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.