Eaters (5 page)

Amidst the cacophony of screams, the sound of a child wailing nearby drew her attention away from the man. She found the source…it was a young boy, standing on the sidewalk, crying. He wore blue and red
Thomas the Tank Engine
pajamas, and had his little hands balled into fists. Tears streamed down his face in rivers.

I have to help him. I have to
…

Before she could get a signal from her mind down to her feet, a shadow loomed over the boy. It was a young woman in hip clothing—skinny jeans, a rock t-shirt, and black and white checkered high tops. Her honey-colored hair had streaks of pink in it. She picked the boy up, slung him over her hip and ran off.

Was that the boy’s—

A face smacked up against the glass, its mouth formed in the perfect oval of Edvard Munch’s painting,
The Scream
.

Cheryl jumped back away from the window. The blind slats stayed bent, and she could see the unblinking glassy eyes staring straight at her. Blood-covered teeth snapped up and down like a wood nutcracker.

Mark ran up and pushed the blinds closed. “That’s it. Everyone get back. We don’t want to draw any attention to this place.”

“Do ya mind, hon?”

Cheryl whipped around towards the sound of the throaty voice in her ear and realized that she was standing on the pointy tips of the shoes of a woman behind her. She stepped off. “I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. You know, I own the nail salon next door. I just came in here for a goddamn sandwich, not knowing that the world was about to go nuts. Now, I’m stuck with this lot of losers.” She fished a slim cigarette out of her purse and lit it with a silver lighter.

The flame created a brief golden glow over the woman’s face, a road map of fine lines. The vertical crevices of dark red lipstick around her mouth deepened as she took a quick drag. “I don’t know if I’d rather spend my last hours with the gaggle of hens over there or with the motley crew here, but I sure as hell don’t need some pigeon-toed pixie stomping all over me.”

Cheryl’s already tense body stiffened like the laces of a steel corset had been violently tightened. As a young girl, she’d been pegged as a shy, polite type. There was still much of that in her today—the introverted girl who’d rather bow her head and back off than risk an escalating conflict. But the adrenaline was raging in her body right now, and after what she’d just seen outside the window, the rules of etiquette were no longer her biggest concern. She really wanted to slap this woman, maybe give her a good one-two punch—not the shadow type that she’d learned from kickboxing class at the gym, but a serious bone-cracking hit.

Her hands balled into fists and her teeth clenched. “I
said
I was sorry.”

The woman tossed her head back, took a long condescending drag, then blew smoke in Cheryl’s face.

Before she could react, someone yelled, “Hey lady…put the cancer stick out.”

A chorus of voices followed. “Yeah!”

Cheryl felt empowered with the crowd behind her. “You heard them.”

“Piss off!”

Cheryl’s hand shot up and knocked the cigarette to the ground. The next thing she knew, the woman’s bony hands were around her throat, and she was falling hard on the tile floor.

“Hey! Get offa her!” It was Mark. He pulled the woman off and sent her flying into a group of chairs. The sound was like a bowling ball hitting a strike.

Cheryl tried to sit up and breathe, but found herself gasping for air.

“Are you alright?” Mark asked along with the concerned group hunching over her.

It was another minute before she could speak. “I…think so,” she said as her chest heaved in painful gulps of air, and she considered that it might not have been a good idea to stand up to a cranky pit bull wearing lipstick.

Once she could breathe again, Mark helped her to her feet. She glanced nervously around, worried that the woman might come back again to retaliate, but the store was so dark, she couldn’t see more than an arm’s length away. She hobbled as he guided her over to a booth and sat down next to her.

She melded into the cool plastic and leaned her head on the brick wall. Her voice came out in a raspy whisper. “What’s wrong with those people out there?”

Mark leaned in closer and whispered back. “They’re sick.”

She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anyone sick like that. They’re eating garbage…and people. They’re
eating
people!”

“Keep it down, Cheryl. Everyone in here is already on edge.”

“Of course they are. I’m on edge, too! What’s happening? You knew. Somehow, you knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? You were so quiet when we heard the news on the radio this morning.”

He was silent for a moment then he wrapped his arms around her, hugged her, and kissed her on the cheek. She could feel wetness coming from his eyes.

“You were erasing footsteps in the dirt outside the tent this morning, weren’t you?”

She felt his head nod on her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t. I was worried they were here.”

“Who was here?”

“The Eaters. I didn’t know then…I just—”

“You didn’t know what?”

Mark took a deep breath then began pouring a strange story out to her. “I think it started with the dogs. We got these shepherds at the base near Kabul, and they’d been trained to sniff out bombs. They brought them to us to do some more work with them, because they’d started acting strange…avoiding their food…and going for the slop in the garbage cans instead. We’d only had them for a few days when they got really sick and started attacking people. They just went crazy, like they had rabies or something. We had to shoot them—there was no other choice.

“Dogs? But—”

“It didn’t end there. One night after that, some of our regiment was attacked. We were asleep in our tents when we heard footsteps outside. Thinking it was Taliban, we started shooting, but the sick-looking bastards just kept coming. There were dozens of them, walking straight towards the gunfire. You couldn’t stop them—unless you scored a head shot. The attacks went on for days and some of my buddies were killed. But the odd thing was, when one of them slipped past the guards into camp, they left most of us alone. They were usually just after the garbage…or the wounded. My buddy, Jeff, had shrapnel in his leg. They couldn’t get it all out, and it got gangrene. One night, an Eater came in…and…and ate his leg.”

Cheryl shuddered, knowing that it would be a long time before she got some of the gruesome images out of her head that she had seen and heard today. This was all so much to digest. She tried to wrap her mind around what Mark was telling her and make some sense out of all of it. “So you think whatever the dogs had, it somehow jumped species and spread to humans?”

“What else could it be? There’s more…I found out later that those dogs weren’t normal to begin with. They’d started out in a lab, some type of genetic experiment. They’d originally been created to sniff out cancer.”

“Cancer?”

“Yeah. Think about it. Bred to search for something rotten…”

Cheryl thought again about Paul. He’d devoured that putrid burger like he was a starving animal, and it was a delicacy plucked from the Queen’s table. Just before that, he’d been so cold. He’d been dead. She knew it. There hadn’t been a pulse.

“…but what no one knows is how this disease, or whatever it is, transferred from the dogs to people. And, it seems to have mutated, turning people into these rotting eating machines.”

“Why weren’t they quarantined when it started?”

“It happened too fast. You probably heard on the news a few months ago that a whole village was bombed. They were all infected, wandering the streets, just eating, eating, eating…any rotten thing or creature they could get their mouths on. Whatever this virus was, we tried to contain it, tried to keep it from spreading to the rest of the world. But from the looks of things here, apparently we failed.”

She let that statement sink down to the pit of her stomach and was silent for a moment, taking in the hushed jumble of voices around her, and the backdrop of the shrieks outside. She squeezed his hand, hoping for some kind of hope to come out of him next. “What are we going to do? We can’t stay here forever…”

“Well…we got food. We got water. I say we stay put for now. Try to find out what’s going on. Maybe someone will come restore order. Maybe the Guard.”

“The Guard?
You’re
the Guard. And, you’re here with me instead of out there.”

“I had to find you, Cheryl. If I’d reported like they wanted me to, where would you be right now? Splattered all over the sidewalk out there?”

She winced.
He was right
. If he had gotten there even just a few seconds later,
she would have been trampled by that crowd...then maybe eaten by one of the infected.
She shuddered at the thought. There was no doubt that Mark had saved her life by going AWOL from his duty.

Suddenly, the darkness retreated as a fluorescent light popped on in the back of the store.

Mark jumped to his feet. “I thought I said no lights!”

All twenty plus people turned and looked at the silhouette of a person standing in the back hallway among the shelves of bread loaves and gallons of mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, and pickles, backlit by the rectangular glow of sunlight coming in from the open back door.

Mark grabbed his rifle and yelled, “There’s a back door! Nobody locked the damn back door!”

Chapter Five

The heavyset middle-aged woman had on a pink cotton nightgown with a matching terrycloth robe, and fuzzy slippers that had once been white. Her graying hair was done up in tiny bristled curlers, and her entire front side, from her chin down to her feet, was mottled with dirt and blood. The most disturbing things were her gray, peeling and welted skin, and her vacant, coal black eyes. She shuffled forward with slow, dragging steps, and Cheryl thought she looked like a corpse that had been plucked from a bin at the city morgue and reanimated with batteries and cables.

The crowd in the store parted down the middle as Mark aimed and fired. The bullet hit her square in the chest, knocking her flat on her back.

“Mark!” Cheryl screamed. “How could you? She was sick! She was—”

“Already dead.”

But was she?
The woman’s upper body lifted straight up, then she came to her knees. One hand was outstretched, the fingers curled up like claws, as she began crawling towards them.

Mark aimed again.

“No!” Cheryl grabbed the barrel of the rifle just before he fired, knocking it a few inches off course.

The woman’s right shoulder was blown away. She wobbled back and forth on her knees then fell face forward onto the floor.

“Why did you do that?” Mark asked, shaking the rifle at her like it was a club.

“She was an old woman. She looked like my grandmother…”

“I don’t care if it had been your grandmother. Don’t ever do that again!” He walked over to the woman’s body. It was quivering and jerking, flopping around like a fish in a frying pan. He put his boot on her back and fired a second time, straight into her head.

Cheryl screamed and buried her face in her hands as blood and other detritus splattered around the room. When she looked up, Mark was staring down at the still body as if he expected it to move again.

A man with blood-soaked cowboy boots standing near him shouted and pointed towards the back door.

Another figure stood there—this one a young man wearing a yellow polo shirt with a logo from the pizza store next door. He snarled, baring a mouthful of teeth as Mark rushed towards him and slammed the door in his face. He held his back to it, and yelled, “Where’s the manager? Somebody lock this door…now!”

The man with the Mario Bros. mustache rushed to the back. Mark held the door against kicks and pounds from the other side while the man fumbled to get the key in the lock. When it was secured, they walked back towards the others.

Cheryl watched them, not enjoying seeing Mark in soldier mode, but thankful all the same.

The manager, Gary, according to his nametag, turned to Mark. “Why didn’t you shoot him too?”

“I don’t want to waste any bullets. I don’t know how long they need to last us.”

“I knew him. He was a good kid. I’m glad I didn’t have to see him die.”

“How many employees do you have here?”

“Two. Justin and Steve.”

“Tell them their new job duties include body removal. You got a cooler to put that in?” he asked, pointing to the woman’s sprawled body.

“Yeah…it’s—”

The fluorescent light that had come on when the woman had walked past the motion sensor suddenly snapped off, throwing them back into darkness. The shop was instantly quieter without the hum of the computers, refrigerator, and ovens. Then, with a
whoosh
, they all came back on.