Gerald Dean Rice's Blog, page 106

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 7

I actually heard the legion of flies before I saw the group of seven teenaged hoi surrounding a man and a woman, huddling together. One of them slashed the woman's cheek and she screamed, clenching to the man's side even tighter. I realized I'd been staring and looked away just as one of the hoi looked up and saw me.

"What you lookin' at, skintight?" he said. I picked up my pace. "Hey, I'm talkin' to you, 'bag." 'Bag was a slur, shortened from 'skinbag'. I walked as fast as my feet would take me, my eyes on a fixed point far in the distance, but seeing him approach out of the corner of my eye. He closed on me fast, lifting his arm in the air. I turned at the last moment to see he had a steak knife in his raised hand.

I'd forgotten about Ollins, but as if out of nowhere his fist clamped down on my would-be attacker's wrist. He was recently dead, the gash where his collarbone used to be was still red, but from his pockmarked face he could have just as easily died from acne.

Ollins put a stiff arm into his back and pulled the teen's arm back even farther until the shoulder crunched. He let it go and the dead boy whirled on him, his eyes huge with rage and jabbed the fork I hadn't seen in his other hand into Ollins's middle. The bigger hoi was a head and a half taller; but the smaller seemed unfazed at the difference in size.

Ollins latched onto the remaining arm and lifted. The boy was standing on his tippy toes when his remaining arm simply slid out of the socket with a squishing sound. Ollins threw a quick boot to one of his knees, snapping it backwards before pulling out the fork and letting it fall to the ground. He didn't bother to look at the younger bougie's buddies, but I saw them standing and watching in awe as he fell in step behind me. The two humans with him had already fled.

When we got to my house Ollins checked all the rooms for looters. Despite seeing plenty of it going on, I'd never thought about it; I didn't have anything worth stealing and where would they take it anyway? He stood in the living room with his arms folded and nodded.

I went into my bedroom to pack a bag. I still hadn't made up my mind, but this was a good way to buy time while I figured this out. But would I even need a bag?

There was a knock on the door. I opened it and there loomed Ollins. He made a gesture with his hand, like he was giving himself a shot in the arm. I guessed it was time. He pointed to himself and raised his eyebrows.

"No. I'll do it," I said. "Could you give me a minute to myself? I'm sure you remember what it was like to be alive—let me say g'bye, okay?"

He stared at me a moment, then nodded and let me shut the door. I crawled into bed and set the case out. Managing to open it, after a minute I realized there was no way I could do this. And it wasn't just my thing with needles. Being alive had a value I couldn't qualify, but was even more valuable now that the prospect of the living being wiped off the face of the Earth was a real possibility. I would have been executing myself. There's nothing like the prospect of death to show us how much we want to live.

Once I'd resolved myself to not do it I was able to pick it up. My hand was a little shaky. I removed the cap and squirted the contents onto the carpet. Whatever PF-429 was, it stunk. I hoped hoi didn't have a sense of smell.

There was a bang on the door and I thought Ollins was about to burst in. Panicked, I tossed the glass syringe, shattering it against the nightstand. When the door didn't open I kicked the broken syringe under the bed and went to the door.

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 6

They say the ones who can't control it don't last long." I glanced at it and dropped it into my pocket, forgetting about it in the next second.

I would—might do it. It wasn't the dying part. Suicide had risen higher and higher on my to-do list with each passing day. I believed it would be painless. I believed that one way or the other it was how the whole world was going to go, despite the "rosy" picture Jack had painted. But the thought of injecting myself with a needle!

I just didn't know if I could do it. Even holding the case and looking at it made my stomach swim.

I closed it and stood. Jack looked confused a moment and remained seated.

"I'm embarrassed," he said. "I can't see you to the door. Rigor mortis."

I quickly left his office, hearing Jack slide that drawer open again just before. Cindy, the pretty secretary who wasn't so pretty anymore smiled at me with her eyes because her lips had been torn off. She turned away and went back to smacking the endless amount of flies circling her head.

A giant, bald-headed bougie stood in the doorway with a proper cloud of flies buzzing around him. He was holding a sheet of paper with "I am Ollins" written in blue ink printed on it.

"Hi. I'm John," I said, extending my hand. He put his paw around it, dry and cold, but gentle, giving my arm a single pump and letting go. I could see he wasn't talking because his throat had been crushed.

Ollins stood aside and let me pass, but followed me to the elevator. Great. I got it. I take the shot and everything's hunky-dory; I try to escape I get pulled inside out by my new shadow.

The lobby was even more crowded than this morning. I had to take care to stay away from a cluster of prols chained together by the neck by one of the potted plants. Bunny Orlean was behind the security desk, playing with her false eyeball. I sighed. She'd hated me when she was alive.

"I'm gonna reach into that belly, freshie," she yelled at me, popping her prosthetic back in. A lot of the bougies wore their kill items like jewelry. Orlean pulled the knife out of her chest and came around the desk. "C'mon," she said, standing in front of the doors and waving me closer.

I stopped. Ollins breezed past me and Orlean looked up at him like she'd just seen him. He was in front of me, completely blocking her from my view.

"The hell do you want—my beef's with him."

She tried to sidestep Ollins but he corralled her to the side so I could pass.

"Hey, pal, get your hands offa—" she whipped the knife at Ollins, cutting his arm. His huge fist sprang out, bashing into her temple. Orlean bounced off a wall and save for the flies, lay still.

It was an almost uneventful walk home. The bougies really were rounding up the prols. They were even clearing the streets of debris; burned out cars, chunks of buildings and other things. They didn't have uniforms yet, but a bougie—I'm sorry—a hoi wore a makeshift kerchief wrapped around his or her shoulder to distinguish themselves from the prols. I began to think the whole undead thing might not be so bad.

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 5

"But humans—the living—won't accept that. A family of four isn't going to be okay with you killing one of them. We—they'll fight."

Jack waved his hand and slid it back in his pocket.

"You're dead anyway you cut it. You get hit by a truck, get munched by a prol, jump out this window or keel over when you're a hundred, you're dead. And then you'll get up. At least this way you get to go out on your own terms."

He walked back to his desk and sat down, looking at that top desk drawer. He had that blank stare in his eye again, but it was different. I'd seen that nickel-plated .22 when he'd reached into the drawer to retrieve the case.

"You know what the big guys are thinking? They're thinking that if the right guy can get this done he gets to come upstairs. Hell, you'd be my boss."

"But nobody knows me. I don't know how to do anything, how am I even going to sneak out of the quar—" I clapped my hand over my mouth. I hadn't done that since… well, I don't think I'd ever done that. But the Q-word was a big no-no. I'd seen one of the bougies disemboweled by several of his peers for saying it.

Jack didn't seem to notice. "Don't you see that's the beauty of it? It will work because you're a nobody. They'll think you just escaped, they'll check you for bites and find a needle prick. They think we're all mindless over here, zombies don't infect by injection. They'll welcome you like you're one of their own."

"How would you know you could trust me? I mean, I could fake taking the shot, sneak over and then blab everything." As soon as it was out of my mouth I regretted saying it.

Jack only laughed.

"Thirty-eight years you've been one of them and what have they shown you? I remember you in high school—you got beat up practically every day and from the looks of your personnel file it doesn't look like it's gotten much better. I'm giving you an opportunity to belong. You can try fitting in with them, but why would it work now? We need you. You could be one of us—all we ask is one thing. If you can move past a little needle prick you're all set. When was the last time you got a raise anyway?"

Four years, two cents. He was more right than he knew. I covered my wedding band with my right hand, thinking of my Bonnie. Even she hadn't waited for me. She pretty much had sped off in the station wagon with Connor and Kramer poking their heads out the back windows, wagging their tongues at me.

"What would I have to do?"

"Well, take that back to your desk, think about. Better yet, take the rest of the day off." He put his hand over mine. It was still sticky from the meat he'd just eaten. "Get back to me."

I looked from the case and back up to him, really wondering if this was something I could do. I didn't have a life and they knew it. Bonnie and the dogs had made it out before the quarantine, maybe I could go see them if I could get through.

Jack looked at me. Really looked at me like I was a friend. They needed me—finally I was important to someone.

"Oh, and take this," he said, pulling a crumpled business card out of his breast pocket. Something gelatinous oozed out of the open wound in the back of his head and rolled down his back. "I hear it helps with the craving, but I haven't had time to go.

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 4

"Right after my promotion your name was the first past my lips. You're on a very short list."

I held the syringe up to the light.

"What is it?"

"Something the company came up with before the Conversion." That's what they called it in corporate—the Great Conversion. "That's PF-429. They boys in marketing are calling it 'Termicil'."

He began explaining further after turning from the window to see my blank face.

"It's pretty much a better version of the stuff they use to euthanize dogs cocktailed with some kind of preservative. A drop of that is enough to kill you. Get this—it keeps the heart pumping for up to ten hours after brain activity ceases. The original plan was to use it on death row inmates who wanted to donate their organs. Cuts down on transport time or something. The lab guys are looking into extending the duration of the drug. Make the other side more appealing to the arists once we take over. Completely painless—you'll be dead in seconds."

"But I don't… I don't wanna die."

"Listen!" Jack slammed his palms down on the desk, leaning over and staring at me. Anger. The other thing that makes the undead look at humans like food. Jack gritted his teeth, looking like he was about to fly over the desk at me. But he looked away, turned and went back to that window.

"It's not about you and what you want." He was calm again. "You're not getting out of here, every day there are more prols roaming the streets looking for a freshie, and hell, they don't want you out there. Either the prols out there overwhelm the arists and eventually get in here and kill you or the arists win, come in and wipe this place off the map. The only reason they don't bomb us all to hell right now is because they don't know what effect it will have on the space dust that's reanimated us." He rolled his eyes at the last part.

"Wanna know a secret?" He looked at me and leaned against the window. "The space dust, the signal, the virus, the rads—it's all BS. But it's all true too. I know it's a little 1984-ish, but it's a good place to hide the truth. Right in the middle of the lie.

"The reason the scientists can't all agree is because they're looking for the reason for the dead walking around when it's really a combo of several things, including a genetic mutation that began in human beings in about the fourteenth century."

"How would you know that?"

He shrugged. "That's the thing they'll never figure out about the virus. It's semi-sentient. You see a lowly prol stumbling around, trying to eat you, but there's memory from a thousand generations in him. He has the memories of the one who bit him too. And the one before that. On and on like that. That's why they like to eat the brain if they can get to it. To make that mind a greater part of themselves."

Jack stared into the silvery sky for a long time. For a moment I almost thought he had really died.

"We are a growing community. A subgroup. We want to become part of the larger community. Do you understand that, John? Wanting to belong? We're all human, just some of us lack a pulse. When you don't belong anywhere, that's when you're really dead."

The Beggar's Bowl

I just put this up on Smashwords for $0.99 with 3 pages of the follow-up to The Ghost Toucher, The Golden Ones at the end. I have to take a picture for the cover, but the story itself is available now.

What a Bargain!

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 3

"No," I said, covering my mouth and nose with my shirt. As disgusting as it was, it was preferable to him gnawing on me. "Go ahead."

Jack grabbed a loop of intestine and bit into it, fresh blood and feces spilling out. The smell got even worse as he became engrossed. The slurps, the moaning, the bits of flesh caught between his teeth and fingers, the flies—I scooted back a foot and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up. Jack was no different from any prol, lost in his food.

After a minute or so he looked up. He stared at me like I was prey, blinked twice, and was back.

"Over succeeding would be saturation above sixty-eight percent," Jack said and belched. "The human race would die out entirely if we converted too many."

"So you're not going to kill everybody?" I asked.

"No." He swallowed what was in his mouth and waved a hand at me, a hunk of flesh falling off his index finger. "We need humans to survive ourselves. We just want a level playing field. We kill so many, we convert so many and for the most part leave the rest alone. In fifty years it'll be the most normal thing in the world for an arist to be elbow to elbow with a hoi.

"Hey, look at me—I'm not trying to eat you, am I? Sure you have to be careful of the prols, but haven't hoi police been rounding them up? We're building infrastructure. There's a clear future ahead and we need the arists. I need you to be a part of it—to help make it happen."

He made a face at the half-eaten pile in front of him and swept it into his trash can.

"We're going to utilize the BOST strategy initially—that's bite one, spare two. Rough estimates say two out of every ten in this country is an Undead-American, so that's two of us versus eight of them. If we convert two then that's four of us versus six of them, bringing us pretty close to the parity we're looking for. Now we'll have to quickly consolidate with all the 'free-range' prols—" he made quotation marks with his fingers—"to keep them from killing off too many. Now our way calls for conversion of only twenty-five percent of the living. Twenty-five. That something most of the arists can live with, isn't it?" He chuckled at his joke. "The problem is those free-rangers. If we can't get out of here quick enough and head them off then it's boo time."

"Boo time?"

"The crowd boos, the curtain falls, show's over."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"We need an in tacter." He smiled at me.

"A what?"

Jack reached in another drawer and pulled out a small, black rectangular case and slid it across the desk. I scooted back, leaning over to grab it.

"Go ahead and open it."

Inside there was a syringe filled with a pale yellow fluid.

"Part of the new expansion strategy involves infiltrating the aristocracy with one of ours that can pass. Considering even the freshest of us could be spotted at twenty yards we began looking into the possibility of a switch hitter. We needed someone who could always be counted on, someone who didn't have anything to lose, someone ready to be a team player." He was pacing in front of that plate glass window, looking down onto the street. If I'd had the guts I would have pushed the both of us right through it.

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 2

Jack got that dull look in his eyes. The one just before a z-word gets all chewy. Every day I walked to work and I was coming to a cross street one morning when I saw a human and a hoi about to cross the street. They were dressed in the same navy blue suit, even had similar briefcases. I guess they knew each other when they both were alive, but the hoi stopped at the corner, looked both ways and glanced at his wrist.

"Uhh, what time is it?" he asked, scratching his head.

"Seven forty—"

And the hoi was on him. He knocked the man's wrist into his mouth and sent him reeling into the street, the left side of his mouth a bloody ragged mess. I froze, watching it—I'm sorry, but I thought of him as a thing at the time—eat the man's face, holding him down by a fistful of hair as it tore away at his lower left cheek, stripping skin all the way down to the side of his neck. The man's screams turned into drowning gurgles as it chewed through an artery, blood spurting all the way to within a foot of me.

Then the hoi was back. He realized what he'd done and recoiled from his friend's body. And then of all things—he tried doing CPR! I watched him count out—one, two, three, four, then pinch his nose and breathe into his mouth. Imagine a corpse trying to revive someone!

His friend did get up. When he stood it was obvious the CPR wasn't what did it. The hoi had eaten a big chunk of muscle out of his neck and it was obvious the man was dead.

"Dave, I'm sorry man," the first hoi said.

"Dude—my suit!" the second said, looking down at himself. He threw his hands up in frustration and turned away, walking across the street. "C'mon, maybe we can catch breakfast."

They hadn't even looked at me. Maybe that was the first sign I was different. Maybe that was the reason Jack had chosen me. By the time I knew it was too late to ask.

"Ah, yes, the future," Jack continued. "You know one of the keys to any thriving community, John?"

"No," I said.

"Growth. Works the same with the living as it does in here. G.O.W., John. Either we grow or we die." I gave him a look. "You know what I mean."

"Right now they think they have us trapped in here. Every now and then one of the M.F.E.s—mindless flesh-eaters—slips through and they put him down, study him or whatever it is they do, but that's pretty much it. They don't realize we really don't want to get out just yet. Full out aggression is too iffy at this point. We could succeed, we could fail, hell we could over succeed."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm glad you asked that." He leaned back in his chair, made a face and sniffed. "Hey, what's that smell?"

I was nervous, thinking he might have been smelling me. But he looked around and opened one of the drawers at his side, looked up at me and smiled.

"Wow, they're really rolling out the welcome wagon." He reached into the drawer with both hands and pulled a pile of entrails, dropping the whole stinking mess on the desk. He put his face over it and breathed in like it was manna.

"I could use a little B.T.E. You mind if I?" he asked, pointing at it. He had that look in his eye again.

Technical Difficulties

Yeah, I didn't mean for 'Tonight' to come before the first post of FEA, but there you go.  Next installment at midnight!

Tonight

Starting at 8pm tonight and midnight there after I'll be posting my story "Flesh-Eaters Anonymous".  I wrote this several years ago, probably back in '07.  It's got its problems and maybe putting it up here will help me work them out.  Enjoy.

Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 1

"That's right, John. You're looking at the new veep of the whole Northeast Division." Jack Tate sat behind an expansive wood desk with a giant plate glass window behind him that gave a view down on Fifth Street. It used to be a pretty good view until the Black Group Building across the street was blown up.

Jack had a fresh bullet wound in his temple, small enough to have come from a .22 or something like that, but the ragged mess on the other side of his head was anything but. He must have done it without his suit jacket on; the collar of his white shirt was deep crimson, but the gray jacket was unstained. He'd been a living, breathing, non-flesh eating Jack Tate just before lunch. I shifted in my seat.

"Uh, congratulations," I said.

"Hey thanks, man. Means a lot." He'd been under a deadline, was all I had known. I was in accounts receivable, he was my manager's manager so we passed by one another often enough. We'd actually gone to high school together, he'd graduated the year after me. I had already been working here eight years when he first started.

The past few days he had had a bewildered look, like the stress was becoming too much. His eyes were still red-rimmed and he had the faint odor of vodka on him, but he had a sparkle to him. Jack was fresh enough to not stink and if you really zoomed in on his eyes you could almost forget about the gaping head wound.

And the flies.

Nobody tells you about the flies and you never see it in the movies. Not sexy, I suppose. But almost every one of them walks around with a cloud of flies buzzing around. Jack only had a few right now, but by tomorrow morning he'd be a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the walking dead.

Jack leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and laced his fingers behind his head. There was a hole with some of the cushioning coming out by his left hand. He must have done it right there.

"How long you been working for the company, John?"

"Oh, I'm not sure. Twelve years?"

"Jeez, that's long. And you're still in A/R? Hell, I don't need to turn you; you're already dead."

"You're going to—"

"No, no, no," he said. "It's a joke. I brought you in to talk about the FOH."

"Flint Osteopathic Hospital?" I'd started to cry and Jack must have heard it in my voice.

"Stop it already." He held out the box of Kleenex on his desk and I took a few. "I'm talking about the future of humankind. I'm not gonna eatcha. Really, I'm not. Not hungry anyway."

As you all know hoi don't eat people all the time. I was surprised to learn how many have higher brain function, even the ones that sustain damage to the brain. Like Jack. In the early days even they were corralling the prols and the humans could walk around almost like nothing had happened.

"Where was I?" That's the other thing I learned. Sometimes you get confused. Throw in a non-sequitir or two and you're completely thrown. That's a bad thing.