A FEAST OF FLESH: STORIES OF ZOMBIES, MONSTERS, and DEMONS
by
AARON POLSON
* * * * *
A FEAST OF FLESH
Published by Aaron Polson on Smashwords
Copyright 2011 by Aaron Polson
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Table of Conents
Cargo
Tesoros Magic Bullet
The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country
Former Vocations (a poem)
The Distillery
In the Primal Library
Familiar Faces
Sea of Green, Sea of Gold
Bona Fide King of His Realm
Down There
Acknowledgements
Cargo
Start with the remnants of a desert town, a little girl, a man with a truck.
The town consists of shacks and ruined shells of larger buildings, rolls of barbed wire and sharpened lumber surrounding it on all sides like a great, prickly tortoise slumbering in the heat. The girl is too thin, like the rest of the survivors, with naps of sun-bleached hair in long, disordered strands. Her large eyes call from an impish face, blue and clear like the sky on good days, the days without dust storms. Both the man and the truck wear layers of grime like armor.
He only works after a moonless night, the ones survivors call nameless.
The Ruined Ones come with secret, padding feet to the edge of the wire. They learn the hard lesson of sharpened lumber and rolls of razor wire after scores of their brothers and sistersshould they even consider the wordthrust themselves into the teeth of the villages defense. On nameless nights, their hot, angry cries scald the sky. In the morning, the man starts his truck, a rusted, grumbling thing, and rides it toward the gates. The men at the gates collect the deadhumans wrapped in burial shrouds and those grim-grey husks impaled on the fortificationsand heave body upon body until the bed of the truck hunches under the load.
On most days, no one watches him drive through the broken remnants of city streets.
No one expects anything from the man but to be rid of the bodies. For this, they keep him fed from their gardens. For this, no one expects more. On the days with cargo, the man and his truck chug across the dusty flats to the pit. He earns his food and shelter on the days with cargo.
Since Red shot himself in the mouth, he does the job alone.
He carries dozens of dirty pseudonyms, glares, and hateful, whispered rumors so the rest of the survivors can pretend they are safe and different and far away from the rotten, dying world. After the nameless nights, the others shut themselves in. They live without the burden of the dead. For nearly a month, they pretend the world can be good again and they all love one another.
Everyone but the man and his truck.
No one knows his proper name.
After one nameless night, the girl stands by the side of the road and waits as the truck rumbles past. The man hardly offers a glance, but the girls bone-thin hand reaches out. Dust blows in her face. She squints through the cloud of brown ash, studying as the men piled bodies onto the bed. She watches until the truck fades from the gate into a dark speck in the desert.
The man wears one long scar across his left cheek and nose. Reds face had been scarred too many times to count, his skin
black, hungry mouth. The truck slid to a halt at the lip of the pit. Dust skittered across the landscape in a game of chase.
Both men continued in silence, tossing body after body into the smoldering remains below. The charred remnants of a thousand lives lay in the pit, broken and blackened bits of bone and scorched flesh. The bodies landed with tiny thumps. Without rain to quench its thirst, a fire burned at the bottom. At last they tossed in the girls body, the last body, each taking one end and heaving it together, until it hung in the air, suspended for a moment, then twisted and tumbled with the others into the reeking smoke below.