The Seven Habits

Something about the clerk caught my eye, man. Not in a sexual way, either. Don’t get me wrong. She was cute and all. Had these stawberry blond ringlets wisping over this round face with high cheekbones. Eyes like sapphires. And even beneath that lime green smock you could tell the bitch had a nice rack. So okay, maybe at first I was a little aroused. I mean, I’m a man, ya know? I respond. Even against my better judgment. So I’m checkin’ out her tits and I can’t help but notice the name tag pinned to her apron: Hi, my name is CLARICE ask how I can help.

But then I noticed how she had these little beads of sweat on her brow, right? I look a little more closely and I notice there’s these wet stains spreading across the armpits of her white blouse. Wasn’t long before I realize her entire body was practically shimmering in a sheen of sweat. The strands of hair hangin’ down the back of her neck? Drenched, man. I mean, they’ve got the air conditioner pumped up so much I’m practically fartin’ ice crystals. I got my sleeves rolled down and the woman in front of me is trying to warm herself by rubbin’ her hands up and down her arms while she talks to her husband or boyfriend or whatever. We’re all fuckin’ freezing. But this chick? She’s sweating like a whore on payday, man.

Let me tell ya, I lost that chubby real damn quick.

See, that’s the first sign, man. The infected… their bodies are undergoing changes at a molecular level, see? You know how much energy it takes to alter just a single sequence of DNA? You could power a small town for a week. Energy excites molecules, right? Hopped up molecules create friction and friction builds heat. On top of all that, you’ve got your own body tryin’ to fight this shit off. The infected are like these walking nuclear reactors… and they sweat. Good God, do they sweat.

I get my ass outta that line real quick, believe you me. I just sit my basket on the empty counter to my right and hightail it out the door. I don’t want her touching my shit, man. I don’t want her fingers all over my can of shaving cream. I mean, I’m gonna be sprayin’ that foam out and spreading it all over my face, ya know, and then scraping a razor across it? One little nick and next thing I know I’m buying stock in Degree antiperspirant, if ya get my drift.

But at the same time, I keep thinking about Ocean. I see her driving that tire iron into her mother’s skull, feel her confusion and pain and emptiness. All the conflict raging inside her, justification versus guilt and all that shit. And it pisses me off, man. No kid should ever have to experience that.

So I get to the little brick wall on the other side of the waterfall and I get this idea in the back of my mind. A way I can help that poor little girl, and maybe everyone else at the same time, man. The future is malleable, man. Things can be changed if you’ve got the balls to see it through. I was positive of that.

So I kinda lean against the wall with the spray of water splashing against the back of my neck and I watch this chick, man. I mean, I really study her, ya know? I see how she drags the items across the scanner and stuffs them into the open mouths of the plastic bags like a mama bird feeding her chicks. I watch as she keeps mopping her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, fanning herself with her hand when she can catch a moment. I keep picturing all those nasty little bastards surgin’ through her bloodstream, eating away at her humanity, slowly changing her into a harbinger of death.

I’m not a psycho, ya know? I’m wrestling with myself. I’m thinking she’s got a family, dude. She’s someone’s daughter. There are people out there who fuckin’ love her. And this other part of my mind? It just sees a biochemical playground, a spawning ground. It stares at her the way you’d look at a maggoty slab of meat when you were expecting steak. And those scientists are just knocking on the door of my mansion— hey, mister, wanna buy some brownies?

You know what really made the decision for me? It wasn’t even Ocean, if you can believe that. Nah, man, it was all these people around me. It was the harried looking mother running after the kid in the blue overalls. It was the teenagers makin’ out in front of Dark Desires without a care in the world. The janitor emptying trashcans. The rent-a-pig giving me the hairy eyeball from over by the escalators.

I looked around and all I saw were these decaying carcasses, man. These rotters, to use Ocean’s word for it, pushing their strollers and laughing in small groups while an orange balloon slowly drifted toward the ceiling. They were all dead, each and every one of them. And they had families too, right? They had people who loved them as well.

So right then and there, I decided to shell out the cash and buy every fuckin’ box of brownies being pushed at me. I’ll take them all.

But I had to be sure, you know? I didn’t want to condemn this shop girl just because she maybe had a glandular issue. Or a touch of the summer flu. No, if I was gonna do this thing I had to be absolutely certain.

There are seven signs, man, and before I did anything drastic, I needed to make damn sure she had each and every fuckin’ one

CHAPTER SIX

Ocean was surprisingly relaxed as she stood with her eyes closed, breathing in short gasps so she would inhale as little of their stink as necessary. She heard the rotters’ footsteps scraping against the asphalt, could imagine flakes of decayed skin drifting to the street like a blizzard of scabs. She could picture their hands reaching out for her; bony fingertips like ivory claws jutting through flesh that seemed to be perpetually sloughing off the cord-like mass of muscle, their teeth, yellow and brown and fuzzy with mold, whispered promises of infection and death in the rasp of gas over vocal chords.

But at the same time she could feel the rays of the sun warming her arms and face. There was just the hint of a breeze, enough to rustle her hair in a way that took her back to a time when everything had been simpler. The ruined city and the rotters who roamed it had always painted her view of life, they were just as much part of her reality as the clouds in the sky. But things had been better back then… hadn’t they?

Her hand thrust into the loose pocket her mother had sewn onto her top and she ran her fingers along the smooth, glass belly of a pig.

It wouldn’t be long now.

She had to cherish these few remaining minutes. To truly experience all the things she’d been too distracted by hunger and fear to appreciate.

How good it felt to breathe….

The rhythm of her heart….

Even the sound of her voice, so small and otherwise insignificant in the relative quiet of the afternoon. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”

She listened.

She waited.

She lived. If only for a few seconds more.

A savage cry echoed off the crumbling buildings and Ocean’s eyes snapped open as her body jolted with shock. The rotters closest to her were turning away, as if the introduction of this new sound held greater promise than the silent girl before them. Through the gaps between their bodies, she could see something moving, nothing more than a dark blur, really. Now that the echoed shout was fading, she was aware of another sound. It was a dull thud and sharp whack merged into a single noise, preceded time and time again by a swish that reminded her, somehow, of the toy Daddy had made her when she was very small.

He’d taken what he’d called fan blades from one of the cars and attached them to a metal rod. When the wind blew hard enough, the flat vanes would start to spin and the sound they made was very similar to this one.

As she watched the rotters move toward the source of the sound, Ocean saw a head tumble into the air. It almost seemed to rotate in slow motion as it arced skyward; she had ample time to notice how the face looked like it had been chewed away at some point in the past.

Then she saw him, spinning like a tornado of rage, kicking back the rotters closest to him with leaps and growls, a whirlwind of constant motion and violence. In either hand, he held the curved blade of a sickle. For the most part, the metal was pitted and flaked with rust, but the inner edges had been honed to perfection and gleamed as brightly as the reflection of the sun on a car’s mirror.