Cattle by Rod Redux
Cattle
It is ten years after the global apocalypse. The Phage, the zombie virus that brought the world to its knees, has mutated, restoring the minds of its undead victims: their personalities, their memories and even their dreams. The hungry dead are no longer the mindless monsters that drove mankind to the brink of extinction. They possess once again the human cunning that once made man the masters of the world.But they still have their relentless hunger for human flesh.The last few living humans still at large in this twisted new world now find themselves hunted for a far more insidious reason. If captured, they will be kept, farmed, and forced to produce the living flesh their hungry masters crave...
This is the first installment of an ongoing story I'm working on for you, my friends and readers. I can't promise to work on it any more regularly than the mood strikes me, but I hope you enjoy it all the same!
1. Illinois
“Try to keep up, Harold!” Brent Scarborough gasped, racing through the forest as fast as he could go. His lungs were burning, his heart thudding in his chest, but he didn’t dare slow his pace, not even for his friend. They’d been running together for two years now. Harold Killian was like a brother to him—closer than a brother, to be honest—but the deadheads were on their tail, and he was determined to get away, to survive, and make it to the fabled Free Zone, where they could live among their own kind and have some kind of normal life again, without worrying about deadheads eating them alive their every waking moment.“Just go!” Harold gasped, limping several yards behind him. “Don’t you wait… on me, Brent Scarborough!”Harold had twisted his ankle pretty badly when they took off through the forest. A meat patrol had come up unexpectedly on them as they were foraging for food in an old service station—caught them dead to rights as they were coming out of the crumbling Pack’N’Tuck—and they had rabbited into the woods. It was autumn. Probably late October or November. The floor of the forest was thickly carpeted with leaves, and Harold had stepped into a chuckhole, nearly breaking his ankle. They would have been fine if their pursuers were dumbheads. They were good at eluding the dumb ones. But it was a meat patrol, and the zombies had squealed to a stop and given chase. It was the reapers’ job to find and catch wild humans. The deadheads were well trained, and they were armed, and they never gave up.Brent could hear the reapers calling out to one another behind them. Their bone chilling grunts and snarls echoed in the distance, but they were closing in, and Brent felt almost faint with terror. Terror for himself. Terror for his friend.This is it, he thought. We’re going to die! And we were so close!The Free Zone was a city populated and controlled by living men and women. Once it had been called Peoria, but it was the Free Zone now. The people of the Free Zone had ensured their survival by rigging their fortress city with nukes. Any aggressive move by the zombie nations and they would blow themselves up, vaporizing every man, woman and child in the city. There were so few living human beings now the deadheads didn’t dare move against them, and sometimes they even protected the living men from herds of mindless dumbheads. In exchange, the people of the Free Zone gave the zombies their dead. The zombies couldn’t starve to death—they were already dead—but they were always hungry. It was a suicide standoff, but it worked, and the zombies were content to pick off any wild runners who tried to make it to the Shangri-La of the Living.A shot rang out, its report rolling through the forest, and Brent cried out. He couldn’t help himself. The yelp had jumped out of his mouth before he could catch it, like a frightened frog. He tried to increase his speed, but his strength was rapidly flagging. He couldn’t run all day without stopping. He was only a man. But his pursuers could.Harold grunted loudly and fell, the dry forest duff crunching under his body as he hit the ground and rolled.For a second, Brent thought his friend had been shot, and he started to turn back to help him, zombies or no zombies.“Go, go!” Harold panted, struggling to get back to his feet. The barrel-chested older man was sweaty and red-faced, his bright orange hair disheveled, a long scratch on his cheek where some broken branch had gouged him. As Brent wavered between obeying and helping his companion, Harold yanked off his backpack and threw it to the younger man. The bag held all his worldly possessions: supplies, a few keepsakes, and the little bit of food they’d found in the abandoned service station: some old canned vegetables, a few packs of Ramen noodles. “Harold, no,” Brent wheezed, looking down at the backpack like it was going to change into a hungry alligator at any second.“If you don’t go, they’re going to catch both of us today,” Harold said. He tested his ankle and groaned at the pain. “Go on. I’ll catch up if I can get away from them. Get to the Free Zone. Don’t throw your life away on me.”Another shot rang out, and Harold Killian’s eyes bulged out. His body stiffened, and then he dropped to his knees.“Harold!” Brent howled.Harold tried to talk, but his last words came out a froth of blood and spit. He toppled forward onto his face and didn’t move. A moist red stain expanded around a tiny hole in the back of his denim jacket.Brent squeezed his hands into fists, screaming through his clenched teeth. He spotted one of the reapers then, trudging up over the rise, a rifle in its decayed hands. He ducked, snatched up his friend’s backpack, and started running.They wouldn’t follow him any further, he knew. They were like sharks. They wouldn’t be able to resist the smell of his friend’s blood. They would tear the dead man apart, eat until their bellies couldn’t hold anymore, then take the rest to the nearest town and put it on the meat market. Harold was a big man. He’d probably fetch a handsome price, even if they ate half of him here in the forest.Brent ran.He ran for his life.
2. Night
There was one thing more frightening than death, more horrible than the zombies who had inherited the earth, and that was being alone.Brent was 23 years old when the zombie apocalypse went down, a junior studying at Western Tennessee University, still living at home with his parents to save money on tuition, and engaged to a bright, funny, sexy little bookworm named Naomi Richardson. Naomi was a sardonic feminist, wore crazy hornrim glasses to damper her rather stunning beauty, and only read novels written by dead authors. Her only nod to conventionality was dating him, and a longtime addiction toThe Days of Our Lives, of which she was both proud and embarrassed. The soap because it was so ordinary, and him because there was really nothing special about him apart from his looks. Your typical college jock, that was Brent Scarborough, studying business and partying on a football scholarship. His mother loved Naomi and couldn’t wait for them to marry and start having beautiful babies for her to spoil. His dad thought Naomi was strange, and that Brent should sew his wild oats before settling down, though he would never say something like that in front of his wife or future daughter-in-law. He only said it to Brent after he’d had a few too many drinks.But that was before the Phage. That was before people started getting sick and eating each other. That was before his mother and father and fiancé died, and he was cast adrift on the churning whitecaps of a global catastrophe.He had survived because he was strong and fast and lucky. He might not have been the sharpest utensil in the silverware drawer, but he quickly found that he possessed a keen instinct for self-preservation. It had kept him alive when so many others were dying, kept him going when other smarter people gave up.He wanted to live, and that survival instinct drove him on when any other rational being would curl up into a fetal position and surrender.But he hated being alone.He was crouched in the corner of some sort of derelict pumping station now, a squat little shed with a tin roof and cinderblock walls. In the center of the bare concrete floor was an abstract sculpture of pipes and gauges. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the station was for, but he was glad that he had stumbled across it. He had almost wept with joy when the door gave way under his first few kicks. It was safer, and a whole lot warmer, sheltering inside the shed than it would have been sleeping out in the open.“What do you say, Harold old buddy old pal?” Brent murmured, huddled under his jacket and threadbare blanket. “It’s a lot better than sleeping outside,” Ghost-Harold replied.Teeth chattering, Brent nodded. “Yes, indeed!”He knew there weren’t any ghosts in the shed with him. He wasn’t that crazy, but he was still too juiced up on adrenaline to sleep, and it was a way to keep his brain occupied until exhaustion finally claimed his weary soul. It was that or replay the day’s events in his mind, and he certainly didn’t want to do that.“Remember how we met, Harold?” Brent said, grinning a little in the dark.“Oh, yeah,” Ghost-Harold said with a chuckle. “Sorry about that.”“It was about two years ago,” Brent said. “I was on my own at the time. The girl I was traveling with just before you, girl named Angie Wright, had just died. She scratched her hand trying to climb over a barbed wire fence and got some kind of infection. It was pretty bad.”“You guys fuck?” Ghost-Harold said.“I told you already,” Brent said. “No. She was a lesbian.”“Oh, yeah, right. I forget.”“Anyway, I was on my own. It was a hot summer afternoon, and I decided to cool off in a creek. I was splashing around buck naked when you came out of the woods with your rifle. ‘Put your hands where I can ‘em!’ you yelled. Oh, man, I about messed myself. And then you told me to turn around, and I thought for sure you were going to shoot me in the back. That, or cornhole me. Or both!”“Naw, man, I don’t swing that way!” Ghost-Harold guffawed. “I just wanted to rob ya!”“You did, too. Took everything I had. Even my clothes.”“Yeah, but you followed me. You followed me for the rest of the day, naked as a baby, until I felt sorry for you and gave you your stuff back.”“Yeah,” Brent said, smiling at the reminiscence. The smile faded and he sniffed. “We got off to a rough start, but we ended up making a pretty good team.”“We sure did, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said.“Always stayed two steps ahead of the meat patrols. Always… Ah, hell, man, why’d you have to go and die today? I hate being by myself!”“Sorry, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “I couldn’t help it.”“I know.”“You just keep running, kid. You’ll make it to the Free Zone, and then you can find you a nice live girl and get married and have a whole passel of fat little live babies.”Brent snorted. “Is that all you think about?”“What? Making babies?”“Yeah.”“What else is there to do? We gotta repopulate the world, kiddo.”Brent sighed. “I think our time has came and went.”“You and me?”“No… humanity.”“Oh… That’s fucking grim, kid. Why you gotta say stuff like that? It’s depressing.”Brent laughed. He pulled his backpack around and laid his head down on it. He wished he had some light to see by. He hated being in the dark almost as much as he hated being alone. But he couldn’t make a fire, and it was too cold out to leave the door of the pumping station open, even just a crack.“I don’t think I’ll ever have kids,” Brent said. “I used to want kids, when Naomi and I were engaged, but not now. Not anymore.”He imagined he heard a scraping sound as Ghost-Harold lay down on the other side of the pumping station.“They’ll just get eaten,” Brent said.Ghost-Harold didn’t speak, but only because he wasn’t really there, and Brent was finally falling asleep.
It is ten years after the global apocalypse. The Phage, the zombie virus that brought the world to its knees, has mutated, restoring the minds of its undead victims: their personalities, their memories and even their dreams. The hungry dead are no longer the mindless monsters that drove mankind to the brink of extinction. They possess once again the human cunning that once made man the masters of the world.But they still have their relentless hunger for human flesh.The last few living humans still at large in this twisted new world now find themselves hunted for a far more insidious reason. If captured, they will be kept, farmed, and forced to produce the living flesh their hungry masters crave...
This is the first installment of an ongoing story I'm working on for you, my friends and readers. I can't promise to work on it any more regularly than the mood strikes me, but I hope you enjoy it all the same!
1. Illinois
“Try to keep up, Harold!” Brent Scarborough gasped, racing through the forest as fast as he could go. His lungs were burning, his heart thudding in his chest, but he didn’t dare slow his pace, not even for his friend. They’d been running together for two years now. Harold Killian was like a brother to him—closer than a brother, to be honest—but the deadheads were on their tail, and he was determined to get away, to survive, and make it to the fabled Free Zone, where they could live among their own kind and have some kind of normal life again, without worrying about deadheads eating them alive their every waking moment.“Just go!” Harold gasped, limping several yards behind him. “Don’t you wait… on me, Brent Scarborough!”Harold had twisted his ankle pretty badly when they took off through the forest. A meat patrol had come up unexpectedly on them as they were foraging for food in an old service station—caught them dead to rights as they were coming out of the crumbling Pack’N’Tuck—and they had rabbited into the woods. It was autumn. Probably late October or November. The floor of the forest was thickly carpeted with leaves, and Harold had stepped into a chuckhole, nearly breaking his ankle. They would have been fine if their pursuers were dumbheads. They were good at eluding the dumb ones. But it was a meat patrol, and the zombies had squealed to a stop and given chase. It was the reapers’ job to find and catch wild humans. The deadheads were well trained, and they were armed, and they never gave up.Brent could hear the reapers calling out to one another behind them. Their bone chilling grunts and snarls echoed in the distance, but they were closing in, and Brent felt almost faint with terror. Terror for himself. Terror for his friend.This is it, he thought. We’re going to die! And we were so close!The Free Zone was a city populated and controlled by living men and women. Once it had been called Peoria, but it was the Free Zone now. The people of the Free Zone had ensured their survival by rigging their fortress city with nukes. Any aggressive move by the zombie nations and they would blow themselves up, vaporizing every man, woman and child in the city. There were so few living human beings now the deadheads didn’t dare move against them, and sometimes they even protected the living men from herds of mindless dumbheads. In exchange, the people of the Free Zone gave the zombies their dead. The zombies couldn’t starve to death—they were already dead—but they were always hungry. It was a suicide standoff, but it worked, and the zombies were content to pick off any wild runners who tried to make it to the Shangri-La of the Living.A shot rang out, its report rolling through the forest, and Brent cried out. He couldn’t help himself. The yelp had jumped out of his mouth before he could catch it, like a frightened frog. He tried to increase his speed, but his strength was rapidly flagging. He couldn’t run all day without stopping. He was only a man. But his pursuers could.Harold grunted loudly and fell, the dry forest duff crunching under his body as he hit the ground and rolled.For a second, Brent thought his friend had been shot, and he started to turn back to help him, zombies or no zombies.“Go, go!” Harold panted, struggling to get back to his feet. The barrel-chested older man was sweaty and red-faced, his bright orange hair disheveled, a long scratch on his cheek where some broken branch had gouged him. As Brent wavered between obeying and helping his companion, Harold yanked off his backpack and threw it to the younger man. The bag held all his worldly possessions: supplies, a few keepsakes, and the little bit of food they’d found in the abandoned service station: some old canned vegetables, a few packs of Ramen noodles. “Harold, no,” Brent wheezed, looking down at the backpack like it was going to change into a hungry alligator at any second.“If you don’t go, they’re going to catch both of us today,” Harold said. He tested his ankle and groaned at the pain. “Go on. I’ll catch up if I can get away from them. Get to the Free Zone. Don’t throw your life away on me.”Another shot rang out, and Harold Killian’s eyes bulged out. His body stiffened, and then he dropped to his knees.“Harold!” Brent howled.Harold tried to talk, but his last words came out a froth of blood and spit. He toppled forward onto his face and didn’t move. A moist red stain expanded around a tiny hole in the back of his denim jacket.Brent squeezed his hands into fists, screaming through his clenched teeth. He spotted one of the reapers then, trudging up over the rise, a rifle in its decayed hands. He ducked, snatched up his friend’s backpack, and started running.They wouldn’t follow him any further, he knew. They were like sharks. They wouldn’t be able to resist the smell of his friend’s blood. They would tear the dead man apart, eat until their bellies couldn’t hold anymore, then take the rest to the nearest town and put it on the meat market. Harold was a big man. He’d probably fetch a handsome price, even if they ate half of him here in the forest.Brent ran.He ran for his life.
2. Night
There was one thing more frightening than death, more horrible than the zombies who had inherited the earth, and that was being alone.Brent was 23 years old when the zombie apocalypse went down, a junior studying at Western Tennessee University, still living at home with his parents to save money on tuition, and engaged to a bright, funny, sexy little bookworm named Naomi Richardson. Naomi was a sardonic feminist, wore crazy hornrim glasses to damper her rather stunning beauty, and only read novels written by dead authors. Her only nod to conventionality was dating him, and a longtime addiction toThe Days of Our Lives, of which she was both proud and embarrassed. The soap because it was so ordinary, and him because there was really nothing special about him apart from his looks. Your typical college jock, that was Brent Scarborough, studying business and partying on a football scholarship. His mother loved Naomi and couldn’t wait for them to marry and start having beautiful babies for her to spoil. His dad thought Naomi was strange, and that Brent should sew his wild oats before settling down, though he would never say something like that in front of his wife or future daughter-in-law. He only said it to Brent after he’d had a few too many drinks.But that was before the Phage. That was before people started getting sick and eating each other. That was before his mother and father and fiancé died, and he was cast adrift on the churning whitecaps of a global catastrophe.He had survived because he was strong and fast and lucky. He might not have been the sharpest utensil in the silverware drawer, but he quickly found that he possessed a keen instinct for self-preservation. It had kept him alive when so many others were dying, kept him going when other smarter people gave up.He wanted to live, and that survival instinct drove him on when any other rational being would curl up into a fetal position and surrender.But he hated being alone.He was crouched in the corner of some sort of derelict pumping station now, a squat little shed with a tin roof and cinderblock walls. In the center of the bare concrete floor was an abstract sculpture of pipes and gauges. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the station was for, but he was glad that he had stumbled across it. He had almost wept with joy when the door gave way under his first few kicks. It was safer, and a whole lot warmer, sheltering inside the shed than it would have been sleeping out in the open.“What do you say, Harold old buddy old pal?” Brent murmured, huddled under his jacket and threadbare blanket. “It’s a lot better than sleeping outside,” Ghost-Harold replied.Teeth chattering, Brent nodded. “Yes, indeed!”He knew there weren’t any ghosts in the shed with him. He wasn’t that crazy, but he was still too juiced up on adrenaline to sleep, and it was a way to keep his brain occupied until exhaustion finally claimed his weary soul. It was that or replay the day’s events in his mind, and he certainly didn’t want to do that.“Remember how we met, Harold?” Brent said, grinning a little in the dark.“Oh, yeah,” Ghost-Harold said with a chuckle. “Sorry about that.”“It was about two years ago,” Brent said. “I was on my own at the time. The girl I was traveling with just before you, girl named Angie Wright, had just died. She scratched her hand trying to climb over a barbed wire fence and got some kind of infection. It was pretty bad.”“You guys fuck?” Ghost-Harold said.“I told you already,” Brent said. “No. She was a lesbian.”“Oh, yeah, right. I forget.”“Anyway, I was on my own. It was a hot summer afternoon, and I decided to cool off in a creek. I was splashing around buck naked when you came out of the woods with your rifle. ‘Put your hands where I can ‘em!’ you yelled. Oh, man, I about messed myself. And then you told me to turn around, and I thought for sure you were going to shoot me in the back. That, or cornhole me. Or both!”“Naw, man, I don’t swing that way!” Ghost-Harold guffawed. “I just wanted to rob ya!”“You did, too. Took everything I had. Even my clothes.”“Yeah, but you followed me. You followed me for the rest of the day, naked as a baby, until I felt sorry for you and gave you your stuff back.”“Yeah,” Brent said, smiling at the reminiscence. The smile faded and he sniffed. “We got off to a rough start, but we ended up making a pretty good team.”“We sure did, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said.“Always stayed two steps ahead of the meat patrols. Always… Ah, hell, man, why’d you have to go and die today? I hate being by myself!”“Sorry, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “I couldn’t help it.”“I know.”“You just keep running, kid. You’ll make it to the Free Zone, and then you can find you a nice live girl and get married and have a whole passel of fat little live babies.”Brent snorted. “Is that all you think about?”“What? Making babies?”“Yeah.”“What else is there to do? We gotta repopulate the world, kiddo.”Brent sighed. “I think our time has came and went.”“You and me?”“No… humanity.”“Oh… That’s fucking grim, kid. Why you gotta say stuff like that? It’s depressing.”Brent laughed. He pulled his backpack around and laid his head down on it. He wished he had some light to see by. He hated being in the dark almost as much as he hated being alone. But he couldn’t make a fire, and it was too cold out to leave the door of the pumping station open, even just a crack.“I don’t think I’ll ever have kids,” Brent said. “I used to want kids, when Naomi and I were engaged, but not now. Not anymore.”He imagined he heard a scraping sound as Ghost-Harold lay down on the other side of the pumping station.“They’ll just get eaten,” Brent said.Ghost-Harold didn’t speak, but only because he wasn’t really there, and Brent was finally falling asleep.
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