Zombies - Encounters with the Hungry Dead Part 54

"If I let them go they will kill me."

"If you kill them you will die, I promise you."

"It sounds like it's worth the risk." Alyxa smiles at the young men, their eyes jiggling in their goggles.

"Alyxa..." I say, taking the blades away from the boys. "Don't do it. We can try to escape now. We'll see the sunlight."

I smile at her, but she will not look at me.

As if shrugging, Alyxa turns away from them to look at Timmy.

"Happy birthday," she tells him, smiling.

Then a slicing sound and blood sprays into musty air, the two c.o.c.kroach boys holding their wide-open necks as they fall to the ground. Redness pools under our bare feet.

And she just stares at Thomas coldly. Her eyeb.a.l.l.s are black pools without any white in them.

The shock has taken the breath out of Thomas. "You... b.i.t.c.h," he chokes, too weak to cry. "I can't believe... you... killed them. You f.u.c.k... ing b.i.t.c.h."

"What did you do?" I yell at her, and her face twitches back at me. "Kill Thomas. He's the only one who deserves to die."

"I'd rather see Thomas suffer."

I gather our things, dressing myself in the correct attire for fighting the living dead, collecting the sharpest homemade weapons.

"Hurry up," I tell Alyxa, throwing the rubber outfit at her. "We need to go before the others get back."

"What about Thomas?" she asks.

I look down on the pathetic retch, his face wrinkled downwards. "Kill him, quickly."

"No, I want him to come with us." She laughs, cutting her own shoulder with a lemon knife.

"No time for games," I tell her. "He's just going to slow us down."

"I won't rest until I make this perverted a.s.shole suffer," she tells me, bringing her knife to his chin. "Either I stay here and do it or I feed him to the dead." "Fine, take him," I tell her. And she runs up to me and licks all the blood off the side of my head.

Last week, Alyxa was lying next to me in the darkness. She was cradling her stomach as if pregnant again. It was too dark to see, but I swear I could hear her smiling, her eyes closed just smiling at the thoughts that were spinning around in her head.

"Do you remember when mom used to make pies in the summer?" she asked me.

"My mom never made pies," I told her.

"She made them on Sat.u.r.day afternoons when the sun was directly above us," her voice like a little girl's. "The sun was so big, warming up the garden in the backyard, hugging flavor into mom's pies through the window."

"I thought you hated the sun?"

"No, not before mom died," she told me. "It was big and warm and comforting, just like my mom. And I'd play in the suns.h.i.+ne all day long, squis.h.i.+ng frogs into jelly and rubbing it on the sidewalk to cook."

"Yes, of course," I say.

But she's never known her mom...

We leave the sick people behind. Most of them only have a few days left anyway. The very young c.o.c.kroach boys hide behind the skeleton piles, waiting for us to leave so they can eat the two freshly dead teenagers.

Thomas doesn't put up a fight as we push him through the crawls.p.a.ce, but he's so fat that he can hardly get through. Fat from eating people.

"Let's not go down through the ceiling," I say. "They'll be expecting us there."

"Where then?" Alyxa asks.

"One of the office vents," I say.

"But those are farther from the exit," she says.

"But they won't be waiting for us there," I say.

She nods.

I was right. Peering through a vent into one of the stale offices, there aren't any corpses in sight. Unfortunately, the vent is screwed shut. We'll have to break through and the noise will probably attract them into the room.

The door to the office is shut. It might even be locked. That helps a little, but we don't want them to swarm in the hallway outside the door. We'd never be able to get through them that way.

Alyxa kicks the vent in. The bang echoes through the room but we don't hear any noises in response.

"Come on," she says, sliding through the opening.

She pulls Thomas's plump legs and I push on his shoulders with my feet until he can get through the vent hole. He cries out as his flesh compacts. His breaths heavy, like he's suffocating. He hasn't gone through enough of the crawls.p.a.ces to get over the claustrophobia.

This attracts the dead. I can hear them in the next office, pounding on the walls to get through.

"Hurry up," Alyxa cries.

I shove all my weight into Thomas, not worried if I hurt him or break his neck in the process. Let out all my anger to get him through.

He plops out on the other side, lands on his legs weird.

"Get up," Alyxa tells him, but he won't get to his feet.

I crawl out of the shaft and hurry to the door. No sounds when I put my ear to it, but the scratching against the other wall might be interfering.

"Leave him," I say.

"But I want to watch him die..."

"Come on," I say.

She pulls Thomas up by the hair. His ankle must have been twisted because he can't stand on it anymore.

"You don't want to do this," Thomas cries. "We'll die horribly."

"As long as I get to see you die first," she says.

Out in the hallway, the corpses are animated mannequins. Naked, mechanical, featureless. Spread out but not close enough to be a problem yet.

Alyxa and I drag the fat man across the tile floor, over rubble and mummified body parts scattered around like old laundry.

"We've got to run," I say. "Drop him."

"Not yet," she says. "I want to feed him to them."

The fat man oozes a yellow substance from his mouth.

"You..." he chokes on the goop in his throat. "I'll kill..."

He falls to his knees and pukes up a blanket of yellow muck. Alyxa pulls on him to get up, but he's glued to the floor. The regurgitation becomes violent. Yellow squirts from his nostrils, through the corners of his eyes.

"What's wrong with him?" I ask.

Snails crawl through the soup. They stick to Thomas' hands, to the sides of his face. A slug stretches out of his nostril and dribbles grease onto his upper lip.

"Help me," Alyxa says.

I grab Thomas by the other shoulder and we lift him off of his knees, but he jerks out of our grasp and stabs me in the chest.

We let him go and he backs away, pointing a knife at us. I look down at my chest: a little round hole. Black blood squirts out of it with a swirl of mucous.

It's not a knife, it's a pen. But he holds it like a knife, threatens us to back off "Murderers!" he cries, snails and slime still pouring out of his mouth. A thick yellow waterfall pooling onto his belly.

Alyxa curls her eyebrows at the undead.

"Eat him!" she cries. "You're too slow!"

The closer the corpses get, the slower they seem to move.

She runs up to the zombies and smacks them in the face, gets behind them and shoves them at Thomas. They don't attack her. They just groan at her through holes in their skulls.

"Come on! Eat him!" she cries.

Thomas just points his pen at me, holding his mouth shut with his other hand, snot dripping through his fingers.

"I'll eat him then!" she cries.

Thomas turns to point his pen at her as she leaps onto him, grabs him around the shoulders and wraps her legs around his waist. He stabs at her with the pen but it does not break the skin.

Alyxa bites into his neck and chews through his flesh until she opens a major blood vessel. But instead of blood gus.h.i.+ng out of him, it is the same yellow snot that he has been regurgitating. It leaks down Alyxa's lips and chest. She growls at him, a flesh-hungry ghoul.

He falls to the floor and seizures. Alyxa squeezed around him like a spider, trying to hold down his flapping limbs as she eats him.

The living dead pa.s.s me and pile on top of Thomas. They tear him apart, taking pieces of him into their black mouths. But they don't attack Alyxa. They eat with her, like she is one of them.

"Come on," she says to me with yellow slop all over her face. "Join us."

I back away from them, holding the blood in my chest by plugging the hole with my little finger, and she returns to feasting on the fat man.

The living dead do not attack me either for some reason. They b.u.mp me out of their way to get to Thomas. I stagger down the hallway, looking for a room to duck into.

A hand grabs me.

"Come back," she says. "We're safe."

She digs her fingers into her crotch and rubs it on my face.

I cough at her.

"It smells like death," she says. "That's why they aren't attacking us. The menstrual blood stains on our bodies have turned rancid. They think we're dead like them."

She rubs more rotten smells onto my neck and stomach. I hold my nose and mouth but still feel like puking.

"Let's go," she says, smiling, kissing me on the forehead.

But instead of taking me towards the exit, she goes back to Thomas's body to eat more of him.

"What are you doing?" I whisper.

"I want to feed," she says.

"We've got to get out of here," I say.

"No," she says, "we don't have to leave anymore. We can fit in with the living dead now. We can live with them."

"We must leave," I say.

"We'll never leave," she says.

And she goes back to Thomas.

She drops her weight next to the gurgling zombies, but her knees don't hit the ground. A wire has hooked her by the neck. She opens her eyes wide at me as the noose tightens around her throat.