The hands were so close that she could see the little black specks beneath what was left of the fingernails. They clutched at the air, seeming to squeeze invisible stress balls with sheer abandon.
Even now Donnely, and others like him, were probably out there. Scouring the countryside. Searching for fresh stock. For new victims, for more women to defile.
How long would this go on?
“No more.”
Her voice was a soft whisper but was filled with more resolve than the loudest shout.
She could still fight back. She could bring the entire Garden crumbling down, could utterly destroy all they’d worked so hard to build. And it would serve the bastards right.
She extended her hand quickly before she had a chance to lose her nerve. Thrusting it into the darkness, through the bars on the little windows, squeezing her eyes shut.
It didn’t hurt as badly as she thought it would. The bite was quick and felt no different, really, than the time she’d been nipped by the neighbor’s chow as a kid. Wrestling her arm free from the rotter’s weak grasp she immediately wrapped the open wound in the hem of her dirty smock and applied pressure. Blood blossomed on the fabric like a rose in a dirty field of snow, but it had been nothing more than a flesh wound. Within fifteen minutes, the blood had clotted and she licked the iron tasting flecks from the tip of her finger. If anyone bothered to ask, she’s simply say she’d jabbed a splinter from the door into it. But no one would. She knew this as surely as she knew the contagion was flowing through her veins, poisoning her healthy cells with the infection of the walking dead.
“Bring it on, fuckers!.” She shouted so loudly that her vocal cords felt strained with the words. “Bring it fucking on!”
At the same time she heard another voice, this one echoing through the corridors of her mind instead of the hallway with its series of cells and captives: it was the voice of Donnely, culled from her memory.
“Did you know that any exchange of bodily fluids will do the same damn thing? You kiss someone who’s infected, for example, and get even the smallest amount of spit in your mouth and you’re done for.”
So let them come. Let the parade of rapists begin. She would spread her legs and would welcome them into her body, would take every single man in the colony if they sent him. She would exchange bodily fluids with each and every one and let them have their way.
She would have her revenge.
From down the hall she heard a door swing open. A male voice doing an off-key rendition of Snoop Dogg’s Sexual Seduction.
Laying back on her sleeping bag, she closed her eyes and waited for him to enter her cell.
“My name is Alejandra.” she whispered.
“My name is Alejandra.”
Skinning the Freshy
I. FRESHIES & ROTTERS
The basic rules of Freshies and Rotters:
1. Half of the players are designated Refugees and represent the living. Refugees can basically do as they please and are bound to no special handicaps.
2. The other half are Rotters. Rotters can only stagger after the refugees and are not allowed to use tools or anything that would denote a higher intelligence. The job of a rotter is to pursue the Refugees through the muddy streets of Free Town and try to catch them.
3. If a Rotter lays a hand on a Refugee, then that player becomes a Freshy. Freshies are allowed to sprint after the remaining Refugees as quickly as they can. However, they can only run for the amount of time it takes to count, out loud, to thirty. After reaching thirty, the Freshy becomes a Rotter and must shamble along with the rest of the undead team.
4. The game continues until the last Refugee has been cornered and changed into a zombie.
I spent God knows how many hours playing this game as a child. And I was good at it, too. Whenever I was on the refugee team, I would always be the last one left alive. So much so that some of the other kids began demanding that I always start out as a Rotter. I declared it wasn’t fair that I should always be undead just because I was good at running; they would argue back that they wanted to know what it felt like to be the last person left alive and that I was ruining the game for them. Sometimes, it would even come to blows and we would scuffle the ways boys will, fighting over something that really doesn’t really mean a damn in the larger scheme of things. But to me it was important: I loved that silly little game more than anything else in the world.
I remember the feel of the mud squishing through my bare toes, the smells of shit and piss and boiling roots that wafted from the shanties and lean-tos, the constant coughing and hacking as dark smoke curled from barrels aglow with crackling flames. Free Town was the only world I’d ever known and I was enamored with every soot stained nook and cranny of it.
Some of the kids would lean against the wall that encircled our little city and press their ears so tightly against the bricks that they would leave bloody pucker marks when they finally pulled their heads away again; they would try to listen for the world beyond the wall, for the scratching of the corpses we knew were just on the other side. Tommy Ballister used to stand like that and daydream about exploring the wilderness beyond our home, of hacking his way through the undead horde and discovering cities hidden in the undergrowth of forest; and Sarah Thompson would be right there with him because, as she so often reminded us, her Grandpa had taught her everything she’d ever need to know about surviving in the outside world. They wanted to be adventurers, to find the artifacts and relics of a world we had never known. A world some of us doubted had ever really existed. But me? I was happy with my family’s tent, with the mouth-watering aroma of roasted rat on Sundays, with life inside the wall. The other world held no interest for me: let me do my chores, let my mother teach me to read and write, let me play Freshies and Rotters until it was time to bed down for the night. I was perfectly content.
Though it was never put to us in this manner, I can now see that Freshies and Rotters was basically a parable game. And the lesson it taught was the lesson of life outside the walclass="underline" in the end, you can’t win. Everyone becomes a freshy or rotter sooner or later; the undead team will just keep coming after you until there’s no refugees left.
Maybe if someone had explained it to us like that things would have turned out differently. Perhaps there would have been more fear of what waited out there in the dark. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference what-so-ever. Maybe we would’ve thought it was just another made-up story to scare little kids like the Boogeyman or Charlie Manson. But atleast we would have had the facts. At least we would have known.
II. RETURN TO INNOCENCE
Sometimes, I awake in the darkness with tears still warming my face. I listen to the chirping of insects in the underbrush, to the distant call of an owl who sounds so forlorn and alone that he could very well be the last of his species. I awake with the feeling that something inside me, part of my soul perhaps, has collapsed like a sinkhole during my sleep, leaving nothing more than a dark, empty pit.
I curl into the smallest ball possible, pull my knees practically up to my chin, and wrap my arms around my legs. I try to tell myself that it’s only to help trap my body heat, to ward off the damp air that seeps into my flesh with a chill that penetrates the very marrow of my bone.