Eaters (6 page)

“Generator?” Mark asked.

Gary nodded. “Yes.”

“How long can it run?”

“I dunno. A few hours? We’ve never needed it longer than that.”

“Does it keep the meat cold?”

Cheryl couldn’t see it, but she knew the store’s assembly line included bins of sliced turkey, chicken, salami, bologna, and other cold cuts. It was hard to believe that she’d been starving for a Turkey Jack just a short time ago. Now, even though she hadn’t eaten since the marshmallows last night, the thought of food made her stomach turn.

“Yeah, sure,” Gary snorted. “Why? You need to break for a sandwich?”

“No, smartass. I’m just concerned about the smell if it starts to go bad. There’s a lot of meat here to spoil if the power is off for too long.”

Mark came back over to her while Gary shouted to his crew to get some trash bags to use as a tarp to move the woman’s body and some rags to clean up the floor, so no one would slip in the blood. He started to guide her back to the booth where they’d been before, but stopped and grabbed his cell phone out of a shirt pocket. She saw that there was no signal before he snapped it closed.

“Has anyone here gotten through to 911? To the police? To any authorities?”

There was a round of groans.

“I heard a lady in the corner talking on her phone to someone. Maybe she’s found out something.” Cheryl pointed him towards where she’d heard the voice then followed him over.

“Ma’am?” he said to the woman sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. “You able to get through to anyone?”

She was sobbing. It took a moment for her to stop crying and talk in a warbled voice. “My mother. She’s got my kids. They’re trapped in the house…”

Cheryl didn’t have any family close by. She thought about her father, and her aunt, many miles away in Arizona. She could only hope that everything was all right in that part of the country. She leaned down and put a hand on the woman’s arm. “Has she heard anything on the news? What part of town is she in?”

“She’s on the east side. She hasn’t heard anything. There’s no TV. There was radio until just now. Some DJ was holed up downtown, still broadcasting from a barricaded office, but he stopped talking about an hour ago.”

“What about a shelter?” Mark asked. “Have any shelters been set up?”

“For the sick?”

“No. For us…”

“I haven’t heard nothing.”

Her sobs returned full force, and it was obvious that the interrogation was over. There would be no more news forthcoming. Cheryl and Mark retreated back to the booth. They leaned on each other, trying to take a mental and emotional break, even though that wasn’t really possible.

After a moment she said, “We should have let more people in. We could have saved some others maybe.”

“No. We barely made it in here ourselves. You saw the other stores. They locked the doors. They were so scared…they weren’t letting anyone in. We were lucky to get in here.”

“Yes, but…” she trailed off, and sat up. “Listen…it’s quieter outside.”

“You’re right.”

She followed him to the window.

It seemed like just a few minutes had passed since she was outside walking on her lunch break, but it had actually been a few hours. The shadows were long and thin on the sidewalk, giving it a zebra striped effect. And amongst the patterns of shimmering light and bands of purple shadow, there were bodies—
lots of bodies
. She couldn’t believe that just a short time ago the motionless lumps had been people, walking, talking and going about their day.

“Look at all of them…” Cheryl watched, wide-eyed at the number of Eaters still roaming and shuffling about. They didn’t outnumber the dead, but there were a lot of them. She guessed there were dozens within her view that stretched from the shop to the park across the street, but given the wall of figures that she’d seen in the park just before they ran into the shop, there was probably an army of them out there.

“Yeah…not good. What we can see from here is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

She pulled him away from the window, but kept him close enough to cup a hand over his ear and whisper. “Mark, how do we know that some of the people in here aren’t infected? I mean, remember that guy at work? Paul, the jerk I told you about before? Well, one minute, he looked a little…
off.
Then it was like he was dead, and then, like a lightning bolt, he just went nuts. It happened so fast. If there’s a virus causing this, what’s the incubation period?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was always villagers that got it. None of my squad got sick. But we were popping a lot of vitamins, smoking a lot of weed, even doing some herbal stuff like ginseng and ephedra to keep our energy and immune system up. I don’t know if that had anything to do with keeping us well.”

So many questions…so few answers as to how this epidemic had spread so quickly and why some got sick and others didn’t.

The generator did not power the air conditioning. Cheryl realized that she was sweating, and the heat made her tired. She fumbled her way across the room to get a bottle of water from the counter then returned to her spot and leaned back in the booth while Mark started chatting with a man nearby.

As she sipped her water, she looked around the room. The light was even dimmer than before, but she could tell that there was quite a diverse lot of people holed up with them. There were more men than women, but the split was close, probably sixty-forty. She saw the woman with the young girl that they’d let in earlier lying in a booth with her daughter asleep in her arms; the store manager and his employees huddled together like a three-man football team; and there was an assortment of men and women, young and old, in business and casual dress. The one person she didn’t see was the obnoxious woman who’d been smoking earlier.
Maybe, she was in the bathroom
. With a mischievous grin, Cheryl figured they should consider locking her in there if she got out of hand again.

She thought that it would be easier to see the people better—
inspect them—
in brighter light. Then they might have some warning if someone started to show signs of infection. If it happened, she hoped it wouldn’t be someone sitting close to her, and that Mark would be able to stop them before anyone got hurt.

She nodded off for a few minutes and when she woke, water was spilled on her lap and she could hear Mark in a heated conversation.

“How about you just listen to the man with the gun?”

Cheryl was appalled.
Was this her Mark?

He wasn’t talking to the bald guy in the plaid golf shorts anymore; it was Gary, the manager.

“We don’t want any more trouble in here. Why don’t you just put the gun away?”

Mark shook his head. “You don’t get it. This isn’t a movie. This is real. There’s a virus going around. Once it infects, it kills people, but they don’t exactly die—they just turn into rotten, flesh-eating monsters. If I hadn’t shot that woman, there might be several of us lying on the floor right now. I saved your ass. A
thank you
might be more appropriate.”

The argument abruptly ceased when red and blue lights began strobing on the other side of the blinds. The man closest to the window went over and looked out.

“Hey! There’s a police car out there! We’ve got to let him know we’re here.” Before anyone could stop him, he grabbed the cord, raised the blinds, waved his arms, and started pounding on the window.

Now that she could see out, Cheryl could tell that he was wasting his time. The policeman leaning out of his car door with a handgun was young—probably a rookie in his first year. He began shooting randomly at Eaters like it was some crazed sport. Trying to get his attention was about as useless as waving at a jet pilot 30,000 feet up in the air, because his mind—whatever might be left of it after so much trauma—was beyond reaching, and he was very focused on his futile task.

They all watched as the worst-case scenario eventually happened. The gun ran out of bullets, and the Eaters closed in on him. They scrambled over the top of his car, beating on the windows with their fists, the protruding bones of their arms or legs, even with large rocks and the broken wood slats from park benches, a terrifying sign that they truly weren’t all just
mindless zombies.
Some of them still had some violent intelligence at work propelling them towards their goal.

When the windshield cracked and shattered, Cheryl looked away, and so did many of those around her.

“They’re like killer bees. Once they’ve focused their attention on you, they don’t let up.”

The woman next to her who said it was about her same age. Instead of wearing a bloodied suit, the young woman had on a sundress—a pretty white cotton one with embroidered daisies at the hem—that looked like it would be appropriate to wear to a picnic on a sunny afternoon in the park instead of in a mess like this. She was still watching out the window intently, like she couldn’t pry her stunned eyes away.

There were others still watching too, like rubbernecking drivers going past an accident, unable to tear their eyes away from the horrors. One said, “There’s one digging through the trash over there. I just saw one put a big slimy tomato slice in his mouth.”

“That’s nothing,” the lady in the sundress said as she pointed to the right. “There’s a group of them in the street. They’ve started eating the corpses.”

Cheryl winced and covered her mouth with one hand. “I could have gone my whole lifetime without hearing someone say a sentence like that.”

Someone from the back of the shop yelled, “Can you all nix the play-by-play? Some of us have had enough.”

As the dejected man who’d tried to flag the policeman for help lowered the blinds, Justin, the wiry shop employee with pock-marked cheeks, came up from the back and approached the lady in the sundress. “Have any of them come near the door?”

She hesitated. “Yeah. Some old woman did. She tried the door, but when she realized it was locked, she just started mumbling and walked off.”

Cheryl shuddered. The back entrance of the shop was a steel door, and it was bolted shut, but the front of Subs & Such was all glass. It wouldn’t take more than a big rock or a steel pipe thrown at it to shatter it. So far, none of the Eaters had paid much attention to the sandwich shop. They seemed to be sated with the garbage, live victims, and corpses outside. She hoped the people in the shop were able to stay quiet and keep their low profile for as long as possible.

That hopeful thought did not last for long.

A couple of hours later, a man claimed to have heard a news report on his phone. “The power is out in many areas and some major roads are closed, but they’re saying that some people are venturing out, at least to try to get to one of the Red Cross shelters that are being set up.”

A gruff voice yelled, “That’s nuts, man! Didn’t you see what happened out there? Ain’t nobody going nowhere.”

The man with the phone continued. “Well…they’re saying that it’s only a few of the sick ones that have started attacking people. They’re not all so violent, and it’s worse in some parts of town than others. They say just to leave them alone. To get out of their way if one comes near. Don’t threaten them, don’t look them in the eye, and if one growls or comes towards you, just slowly back away.”

There were scoffing laughs in the room.

“Like they’re dogs?” someone asked.

Another, more hopeful, said, “Great! Maybe we can get to our cars and try to get home.”

Mark held out his hand. “The hell you are—the hell anyone is. It’s not safe to step a foot outside that door.”

A man wearing a baseball cap and ratty t-shirt that read
Got beer?
spoke next. When she had noticed him earlier, Cheryl thought he had
disgruntled postal worker
written all over him when he’d simply introduced himself as ‘Ed’ without any other details. She’d guessed that he might be the first to freak out and do something stupid.

He hopped up off his perch on a table. “I don’t know about trying to drive anywhere just yet, but since you freaks in here won’t let anyone have a cigarette, I think I’ll take my chances and go puff out there with the deadheads. They won’t mind. And, while I’m at it, I think I’ll run next door to the liquor store and grab me a six-pack. Actually, maybe I’ll just bunk over there. They’re probably having a good party, compared to this morbid crowd.”

Everyone must have thought he was joking, because no one stopped him when he ran over to the door and turned the latch. He stepped out, and a cigarette and orange flame appeared like a magic trick from his pocket. He took a long drag and exhaled a puff of smoke, then began walking a few feet to the right, towards the liquor store.

Through the blinds, Cheryl, Mark, and a few others watched as a group of bedraggled-looking Eaters, two men and a woman, who had been shuffling about in the road, lifted their heads and sniffed the air, then started coming towards him.

Ed held up his hands. “No need for alarm, people. I’m just passing through.”

A man in a navy blue suit nearest to the sidewalk picked up speed. His head shook from side to side as he did an unsteady zigzag towards Ed. The decidedly inhuman-like walk was even odder, because his face was skeletal, a bony mishmash of scraps of skin and flesh. His teeth snapped back and forth like a steel trap, and drool slithered down his chin. The appearance was so horrific, if Cheryl didn’t know better, she’d have thought it was an actor who’d spent a few hours in a makeup chair getting ready for a performance on Halloween night.