Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel (3 page)

Chef scowled, “I hope you make combination decisions on a slightly better basis than that, John.”

“I’ll never tell,” Doc made a zipping motion across his lips.

“Unfortunately, your lip is unzippable,” Chef said.

Short Order laughed. Doc smiled, but said nothing else.

Short Order presented last. He had made poached rainbow trout with mousseline sauce and sliced cucumber.

“Yeah, that is funny. Did you guys do that on purpose?” Doc said with his arms crossed.

“What the hell are you talking about, John? Just say it,” Chef ordered.

Doc looked at Short Order and at Chef. He shook his head.

“No,” Doc declared, “I zipped my lip and I have something to prove to you tonight, Head Chef David Sharp.”

“The upside of an actual zipped lip would be not having this conversation in the first place,” Chef said.

Short Order noted, “Could you imagine, David, if Doc was silent and Mutt actually spoke?”

Doc laughed and squeezed my shoulder.

“My life is full of things I wish,” Chef noted. “Let’s try this creation of yours already, Shaw.”

As we took forks from the plate to our mouths, Short Order waited and cracked his knuckles.

Doc and Chef both spoke over mouths full of fish and cucumber, “Stop.”

Short Order didn’t bother apologizing again, but just folded his arms.

“Why trout?” Chef asked, “You know this is normally a salmon dish.”

Short Order bristled a little, but held it at bay, “I know, Chef.  If I were cooking this ten years ago, I would have used salmon, but we didn’t have any.”

“No deep sea fishing lately,” Doc agreed.

Short Order said, “It was worse with carp.”

Chef said, “I would have tried something that was natural with the ingredients we had at hand.”

Short Order said, “This is what I would eat as my last meal … if I had salmon.”

Chef said again, “If your last meal is here, you’ll have to cook what’s at hand.”

“I don’t want my last meal to be here,” Short Order said looking down at the floor with his arms crossed.

“Where then?” Doc asked.

Short Order opened his mouth and then closed it again. He just shook his head.

Doc poured the wine and we took larger portions of what was left on the plates.

Doc had replaced Shaw as Sous Chef. Shaw handled supervising the rotating staff better and Doc handled the cooking better. All the food got better with the three of them. More went into growing crops, raising animals, and hunting once there was a reason to look forward to it. Even the box lunches we took on work outside the Complex were better.

That’s when I started working hard to get an apprenticeship. Chef didn’t see how a kid that didn’t talk was going to work. Doc insisted that he be allowed to take me as his apprentice. I think he thought it was funny, but I got what I really wanted.

The food was good. I moved it around with my fork mixing the dishes without realizing I was doing it. My stomach felt tight. I was afraid I was going to insult the chefs.

When I looked up, none of them were really eating either. Chef was rolling the cork from one of the bottles under his hand on the table. Doc was taking a few bites, but he was drinking more than eating.

Doc finally said, “Should we have toasted? To rebuilding or to … something else, maybe?”

Chef dropped his fork and stood. He walked away from the table.

He said, “I don’t know if I’m up to this. Up to this again, I guess.”

No one said anything. Short Order left his plate and walked out of the room.

Chef said, “We can clean up in the morning. Should we sleep in the panic room, just in case?”

“No,” Doc said, “Keep your door closed and locked in case we missed any creepers, but it will probably be better to sleep in our beds again. It could be better, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Chef snorted. “We’ll try that and …figure out the rest of this in … We’ll talk in the morning after breakfast. Nothing special. We’ll just cook up some eggs and bacon before it goes bad. Then … we’ll talk about it after breakfast.”

Doc didn’t answer. Chef left down another corridor. Doc forced down one more bite.  He drained another glass of wine.

“You know what was so funny about their dishes?” Doc asked.

I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me.

Doc continued anyway, “Before the iceberg sunk the Titanic, the rich assholes … do you know about the Titanic, Mutt?”

I nodded that I did. He looked at me suspiciously like he didn’t believe me. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t get from the times before the zombies, but I had read about the Titanic. It was big; it sank in the ocean. Icebergs were big, frozen water. They hid below the surface. Both the Titanic and icebergs were used as references in a lot of different books. Lots of ships sank. I didn’t get what captivated people about the Titanic over a hundred years before the zombies sank the rest of the Earth.

Doc went on talking. “There was a ten course dinner the night it sank for the richest people onboard. Chef’s dish was part of course four. Short used course three, if I remember it right. I think my potatoes were part of course five or maybe six … maybe the carrots too? They didn’t have rabbit. That would have been poor people’s food. Anyway, I can’t imagine that Chef didn’t know. His was so specific. He used to be a food critic or a charity chef or something like that. Surely, he had run into the Titanic tribute dinners before. I wasn’t any kind of cook before the zombies and I knew about the ten course meal. It’s possible Shaw picked up the salmon dish from somewhere else, but David had to know. Either they did it on purpose for the ‘last meal’ challenge and didn’t say so or it was a big ass coincidence. I’m not sure which would bother me more. It doesn’t seem like the best precursor to us trying to rebuild here. I’m not much interested in rearranging deck chairs tomorrow, if that’s all we are doing here.”

He turned up one bottle to his glass and only got a swig. He left it there without drinking it. He laid the bottle on its side against one of the plates. He picked up the other open bottle by the neck and walked toward the kitchen.

He stopped with his hand resting on the last lantern.

Doc asked, “Do you want to stay with me, Mutt?”

When he turned back, I shook my head. I didn’t want to be alone in this room or any other, but I wasn’t interested in watching him drink. He nodded back at me.

“I’m going to make my way without the lantern. Be careful and lock your door tonight,” Doc said.

He walked out through the kitchen. I heard him trip in the back hall somewhere and laugh.

I took one more, small sip from my nearly full glass. I wasn’t much of a drinker.

My bedroom was back through the back hall too. I had to step over my last zombie that had waited for me outside the pantry door. I was still dirty from lying in the closed pantry for days. I wasn’t sure if the water worked in the showers without the generators.  I thought so. I knew the tanks were sun heated too. I had no interest in showering in the dark after everything today. I had watched copies of old horror movies too.

I ended up sleeping in one of the panic rooms. The cots were better than the pantry. I had to step over bodies to get there, but not the one that had been hunting for me. I woke up hungry later that night, but I stayed behind the locked door until morning.

Chapter 2: The Week We Tried to Make Due with Old Ingredients

The next morning was plain old eggs and bacon. Chef was rolling the cork from one of last night’s wine bottles under his hand again. We sat at a different table from the previous night’s mess.

Once we were finished, we scrubbed down the tables and completely broke down the kitchen for a deep cleaning. It took a couple hours. It seemed like we were really putting too much into it, but I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with my zombie, so I did what I was told.

We started clearing bodies out of the halls. We hauled them up to the roof at first and dumped them off the back of the buildings. After a couple trips, they decided it was good enough to pitch the ones we didn’t know out the window.

The last body we took to the roof was Coach. His real name was Derrek Gathers, but he was called Coach because he did college football before the zombies came. He explained it to me a couple times. I didn’t get it, but I sat and listened. It was the least I could do and also I was locked in a cage at the time. He was there the day the scavenging crew brought me into the Complex. I was sick with some fever. They kept me in quarantine until they saw I got better and it wasn’t zombie infection. I was sure they were going to kill me, but Coach sat by me just outside the screen of the quarantine room and kept telling me everything was going to be fine in between his football stories.

The quarantine room I was in was converted into an office and the other one had machine parts stored in it at that point. It struck me in that moment that we had nowhere to put someone that was brought in new.

I guess we have lots of room now, I thought.

Coach sure didn’t deserve to be eaten half up and then to have his head crushed by one of the cooks. I only recognized him because of the mole on his cheek. He was nice to me and most everyone else. He didn’t like Doc much.

As we got ready to roll him off the edge of the roof, Doc paused. I looked up from Coach’s empty face to Doc’s. He nodded at me. I looked down and then back up again.  I nodded back and we rolled his body off the side.

One of his arms broke off when he missed the pile and hit the street. I wished I hadn’t watched that. We were going to have to burn the bodies. It seemed like they were too close to the building for that. We weren’t thinking through this.

We started dumping all the bodies out the closest windows at that point.

We made it down to the third level when we found one still walking. Short Order speared it in the forehead with the hook he had been using to pull the bodies onto the blankets. It kept moving with the hook planted in its skull.

“Why isn’t it dying?” Short Order yelled shoving it back by pushing into its chest.

Chef yelled, “Watch its hands. They can tear you open, if you let them get hold of you.”

I had seen it happen, but like everyone else, I just tried to stay away from their teeth.

Doc threw the blanket over its head and Short Order shoved it down to the floor. It kicked its legs and punched up against the fabric of the blanket as Short Order sat on its chest.

“Can I get some help here?” Short Order asked.

Doc felt the creature’s face with his foot. He found the spot he was looking for and stomped down twice on the back of the hook through the blanket. The zombie stopped moving.

Short Order pulled up the cloth slowly and jerked the handle of the hook from side to side until it came out of the dead body’s face. Doc limped down the hallway as we shoved the body still wrapped in the blanket out the window of an abandoned apartment.

Chef picked up a steel bat that was resting by the door jamb inside.

He said, “Whoever was here never got a hold of this to use it against the zombies or those damn bikers.”

“It was Jeff and Marta,” Short Order answered. “They lived here. They had two kids too. We dumped Jeff out before that walker came along. We didn’t find Marta or the kids. I don’t remember the kids’ names.”

Chef didn’t say anything. I knew their names, but I didn’t think Shaw was really asking. They were Rebecca (called Becky) and Jeffery Jr. (called Jeffie or J.R.). I knew other things about them too that didn’t matter anymore now that they were all gone.

Marta helped me learn how to read and write which couldn’t have been easy since I didn’t talk.

Doc came back with his aluminum shaft.

He said, “We need to walk the halls again.”

“I’m sure it’s just one we missed,” Chef said. “It was bound to happen. Let’s just keep going.”

It took us a little longer to pull and dump the next couple bodies with everyone trying to carry a weapon in one hand.

We heard the others down a stairwell and we did stop. There were two of them. Doc sliced right down the middle of the skull of the one in leather chaps and nothing else. Its skull folded open and its split brain fell out in several dry chunks. Once it fell, I saw that there were swatches of rotten cloth fused to its bare flesh in several places.

Chef took the woman in the matted dress. He pulverized her face without putting her down. She waved and twisted her arms in front of her once she couldn’t see anymore. With her teeth down her throat, I wondered if she could still bite at all. She was a zombie, so it didn’t matter. I watched while holding my small, metal pipe down at my side.

I thought for the first time in years, there was someone out in the world that used to know her better than I knew Coach Gathers.

I pushed it out of my mind so that I could focus on bashing their brains out when the next one came along.

He took three more downward shots before the crushed skull dropped with the rest of the body.

Chef dropped the bent bat to the landing below in disgust. “Where the hell did you get that tiny, aluminum pole that never breaks, John?”

Doc smiled as he stepped over the exposed crotch of his kill. “It is a display rod from a lab set-up in a chemistry classroom.”

“Were you a chemistry teacher, Doc?” Short Order asked.

I found it odd that these guys didn’t know this stuff about each other after all these years working in a kitchen. I didn’t know either and I knew a lot about a lot of people. People talk a lot more when they have someone that never speaks.

“That would explain my poisonous cooking, wouldn’t it?” Doc laughed.

“Do you recognize these?  None of them are our people,” Chef said.

Doc pursed his lips. “Chef, do you remember one of our guys walking around the Complex in assless-crotchless chaps? What the hell is your point?”

“We missed three in just a few feet,” Chef said.

“Well,” Doc said, “let’s walk it again.”

We only got as far as the first hall at the bottom of the stairs when we found a door that was jammed open. We had to put down two more trying to come in before we pulled it closed and hammered it shut.