Virus

Content warning: Includes graphic violence, cannibalism, and psychological distress.

        I am so crushed by time. Time and these oozing wounds and the rotten flesh like mealy apple that is my chest cavity. Rotten skin and an infected mind. Gangrenous parietal. So insatiably starving for living flesh, to rend it in my grinding jaw, the music of muscle mashing between molars and canines. A beating heart, my own a thick, bloody steak. The fog of insanity. I am a monster. A living dead.

              I was once a man.

              The axe head dragging heavy in the dirt. A curved, razor edge and an engraved raven screaming in the silver. Scratches all along the throat and dried blood caked from heel to toe. A thin trail drawn in my footsteps full of nightmares and terror. A horsefly crawls from a soggy hole in my cheek.

              Up ahead, in the cobalt blue between night and dawn, a cabin with windows boarded and the door barricaded. Faint whisper of light on the eastern rim, hope pretending to be where it’s certainly not. Or is it truly there? Does hope still exist when your own has gone from the world?  

              Footsteps forward. An animal slaughtered and torn to bits in the yard, a goat most likely. Its Rib cage shorn and sucked of the marrow. Bones and hooves make for lovely crowns - some of the infected have shown an affinity for satanic macabre.

              My own skin crawling, the devil inside me too.

              Feed. Devour.

              Carcasses, piled and burned and turned to ash. Skulls with strips of flesh melted to orbitals. An explosive exit wound from a lonely dome rolled to the bottom of the blackened heap. Shotgun. Sawed-off. The stench is unmistakable – an overpowering, mutant reek blowing about in the wind. Someone has defended this place well.

              It’s eerie and silent. No barn or garage. Tracks swerve backwards frantically in the gravel driveway, no vehicle in sight. A rope swing slung from the branch of an oak shivers in the breeze. Crows cry from the barren trees. They’ve learned not to pick at our remains. Those that do go stark mad. They attack their own and soon the whole murder is infected. Dark balloons writhing in the sky, plowing at high velocities into stone structures, crashing through glass and shredding themselves to feathered ribbons.

              Perhaps everything living is gone.

              No. Through the foul aroma, something else. Sweat. Blood. Tears.

              Feast.

              The wood porch groans under my feet, rancid stumps numb to feeling, digits cracked and twisted from wild wanderings. Everything boarded, nothing through which to peer. I rap a knuckle on the door. Solid, reinforced with planks or perhaps the overturned dining room table. I make sure to stay clear of the frame - whatever shotgun did damage to that skull could be waiting on the other side.

              Moments go by. Nothing.

              I asked Caroline to marry me in a field of sunflowers. I planned to surprise her at the peak, but the sun pouring over the ridge painted everything a warm, liquid gold and filled me with a fearlessness I’ve not felt since, a courage that makes old friends of forever. She paused, a petal between her fingertips, and when she turned around I was on one knee with a little box and a ring. I didn’t even get the words out. “Yes”, she breathed, dropping to the ground with me. My palm circling the small of her back, her hand running laps through my hair. Brown eyes like Kodiak fur.

              I press my ear to the door, raw appendage blistered by the cold, the upper portion torn away by raking fingernails. Inside, a sound wave, barely a ripple, and then a booming echo, the thundering of a grandfather clock from a time long past. What’s the hour? 5am? 6? What do the hands of a clock mean when time itself has stopped? And who said it ever really began? All of us zombies back then, slaves to time. Wishing we had more. Doing nothing with it. The best intentions and all of our might. And all we did was eat the world.

              Mind virus. Mustard gas in my demented cerebral. Entire battalions twisting in the mud, gasping and choking, clawing away at their necks. 

              Quiet. Solitude. A freezing morning and a cabin in the woods.

              Flesh. Feed. Gorge.

              I descend back down the steps and head for the rear of the house. My eyes dart in their sockets, alert to danger, the obliterated mutants in the yard burned in my thoughts like the scorched outline of a cattle brand. A ton of ammunition to build a mountain of bodies that big. Land mines and claymores maybe. But the car gone and no sniper fire to greet me. A fiendish drawl of laughter leaks from me. Where else to go? The hell is all around you.

              The back yard gray and dreary and desolate. Spindly trees like crooked skeletons and a rusted weathervane plunged into the earth. A playscape with a slide and tunnel. Haunting emptiness. Abandoned next to the playscape – a purple big wheel with pink streamers taped to the handlebars and Disney princess stickers pasted all along the back seat.

              Ice in my fingertips and chalk in my throat. A rupture in time and a memory forced to the surface.

              Winter sunlight streaming through the living room window and a cinnamon aroma wafting through the hall. Evergreen needles and ornaments sparking within, icicles and candy canes and crimson hearts adorned with all of our smiles. Thrashing, tearing, ripping. The wrapping paper undone while she giggles with glee.

              “Wow!” she hollers, animated as a cartoon coyote losing its top. “Yay daddy!” She bounces up and down in the rubble, the paper crunching and crinkling beneath her.

               A smile on my face and Caroline’s hands on my shoulders. She kisses my cheek and rests her chin on the top of my head. “Oh what did you get her?” she asks, the size of the box exasperating the tone in her voice. Surely there’s nowhere to put it, not in this tiny space.

              “It’s a big wheel mommy!” She’s flipping it sideways and shoveling away the mess to give her mother a clear view. Her eyes beam with excitement and electricity crackles in the room, fleece jammies and wool socks floating a few strands of her strawberry blonde locks in the sunlight. “Can we take it out daddy? Can we?” She tugs at my arm.

              “It’s alright with me – ask your mom though! Even daddy has to ask mom when he wants to do something around here.”

              She bites her lip. She can be annoyed by the box occupying half the living room or the childishness of her husband’s silly, untrue joke. But what she can’t deny is the thrill in her daughter’s voice or the simple joy that arises within a child when they receive a bike on Christmas.

              “Oh okay”, she relents. But coat and boots on missy. And take your father with you – I’ve got a breakfast casserole in the oven and I still have to ice the cinnamon rolls.”

              Gabbie bounds from the room cheering.

              “And you.” She gives a playful shove. “Get that box down into the dumpster before I tape you inside and return to sender.” I wrap her in my arms and take her down to the rug. She shrieks and we laugh and kiss, rolling around in the mess.

The empty playscape again front-and-center and the big wheel lonely on the hard ground. Rage surges through me; I have the sudden urge to split a living thing in two, to pin its entrails to the wall. My hunger is an ocean. A quick-twitch wretched suffering and a tweaking need for flesh between my teeth. There’s a log on a stump - from the before times, when smoke from a chimney wasn’t a sure way to get you killed. I raise the axe over my head and unleash an animal howl. I bring it down savagely, splitting the log in two and the stump three-quarters the way to the ground.

              Rage. Feed.

              I pry the axe free and return my gaze to the cabin. Something unexpected – the back entrance is exposed. The door’s been ripped from its hinges; it lies mangled ten yards away. Darkness in the frame. Silence. No movement but my own steps forward. A snarling in my mind, an impatient unease.

              I pick up a stone and lob it through the door. No hail of gunfire. No screams shredding the silence. I hold the axe steady and enter.

              A trail of blood on the kitchen floor and a shattered coffee pot nearby. Jagged remains of dishes scattered everywhere. Bullets in the wall and casings at my feet. A confrontation. But where are the bodies? Or at least the remains. Somewhere near – the scent is stronger. And the sound audible through the door, it’s clearer now. A radio. There’s a radio playing.

              It’s coming from the living room. More blood on the carpet, not just droplets but messy splatters with a darker hue. A more gaping wound. An open artery. A bigger chunk removed.

              A green light blinks in the book case. The radio mumbles away.

My monologue’s out of control

I found the hole where the happiness goes

Lump in my throat and a throat in my tongue

I’m gonna scream at the top of my lungs!

You get lost in the ocean

What do you do when you are so broken?

The flood, the feeling comes over

How are you so loved and so lonesome?

              I press the power button and the noise ceases. Starving. I’m so starving. An unstable calm has bloomed within me, a hurricane eye still and silent, outside of which the chaos of the universe churns. A chaos untamed by the god that created it. What god? So much hatred in my heart. If infinite wisdom allows for this then I wish to remain a feral beast forever.

              Up the stairs I go. In the hallways is where I find them. An infected with its head blown off, gushers of blood pooled in a lake around its body. Rigor mortis set in long ago; the creature’s bony fingers have curled and cemented, its spine stiff as a folding board. And the smell putrid even to me. Black flies feasting on the carcass. A rat scurries from the gaping hole in its neck.

              The man of the house sat up against the wall at the end of the hallway, a shotgun blast through his heart. I bare my teeth and lean in for a closer look. Yellow in his eyes. In his fingernails. Claw marks on his neck, infected by the thing he slew. Took his own life to avoid the fate of us.

              He’s a week dead at least. No use to me – I crave flesh that’s alive. There’s nothing alive here. I reach into his pocket and find an unused shell. I slot in into the shotgun and tuck the weapon under my arm. I descend the stairs and head back outside. I make for the woods behind the cabin. Maybe I can kill a buck and drain its blood – enough to sustain me while I hunt.

              Icy dew on the hard ground; it cracks beneath my steps. I stop in my tracks and a hellish grin spreads slowly on my cracked lips. What a gift of the virus – the nose of a blood hound. The scent has returned. It possess me, makes my blood boil. I follow it, saliva dripping from my chops.

              Thump.

              Hollowness beneath me. I roll onto my toes and then back on my heels. A creaking and then a soft whimper. I can hear the blood rushing in their veins. I rain blows down upon the concealed cellar door. Screams that curdle the air and animal fear that only presents inches from death. I jam my heel into the destroyed wood and rip the pathetic thing from its hinges. I descend down.

              Feeding time.

              A woman, in tears and shaking uncontrollably. The virus propelling me forward like a demonic puppet. So dark in here, just a single lantern and still barely any light in the sky. My jaw ready to clamp her throat.

               A whimper beneath her breast. A child, a girl, two years old.

              Time swirling backwards again. Terrified screams. Creatures tearing through our home, crawling on the walls and ceiling. Caroline sprints to the truck, Gabbie bawling in her arms. The pistol barks in my hand; a bullet explodes through the eye of a pursuing mutant. Now I’m tearing after both of them, heart in my throat, the fear of god releasing atmospheres of adrenaline. I rip open the cab door but it’s too slow. The creature’s claws are in my calf and he’s drawn blood. I waste him with the last bullet in the chamber and fall backwards, dragged to the pavement.

              I can feel it surging inside of me. Caroline’s screaming, my face in her cupped hands. Hot tears streaming down. Foam in my mouth and violent convulsions. My wind pipe is constricting.

              “Go.” I breathe. “Caroline. Go.”

              “No!” she cries, “No. I won’t leave you.”

              Jagged needles of pain shooting up and down my limbs. Feverish sweat pouring from my glands.

              “Go or I’ll kill you.”

              She clutches harder. “No! I won’t.”

              Yellow sun bursting in my corneas. Boiling rage and insanity beginning to blink its horrible visions. I take a final look at my baby girl. Then my last words before losing control.

              “Go. Or I’ll kill her.”

              The jeep roars from the driveway, gravel dust clouds and descends upon me. Wailing with her hands, pounding the glass, is Gabby. In her grip, her little Jonathan husky doll.

              Time present again. In the dark cellar, a mother and her daughter, and in the terrified girls hands a stuffed beagle. Her own Jonathan.

              I jolt backwards, the cords in my neck straining under great pressure. Oxygen has evacuated my lungs.

              Kill. Feed.

              Musty in the cellar, a dankness that comes with the dark and wet.

              Go Caroline.

              I won’t.

              I collapse to my knees and retch. Blood in my eyes. Ravenous hunger that grips me. The woman clutches her girl and cries. She rocks back-and-forth covering her daughter’s eyes.

              “No.. I can’t…No…I won’t.” Choked words between the retching.

              I won’t leave you.

              Go. Or I’ll kill her.

              The fury is about to take over; I can feel it cresting into the abyss. One last shred of humanity inside me. My daughter’s eyes in my soul. I clasp the shotgun and slide it panicked across the cement floor.

              “Do it!” I scream, but the virus has taken everything and it comes out as a wild, maniacal howl. I’m overtaken, completely overrun. There is no more of me left. 

              She lunges for the shotgun. I lunge to feast.

              A blast shatters the morning. There is no more of me left.