Apex Book Company

First appeared in The Undead: Flesh Feast

Permuted Press specializes in post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction.

Visit them at http://www.permutedpress.com

Buy The Undead: Flesh Feast from the Apex aStore (Amazon).

Yesterday in the park, I fed the zombies, tossing bits of cadaver onto the cold cement as they fought each other like pigeons for the morsels. They’re not so different from pigeons when you think about it, driven as they are by a primal need to feed, to sustain.

The pigeons, by the way, are all gone. Nor have I seen a four-legged creature in some time. Not even a dead one. They’re all just… gone.

Anyway, yesterday, one of them creatures that was feeding–a small girl of about seven or eight, still in pigtails–ate right from my hand, licked the blood off my fingers and moaned for more. That was a first for me, and I thought it was a good sign. I kept urging her to bite, saying, “Come on, just a nip; you can do it, Precious.” But she didn’t. Frustrated, I drove my hand into her top teeth and drew blood from the veins on the back of my hand. But nothing happened; no sickness overcame me, nor did it get her chewing on my goods. I held my hand out longer and longer until she licked it clean much as my mongrel used to do to my dishes after I’d eaten, but she still wouldn’t bite. And just like a dog, she sniffed around my chest and legs, looking for meat I might have hidden. But I had no more to feed her.

Clean meat is scarce; uninfected corpses have been hard to come by lately. I know there’s one under a car near the bookstore. The zombies have been trying to get him for a couple days now, but he’s wedged under there good, his head all sunken and his belly distended. Died from starvation, the poor guy. Hell of a way to go, right? Perhaps tomorrow I’ll dig him out and cut him up…if I can get him back to my “home” before the zombies tear him limb from limb. The zombies. The Zees as I call ‘em now…just to break up the boredom.

Maybe I could tie the chunks of meat to my body and see if that would work, see if they’d take me in the process.

Where was I…

The little girl. Yeah, the little girl, eyeball dangling on her cheek like a cat toy. She finally gave up and went foraging. But the others, they stood around me just waiting, eyeballing me hard, as if I could pull fresh meat from the air and fill their bellies.

“Don’t you look at me like that,” I yelled. “I got the freshest meat this side of hell. Look!” I held up my hand so they could see the bite mark from the girl’s teeth. “Look at it. Smell it. It ain’t bad. Taste it! For Christ’s sake, just try it!”

But they didn’t listen, just stood there swaying, looking up into the sky, maybe waiting for it to rain. Oh they can hear, don’t get me wrong, they got ears like boom mics, but if it ain’t alive–aside from me anyway–they don’t give a shit. I looked at my hand, knuckles pruned from the little girl’s tongue, and I started to cry.

Tears make the time go by these days.

When the sun went down I made my way over to the 7-11 for some fine dining. All around me, the Zees shuffled about, moaning and groaning like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir played at 33 rpm. I used to complain about the noise from my neighbor’s stereo, that Satan music, big metal or angry metal or whatever they call it, but what I wouldn’t give to hear it now, to hear something different than these things bellyaching all damn day and night.

The 7-11’s power has been out since I got here, and half of the store is burned to the ground. The canned food aisle made it through pretty much untouched, though. I grabbed a can of Chef Boyardee and opened it with the can opener I keep in my pocket. Room temperature, but God, food is food, right?

I cried while I ate, that much I remember, sitting there, tears rolling down my face, a Zee staring at its reflection in one of the cooler-door windows. I mixed my tears with the imitation raviolis and swallowed it all down.

When I was done, I tossed the can at the Zee to see what reaction I could get. Damn thing didn’t move, didn’t even notice a can just bounce off its head.

The gun in my pocket called out to me again, like it did every day. Like Romeo to Juliet, in a metaphorical sense, you know. It begged to be used.

But I can’t do it. If I take that route…I’m dead. I mean really dead. Gone. Nothing. I don’t want to be dead…I want to be undead. I want to feel something, even if it’s just aching hunger pangs and a yearning for brains. I don’t want to stop feeling.

Ain’t that what life really is? Feeling?

And so I sat and cried some more–ticktock, ticktock–and eventually I just fell asleep on a candy rack covered in melted chocolate bars.

When I awoke this morning in the 7-11, a group of Zees was looking down on me, their drool landing on my chest and soaking through to my skin. How best to describe the odor of Zee drool? You ever–whoever you are, who finds this dog-earned notebook one day–you ever open a trashcan that a baby’s diaper has been festering in for a couple days, all out in the sun and stuff? Now cover that diaper in fresh puke from the town drunk…okay, you get the idea. It’s like that. Better than any alarm clock when it comes to getting you out of bed, that’s for sure.

“Morning, Sunshines,” I said. This was met with a witty retort, or what I guess would be a witty retort if I could speak zombie. To me it sounded like one of them didgeridoo things from Australia.

Before all the radios and TVs died, they said the plague was a global problem–what’d they call it, a pandemic?–but I bet some bush people in the Outback survived. Well, maybe. Maybe not. It’s been a while. And it means shit anyway because where the hell would I get a plane or ship to get there? It’s been…what…six months now? And I ain’t seen a living soul. I’ve driven, biked, walked from Dallas to San Diego, and bupkis.

I rolled off the Hershey mattress and looked outside, saw it was another beautiful day for being the most unwanted man in existence.

Getting over to the bookstore was a huge pain in the ass, what with the cars all flipped about and the Zees all following me around waiting to be fed, tripping me up like cats running between my legs. Like I got a chef’s hat on or something. They know I can get the food.

They can learn, the bastards.

Once I’m gone, I want to keep on learning as well.

I want to be a part of something.

There was a time maybe I didn’t, when I wanted nothing but peace and quiet, happy to hole up in the TV room downstairs. Got to the point most people said they didn’t want me around anyway if I was going to be like that–which reminds me of the time Brandy asked me what “ostrich sized” meant–and I think at first I was sort of happy about the prospect of a Zee plague. But now…

As I walked, I started thinking on that whole situation, remembering what it was like in the school basement. Boy, that was dumb hiding down there, with no real way out and nothing to eat but big cans of unsalted corn and beans meant for the school cafeteria.

Someone, one of the town folk I’d never seen before, had a radio, and we’d been listening to static that morning, seeing as how the airwaves had been dead for over a week. The Zees were scratching at the door, shaking it, making it rumble in the jamb. They’d been doing it for longer than the airwaves had been dead, so we’d kind of gotten used to it. Ain’t that pathetic? The radio, however, was pissing me off something fierce.

“Can’t you turn that shit off?” I said. “Ain’t no one gonna broadcast nothing.”

“Some of us are still optimistic,” the man with the radio said. “You should try having some hope.”

“And you should go chat with what’s on the other side of that door. Give all of us some more room to move. Take that damn radio with you.”

“You really are a jerk, mister, you know that?”

“I know lots, like you’re heating up my nerves. Them things out there want you, they better hope they get in before I beat you dead with that radio first.”

I was thinking about taking a swing at this guy when the door opened. Don’t ask me how…must have been all that yanking and pushing and pulling for two weeks straight: the damn thing just gave. Them creatures were piled so high on the other side they literally spilled into the room, grabbing at the nearest piece of flesh they could see. The screaming was deafening as everybody ran around all helter-skelter, taken by surprise, swinging pots and pans and yardsticks. I punched, I kicked, I shoved hard, the blood in my ears cutting out the sound of people being eaten alive all around me.

In the confusion, the ground came up to me right quick, Zee feet stepping on me as they went after their quarry, and so I called it quits and lay there waiting for my turn. Ticktock, ticktock.

Want to know the crazy part? I fell asleep. Yup, right there in the middle of all that carnage, waiting for my turn, I fell asleep. I’d heard of guys doing that in the war, some kind of defense mechanism of sorts. What’s crazier, of course, is that I woke up again.

Untouched.

When I got up, some of my former compatriots were shuffling around, having joined the enemy so to speak. All around me, the Zees paced back and forth, ambling around with blood on their lips, flesh stuck in their teeth. Thing is, the basement door had shut again and some bodies were in front of it, acting as a big doorstop. The Zees were scratching on it, from the inside now, just like dogs. Yeah, like dogs, remember? I got up real slow, waiting for them to notice me, waiting for the inevitable to happen, not really sure why I was still alive anyhow. Not caring about much neither.

“Hey,” I said to the room, “you missed me. Come on, get it over with.” I opened my arms in a hugging gesture.

They looked at me, looked back at the door, went on pacing.

They didn’t want me.

Shit, I thought, now ain’t that just a bit off kilter. Why didn’t they want me? Didn’t make no sense, you know? They should have been all over me, pulling my meat from my bones like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. But they couldn’t care less.

What they really wanted, I learned after some time–time spent staring straight ahead, fighting to rationalize my position in all of this–what they really wanted was for me to open the damn door. Because when I finally pushed through them, grabbed a bulk size can of corn off one of the shelves (most of the shelves were tipped over, the cans had all ruptured when the others used them as weapons), kicked the bodies out of the way, and opened the door, they immediately made for the hallway beyond it, and eventually, the door to outside.