Eat'em (9 page)

“No,” I pushed her away, “I can’t. So long as he’s in my life, I can’t.” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to make the swirl disappear into blackness. “I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take YOU anymore! You’re a burden, Eat’em! You’re a burden I can’t handle! I can’t have a life or a girlfriend or just five minutes without you ruining everything! I renege. I don’t want you as a friend or a servant or an ally or any of those things. I don’t want you climbing around in my head when I just want a normal life. Go away! GO AWAY! I don’t want you around anymore! Eat’em, just go away.”

The room spun. And when it came to a halt I finally opened my eyes.

My eyesight returned to normal. The outer edges, once again, a discernible blur. Dixie sat on the edge of the bed. Drawn away from me. Her face mottled in confusion.

An uncomfortable silence fell over the room. For the first time in over three years, Eat’em was gone.

“I’m sorry,” I felt the breath come back to my lungs. As if I’d been in a vacuum the moment Dixie started kissing me and the air finally returned. I wondered how long I could have gone on feeling so breathless. Part of me wanted to try again…

But she looked afraid.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I have to go.”

I left. For the first time ever, by myself.

Chapter 19

The bathroom blonde’s name was Carrie Gerberich. Her stretched image on the restaurant’s flat screen couldn’t replicate how piercing her eyes were in person. The sapphire blue dulled on the display. Her milky skin washed out.

I ditched class to avoid an embarrassing conversation with Dixie. Confessing to her was stupid. Part of me wanted to hide in Val’s apartment, but without Eat’em the quiet would drive me to madness. Instead, I settled for the chaos of Buffalo Wild Wings, a sports bar in the Arlington Highlands. The commotion from Rangers fans camouflaged my solitude.

High definition flat screen televisions decorated every wall. At least fifty sets played baseball. A few others aired either soccer or various college football games. And one, the one I found myself glued to, silently displayed a melancholy newscaster and Carrie’s photo in the top right corner.

The ticker read “College student slain by police after violent attack, leaving two others fatally wounded…”

It was her. Miraculously back from the dead, only to have died again at the hands of police. I bit my lip to keep from hyperventilating.

“Excuse me,” I yelled at a waitress to be heard. She spun around, her miniskirt staying perfectly pinned to her upper thigh, just low enough to keep her covered. “Are you able to turn up the volume on this?”

“Sure honey,” she leaned over my lap and hit the volume up a couple notches, just loud enough to hear over the uproarious screaming. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“No,” I returned her smile, if only to be polite. “No, I’ve got a couple years on me still.”

“How about a soda?”

I shook my head, holding up a half-drank glass of water. “I’m okay. Thank you.”

“Let me know.”

She hurried off. I could tell she wanted to clear up the seat. There was a line at the door and all I had to eat was a complimentary basket of tortilla chips. The news of the blonde kept me glued to the chair, unwilling to make room for more guests.

“…investigating a series of similar events to happen over the last couple weeks…” A cropped and blurred photograph replaced the image of the blonde. It was two pairs of legs. A man’s and a woman’s. They laid motionless on a sidewalk. It could have been a cropped photo of a couple spooning had it not been for the streaks of blood. The tableau was shot so beautifully one might have titled it “Lover’s Quarrel” and sold it at an auction. Yet in big bold letters the local anchorman sat in front of a piece of art simply titled “DEAD.”

“DAMMIT!” a shout rang through the restaurant followed by jeers and boos. “That’s what happens! THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS! You get rid of Hamilton and you might as well throw away the franchise! Sonofabitch! THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS!”

The anchor continued on with more details behind two violent outbreaks.

Police found Carrie cannibalizing on a homeless man outside of a RaceTrac gas station. The man, a Mexican migrant worker, lived in a field behind the convenience store with a community of vagabonds who used the lot for a place to stay at night. A clerk called police after discovering the girl eating the throat of the unnamed victim.

“She tore his neck clean out,” a woman with a jagged yellow grimace said between missing teeth. “Had his throat all droppin’ down like this,” she made a pantomime gesture as if she stroked an invisible ZZ Top beard. “Blood’s all ovah. I says to this guy, ‘I ain’t touchin’ her. Got rabies. Seen it before. Rabies. Not touchin’. They got him in there callin’ the cops.”

The woman’s English was broken more due to poverty and ignorance than a product of a second language. The channel censored most of her words, but reading her over exaggerated facial expressions left little to the imagination. Still, they gave her subtitles with the slang and swears clarified as if she were a Disney Princess speaking some foreign language from a distant far off land.

“Though officers at the scene have stated this is unrelated to the violent attack that occurred over the weekend, many aren’t so quick to dismiss the similarities in the two incidents,” another image flashed of a familiar house. Shattered pictures of the Canine Civil War and a single bloody handprint blew up on the screen.

Frozen corpses along the climb up Everest couldn’t imagine the icy pangs that ripped across my flesh. Bumps raced across my arms and a cold sweat danced above my brow. Officer Bellecroix shouted accusations around in my skull. He’d remember. There was no way he wouldn’t remember. It’d only be a matter of time now. The next image would be of me. The bloody-shirted suspect. I tried to push the thought out of my head. The anchor said they were unrelated. Unrelated. But… I knew there was no way he would have forgotten. The time. The day. My name and suspicious behavior. He would have to remember.

“It’s difficult not to draw a comparison between the two tragedies, which occurred just one week apart,” the anchor read deadpan. “Violence of this nature conjures images from such movies as World War Z and 28 Days Later, where mankind falls prey to a virus that turns men and women into cannibalistic hordes of zombies.”

Straight from my mind to the screen, Lieutenant Bellecroix took center stage at an impromptu press conference. The APD emblem shone behind him framed by an American flag on one side and a Texas flag on the other. Bellecroix barely hid the annoyance on his face from an unseen reporter.

“It’s not zombies,” he said bluntly. “I can assure you there is no zombie outbreak ravaging this state or any other. What we have here are two separate incidents that share a common theme. What that theme is, we don’t know at this point, but we will find out. We’re looking into the possibility of synthetic drugs. The word bathsalts is bouncing around. It’s a possibility. We still don’t know. But we’ll find out.”

An outburst from the baseball fans almost sent me out of my chair. I grabbed my water to keep from knocking it over and waited impatiently for more information.

“Unlike the attack last night, two suspects were found at the home of local resident Louise Parsons,” I shook my head and almost blurted my confusion before regaining composure. The TV continued, “The two men shot and fatally wounded Parsons before commencing in what Lieutenant Bellecroix described as ritualistic cannibalism. In neither situation did any of the attackers respond to police request to stop.”

What is going on? Could this be part of the infection? Is it making people cannibals? It almost sounds like it could be rabies. Who were these other two men found at Parson’s? Are there more infected? My mind filled with questions.

The scene cut back to a reporter standing in front of the RaceTrac where Carrie Gerberich had been shot only hours ago. A group of men and a couple women stood near the dumpster, smoking cigarettes and drinking from cans hidden in paper bags. The yellow-toothed Disney Princess nuzzled up to an old man in an Australian duster and a camo hat.

“A spokesperson for the Arlington Police Department said an investigation will be underway to see exactly why non-lethal means of apprehending Miss Gerberich were not utilized and stated she doesn’t believe police acted in any way contrary to how they were trained,” as the reporter spoke, I saw a familiar figure emerge from the dumpster behind her. Eat’em. He crawled from the depths of the garbage, dragging a large bottle, wrapped in his tail. He sat on the edge, his legs dangling over, sniffed the contents, stuck his tongue out and threw it back into the dumpster. The reporter continued, “We’ll keep you updated as new information unfolds.”

Was that live?
I looked at my phone for the time and back at the screen. Yeah, it was.

I dropped five dollars onto my table and headed through a crowd of irate ball fans as they screamed, “Come on!” “No!” and a variety of colorful outbursts.

At one point in my life, I dreamt it would be me on that field. By the sound of some of the threats made by the Rangers’ fans, I may not have been much better off.

Chapter 20

Finding the gas station took longer than I’d hoped. I walked for more than two hours before recognizing the dumpster from the television.

No police tape marked off the area like I thought it would. The place looked the same as it probably did any other day, still open for business in spite of the gruesome deaths that had taken place earlier in the day.

Dusk fell over Texas by the time I arrived. Various shades of pink and purple painted the night sky and a crescent moon smiled just above the horizon. The lights the city threw back at the heavens masked the stars. Soon it would be too black for most to see. Fortunately, my night vision surpassed most.

Crossing a gravel walkup, I peaked around the corner at the empty lot behind the RaceTrac. Not a single square foot of the massive field remained unoccupied by sleeping bags, blankets, and makeshift bedding, all concealing individual mounds of misfortune. The smell could only be compared to that of a twice-worn, long-forgotten sock Eat’em once discovered in the threshes of Val’s bedroom closet.

I hustled back to the dumpster and lifted the lid, careful not to bang it against the brick wall of the convenience store.

“Eat’em,” I whispered into the darkness.

He wasn’t there.

A sudden commotion brought my attention to the field of sleeping migrant workers and down-on-their-luck bums.

A man screamed
What’s his name?
repeatedly while someone else shushed him and told him it’d be alright. My skin crawled, but as he drifted back to sleep, my nerves slowly subsided.

I closed the lid and headed into the store. A bell jingled to announce my presence, but nobody greeted me behind the register. I could hear someone poking around in a small room marked Employees Only. It sounded like he was dragging boxes around. Probably late night inventory work or something, even though it wasn’t particularly late. Just a little before nine.

I drifted from one aisle to the next, hoping to see my demon friend with a faceful of chocolate, or nougat, or ice cream, or candy, or anything. I imagined him in the fridge, shot-gunning a rip it, his small gut protruding over his lap.

My heart began to sink lower and lower. Eat’em made me mad, but I didn’t mean to be so harsh with him. It wasn’t like me. I prided myself in my infinite patience, and now my impatience for my one true ally left me with nobody else to confide in.

I found myself adrift by a shelf full of condoms and feminine products and rows of assorted medications. A single bottle of Pepto-Bismol chewable tablets sat alone on a row otherwise comprised of Tums and cold pills. I picked up the bottle and sighed.

When I looked up my heart almost dropped. A friendly-faced, blood-red, spiky imp leaned over the top of the rack, his tail swaying gently behind him.

I smiled and said, “Can I have this?”

“The Pepto?” he asked.

“The Pepto, yes,” I said. I fought back the pressure at the back of my eyes and the urge to grab Eat’em and squeeze him. Instead, I said, “If I can have them I’d be grateful. I’d follow you now until the day you die. I’d follow you and I would be your one true compatriot. The Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote, the Robin to your Batman, the Tom Sawyer to your Huck Finn. I’d do what you ask of me. As your one true ally. I’d be your best friend. All I ask for, to be yours until forever, is that you bestow upon me these delightful morsels.”

“You’re paraphrasing, yes?” He said.

“A little.”

“Yes,” Eat’em smiled. “Take it, Jacob.”

I opened the bottle and poured out a handful of pink tablets, which I popped into my mouth and chewed. “These aren’t very good, by the way.”

“I know, right?”

“But they’re worth it. Worth it so much. Even if these. Pepto. Really are bad, awful stuff.”

Eat’em leapt over the shelf and onto my shoulder. He kissed the side of my face and for a brief moment everything was once again right in the world. What is man without his demons?

“I missed you, buddy,” I said.

“I thought you never wanted to see me again, yes,” Eat’em thumped his tail joyfully against my back as he took his place once more on my shoulder.

I offered him a tablet and said, “A pact is a pact, pal. What’s Robin supposed to do without Batman?”

Together we finished off the bottle of pills, gulping down our bitter-sweet friendship one awful tablet at a time.

“You got a stomach ache there, guy?” I hadn’t heard the clerk come in from the back. He watched from the counter, as I finished the last bits of antacids.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, reaching for my wallet, “I’ll pay.”

Eat’em and I approached the register as I took out a couple bucks for the medicine.

The clerk kept his head buried in the computer screen. He fumbled around the keys, searching for the right input for the bottle of medicine. He said, “Just one second. It’s my first time using this thing. Takes a while to figure stuff out.”

“New computer?” I asked.

“More like a new brain,” he said coldly, betraying his put-on smile. “You ever wonder what it would be like to be a god?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come again.”

He looked up, his eyes black and vacant.

We shared the same sentiment.

“Oh shit!”