Eaters (7 page)

Surprisingly, Ed didn’t flinch. He held his ground as if he thought he could
take
the man. Cheryl wondered if he was right. The Eater looked frail, literally like a walking corpse. Wouldn’t it be easy to just give him a sucker punch and knock him down? It seemed possible—his body was so ravaged by the disease, perhaps he was less of a threat than his nightmarish appearance suggested.

The Eater stumbled up over the curb then came towards Ed with his fingers outstretched like claws. The couple behind him, who were obviously sick, but not in an as advanced state of decay, did the same.

Ed hesitated for a second as if he didn’t know whether to keep going forward or back up a couple of steps towards the sandwich shop.

Before he could make up his mind, the first Eater reached him and grabbed at his shirt.

“Back off, buddy!” Ed yelled, dropping his cigarette and batting the gnarled hand away.

They surrounded him, closing in like a pack of wolves.

Cheryl panicked. “We gotta do something to save him. Mark, go out there and shoot them!”

Mark shook his head. “If I did, the sound of the gunfire might draw attention to us. He was stupid. He shouldn’t have gone out there.”

By now, any window of rescue was gone. As the Eaters began ripping and tearing at his clothing, skin, and hair, Ed fell down to his knees and curled up into a defensive position with his hands covering his head.

Cheryl looked away, tears streaming down her cheeks, as they tore him apart, one fistful at a time, like they were the devil’s two-year-olds, and he was a blood-filled birthday cake.

Chapter Six

Two days later, very little had changed with their situation, except for the unfortunate drop in the number of survivors in the shop. After Ed’s death, three people had shown signs of the sickness. It started with a fever, followed by welts and ashen skin. After the first one collapsed and seemed dead, they dragged his body to the cooler, but before they could shut the door, he sprang up and tried to attack the shop employee, Steve. Mark shot him just in time. After that, they didn’t take chances. As soon as someone collapsed and no longer had a pulse, a couple of gunshots to the head ensured that they’d stay dead.

Now, they were down to eighteen.

The generator had pooped out a day back, and the power hadn’t come back on. The weather outside was hot, and the thermostat inside the shop read over ninety. Since the meat was spoiling quickly, they’d been eating the bread, chips, and condiments instead. There was still running water, but someone had heard from a friend over the phone that it wasn’t safe to drink the tap water, though they didn’t know why. There was still soda in the machines, but it was starting to taste flat and stale. Cheryl drank it anyway. The sweet taste and caffeine was almost like a treat since the chocolate chip cookies were long gone.

She envied the survivalists now, holed up in their shelters with a stockpile of rifles, ammunition, canned foods and assorted comforts. They must be laughing at all the naysayers now. She’d never taken much stock in the gloom and doom philosophy, but now she wished that she’d paid just a little more attention. Of course, a stockpile of rice and beans and jugs of water in her apartment wouldn’t be much good right now.

With the stifling heat, people had begun to make fans out of the sandwich menus and the wannabe comedians in their crowd tried to lighten things up with jokes.

“Hey, maybe this will make the trash companies obsolete. Every block will have its own composting zombie. You can just throw your scraps on your neighbor’s lawn, and he’ll eat ‘em right up. Of course, you have to make sure he doesn’t take your arm or your leg at the same time.”

Cheryl laughed, doubling over in pain as another deranged thought came into her mind. “What if the Eaters become a new consumer group? There’ll be a new Eaters Food Network with recipes for bloody rotting steak, maggot soup, gourmet moldy cheese…”

“Yeah,” someone else chimed in, “that would be great…until you find out the secret ingredient in their soup is stewed thigh bone and a cup of human brains.”

Mark leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and grinned. “You’ve got a terribly sick mind.”

“I’ve got to keep it going,” she admitted. “If I try to play this straight…I’ll lose it.”

The conversation soon turned more serious when a man close by said, “There’s got to be authorities somewhere rounding them up. Why don’t they just take them out to the city dump and barricade them in? They could feast there…and leave everyone else alone.”

“And then what?” someone replied. “Once they ran out of crap to eat, they wouldn’t stay there. They’d attack the guards and get loose again. Have you seen even one damn cop out there since the idiot who got himself killed? Maybe they’ve all split and we’re in an abandoned zone.”

It was true. They hadn’t seen another police officer, no National Guard, no ambulances, not even a single car going down the street. Was it just this part of town? Or was the whole country in crisis?

The first good news came in the afternoon. Gary found an old battery-operated radio in the supply room, hidden behind a stash of paper towels. It was unusual luck on top of that to actually find a few ‘C’ batteries that still had juice in them.

At first, there was nothing but static, but he eventually found a station on the A.M. band that was still broadcasting. The announcer said that Governor Weiss had issued a State of Emergency, and there were Red Cross shelters being set up around the Denver area. When he mentioned one at the First Savior Church on 52nd & Taylor, the group huddled around the radio cheered.

“That’s just three blocks away from here!” someone shouted.

Cheryl wasn’t as optimistic.
Three blocks.
That was a lot further away than it sounded if you were trying to fend off mobs of infected flesh-eaters.

The woman with the young girl on her hip—she was probably five or six years old, but was sucking her thumb to ease her stress—spoke up. “You know…we can’t stay here much longer. We’re going to have to take our chances and try to get to it.”

“That’s a given,” the man behind her said.

“Why don’t we try to go now? We could just run to our cars and drive away.”

Mark was less optimistic. “There are eighteen of us. You want to take the chance that we’ll all make it? Besides, we heard a lot of glass breaking last night. For all we know, it was car windows being smashed. I don’t think I’d want to make that drive in a makeshift convertible. That kind of ballsy act might work for Bruce Willis or Will Smith in a movie, but I’m not about to test my stunt driving and my luck.”

Cheryl silently agreed. There were so many Eaters still roaming outside, it didn’t seem safe to try to leave.

They took a vote, and by a narrow margin, it was decided that they should wait a little longer. There was still food and some soda, so they weren’t at risk of starving yet. But with this many people, they might run out in another two to three days.

After declaring a truce and deciding that cooperation was their only chance for survival, Mark and Gary teamed up as leaders. They started organized shifts of volunteers to take turns watching out the window, listening to the radio, and attempting calls on the few working cell phones.

Cheryl signed up for a window watch position, but she wasn’t sure why. She guessed that, despite the awful scene outside, it would be easier than trying to call out on a phone to people who weren’t answering or listen to bad news on the radio, since the announcer seemed to have more pessimistic things to say than hopeful comments recently.

Early that evening, Mark left his makeshift command post behind the counter and came over to her spot on the bench. “Try and get some sleep. Your shift starts at 5 a.m.”

“I’m exhausted, but I don’t know if I can sleep.”

She curled up into a ball on the hard plastic bench and hugged her knees. A paper bag filled with napkins served as her pillow, and it was already soaked with her sweat.

He reached down and patted her on the head. “You’d better get some rest while you can.”

Rest? Rest didn’t seem like a real option when the world had gone insane, and their lives were in danger.
Was this similar to what Mark had endured, trying to sleep in a war zone?
She’d only been here a couple of nights, and the stress was already taking its toll. It was hard to believe that just three days ago, she’d been camping with Mark, lying under a glittering sky of stars and dreaming of their future together.
Life sure can change in the blink of an eye…

Eventually, she did manage to fall asleep. It was almost dawn when he woke her. He took her place on the bench, trying his best to make himself fit, but his boots dangled a good six inches off the end.

She went to her post at the window, peeked through the blinds and saw just a tinge of pink in the eastern sky. There were a dozen Eaters milling about in the park across the street, and Cheryl was glad that she couldn’t see that well yet. She didn’t want to see the food stains, the bloody clothes, or their dead eyes. She was still baffled as to how human beings could turn into the walking dead—mindless vultures that ate slime from garbage bins and human flesh. It all had happened so quickly; it just didn’t make any sense. Despite Mark’s explanation of an origin for the virus, nobody seemed to have any clue how it had been transmitted to so many people so fast.

Most of the group was still asleep behind her. Even so, there were very few quiet minutes without a slew of grumbles, moans, and complaints, because everyone was getting more restless and cranky. She supposed that was normal, considering the dwindling reasons for optimism. Some were strangely silent though, as if they’d made peace with their maker and were resolved to whatever fate awaited. Others, not taking the situation so well, sobbed softly to themselves.

“I can’t sleep. It fucking stinks in here.”

Another random voice scolded. “Shut up. Tell us something we don’t know.”

Even though they’d put all the rotting meat in the cooler with the dead bodies, she could smell it too.
Dead flesh
. She tried not to gag thinking about it. She also tried not to think about the flies. How did they get in here anyway? She hadn’t remembered seeing any inside during the first day. Every time they killed them, more seemed to spontaneously appear.

Mark raised his head and called out into the darkness. “If we stay here, we’ll have to dump the meat and the bodies soon.”

Cheryl wondered how they were going to do that. If they just hoisted everything out the door, there’d be a feeding frenzy that would attract untold numbers of Eaters to their location. It would be a dangerous move. But, for sanity and health reasons, it was going to have to be done at some point…if they stayed.

Her wandering thoughts stopped as a movement across the road caught her eye. She raised the blind a little higher and squinted through the window.

Mark had obviously been watching her from behind. “What’s going on out there?”

“There are too many trees in the park. I can’t see a thing past them, but I thought I saw something.”

Cheryl realized that a woman was standing twelve inches away from her on the other side of the glass, staring directly at her. She had opaque eyes that looked like they were completely blind. It was obvious that she was an Eater from her appearance; half of her face was nothing but the white bone of pure skull,
as if someone had eaten it off
.

Not knowing if the woman could even see her, Cheryl didn’t move for a second. But then, as if he’d manifested from the air itself, a man suddenly appeared next to her. His face was a pasty whitish-gray and peeling like the paint from an old barn. There were black half-moons under his eyes, and a slick redness to his lips. His dark tongue swirled around his lips, then he licked the glass, tasting it like it was made of sugar. There was no doubt that the black marbles that were his eyes…
had seen her
.

She dropped the blind and backed away. “They know we’re in here…”

Before Mark could jump up, there was the loud sound of fists pounding on the glass.

As he scrambled to wake everyone, she kept backing up, tripping over people on the floor.
How long? How long had they known? Since Ed opened had opened the front door and let out a whiff of the rotting meat inside?
The movement in the park that had gotten her attention before the faces appeared at the window had looked like a group forming a circle, some sort of meeting. She whispered out loud to Mark and to the universe as she felt the blood drain from her face, “We have to get out of here.”

Mark didn’t question her. He seemed to intuitively know what she had seen as he hopped to his feet and spoke in a hushed, but sharp tone. “Everyone…get up! Back door, now!”

One by one, the sleeping were roused, and they all quickly headed towards the back of the shop.

Mark pushed to the lead with Gary on his heels. “Grab anything you can to take as a weapon. If an Eater attacks you, aim for the head. And for God’s sake, stick together. If you get separated, we’re not coming to look for you.”