Cattle: Chapters 11-15

11. Muriel

He was surprised when he woke up-- mostly because he had awakened. He had believed, as his consciousness swirled away like water down a drain, that he would never wake up again, but he did.He opened his eyes, or tried to—one would only come open to a slit—and realized that his head was resting on a woman’s lap. She was a pretty woman, middle aged, a bit too thin, with long brown hair salted with gray, and very compassionate features. Her hair was tied back behind her head in either a ponytail or a bun, he couldn’t tell for sure, and she was stroking his bangs back from his brow, which felt wonderful. Above and behind her were metal panels strung with barbed wire upon which a light blue plastic tarp fluttered rapidly. It was cold, and there was a sense of swift forward motion, the rocking movement of travelling by automobile. It had been years since he rode in a car.“Easy,” the woman said, and she smiled soothingly. “They beat you pretty badly.”The woman’s body swayed to the right as the truck they were riding in went around a curve in the road.“What’s your name?” the woman asked, after she had righted herself.“Brent,” he said. “Brent what?”“Scarborough. I’m Brent Scarborough.”He started to sit up, and she put her hands on his shoulders to hold him down. “You shouldn’t try to move around too much,” she said. “Not yet. Just rest a few more minutes. Get your bearings.”“I’m okay,” he said, pushing her hands away. He sat up and immediately regretted it. His head pulsed like an infected cyst. He clutched his temples and groaned. The world faded out on him, then swam slowly back, bright scintillating spots dancing in his vision. He concentrated on his breathing, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and the dizziness withdrew.“Where are we going?” he asked.The middle-aged woman arranged the edges of the blanket that was draped across her shoulders, pulling it closed in front, but not before he saw that she was pregnant. Her breasts were full, her belly round and firm. She was dressed in filthy blue jeans and a slightly tattered denim shirt.“You know where we’re going,” she said, fussing with the blanket, not looking at him.There was a deer carcass in the cage with them, lying in the bed of the truck just a foot or so away. Its fur was matted with congealed blood, its eyes blank, tongue protruding. It had been partially eaten. Its thick neck and muscular chest had been thoroughly chewed. Piled beside the deer were several smaller animals, all dead: cats, rabbits, a collie, a raccoon. The big deadhead he’d killed yesterday was lying among them, body naked and pale, face tucked into the corner of the truck bed like a resolute napper. Its head gaped, a hollow gourd. Someone had had a snack.Brent examined his arms and hands, looking for bite marks.“They didn’t bite me,” he said, not quite able to believe it. “Not even a finger!”“They argued about it,” the woman said, smiling morbidly. “Several of them wanted to, but their boss said no, said they were taking you back alive. The tall redheaded one defended you, too.”“The tall redheaded one?” he repeated, head jerking up.The woman nodded. “I think he knew you.”Harold! But it couldn’t possibly be his friend, could it? Harold was immune to the Phage, like him, like all of the people who had managed to survive so far. Anyone who could catch the Phage had already caught it. That’s what Brent and Harold had believed, but maybe they were wrong. They’d never been bitten, and didn’t care to be bitten to test their theory. He shook his head. It didn’t make sense.“You were very lucky,” the woman continued. “They ate that one’s brains, and some of the deer this morning. I think they were full. Otherwise, they probably would have munched on you a little.”“What’s your name?” he asked the woman. The truck they were riding in jounced over a large pothole, and they both cried out—the woman startled, Brent from the pain in his head. He touched his face carefully. His right eye was hot and puffy. Swollen. That’s why he couldn’t open it. And there was a pop knot on his forehead, near his left temple.“Muriel,” the woman said. “My name is Muriel Jones. I’m the reason you got caught. Sorry about that.”Brent stared at her blankly for a moment, trying to process that statement. “What do you mean you’re the reason I got caught?” he asked.“They were running me down,” she said. “I escaped from the pens a week ago. Headed for the Free Zone. They caught me early this morning. They were taking me back to Manfriend when they saw blood splattered in the front yard of that farmhouse. They pulled over to investigate. About twenty minutes after pulling over, they opened the cage and tossed you in. You and Mr. No Brains over there. A zombie, I take it?”Brent nodded. “Yeah. I killed it yesterday. It tried to get into my hideout.”“Bad luck,” Muriel said.“Yeah,” he nodded. “Bad luck.”Muriel’s hands moved beneath her blanket. She put a cigarette between her lips, ducked her head down and lit it with a plastic lighter. The smoke vanished almost instantly through the gaps in the rattling blue tarp. She smiled at him, the cigarette jittering between her taut lips. “Want one?” she asked. “I found them in the house I was hiding in. They’re kind of stale but…”He was a little outraged she was smoking. Old conditioning from the days before the zombie apocalypse, when smoking was a Bad Thing, especially for pregnant women. Brent wondered if all those health nuts regretted their ascetism at the end. Life sucks and all the rest, only now you sometimes came back. If Brent had known what was going to happen back then, he might have indulged a little more often himself. He used to drink a little, but had never smoked.“Yeah, give me one,” he said.Muriel lit a cigarette and passed it to him. “I saw that look in your eyes,” she said, amused. “I wouldn’t smoke if there was any chance…”“Sorry,” he said. He took a drag of the cigarette and coughed.“I’ve been a breeder for them for five years,” Muriel said. She pushed an errant strand of hair from her face. “In those five years, I’ve had six children. They took them all.”“I’m sorry,” he apologized again.“I don’t know why you’re sorry,” she said. “It’s not your fault. It’s not really their fault, either. They can’t help what the Phage has turned them into. They’re as much a victim of all this as we are.” She cocked her head, looking at him thoughtfully. The corner of her lips quivered, not quite a smile. “If anyone is to blame, it’s God, but I don’t think He really exists. How could He? And if He does… well, all I can say is: what an asshole!”Brent laughed, and then immediately felt ashamed of himself. He had been raised a Southern Baptist. The evangelical denomination was almost as good at instilling guilt in its adherents as Catholicism. Guilt, and a heaping helping of fear. Hell was very real for Baptists, and God a short-tempered curmudgeon. Brent wasn’t too sure God existed either, not anymore, but it was best not to take any chances.“You seem like a nice kid,” Muriel said, smiling at him sadly. “We’ll arrive at Manfried soon, and then they’ll probably kill you. You want to come over here and sit with me before we get there?”He thought about it a moment and then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that would be nice.”Muriel opened her blanket, inviting him in. “I had two boys before the zombie apocalypse,” she said as he shifted over beside her. “One of them would have been about your age if he’d survived.” She lowered the blanket over the two of them and leaned her head against his shoulder, still puffing on her stale cancer stick. “His name was Billy.”Brent moved his hand beneath the blanket, grasped her free hand, held it. Her hand was cold and bony, but it felt good to hold her hand. It was comforting. He hadn’t held someone’s hand since… well, it had been so long he couldn’t remember the last time he’d held someone’s hand. He used to spoon up with Harold on really cold nights, but that wasn’t the same.“I almost made it,” he said.“Where did you start your run?” Muriel asked.“Tennessee.”“That’s a long way,” she said. “You did good.”They were silent for a moment, their bodies swaying together as the truck flew down the crumbling highway.“I don’t want to die,” he said finally, his voice low. He felt ashamed of his weakness.Muriel turned her head on his shoulder a little, exhaling smoke. “I know, baby,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. She put a cold hand on his cheek. “Just try not to think about it.”

12. Manfried

They arrived in Manfried shortly after. Houses and retail buildings flit past the gaps in the tarp, too fast to make out any details, only that they were deserted and dilapidated, walls falling in, roofs collapsing. Every now and then, a zombie would flit past, too, walking down the sidewalk, dressed in winter garb. A few of them raised a hand to wave to the drivers of the truck. Some looked like normal human beings. Others looked like ambulatory skeletons. The only thing the victims of the Phage had in common was that they were dead, and they had an uncontrollable hunger for human flesh.“Where do they live?” Brent asked. “Do they stay in houses like regular people?”“Most of them do,” Muriel said, lighting another smoke. “But just in the homes surrounding the supermarket. There’s not a lot of them. Maybe two, three hundred. They keep us all together in a big grocery store in the center of town. There are stalls inside, and a big fence surrounding it. It’s a tall chain link fence with barbed wire along the top, like you’d see at a prison.”“To keep you in?”“Yes, but also to protect us.”“From what?”“From them.” Stroking his arm, Muriel said, “They breed us like animals. Take the babies and eat them. They kill and eat all the males, too. Anyone too old to breed. Infertile females. They keep a few men to… you know, impregnate the women. Oh, they keep a few children. Just enough, I suppose, to replace the breeders when we get too old to bear young. None of my babies, though. Not that I would want such a thing. It’s better they die before they know what kind of world they’ve been born into. That’s horrible, I know.”“My god,” Brent murmured.“They all do it,” Muriel said. “The Zombie Nations, I mean. Breed us like cattle. We’re not their primary food source, though. There are too many of them and not enough of us. Mostly they eat venison, anything else they can catch, but they can’t, or won’t, subsist on animal flesh alone. They need to feed on us to keep up their strength, to stave off decomposition. Perhaps it’s nutritional. I can’t say for sure. But them seem to relish human flesh more than any other food. Their demeanor is almost… orgasmic when they engage in cannibalism. They barely seem able to restrain themselves from attacking us, even when they’ve fed.”“How smart are they?” Brent asked. “I’ve only seen them from a distance,” he explained when Muriel glanced up at him.“They’re no different from the living,” she said, settling her head back on his shoulder. “Some are smarter than others. It’s really their… emotional capacity that seems to remain impaired. They don’t feel like we feel. They’re smart, but their emotions, their morals, are just as dead as their bodies. Most are like that. There are a few that seem to feel love. Most just seem to feel anger. Malice. Greed. They enjoy being cruel. Our suffering amuses them.”“How did you escape?”“One of them helped me escape. One of our guards. He was one of those deadheads I just mentioned to you. A zombie that could still feel love. He fell in love with me, I guess. He said I reminded him of his wife. His name was Chuck. He smuggled me out of the compound one night.”“What happened to him?”“They killed him,” Muriel said. “They caught up with us once. This was a couple days after he smuggled me out. Chuck held them off while I ran away. They killed him and ate him. I didn’t see it. I only know because they boasted about it.”“I’m sorry.”“You say you’re sorry a lot.”“Sorry,” Brent laughed. Muriel cocked her head to one side, breathing smoke. “The Zombie Nations are organized like the North American Indian tribes. A sort of loose confederation. They keep to themselves mostly, but sometime they trade. They raid one another for food, too. Our tribe got raided last summer, but the Manfried zombies repelled the attack. It’s all very interesting, in an abstract sort of way. I used to be a history teacher, you know. What were you?”“I was a student in college when the Phage struck,” Brent said.“What were you studying?”“Business... Football.”“Girls?”He laughed. “Just one.”“What kind of grades were you getting with her?”“I’d like to say A’s, but probably C’s,” he said, and she snorted.“You were probably getting A’s,” Muriel said. “We don’t like to tell a man how well he’s doing. It gives him a big head.”“That’s funny.” Muriel shrugged. “Girls are funny. We don’t even know what we want until we’re forty. I like you, Brent. If we had more time, I’d send you off with a bang. A literal bang, if you know what I mean.”“You’re spoiling that maternal vibe you’ve got going,” Brent teased her.“Life’s too short to play games. Especially now.” She turned and looked somberly at him, her lips clamped to her cigarette. The truck was slowing, the breaks squeaking. “We’re here, sweetheart. Be brave. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”Brent nodded.

13. Longworth’s

The truck stopped. Brent heard a brief exchange, the voices rough and quick, more like the barks of angry dogs than the speech of human beings. Muriel listened with him, her cigarette trembling. There was a loud rattling sound, obviously the gate of a chain link fence being drawn back, and then the truck eased forward again.I’m going to die now, Brent thought.Rather than being frightened, he felt a sense of dislocation, the same sense of disconnectedness that came over him when he was fighting the zombie’s at the farmhouse. It was a defense mechanism, he knew, his brain’s way of coping with his terror so he could continue to function. In the face of imminent death, the human mind reacted by pretending nothing was real, that reality was an insubstantial illusion, when it was the reverse that was true. The universe was very real. It was the souls of men that were thin and all too fragile.The truck curved around, stopped once more. The engine died with a sharp backfire. Doors creaked open. Someone complained about his sore ass. Someone else laughed. It was like listening to aliens talking. Their voices made Brent’s hackles rise. They were human… but not.Would they converse so casually, would they joke around and laugh, as they devoured him?The blue tarp shook.“Lift it up, don’t drag it,” someone snapped. “The barbed wire will rip it if you try to drag it off.”“Yeah-yeah.”“Look, just climb up there and fold it back.”Sunlight sliced down like a guillotine blade as the edge of the tarp folded back. Brent and Muriel squinted into the light as a deadhead in a red flannel shirt and jeans folded the tarp again and again, peeling it off in sections. He was standing on the back wheel, gripping one of the bars of the cage’s frame as he stripped back the plastic covering. He grinned down at them, his face gray and crenelated, a cigarette jutting from the corner of his withered lips. “We’re ba-aaack!” he sang in a frog-like croak.Muriel looked away, her face expressionless.The zombie jumped down once the tarp had been removed, chortling to himself. Brent moved away from Muriel, shifting up onto his knees to survey his surroundings. They were in the parking lot of a grocery store. The supermarket was a low profile cinderblock construction, not substantially different from any of the thousands of grocery stores spread across the country. Two sets of automatic doors bracketed several tinted show windows beneath a full-length colonnade. LONGWORTH’S was emblazoned across the front of the supermarket in large red plastic and aluminum letters, the kind of letters that would have lit up at night back in the good old days, summoning the hungry to its halls of junk food and frozen TV dinners. The letters were faded and broken now, with bird nests tucked into the gaps. The building was filthy and swayed from neglect. The doors and windows had been reinforced with wire mesh.The parking lot of the supermarket was surrounded by a fifteen foot tall chain link fence with barbed wire running along the top. In the side parking lot were several piles of building materials, half a dozen industrial vehicles, some wooden sheds and a small silver trailer. There were thirty or so deadheads moving about the parking lot, half of whom were armed. The rest were laboring at one project or another—not very enthusiastically, though. Only of few of them seemed interested in the meat wagon’s arrival.“Here, tut thessse on,” a deadhead growled.Brent turned to the zombie who had spoken. It was the same one who’d taken him captive. The lipless ghoul was holding a pair of handcuffs through the wires of the cage, grinning. Of course, he would always look like he was grinning.Brent just stared at the cuffs. He didn’t move.“Do it, honey,” Muriel whispered.He glanced at her doubtfully.“Don’t fight them. It’ll just make it worse,” she said, and then she put out her cigarette.Brent sighed. He reached out and took the handcuffs from the deadhead. He put the bracelets on his wrists and ratcheted them closed. “Hold out your handsss,” the zombie said.Brent extended his arms through the wires of the cage and the zombie tightened the cuffs, then turned to Muriel. “You, too,” he said, holding out a second pair of cuffs.As Muriel fumbled her handcuffs on, Brent looked around for Harold. Muriel had said there was a redheaded zombie in their party, a deadhead who had argued in his defense while Brent was unconscious, who had acted as if he knew him. He didn’t know how Harold could have come back after he was killed, but Brent supposed it was possible. Maybe the Irishman was a carrier or something. The truck he and Muriel were caged in looked like the same red Ford that had caught them exiting the service station several days ago.If Harold was in the group, however, he had departed before the tarp was removed from the cage. Perhaps he had gone inside the supermarket, or the silver travel trailer on the side. He didn’t see any zombies with red hair in the parking lot.The Ford’s tailgate dropped with a bang. One of the zombies unlocked the cage. It pulled the chain from the frame of the door and yanked it open. “Out,” it snapped. The male ghoul had a bony, withered body, eyes and cheeks sunk in, but a shocking mass of fine blond hair, parted down the middle and feathered. Its clothes were fine, too: clean, well made. Vanity must have accompanied its reason when it returned from the dark place the Phage had temporarily imprisoned it.Muriel moved to obey the creature, shifting around in the bed of the truck and then scooting toward the tailgate.“Now, quick, move!” the zombie said impatiently.“Hold your horses, god damn you,” Muriel said, sounding only slightly annoyed.“Now, quick!” the zombie snarled.The door of the silver travel trailer swung open. An enormously fat man limped out onto the wooden deck. He climbed down the steps and headed toward the meat wagon as Muriel slid her legs over the end of the tailgate and prepared to drop down. The fat zombie was dressed in khaki overalls, a long sleeve blue shirt and a brilliant orange work vest. Two smaller men accompanied him. They trailed after him like lamprey after a shark. The zombies surrounding the truck stood a little straighter as he approached, tightening their grips on their weapons.“Muriel!” the fat zombie called in a jocular voice. He favored his left leg as he walked.Muriel hopped down with a grunt, holding her swollen tummy. “Cooley,” she said.“How far did you get this time, dearest?” the deadhead asked.“Not far enough,” Muriel replied.“Out, now, quick, quick!” the feather-haired zombie snarled at Brent.The fat one had drawn within grabbing distance of Muriel, which is exactly what he did. His arm shot out with shocking speed, and squeezing Muriel’s cheeks between his fingers, he shoved her back against the tailgate. Muriel cried out, clutching at his wrist. Brent lunged forward instinctively, but froze as the deadheads trained their weapons on him.“I warned you about trying to escape again!” the fat zombie snarled at her. “As soon as you squeeze out your squealing little piglet, I’m having you hobbled! We’ll see how good you run with your toes chopped off.”Muriel hawked and spat. The fat creature laughed. It released her cheeks and scooped her spittle from its face, licking its fingers with a savorous expression. “You have a few more years of breeding left in you, I figure,” it said, opening its eyes slowly. “After you’re done, I’ll slit your fucking throat myself.”“What about this one, boss?” the vain zombie asked. He nodded toward Brent. “You want us to butcher him now, or you got something else in mind for him?”The fat zombie eyed Brent appraisingly, rubbing its bulbous chin. “I don’t know… not much meat on his bones.”“He is kind of skinny,” the feather-haired zombie agreed.“Did he put up much of a fight?” Cooley asked.The blond zombie shook his head. “He’s been pretty cooperative. He fought us when we busted in on him, but he hasn’t given us any trouble since.”“Get him down. Let’s have a look at him,” Cooley said. “It’s been a while since you guys brought in a runner.”Brent tried to restrain himself as the zombies rushed forward and snatched at him. His instinct was to pull away, to kick at them, punch, scream, fight, but Muriel had told him not to struggle, that it would be easier for him if he did as he was told, so he did his best to control his terror, to curb his instinct to resist them. They yanked him down from the back of the truck, and at the fat one’s instructions, ripped at his clothes, tearing them away from his body. Brent tried to cover himself as they tugged down his pants, but one of them grabbed his wrists and held his arms aloft.The fat zombie, the one Muriel had called Cooley, curled its lips back from its teeth. “Just skin and bones,” it said, “hardly fit to eat. Just look at those ribs.” Addressing Brent directly, it asked, “You like girls, meat?”Brent said, “Huh?”The fat one leered. “Girls! You like girls or boys?”Brent couldn’t quite process what the thing was asking him. His shirt hung in tatters from his shoulders. They had jerked his pants down to his knees, exposing his genitals. He stood there shivering in the frigid winter wind, wrists cuffed together, and tried very hard to puzzle out the meaning in the monster’s words, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. He thought the thing had asked him if he liked girl meat, but he wasn’t a deadhead; he didn’t eat other people.“He’s a dummy, I think,” the vain one laughed.“No, just in shock,” the fat creature said. “He’s too frightened to think.” The obese zombie took a limping step toward Brent, loomed over him, leered down at him like a window peeper. He spoke loudly, as if volume would impress the meaning of his words on Brent, and it actually did, sort of. “Do you like to fuck girls or boys?” he yelled.“Guh-girls,” Brent said, blinking up at the monster.Cooley snickered and grabbed his balls. Brent whimpered as it squeezed his testicles, rolled them around in its cold, slimy hand.“He’s all there,” the fat creature said. “One dick, two balls. That’s all he needs to get the job done.”A couple of the zombies standing nearby laughed at that. Muriel stared off into the sky, her face unreadable. The gusting wind whipped loose strands of hair around her head. They looked like tentacles snapping at the windblown snow.Cooley released him, started away. “Put him in the coop with the rest of the roosters,” it said with a dismissive wave. “We’ll let him peck at a couple of the hens. If he works out, we’ll butcher Vickers. We’ll get more meat out of him. He’s getting old and lazy.”“Yessir,” the zombie with the feathered hair said, watching the fat one limp back to its trailer. “You’re lucky, meat,” he said, and started tugging Brent’s pants back up. “But if I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open tonight.”

14. Roosters

The smell struck him like a slap on the face. As soon as he passed through the door of the supermarket—a door that would have opened automatically back in the good old days of electric lights and high speed internet -- Brent swayed back with a cry of disgust. It was a smell of unwashed human flesh and waste so powerful it seemed it should be visible, a greenish-black cloud of human effluence. The deadhead standing behind him gave him a prod with the barrel of his rifle, and Brent pressed forward, feeling as though he were physically pushing his body into that fog of human suffering. He could feel it settling on his skin, moist and corrupt. He could taste it in his mouth. It almost made him gag.He had entered a sort of vestibule. To his right was a desk, manned by a skeletal creature that looked more dead than alive. Behind the desk was an office with a plate glass window. It had probably been the manager’s office when the building was still an actual supermarket. The walls of this makeshift lobby were shoddily constructed from mismatched building materials: planks and beams and pieces of gypsum and wooden paneling. Through the chinks in the clumsily built walls, Brent could see women moving around in the chamber beyond. They were like ghosts in their thin white garments. Their murmuring voices drifted to him like penitential prayers. From somewhere came the monotonous squall of an unhappy baby. A zombie guard barked at some unseen internee, and a woman responded in an appeasing voice, “I’m trying!”“Ah, home sweet home,” Muriel said. One of her escorts snatched her cigarettes from her breast pocket then, and she yelled, “Hey! Give those back, god damn you!”“Go to your fucking cubicle, meat!” the zombie snarled, raising a fist as if to strike her.“Go ahead, do it,” Muriel said defiantly, raising her face to the blow. “I’ll fall on my stomach. Whatever will you do for Christmas dinner then?”“I said go to your cubicle!” the zombie repeated.She glanced back at Brent. “Don’t tell Vickers you’re going to replace him,” she said. “He’ll kill you if you do.”Brent nodded.She smiled at him sympathetically, and her guards pushed her forward. They passed through a heavy metal door that hung slightly askew. Brent heard a gate rattle open. “They got me!” she announced in a mocking tone. Her escort snarled menacingly at her, but she just laughed. A moment later, he saw her pass by one of the gaps in the wall-- walking to her quarters, he supposed.“And why is this one here?” the zombie at the desk asked Brent’s guards. It had long, stringy hair, like frayed ropes, and liver-colored, crinkled skin. Spectacles perched on its shriveled nose, an incongruent adornment. Its eyes were gray and baleful.“Cooley said to put him in with the roosters,” the ghoul standing directly behind him said. “He’s going to replace Vickers, unless he’s shooting blanks.”“Vickers has been a good breeder,” the desk clerk said, looking at Brent appraisingly. “He is getting a little old, though. What’s your name, meat?”“Brent,” Brent said.“Not anymore,” the desk clerk grinned. “Now you’re number 404.” It passed a fat laundry marker to one of Brent’s guards, then rose and tottered into the manager’s office.“404,” Brent’s escort said, and it scrawled the number on Brent’s chest, just about his left nipple. It had to step close to do it, pushing Brent’s arms up over his head, and the ripe stench of decaying flesh fought the smell of the building’s interior to a stalemate. Brent tried to breathe through his mouth, but that only made it worse. The zombie raised its head and grinned at him, and Brent could see mites swarming in the sockets beneath its bony brow, crawling busily around its filmy eyeballs, trundling over them. He averted his head in disgust.The clerk had returned. It held out a pair of flimsy white boxer shorts. “Put this on, 404,” it said. “Meat don’t wear clothes here.” The boxers looked as if they had been laundered, but there were several brown stains in the material-- at the waistband, down the right leg. Blood stains, most likely.“Hold out your wrists,” the deadhead who had marked him commanded.Brent held out his cuffed wrists.“Just try something stupid,” the zombie said, unlocking the bracelets. “I haven’t had fresh meat in two weeks.”Brent didn’t reply. He didn’t try anything stupid either. He massaged his wrists after the handcuffs had been removed.“Take off your clothes and put the shorts on,” the clerk said, gesturing to him absently. It flipped through some sort of logbook and made an annotation. Its flesh looked like the casing of a Slim Jim.“Age?” it said.“Thirty,” Brent said, shrugging off his tattered shirt. He toed off his boots one at a time, bent and stripped off his socks, then took a deep breath and shoved down his pants and underwear. He stepped out of them, yanked the boxers out of the zombie’s hands and slipped them on.“Have you ever fathered children?” the clerk asked.“No.”It glared at him a moment, then rolled its eyes and wrote in its logbook some more.“Now what?” Brent asked. The clerk seemed to have dismissed him.“Follow me,” his guard answered.Brent followed the zombie through the crooked door. On the other side was a long corridor. It ran nearly the entire length of the supermarket. On one side was the outer wall of the building, bare cinderblock with water stains running down from the ceiling. On the other side was another chain link fence. The panels of the chain link fence were attached to the columns that supported the roof. Armed deadheads were spaced at intervals along the passage. There was one gate just inside the corridor, and two more at the far end. On the other side of the chain link fence was the women’s quarters. Office cubicle panels and pieces of the supermarket’s original shelving units divvied up the space. Women of various ages moved among the maze-like compartments. Most were in their twenties and thirties, though a few were a little older. There were no elderly women, and very few children. They were all dressed in white boxers and flimsy white undershirts. Nearly all of them were in varying states of pregnancy. There were forty, maybe fifty women that he could see. Many of them turned or stood up to look at him, their eyes dulled by captivity and despair. Their living space was only dimly illuminated. What light there was slanted in through a series of skylights in the center of the roof.From somewhere came an electric whirring sound, some kind of industrial space heater maybe. He could hear a rattling engine sound, too, a gas-powered generator perhaps.“Come on,” Brent’s guard growled, and it prodded him forward.Brent walked. Each time he passed one of the guards, the zombie grinned at him and croaked, “Fresh meat!” The women repeated their taunt, a sibilant susurration: “Fresh meat! Fresh meat!” It was an eerie sound, their hopeless whispering; it raised goosebumps on his arms.Halfway down the corridor, he encountered a young black girl with teary eyes. She was standing beside the fence, her skinny fingers curled around several of its diamond-shaped links. “Please, have you seen my dad?” she questioned him rapidly. “They separated us when they brought me here. Have you seen him? He said he’d come back for me!”“Shut up!” Brent’s escort growled. It struck at her fingers with the butt of its rifle.The teenager jerked her hands back with a squeal. A couple of older women scurried forward to embrace the girl. They guided her away as she continued to babble about her father. 398 was written across her forehead in black ink. The hysteria in her voice made Brent’s heart race. He could feel his own terror tugging at its reigns, struggling to break free. It was all he could do to maintain his control, to continue forward without his legs giving out on him, without screaming and trying to escape.What if this is a trick, he thought. What if this is where they take you when they butcher you? The meat department is always at the back of the supermarket, isn’t it? Maybe that’s where they’re taking you, so they can chop you up and run you through the slicer? Where they can process you. Turn you into cutlets and burger. Make sausages out of your guts.Terror came over him so powerfully then he thought that he would piss himself. He felt a hot surge in his groin and had to squeeze down with his PC muscle to hold in his urine.If he was going to die, he didn’t want his last act to be pissing himself like a frightened little puppy. If he was going to die, he wanted to die like a man.I hope I give them diarrhea, he thought.He continued down the passage. The tile floor was chilly under his feet, although the ambient temperature was warm enough. It was certainly warmer inside the supermarket than it was outside.He passed beneath a hanging sign that said PRODUCE. The sign was festooned with cobwebs, like it had been decorated for Halloween. Maybe it had been. If he remembered correctly, the pandemic had begun shortly before Halloween. He was planning on going to a costume party at a friend’s house. He was dressing as Shaggy, Naomi was going as Velma. He had bought a large stuffed Scooby Doo to take to the party with them. Naomi had told him she wanted to do it with their costumes on before they left for the party—a little fantasy roleplaying.“He’s going in with the roosters,” Brent’s escort said to the zombie guarding the two end gates. That zombie nodded and turned to unlock the further of the two gates. He keyed the padlock open, swung the door out.“Inside,” his escort said.Brent passed through the doorway, and they shut and locked the gate behind him. He turned and saw three men sitting around a table playing cards. They all stared back at him like goldfish in an aquarium, eyes wide, mouths hanging open.“Oh, shit,” one of them said.The men occupied what must once have been the deli area of the supermarket. There were stainless steel counters behind them, and an enclosed section with a swinging door and a plate glass window: the meat department, now their dormitory. Brent could see that cubicles had been erected inside the butcher’s station, and there were mattresses on the floor. All three men were dressed just like him, naked but for a pair of plain white boxers. One of the men was tall and heavyset. He wasn’t fat, just big-boned (as a famous cartoon character was inclined to say). He had long brown hair and a beard, both streaked with silver, and one of those hangdog faces that must always look slightly morose, even when he was happy. His entire upper body was embellished with tattoos. Mostly biker-type ink. Naked women. Skulls and snakes. All a little bit fuzzy and saggy. He might once have been an intimidating man, but drooping pecs and a small potbelly had tempered some of that fearsomeness. He was the one who’d said, “Oh, shit.”The second man was handsome and fair. He was about Brent’s age, with shoulder length blond hair and a good physique. His might have been movie star looks back in the old days, once they fixed his teeth. A scar wriggled up from his chin through his left cheek, puckering the flesh along the edges. It lent him a rakish, somewhat piratical air.The third man was a skinny black fellow with a badass set of dreads. He was rail thin and dark as coal, with delicate, almost effeminate features and very long fingers. His eyes and mouth seemed slightly too large for his face. He held his body as if he had a tendency to retreat.For a long moment, neither party spoke.“Don’t let them smell your fear,” Ghost-Harold spoke up unexpectedly in Brent’s mind. The imaginary voice was so real that Brent lurched. He looked instinctively over his right shoulder, where the voice had seemed to issue from. “Men are like dogs. If they smell your fear, you’ll be their bitch from here on out.” That time the voice had sounded as if it had come from his left shoulder.“Got it,” Brent murmured out of the corner of his mouth. He turned to face the trio and saw that they were looking at him in bewilderment.“Who are you talking to, buddy?” the biker asked. The bearded one was numbered 282. The number was on the upper part of his left pec, in an open space between a black widow spider and a pinup model wearing black garters and little else.“No one,” Brent said.“It sure sounded like you were talking to someone.”“Nah,” Brent said. “He’s dead.”The black man looked at the biker, his eyes comically wide. The handsome one leaned forward in his seat, smiling at Brent as if he were waiting for the punch line.“So what’s your name, buddy?” the bearded man asked.“Brent.”“Brent what?”“Scarborough.”“Where you from?”“Tennessee.”“How’d you get here?”“I walked.”“Running for the Free Zone?”Brent nodded.“Me, too. That’s how they caught me. I was trying to gas up my hog at a service station when a meat wagon rolled up on me. I’ve been here five years now.”“What’s your name?” Brent asked.“Vickers,” the biker said. He thumbed the blond. “This is Jamie. And this guy with the cool dreads is Ian.”“I know. Weird name for a brother, right?” Ian said.Brent shrugged. “I had a black friend named Poindexter when I was in college. We called him Dex.”“So why’d they put you back here with us, Brent?” the biker dude asked. He looked at the playing cards in his hand, then laid them on the table face-down.“I don’t know,” Brent said. “Don’t they normally keep all the guys together here?”“No,” Vickers said.“Normally they eat them,” Jamie said with a grin. “We’re the stud service around here. They call us the roosters. We keep the hens laying, if you know what I mean. It’s the sickest fucking thing you could ever imagine, but it keeps the corpse brigade from chewing on us.”Brent feigned confusion. “The fat one just said to take me in the back. I thought they were going to kill me, but they wrote a number on my chest and marched me back here.”“Good, good,” Ghost-Harold said. “Just keep playing dumb.”Jamie stared at him for several seconds, eyes narrowed. “I think he’s lying,” he finally said. “I think they’re planning on retiring one of us. You know how they do things around here, Vick. They always kill the males as soon as they haul them in. They just keep us for breeding.”“Maybe they mean to fatten him up a little,” Vickers said. “Look at the poor bastard. He’s skinny as a rail.”Ian nodded, blinking from Vickers to Brent and back again. “Yeah, that must be it. Look how skinny he is.”“Which one of us is it, guy?” Jamie demanded. “Which one of us is getting the axe?”“I told you I don’t know!” Brent yelled, feigning confusion. “I don’t know anything except… except they killed my best friend!”“Pull your hair out,” Ghost-Harold said.Brent grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled, his face twisted up in anger and frustration. He growled through his clenched teeth. His theatrics was only about five percent acting. His face turned red, and the veins in his temples puffed out. He could hear his heartbeat whooshing in his ears.Ian stepped back, eyeing him nervously. Jamie looked amused. Vickers seemed more concerned than anything. The old biker half-rose from their card table, making a soothing gesture with his hands. “It’s all right, dude. Take it easy. There’s no need to get yourself worked up. We don’t mean to give you the third degree. We’re all buddies here.” He looked at his companions. “Right, guys?”“Sure,” Ian said, nodding his head rapidly. “We’re all bros. You watch my back I’ll watch yours.”“Jamie?” Vickers said.Jamie didn’t respond. He just stared at Brent and grinned.

15. Dinner

The roosters treated Brent with kid gloves after his mad little outburst. They invited him to sit down at their table, supplying him with a couple of plastic milk crates for a seat. Vickers gave him a smoke, lit it for him with a match. The trio continued to ply him with questions, neglecting their card game for the moment, but they didn’t question his internment with them, merely his history, and how he’d gotten apprehended.Brent was open with them about his past and the circumstances of his capture. He just played dumb when they asked him why his life had been spared. The zombies, the roosters explained, always slaughtered their male captives immediately on their return. They hadn’t kept a male captive since Ian, who had been spared to replace the last rooster, a guy named Jack Beachum, who had keeled over with a heart attack the previous spring. “They only keep three males at once,” Vickers explained. “Jamie here took over for Brooks, who got killed trying to escape. It’s just dumb luck. They don’t care if we’re fit or smart or good-looking, so long as we can fuck. That’s why I don’t understand why they didn’t kill you. Unless they think there’s too many women for us to service now.”“They didn’t tell me anything,” Brent said, drawing on his cigarette.They talked about themselves after they got Brent’s story. Vickers was from Arkansas. He had owned and operated a bike repair shop. He was somewhere around fifty, he said, though he couldn’t remember just exactly how old he was anymore. He was captured with his wife, but they’d killed his woman when she couldn’t get pregnant.“She had a hysterectomy when she was thirty-five,” he explained. “Endometriosis. She kept it a secret from them for a while, but they’ll only keep the women for so long if they don’t get pregnant. It’s like we’re livestock here, and if we’re not productive…” He ran a finger across his throat.“How did you get here?” Brent asked. “Why didn’t you stay in Arkansas? Or go west, out into the desert where there’s not as many zombies?”“We were heading for the east coast. That’s where her family lives. But then we heard those radio broadcasts, and we decided to run for the Free Zone instead.” Vickers lit another smoke and looked thoughtfully at Brent, head cocked. “Sometimes I wonder if there really is a Free Zone. Sometimes I think it’s just… you know, bait. To bring the meat out of hiding.”That thought had occurred to Brent as well.Ian was a native of Western Kentucky, he said. He’d gotten captured running for the Free Zone, too. He was only seven years old when the pandemic broke out. He had stayed in the backwoods of Kentucky, living off the land, until his parents died, first his mother, who had perished during childbirth, then his father, who had contracted the Phage during a bout of pneumonia. He had run for the Free Zone mostly out of loneliness, he admitted. He couldn’t bear living alone.“I know it sounds crazy, but I’m glad I got caught,” he confessed. He laughed guiltily, ducking his head. “I wouldn’t be saying that if they’d decided to eat me, obviously, but this place is better than how I was living before. It’s better being here than being by myself.”Brent, who also hated being alone, could sympathize—though he couldn’t imagine ever becoming accustomed to this place, to this human meat factory.Jamie, a native of New York City, had been on a flight to New Orleans for a business convention when the pandemic struck. His flight got rerouted to Nashville during the chaos of the outbreak, and he found himself stranded in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by several hundred thousand of the hungry infected. He had endured by banding up with several other groups of survivors, abandoning one after another as necessity demanded. He was slowly making his way back home when he was captured. He didn’t know that New York had gotten nuked until Ian joined their group.“My dad had a solar-powered radio,” Ian explained. “That’s how I knew about New York City. Atlanta, Georgia got blasted, too. And some city out west. I can’t remember the name now. Seattle, maybe? My dad used to listen to the news all day. Until the radio stations quit broadcasting, anyway. He had a journal, and he would write down everything he heard in it, all the pertinent information he’d collected. He kept a big map of the United States on the wall of his office, too, and he’d take a red marker and scratch out cities on it if they got blasted. He called them dead zones. Said they were uninhabitable now because of the radiation, like some place called Chernobyl. He was really smart, my dad. Our cabin had a fallout shelter and several years’ worth of supplies. I guess he was one of those doomsday preppers.”The door of their quarters swung open as they chatted. Brent turned in his seat and watched as two women stepped inside. They waited with their heads down until the guards had shut and locked the door, then advanced into the room, a young blond with the number 344 on her forearm, and a brunette with 352 scrawled across her forehead. The blond was carrying a large plastic bowl. The brunette was carrying two metal pails. Judging by the slant of the brunette’s shoulders, one of the metal pails was heavier than the other.“Five minutes,” the guard at the door growled.“Grub,” Vickers announced, standing up to greet the women. “Paula,” he nodded to the blond. He took the plastic bowl from her hands. “You coming back to see me tonight?”The blond blushed. “I wish,” she said. “I think I’m out of rotation for a little while.” She touched her stomach with a meaningful expression, and he looked surprised. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me again.”Vickers grinned. He set the bowl on their card table and gave her a rough hug and a kiss on the forehead. “You’re welcome, hon,” he said. “I’m glad you’re safe-- for a little while, anyway. I’ll miss our little visits, though.”The blond giggled.Brent watched the exchange with something like horror. He wasn’t horrified by the behavior of the two, only by the grisly fate awaiting their child. The blond was happy to be pregnant because it meant she would live a little longer, even knowing that her captors would probably devour the baby shortly after birth. Vickers was pleased that his “services” had helped the young woman. He was proud of himself. Necessity had forced them to accept their terrible roles, but it did not make the situation any less terrible to Brent.And then he wondered: would he be so casual about it in a few years’ time?Assuming he lived so long...!Ian had taken the metal pails from the brunette’s hands. He set the heavy one on the stainless steel deli counter by the back wall, exchanging it with a lighter one, then carried the second pail to the far end of their living quarters. He ducked behind a section of shelving, then returned, carrying a different bucket.“Here you go,” he said, passing it to the brunette.She wrinkled her nose. “Thanks,” she said sarcastically.“Vickers had diarrhea last night,” Ian apologized.“Time’s up!” the zombie at the doorway barked.Vickers and the blond embraced quickly, reluctant to part. The blond ran to the deli counter and grabbed an empty bowl, then trotted toward the entrance. “Bye, Vick!” she called. “Thanks again!”The brunette shuffled after her with her sloshing bucket of offal, grumbling under her breath.“You going to eat?” Ian asked, before the smell of their waste bucket had even dissipated.Brent looked into the plastic bowl the blond had brought to them. He sat back with an expression of revulsion. The bowl contained food—vegetables, fruit, meat, all of it from cans-- but it had all been chucked in together, looking more like dog slop than dinner.Ian noted the expression on his face and shrugged. “That’s about as good as it gets, mate. Zombies aren’t exactly gourmet chefs.” He chuckled at his own wit, picking bits of vegetable directly from the bowl.“You need to eat,” Vickers said, returning to the table. “You need to keep up your strength.” He used his hands to tear off a chunk of processed meat product and brought it to his mouth.“For what?” Brent asked.Vickers grinned but did not answer.Two zombies entered sometime later, as the daylight—wan as it was already—dimmed even further toward night. They shuffled in carrying a single mattress. They didn’t approach the roosters, but tossed the mattress down just inside the door. Then they withdrew.“There’s your bed, I think,” Vickers said.They tossed a wadded blanket on top of the mattress, then shut and locked the door.“And there’s your blanket,” Vickers chuckled. He smiled at Brent strangely. The smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I guess you’re moving in.”