#21
"The Sorry-Making Machines" Issue
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Turning
by Richard K. Weems
Had you been in anyone else's steel-toes, you would have punched a hole in the idiot's skull the second he got bit then spilt his carcass out the hatch as though it were a sack of empty cans. Unfortunately, the idiot this time is you, and that is indeed an oval-shaped bite where the heel of your palm used to be.
You were the one with the simplest task to fulfill. Marlowe jogged the mile-point-five to town to scavenge, fill the haversack and jog back to your bunker, ducking the undead every yard of the way. Daniels leapt out the hatch once he caught sight of Marlowe and cleared a path among the locals, the zombies that linger outside like strays around a meat packing plant. All you had to do was hold the hatch open until everyone got in safe or you retrieved the haversack, whichever came first.
But while you stood there, your hand squeezed into the handle loop, the flesheater known as Gladys leaned out from behind the hatch and bit into your palm as though it were an overripe pear. You felt little more than a cold pinch, as though you'd been nipped by frozen tongs.
Only now, when you look, do you realize the gravity of your situation.
"Motherfuck—," you snarl. For the final syllable, you whack Gladys with the hatch while she chews what was once yours. Gladys resembles a homeless church lady down to the pillbox hat and torn veil. Rule One when you open the hatch? Check the sweep, dipshit. You'd like to take your steel pipe to Gladys's stupid lid, but the damage is done. Your oozing, ovular wound ripples with cold, as though you kept it on ice too long. This cold has already leaked beyond the wound into your palm.
You hope a blowtorch might seal the hole and stop the infection, but that kind of equipment is downstairs and you have to get past the rest of your pack, who is hungry and eager to divvy up the incoming supplies. If they see your wound, they'll brain you on the spot and absorb your share. They are like rabbits burrowed under a nation of fox-always on-edge, eager to excise any microbe of danger. Even if you get to the blowtorch, will they accept your self-mutilation, or will a feeding frenzy ensue? Your girl, Pretty Boy, should defend you, but these are tough times. Best to keep the wound to yourself for now and take care of it where the rest won't hear you scream.
Then Marlowe gives your hand a double-take as he shimmies past you. Marlowe, the slimy runt who has maintained a covetous eye on your blanket, your corner of the bunker that nets in heat from the fire, and your girl (strike that—the only girl) since he joined. Even on a half-can-of-ravioli-a-day diet, Marlowe still has a paunch and spiky man-boobs, so the chance to get you out of the way and enter the lottery for Pretty Boy is probably the best prospect he's had his entire life. Your suspicion is confirmed when he pretends he's seen nothing and jogs down to the lower level, the haversack so weighty with nonperishables it slaps his ass with every step. No doubt, he wants to blab about your wound to everyone. The cold has spread to the center of your hand, making your fingers feel like transplants from someone else, but still you think you can burn the infection away, if given the chance.
By the time Daniels backs through the hatch, you wish you'd buried the elbow joint at the end of your steel pipe into Marlowe's temple. As long as you saved the haversack, you could have made up any story you wanted.
"Seal it," Daniels curses as he crouches by the stairs, his knuckles pale around the grip of his Rawlings. A half-dozen locals, including Gladys, have shambled close to the hatch. That undead church lady bitch still chews.
For a moment, you consider going out in a blaze of gore and bum-rushing the locals to see if you can de-animate a heap before they overcome you. You've never seen anyone get over a bite or scratch. Not that spindly pre-teen you ran with in your nomadic days, not even Brills, who was a water heater with arms, even though they all swore they could. Part of you knows you're Undead Man Walking, but another part thinks you can prove to be the exception, so you seal the hatch. You yank your wounded hand from the loop and pull down the sleeve of your thermal top. The numbing cold has taken over your whole hand, save the pinky.
Daniels grins. "I love the smell of fresh cans in the morning." He props his Rawlings on his shoulder and skips down the steps. You follow, but you make sure you have a solid grip on your pipe. Marlowe only just got downstairs, but still could have had time to drum up an ambush.
Who built this bunker, and whether it was designed to protect against zombie apocalypse or just any run-of-the-mill worldwide devastation, no one in your pack knows. A shack of poured concrete is all that pops above the surface. The hatch sits at the end of a serpentine path worn into the surrounding caliche. Even those before you weren't the first to discover this place. Turnover is high. You've lost four since you joined, one to a fight with Daniels over a missing can of baked beans, the others to the usual hazards of your present circumstance. You may still have a crumb or two of their skulls embedded in the elbow joint of your trusty pipe. As Daniels precedes you into the utility room, you prepare to defend yourself.
For now, your luck holds. Marlowe points to the stairwell in an attempt to rat you out, but the pile of humanity at his feet, hunched over like beetles, rummage and bicker over the fresh supplies and pay him no mind. As soon as you're through the door, Marlowe's cheeks and mouth fall, his hairy nostrils almost a window to his brain. He knows you need only three steps to put his face in range of your pipe. The infection is past your wrist now and drifting up your forearm. Your sleeve is dotted, but not wet. The wound barely even trickles, as though Gladys cauterized your veins with her teeth.
"Sentry gets first dibs on hash." Daniels raises his bat to remind everyone that it was his black ass that cleared a path for the food. "And if there's no hash, I'll take creamed corn."
In that primal Twister game at Marlowe's feet you make out the braces of Pretty Boy's overalls, then those rebar-like arms that hang out of her wife-beater. This tomboy outfit inspired her name and makes the rest of the pack throb, but the others are going to have to get their jollies rubbing against her in pile-ups like these, because you're her exclusive. She rises with a can of peaches in each hand, her blond hair clumped into those pigtails you adore. She sees you and holds out the cans, triumphant.
"We got our first picks, boys," she says as she steps out of the pile. "Just make sure the rest splits evenly." A spark of warmth momentarily counteracts the cold in your arm at the fact you are the only other member of her first person plural. You might have to lose your arm at the elbow now (shit, this stuff travels fast!), but if she is the one to bring down the axe and make sure the blowtorch seals off every capillary, you will be a happy man. The world the way it is now, this might be the truest expression of love you will ever see.
Outnumbering her sevenfold, your pack could overpower Pretty Boy and have their way with her. The zombie horde outside would leave her no other option but to live with those odds, but back before you joined, Pretty Boy took a length of chain to the balls of someone who did her wrong and then dared fall asleep, so the men give her space. Even now, Vlad and Tooth are constructing equitable piles of cans for her and you.
She's the one who enticed you into this bunker. You were on your own, the last survivor of a nomadic party that didn't know how to scout ahead, when you spotted a runner equipped with a haversack and a world-class ass. You hadn't been close to a live woman in months, so this jogger made you stupid and frothy as though at an oasis spewing canned peaches in syrup. You pursued her pigtails onto a serpentine path that led down a basin. You aped her weaves to keep clear of the undead along the trail. But when you came to a clearing, a metal hatch on the far side, the object of your pursuit spun into a fighting stance, a length of chain in one hand, a ball-peen hammer in the other.
"You better be alone, dickwad." The smattering of undead also had their sights on her, but your hunger was of a different ilk. She swung the chain at the air, and the hatch opened as if on cue. A Zulu warrior armed with an aluminum bat emerged and laid out some of the undead to clear a path to the hatch, but she stood her ground as she waited for an answer.
You unsheathed the pipe on your back and brained a tub-a-lard zombie near at hand.
"Let's get inside, then." She turned and let you follow that ass into the bunker. You would be let down when she proved to already have a man—a beanpole of a boy, barely old enough to drink, always worn out from keeping up with Pretty Boy's needs—but you would clear up that problem in a few days so she could choose you as her new exclusive.
As she approaches you now, peaches in hand, you know that hunger is the only thing delaying the fuck you put off this morning, also out of hunger. That's been the nature of your relationship: the sex is sudden, exciting as hell and always on her terms. Role-play, lumberjack, pitch-a-tent. She'll wake you from sleep with her expert hand, wheedle her toes into your crotch while you stoke the fire or lick a can clean and announce, "Let's go, buster, I'm fucking hungry," and you can't remember ever getting laid this furiously in your pre-apocalypse life. What was that life, anyway? You've been focused on surviving since this shit came down (you can't even count how many years ago), so memories of your previous life have rotted out of neglect. You'll regain glimpses now and then of pounding the shit out of a basket of pretzels at a sports bar when a certain football team turned over the pigskin, or collecting stray carts in a Kash & Karry parking lot, but that's it. Whatever that life was, it didn't include Pretty Boy, so when she approaches you, you ready yourself to ask her if she would make you a happy man and hack off your left arm at the elbow. You prop your pipe against the wall.
Behind her, Marlowe shouts, "Look, down there!" and Pretty Boy's gaze drops to your wound. She clenches the can in her right hand as though she's ready to bury it in your face.
"Please," you whisper.
She isn't going to help you with the axe or blowtorch. Behind her, Marlowe checks her out as though she were an industrial-sized portion of pork and beans.
Pretty Boy nods to Daniels, who nods to Tooth, a hick with poor dental habits but deadly with the screwdrivers he keeps in a pan flute-like sheath on his hip, and the two men grab you by the biceps.
"Where am I going?" You aren't embarrassed so much by your fear but the crack in your voice during the last word. Be a man, Pretty Boy's look says, the same admonition she'd give you when you'd come twice and she still wasn't done.
Now that you're in custody, Marlowe lunges at you and yells, "Outside with you, fucker." Daniels shifts his weight as though to lift you up the stairs so he can dump your ass out the hatch, but Pretty Boy lights a hand on his shoulder, and he relaxes. Now that you're on your way out, everyone wants to jockey for your spot. Even Tooth beams his single canine, dark like burnt caramel, as though it might earn him Pretty Boy's attention.
Pretty Boy considers what to do with you. "Let's watch," she decides, and she points to the nearest storage closet, where she first had her way with you. Your whole forearm feels like refrigerated Jell-O. The other men of your tribe hug cans to their chests like squirrels rejoicing in their nuts. After Daniels and Tooth carry you into the storage room and seal you in, you think Pretty Boy watches you through the wire-meshed window because she wants to see you fight off this shit. You're trying not to remember she was the one who also wanted to watch Brills turn.
Brills was the kind of beast who would have carried the M-60 in a Vietnam flick, but he settled for a plumber's wrench that looked like a toy in his beefy hands. He didn't watch his back while making a hole for a scrounger one day and got clawed across the shoulder, a wound too obvious to hide, so when he came downstairs, he offered himself up for judgment.
"What's it going to be?" he said. He turned to present his wound, which like yours oozed and barely stained his Harley tee.
Brills commanded respect with his size, also for his swing. He once cracked a local in the head so hard it rocketed off into the skull of another for an honest-to-god combo shot. Even Marlowe was reluctant to suggest anything, as Brills wasn't dead yet and could still pack a swing.
Pretty Boy was the first to chime in from the corner you two shared. "Think you can fight it?" she said, and she grabbed your arm in that way when she had a new role-play idea.
"Fuck yeah," Brills said, chock full of bullshit confidence. He walked to the storage closet and let you and Tooth strap him down to the metal table. When he was secured, Pretty Boy ordered you to stay with him.
"You do him when he turns," she said. She trembled, she was so hot. No doubt, she wanted to fuck you right there while Brills shivered on the table.
But she settled for watching from the window while you stood over Brills. "The cold," he explained as he died, though you didn't ask for explanation at the time. "That's the worst. Creeps through your body like a fog and nothing you can do to stop it."
Maybe these weren't the man's exact words—in all honesty, he offered little coherent thought as he shuddered through the hour and a half it took him to turn, and you were in too much of a rush to get to your fuck appointment to pay much attention. But he did insist he could kick this zombie shit, all to no avail. He died, then he churned back to life and pushed feebly against the restraints to get at you.
"Now," Pretty Boy yelled through the wired glass, both before and after you opened up his skull with your pipe. She could barely wait to get you inside her. The two of you humped in the sleeping bag while Daniels and Vlad hauled Brills's remains to the hatch for disposal.
As Pretty Boy once again peers through the window, this time at you, you refuse to accept that she never wanted Brills to fight his infection, that watching you turn is the only thrill you hold for her anymore. You command the fog in your arm to cease and sink back from whence it came, but the spot where Daniels grabbed your bicep, the spot that has already broken into a Pleiades of bruises, sinks into the cold. If you can't hold it off altogether, you wish it would at least keep a consistent pace. Already, you're woozy, so you lean against the metal table. You have a brief flash of plugging in the rotary on the wall and psyching yourself into losing your whole arm, but your legs are weak and you would need two hands to run it, anyway.
"Motherfuck—," you mutter, and you stamp the floor with weak punctuation.
Pretty Boy makes room for Daniels to take a peek. You've been reduced to a new form of television, entertainment to while away the time until the next scrounge run. You would have taken greater umbrage to that notion back when you were a wild-eyed survivor. You'd weathered herds of the undead not to mention humans lacking good intentions: ex-military, of course, but also feral kids and even a posse of middle-aged women with rifles and retribution on their minds. When you first joined this underground pack, you still had enough edge to get rid of Pretty Boy's previous man.
Ironically, you had hatch duty then, too. Pretty Boy wore the haversack, and beanpole cleared the path with his two-by-four. He could barely wield the thing due to his sex fatigue. Pretty Boy needed a more virile man, and this was your shot. She was safe inside, waiting at the top of the stairs. When a local came up beanpole's flank, all you had to do was nothing—no warning, no backup. The local bit him at the base of his neck, and beanpole flinched and jumped into the arms of the local he'd been trying to ward off. Soon, two more had their fingers in his flesh.
He begged you for help, didn't he? That beanpole whimpered, "Please?" as he got eaten alive. You turned to Pretty Boy. The decision was hers.
"Close it up," she said. She headed downstairs. "He's gone." She chose you that very night, soon after chow. She laid her blanket on this very table and screwed you amid the smells of her fluids and beanpole's, since they'd fucked only that morning.
Now you wish you'd cracked his skull as a final favor. Instead, beanpole joined the ranks topside and still wanders about out there. You used to enjoy the sight of his skinny ass wobbling about with the locals, but now you wish you'd given him a decent end so that maybe you'd deserve one of your own now.
The cold has filled your arm and spilled into your chest. You have a hard time gathering your breath. You never asked Pretty Boy how long she's been in this bunker, how many men she tore through before beanpole. What the fuck was his name? You called him something before you closed the hatch, but you were stuffed with superiority and accomplishment at the time, and no doubt you were smarmy as hell when you said, "Sayonara—" whatever. Now she watches you through the window as though you're a spaniel she's putting down for shitting on the rug. As the dribble of cold tumbles into your gut, you wish she would hold you. Or grab your head and shove your face between her legs. Anything for some warmth.
Face it—she's better suited to this world than you. Back when you roamed like a feral animal, eager to kill any threat at hand, you may have held a respectable position on the food chain. When Pretty Boy chose you to replace beanpole, you fancied yourselves a rock'em-sock'em Adam and Eve team who would bring forth fledglings as hard and sharp as diamond crags to take back the world for the living.
But since then, you've softened. Blood floods your cheeks, not just your netherworld, when you see her. The world as it has become has no place for that kind of sentimentality. Now your other arm is cold, now your hips and left thigh. Have you blacked out here and there? Could an hour really have passed? Different faces have presented themselves at the window, but Pretty Boy's has been constant. She's studying you.
You fucked her daily for two months, and she's never shown any sign of pregnancy. She is a bottomless pit of desire—not to perpetuate the species but to fulfill her needs. She's the fittest of any of you. She knows there's no future. Didn't she tell you once to pretend she was that zombie Gladys? She snapped and clawed at you while you fucked her, and you finished sooner than you thought possible, so quick she offered to snag that flesheater with a rope and bend it over a rail.
"What do you think it's like?" she asked. "Would it be like fucking a wallet?"
The cold wafts into your neck like a drain overflow. Pretty Boy knows the only purpose left to this life is to consume everything left to consume, and you are now an empty can. A sack full of empty cans. Only the silliest, most optimistic side of you could think she would shed tears for you. Face it—she's giggling. She opens the door and escorts Daniels into the room, his Rawlings clutched samurai-style, his other bat being encouraged by Pretty Boy's deft hand.
Everything is so dark now, the air as dense as pudding, but still you raise your arm in a defensive gesture. Fuck all that mercy-kill nonsense you used to believe in. After all this suffering, don't you deserve to see it through to the end? Even if for a moment, you want to know if some semblance of you will remain locked away within your animated corpse.
You hear the first strike rather than feel it—the clang of aluminum Rawlings against the aluminum alloy in the table beneath you, your skull caught between them. Your defensive posture didn't mean shit. Maybe because you're not quite yet dead, your skull resists its encouragement to split. Such a stubborn rock. But fluid running down both sides of your mouth suggests your nose is spread flat across your face like a flounder.
Daniels rears up for another shot, but Pretty Boy manipulates his joystick and puts him on pause. "Hold," she coos, and she looks you in the eyes, or rather eye, as one of them has wandered off on its own devices.
I know, I know, you want to say. I may not be strong enough to be your Adam, but I still love you, but all you manage is a whimper. A pathetic little murmur. A tiny, wimpy "Please."
Her smirk turns to a frown. She hoped for better from you. With a slight tug, she unleashes Daniels. "No brains, no head," she warns him, and the Rawlings this time sets off a clang between your ears, like a massive bell, or is that the sound of everything spilling out of you?
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