Collegare - Young Writers of Earth (a court of thorns and roses ebook free txt) 📗

feel right leaving the meat for the flesh eaters. They would soon smell her and come looking for a feast.

Inside, the blood of the deceased female was beginning to thicken like heavy soup that’s sat stagnant for too long. The insects had smelled the syrupy sweetness and had converged on the corpse in a desperate attempt for satiety. Hordes of cockroaches had traipsed through the blood, their legs all wedged in her sticky life-milk as they writhed in futility for a chance at freedom.

As I cleared the shelves, various packages of noodles hit the floor with a monstrous thud, cracking the exoskeletons of cockroaches under their weight. I loosened the shelf and pulled it from the gondola unit, placing it to the floor next to the body. On aisle 8, next to the ironing boards, there were a few packs of clothing line that I snagged and tied into one of the holes of the shelf. I grabbed a fire extinguisher off of the back wall and blasted the body, scattering the roaches. They scurried in a fury, the collective sound of their tapping legs smacking against the linoleum.

I hooked my arms under her shoulders, lifting her body. There was a sticky suction noise as the pulpy stump that was once her face separated from the floor. Her blood ran free, pouring to the floor in a mixture of bone, brain tissue, and flesh. I dragged her limp body slowly to the shelf, laying her gently upon it. I used the remaining twine I had left to fasten her body to the metal rig, making sure to tighten the rope around her chest and feet.

The next few hours were spent drowning in sweat and exertion. I swear I pulled three muscles dragging that damn carcass through the barren streets of Columbia. Every few minutes I would have to stop and collect myself, wiping the sweat from my brow with a sleeved hand. Once in a while the shelf would catch on some hidden debris in the darkness and jerk the body, sloshing blood and brain matter across the deserted streets. That hard packing sound of liquid against asphalt turned my stomach slightly.

I made sure to stay close to the open streets where I could keep eyes on the surroundings. I hadn’t seen the flesh-eaters all night, but the scraping of the metal would surely play Pied Piper to their infesting rat syndrome. Soon, the beasts would come and I would have to be ready for them. It was hard enough fighting the swarms on regular nights, but the added 130 pounds of dead weight would only further complicate things.

The vultures sat perched on useless power lines and watched as I dragged her corpse through the midnight streets. I could smell the musky stench of their acidic urine as they evacuated their bladders, the pungent liquid trickling down their legs to the asphalt below. Vultures were the only animals that had ceased to become infected with the sickness, even after they feasted on the living corpses of the flesh-eaters. The corrosive acid in their stomachs worked as a kind of anti-bacterial solvent that would almost purify the flesh, allowing for a happy feast. And feast they did, the vultures, in these times of scattered flesh and rotten corpses. I could sense their mouths salivating at the prospect of fresh, uninfected flesh. But they wouldn’t get her body, not on my watch.

I stopped to catch my breath, leaning over and spitting excess saliva and snot from my mouth. The chill of fall and the exertion produced a thick, snotty mixture in the back of my throat. The scraping of the metal stopped with me, but there was still a shuffling that echoed through my ears. The soft sound of leather dragging across asphalt was lightly reverberating through the hollow shells of the buildings around me. At first it was a distant, sparse sound that only fluttered through the nighttime air sporadically. Soon, the sound intensified. It was time. The stench of death had finally led the flesh-eaters to me and they were coming to feast.

I dropped the twine and gripped my rifle, rushing quickly, but silently, to the building on my immediate left. Crouching behind the shabby remnants of a marble pillar, I rested the rifle gently between the broken rubble of what had once been some pretentiously gaudy piece of architectural regurgitation. The echo of the scraping was growing louder in my ears. I trained my rifle on her corpse, using the poor girl’s body as bait for the flesh-eaters. Even in death we get no peace in this war-torn, concrete jungle.

The walking beast—an inhuman cask of what might have been a man, once upon a time—took what felt like hours to shuffle to her corpse. The carnivore was nursing a bum ankle and the constant pressure he had put upon the wound had forced the bone to snap and cut through flesh and sinew. But, alas, the creature felt no pain. He kept a constant pace towards her body; towards what her perceived as his next possible meal.

He was closer now, and my rifle was trained right between the dual 6-foot-graves that were his eye sockets. My finger twitched on the trigger, ready to squeeze and end it all when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the vultures dive through the thick veil of nighttime darkness. They attacked in a furry of ironic poetry as the predator became prey to the flying scavengers. The vultures picked at loose flesh as the creature swatted at them like one would swat a gnat. It was quite a sight to see vultures so feral, but I guess these troubled times colored everything with shades of desperation…and desperation tends to make savages of us all.

The noises were horrific. The vultures screeched and their meal grunted, the guttural combination reverberating in my brain and bouncing around the inner walls of my skull. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I watched the carnivore get his comeuppance, even if he felt nothing but mere annoyance. Soon the creatures face was nothing but skull and his body fell with a squishy thud. The scavengers continued to pick the carcass clean for a few more minute before one of the vultures noticed the woman’s corpse off to the side.

I stood and fired a shot into the air, scaring the birds from the fresh carrion. As the scavengers took to the night’s sky, the door to the building behind me broke open, releasing a horde of flesh-eaters from their vacant habitat. The shot had attracted them and they clumsily spilled into the streets, teeth gnashing in a sea of undead groans and moans. They could smell my skin and the hunger in their stomachs fueled their ruthless plight.

I shouldered the rifle and rushed over to the woman’s body, grabbing up the twine and pulling as quickly as my muscles would allow. The carnivores were slow behind me, so I had the advantage. Sweat filled my pores as the veins in my head popped out with each exertion. My muscles felt like jelly but I kept tugging, the sound of their groans filling me with panic. The flesh-eaters were gaining on me and my body was growing weary.

I stopped, grabbing up the rifle and preparing to take aim at the undead beasts. I took aim and the door to another building broke open, releasing more of the carnivores into the nighttime Columbia streets. I pulled the trigger and the echo was great. I hit one of the creatures, its head exploding with pulpy flesh and bone as it fell to the ground. I turned and fired at one of the carnivores behind me, hitting her in the face and ending her quest for food. There were too many of the creatures and if I was going to escape, I would have to do it alone.

I turned towards the one open path between two buildings and rushed through, leaving the body of the girl for the beasts. Another lost soul in this frantic apocalypse; another missed opportunity. I ran down the alleyway and away from the battle zone. I didn’t look back, just kept my eyes forward. For a while, all I could hear amidst the darkness was the hard tap of my shoes against concrete and the sound of the undead as they feasted on the flesh of the unknown girl.

***

It rained that night and into the early morning. The heavy winds furiously blew the large, orange leaves of autumn through the desolate streets and the sound of their crinkling kept me on edge throughout the night. I rested my heavy bones in an old abandoned postal office about two miles away from where I had lost the girl’s body to the vicious carnivores.

The post office was a small, but fortified place in the corner of an old shopping center that had once been pretty, but was now nothing more than another desolate eyesore. I remember the hey-day of the shopping center well. I spent many late nights in the post office waiting for whomever I had elected to pick me up after working my shift in the local bookstore. The post office was the only place close by that was open twenty-four hours with heat inside, which was a valuable commodity in those harsh winter months. But now, the place was bare and dull. All the postal boxes had either rusted shut or been completely destroyed. The postal machines had ceased to be of any use long ago and all that remained in the shell of a building was a table and a rusted out mail box. But, there was a heavy, barricaded door on one side and an easy vantage point through the glass doors on the other side so it was as safe as a dilapidated building could be.

Throughout the restless night, I went out to fill empty jugs with fresh water from the tears of heaven. The water pollution is what started this whole problem—turning innocent humans into vicious, undead killers—so clean water had become kind of a delicacy in these times and the only way you could get drinkable water was from the sky when it cried. When you are forced to live on various canned sugar drinks you begin to miss water’s simplicity.

Soon, the daylight came and took with it midnight’s veil of darkness and the sky’s infinite sadness,