They Eat Read online

  He held the gun in both hands again, turned and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the quick one in the shoulder.

  It looked up at Shawn, showed its summer cloud white teeth stained with Bannon’s blood and growled before biting into the old man’s arm again.

  Mr. Bannon howled with pain.

  Shawn stepped closer and fired again.

  This time, the bullet grazed the top of the quick one’s head.

  The others were now right on top of Mr. Bannon, thumping and thudding against each other as he used his free hand to deliver strong blows to their open, bloody eye sockets and skinless faces.

  Shawn stepped closer and fired again.

  The bullet ripped through the back of the quick one’s head. It sent the creature crashing to the ground, taking Mr. Bannon with it.

  “Mr. Bannon!”

  Shawn emptied his gun into the heads of the rest of the crowd, only stopping when the loud booms turned into the soft clicks of his empty weapon.

  He stood drenched in sweat and out of breath, facing two of the last standing stragglers.

  They looked like they used to be teenagers.

  One had a mohawk with patches of curly hair still clinging to the part of its scalp that wasn’t sliding down its face. The other had a tattoo on its face with piercings that hung low on to the rotting skin of his bottom lip.

  Shawn flipped the gun around in his hand, wrapped his long, thin fingers firmly around the barrel, and hammered it into their heads until they folded into the ground in a cold, twitching heap.

  Quiet rained down on the block again.

  Shaw bent down and rested on his knees. His breathing was hard, but shallow.

  “Fuck, old man,” he said looking at Mr. Bannon lying with his arm still locked in the quick one’s dead jaw. “You done got yourself killed.”

  “ … No, I didn’t,” the old man whispered.

  “Mr. Bannon!”

  Shawn ran to the old man as he struggled to pry the thing’s teeth out of the gushing wound in his arm.

  “And don’t even bother asking me why I didn’t help you when you ran out of bullets! Cuz it’ll be the same answer you’d give me if I asked you why you jumped outta them damn bushes and started running.

  Now help me get this fucker off me and get me in the house!”

  7 kenneth bannon

  They tried to send me to Vietnam in ‘65, but that didn’t work out very well for the U.S. government.

  They sent me home two weeks into basic training because of my eyesight.

  I’ll never forget the day I showed up on my momma’s doorstep, fresh off the bus from Fort Dix and gave her the news. When she opened the door she had that same look in her eye she always had when I caught her with some man who wasn’t my father on top of her.

  I tucked my chin so far into my chest I could feel my heart beat in my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, momma.”

  “Aw, hell boy. I coulda told them you couldn’t see wortha damn before they put you on the bus.”

  She laughed.

  I didn’t.

  The pickings were slim for young black men back then. If your parents weren’t rich and connected, there was no college and good luck trying to get one of those union jobs in the factories.

  “Too many negroes, not enough jobs,” my dad would saw as he flipped through the morning paper.

  I didn’t understand him when I was a kid, but I did when I came back to the city that summer.

  I wanted to make him proud, but my shitty vision spurred by my albino skin made it impossible. Bored and unemployed, I took to hanging out with friends with the same condition. And before you ask, I didn’t have a gang of albino men to hang out with, but they were just as bored and jobless as I was. Without the slightest inkling of what to do with our lives, we took to getting high on whatever we could afford. Me, Jack Jackson (a name he caught shit for all through school) and Donny McIver spent our days sleeping and nights in my parent’s attic listening to Al Green belt out tunes of love on my father’s old record player.

  It was around this time that the nightmares started.

  I’d fall asleep, the haze of marijuana smoke lulling me softly into slumber. The black behind my eyes would turn grey and they would come out of the hazy mist … one by one.

  I’d seen many of my friends go off to war and never come back. Before it started, I would dream of them the way we were before they left, laughing, smiling at pretty girls. But the nightmares began and they changed. Some of them would lumber slowly out of the fog, their flesh rotting on their bones as they moved toward me. They never spoke; they just feasted on the skin and muscle of the crowd of people that stood between us. They growled with delight as they sunk their shining, white teeth into men, women, and, on some nights, babies. It was on those nights that I woke up breathing hard, sweat soaking my sheets.

  At first I told Donny and Jack, but the looks on their faces told me I should keep the truth to myself.

  Time passed and the dreams and my vision got worse.

  “Mr. Bannon, there really isn’t much we can do about your progressive vision loss,” the old, white doctor said as he fixed the thick lensed glasses on my nose.

  I thanked him anyway.

  Shortly after that, the creatures started evolving in my dreams. Instead of slowly pulling people in front of me to the ground and peeling the flesh from their bodies while they fought and screamed out into the still grey air, they moved quickly.

  They were tall and just as grey as the air around them, but the skin had sloshed off their faces, leaving the magnetic glow of their solid white teeth affixed flush to their faces. It made them look like they were perpetually happy, even as they ate. Their muscles moved and flexed with an animalistic prowess beneath the thin layer of skin covering the rest of their bodies as they moved about from person to person, leaving heaps of corpses in their path. Beneath their rising and falling chests was a cavern where their stomachs used to be; a small piece of their intestines dangling, shaking inside their midsections. I watched in horror as chunks of chewed skin, hair, and blood fell in splats from the hanging piece of dead tissue inside them.

  I would try to scream, but nothing ever came out.

  Soon my dreams were becoming the only things I could see clearly. They were also quickly becoming more of a reality, as I could smell the death around me and feel the creatures touching my skin.

  It never failed, every time the largest and most grotesque of the horde would reach out to me, my head in its palm like it was cradling a baby, I’d jump awake, sweat gushing from my thinning body.

  Eyes wide open, I’d scan the dark room, the contents of which reflected off my defective retina in messy, blurred blobs.

  *****

  I tried to live a normal life, even had a few girlfriends, but they always turned to exes after the first time we spent the night together.

  My job situation was no better. I tried a job working the night shift at a local market in hopes of avoiding the “things” that stalked my dreams at night, but they started coming to me in the day when I tried to sneak quick naps.

  Looking in the mirror those days was almost as frightening as what I saw when I closed my eyes.

  It was impossible for me to get any paler, but the bags under my eyes were heavier than a fat man’s to-go plate from a Chinese buffet.

  I started coming home and going straight to my room and my mother stopped asking me if I was going to eat.

  My father tried to “talk some sense” into me, but I stopped listening.

  They were both turning into mocha-colored blobs of flesh to me anyway and the day was quickly approaching where I wouldn’t be able to see them at all.

  *****

  It was hot that night. I bumped my legs into every piece of furniture in my room, but finally made it to the window to turn on the fan.

  I’d been awake for 3 days before they started coming to me. I tried to run, but they’d always catch me, eyes glaring as bright
white as their exposed teeth.

  The optometrist told me that morning that my retina was the worst he’d ever seen in someone my age.

  I cried when the words brushed off his lips with a level of sincerely and care he’d left at home and let the warm tears sit on my cheeks until they turned to salty trails of dust.

  When I got home, I sat on my bed and stared at the walls. My eyes jumped in their sockets, desperately searching for the images of what was right in front of me.

  All I could see was them. They hovered just beyond what ever light my eyes still were able to capture, biting the nothingness in the air in my direction.

  But I was tired -- tired of running, tired of hiding, tired of not being able to see my family.

  I decided right then that it was going to be me or them, but I wasn’t going to live like that any longer.

  I lay on the bed and closed my eyes.

  The blackness came, then the mist and so did they.

  The biggest of them wrapped its long fingers around my arm and pulled me toward its hungry mouth.

  I struggled in its iron-like grasp, but it pulled me closer with ease.

  My clenched fist moved before I knew it, curled in my defense and flew into the spewing cavern in the creature’s belly. The force behind my blow sent chunks of chewed flesh flying from the creature’s mouth and onto my face, but it also loosened its grip. I crashed to the ground and scrambled around, trying to regain my bearings. I heard the thing hit the ground behind me. It heaved and gagged, the sound of chunky wetness and the smell of copper pushing through my nostrils.

  The ground was cold and wet. Random small hills of gravel dotted the space beneath my fumbling fingers as they tried to make sense of the feel of my surroundings. Some felt slick with rain, while others were thick and sticky, but I tried not to think about what was making them feel that way.

  My hands stopped when they met a soft, warm bump. I pushed back quickly and fell on my ass, knowing it was one of the thing’s victims.

  I could hear the thing behind me regain its footing in the gravel. It snapped its large teeth out into the air on my back.

  I rose to my feet and turned to face it.

  This is your dream, Kenneth. You control what happens.

  The grey air around us cleared as the thought entered my mind.

  The slowest of them, midsections still intact, were crowded in a circle about 50 feet away ravenously feasting on the bodies of classmates and friends I’d last seen picked off by the draft. At my feet, I saw the soft lump I’d stumbled into was a woman. She’d curled herself into a ball to protect herself from the horde, but the gnarly gashes in her back proved she’d been unsuccessful. But the thing was in front of me now and he had a friend, a ganglier twin who looked just as hungry. I let a tear drop from my eye at the thought of not having time to worry about her. With the grey mist gone, I saw them all clearly. The piece of intestine hanging in their otherwise empty torsos vibrated violently as they growled from within. Their horrifically white teeth clenched tight in anger and frustration. And their eyes … their eyes were a soft gray, like the sky after a winter storm.

  “You fuckers are as blind as I am,” I shouted at them as the realization hit me.

  I need a weapon.

  I ran my hand down the side of my leg and felt cold steel appear out of nothing. It ended at a handle tucked into a harness around my waist, just like I thought it would. I pulled the sword from my body. It fit perfectly in my hand.

  The sound of scraping metal cut through the air like singing birds after a hard winter.

  Now kill these bitches! All of them!

  I lowered my eyes to slits in my face as the first of the two larger creatures sprinted toward me.

  My sword sliced through the side of its neck effortlessly.

  I steadied myself on my feet in time to watch its head slide off the diagonal cut and into the gravel at our feet.

  The breath of the second one tickled the hair on the back of my neck as its companion’s head rolled to a stop.

  I thrust my sword backward and sent it pummeling through its empty gut and out through its spine.

  I turned to face it, just as it opened its mouth wide as if it were in pain, but didn’t have the vocal strength to express it.

  I lifted my sword slowly and I stared into its eyes. They fluttered about, milky pupils trying in vain to see.

  Grunts of strain and effort punctuated each inch of torn, dead flesh as I used both hands to raise my sword, slowly cutting the creature’s long body in half.

  The last inch of my blade came out of the top of its head and its body fell before me, split like an empty banana peel.

  For the first time in my life I felt triumphant, charged and primed by the heat of my served vengeance.

  I turned to the crowd of things eagerly feasting on my friends.

  “You’re next,” I screamed from my gut as I raised my sword over my shoulder.

  “Kenneth?!”

  My mother’s voice pulled me, literally kicking and screaming, awake. I could no longer smell death around me, just the crispness of the moth balls she insisted on putting in the closets in my room.

  “That’s you, right Ma?”

  I opened my eyes, but the black and colorful spots that dotted my field of vision before I’d fallen asleep had grown and bled into each other.

  I could hear my mother, but could only see her in my memories.

  *****

  The state declared me legally blind a few days later.

  Sometimes I think it was for the best … especially as the years passed and my parents’ youth fled them.

  Being blind isn’t as bad as people make it out to be.

  I couldn’t see, but I did a damn fine job of hearing, feeling, and tasting everything. People, especially women, had pity on me. It was annoying, but I learned to use it to my advantage. After mom and dad died, I stayed in the house on Sanhican Drive.

  It was home.

  It was the place where I’d fought my greatest fight.

  I didn’t tell anyone about that dream until many years later.

  “I knew they’d be back,” I told the young man as he scrambled around my house looking for something to dress my wounds.

  “Mr. Bannon! Just calm down I’m going to get you cleaned up.”

  8 tammy collins

  “I’ve got to get my mom, Tammy,” Gus stuttered lightly while staring at the empty road in front of them.

  Tammy worked in silence, simultaneously pushing buttons on the camera and the tablet the station finally relented and bought six months before.

  “Got it!”

  “Got what? Do you even hear me talking to you?”

  “Yeah, Gus, I hear you. I just …”

  The news van rumbled over the pot holes of Passaic Street as Gus drove through the battered neighborhood.

  “My ma said this is where all of the black doctors and lawyers used to live,” he whispered as he finally took his eyes off the road and looked around their dilapidated surroundings.

  “OK, Gus. The station has our footage. I just got a text from Abe and he loved it … said we are going to live in 10 minutes. We need to find somewhere where those dead heads aren’t eating people’s faces off so we can set up the intro.”

  “My mom, Tammy!”

  “I know, I know. We gotta get your mom.” Tammy lowered her eyes back to the tablet and swiped through the touch screen.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s more important than you making it big.”

  “Stop the truck!”

  The van skidded to a halt with a painful squeal.

  “So we go get your mom and do what with her?” Tammy faced Gus and widened her eyes as she spoke.

  “We help her. We save her, Tammy. It’s only a matter of time, hours maybe, before those things … you saw those things …”

  The emotions swelled in his chest before his voice trailed off.

  “Yea, I saw them, Gus.” Tammy smacked. She touched hi
s hand, just like she read about in freshman interpersonal communications -- to show him she was concerned.

  “Think about it. We go and get your mom from her safe home and bring her out here with us? With those things? And that’s considered saving her?”

  Gus didn’t respond, but stared into Tammy’s eyes as her forced sincerity worked its magic on him.

  “The best thing we can do for her, for everyone in this city, is to tell them what’s going on out here.”

  The pregnant silence in the van tickled their ears.

  “Ok,” Gus said abruptly The way his body moved indicated he was annoyed, tight and stiff, but he undid his seatbelt and took the camera from Tammy. “We’ll record the lead in, send it to the station and then we’re going to my mom’s house. I have to check on her at least.”

  “We’re getting out here? In this neighborhood?”

  Gus looked back at Tammy, smiled and slammed the van’s door behind him.

  “You know, when I was growing up me and my friends would joke about how if some real shit ever went down, the hood would be the last place to go.”

  Gus looked over his shoulder at the abandoned houses and neon signs screaming “Lotto” and “Liquor”.

  “Looks like we were right.”

  Gus stood in front of the van, positioned the camera on his shoulder and waved his hands at Tammy.

  “C’mon, let’s do this!”

  Tammy pulled the sun visor down and checked her hair and makeup in the small mirror.

  You got this! You’re perfect! Now get your ass out there and make magic.

  *****

  This is Tammy Collins live on the air for WTRE News with an update on the recent apparent outbreak that is causing some local Trenton residents to cannibalize others. We have some additional footage from the downtown area, showing just how violent and aggressive these people are becoming. I’d like to again warn our more sensitive viewers that the footage we’re about to air is extremely graphic.

  The red button on the top of the camera came on and Tammy dropped her smile.

  “We’ve got 2 minutes and 9 seconds before we’re live again.”