They Eat Read online

  They were approaching downtown Trenton, where the traffic would be twice as heavy.

  Gus swerved the van to pass a car at a stop light.

  “Gus, you have to calm down!”

  The van fishtailed, but he quickly regained control.

  “Gus, you’re going to kill us,” Tammy screamed as the van approached the bright red glow of the brake lights of the line of cars stopped at the red light ahead of them.

  “Gus!”

  Tammy slapped Gus in the face. The blow worked as she’d planned, snapping him into their situation.

  He stomped on the brake pedal with both feet and turned the steering wheel at the last moment, slamming the side of the van into the back of the Prius stopped at the light.

  “No! No! No! No! No!” Gus chanted while violently shaking his head.

  “Gus, you have to get a hold of yourself.”

  The owner of the Prius contorted his 6 foot frame out of his car and hobbled toward them. He looked like he worked out 8 times a week, his round, veiny biceps sticking out of the arm band of his spandex shirt.

  The impact of the van smashing into the back of the car Tammy thought he should have thought twice about buying was apparent. He held his head and steadied himself on the mangled pieces of the trunk, then made his way to the driver’s side of the van in an attempt to intimidate Gus. The fact that it wasn’t enough to shake Gus out of his shock pushed the unsteadiness from the giant man’s body and replaced it with rage. He punched the hood of the van.

  “Hey, buddy!” the muscled man screamed. “Hey, buddy. What the fuck are you? Deaf?”

  Gus stared straight ahead.

  “No! No! No!”

  “Look, you crazy fuck! Open the door right now!”

  “Back the fuck off!” Tammy yelled back.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch! I was talking to your boyfriend over here!”

  The muscled man raised his arm in Gus’ direction, but put down a bloody stump.

  Tammy watched with her bottom jaw in her cleavage as everything moved in slow motion. The muscle man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked from the blood squirting from the remains of his severed arm to the thing from Crystal Waters standing next to him and back again. As the shock dulled and the pain set in, an uncontrollable shriek ruptured from the bottom of his stomach. The light ahead of them was still red, but the other cars stopped in line sped away in a hail of exhaust smoke.

  Tammy thought she saw the thing from Crystal Waters almost smile. It clutched muscle man’s severed forearm in its long, talon-like hands and chewed on it like a starving animal. Tammy blinked, the seconds ticking by painfully. By the time she pulled her eyelids open again, the thing had already eaten so much of muscle man’s arm that only the stark white bone jutted awkwardly in the air.

  Tammy knew this thing was once human, just like the other men and women who spilled out of the nursing home. But this one was faster, stronger, like it evolved during its short trek, from a lumbering hungry cannibal to a monster. Its greyed skin was so thin you could see through it; a layer of mucus the color of old, congealed bacon grease just beneath. Tammy thought its skin was going to fall off its body as it jerked and shuttered with each bite of muscle man’s arm, but it didn’t.

  Muscle man turned to run back to his Prius, his mutilated limb dangling beside him. The thing gave chase with the ferocity of a jungle predator. It was obvious the man’s chances for survival were slim.

  “Uh, Gus … I think we need to get out of here.”

  “No! No! No!” Gus shook his head from side to side violently. His body was tense, but his eyes vacant and bulging out of the frame of his dark brown face partially hidden in the shadows of the van’s dark interior.

  “Please get us out of here, Gus!”

  Tammy rolled her fist into a small boulder and hit Gus again, this time in the back of his head.

  “Fuck did you do that for?” Gus squealed in a tone uncharacteristic of his normal, quiet bravado.

  “We have to get out of here, Gus! Look!”

  Tammy pointed to the scene in front of them. The thing was crouched atop muscle man’s crumpled body, ripping out handfuls of skin and flesh and shoveling them into its mouth.

  Gus put the van in gear and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

  The back tires spun themselves into the ground while the front of the van bobbed from side to side.

  “We’re stuck!” Tammy called out. She turned away from the van’s window, panic over her face like a funeral veil, after seeing the van’s rear wheel well wedged on a piece of twisted plastic sticking out of the Prius’ battered trunk.

  Gus put the van in reverse and smashed the gas pedal into the floor again. A cloud of burned rubber and smoke rose around them, shielding them from the sight of the ferocious feast taking place just feet away.

  “Try again, Gus!”

  He shifted into drive again, thickening the rubbery smoke.

  The van shook hard like it was hit by a horny bull.

  Tammy could see the thing looking at them in the distance, its gleaming white teeth unintentionally smiling wide at her. Its tongue fell out the side of its mouth as he charged the van, throwing all of its strength into its side.

  The van rocked on its large axis again just as Gus threw it into reverse.

  “C’mon, Gus!”

  “I’m trying, Tammy!”

  The thing backed up and charged again.

  Fear and repulsion curdled in Tammy’s throat as she watched pieces of what she could only guess were muscle man fall out of the open cavity in the creature’s torso.

  “Looks like his gotdamn stomach fell off, Gus!”

  Gus put the van in drive and stomped the gas pedal just as the creature rammed his body into the side of the van again.

  The metal on the wheel well ground in a high pitched yelp as the van broke free and sped down the block.

  The van swayed and pitched to the hum of its aging engine as Gus red lined it through the abandoned buildings lining downtown Trenton. “You OK, Tam,” he asked quietly, feeling bad about not asking her as soon as they broke free from the grisly scene at the nursing home.

  “What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine,” Tammy said with an attitude. “I’m just glad we got all that on camera!” She smiled menacingly at the glowing red dot on the camera in her hand. “This is going to set my career on fire!”

  *****

  “Reporting live from WTRE evening news, this is a Tammy Collins on the scene at Caldwalder Park in Trenton. My camera man and I were just attacked in downtown Trenton and over on Crystal Waters Drive by crazed maniacs who, we think, tried to eat us. We have all of the disturbing footage which we’re going to be airing in just a moment here. Please, for our viewers who are sensitive or may have small children, we want to warn you that what you are about to see is extremely graphic. OK, Gus.”

  Gus pressed the red button on the camera and the footage they’d captured ran across the display screen. Tammy flinched when she saw the old man fall on top of her. She looked at Gus to make sure he hadn’t seen her.

  He hadn’t.

  But she saw Gus; and for a moment as she watched the looks on his face go from fear to sadness to the depths of desperation, she felt the slightest tug of sympathy for another person for the first time in her life. It faded just as quickly as it blipped in her brain while the camera’s footage continued to roll by.

  “Eat your heart out, Katie Couric!” was what replaced it.

  6 shawn

  Shawn couldn’t remember the last time the block was so quiet.

  Sanhican Drive was the first street travelers met in the city when coming off of Route 29 from the suburbs. The houses on one side of the street sat ground-level, while those on the other side were perched on a hill that ran the full length of the block. A lifelong resident, Shawn’s mother told him about the canal that used to run where the ground level houses were.

  “It would flood every year, Shawny baby. So the government
came, dammed it up and laid Route 29 on top of it.”

  It was one of the many stories of “the old times” his mother told him while she lay in her hospital bed, her body being slowly eaten by cancer.

  When she died, Shawn was sent to live with his grandmother. The quiet that fell on Sanhican Drive that morning conjured thoughts of how normal of a life he could’ve had if his grandmother was as interested in raising him as she was sitting in the front pew for every one of Deacon Williams’ sermons.

  He stepped off his porch and took a deep, full breath of Newport smoke as he embarked on his daily ritual: walking to the “Community Food Market” to get a cup of hot chocolate. The neighborhood hadn’t been much of a community in quite some time, but when Mr. Chin sold the small bodega to Mr. Diaz, the new owner sprawled the gaudy yellow sign with the red “Community Food Market” lettering atop the front door. Shawn wanted to hate “them” all for coming and making money off the working class blacks in the small West Trenton neighborhood, but he knew it was silly. “They’re trying to feed their families, just like I am,” he thought as he smiled at the young Dominican girl that handed him his change.

  He stepped back out of the store and put the cup of hot chocolate to his nose. Shawn was never a fan of coffee and even though he usually got a bunch of shit from his friends about it, he loved the way the warm chocolate felt going down on cold mornings. He climbed the stairs to the front of one of the abandoned houses on the hill and looked down the street. He could see everything from the top of the hill, especially the glow of the florescent sign towering above the gas station at the end of the block. It marked the end of his working class neighborhood and the beginning of the city’s affluent Hiltonia section. Every resident of Sanhican knew better than to venture past the ominous black and yellow sign. It was where the grass got greener and police got meaner, beating back the poor with warnings to stay away. But Shawn rarely had the desire to go further. While his life was far from perfect, it was all he knew.

  The houses on his block stood perfectly in line, like the plastic soldiers he lined up on the porch on one of the many summer days he played outside alone. Everything was obedient and flawless, even in its dysfunction.

  Shawn looked at his watch.

  It was 7 a.m.

  By this time on any other day, the neighborhood would be coming alive with kids on their way to catch the breakfast program at school, old men and women shuffling to the store to get their morning cup of coffee and junkies stumbling through looking for someone to serve them whatever would scratch their respective itches.

  Shawn sat down on the top stair of the abandoned house’s porch and relaxed, having decided the silence was better than the normal hustle and bustle. Sure his pockets were full of product and not money, but he was a patient man.

  He pulled his smart phone from his pocket and pushed the icon for his favorite radio app. He got shit for his choice of talk radio over the deep bass and rhythmic chanting of the local hip-hop station too, but it was yet another criticism he cared little about.

  Caller, what do you think about the new legislation passed down that changes the legal smoking age?

  Well, Steve I think it’s just plain ridiculous. I mean how the hell can our government tell us we can go to war, but we can’t smoke while we’re doing it. Imma Iraq vet, Steve, and I’ll tell you something else --

  We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for a special report from our television affiliate, WTRE News.

  Shawn listened in as the female anchor’s voice described a horrific scene. She claimed dead people were trying to eat her and her cameraman; that they narrowly escaped with their lives. According to her, their attackers were all different, but equally deadly. There were some that moved slowly like their bodies were still set in rigor mortis. “And we still aren’t sure about what causes it, there are some who’s abdomens are hanging and dragging on the ground, with stomachs full of what we can only assume are consumed people,” she said in a tone that defied the severity of what she was talking about. Shawn sat up straight on his perch, half amused, half appalled as he listened to the woman talk, describing what she called “the deadliest of them all”. They had the strength of five men, ran with the speed of predatory animals, and ate with the same ferocity. “From what we’ve been able to discern, their bodies have rotted to the point that their hanging stomachs have snapped off their bodies,” she said, pausing to take a deep breath before continuing. “Whatever they eat is falling out of the decayed hole where their stomachs used to be as quickly as they can shove it down their throats.”

  Shawn laughed out loud at the reporter’s active imagination, but stopped with his mouth still agape when he looked down the block toward the gas station. He ripped his ear buds from his ears and threw them to the ground as the dark figures began peppering his field of vision.

  They sounded worse than they looked, their bare feet slapping with authority against the cold concrete -- and they looked just like what the reporter on the radio described. The slowest of the group stumbled about in the rear of the forming crowd of monsters. But it was the ones in the front, their demon-like bodies sprinting from car to car to stare in the windows, that pushed his heart into his ribcage.

  Two of them grabbed a firm hold of the trunk of a Cadillac parked in front of the “Community Food Market” and shook it until it bounced so high on its rear axle that it flipped on its hood.

  Growling with intensity as it drew closer, the terror made its way down the block.

  Shawn rose slowly to his feet and stepped backward into the bushes that lined the front of each of the hilltop houses. His mind fought to make sense of what he was seeing, but the fear swirling around it was clear. He retreated into the greenery without the slightest of whimpers or calls for help. His skin pricked and tingled as the leaves brushed against him in the wind, but he remained still, wishing he could disappear into the darkness behind his closed eyes.

  The smell of rotting flesh wafted around him and stuck to his nose hair as the horde drew closer.

  The group moved down the block, sniffing the air, peering in windows, looking almost frustrated by the absence of anything living.

  Shawn opened his eyes.

  By his count, there were 9 people – or what used to be people.

  The fastest of the group bit out at the air. Another jumped on top of a car parked at the bottom of the hill directly in front of Shawn.

  Its entire body in full view, Shawn gagged at its thin frame and greyish skin that hung on its body like an old window curtain. Its bald head was cracked down the middle, a blow that would have killed any normal person, but the blackened, puckered hole in its abdomen told Shawn it was anything but that. It snapped its large, white teeth in every direction, but stopped when it turned toward Shawn.

  This fucking thing can smell me!

  Shawn trembled as the thing’s white eyes widened and fixed themselves on the bushes. It started toward Shawn, fast and determined.

  He gripped the small pistol he kept in his waistband for protection and aimed it at the creature’s head.

  He’d never shot the gun before, or any gun for that matter.

  He had only bought it a few months before, the day after someone stuck cold steel in the back of his neck and stripped his pockets down to the lint.

  The creature moved fluidly to the top of the hill, its gait wide and long. It was within arm’s reach of the bushes when it pushed its gangly limbs inside, fishing around for Shawn.

  Shawn squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet exploded from the gun’s chamber, into the front of the creature’s head and out of the back in a sharp, wet pop.

  The thing fell to the ground, flat and still. The stomp and slosh of the dead crowd stopped abruptly as the thing’s back hit the grass. They turned in unison toward Shawn and his bush fortress’ direction like a dead army with specific orders. Shawn released the trigger and steadied his hands again.

  They’re not getting me witho
ut a fight. I’ve had to earn every meal I’ve ever eaten. They’ll have to do the same.

  A few houses down, the sound of metal on concrete aroused the crowd’s attention.

  Mr. Bannon?

  Shawn remembered talking to the old man a few times when he was younger. He told Shawn he went blind in some freak accident during the war. Shawn didn’t know or care which war the old man spoke of. It was the milky white of his eyes and the way they moved around, looking for something but not seeing anything, that caught Shawn’s stares.

  Mr. Bannon was only seen once a day those days: in the morning. He always entered the block with the loud bang of his screen door hitting his porch and the clicking of his cane on the cement all of the way to the bottom of the stairs to get his morning paper.

  That day was no different.

  The herd of roaming cannibals spun on their collective heels, just as they had when Shawn squeezed the trigger the first time, and drew down on the old man.

  Mr. Bannon moved slowly down the stairs as the crowd drew down on him, the two remaining quick creatures leading the way.

  Shawn wanted to scream out to the old man, warn him, tell him to go back inside. But opening his mouth would mean definite death for both men.

  The larger of the two towering demons snapped at the air around the old man, tasting and smelling his flesh.

  “Oh, I see what this is,” the old man yelled suddenly. “I always knew you fuckers would come back … and I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Shawn jumped from the bushes and started running down the block when he heard the sound of metal scraping behind him.

  “C’mon, mothafuckas!” The old man cursed and hissed at the growing crowd as he thrust the machete formerly concealed in his cane into one of the fast one’s nasal cavity. He swung the blade loose with a full grunt sending the top half of the creatures head spiraling in the air.

  Mr. Bannon was stronger than Shawn thought, but not quick enough to stop the remaining quick one from biting down on his arm.

  “Argh!”

  Shawn’s feet stopped moving.