Eaters (35 page)

The door that connected to the second room started to bulge inward with a loud
crack
. They had only seconds left before their plan was thwarted.

The next thing she knew, the front door was open and Aidan was smashing in heads. Blood, bits of gray flesh, and viscous fluids sprayed everywhere, as his arms seemed to fly back and forth in a blur. It was like the classic video game
Space Invaders
. He killed one row of aliens off then another row mounted up over the bodies of the fallen ones and came right at him. He grunted and swung…and swung again.

Suddenly, she realized that there was a heap of bodies in the doorway with a red haze lingering over them. Aidan hunched over, breathing so hard, she thought that he was going to collapse. Beyond the doorway, the parking lot looked empty. “Come on,” she urged, after giving him a couple of seconds to recover.

He was bloody and sticky from head to toe as he hopped on the bike behind her and circled her waist with sweaty hands. With a quick twist of the throttle, she rode over the hill of dead ghouls, leaving the blood bath at
Motel Hell
behind them. Anyone who saw them pass by would think that they’d seen two blood-splattered ghosts, riding down the road like bats fleeing hell.

* * *

Breakfast was cold, charred pizza. They found it in the oven of a pizza parlor on the outskirts of the town and had to step over the remains of bodies to get to it. From the looks of the scene, the employees had been taken by surprise, and pizza cutters were woefully inadequate weapons.

Every little town they passed through after that felt like déjà vu. Most of the population had fled or seemed to be in hiding. The only signs of the former residents were remnants of corpses or a stray bone in the road. In some areas, the power seemed to be off, and in others, red blinking traffic lights seemed to flash warnings for them to move on. Cheryl was surprised that Aidan wasn’t raising any doubts about her quest to continue on towards Tucson. She knew there were probably plenty of abandoned houses with enough supplies to tide them over for a while. Maybe it was the fear of staying in a ghost town that kept him in forward motion. She chose not to question him. Any mention of stopping might put a hole in her plans.

They eventually started to see some people but wished that they hadn’t. Many had live eyes but were staggering along the roadside and had the first signs of sickness, so they rode on by as fast as they could. Occasionally, they encountered someone who had pink sunburned skin and wild red eyes who looked like they just were dehydrated, disoriented, and in a state of shock. When they stopped and tried to talk to such a person and give them some water, they just kept walking like they were trying to walk their way out of a bad dream, one footstep at a time. Cheryl felt a terrible pang of guilt when they left someone behind, but what could they do? She and Aidan weren’t doctors; they had only as many supplies as they could find and carry, and they had no shelter to offer. There was nothing they could do except say a little prayer in their heads to a silent God, hoping that the person would eventually wander towards some people that would take them in, or that their death would be mercifully quick.

The worst experience was passing a group of kids, a flock of ragamuffins with dirty cheeks and torn clothing. They ran into the middle of the road when they heard the motorcycle approaching but then seemed to change their mind and darted off to hide in tall stands of weeds. Aidan looked back at her with a grimace and shook his head. It was a silent confirmation that the number of stray people was just too great; they couldn’t pick them up and take them home (
home?
) any more than they could help the dozens of wandering cats and dogs they saw. During these hard moments, Cheryl tried to keep her dad and aunt at the forefront of her thoughts. She kept on going for them, hoping against all odds that they had somehow made it to a shelter and were okay.

Abandoned cars were common on the mountain roads. They passed an SUV with a smashed windshield. Its wipers were torn off, and the driver’s side door was open. Streaks of dried blood raked down the outside of the door and continued across the road where a single shoe—a man’s tennis shoe—lay on the dotted yellow line. It was just another point of interest along their route, nothing worth stopping to investigate unless the vehicle looked promising for supplies or they needed to siphon gas.

A little further up the road, they passed up an invitation to stay with a survivor that they encountered. The crazed desperation in the man’s red-veined eyes was just too unnerving, and both Aidan and she agreed that they might find themselves robbed or attacked in the middle of the night.

She still heard Mark’s voice in her head, chiming in at random. Sometimes she got tired of his saccharin sweetness, always cheering her on and telling her that everything was going to be fine.
Everything was not going to be fucking fine
! It never was going to be again. A worldwide epidemic of the Black Plague would have been preferable to this. At least the people who died from that disease
stayed dead
! From now on, it was
soldier up
(Mark’s favorite phrase) or die.

In Vail, the empty ski lifts swayed in the wind over the treetops like giant fishing hooks snared on a line. Cheryl wondered if they’d ever run again, or if they’d spend the winter idle as snow blurred them into the landscape. The latter seemed like the answer a little later when they saw a cap that said
Vail Ski Patrol
on the roadside when they stopped to get a drink of water from a creek. It was flattened with a tire track across the top and had speckles of dried blood across the brim.

Later that night, they met a forest ranger who was filling a basket with mushrooms underneath the trees beside the road. He wore his ranger shirt open, baring his wooly chest, and his hair and beard were long and wild. After chatting with him for a few minutes, it was obvious that he wasn’t unhappy about the crisis. He was a proverbial mountain man who ate weeds, herded goats, and took infrequent baths in an alpine stream. That night, he gave them shelter in his cabin and served them a nettle stew with chunks of deer meat and gritty cowboy coffee. He took great pride in showing off his assortment of weapons that included rifles, axes, and long two by fours with nails poking out of one end. Before they parted ways the following morning, he gave them some advice as he sharpened a hunting knife on the edge of a piece of granite.

“These infected—
Eaters,
as you call them—are just like wild animals. You’ve got to imagine that the world is filled with nothing but these snarling wolves now. Always keep your guard up, and you can fight them off. I’ve had to kill more than a few, including most of a Japanese tour group that came through here. One minute, they were photographing wildflowers, the next they were helping themselves to mouthfuls of their buddy’s brains.”

A tour group?
Cheryl shuddered.
That sounded like a lot of corpses.
“What did you do with the bodies?”

“Nothing. There’s enough scavengers around here to take care of them.”

The visual that conjured up wasn’t pretty: mountain lions carting off limbs, coyotes playing tug of war over intestines, and vultures pecking at eyeballs. It didn’t seem sanitary either. Didn’t they use to burn bodies during plagues?

He had more advice about what route they should take. “I wouldn’t try heading due south. I heard that Leadville is in pretty bad shape, and you could easily be cut off on one of the narrow passes between ridges. It’d be a little shorter and a lot cooler going that route, but I’d recommend you keep going west through Utah then go south. Avoid Phoenix. Find a way to skirt around it. Someone came through here a few days ago from there and said it was the devil’s town. Nothing but blood sprayed like graffiti all over the place. Even worse, what’s left of the uninfected there are roaming in gangs, looting and terrorizing anyone they run across. They’d be more of a danger to you than any of the sick ones you’d see.”

He gave them a two by four with the sharp end of the nails sticking out before they bid him farewell. Cheryl carried it, but it was an unspoken agreement that she’d keep the gun and the lamp base, and the fancy new Eater-killing-device was Aidan’s.

* * *

As they traveled, they became experienced looters. Before entering a grocery store or convenience store, they rode up and down a few of the nearby streets to gauge the numbers of Eaters in the area. If the town didn’t seem to be crawling with them and no one fired warning shots to shoo them off, they felt safe enough to commence a raid.

By this time, most stores had been ransacked, either by the living or the walking dead. Power was on in some and out in others, but the more time passed, it became more and more rare to find a store that still had juice. That meant that there was a lot of rotting food inside. The darkened coolers were filled with roast beef and tuna salad sandwiches that were nothing but brown and green slime inside their plastic wrappers and milk that had curdled into solids then started to decompose and leak out of the paper carton. The only safe foods were in cans and aseptic pouches or the dried goods like chips and crackers. They couldn’t carry much with them on the motorcycle, so they kept provisions to a minimum, figuring that they could find more along the route.

They found a gun shop in Parachute, Colorado but it had been mostly cleaned out. They carted off a few boxes of 12-gauge shells, thinking that they might be useful as a swap in these days when money wasn’t as useful as ammo, food, water, or medicine.

Sometimes, gas was scarce. Other survivors had apparently also decided to siphon gas from abandoned cars. Once, when they had found a good supply, they decided to try an experiment with Molotov cocktails as weapons. They found that the flaming bottles slowed an attacker down, but since they didn’t feel pain, it didn’t stop them. So they eventually ditched the idea, deciding that the world was in bad enough shape without them setting it on fire.

There were long periods of time when Aidan was quiet and seemed to be battling some internal demons that he didn’t want to talk about. She tried to give him mental space, as well as one could when they were back-to-chest on a motorcycle.

Later that day, they saw a round shape that looked like a boulder up ahead just off to the right side of the road. As they got closer, they realized that it wasn’t a rock; it was an Eater with skin so gray and tattered that it no longer looked like flesh. It was squatting and hunched over in a perfectly round shape. There was a chunk of road kill in its gnarled hands, a dead skunk from the look of the black and white tuft of fur. As they rode by it, the man-creature turned and stared at them with its gelatinous white orbs. Aidan kicked at it spitefully, knocking it upside the head and backwards onto the road. It seemed spiteful and was unnecessary since it wasn’t coming at them, but Cheryl didn’t mind if it helped him to vent some of his frustrations on a subject who could feel no pain.

Smashed peaches and watermelons covered the town square in Palisade. Yellow Jackets flitted over the sweet mess, flying in wobbly flight patterns like they were drunk on the fermented fruit. A wood sign next to an overturned fruit cart said
Happy 4
th
of July!,
a cheerful sentiment, but it was speckled with bullet holes. How many days had it been since then? Cheryl didn’t know. It didn’t seem to matter anymore.

In Grand Junction, the weather turned abysmally hot. Heat waves rippled off the pavement, making it look like rivers covered the road up ahead. Miles back, she had ripped the sleeves off of the Ladies Gym shirt and slit the neckline into a “v” to make it into a tank top and tied Mark’s camouflage shirt tied around her waist. The tops of her shoulders were freckled and burnt now, and flaking in a few spots where blisters had burst then started to peel. Aidan was in similar shape. He was already tanned from his days of working construction, but his arms were the color of well-done steak now, almost black. He wore a bandana tied around his forehead to keep off the sweat.

Her gun was empty, but she hung on to it anyway, figuring that un-sick humans might take pause at the mere sight of it.

As hot as it had been in western Colorado, when they hit Utah it seemed like they were heading straight into hell. Temperatures had to be somewhere around a hundred and ten. No matter how fast they rode, the sweat didn’t evaporate off their skin. They took frequent shade breaks during the day and re-soaked their bandanas whenever they encountered a stream, and filled up their water bottles or pilfered new ones when they could.

That night, after the sun went down, the temperature cooled a few degrees, turning from abysmally hot to just slightly unbearable. They made it to southern Utah and slept in a canyon where they saw nothing more threatening than a few coyotes and a herd of elk. They decided to make a fire and heated up some canned beans to go with a loaf of bread.

After they finished, they leaned back on rolled sleeping bags. She thought Aidan was asleep when he mumbled, “What would you be doing tonight if all this shit hadn’t happened?”

“That depends. I don’t know really know what day it is. If it was a weeknight, not much. Probably hanging out with Mark.” In an alternate universe where things had gone as planned, she probably would have been kicked back on the couch, perusing a bride’s magazine. She’d have been daydreaming about quitting her stupid job at the insurance agency, buying a yellow house with a picket fence, and putting in a little garden with lots of juicy tomatoes and fresh greens. On that imaginary trip, she would have fast-forwarded to a future where she was baking cupcakes for Mark Junior’s Cub Scout pack. None of that was ever possible now, and she knew that Aidan wouldn’t want to hear a bunch of Pollyanna crap. “If it was the weekend, we liked to go line dancing.”