Three's a Crowd

I yawned as the heavy, fruity stream of my first morning piss hit the toilet bowl. It was hard to stay hydrated these days, stuck inside except for a couple of hours spent foraging when the sun was high enough to chase the shadows into the alleys and hot enough to blister the pavement.

Another yawn gaped my face and an errant fly landed on my tongue. With a grimace I coughed and spit it out, watching it fall to the boy-shorts stretched between my knees before righting itself and joining its fellows on the clouded glass of the bathroom window.

There was a sound outside, and I held my breath to listen. Somewhere out on the street, something metal clanged. Even the flies went completely still, the silence holding us all in its fist. Somewhere in the distance a generator whined and groaned to life. I wiped my ass and shut the toilet lid, if only to limit the number of flies that would be inside it the next time that I used it.

For the first few weeks, all the public utilities worked. We followed the recorded guidelines that blasted from the military trucks that rolled down the street twice a day, and stayed in our homes at night, blacking out the windows and only using candles and flashlights as necessary.

Now, the bathroom burned my eyes with the acrid stink of days' old piss and shit. During the safe hours, I’d taken to hanging my ass out the narrow, sooty window over the bathtub and voiding onto the pool deck below. But only when the sun was high, and never if I could hear the shuffling steps of my neighbors anywhere nearby.

I closed the bathroom door. It helped, as did weeks of exposure to the rancid reality of the new world. I hadn’t changed my clothes in three days. There wasn’t enough water to waste on washing them anyway. Yesterday, I snuck into Chrissie’s bedroom when she and Jack were out of sight, grabbed a handful of her Victoria’s Secret five-for-fifty-dollar specials, and hid them under my mattress.

The buttery cotton of my own shorts turned to burlap in my jeans as I thought about all the silk and satin men gave Chrissie in return for a hair flip or a giggle. The world had ended while we sat by the pool, but she still occupied more space in my head than the shamblers outside. I listened, but they were somewhere else in the apartment. I shimmied out of my jeans and cotton boxers and slipped the bubblegum pink satin and white lace over my calves and up my legs, wishing I had a way to shave.

Jack had let us use his electric razor when the water ran dry but the generators were still running. Then they ran dry too, and batteries ran short so we put them away for important tools only. Now I rubbed satin over the new forest on my legs and the thick, curly shrubbery between my thighs that stuck out over the waistline.

No one was going to see it anyways. I wriggled on the bed on my back and played with the coarse curls. The soft cloth slid over my ass and turned me on. There was no one to help deal with that. Not for a long time. Not since before the town’s first undead had walked into Walmart and bitten the pinch-faced lady who policed the self-checkout lane.

Jack used to be good for some uncomplicated company. Once, it had only taken a look from me, or a text from the bath to get him in my room. He’d spent hours in my bed, in my arms, on top of me, driving deep into me until he’d come with a grunt and roll off, reaching for a joint to share, and a laugh. But, like I said, that was before.

Before the loudspeakers and the military trucks and the shuffling, shambling neighbors who remembered to say good morning, but forgot you’re not supposed to bite and tear and eat your friends.

When Darren’s shuffling walk toward our apartment signaled making sure the condoms and weed were put away, instead of more furniture up against the door.

Before Chrissie came to stay.

Chrissie wore personality like an accessory and changed hers to fit her outfit or her mood. The dumb blonde had moved in, the mean girl had sauntered out of her bedroom the next morning with Jack’s boxers and a sly smile.

After that, I always slept alone.

In the first days after the shamblers showed up, there was a mad rush on the apartment for Jack’s baggies of sticky icky as everyone still breathing looked for an escape from the new now. After a few weeks, no one in the apartment complex wanted the weed Jack sold for a living, and nobody was left to collect rent, so for days on end we stayed indoors and smoked, munching our way through the boxes of MREs the military men had left stacked on the sidewalks around town.

Every so often we’d run into other survivors. Sometimes, we never saw them again and we’d sit around in our ever-dwindling group and wonder aloud if they found a way out. More often, we’d see them as they plodded toward us, wet, rotting, calling out to us from around thick, bloated tongues.

Nobody came to rescue us. The air got more rank, food, and water scarcer, and the community dwindled and disappeared until all that was left were the dead in the streets, and the dead who walked. No news stories came out to tell us it was just our town, state, or country. The internet went dead within hours of the first local report of the bitten coming back to life.

We never learned who set off the apocalypse or when it began. Somewhere, someone with a string of letters after their names, or important titles who got money from donors at expensive dinners, or with businesses that made enough money to hide from the EPA had fucked it up for the rest of us. They were probably holed up underground somewhere, waiting out the dead who walked several stories above their heads looking for someone to eat.

Then no one was left in the complex except us and our politely ravenous neighbors.

The weather got hotter and drier. The chaotic rainbow of zinnias and hydrangea bushes lining the complex sidewalks that had drawn me to this apartment over all the others in my rent.com favorites list slowly faded and curled up in little brown knots on their stems, shriveling away in the surrounding stench of shuffling, decaying death.

The complex pool was full of bloated bodies trapped by the tarpaulin pool cover. With graceful, fluid motions they reached out like limbs of anemones for us when we skirted by to hop the fence between the apartments and the shopping center behind it wall. Trapped in the sun, they looked and smelled the worst of all the undead.

Big, military trucks with armed men who shot at anything that moved and loudspeakers became our clocks. They indicated the only passage of time that mattered anymore. When the trucks rolled through after sunup, reminding us to stay indoors, we knew the sun was high enough to forage. When they next rolled through booming the message, we checked the boards nailed to the picture windows and lodged extra furniture behind the front door.

Always listening.

Sometimes, a neighbor would drop by, and we’d stop breathing to listen harder. Darren, the super, was our most frequent visitor. He’d scratch at the door until his key slid home into the deadbolt and Chrissie would scream into a pillow in the back room until he gave up on getting it to turn and shambled away again.

Darren had always liked Chrissie. Everyone liked her, apparently, except me.

I considered stealing the rest of her underwear, but even a clothes horse like her would eventually notice. I laid on the bed waiting for the sirens and the loudspeaker that would tell me to stay inside, but that meant the streets were clear enough for the soldiers to feel safe.

The sun climbed the bedroom wall, but no loudspeaker sounded. No trucks ground and rumbled down the street over the picked clean bones of the dead. Thinking of it, I realized I hadn’t heard them for a while. Outside my room, Chrissie and Jack started moving around.

“Janet.” Chrissie whispered from outside the door. “Janet, aren’t you hungry?”

I rolled on my side and stared at the locked door. “No Chris. I’m fine.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“I’m sorry, Chrissie. I can’t help you. Talk to Jack.” I curled up and tucked my legs under the blankets. I hadn’t been cold in a long time. The sun burned down too hot and the air conditioner had failed with the last generator in the complex. But goose bumps prickled along my skin even as sweat tickled down my neck.

I scratched the hot, angry red skin at the edge of the bite on my arm. Spider legs of infection crawled out in every direction from the meaty patch surrounded by perfectly even teeth marks.

Veneers, I thought to myself. Of course.

The tiny hairs on my arm lifted to attention when I squeezed the muscle around the wound until liquid spurted out of it, a mixture of blood and pus and clear, thick mucus. It smelled worse than the toilet full of shit or the street full of bodies.

Fuck.

Couldn’t be helped, I supposed. The day the soldiers opened fire on a pack of desperate scavengers begging to be rescued, we knew someone, somewhere, had decided our fates. I’d never made up with Jack and told him that I missed him laughing and smoking in my bed. I’d never get to find out if Chrissie had a personality in her hope chest that let her be friends with other girls.

I’d never shave my legs again… Then again, how much longer would I care?

The last unsmoked joint in the entire city sat on my bedside table. Jack had used the rest of his meager stash to fight the pain after Darren had finally caught up with us outside. It was Chrissie’s fault. She was supposed to be listening. She was in a pout because Jack didn’t watch her tightrope walk the retaining wall between the buildings. He snapped at her for being childish and she pretended to fall.

Jack caught her. Darren caught Jack.

He even apologized as he wiped a bright red streak of Jack off his chin and licked his fingers.

“You get so hungry, you see.” He smiled politely and shrugged, or at least seemed to. It was difficult to tell, the way his rotting flesh hung in tatters off his shoulders. Then, he lunged again.

Chrissie had curled up in a ball on the walking path, shrieking, as useless as she ever was.

I left her, but Jack scooped her up, covering them both in the crimson rain that poured, then trickled down his neck. I held the door for him then slammed the bolt home and put my ear against it until I could hear the soft shoe shuffle of Darren approaching our door.

I tried to recall if he’d said anything, but my arm distracted me. The itch was gone and with it, most of the feeling. I examined myself with a curious detachment. Somewhere deep down, I thought I saw myself screaming in horror at the thick, veiny web that had overtaken pink skin and turned it a foul greenish black.

How long have I been here alone?

I glanced toward the window for the sun, but it had sunk far enough that there was only light enough to illuminate the bed, and my changing body.

Jack had changed fast though. The weed had helped for a few hours, but by the time Chrissie had smoked herself into a heavy sleep, he was looking at her with hungrier eyes than he had the day she arrived, wearing a tiny halter dress, our listing for a roommate in her hand.

He tore his eyes away from her to fill his pipe, but his stash box was empty. He smiled at me as if I’d been away and just returned. “Are you hungry, Jan? I’m so hungry.”

I shook my head. “No, the sight of that wound killed any appetite I had left.” He laughed, the motion of his throat making pus ooze down in a steady stream to his chest.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore, but I’d sure like to smoke one more time with you.”

There was still life in his eyes, but they glinted at me with cunning in them that I had never seen before. I moved closer to my bedroom, leaving Chrissie snoring between us. He didn’t seem to notice or care that I inched away from him, and after a few moments of me starting at him while he stared into space, I felt silly.

“I do still my emergency joint, do you remember?” I asked, nearly jumping out of my skin when his head swung around.

“Oh, Janet, there you are. I think I drifted off.” He sounded like he had when I drove him home from having his wisdom teeth out, back in the days of just us, alive and well. “I don’t think I need your last joint. I just need—a little snack. My jaw aches.”

We both glanced down at Chrissie stoned and snoring and oblivious. Why hadn’t she hidden? Why did she let herself get stoned to the point of being comatose as the man she’d gotten attacked slowly died, four feet away?

“She’s so thoughtless,” he sighed, his jaw creaking, infection crawling over his greying face. “Easy, but thoughtless.” He pointed a purpling, swollen finger at her. “That, is a parasite.” He waved me off, not pausing for a reply. “Oh, I know you knew it. I know you hate her and you hate me.”

“I don’t.”

The cunning glint met my gaze. “Then come here and be my girl again.”

“I thought you said you were hungry.”

“I am hungry,” he hissed. “I’m fucking starving. You’re hungry too. I’ve seen the way you watch me when I’m with her. You want to tear her apart and fuck me over her dead body, and right now, I’d let you.”

That was the moment I realized Jack was gone, and whatever was running the show now, it was time for me to leave. “Goodnight, Jack. Enjoy your snack.”

His eyes jumped to Chrissie, dark and ravenous. The same look we saw a hundred times in family, old friends, and casual acquaintances as humanity became the most inhuman version of itself.

I went in my room and shoved the bed against the door, then had a good cry.

Last night I finally tried to escape the prison I’d accidentally set for myself. Jack moved faster than I thought he could, even though his cheeks were sloughing off his face, eyes ready to fall out from beneath his eyelids.

I dodged him and put the sofa and tables between us. Chrissie stared listlessly at me from the couch, her head tilted like a dog, listening.

“Janet.”She ground out the word, dragging two syllables across a half-eaten jaw. Her tongue caught between her teeth and she bit a piece off, chewing thoughtfully. Are you hungry, Janet?”

I backed away, keeping an eye on Jack as he watched from between me and the door. “No, Chris. I think I’ll go back to bed.” I made a run for it, but a weight dropped on me in the doorway. I swung around to free myself and her teeth sunk into my arm. She pulled back as I wriggled away from her, her eyes bright and confused.

“Janet, I think you’re prettier than me now. That doesn't seem fair.”

I kicked the door shut in her face and scrambled over the bed to blockade myself in again. My arm burned where she’d bitten me, a patch of skin and meat missing, like I’d bumped into a cookie cutter shark. That’s what waited for me outside my bedroom. Devoured one tidy circle at a time, bites torn out of me with neat, evenly spaced teeth.

Or I could rot in here alone, until I was too far gone to move the bed or turn the doorknob. The shuffling was closer now. They knew I was turning, that we were going to be a trio again soon. I glanced at the forgotten joint clinging to my numb fingers.

The world was over.

Maybe someday, if aliens decided to study our planet, they’d study us and figure out what happened. Their scientists would postulate about our greed and fear and selfish lives and tell their kind how much better they were than us and how we’d destroyed ourselves to gather and hoard imaginary currency that only existed to serve some and punish others.

The door loomed in front of me, waiting. Chrissie and waited on the other side, trapped in here with me behind the boarded-up windows and doors we’d been so careful to secure against the undead.

I laid back on my rancid, sweat-soaked pillows and forced my left hand to raise the joint to my lips. The lighter took a couple of tries, but finally, I inhaled the smoke deep into my lungs and held it until my lungs burned and the need to cough took over. I exhaled, but the cough never came. The joint burned down faster than I’d hoped, and with less high than I needed. But I sat in my bed until the joint had burned down to my singed fingers and the room smelled like a frat house the morning after.

The paper burnt my lips and I bit my tongue, reveling in the flavor of sweet copper that filled my mouth. I shuddered at the animal need that replaced my thoughts. It was time. No more procrastination. I squeezed down between the bed and the door as my vision began to blur on the edges. Finally, it gave and slid across the floor, casters squealing in protest.

My left leg dragged as I forced myself to take one step, then two. My lungs felt soggy, full of water I couldn’t express. I stopped trying to breathe and listened.

There was nothing. No shuffling, no breathing, no heartbeat. My room and the apartment were completely silent. So was my body.

C’est la vie, I suppose.

Arduously, I opened the door. Jack stood in the middle of the room, staring blankly down at Chrissie while she gnawed on his left leg like a dog with a rawhide. He lifted his gaze to mine, one eye resting on his cheek, the other glazed over and filmy.

I used my left hand to raise my right, the last joint of Jack’s Sticky Icky still clinging precariously between my first and second fingers. “I’m lonely.” The words came out thick and lumpy, but they did the trick.

Jack shambled toward me, dragging Chrissie until she released his leg with a growl. He looked down at the joint, then back at me. The predatory glint was gone from his eyes, his mouth hung slack.

His leg wasn’t the only thing Chrissie had been chewing on. There were bits missing from both of them. What was left was teeth, bone, and enough stringy, bad meat to keep moving. I half limped, half shuffled back to the bed and sat down, patting the spot next to me with my functional hand.

Chrissie pulled herself along the floor with her hands, the bare bone of her legs dragging behind her. Jack fared better, walking like a drunk penguin, and plopped down next to me on the mattress.

“Hungry,” he whispered. I pushed his face into my breasts and and pressed Chrissie’s head into my thigh as she clung to me.

“My first threesome,” I mumbled, words feeling more and more unnecessary as teeth dug painfully into my flesh.

Jack stopped chewing and looked at me in confusion. I wanted to tell him that all I ever wanted was to be included, but the buzzing in my ears chased away the thought. A fly landed in my open mouth. I swallowed it before it could escape.

I was just so hungry.