Clarke laughed and died.
A day later, he woke up.
2 / Chums
“Are you hearing anything I’m saying?” Stoddard barked through his mask. Bradshaw realized he’d been staring blankly into a pile of entrails and blinked. “Nope, not a thing.”
“Where’s your mind at lately?” Stoddard asked. He steadied himself on his shovel, presumably was scrutinizing his friend’s face; Bradshaw couldn’t tell thanks to that bug-like filtration mask. Stoddard had never gotten used to the smell, the stench of rot that blanketed the streets and permeated this truck. He used to puke all the time but had started taking caffeine pills to suppress his appetite (along with excessive amounts of Dramamine), and no longer ate while on the job. The glassy visor of the mask hid his eyes. It was unnerving, and Bradshaw was reluctant to talk anything other than shop under such circumstances. He looked back down at the entrails.
They were standing knee-deep in guts in the rear of a refurbished dump truck. The gleaming casings of intestines quivered as they jostled along. Bradshaw worked his shovel beneath a pile of cadaverous tissue. “This whole mope thing,” Stoddard called, “it got anything to do with why you’re on slop duty?”
Jesus. Did he really not understand? Two soldiers had died on Bradshaw’s last field assignment. It only made sense that he’d be confined to the base for a while. Only made sense he wouldn’t want to talk about it. Furrowing his brow, he said, “I’m burned the fuck out. I was burned out before what happened in Congo… I wonder if that’s why we lost them.”
Stoddard shook his bug head emphatically. “If you hadn’t been there, no one would have come back. Remember that.” It was quite the opposite, actually, but Bradshaw just offered a thin smile. “Thanks, Joe.”
“I’m serious!” The truck turned off of the tree-lined access road onto a residential street: all duplexes in bland pastels, typical of a military base. Scooping some viscera into his shovel, Stoddard lobbed it over the side where it splattered in the well-manicured grass. “So much for making it into Better Homes and Gardens.” He cracked. The houses looked like shit close-up anyway: walls spattered with rust-colored stains, windows smeared with filthy fingerprints. It was no problem to treat the grass, but no one was going to stand out here cleaning windows. Especially when the afterdead just messed them all up again. Like little kids trashing their rooms, only instead of dirty underwear and spilled Kool-Aid, it was dried-out organs and lost limbs. And here they came; hearing the truck’s rumble, the afterdead staggered out of open front doors, past the skeletons of cars and plastic flowerbeds.
It was important to put on the appearance of a real base, just in case some foreign satellite was able to punch through the scrambled signals shielding the area. Offices, hangars, a commissary, a school, a clinic. Traffic lights and trash dumpsters and playgrounds with little shoeprints stamped into the sand. All a brilliant facade — but now was feeding time, and all semblance of normalcy vanished as dozens upon dozens of dead converged on the street.
Bradshaw joined Stoddard in hurling shovelfuls of gore out the back. Those afterdead who were quickest fell upon the first offerings in a defensive posture. The others continued to follow the truck. “It’s funny.” Stoddard observed. “The runners are always going to get the most meat, and the more they eat, the stronger they get.”
“It’s not funny, it’s Darwin.” Bradshaw ignored the putrid rot in his nostrils, ignored the stumbling parade reaching toward him. “Before long those runners are going to be too healthy. We’ll have to take them out.”
“I look forward to it.” Stoddard replied. He reached behind his back to pat the sheath where his widowmaker was stowed. “Have you seen Postman lately?” He tossed another wave of slop. It hit a woman head-on. She collapsed, and Stoddard’s hand flew to his mask in shock; after a second, he started to laugh. Several other afterdead knelt to pick the gore off of her thrashing body. “Kinky!”
“Anyway,” Bradshaw muttered, “no, I haven’t seen Postman. Why?” Postman was one of the oldest specimens on the base. In the beginning, the scientists had suited corpses up in uniforms, to better identify them regardless of physical condition. So you had Postman, Electrician, Nurse (Stoddard’s favorite) and the like. After a while it was determined that specimens weren’t around long enough to require such measures. But a few of these veteran afterdead still existed on the base, and Postman was one. He — it, rather — endured because it didn’t feed often, which made it one of the weaker and less desirable subjects. The scientists said that Postman had learned to pace himself in order to avoid being targeted. But how the hell would he — no, IT, dammit — know to do such a thing?
“Postman took a headshot last week,” Stoddard said. “He tried climbing into Grimm’s slop truck, bought himself a lobotomy. Anyway, after Grimm came back and filled out the report, we had to go find Postman and verify it. So we go to the school, and he’s in there, but not wandering the halls like usual. He’s sitting on the floor with a stick.”
“This is one hell of a story.” Bradshaw flicked a string of meat off his waders. “Let me finish,” Stoddard scowled. “Anyway, Postman’s got this stick and he’s fishing around in the bullethole. He’s trying to get the bullet out.”
“How do you know he was after the bullet? Maybe he was just poking around.”
“Yeah, sure. They don’t get bored, Ken. Anything they do, it’s for a reason.”
Not true, Bradshaw thought. All they really needed to do was eat. Didn’t breathe, didn’t fuck. They barely qualified as animals, yet some rotter sticking a twig in his brain justified a twelve-page report in triplicate. More paperwork than he’d had to fill out after two field operatives died. Behind the truck, two males bent and bloated by decay played tug-of-war over a rope of tissue. Bradshaw heaved more chum at them, and the conflict ended abruptly. As more and more feed littered the street in the truck’s wake, the afterdead were falling to their knees like supplicants. There was something familiar and troubling about it… Reminded him of Sunday worship as a kid. He’d grown up in a Texas border town, his mother a black homemaker, Dad a Venezuelan preacher. Their very own little white church seemed to absorb the dry heat, and every week Bradshaw would stand in silent awe as Dad cried from the pulpit, sweat running in rivers from his face and fists. Looking back, it wasn’t any spiritual rapture that overcame so many in the congregation — it was heat exhaustion. But to the young boy it was a power radiating from his father. Even the walls ran with moisture. It was a local phenomenon, those glistening tearstains that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the walls. Especially on Sunday: as the worshippers swayed in praise, the entire room had seemed to vibrate. Bradshaw would grip his mother’s hand, head hot and swimming, the buzzing in his ears swelling to a crescendo, and the walls wept. They wept.
In lieu of a life-size crucifix there was a stained-glass image of the Savior behind the altar, and Dad meticulously polished it every other day. Bradshaw would sit in the pews sometimes and watch. Whenever his father’s back was to him, the boy reached out and touched the tearstains. He pressed his fingertips to his nostrils; the smell was sweet, like something from his mother’s kitchen. It made perfect sense to a child that Christ’s teardrops were of sugar and syrup. His wouldn’t be bitter or salty. Lot’s wife turned to salt because she disobeyed the Lord, Dad said.
One day, when it reached 110 degrees and dusty winds battered the church, and Dad was cleaning the stained-glass window, Bradshaw had felt the room vibrate again. The walls murmured to him. He pressed his hand to them, felt it. Then he looked up and saw his father’s fear-filled eyes fixated on him.