The Way of All Flesh Read online

  David was surprised to find that he was running. He didn’t remember telling his body to do so, but that was okay. He wanted to get to the meat before the woman took it. No, more than wanted. He needed to, in the worst goddamned way.

  He heard a voice inside his mind then. His own, gentle but forceful.

  Don’t you think it’s more than a little weird that someone cooked an animal, put it in a hamster cage, and left it sitting on a park bench? Does that seem in any way even close to normal?

  It didn’t, but David didn’t care, wasn’t capable of caring. The hunger had too strong a hold on him. That meat could have been full of poison-coated razor blades, and he still would’ve wanted to sink his teeth into it, tear off warm, greasy mouthfuls, and swallow them whole—flesh, metal, toxin and all.

  Up to this point, the woman’s face had shown no expression, but as her fingers fumbled at the cage latch, she grimaced in frustration.

  “Open!” she shouted, as if she expected the cage to obey her command. “Open!”

  It refused to listen, however, and she smacked the flat of her hand against the cage door, jostling the meat inside. Why doesn’t she just open the door? David thought. Was it wired shut somehow, maybe even welded shut? The thought that he might not be able to get to the meat sparked panic, and he ran faster.

  “That’s mine!” he yelled as he reached the woman. He grabbed hold of the cage and tried to yank it out of her hands, but she held on tight.

  “No, it’s mine!” Her eyes flashed with animalistic fury and she bared her teeth at him.

  He felt the urge to do the same. More, he wanted to tear the cage free of her grip, raise it over his head and slam it down onto her skull with all his strength. He was bigger than her, stronger, and felt certain he was infinitely hungrier. That gave him a fuck ton of incentive. And once she was down on the ground bleeding and moaning, he would keep hitting her over and over until nothing was left of her head but a pulpy smear or the cage popped open and gave him access to the meat—whichever came first. He almost did it too. Was this close…

  He stopped pulling on the cage, although he didn’t let go of it.

  “Look, we’re both hungry, right? You’re having trouble opening the cage. Let me try. If I get it open, I’ll split the meat with you.” It was hard to think past the hunger, and he had to concentrate like a son of a bitch to even conceive of the words, let alone get them out. But he did.

  When he was finished, the woman continued to glare at him for a moment, still showing her teeth. But then her anger drained away, and her expression became impassive once more.

  “Do you think you can do that?” she asked. Her tone was calm enough, although there was an underlying tension in her voice.

  “Yes,” he said, the same tension in his own voice. In truth, he had no idea if he could open the cage. It was taking everything he had just to keep from attacking the woman. He suspected she was fighting a similar battle within herself.

  Behind him, Simon said, “This should be interesting.”

  Again, David ignored him. He removed his hands from the cage.

  The woman didn’t acknowledge Simon’s comment, didn’t so much as glance in his direction. She kept her gaze fastened on David. She didn’t release the cage, but she turned it around so that he could reach the door. He took a moment to examine it, but he could see nothing special about it. It opened and closed by a simple sliding latch, that was all.

  “The proverbial piece of cake, right?” Simon said. “Nothing to it.”

  “Shut up,” David muttered. He reached for the latch, but then hesitated. Even though he knew that all he had to do was take hold of the latch’s metal pin with his thumb and forefinger and slide it to the right, his fingers felt suddenly thick and clumsy, his hand a useless lump of meat. He felt a surge of anger, and he wanted to smack his hand against the cage just as the woman had done. But he restrained himself. Moving with the slow torturous care of a man trying to defuse a bomb, he reached out, took hold of the pin and slid it to the side.

  The cage door fell open.

  David’s hand—no longer so clumsy—reached inside the cage, grabbed hold of the meat, yanked it out and brought it to his mouth in a single swift motion. He sank his teeth into its soft succulence, flesh popped, savory, wet warmth exploded in his mouth, and he experienced a foodgasm unlike anything he’d ever known.

  The woman shrieked in fury, flung the cage aside and grabbed for the meat. David twisted to the side to protect his prize and jabbed a hand toward her. The flat of his palm struck her solidly on the breastbone. The impact sent her stumbling back, her legs bumped into the bench, her knees buckled, and she fell into a sitting position with a thud.

  He felt two equally strong but conflicting impulses just then. The first was to run, to get as far away from the woman as possible so he could enjoy his repast in peace. The second was to bend down, grab hold of the discarded cage with his free hand and beat the woman to a bloody pulp. He was leaning toward the latter, as it would ensure that he would get to keep all the meat for himself. He went as far as taking a step toward the cage—but then he stopped.

  A deal’s a deal, he thought.

  Using his teeth and hands, he tore the meat in two and held a chunk out to the woman. She looked at him for a moment, gaze clouded with suspicion. But then she rose from the bench and reached out to take David’s offering with a grateful smile.

  “Thanks.”

  “Isn’t this a touching scene?” Simon said. “Damn shame it has to end.”

  The woman raised her share of the meal to her mouth, but before she could take a bite, her head exploded in a shower of crimson.

  Kate watched as the round from her deer rifle—a Browning BAR Mark II Lightweight Stalker—found its target. The zombie jerked as she lost the top half of her head, then she fell limply to the ground, like a life-sized mechanical doll whose switch had just been flipped off.

  “Nice,” Nicholas said. “Best shot you’ve made all week.”

  She didn’t respond, nor did she turn around to look at him. She kept her rifle up and sighted on the second zombie’s head.

  “One chore says you can’t make it two for two.”

  Nicholas enjoyed his little games, thought they made the day go faster. Kate didn’t care one way or the other, but she usually indulged him. After all, it wasn’t as if they had anything better to do. On any other day, she would’ve taken him up on the bet. But not today…not when the zombie she had her gun trained on was her brother. Or rather, what was left of him.

  The two of them stood a hundred yards from the playset, next to a large oak tree on the southern edge of the park. It was early November, and most of the leaves had changed color and fallen from the trees. They’d had to be careful to avoid crunching any of the leaves while walking through the thigh-high grass. Most of the time zombies seemed unaware of their surroundings, and they usually moved slower than a glacier made of molasses. But when meat was nearby, their systems revved into high gear. Their senses became sharper, and their reflexes became quicker—almost as quick as a human’s. Even the smallest noise could catch their attention. And while Kate was by this point a practiced hunter and could pick off a charging zombie with relative ease, she preferred to kill them from a distance. When zombies got a whiff of meat, especially when it was still alive, they moaned, yowled and hissed in a way that reminded Kate of a pissed-off cat. Not only was it creepy as hell, the sound drew other zombies like sharks to blood in the water.

  “Something wrong?” Nicholas asked.

  Kate didn’t answer. She knew the question he was really asking: Why hadn’t she shot yet?

  Eight months ago the plague had hit. She didn’t know the scientific name for it, but the media had called it Blacktide because of how unbelievably fast it had spread. In less than a month, two-thirds of the human race was dead. Of the surviving third, three-quarters became zombies. The rest—whether through some kind of immunity or sheer dumb luck—survived and remained
human. Kate had been one of the fortunate, although there were days when she didn’t count herself as such. She knew David and his family hadn’t shared her immunity. One day, before everything had really turned to shit, she had gone over to their house to check on them. David, Sarah and the kids were gone, their front door left wide open, but their golden retriever Sasha—or at least her savaged, half-eaten corpse—had been left behind, along with a dozen or more bloody handprints on walls and doors. Some made by children, most by adults.

  That was the day Kate had become a Ranger.

  For the last six months—in addition to making supply runs—she had helped patrol Lockwood, killing zombies and disposing of their bodies in the fire pits outside town. And all that time, she had kept an eye out for her brother and his family, but she had never once caught sight of any of them. Until now.

  Each day before going out, she told herself that if she spotted one of them she wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. She wouldn’t be killing them; she’d be setting them free. It would be a mercy, a last act of love from a family member. And she believed that, she really did.

  So why couldn’t she pull the trigger?

  David wasn’t just her brother. He was her twin. Fraternal, of course, but from the day they were born, they’d shared a bond just as deep as if they had been identical. But that should’ve made it even easier to shoot, shouldn’t it? If their positions were reversed, she’d want David to put a bullet into her brain, and she was certain that was what he’d want her to do for him.

  Still, she hesitated.

  David stood there, blood smearing his mouth and chin from the squirrel he’d bitten into. Blood on his hands from where he’d torn the animal in two in order to share it with the other zombie—and wasn’t she having a hell of a time wrapping her head around that? She’d never seen a zombie do anything like it before. With them, it was every dead man for himself. He still held on to his half of the squirrel, the back end, she noted with a twist of nausea, tiny entrails dangling from it. He held the nasty thing down at his side, momentarily distracted by the sound of her gunshot, Kate guessed—but not so distracted that he would let go of his grisly little treat. Once zombies got hold of food, they didn’t release it. Not willingly, anyway.

  She was surprised by how much he still looked like the David she remembered. His clothes were filthy, covered with old bloodstains, dirt and mud. If she hadn’t known that he always wore a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt to work and navy-blue pants, she would’ve been hard-pressed to guess their original colors. He also always wore comfortable black work shoes, the kind with thick soft-rubber soles for people who were on their feet a lot. He’d lost one of them along the way somewhere, the right one. The black sock on that foot had been worn through some time ago, and its remains hung in tatters around his ankle, leaving his foot exposed. His brown hair hung tangled and matted down to his shoulders, and his face was covered with patchy stubble. Once someone became a zombie, their hair continued to grow for a couple months, although the rate of hair growth eventually slowed and finally stopped altogether. Facial hair ceased growing even faster, usually after only a week or two. She had no idea why. She wondered if there was anyone left alive in the world that did know or—for that matter—cared.

  His skin was leathery, his complexion sallow, eyes cataract milky. He stood awkwardly, left shoulder higher than his right, head canted to the side, left foot turned slightly inward. She wondered if he’d been injured sometime during the last six months. Zombies weren’t alive, but they weren’t exactly dead, either. As far as Kate knew, there wasn’t a word for what they were. They ate, they breathed—although infrequently—and they even excreted. Their shit was a foul clear liquid that smelled like sulfur and rotted meat. They also healed, if slowly and at times imperfectly. She wondered if that’s why David carried himself the way he did.

  But for all the terrible changes Blacktide had wrought in her brother, he still looked like David to her. More, he felt like David. And even though she desperately wanted to do her duty to him as his sister, as the last living family member he had in the world, she could not bring herself to shoot him.

  The entire time she had been struggling with her feelings, David had merely stood and looked at her, his face expressionless, eyes cloudy, dead and dull. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her and what, if anything, he thought or felt.

  On impulse, she reached out to him with her mind.

  “David? Are you in there?”

  David stood frozen in shock, unable to believe what had just happened. Up to this point, the most serious injury he had ever witnessed in person was when an old man had slipped on a patch of ice outside of Walmart one winter. The man had broken his hip, and David still remembered the horrible snapping sound and the man’s scream as he hit the ground. He’d called 911 and waited with the man, talking with him to keep him calm until the paramedics arrived. But this…this was in a whole different league. Hell, a whole different galaxy. This was the Super Bowl…no, the goddamned Olympics of physical injuries. The woman’s fucking head had exploded right in front of him, like someone had stuck a firecracker inside of a melon filled with red juice and meaty pulp.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Far worse was the thing that had killed her.

  The creature—he didn’t know what else to call it—stood some distance away, next to a gnarled, rotted tree that looked as if it might fall down any second. There were two creatures, actually. The second stood several feet behind the first, but David wasn’t worried about that one, not right now, mostly because it wasn’t the one pointing a rifle at him. At least, he thought it was a rifle. The weapon was fashioned from organic material instead of metal: lengths of bone lashed together with strips of what looked like muscle and tendon. It looked like some kind of avant-garde sculpture rather than a rifle, but he’d seen what it had done to the woman’s head, and he knew that whatever kind of bizarre weapon it was, it was functional.

  They were of a type: tall and ivory-fleshed, hairless, earless and noseless, with eyes like red-hot coals. Their mouths were broad slashes bisecting the lower halves of their faces, lipless lines that, when parted, exposed twin rows of sharp needle teeth. They wore human clothing—jackets, jeans, boots. The second creature, the one that hung back, also wore a ball cap, black with a white skull on it. David had seen that skull face before and recognized it as the emblem for some band or other. The…Misfits, that was it. Punk band, he thought, or maybe alternative. He couldn’t remember. It had a bone-and-meat rifle too, but it wasn’t aiming the weapon at David. Not yet, anyway.

  Though there was no indication of gender in the creatures’ faces, something about the one holding the rifle made David think it might be female. Her jacket hid her upper figure, but her jeans hugged her hips like a woman’s. But it was more than that. She felt female to him.

  David heard a soft whispering then, almost like the sound of a gentle breeze blowing across a field of waist-high grass. It almost sounded like a voice—a woman’s voice—familiar and comforting. He thought he might be able to make out the words, if only the voice were a bit louder.

  “You just going to stand here being a target, or are you going to wake up and haul ass out of here?”

  He’d forgotten all about Simon, but the boy’s words snapped him out of his trance. The whispering died away, and David—after one last look at the she-creature’s horrible red eyes—turned and ran.

  Kate watched as her brother dropped his half of the squirrel and turned around, almost losing his balance and falling over in the process. He then began hobbling away at what for a zombie was an impressive rate of speed. Kate and Nicholas could catch up with him easily if they wanted to. They wouldn’t even have to run; a brisk walk would do it. But she made no move to go after him.

  Nicholas stepped to her side. “I’ll take him out if you want.”

  She kept her gazed fixed on David and her rifle raised. As hard as it was seeing him like this, it was, she realized with some surpr
ise, better than not seeing him at all, and she intended to watch him as long as she could.

  Nicholas continued. “You can tell everyone you did it if you want. I won’t say anything.”

  Despite her desire to keep her eyes on David, she turned to look at Nicholas. “What are you talking about?”

  Nicholas Kemp was a decent-enough looking man, if nothing to write home about. He had ice-blue eyes and an easy smile, and thick black hair that stuck out from beneath his cap. He was in his mid-thirties, a little older than Kate, although he had a certain boyishness that made him seem younger. He’d been her patrol partner for a few months now, and they got along well, but they weren’t close. Nicholas was the kind of guy who, despite being outwardly friendly, tended to keep other people at arm’s length. Kate had never taken this personally, though. In the world after Blacktide, people tended to avoid getting too emotionally close to each other. It was easier that way.

  Nicholas’s tone was gentle as he replied, “You know what I’m talking about.”

  She did. She just didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself. Nicholas went on.

  “I know that’s your brother. You’ve shown me pictures of him, remember? Sure, he looks different now, but not that different. I understand why it’s hard for you to put him down, so I’m offering to take care of it for you. You know, because we’re friends.”

  Are we? Kate wondered. And was this a new gesture of friendship in the world? Instead of buying someone a present to show you cared, you offered to shoot one of their relatives in the head?

  She turned back to watch David. He had reached the far side of the park and was heading out into the street. They could still catch up to him easily if they wanted. She’d reached out to his mind on impulse. They’d always had a special connection, one deeper than ordinary siblings, and she’d thought… Well, she wasn’t sure what she’d thought. But he had hesitated, hadn’t he? Maybe he had felt her reaching out to him, maybe there was still something of him left inside the creature he had become.