Everyone Dies in the End #50

Artemis

Arty drove. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as they had feared. Oh for sure, Interstate 85 was a nightmare, choked with the metal of fleeing cars, trucks, and tractor-trailers, the highway a decrepit amalgamation of crushed steel, burning rubber, and broken lives. They stopped more than they drove. Both Arty and Todd pushed cars, pulled wreckage, and screamed at wandering survivors. It was slow, but it wasn’t deciding. The corpses were deciding.

They found them in the black interior of a broken-down UPS van. The van, and the overturned trailer it had nosed into, blocked the two northbound lanes; a mound of burning tires blocked the southbound concrete, the thick black smoke sickly sweet. But there was nothing unusual about the wreckage. There were lots of wrecks, lots of burning tires. Todd and Arty piled out of the Bronco to check it out. With luck they could drive the white SUV on the grass between the north and southbound lanes, but they had to be careful. They had stuck the Bronco ten miles back in the median. The grass had been slick with oil from a nearby wreck. They didn’t want to repeat that mistake.

The UPS van appeared undamaged, even the tires were inflated. As they approached Arty noticed the large door in the rear of the truck was not only shut, but also the heavy swinging handle that sealed it sat in its cradle.

“Hey, let’s check the truck,” Art called to Todd, who was in the lead. Todd nodded. They didn’t need a ride; in fact driving the truck would be impractical. Gas was becoming harder and harder to find, they didn’t need a gas-guzzling UPS van to add to their troubles. But what the UPS van might carry was an entirely different matter, and a sealed truck might carry something useful. A couple of seconds later the smell hit them.

When he was ten, Arty’s family took a trip to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They did so every summer. The drive was no more than three hours from their home in Wilson, North Carolina. Arty’s parents loved it, but the quiet beaches, pristine dunes, and quiet nights that his parents relished bored Arty and his sister to tears. Before this trip, Arty’s father, who was an anesthesiologist, at Saint Mary’s Hospital, was called to cover a sick co-worker’s shift. He came home late and the family rushed to get out of the door, into the car, and headed to the beach. In their haste, they left what was to be the first evening’s beach dinner—two pounds of ground beef—on the kitchen counter. A week later they returned to a house full of flies, a counter of maggot infested ground beef, and its overpowering stench.

The UPS truck smelled like that hamburger.

“Oh my God,” gagged Arty. “What the hell is that?”

“Something dead,” Todd replied.

“Really, you think?” Arty quipped.

“Maybe a lot of something,” Todd answered through clenched teeth, but continued to advance on the truck. “The again it could be a rotten steak and the rest of the truck is full of goodies.”

“Goodies?”

“Yeah, goodies.”

“Like?” Arty queried.

“Like I don’t know until we try, smart ass. Are you with me or not?”

They were at the back of the truck. The double doors rose above them. The stench was gut-wrenching, and Arty seriously doubted it was a slice of steak, but he also doubted if beggars, beggars with only a couple of cans of spam, two boxes of ammo, and a five-gallon can of gas, could be choosers.

“Yeah,” Arty sighed, “I’m with you.”

“Stand back and cover me,” was Todd’s reply. Arty did as he was told, taking a couple of steps away from the truck, raising his 9mm pistol in a shooter’s stance, and aiming it at the juncture of the metals doors.

Todd gave him a glance before pulling the large, silver locking handle up and then twisted it away from the truck. The doors immediately sprung open, and both men jumped. Pushing the door from the inside of the truck was a man, at least it had once been a man. Now it was no more than six feet of rotten flesh. Immobile in itself, yet mobilized nonetheless. The corpse pushed past the doors and fell to the ground with a sound not unlike a large bag of puss. Not that Arty had ever heard a large bag of puss strike anything. He held the 9mm’s sites on the corpse’s head, and Todd kept his shotgun to his shoulder, the barrel; pointed at the putrid mass of flesh. Pointed as if he expected the corpse to move, but it didn’t. Artemis had seen some weird shit since the missiles came and met a girl who could heal with no more than her touch, but it seemed that the weird shit ended when the heart stopped beating. There were no zombies in this world. Dead was dead. Both men relaxed.

And that’s when the second corpse rolled from the back of the van. It fell on top of the first, and again both men jumped, but not as far. This one was a woman, at least judging by the shredded the skirt clinging to its hips. Her flesh was covered in maggots. Like the first, this corpse was just a corpse, it meant them no harm. In fact it meant nothing to them, or itself. Its only contribution to the living world was the foul smell.

The stench was unreal, unbelievable, unholy, and way more, Artemis thought, than two corpses seemed capable of producing. Maybe Todd shared the thought, or maybe Todd was just curious. Without speaking he took a step toward the van, and then another, and yet another. He hooked the barrel of the shotgun on the partially opened van door and pulled, and then they both knew what had pushed the corpses. It was more corpses. Maybe a hundred. They didn’t know for sure, nor did they care to find out. The van was stuffed. Wall to wall and treetop tall, thought Arty, and he felt a strange urge to giggle. It was sickening, but still it wasn’t all.

They stood in silence for a moment. The smell making their eyes water. Todd spoke, and his voice was low, slow, as if he were afraid to open his mouth. “I don’t see a bullet hole, knife wound, or bruise on any of them.”

“What does that mean?” asked Artemis.

“I think it means,” Todd whispered, as if he were afraid the bloated corpses might hear him, “that whatever sick perverts put them in there, put them in there alive and let heat and dehydration do the rest.” He stood still for moment, and Arty could hear him breathing heavily. At last he turned toward Arty and his eyes were cold. “What do you think?”

Arty stared at the corpses for a moment longer as he fought the bile rising in his throat. The crawling maggots made the entire pile appear to quiver and the odor was almost a physical assault on his senses. But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the van he could see more than maggots, he could see flesh, and even more than flesh, he could see bites. Not bite marks, but where something had ripped pieces of flesh from the corpses, sometimes ripped to the bone, ripped as if feeding. And then he realized. They had been feeding on each other. Left without water, left without food, they had fed on each other.

The bile won the battle and Arty fell to his knees, vomiting yellow gruel. When he recovered, or at least when he could breathe, he wiped his mouth, glanced at the seething mass of maggots, and spoke.

“I think we should get the hell off this road before we meet the sickos that locked these poor suckers in there.”