TAGGED: THE APOCALYPSE (14 page)

Alexis emerged from the shower completely nude
, holding the bed sheet casually draped over one hand. She feigned surprise at seeing Jackie and covered herself briefly, ineffectively and not very convincingly with her long delicate hands, as she took confident strides with her long legs toward them. Jackie stopped and stared at her.

“Hello
, Jackie.” She dropped the sheet, pressing her large pink nipples and naked body against Jackie and giving him a big kiss on the cheek. Even bare footed she was slightly taller than Jackie in his heavy boots. She looked frankly at Sven after the kiss, her hand lingering on his massive shoulder completely un-self-conscious. “I’m sorry, were you boys talking business?” Alexis strode to the mattress on the floor past Sven, folded over double ostensibly to look inside the overnight bag beside it. She then looked over her shoulder, upside down, at Jackie past her shapely bare ass and the bulls eyed side ways poker faced money shot she was offering him. Satisfied, she turned and strode back to the shower, casually ignoring Sven as she passed him, swinging her bag, head held high.

“Chicken run. Ten minutes.” Jackie turned and was gone.

SNIP!

Eve’s long dark lo
cks fell silently to the floor around her. Eve slapped herself on the forehead, “Stupid!” She said. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” She hit herself in the same spot with the flat of her hand, with the repetition of each word. Her forehead quickly turned an angry red.

SNIP! SNIP!

This was even worse than that thing with Amber that slutty bitch of a cheerleader! How could she be so stupid to let herself be set up like that
again
? At least Amber was probably dead, or more likely one of the undead things roaming the earth. Eve tried to take some satisfaction in the thought, but all she felt was rage.

SNIP!

If she was going to be forced to work as a prostitute, at least she was going to be ugly.

SNIP! SNIP! SNIP!

She had trusted Candy. She had confided in her like a big sister or a friend. During some of the long nights of the first attacks, Eve, unable to sleep, had crawled into Candy’s bed and fallen asleep safely wrapped in her arms. Sven had even instructed Candy to ‘watch out for her.’ Eve’s rage melted into a heavy sadness. Her limbs suddenly felt like they weighed a thousand pounds, and her eyes filled with anguished tears. “Why?!!!” Then the tears came gushing out of her, and once they started, they wouldn’t stop. She found herself doubled over weeping great gasping sobs over the sink.

Pull yourself together, Eve.

SLAP!

She slapped herself hard across the face. It stung, badly, but her tears stopped instantly.

SLAP! SLAP!

She smiled
or was it a snarl like one of the infected? In a twisted way it felt really good. Not good exactly, more like just
real
. The pain pulled her back to reality. It pulled her out of her bottomless well of emotions, into the here and now. She needed it. She craved it.

She took a heavy breath and examined her work in the mirror. She looked like shit. Her thick, dark brown hair once flowing gracefully over her shoulders now was just ragged clumps of unevenly sheered off…fur really.
Her eyes were red, and there were dark circles rimming them. Raccoon face.

SNIP! SNIP!
SNIP!

Done, if you could call it that. She didn’t look ugly as much as she looked more like a scrawny, frightened little boy
- like someone had rubbed all the cute girl-shine off of her. She looked at the heavy scissors in her hands. She opened the blades and rubbed the sharp edge lightly against her arm, tracing the line of the prominent blue vein just beneath. She pressed a little harder, feeling the sharp edge pressing against her soft skin. The blade left a reddish white trail that quickly faded but didn’t break the skin.

This was no kind of life to live. She had no one and nothing left to live for. Her parents were both dead. As much as she felt bound and restricted by them while they were here, at least they loved her. Even her crazy mother loved her in her own twisted way- at least before she went off the deep end. Eve shook her head to expel the thought of her mother’s last moments on earth. Sven was fucking that bitch Alexis
, who made certain to remind her at least one thousand times a day with a look, or a nod, or a self satisfied smirk every time they passed each other in the bottom of the tower. To Candy, she was just a commodity to be used - used and discarded when she had served her purpose.

Someone pounded loudly on the bathroom door, “Chicken run!”

She could kill herself but why bother, she realized, when death was all around her? One misstep, one false move, one momentary lapse of attention and the infected got you. Pull yourself together, Eve.

“Coming!” Eve called through the locked door. She quickly splashed water on her face, collected herself and rushed out the door.

“This is it. It’s now or never. They all went on the chicken run.” Dennis spoke in a harsh whisper to Brit inside the guardhouse. Thompson and Rusty followed close behind.

“I don’t know.
Things are going really well. The community is finally getting on its feet. With the chickens and the pigs they found, we may finally have a sustainable community without having to rely on scavenging so much.” Brit shook his head.

“What?! Why didn’t you say this before?” Dennis was turning red.

“I’m in,” Thompson said.

“I’m in
, too. This is a federal installation and we are duly appointed federal officers sworn to protect this installation.” Rusty rehashed his well rehearsed outrage speech, “They are trespassing on federal property, running a house of prostitution, operating multiple criminal enterprises, drug dealing, moon-shining, growing marijuana…somebody, please correct me if I am saying anything that isn’t true! They treat us like second class citizens around here. They
stole
our weapons! Weapons issued to us by the United States- God bless America- and provided to us for the protection of this installation. This is our power plant. I’ve been working this gate for fifteen years.”

“Exactly!” Dennis said, “
and how do you run a power plant without nuclear engineers?”

Thompson made the sound of an explosion. “You’d have
meltdown,” Rusty said. Rusty roughly shoved Brit. “Are you with us or not?”

Dennis quickly stepped between them
. “We’d all be dead without them,” Brit said.

“We’d all be sitting on a year
’s worth of food, safe and warm, with heat and lights and working plumbing,” Thompson said.

“The survivors would have rushed the gates. There would have been no way to keep them out. What would you have done, shoot them?” Brit said.

“Well, yeah,” Rusty said. “It’s us or them.”

“This is our place
,” Thompson said.

“This is our power plant,” Dennis was the calm voice of reason.
“You know they’ve turned this place into a circus…a whorehouse.”

“Yea
h,” Thompson nodded vigorously.

“That’s fucked up
!” Rusty’s face was turning a disturbing shade of crimson.

“I live over in the control tower. They’ve got everything. Stockpiles of food, weapons, ammunition, lights, you name it. And they got all of it from pimping those girls, selling pot and making liquor.”

“Those are our guns!” Rusty almost screamed.

“A lot of the guns and ammunition were taken from the armory inside this
guardhouse,” Dennis said.

“No violence.” Brit felt the argument was lost.

“No violence.” Dennis immediately agreed before hotheaded Rusty could jump in.

Rusty seemed to be having a hard time swallowing it but finally
agreed, not very convincingly, “Okay. Okay, then.”

“We’re just going to get more of what’s ours for running the plant. Things are going to get divided more fairly from now on
,” Dennis continued.

“Yes. Ok
ay,” Brit nodded.

“This is our power plant. We run it. We provide the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.” Dennis waved his hands expansively.

“Yeah!”

“We provide the heat, the lights, the power…”

“And the security,” Thompson added.

“Damn straight!” Rusty nodded.

“Think of us like the government. We’re just going to levy a tax,” Dennis said.

“We get our cut,” Rusty was catching on.

“Of everything,” Thompson’s eyes went wide, realizing the possibilities.

“So what’s the plan then? We talk to them when they get back?” Brit asked.

“Hit em’ where it hurts,” Rusty said.

“Remember
, Sven took advantage of Eve after her parents died.” Dennis spoke directly to Brit, watching him closely to gauge his reaction.

Brit didn’t know what to say. This was supposedly
why he was living in the guardhouse. Recently, Jackie had been pressuring him relentlessly to come live in the tower with them. It was safer, better food and the guards were filthy, vile pigs. A gigantic nest of cockroaches had sprung up in the kitchen area. Of course, the cockroaches would survive the apocalypse. They had become so numerous that yesterday he found a cockroach in his bed. It was so large it actually challenged him. He could hardly stand it over here. But the real reason was that he just couldn’t face Sven. He couldn’t wake up every morning knowing that he was in the next room screwing some girl, the latest of which was Alexis. Brit knew that eventually Sven would realize that he was in love with him and that his reaction to Eve had been pure jealousy. “We don’t know what really happened.”

“Fuck
‘em!” Rusty shouted.

“Poor chickens. This is why I’m a vegetarian.” Eve squinted to look into the dim chicken coop through the small crack in the rear of the giant industrial barn-sized plastic structure. The inside of the coop was a kill zone. Dead chicken carcasses were piled a foot deep or more on the floor. They lay bent, twisted, mangled and smashed in piles of feathers, dust, blood, chicken shit and dirt. The survivors sat nervously jerking their long necks spasmodically, wide-eyed from the topmost tiers of long wooden racks attached to the walls among piles of crusty, chicken shit straw.

The sound attracted her attention even before her eyes adjusted to the dim light.
Hundreds and hundreds of infected packed together in the center of the coop, touching, jostling, biting, snarling and writhing like maggots. It was what she imagined hell would sound like and it chilled her to the bone and made her involuntarily shiver and wrap her arms around herself. A terrible and constant moaning emanated from them, almost like a twisted meditation chant. The voices all mixed together in some terrible harmony, the higher voices of the undead women and children and the lower voices of the undead men groaning and moaning in agony. Layered beneath and within this festering harmony were the sounds of many teeth grinding and gnashing and jaws snapping, the sounds of an unquenchable thirst and hunger for human flesh and blood. A high wail pierced through the moans. It began quietly at a high pitch and steadily increased in volume until Eve wanted to scream and she had to cover her ears. It was like someone slowly driving a knife into the wailing victim’s heart and with every millimeter deeper the pitch became louder and more fervent and more painfully desperate. Two more wailers joined in and a low pitched male voice screamed, and then five more. It almost sounded like the screamer was calling for help, but he was dead. He was infected. There would be no help for him or any of them. They were the damned. Other voices joined in what sounded like howling. Each voice that joined in held so much pain. The howlers mixed with the wailers into a twisted chorus of agony and now more howlers had joined. Eve wanted to scream. She wanted to
do
something; anything to make it stop.

“Eve!” Jackie called from the truck where they were loading their meager catch of
fourteen chickens clumsily corralled and finally trapped in a large commercial fishing net. “Get away from there. It’s too dangerous.” Just beyond Jackie, she could see Sven watching her.

“We have to help the chickens,” Eve said. “The infected just kill them. They’re not even eating them.”

Jackie covered his mouth, trying to suppress a chuckle, and turned away towards Sven. Several of the men loading the chickens smiled, and even Sven! Now she was mad. “Come over here,” Jackie waved to her and then turned his back dismissively.

“We could open the door to let the chickens escape. The infected won’t come out because of the light…” No one was listening. She could see Sven talking to Jackie and smiling.

She tried to peer back into the coop but something lunged at her from the other side snarling and drooling and scratching with heavy claws. She caught a glimpse of its eyes and teeth. It was filled with rage and thirst and hate. She wished she had a gun, but they wouldn’t give her one. She felt in her pockets and found her lighter. Before she even knew what she was doing, she bent down and lit the dry grass mixed with the hay sticking out of the sides of the coop. She turned and walked toward the truck. Sven was still watching her. Good. But now he looked surprised.