It was a nice break from the basement, and from Killian. Though after a few hours I was missing him. He usually came and visited if he couldn’t sleep. He was working with Doc at the clinic, and would be taking up extra hours since Doc was leaving with Leo and Greyson. The doctor was going to be helping the mayors in the lab, and the others they were taking were going to be sentries or guard. Reno’s cousins (Carson’s kids) Carson Jr and Gini were the guards and my fellow sentries Owen and Donny were going for lookouts. I had no desire to be a part of that team. I would be content never going to Donnely ever again, even if it was good scavenging.

So now I was officially in charge, I was in all respects the Mayor of Aras. Reaver, Scourge of the Greywastes, Demon of Indifference and the Raven; and what was I doing right now?

I wiped the sweat off of my brow and pushed my hair out of my eyes. He was still partially frozen, but what had started to unthaw was smelling already. Killian had wanted to carry him to his little cemetery but I offered my services.

Which looking back was very smart. Killian’s graveyard was hidden behind piles and piles of shit .Small mountains of it that towered over your head, leaving all underneath in permanent shade.

The area he had led me to was set way back behind both of our houses, off to the north west. All of the refuse that had been cleared out of the occupied parts of Aras had been put here. Broken medians, rusted vehicles, gravel, store signs, and lots of broken pavement. It was a haven for the stray cats, radrats and the scavers but useless to anyone in Aras.

I hadn’t even bothered exploring a lot of this place. I liked houses or shops, what was the fun climbing over piles of shit? There was rusted wire everywhere, camouflaging its self in the dregs or protruding out like brown twisted bones just waiting to cut your leg or arm and infect you with tetanus, or something equally bad.

Well, I wouldn’t get cut and I wouldn’t fall, even with Perish on my shoulder. The boy wouldn’t have made it over the first tipped over car. At least we had those vaccinations now. Killian hadn’t had the heart to clean out his satchel bag yet besides the fruit, he was carrying a new one right now. But I knew once he remembered he had them he would stab me with one. I was planning on selling the rest, I’d give the mayors and Reno a good discount.

I hoisted the dead scientist and got a better grip on him. I had him slung over my shoulder, his rotting stump of a neck only a foot from my nose. He had been drained, his blood was gone but everything else felt intact. I could smell every rotting organ. The intestines always smelled the worst, next was the liver. Too rotten for eating unfortunately, even if he had been on ice.

I jumped from a pile of gravel and wire, over to a slab of pavement on a sharp angle. Killian was already half way up it. He was carrying the blue bag with his head. The red blood stain was now a dull brown. I saw a maggot wiggle out but I didn’t say anything to Killian. If he knew the very bag he was carrying was chock full of them he would flip the fuck out.

“How the fuck did you carry your  mom and dad up here?” I said, I grabbed onto a piece of pipe and used it to hoist myself up to the top of the concrete slab. I looked behind me and saw a steady trail of what looked like rice leading all the way up to me. I would ask if there was a different way to get back. Or stay long enough so the little worms baked in the sun and died. Maybe he wouldn’t notice them then.

“They were just bones and their heads,” Killian said quietly, he was waiting for me on top of a gas station sign wedged between two slabs of concrete. “They fit into a tote all together, well... I got more of my mom back then my dad. Not what was important though. I had wanted to find their hands. Mrs. Kirkson had made a stew out of them. She was nice enough to... to give me them after.”

I leaned up against a bent street lamp and took a second to catch my breath. I gave him a sideways glance. “What, so you went from house to house to get their bones back?”
Killian nodded. “I filled up a bucket... most of them were really nice about it. I had to dig through some trash cans though.”

I believe the Massey flesh I got was from the ribs or the thighs, it was too far back to remember. If I had received bones though, I would have tossed them to the deacons or the cats... like a normal person.

“Greyson and Leo both made barbeque, you know... the usual. My dad loved barbeque, so he would have liked that.”

Fuck, this kid was something else.

I nodded. “That’s... that’s nice.”
“Jess’s mom had made a pie out of my mother’s meat, she always liked pie.”
“Oh yeah...”
“What did you make?”

Oh jeez... I should have known this was going to lead somewhere.

I thought back, trying to remember. “I usually just fry up the arian meat with some onions or potato, nothing fancy like pie or anything,” I said. Something occurred to me though, I voiced it before I could stop myself. “Ordinary, boorish food, unlike fancy pies or barbeque. Looks like I gave your mother another reason to hate me.”

I cracked a smile when he laughed at that. It was always one of two things, either he thought I was hilarious or he burst into tears.

“Why... did you want to know these things?” I asked, we started walking down the debris pile now. I could see the sliver of a small clearing behind a boarded up house. It was covered in yellow grass, and looked relatively flat. Probably what was once a backyard.

“To add to the list,” the boy shrugged. “I asked everyone what they had done with Mom and Dad, and wrote them down. I was missing some though but at least I can write yours down now.”

What a weird thing for this kid to want to know. Well, who am I to judge his mental problems. “Do you write things often?” I asked. Thinking back I had watched him write in a spiral bound book when I had followed him.

Killian nodded, he stepped onto bare ground and waited for me. Behind him was the grey, mildew streaked house I had noticed on the decent. The roof was intact but there light shining through the living room, I assumed that was our path to the cemetery.

“I kept track of money, and what was happening to my parents when they got sick, so Doc could get as much information as possible,” Killian said, when I approached him he walked through the cracked door frame and called back to me. “I also kept track of which cats died, and I named them. I kept track of the mercenaries and travellers that died on the way to Aras, and also who died in Aras and how they died.”
I stopped, and stared at him as he walked through the living room. The ceiling was collapsed, with wires and insulation hanging down to the floor.“Why in jesus fuck would you do that? You have your own little death book.”

“No one else does it, so I decided to do it,” he said simply. Well if all else fails he could get a job as a mercer doing the census. They kept track of worthless shit like deaths.

The light I had seen had been coming from the living room belonged to the gap in the north wall. I was a bit curious as to what I could see through the opening. Grey bricks stacked one on top of the other, four or five of them in the large half acre back yard. Completely enclosed by the ruins of the neighbouring houses. It was very private, I couldn’t hear anything but the flies buzzing.

I followed Killian as he walked through the hole in the wall, and in doing so I got a closer look at the grey stacks. When I saw the black marker on them I knew what they were. Each one was a grave marker.

Jeffrey Massey, was written very neatly on the first one I spotted. 192 to 229 was underneath it, and ‘Dad’ at the very bottom. Right beside it was another one, with Kristin Massey. Then two smaller ones, the first one reading Moggy a cat, and the second Beanie the kitten.

Killian was walking towards the farthest one, a few feet away from Beanie the kitten, it didn’t have writing on the brick marker like the others. As I carried Perish closer to it I noticed the hole had already been dug.

“You were here recently?” I asked, I jumped into the hole and placed the rotting scientist down. I took the bag from Killian and put it where his head should have been. I brushed my shoulder as I leapt out. No maggots from what I could feel.

I gave my surroundings a glance. I wish Killian hadn’t turned this place into a cemetery, it was a very secluded area. It reminded me of Greyson and Leo’s backyard and of the place where we had dumped the loader bucket for bathing. There were probably at least a hundred similar backyards in the suburbs. The houses had been built so close together that when they all collapsed the back yard would be locked in by the ruins. You could have three acres of smooth, flat ground and never know it. I bet there were lots of places in this area of Aras that had never been properly explored. All we got for a visual was what we could see from the wall and usually the bigger buildings or the piles blocked everything.

“I was here the day before yesterday, when you were working,” Killian said, his hands were stuffed into his pockets and he was starting to slink down a bit. I looked around for a shovel, hoping to get this over with. I spotted one up against what used to be a fence and grabbed it.

“No, I gotta do it,” Killian said taking the shovel from me. “You’re suppose to bury your own.”

“Who the hell said that?” I asked. Pre-Fallocaust people had some retarded traditions. We should have just eaten him. Why give food to the maggots when it could be ours?

“In a book I read.” He leaned against the shovel and gazed down at the sheet wrapped Perish Dekker. Smelly, covered in maggots, grey and green with rot. His neurotic, rapid voice never to be heard in person again. No more weird hand rubbing, no more
‘okay?’ ‘okay?
’. The greywastes had surely lost a hero.

He would be buried with Nero’s cum still inside of his ass, with the tares inside of him, never healing. Did he still have a look of terror on his face? Would it be recognisable under the rotting chunks of flesh. His eyes would be wrinkly pits in his head, shrivelled and dark like dried prunes. His tongue would be black, and infested with maggots. Climbing in his nose and eyes. Those pink full lips that so eagerly pressed up against my boyfriends would be peeling black leaches. Well now I wanted to see his head.