NEW WEB SAGA — Derek Barton – 2023
I have been writing a lot lately but mainly fantasy. So I don’t want to neglect you, my dark horror readers. So here’s my first ever attempt at a zompoc! What’s that, you say? It’s my first zombie apocalypse story!! ENJOY!!
*****
A sour smell, like decaying meat and rotting lemons, struck Manny. It was so powerful he gagged on reflex and covered his nose and mouth with both hands.
What in gods is that, his inner voice screamed at him.
Tonight, however, the stench resonating all through his background storage area was part of the curse. This rank scent would undoubtedly stick with him for a week like it was imprinted into his brain. He literally would relive it over and over. At least that had been his experience.
Manny’s sense of smell head always been a blessing and a curse. It was probably triple the average person’s senses. He used it often to work out the ingredients and spices used in every day meal’s served by his competitors. He was a small-time restaurant owner on the east side of Chicago. And he was quickly gaining ground on the other restaurants and getting a reputation for his culinary talents.
He walked over to a tiny barred window high on the southern wall and slid it partially open to let in fresh air. That was a terrible decision. More of the foul reek barreled into him again, bending him over, and making him retch loudly.
While muttering curse words to himself through his clasped fists, he shuffled over to a set of metal shelves. It took a moment but he finally spotted a strawberry-lemon air freshener. He immediately sprayed it in wide arching swings through the air.
He hesitantly took away his hands and tried to lightly smell the air. It was livable but still nasty. That was when Manny heard a buzzing, scratching sound coming from the alley outside the storage room.
The summer heat and sticky humidity had forced him to keep every door and window sealed shut in the cramped restaurant. Now through that barred window he heard the very distinct insect-like cadence.
He cocked his head to the left to hear it better. While Manny was blessed with super smell he had lost his hearing in his left ear years ago in his service as a Marine. A rocket shell had been launched into their camp one fine summer evening in Afghanistan. He lived through the war but didn’t come back unmarked.
He could tell that the sounds were from more than one source but from a few, quite a few insects. Grabbing a towel, he wrapped the cloth around his face then unlocked the alley door.
Outside it was near sunset. Only a blinking street lamp at the end of the alleyway was illuminating anything. Next to the door was a large green dumpster and another one opposite his was backed up against an old shoe store. It had been abandoned a year ago so no light from it helped light up the interior of the back alley.
The smell grew stronger and choked him mercilessly. The meaty smell was now combined with a sulphuric taste in the air.
“Carver? Carver, you out here?” Manny managed to call out. Carver was a homeless man that had been residing the last four or five months behind his restaurant.
Manny heard a grunt, muffled but distinct. It came from the other side of the bin.
All over the walls, clinging to the bricks of the buildings, he spotted hundreds of cockroaches. That alien song of buzzing came from them as they fluttered their wings in the air.
They appeared to Manny as though they were fanning themselves like sunbathers at the poolside. He’d never seen anything like it. He was frozen by the spectacle in the alley doorway. On the ground at the base of the shoe store, a sewer grate was askew. Hundreds more of the roaches circled it. They crawled slowly and methodically over each other making a ladder of their bodies to get up and out of the open drain!
A hand slapped at his shoe. Manny shrieked.
It was Carver! Or at least he thought it was as it was hard to be sure in the faint yellowish light.
Carver’s body was wrong, just wrong! His face, the skin and muscles were wax-like, hung like soft raw dough. Red holes dotted his entire upper torso! Blood bubbled out and dribbled down. His eyes were gone! His mouth open and making a squishy gurgling noise.
Manny shrieked again when he spotted the first sets of antennae inside those red holes! Their tiny heads looking out, staring back out at him!
Carver had become a crawling, mewling human bag of cockroaches!
