I awoke to the smell of rotting meat. The air was thick with the odor, going up my nostrils, and filling my body with an unexpected hunger.
When I opened my eyes, I saw another woman lying next to me. She was on her side, her right arm slung over an upturned gallon of spring water, Mountain Best.
I had been laying face down, my lips stuck to some sort of sticky substance on the tile floor. When I rose, I saw that it was dried blood.
With some effort, I pulled myself to a sitting position. When I saw them, I let out a scream that sliced through the air and woke up the sleeping woman beside me.
All around me, heaped on the floor, sitting down, slumped against the shelves were bodies. Bodies of the young, bodies of the old; black and brown bodies, white bodies and yellow bodies.
Bodies with dried blood and vomit caked around their mouths, some bodies with eyes frozen in their last moments of what looked to be complete and total agony.
My hunger evaporated. I began screaming, couldn't seem to be able to stop screaming until the woman next to me grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard.
"Stop. Stop it! Calm down, you're all right. You're all right."
I started crying then.
I shook now with the force of my sobs.
"You're all right. You're all right," she said softly.
After a good ten seconds, I started to pull myself together.
"Wha--what is this. How did we get here? What HAPPENED here?!" I screamed out.
I looked at her, a pale woman with deep bags under steel blue eyes, which looked haggard, despite her sleep. Her red hair extended past her bare shoulders, touching a red-stained and grimy tank top that looked like it used to be white.
She looked at me grimly and shook her head, her curls bouncing from side to side.
"I know as little as you do." Under the flickering flourescent lights, I could see dried blood flecked throughout her blistered lips.
"I woke up just a few moments ago when you started screaming. Christ, I feel like I've been sleeping for centuries." she said, rubbing the back of her neck.
"Look around you. Do you see this? All these people, these cor--corpses!" I retched then, but surprisingly did not throw up.
She turned around at the pile of bodies surrounding us. Her hand flew up to her mouth, her eyes widening in shock, a whimper escaping from her lips.
"Shit." she muttered under her breath,
"Shit! This is insane. It looks like a cemetery exploded in here!"
I scrambled to my feet, feeling a little wobbly at first, but quickly regaining my balance. I must have been out quite a while.
"Hey," I called out to her.
She turned around to face me, her hand still at her mouth.
"What's your name? How did you get here?"
Her eyes became wide and frightened like a child, then.
"My name? I..I don't know. I can't remember anything."
Panic rose up through me like a high-burning flame.
"Neither can I."
********
She rose to her feet, me grabbing her by the arms to steady her. Apparently, she had as little coordination as I did.
"Listen, maybe there's some identification on us, like driver's license, state I.D...." I said.
She still looked frightened, but a cautious relief flooded into her face.
"Yes! I mean, nobody goes shopping without their purse, right?"
"Only shoplifters" I said flatly, not meaning to be funny.
But she laughed then, the fear beginning to fade from her eyes.
I went looking around the area, keeping my eyes out for a purse or wallet on the ground.
I found a small pink handbag in the soup aisle, lying next to a fat man slumped against a row of tomato soup cans. His belly spilled out from beneath his flannel shirt, the flesh mottled and gray.
He stunk like a garbage pile in the middle of the desert. The smell surrounding me was like nothing I had ever smelled before, worming its way through my nostrils up into my brain itself.
I started retching and gagging, but was again unable to vomit.
"That's not surprising. You haven't eaten in God knows when," I muttered under my breath.
The pink bag definitely didn't belong to the soup man, so I scooped it up and brought it back to the meat aisle.
"I think I found something."
"So did I!" she called out victoriously.
"What?"
She presented me with a driver's license showing a picture of herself. In the picture, her hair was shorter and straight and she looked slightly younger, but it was no mistaking that it was her.
Rose M. McKenzie it read on the card.
"I found it in a straw shoulder bag that was down in the dairy aisle." she said, massaging her temples.
"I found a pink bag, back in the soup aisle, a couple of steps from where I fell. I think it's mine."
"Crack it open! I want to put the name to the face." She smiled kindly at me.
I reached down into the bag and came out with only a tube of cherry-flavored lipgloss and a library card at first.
"Try again. It may have one of those zippered compartments" she offered.
I felt around, my fingers landing on a zipper I nearly ripped open in my excitement.
I pulled out a cell phone but it had died who knows how long ago. There was a simple brown leather wallet containing a driver's license and $150 dollars in cash. Rooting around in the purse, I also pulled out a white greeting card, with the words "HAPPY COLLEGE GRADUATION!" printed on the front. Within was a picture of a man and woman. The couple's arms were comfortably slung around each other's shoulders, and they were sitting at a patio table. They looked very happy.
The man had a deep brown complexion, his salt-and-pepper hair giving him a look of distinguishment. A middle-aged White lady with a kind face and close-cropped blond hair beamed at the camera.
To Teresa--all our love and all our hopes for your inevitably bright future.
--Mom and Dad
"These are my parents." I said softly, showing the picture to her, and she looked curiously at the pair.
"Really? A nice-looking couple."
I turned over the driver's license and stared at my own face. I was wearing a big grin and had a snaggle-tooth. My brown wavy hair was cut into a short bob, my eyes were green and my skin was a vibrant tan. I looked down at my arm and noticed that it had grown pale and splotchy with uneven purple bruising up and down my forearms. I was not quite as pale as Rose's color, but nearly.
What the hell had happened while I was unconscious?
On my license, my name was listed as "Teresa Washington" and my age was listed at twenty-five.
"Teresa...that's a beautiful name," Rose said.
********
We walked together through the ruins of the store and realized that we weren't in a supermarket, but one of those one-stop-shop places.
The furniture aisle was a disaster area; coffee tables and heavy entertainment centers overturned, broken chairs littering the floor, and it seemed that nearly every corner was smeared with blood, fluids, and--I had to lean in closer to make sure of what I was seeing--chunks of brains and entrails.
"Shit. Shit!" Rose kept repeating, as if it was a sacred mantra designed to ward off danger.
The dead lay everywhere. Some were sprawled on top of bloodied mattresses, others were sitting up- right in easy chairs and at desks, their heads lolling, their eyes often open and staring unseeing at us as we passed by. Some of the bodies were bloated to the point of bursting from the heat. There was no air-conditioning.
"We gotta find out what's going on here, Rose." my voice trembled and my stomach churned with nausea.
I could see that she was trembling.
"What do you think could've happened? I mean, how could something like this happen and we not remember ANYTHING? We couldn't even remember our own names." she said quietly.
I didn't say anything, couldn't think of an answer.
She turned to me, her eyes wide.
"Do you think it was...terrorists?" she said the word in a whisper, as if she was afraid that some were still laying in wait in the electronics section, ready to pounce upon us and finish the job.
I was silent for a moment.
"I honestly don't know. I don't know how I got here, how YOU got here, how these bodies got here and up until five minutes ago, I didn't even know what I looked like. Maybe it's terrorists. Maybe it's nuclear war. Maybe it's the end of the world. But if it IS the end of the world, I think we're entitled to some answers and to be together with our families. That's the least we're entitled to. If we work together, maybe we can find those answers."
For the first time since I woke up, I felt a surge of confidence and I think Rose was galvanized by it herself.
She stopped trembling.
"Okay, Teresa. You're right. This is no time for cowards. If you can be brave, so can I."
She stiffened her back and threw her chin out.
"Let's go find our answers."
*********
I jabbed at the keyboard of the P.C. in front of me, clicking the 'home' symbol again and again.
This page can't be displayed.
The stark white glowed in the darkened store, as if it was taunting us with its uselessness. Rose was doubled over from the stench that permeated every inch, every corner, radiating from the greyish corpses tangled together in the aisle. I could hear her gagging but like me, nothing came out. There had been a rush, apparently, to get when the getting was good, but from the looks of it, most of the looters had dropped in mid-theft. A few were lying under monitors that had tumbled on top of them, their arms stiffly wrapped around the equally dead machines.
"Stop wasting time!" Rose cried, irritated, "let's go find a magazine or newspaper or something--" she stopped to gag again, this time I really thought there was going to be something, but after a few dry heaves, she pulled herself back up, leaning tiredly against a display.
I had solved the problem by stuffing a couple of cotton balls up my nose, but it was forcing me to breathe in the dank, stale air through my mouth and I was beginning to feel a surge of nausea again.
When we headed over to the magazine aisle, we found it was surprisingly intact.
"Guess nobody was in the mood to see who was screwing who..." I muttered half-way to myself.
Rose laughed a little and I could tell she was beginning to feel better. She was standing straight again.
But then I heard her shout as we scanned the aisle. "Wha--what, what the hell? There's nothing here about anything!"
We ripped through entertainment, political, sports, business magazines, through one smiling, suited, half-clad cover after another and found nothing about crowds of people suddenly dropping dead while shopping for canned goods.
We dropped down to the cold tile, the papers fluttering around us.
"Maybe it was a sneak attack. By terrorists, like I said."
"I'm trying so hard to remember", I rubbed my temples in frustration, trying to will the truth into my head, "Whatever it was, we had no warning..."
I glanced at a cover of a smiling celebrity couple on a film magazine, their arms wrapped around each other's shoulders. They looked like they didn't have a care in the world. They didn't look like they were living in the middle of an apocalypse. I picked it up, and crusty dried blood from my fingers flaked off on their pale grinning faces.
"No damn warning at all."
****************
Rose and I walked out into a deserted parking lot--deserted of the living, but not of the dead.
Bodies lay across the concrete in a haphazard, tangled heap. Their flesh rotted beneath the warm sunshine, their clothes no more than dirty rags slipping off from skeletal frames. Some still sat behind the wheels of their cars, their fingers attached to the steering wheels.
Rose suddenly dropped down to the ground, gasping, her hands clawing the concrete.
"Rose! Are you all right?" I yelled.
"I remember!" she gasped, "It's coming back. I remember my home and how to get there. I remember why I was out! It was to get supplies for me and my family...water, canned goods, and batteries."
She looked up at me, her eyes ablaze.
"Something terrible was happening, Teresa. But what I can't remember!"
She started slapping the side of her head,
"Why can't I remember!" she shouted.
I grabbed her hands.
"We WILL find out. I promise you."
She nodded frantically.
"Teresa, we have to go to my house. I have to go home, I have to see my family. We have to go NOW."
"That's fine," I reassured her, "Take out your driver's license."
We peered at the address printed across the card,
"603 Jean Street Norfolk, Virginia"
"So we live in Virginia," she said.
"We know that much." I said. "Let's go."
********
We took an abandoned silver SUV and Rose drove. There were more bodies along the way, lining the roads, but I tried not to look at them.
We eventually pulled up in front of a large yellow house with white trim.
"We're here." she said and turned off the engine, racing ahead of me before I could get out of the car.
"Wait! We don't know what's in there!"
I was thinking of how she would be able to handle it if she saw a dead husband or child. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I could handle it myself.
As I walked through the unlocked door, I heard Rose's screams from the back of the house.
I ran into the kitchen and found her crouched down over an old woman whose sparse tufts of white hair sprouted from a mottled scalp.
Both of her arms had been ripped from her body.
"She was my grandmother" she moaned, "She lived here. With me and my family."
I stood there, staring down at the old woman's body. Her rapidly decaying face looked surprisingly serene, and her eyes were closed, so that she almost appeared as if she was napping. You could almost believe it if not for her missing limbs and smell which filled the kitchen.
"Oh Teresa, " Rose moaned, "Who could do something like this? WHY?"
I stood there, uneasily, and not knowing what to say. What could I say when someone finds their mutilated grandmother on the kitchen floor?
"Rose...I'm sorry." I offered, somewhat lamely.
She didn't say anything for a while; just stroked her grandmother's face and stared into space.
All of a sudden, a deep pain punched me in the gut. I gasped for breath and clutched the kitchen countertop until my knuckles turned white.
Rose turned back to me in alarm.
"What's going on? What's wrong?"
I couldn't speak, wasn't able to. A burning agony shot through my belly and up my chest and throat until I felt I was going to breathe flame. My nerve endings felt as if they had been set on fire.
I felt at that moment that I was going to pass out, and my eyes rolled back in my head and I tipped backwards into Rose's arms.
"Teresa!" she whispered fiercely, "Please don't do this to me. Tell me what's wrong. We can fix it, but don't do this to me. Don't leave me. Don't do this to--"
"Hungry." I blurted out. "So hungry. I need....MEAT."
"Is that all? I'm sure we've got food. I'll check, don't worry. Pull yourself together, please!"
The pain as quickly as it appeared, began to fade until there was nothing left but a dull ache.
I looked up at her, her face etched with worry.
"I'm sorry I scared you, Rose. It must've been some sort of reaction to not eating for a while. Please....I'm so hungry. Do you have any hamburger, maybe, or chicken? Cold cuts are fine too. I really need meat."
I rubbed my stomach, wincing.
"When I woke up in the store, I was lying in some blood. I know it came from me. Maybe I lost too much."
She nodded.
"Yes. You'll be all right; I'll go check. Come to think of it, I've been feeling a craving for meat, myself, since we got here. Maybe we both lost too much blood."
She opened the refrigerator door and started shuffling things around. There was half a jar of green olives, a package of molding wheat bread and a quart of milk that, from the looks of it, had curdled days ago.
"There's got to be something here. Got to be." she muttered, frantically opening up compartments.
I could tell from her jerky movements and increasing desperation that something was wrong. That she was maybe beginning to feel some of that awful pain in the gut, herself.
Finally she found a package of raw chicken parts in of all places, the vegetable bin.
The expiration date read "July 10th, 2015" and from the clock on her microwave, it was August 31st.
She paused for a moment, before ripping into the plastic.
"I don't care."
My mouth began watering uncontrollably at the sight of the chicken, that burning pain beginning to return.
Before I could stop myself, I grabbed one of the thighs and bit into it, the slimy, stinking flesh rolling around my mouth, and I swallowed it greedily, barely chewing.
Instantly ashamed, I looked up at Rose, expecting her to be repulsed.
Instead, she was devouring a raw leg, slurping at the skin and frantically cramming it into her mouth, leaving a glistening sheen.
Her eyes met mine and I saw the horror in them. She let out a strangled shout and dropped the chicken leg, it landing on the tile floor with a wet plop.
"What in hell is happening to us?" she cried in disgust and buried her head in her hands.
I looked at the partially chewed thigh in my hand and threw it on the kitchen counter.
"Something...something bad. Maybe the something that killed all those people." I said quietly.
A loud thump caused our heads to snap upwards.
"Upstairs." Rose mouthed, and I nodded, grabbing two kitchen knives just in case; that "just in case" I still wasn't too sure of.
We crept softly up the carpeted stairwell, which led towards a large master bedroom. The king-size bed was unmade, rumpled and grimy sheets tangled in a knot upon the blood stained mattress. More blood was spattered across the floral wallpaper in a grisly pattern.
In the corner of the bedroom, in front of the walk-in closet, was one of the corpses.
But he wasn't lying down dead. His one arm grasped the remains of a human torso and ripped chunks of flesh off of it. Like we had stuffed the raw chicken into our mouths almost automatically, he was shoving the torn shreds into his, mindlessly chewing and swallowing with a loud gulp.
His eyes turned in our direction, but he looked right through us. His milky eyes did not register any sort of human emotion, just blank stupidity. He did not even move an inch, but continued to feast on the ragged fragments of the torso.
I heard a sharp intake of breath next to me and before I could say anything, Rose ran at him, raised the knife high and plunged it deeply into the corpse's head. He fell down in a heap on the fuzzy gray carpet, twitching uncontrollably, while she continued to savagely pierce his brain over and over again. Splatters of brain tissue coated her chest and arms, yet she still kept plunging until I shouted at her to stop.
The corpse lay still and quiet, now, like the others at the store and on the road. The remaining torso he had been eating fell beside him in a messy pile.
Rose fell down on her knees and punched the floor with her fists.
I rushed to her and put my arms on her shoulders.
"Do you know who that was?" she shrieked, "Do you?! It was my husband and that body he was eating was..."
she retched then,
"My sister!"
She howled then; long, hard and loud.
******
We left her house, each holding the other--almost propping each other up.
We climbed back into the silver SUV, this time me taking the wheel.
We sat there for a good ten minutes, not saying anything. Rose was clutching a rosary she had grabbed from her bedside table before we ran out of there. It had been her sister's, she'd sobbed. I could hear her mumbling a quiet prayer,
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord and and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.
My eyes were shut tight, my hands cradling my head. I was desperately trying not to have a breakdown.
"My sister must've come home from college, worried about us." Rose said flatly, after a series of prayers.
"Rose..."
"But I wasn't here. I was unconscious in a superstore, trying to buy what would be useless in the end."
I lowered my head, and a disturbing thought occurred to me.
"Rose...has it occurred to you that we haven't shed a single tear?"
She turned around, confused.
"What do you mean? You cried back at the store--" she began.
"No. No. I felt fear, revulsion, and sadness, and I reacted. But no actual tears, water, came down my cheek. It's weird. That just occurred to me right now."
She kept staring, disoriented.
"And just now, after all that's happened to you, you've screamed, you've gagged, but you haven't actually cried."
She was silent then and I didn't blame her. Who could even begin to face the possibility?
"We haven't cried and neither one of us have wanted a drink of water, despite this heat. And neither one of us have even needed to use the bathroom. We were lying unconscious in a hot store for hours, probably days! How does that make sense?"
She was breathing raggedly now. I could heard it.
"And it's not like we haven't cried because we don't feel the pain. Far from it. Rose, what if we haven't cried because we just physically can't anymore?"
She was looking straight ahead at nothing in particular, her jaw clenching and unclenching, her hands trembling.
"Teresa, do you think something truly terrible has happened to us? More dangerous than we thought and that maybe," she breathed in deeply, trying to steady the rhythm, "that has something to do with us eating that raw meat?"
I thought back to the horror in her eyes and the revulsion I felt.
"Whatever is happening, regardless if the world is crashing down into a pile of rubble, I just want to be with my family. I want to go home."
She nodded in understanding and gave my hand a squeeze.
"And now I'm remembering how to get there."
*****
We came to a modest pale green house, its picture windows rimmed in black, fading flowers in once bright colors lining the walkway.
A mailbox in the shape of a rooster sat in front, bulging with mail never picked up, "The Washingtons" emblazoned in white lettering across it. As we got closer, I saw a brown finger dangling from the rooster's head.
Rose touched my arm, holding me back.
"I need to do this. You can wait here, it's okay." I said gently.
She looked from the dangling finger and back at me.
"No. You did it for me. Let's go, honey."
We walked together towards the house. Like Rose's, the front door was cracked open and we entered the cool darkness of the living room.
Someone had been there ahead of us, apparently looting the place for any money and valuables they could find. Furniture was overturned and all of the drawers of a desk were open, papers scattered everywhere. The TV had been yanked out of the wall. Someone had sprayed graffiti on a mirror in big red lettering.
It's Hell
"Hello! Hello, is anybody here? Mom? Dad?" I swallowed, my throat painfully dry.
Rose called out too, looking throughout the living room, hallway, and kitchen but finding nobody.
"Let's try upstairs." I said, jerking my head in the stairwell's direction.
We entered another master bedroom, this one being neat and free of gore.
Rose pointed a finger at the bed in the left-hand corner.
"Teresa!" she cried.
There lying on the bed, their bony arms bound by rope, were the people in the picture.
My parents.
I walked up to them, and gazed down at their decaying faces. They were both wriggling around weakly in their bounds, letting out soft moans that could neither be described as human or animal. They didn't notice me for a few seconds until I called out their names.
"Mom, Daddy..." I whispered, my fingers gently brushing across their hollow cheeks.
Their eyes, milky and vacant like Rose's dead husband's, finally looked up at me.
We stared at each other, me searching their faces for a glimmer of recognition, a piece of remembrance.
There was nothing. I knew they were gone forever.
I knelt by their bedside and lay my head on the sheet covering them, the tears coming up through my body, desperately wanting to materialize, but never able to appear. I silently raged. My parents were dead and I couldn't even mourn them. I knew I was right about who Rose and I were then. There was no longer any hope. It had just been a temporary hiatus.
I felt Rose's hand on my shoulder, felt her compassion radiate from her long, slender fingers.
"They were here. I tied them up, after they got attacked by one of our neighbors outside the house. Mom got bitten on the arm, and Dad was bitten on his hand. It was downhill from there fast. They kept getting sicker and sicker. After a few hours, they both ran fevers over 100 and they started vomiting and coughing up blood."
I closed my eyes, the sudden onslaught of memories flooding me like a tidal wave.
"They both had seen this thing rip through our neighborhood. They knew that whatever it was was not only air-borne but that when some people died, they wouldn't..." I paused. "Stay dead."
"They'd go after the living. Sooner or later."
"But they still couldn't bring themselves to end it. They were too religious for that. Suicide would not be a part of God's plan, they said. So they had me tie them up as a compromise. If they stayed dead, I'd bury them. If not...well, they couldn't hurt anybody."
I stroked their faces, a fierce love coursing through me.
"I remember now why I was at that store, Rose. It was a last-ditch effort to find some medicine that could help them. I knew the truth but I still couldn't accept it. But they had already accepted that it was over."
I kept rocking back and forth, remembering the people crowding around me, each searching in desperation for their own miracle.
"I remember the bodies falling down around me, Rose, the spray of blood and vomit spewing from their mouths as they choked on their own fluids, and collapsed to the floor like overripe fruit. I remember my throat closing up and my body going numb and staggering down the aisle, dropping that pink purse until I finally fell down next to you, Rose."
I turned around. Her lips were tightly pursed together, her shoulders slumped in defeat.
"And we slept. But we died that day, we both died, and we've got no goddamned business being anything except dead."
Rose lifted two cold fingers and pressed them to my neck.
I did the same, but we both got the same answer.
We quietly sat there in the dark for a while thinking about life, death, resurrection, and hunger.
"So what do we now?" she said, slowly and deliberately as she stared up at the ceiling.
"We do what we're supposed to." I said, suddenly very tired. "Do you still have that knife?"
She pulled out the knife from her straw handbag, still stained with the blood of her departed husband.
"Maybe it's the necessary thing to do. But is it the right thing? If your parents thought it was wrong, how about you? I was raised Catholic. I've got enough guilt as it is." Her voice trembled with anguish.
"Would..." and her eyes stretched upwards, "HE understand?"
I said nothing for several moments. The silence between us stretched like a gulf.
I shook my head and willed all of my courage.
"I remember hearing this phrase all of the time when I was a kid. 'God helps those who help themselves'. I think maybe, we're being given the strength to make the right decision."
She said nothing, but stared in sadness at the remains of my parents, who were still moaning softly and staring vacantly into space.
"I want to tell you that even though we've only known each other for half a day, I feel like I've known you for much longer. You know, it's funny. I was never that interested in female friendships in life." Rose said, reaching out to grasp my hand.
I squeezed her hand back, almost not wanting to let go of this last part of humanity, dead or alive, that had become so important to me in the past few hours. But the dead have to die.
I turned away as she pushed the blade through her eye.
The last thing I heard, just as the wet knife in my hand pierced my own brain, right as I dropped into darkness, came from my parents' bed, a low, nearly indistinguishable moan pushing out of their dead throats.
'Teresa'.
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