They Eat Read online

  His hands met the skin on Tammy’s arm and grabbed a firm hold. She jumped, mildly frightened and completely disgusted by the cold, clammy feel.

  She tried to pull away.

  “Can you let me go, sir?”

  His hold stiffened.

  “Sir, please let me go.”

  Gus moved to put the camera down.

  “No!” Tammy shouted. “I want you to get this all on tape.”

  The old man stared at Tammy like a scientists at a rare organism through a microscope.

  His grip on her arm stronger as he pulled her closer to him.

  “That’s enough, sir. Let me go.”

  His teeth snapped at the air, hard and final. He seemed invigorated, dead set on his next move. He lifted Tammy’s arm to his mouth and tried to bite her. But he got a mouthful of her fist instead.

  “I said, let me go.”

  The old man lost his grip on Tammy’s arm and fell to the ground. She’d hit heartier opponents with less force than she’d hit the old man and seen them curl up on the ground, gasping for air.

  But the old man stumbled and fell, then got back up, then charged at Tammy. Again, he was slow, but more determined that before.

  “Back the fuck up, old man.”

  Tammy walked backward in the direction of the fire, never taking her eyes off the old man following her. Gus adjusted his camera and followed the action.

  The fire rumbled again, sending wood and burning debris crashing to the sidewalk in front of them.

  The old man snapped at Tammy again, his teeth punching together with the speed of a snake, but the chomp of a giant turtle. She jumped back to avoid his large teeth and lost her footing, falling backward into the street.

  The old man fell on top of her.

  His teeth clashed violently as he swiped for her face and neck hungrily. Tammy fought hard, but the man was heavier than he looked. She held him as far from her as she could, but the muscles in her arms began to weaken.

  She thought to herself about all of the men she’d defeated on her way to success and silently laughed about the irony of her circumstances.

  I’m about to get eaten by an old man.

  The old man’s head twisted 90 degrees on his neck in the seconds before he flew off of Tammy.

  Gus’ camera made contact at the perfect angle.

  The old man seized and tremored on the sidewalk while trying to regain control of his body, but with his neck now anchored to the back of his shoulders and the side of his head behind his back, it wasn’t going to happen.

  Gus offered his hand to Tammy, but she smacked it away.

  “Why the fuck did you stop filming?”

  “He was trying to eat you!”

  “I had it under control,” she said as she got up from the ground and attempted to wipe the dirt and ash from her blazer.

  “Plus, they were coming.” Gus pointed to sprawling lawn surrounding Crystal Waters Nursing Home.

  There was a crowd of people moving toward them. Some were young and dressed in medical scrubs, others were thin and old, and dying before whatever infection caused their current state. They all moved as slowly as the old man did before his meeting with Gus’ camera, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the fire’s light. Some had missing limbs with jagged edges of flesh and pulpy strings of muscle and tendons hanging; others were dragging their legs with open gashes.

  But they all were clearly dead.

  They didn’t grumble or moan or scream out for “brains”, but the sound of their mangled bodies thudding across Crystal Water’s lawn and onto the street was enough for Gus.

  “You getting this, Gus?”

  “No, Tammy. I’m getting in the van.”

  Tammy stared at the horrific landscape of staggering and limping dead people.

  “Just my fucking luck,” she said as she ran to the passenger side of the van and slammed the door behind her.

  3 fan boy

  I’ve seen every zombie movie ever known to man. My favorite ones are the ones by Romero.

  Zombies are, if not anything else, dead people.

  I know it’s completely irrational to attempt to introduce logic into a completely fabricated situation, but stranger things have happened, right?

  I mean, if zombies are dead, they’re not hopping up from the ground with the grace of a gazelle and chasing anyone at super human speed.

  It’s physically impossible.

  I know what you’re thinking.

  It’s totally possible if the corpse is still fresh.

  But I beg to differ.

  When we die our brains die too. Hell, some would argue that the death of our brains is what causes the rest of our bodies to die, but I happen to know this is only half of the truth.

  Like I said, I’ve seen every zombie movie ever made.

  For zombies, I mean real zombies, most of the brain is dead, except for the small part that controls the ability to talk, eat, and walk, even if it’s all done at the pace of a snail.

  This is the basic zombie knowledge. Duh!

  *****

  My love of the walking dead (pun intended) started when I was just a child. I snuck downstairs way past my bedtime to get some water for the 50th time and caught my parents watching Dawn of the Dead (the original, of course, not the remake).

  It was epic!

  I hit the last stair just as a zombie bit a man trying to climb into the window of the truck. He screamed out in agony, but it was no use. I’d never seen a zombie movie before, but I knew he was dead and the man in the truck did too. You could see the fear in his eyes.

  That one bite, something that would have required a tetanus shot and a few stitches had it not been the zombie apocalypse, spelled his death in big, red letters.

  I got chills.

  But not the kind you’d expect a child to get from fear.

  It was the kind you get when you see something you want, something you didn’t know you needed until it was in your hands. I wanted see more zombies; more zombie movies. I was hooked.

  I got my ass whooped that night though. That was the part I could have done without.

  “When I say it’s time for bed, Isaiah, I mean it’s time for bed.”

  My dad wasn’t a very big man and while we both knew he didn’t like hitting me, there were times when he did it because he didn’t know what else to do to keep me in line. He was a hard-working man, hands as rough as concrete, but they were in direct contrast to who he was. He told me he was hit a lot by his father when he was a kid.

  “It goes one of two ways when you have an experience as a child. Either you become it or detest it as an adult, son.”

  I was armed with this knowledge when I began my rendezvous into the living room after I was told to go to bed. Testing my limits, seeing how far I could push, but I’d crossed the line, even by his lax standards.

  My mother on the other hand, was not what many people would describe as a nice person.

  It took me a while to catch on that the other kids in the neighborhood called her the “crazy lady” when I was a child. She didn’t seem crazy to me. She just seemed like my mother.

  She’d drag her compact, but hefty body to the front door of our row house every day. Standing in only a housecoat and matching bubble gum pink slippers, my mother would spout off a gang of obscenities at the kids congregating in front of our house.

  “Get the hell off my stoop,” she’d yell while trying her damndest to keep the lit cigarette in between her puckered lips.

  Crystal Waters Drive was a small block of 10 row houses, so even when the kids moved on to sit on the stairs of the next porch over, it wasn’t far enough for my mom.

  In the summer, she’d return with the garden hose and spray the kids as they ran down the block; in the fall she used the leaf blower.

  I was in the eleventh grade the first time I heard them call her “crazy”. While the rest of the boys were busy feeling up girls and trying out for varsity basketball, I had my head burie
d in my favorite author’s and illustrator’s fantasies. They were all sprouting up, turning into lanky young men with sprigs of facial hair and I was sprouting out and around from too many cheeseburgers, my mom’s DNA, and late night sessions playing Warrior of War, my favorite video game.

  I was walking home one day with my head buried in Zombie Escape, Vol. II when I bumped into the crow of towering kids.

  I start this story like this because it’s one of my clearest memories. Despite the cliché, I feel like it happened yesterday.

  I usually cut through the alley to hit Crystal Waters before they did, but I’d gotten lost in my book. It had just gotten to the part where the main character cut the legs off the zombie with the hacksaw. The plot was shit, but the action scenes were intense.

  “Here comes the crazy lady’s kid,” the tallest and lankiest of the bunch shouted.

  My face turned red, blending in with the freckles my mom said would come when I hit puberty.

  I pushed past the crowd as the tears of embarrassment fell and ran the rest of the way home.

  None of it mattered to my dad, though.

  “Aww, son. That’s just how your mom is and what you saw today is just how people are,” my dad said when he got off work to find me in my bedroom sobbing into my pillow.

  In hindsight, it was clear that my dad, with his painful past and simple way of thinking knew much more about life and love than I ever would.

  He loved us unconditionally, regardless of what other people thought of us.

  He loved her like she was the queen of England and me like a faithful prince.

  Even as I grew and didn’t amount to what the other kids in the neighborhood did, my father never said a word. My mother, on the other hand, was a different story.

  She hated me.

  But I couldn’t care less.

  So what I didn’t have a job, my own place, or a family like the other kids eventually went on to have.

  I had more important things to do; important things like finishing the Lord of the Undead trilogy and beating the final level in Darkness Falls.

  *****

  I plopped down on the couch and shifted my ass into its favorite groove.

  “Isaiah, you want to dinner?” my mom called hurriedly from the kitchen.

  Since all the kids had grown up and moved away there wasn’t anyone to chase down the block. So my mom chased me. She cooked and cleaned as she always had, but she’d place the plates of food in front of my father and throw mine at me from the kitchen.

  Me? I mostly ignored her … unless it was time to eat.

  The smell of fried pork chops, baked macaroni and cheese, and collard greens slowly wafted into the living room as I put my headset on and logged into the gaming station’s online forum.

  “Ready to play, assholes?”

  The voices coming through my headset made me feel comfortable. Any thoughts I had of ever moving out and getting my own place were waved away when I talked to people who were just like me. I’m not saying everyone who plays games and is infatuated with zombies lives with their parents. I’m just saying it took a certain kind of person to appreciate and understand my lifestyle. The people I gamed with have never broke up with me because I was “immature” or called me “lazy” because I’d rather be inside with my games, action figures (don’t you dare call them toys) and books.

  My mother threw the plate full of heart attack on the small table next to me and moseyed off humming Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. One day when she wasn’t yelling about how much of a failure I was, she said it was her and dad’s song back in college.

  The dishes clanked in the kitchen sink as she got to cleaning up and getting ready to “plate” my father’s dinner.

  “Kill any zombies lately?” my dad asked. He came down the stairs and plopped down on the couch next to me.

  “Yup!” I smiled with a mouth full of collards.

  The knocking at the backdoor put a momentary stop to our conversation, but it was quickly restarted when I inadvertently put two bullets in between the eyes of an approaching zombie.

  “Fuck yeah,” I screamed.

  My mother turned off the water rushing in the kitchen sink and shuffled to the back door.

  “Better not be those damn kids playing again,” she called out to me and my father. We exchanged the same look, knowing it had been years since there were any kids in the neighborhood, let alone any other people. They’d all moved away, long before I sprouted to my full width, leaving a string of abandoned houses in their absence. My mother used to complain about the abandoned houses surrounding us until some developer came through and built the nursing home at the end of our dead end street.

  “What the hell do you want?” My dad and I heard the annoyance in my mom’s voice, but it wasn’t far from her normal tone.

  The person on the other side of the door didn’t answer, just the sound of the old springs on the screen door creaked, then the floorboards in the kitchen.

  … Then my mother’s shrill screams.

  My father jumped from the couch and ran into the kitchen. It was the fastest I’d ever seen him move in years.

  When I tell you what happened next was a moment for the history books, you can bet your whole paycheck I’m telling the truth.

  I hit the "pause" button on my controller and pulled my headset off.

  Yes, you heard that right. I paused my game so I could go see what was going on.

  I rounded the corner casually, my slippers scuffing along the linoleum my dad promised my mom he would replace 10 years ago.

  “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”

  I know it’s ridiculous, but it was the first thing that came to mind as I heard the dull thump our cast-iron skillet made when it hit the old man gnawing on my mother’s forearm.

  Her blood splattered all over the kitchen as the man continued to bite down, taking huge chunks of her flesh into his mouth. My dad matched her attacker’s ambition, swinging the black pot high over his shoulder and slamming it down on his head. The old man was thin and long, like a praying mantis. His skin was pale and so thin that you could see the blue veins all over his head and face. He was making good use of the four teeth he had left in his mouth, using them to turn my mother’s arm into mush.

  The skillet came down on the old man’s head for what would be the last time, crushing his thin skull into jagged fragments.

  “Oh, Betsy,” my dad sobbed, slumping to the floor by my mother’s side. Her body limp and breathing ragged, she sagged her weight back onto my father. The old man wasn’t moving anymore either, but his teeth were still sunken deep into my mother’s arm.

  “Help me,” my father cried as he tried to pull her from the old man’s clutches.

  I wrapped my hand around the top of what was left of the old man’s head and pulled. I could hear the ligaments and muscles of his jaw ripping as I pried his mouth open.

  “Hurry, Isaiah.”

  I pulled harder, my hands slipping against the sticky blood painting the scene. My mother’s limp arm slapped against the pooled wetness beneath her.

  The old man’s jaws snapped back into place, leaving him with a blank, but sinister grin.

  I fell to the floor beside him, exhausted. It was the most physical activity I’d done in a long time.

  “Get me some towels! We have to stop the bleeding,” my father demanded through his grief.

  I crawled over to the cupboard, slipping in the life that used to be my mom along the way. I wanted her to be alive, but the way her eyes rolled in the back of her head and her skin faded from rosy to pale made me think otherwise.

  I swiped two of our dish towels from their hook on the inside of the cabinet, gave them my father and watched as he pressed them into her arm. The blood coming out of her looked black at first, but slid all over my father’s hands in a deep burgundy.

  His sobbing began softly, but soon rose into a woeful moan.

  “Betsy, Betsy.”

  But m
y mother didn’t reply.

  “Call 911!”

  “Pop …”

  “I said call 911!”

  “Pop … I think it’s too late for that.”

  One look at my mother’s face and I could tell my dad knew I was right.

  “Dad … I think you should hit ma too.” I could hear the words coming out of my mouth. They seemed logical, but I could tell they hit my father harder than I could have expected. His bright blue eyes seemed to shift in his skull, sinking deep into his brow, a mixture of rage and disappointment darting between them.

  “What did you say, boy?” His question smacked me with the same force as the sound of his voice the evening I got that ass whooping for sneaking downstairs.

  “Dad, I never thought I’d get the chance to say these words, but mom is going to turn soon. You need to get away from her.”

  “Boy, all that zombie nonsense is made up by a bunch of crazy people. Now get to that phone and call --”

  I wish those weren’t some of the last words I’d ever hear my father speak, but I’d be lying if I told this story any differently.

  Mom was up on her feet before he could finish his sentence. She hovered over him, the green in her eyes fading to a blank white, her teeth gleaming like a fresh Hollywood starlet.

  “Betsy?”

  Mom grabbed his head with both hands and shoved it in her mouth. The sound of his skull cracking under the pressure of her teeth flew through the air and planted itself in my brain … forever.

  His body moved in fits of violence as she chewed.

  I couldn’t read his twisted face enough to tell if her scalp luncheon was hurting him or if his heart was breaking.

  Knowing what I know now about love, life, and family now, it was probably a combination of both.

  “Betsy,” he cried out before his body went limp.

  I picked up the cast iron skillet from the floor. The brain matter hung from it like twisted Christmas decorations. The first hit sent my mom stumbling into the kitchen counter, but she was quicker and more alert than I’d seen her in years. The second blow took her eye with it, but she still kept coming toward me, saliva hanging in thirsty strings from her teeth.

  The third blow cracked her skull, sending sharp pieces of bone and pulpy red chucks flying in my face.