Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan (13 page)

Even at ten, I knew he should have been dead.

Immediately I thought of Andrew, the things he said and the uncomfortable way he looked at my friend.

“Are you okay?”
Blueeyes
lowered me to the ground. I felt his hand on my face, running along my cheek, over my head, down my neck and across my arms. “Are you hurt?” 

He was worried. I could feel it in his fingers, hear it in his voice. He spun me around and slid his hand down my back. He was nervous. I didn’t think he could be nervous.

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

In that moment it didn’t matter why he wasn’t dead. I didn’t care. 

He just wasn’t.

We were in that tunnel for most of the day, shuffling through the darkness, following the sounds of biter feet and
Andrew’s
voice. I stayed behind
Blueeyes,
one hand holding his, the other gripping
Pointycrunch.
The tunnel finally opened into a room.

The area was dimly lit, enough to see a few feet in front of us and little else. The floor was tiled, littered with debris, and stained an ugly yellow that had once been white. We followed
Andrew
through a door at the opposite end and into a hallway with smaller rooms lining the sides. Whatever this place was, it was old. Everything was warped and cracking. The floor was uneven, sometimes unfinished. One moment we were walking on tile and the next, dirt. There were
biters
everywhere, grimacing as they nursed open wounds, huddled into shadowy corners. When we passed, they looked up, eyes narrowed, staring back in anger. They didn’t want us there. That much was obvious. In a room near the end of the hall, shivering in the arms of a female
biter,
was the little girl who’d waved at me. She was drenched in blood, painted red, tears pouring from her eyes as she sobbed into the chest of her companion. Her arm was gone, just gone. A bloody stub remained, jagged bits of cracked bone emerging from the messy mound of flesh like a broken twig. I stopped walking. I didn’t move, couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away. Through tear-soaked eyes she glanced in my direction, her body shaking, lips quivering. 

For some reason I waved. 

Blueeyes
grabbed me by the arm and jerked me forward. “Megan, come on.”

He moved me in front of him, hand on my shoulder, keeping me close. “Who were they?”

Andrew’s
voice was steady, frustrated. “
Breathers
from the north. They’ve been attacking us for years, following us…won’t let up.” He stopped, paused, lowered his head and sighed. “I have a…
history
…with one of them.”

Blueeyes’
tone was similar. “Travis.”

Bloodboots?

Andrew
seemed surprised. “Yes…how did—”

“Prick has
history
with a lot of people. Still…seems like a long time to hold a grudge.”

Andrew
turned away. “Not for him.”

We entered a room at the end of the hallway and
Andrew
locked the door behind us. It was cleaner than anything we’d seen to that point. It seemed out of place. Wherever we were, it didn’t belong there. The countertops were white, freshly wiped, and covered with carefully placed glass tubes and needles in containers built to hold glass tubes and needles. On the wall to the left there were stacks of round containers, capped and labeled with words I didn’t recognize. Everything was organized. Everything was neat. I’d never seen anything so neat.

Andrew
moved to the center of the room. He leaned against a table covered in stacks of paper and motioned toward a door at the rear of the room. “You can’t stay here, not after that. We are civilized, but only within reason.” His eyes moved to me and settled, unblinking. “They’re riled up. They’re hurt and hungry. They’re angry and they’ll smell her. They’re already smelling her. I’m already smelling her. It’s too much to ask of them.” His hand went to his neck and rubbed. He licked his lips. “I-I can’t—I can’t be held responsible.”

Blueeyes
squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt, shoving me toward the door. 

Andrew
stepped away from the table and into our path, keeping his distance, tying his best to avoid eye contact with me. His attention moved to
Blueeyes.
“Before you go…I need to know.”

Outside the room I heard the whispers. 

Blueeyes
heard them, too. “Need to know what?”

“I need to know what you are. I need to know
how
you are…what you are.” His tone changed drastically, soft, almost pleading. His hands folded in front of him, palms mashed together, fingers pointed upward. I’d seen the gesture before. I woke up one night to Mother at my side making the very same gesture, whispering to herself. When I asked her what she was doing she placed her hand on my head and smiled softly. 

Go back to sleep, princess.
I loved my mother’s voice, her mouth, and her dimples. 

I missed her dimples.

When
Blueeyes
didn’t respond, he continued. “I wasn’t always this…none of us were. You know it as well as I. I was a scientist, a doctor. I had a family, a wife…” For the briefest of moments his eyes drifted to me. “…children.” 

He huffed and looked away. “I spent years searching for a cure. I went where they told me and did what they asked. I did everything, gave up everything. When things went bad, they went back quickly. Eventually it all went away.”

When
Andrew
took a step forward,
Blueeyes
snagged me by the collar, maneuvered me behind him. 

Andrew
was becoming more animated, hands gesturing, eyes wide. “I was close. I was always so close. Every time we thought we’d figured it out, there was something…always something missing. We needed something to base the equations against, something new to compare them to…something we couldn’t create in a lab.” 

He was inches from
Blueeyes’
face. “I don’t know what you are, but I know what you aren’t. You aren’t one of us or them. You aren’t like her. You’re something new. You’re exactly what I’ve been waiting for.”

It was a long while before
Blueeyes
responded, fingers drumming lightly against the machete hanging from his belt. I wasn’t sure what he’d do. A part of me expected him to chop
Andrew’s
head clean off, grab me by my shirt, and make a break for it. “I’m not what you think I am.”

“I saved your life.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Maybe not, but I saved hers.”

Blueeyes’
fingers stopped drumming. “What do you want to know?”

Of all the things I expected him to do, I never expected that.

13.

For the ten minutes we listened as
Blueeyes
told his story. He never sat down. He never moved or blinked. He just stood there, bleeding. 

He was living alone when the
gimps
tore through the safety wall surrounding his city. It lasted longer than anyone thought it would. The world was a mess at that point, infested with monsters and getting worse. He made his way across town, staying one step ahead of the horde, through streets littered with bodies, solitary
gimps
feasting on the slow and unlucky. He found his wife at her apartment, locked in her room with their daughter at her side. He pounded on the door for an hour before she answered. Once inside he begged them to leave, tried desperately to convince his wife the city was no longer safe. They needed to get as far away as they could, quickly. She wouldn’t listen. She had stopped listening years ago. When he tried again, she told him to go. When he refused, she shoved him. When he grabbed his daughter and threatened to leave without her, she smacked him.

Daniel is coming back!
She kept screaming it, kept saying his name.
We’re not going anywhere until Daniel gets back.
He hated that name.

Daniel was her new boyfriend, part of the reason she’d left in the first place. He was the one who’d saved her, rescued her from her loveless marriage, and gave her a reason to exist. He was the one who made her feel loved. She called
Blueeyes a loser, a bum, told him it was too late to pretend he cared about what happened to them. 

If anyone’s leaving, it’s you!
That’s what she’d said, eyes soaked in tears, hands balled into fists. In the other room his daughter cried.

It had nothing to do with the monsters outside.

Unable to convince her,
Blueeyes
insisted that he stay, at least until Daniel returned. She didn’t want him to. He didn’t care. Day turned to night, night to day, and back again. The situation outside worsened. The power failed. Daniel wasn’t coming back. On the third day they heard screams from the apartment above them, animalistic, almost a howl. They lasted for hours. All day long fingers scraped the windows, clawed the door. When the
gimps
weren’t scratching and clawing, they moaned. When they began moaning, they never stopped. It was too late. There were too many of them. They were everywhere. The city was overrun. Escape was no longer an option. 

Realizing this,
Blueeyes
boarded the windows and fortified the door as best he could. He constructed weapons, simple things with the little he had available. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t a fighter or a soldier. He wasn’t anything. The weapons weren’t very good, poorly conceived and constructed. He imagined escape scenarios, ways he could get both his wife and daughter from the apartment and through the city to safety. They were silly ideas mostly, overly optimistic. 

Days passed, then a week. They were running out of food. His wife became more distant, irrational, and mean. When she wasn’t crying or cursing, she threw things. She rarely slept. Sometimes he’d find her with her ear pressed to the door, listening to the moans and the scratching. When he confronted her, she threatened him with a knife and managed to cut his arm before he wrestled her to the ground. It took an hour of screaming to calm her down. 

Predictably, his daughter sided with her mother. For years the girl heard only the worst about her father, things he’d forgotten, mistakes he’d made. She knew what she’d been told. He was a
loser.
He was a
bum.
Most of it was true.

Most of it.

After fourteen days the food was gone, picked clean. The
gimps
remained.
Blueeyes’
daughter was sick and getting sicker. A simple cough turned into a cough and a fever. Cold sweats and shivers arrived shortly after. The girl spent her days curled in the corner, her mother at her side, her father in the opposite room.
Blueeyes
wasn’t allowed near her, not anymore. It was his fault they were stuck there, after all. It was his fault they ran out of food, his fault they were going to die. At least according to his wife. She was partially right.

Partially.

Everything changed one morning. He wasn’t sure why his wife did it. The day before, she had started coughing. She coughed blood. Maybe she did it because she was sick. Maybe she was tired. Maybe she’d just had enough. Whatever the reason, one night she just opened the door. 

The
gimps
were there, the same as always, waiting.

He heard her screaming from the other room, heard the moans and the shuffling feet. He heard their chattering teeth. It didn’t matter that he sprinted across the room. He wasn’t fast enough. It didn’t matter that he brought the weapons he’d made. They weren’t enough. It didn’t matter that he was ready to fight them all, to kill each and every one of them to save his daughter. His enemies were already dead. By the time he burst into the room, his wife and daughter were gone as well, smothered in a mountain of decaying flesh, torn to pieces. He saw his daughter’s intestines spread across the floor. She was inside out. 

The last time he saw her, she was inside out.

At this point
Blueeyes
stopped talking. He didn’t cry, or break down, or choke on his words. He just stopped. In that moment he wasn’t there. He was somewhere, but it wasn’t in that room. It wasn’t with
Andrew
and it wasn’t with me. The expression on his face was something I’d never seen from him before, something I’d never see again. He was hurting. 

Bits of his family still dangling from their teeth, the
gimps
turned their attentions to
Blueeyes.
The corpses advanced, desperate hands grabbing, machine mouths chomping mindlessly. He fought as best he could. He swung his arms, stabbed and punched and kicked. There were too many of them. They were everywhere. One of them bit his arm, locked down and removed a chunk of flesh. Another latched onto his leg, tore into muscle, teeth clanking bone. A third ripped open his side, stingy insides stretching to their limit before snapping. Suddenly, everything was bleeding from everywhere. It wouldn’t stop. His arm was soaked, torso saturated, his lower half a mess of drenched clothing and mauled flesh. Everything was slippery. When he tried to shove them away, they slid through his fingers. He wedged his knife in a skull. Unable to pull it loose, he lost it forever. No matter what he did or how hard he fought, they were winning. It was useless. They were eating him alive. The monsters shoved him backward, face to drywall, tearing flesh from his body, swallowing and returning for more. Teeth tore into his neck. When they pulled away, his neck stayed with them. He wasn’t human anymore. He was food, mauled meat, muscles responding on instinct alone. He was dying. He was dead. 

By sheer luck, he managed to slip away from the groping hands and the hungry mouths. There was too much blood. The monsters couldn’t hold onto him any better than he could them. When he hit the floor, he hit face first, lost a tooth. Somehow he crawled through their legs and into the back room. Useless feet closed the door. He had no idea how he locked it. The
gimps
scratched at the wood for hours, tried to rip it from the hinges. They beat it with their dead limbs, gnawed it with their teeth. Nothing worked. Eventually they just stopped, probably forgetting why they wanted it to begin with.