The Maiden

Delia and Balatro returned to King Street at midday, the North Texas air sticky and the sun beating down on their carcass-covered backs. 
        
“Don't look at it, Delia,” Bally said ahead of her.  The old house loomed to her side and though she halted and breathed the stench of dead dog and her own sweat, her head remained canted toward the ground until she shuffled after him. 
        
The development, once a middle class enclave in the poor county, now wore the dust and entropy of a ghost town.  Dry, brittle grass covered lawns like mange on a dog.  An ornamental windmill creaked in the humid breeze.  Wind chimes tinkled above multiple concrete slabs that served as porches to most of the houses.  They passed windows broken or dark and dirty, doors gaping, black and brown spattered patterns on the concrete and peeling paint of entry ways.  Silhouettes looked out. 
        
Figures sometimes moved in the houses but there were no living people as far as she could tell.
        
“We've come home, Bally,” she said.  Ahead of her his head jerked.
        
“All grown up, ha,” he said.  Then his body went rigid.  “Corpses.”
        
Still trudging forward, Delia tilted her head to the left on her next step to glimpse past him, and saw the three figures creeping toward them.  A large man with a halo of grayed hair followed by two females wearing white smocks and holding long, nasty scissors in their hands.  They scuttled single-file on the sidewalk.
        
Corpses these days had blackened faces.  From a distance these seemed unusually pale.  Healthy, if that could be said of a corpse.
        
As the corpses neared, sweat collected in Delia's eyebrows and her breath grew shallow and quick.
        
“My god, it's them,” Delia said.
        
His head twitched again.
        
“No.  Nothing but kindling.  Remember that,” he said.  Beneath the carcasses his hands would grip the baseball bat, ready.
        
The two groups neared each other and stopped once they stood parallel. 
        
Gore draped over Delia and Bally's heads, arms, and clothing disguised them.  Delia stared out past viscera to the figures in her peripheral.  Ahead of her Bally inclined his head toward them but no more.
        
Daddy.  Sissies, Delia thought, reverting for a moment to a younger self who still had a dad and sisters.
        
Her father, or her father's corpse, toyed with something in his hand.  It squeaked between his dry fingers but she could not see well enough to identify it.
        
After long moments full of sweat and her heart beating ever faster, the other three continued on their way, as did she and Bally.
        
He said they were kindling.  Nothing more.  He would destroy them without hesitation if necessary.  She knew he was wrong, though. 
        
They were her family.

***

“Two more years and Jesus comes back,” Bally said, a lazy smile stretched across his face.  His eyes were closed and he lay on a mattress they'd moved into the attic. 
        
Delia glanced at him sidelong but didn't say anything.
        
“Oh, don't be so damned sensitive,” he said and his eyes popped open to glare at her.
        
She crouched at the front edge of the crawlspace, looking out through a faux window in the attic.
        
“Runners,” she said.  A group of four sprinted down the street.  Most runners were obese prior to infection and had burned their frames down to muscled skeletons covered in too much skin. 
        
“It won't be like Dallas, at least,” Bally said.  “Never realized how fat that city was.”
        
“What about the Shalers.  The Barnett Shale extends out here,” she turned from the window, eyebrows raised.
        
He shook his head and pulled himself akimbo.
        
“Most of the existing wells are in Tarrant, Denton, Johnson, Wise, Parker counties.”
        
“I've seen plenty here in Had,” Delia countered.
        
“Yeah, but nothing compared to the counties further north.  It's just a matter of economics.”
        
“It's just a matter of I don't want to be a slave,” she said, turning back to the window.  “They put people in with corpses.  We're all cattle to them.”  The runners raced back from whence they came, teeth bared in demonic grins, eyes wide blank orbs of shadow.  Skin flapped about their frames like loose raiments.
        
They looked like figures running from the past.  Which, in a way, she guessed they were.

***

Something crashed downstairs.  Bally and Delia stopped talking and looked at each other.  He launched to his feet and pulled the baseball bat to his side.
        
Delia stood at his shoulder as he lowered the ladder.  He peeked down into the second-story hall, then clambered down the steps.  In the hall he held up his hand to her, listening.  She waited.  Before moving into the attic they had explored the house, finding neither occupants nor signs of recent activity.  They had closed all the inside doors and piled a bed frame and toy box on the stairs.
        
There came another sound from downstairs.  A rustling from the kitchen.  Delia wrinkled her nose at a new stench in the gloomy house, a mingling of mold and fecal matter.
        
Bally edged down the hall to the stairs.  The balustrade on one side overlooked the lower half of the stairway and the entry area.  Gray light filtered through a second story window above the door and a cheap brass chandelier reflected the window in dozens of small glass teardrops. 
        
The bed frame and toy box blocked the way down, so Bally mounted the balustrade and shifted to slide past the blockade when he overbalanced and tumbled off the edge, arms flailing.  He hit the lower flight of stairs with a muffled bark and several thuds as he slid down the remaining steps.
        
Delia slid down the ladder and scampered to the edge of the stairs.   Bally lay crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, moaning, one leg crooked at an impossible angle.  She hefted up and over the railing and lowered herself first to the rail lining the wall above the lower stairs and then slid to the stairs themselves.  Slouching to Bally's side she looked first at his leg where the jeans were starting to soak with blood and something sharp and white protruded through the denim.
        
The kitchen issued only silence.  She wrenched the bat from Bally's grip and stood up in the pale light.  Smell of mold and shit, with a hint of tainted meat, wafted in the stagnant air.  She wiped the sweat from her face.  The heat made her feel faint.  The quality of light in the room resembled an old photo.
        
A woman shuffled from the kitchen.  Blond.  Young when she still lived.  Now her face had grown loose on her skull and shifted to one side.  The flesh on her arms and belly hung in folds.  A runner.  The lower half of her face had ripped away and left a naked rictus below her upper lip.
        
The corpse lifted a hand toward Delia.
        
“Mapssss,” it hissed.
        
Delia strafed to the woman's side, bat hefted high.
        
“Mapssss,” it said again, voice like a scratched old record.  
        
Bally groaned to the side, the corpse kept repeating its nonsense mantra, and Delia stood there listening between them.
        
Bally tried to move and bellowed his agony.  The corpse turned toward him.
        
Delia swung the bat.  Not because the woman was a threat but because Bally would never stop complaining if she didn't.  The head lolled to the left and the body toppled to the floor.  The stench intensified the moment the bat connected.
        
“Mapssss,” the corpse whispered a last time and grew still.
        
Behind her, Bally moaned.

***
        

“You're lucky it missed the artery,” she whispered.
        
It proved hard to feel sympathy for another's pain when corpses walked the streets.  Especially when one of those corpses was your daddy.  She helped Bally up into the attic.  Helped him get his bone back into his leg, cleaned his wound, tied short planks around the leg.  When they finished he fell asleep or passed out.  Sleep without his hands all over her would be nice, but her shaking legs kept her awake and she finally gave up.
        
Delia sat at the window and stared out at the street full of corpses shuffling in the moonlight. 
        
They liked the dark.

***

When the sun hung fat and orange on the horizon, she crept downstairs, leaving Bally and his snores behind. 
        
She did not run from her past, she stumbled toward it. 
        
The female corpse sprawled at her feet, she stripped and put on the dress she'd worn the last night she'd seen her dad and sisters.  The dress shone white that night like a reflection of her purity. 
        
Over five years ago, just before the world died. 
        
Now brown stains flecked the material.  That felt right.
        
She knelt beside the corpse and stared into the face.  Sometime in the night the idea came to her.  She hesitated.  Delia shook her head and reached down, grasped the flesh on the corpse's face and slid it up off the head.  She did the same with the loose skin on the arms and legs.
        
The denuded corpse exuded an odor not unlike cheddar cheese.
        
The flesh molded onto Delia's thighs like garters, though it hung loose on her arms.  The dress held a couple safety pins placed there so long ago by her oldest sister, Gonnia.  Delia used them to secure the arm flesh to her dress.  Last she fingered the mask of flesh down over the fistful of hair that she then allowed to fall around it.  The skin of the face had tanned like leather and felt strong and sinewy against her cheeks.  It smelled musky with a hint of cheese.  The smell comforted her. 
        
She fingered the face off and made a pony tail at the back of her head.  Then she pulled the mask back onto her head and draped her hair over the top of the flesh, except for the pony tail, guided through a hole in the rear to anchor the disguise.
        
Delia walked to a mirror by the front door.  The yellow morning light lent the entryway a stagnant air. In the mirror she stared at someone both new and old.  Her face below her nose exposed, she smiled.
        
“Hi, Daddy,” the dead girl in the mirror said.

***

The screen door creaked open and then slapped shut behind her.  Dust bunnies fled from eddies her steps created on the wood floor.  They sat on the sofa and love seat as though watching television.  Shelves lined the dark paneling of the walls: memorabilia from the old man's wild cat days—brass oil derricks and plaques. 
        
“Hi, Daddy,” Delia said.  The three corpses sat, heads turned toward her, staring.          

Then they stood.

***

The Fool

From the faux window, Balatro watched her enter the house.  If he wavered during the encounter on the street, Balatro knew now he would have to destroy him and the two bitches the father had chosen over Delia. 
        
Balatro had been the old man's only real friend back then.  He'd never understood Lear's fit of pique at such an obvious refusal to parade her affection for her father in exchange for the largest stake in Lear Oil and Gas.  The old man had interpreted it as a snub from his youngest daughter.
        
And began Balatro's flight with Delia: at first the foolish response of teenagers in love soon culminating in the terrored flight of two young people striving to live through the apocalypse as envisioned by Dario Argento.
        
Before all the broadcasts died, the news suggested rational explanations for the living dead, but ultimately the certainty of scripture won over rationality.  The end days had arrived, those killed or missing in the first few weeks of the Zombie Apocalypse were surely in heaven, and those left behind would have to survive the Tribulations.
        
Survive they did.  Five years until the runners in DFW became too much and the New Oil Men came for the ready wells of the Barnett Shale.  The double threat had sent them southwest, into Had county and their hometown of Nocta.  Back to the old neighborhood. 
        
Back to a past full of ghosts that refused death.

***

A milk jug of tepid water and some cans of food sat just above the ladder when he woke.  He pulled himself over to it and drank first, then peeled the lid off one of the cans and ate the tuna inside, oil and all.
        
Afterward he lay there, willing the food to stay down.  His ulcer burned in his gut.  Once he knew he would not vomit he spent several minutes groaning in pain as he pushed and pulled himself to the window and then propped into a sitting position.
        
The light in Nocta in the mornings glinted off the dull tar of the road, twinkled in the wind chimes on porches, or lit the otherwise dark windows with a glow like heaven.  Balatro tilted his head and stared up at cumulonimbus clouds painted ocher and gold with the morning sun.  A crow flew overhead with a muffled caw, free of the worries of man.
        
It made him think of the dead bird he found earlier on the floor near the faux window.  He wiped at the tears still wetting his cheeks from when he found the small body.  It looked prehistoric—something preserved in amber in a final defiant scream.  Decay did not hide all the blue of its former glory. 
        
The slap of a door startled Balatro.
        
He looked down at the house across the street.  The line of corpses walked off the porch toward the sidewalk.  The old man led the way, holding something up to his face as he trudged forward.  Behind him came the bitches, Gonnia and Reagan, each wearing white aprons and carrying the long scissors from the day before.  Last came a smaller figure adorned in a dress that once dreamed itself white. 
        
As the retinue turned left on the sidewalk the last figure turned its head to peer up at him in his window.  After a moment, Daddy's little girl trotted after her dead family.
        
Balatro spit on the floor and lowered his head into his trembling hands.  When his shaking subsided, he raised his head and looked out into the light of his home town, his jaw set and eyes narrowed.

***

On the next moonless night he went to her.  Plank crutches cushioned with old throw pillows, his leg bound between two longer boards secured to his upper thigh so it bore the brunt of the weight inadvertently placed on the limb, he clambered down the ladder, the cleared stairs, and out the back door.
        
The freaks come out at night.
        
He lowered himself into the shadows between the overgrown shrubbery to the side of the house.  There he hunched, sometimes sleeping, sometimes watching the street, gauging the night life.
        
He smiled in the dark.
        
Over the last few weeks the water and canned food continued to arrive, though she delivered further from his perch as he became more mobile.  He wondered how she judged his mobility.  Each morning she departed the house with the three corpses, the old man holding some booklet or similar prize close to his face, the sisters in their aprons and brandishing scissors, and Delia in her dirty dress and broken dreams.
        
Balatro intended to break them a bit more.  Enough to help her act human again.
        
Each evening the troupe returned home to sit in the dark house.  Once he established their routine, Balatro made a reconnaissance to the house at noon, testing his crutches and the new leg brace.  Timing himself, checking for hiding places on either side of the street and inside the other house, as well as alternate routes.  Inside the other house he'd found a living room much like that he remembered from five years ago, though a thick layer of dust covered everything and a dog carcass sprawled on the dining table like abattoir flowers.  Three of the rooms were tidy if dusty, and a fourth (the front room near the patio) was wiped down to gleaming wood floors, dark plastic of boom box and television, and otherwise immaculate.  Despite this, the room held the only unkempt bed.
        
Crouched in the shrubs he glanced left then right down the shadowy street.  The runners worried him most.  One could come streaking in out of the night without warning and he'd be done for.  He glanced back the other direction, then to the left, eyeballed the houses across the street, and then bolted from cover. 
        
He winced at the clank, clank, clank of his crutches and cursed to himself that he didn't pad the ends.  During his daytime expedition the sound hadn't even met his ears.  Now it sounded like cannon fire.  Over the sidewalk then up the lawn and his wheezing became the only sound outside of his pounding chest.  At the bushes he pivoted and fell to his rump, scanning the street and opposite houses for activity. 
        
Silence.
        
He lingered there, eyes wide, calming his breath.  The air felt cooler at night but still so humid he felt wet all over.  The smell of hyacinths and earth filled his nostrils. 
        
He prepared to stand when he thought he heard a sound from the street.  A minute later two runners charged past, one crooning like a wounded bird, the other naked and sporting a monstrous erection.  Balatro wondered at that—how, without a beating heart?—but dismissed the thought with a shake of his head. 
        
Crouched, head turning to look every way at once, he knocked on the window.  Shave and a haircut, two bits!
        
He should have looked in first, he realized, and turned to bolt when a white hand pushed the window wide and Delia leaned out, eyes puffy from sleep beneath her mask of flesh.
        
“Bally, what are you doing?”
        
“What light through yonder window breaks?” he said with a grin.
        
“Bally, stop acting the fool.  Daddy or sissies are going to hear,” she said.  Her voice took on a small, babyish drawl.  Whining.  He hated her.  He hated a part of her.  But he loved her too.
        
“This ends, Delia,” he whispered, spittle flecking his lips.  “This ends of your doing or mine.  But it ends.  You come back tomorrow night or I will end it myself.”
        
She stood straight and looked down on him, her eyes shadowed.
        
“Go, Balatro.  Things have changed.  I'm sorry.”  She shut the window and turned the latch.
        
Balatro walked across the street, unmindful of the walking dead.  If she did not come, he would fix things himself.  Because things had not changed.  Not one bit.

***

The next night Balatro spent alone without visitors of any kind.  He filled the hours polishing an ax from the woodshed out back.  There was kindling he need deal with.

***

He stood in the kitchen pantry when they returned from their outing.  A squeak from the living room suggested the old man sat on the couch while, through the shutters on the pantry door, Balatro watched Delia sit at the kitchen table and the two older sisters shuffled into the kitchen.  Their heads turned away from him, he saw their shriveled heads now bereft of hair.  They stood together as if dancing, their scissors occasionally snipping at a stray hair one found on the other's body.  Gonnia's face tilted in his direction and Balatro pressed his hand to his mouth.  Lips, eyelids, nose, ears—all excess flesh had been snipped away.  The two rotated slowly in each other's arms until he saw Reagan had been similarly ravaged.
        
Glancing at Delia, she seemed whole, though he saw furtive glances cast in her direction from the two sisters.  Did they know she was human?  Delia sat at the table eating a peach.  The fragrance wafted in the air and filled the entire space as she took several bites and Balatro began to salivate even as the dog carcass in front of Delia sickened him.
         
Balatro slid the pantry door open and slipped forward to stand by the silent fridge.  The light in the house had the old yellow quality that lodged in his brain as uniquely of Nocta.  Motes tumbled in the rays of light as the two dead women turned to look on him with faces stripped of all but the raw necessities: eyes, teeth, gaping nasal cavities.
        
“Hello, sisters,” he said.
        
Delia emitted a sharp eek of shock and he swung the ax with all his might, keeping his weight balanced on the one good leg.  Gonnia's corpse shuddered as the blade hit her neck and her head lolled into Reagan's face, severed but still attached by dry flesh, tendons, gristle.  The cheddar cheese smell exploded from her open neck.
        
Reagan stretched her mouth wide, eyes wide, a thin moan rising to a wail of pain.  Shuffling sounds from the living room and then, strangely, the door opening.  Delia stood in her chair, hands held to her false face, crying and screaming like an animal.
        
Another swing of the ax and Reagan fell, silent, to the wooden floor.  The light in here was beautiful, Balatro realized, drowning in an eternal moment of peace.  He did not understand the six thin, fast figures that charged around the corner and tackled him.  Faces all rictus grins and hollow eyes, flesh flapping free.  He felt the ax ripped from his grasp and once one of them stepped on his bad leg he emerged from the zen of that moment with the sound of a snapping branch and a baptism in pain, as the runners dragged him from the house.
        
Delia and her father's corpse embraced, peering at his handiwork, as Balatro was dragged past. He despaired that they did not seem more interested in his fate.

***

The Dead Man's Daughter

Until the day Bally changed everything, Daddy, Sissies, and Delia followed a strict routine.  In the mornings Daddy woke her and he led his three daughters into town, to the Superstore.  The living, both humans and animals, were corralled there.
        
In Dallas most of the corpses had died except for the obese population of DFW, who became runners.  She had never seen organization amongst corpses.  But here in Nocta they conducted a self-sustaining society.  She understood now why their faces were not blackened: they ate well.  Why they were smarter here, she did not know.  Maybe the rural setting and familiarity with each other proved powerful enough to lead to quasi-human behavior.  She didn't care.  She had her Daddy and Sissies back.
        
Until Balatro came for her.
        
She told Daddy about Bally that day, while Sissies quartered a screaming family with their scissors and distributed the meat amongst the early customers.  Huge, redneck and biker corpses guarded the store from ingress or egress.  Humans lined the windows looking out from the store.  They resembled corpses except for the fear in their eyes. 
        
All corpses seeking meat received it.  The arrangement proved idyllic but for the blood and screams of the slaughtered.  Delia smiled under her face of dead flesh.  She had fooled the corpses where all these others failed. 
        
Daddy knew, though.  He took a plastic bag full of human food back with them each night for Delia to eat.  She shared it with Bally over the weeks of his recovery, though she trusted him less as he became more mobile, and began leaving the food further from his resting place upstairs.

***
        
After the other corpses dragged Balatro out of the house, Delia and her father stood over the dead sisters.  The old man moaned in unmistakable pain.  Delia felt her tears soak into the musky leather on her face.  Angry, she yanked the other woman's face off her head and turned to her dad.
        
“Daddy, I'm sorry,” she said, stepping into him and leaning her head on his shoulder.  He smelled of moth balls, rotten meat, old tobacco.  She turned into his neck and shuddered with sobs.  He quaked as well, his arms wrapped around her.  Once they calmed he stepped back from her and reached into his pocket.  From it he pulled a small pamphlet he incessantly read on their walks into town or when he sat on the couch.  On the front were the words “This was your life!” along with a black and white picture of a man and an angel looking up at the stars.  The initials J.T.C. adorned the lower right corner of the pamphlet and on the back was a web site address, www.chick.com.
        
He folded his long limbs until he sat Indian style on the floor, reading the pamphlet page by page.  Delia peered at it over his shoulder as he read: the story of a man who had died and had not been a good Christian.  His name toward the end of the story was not in the Book of Life and he was cast into the Lake of Fire.  Then the pamphlet showed the alternative, where he confessed his sins and lived a good life and went to heaven.
        
When her father finished reading (if he could read), he pushed up from the floor and trudged to Gonnia's body.  He lifted her up until he held her on his shoulders.
        
Delia didn't realize he was so strong.
        
He turned to her and met her eyes with his own.  His dead eyes full of cataracts and his flesh speckled with blemishes like bruised fruit.  He pointed to Delia's face and then to the face that lay on the floor beside her.
        
She put on the mask and followed her father out into the street.  He had his pamphlet. She had her mask of dead flesh.  They each served their purpose.
        
***
        
Two trips, one for each body.  Bally said nothing as they heaved the stilled corpses on the floor in front of him.  The runners had taken him to a small house at the corner of the street and redneck biker corpses formed a perimeter around the house.  His leg bent as it was, he would go nowhere.
        
After pouring Reagan to the floor, Daddy looked at the boy whom had once been his friend.  Then he turned and left the house. 
        
Delia tarried.
        
“You're nothing but meat now,” she hissed at him.
        
When he gave no reaction, she stomped from the house.
        
***
        
She came to understand the society of Nocta better over the following weeks.  With Gonnia and Reagan gone, Daddy and Delia were expected to play the role of butchers.
        
Delia found the job easier than she first imagined it might be.  Once, one of the cattle realized she was human and his screams grew murderous and accusatory.  After that she relished each time she quieted one of the squealing, angry, piggy humans.
        
“Old man Johnson likes the innards and he's early today.  Shut yer trap or I'll let you stick around to watch him take his share,” she whispered to the man.  The others fought less after that.

***

On the trip home each day she saw stacks of food on the doorstep of Balatro's new home.  Sometimes she saw him sitting there, eating.  In those moments he returned her gaze, but nothing more.
        
Except for that last day.  He must have sensed a change in his captors.
        
The last day he lived, Balatro smiled at her as they clambered past.
        
“I know what you are,” he called.
        
She wanted to ask him what but pride silenced her.

***

Daddy woke her late that night.  While most corpses were active at night, due to their duties in town, Daddy and she rarely mingled with the others. 
        
Delia blinked her eyes, trying to see in the moonlight seeping into the room.  Her dad grunted at her.  He pointed at her mask and the arms and leg flesh.  Get dressed, he was telling her.
        
She thought she understood their destination.  Mere minutes later her suspicions were confirmed.
        
When they arrived Bally lay strapped to a kitchen table on the front lawn of the small house.  The huge corpses surrounded him.  Runners streaked up and down the street and other, slower corpses loped toward the boy on the table. 
        
Scissors pushed into her hands, Delia found herself pushed to the table.  She glanced up and saw her daddy on the other side.  Bally's eyes glinted with moonlight.
        
“There's a dead bird in my pocket,” Bally said to her.  “It's beautiful, but it can't fly anymore.  I loved you.”
        
“I loved you, too,” she whispered behind her mask.
        
Three snips produced only screams and thrashing, but the fourth brought silence.
        
The other corpses left with meat; Delia left only with the dead bird from the boy's trousers.

***

The next morning Delia followed her daddy onto the front porch where a pile of food blocked their path.  The redneck biker corpses lingered on the front yard, to the side, and behind the house.
        
Delia stripped off the mask, the leggings, the arm flesh.  She grabbed a peach, her favorite food in the whole world, and went back in to eat it at the table.  She wondered where they got fresh fruit, but didn't really care.  Nectar coated her chin and she watched the silhouette of her father linger in the doorway before he left for his job in town. 
        
That night he called her with his grunts to the sofa and she sat beside him.  He placed the Crick pamphlet on the coffee table and turned his cataracts toward her.  His hands on her shoulders, his mouth opened and along with the stench of rot came carefully enunciated words.
        
“I love you,” the corpse breathed.
        
Later, her daddy didn't wake her.  He killed her.
        
***

The Dead Man

Lear high-stepped over the mounds of food and down the steps.  He trudged past the guards, his dead Cordelia in his arms.  Dead several hours now, they would not try to take her for meat.  Carrion was not their delicacy. 
        
He walked from town, silent, dead, wishing for the time when his mind would be as still as his blood.  The trucks of the New Oil Men trundled past him.  They were not interested in one as old and feeble as he.  The Nocta corpse community as a whole, though, was another matter.  Healthy corpses.  They might even keep the store and the traps to collect new meat on the highways.  It made financial sense.  And Lear, though dead, thoughts slowed, inarticulate, remained a business man.  He understood the necessities of doing business in this new world, even as he turned from it.
        
Lear carried Cordelia's body out of Nocta.  She had a dead bird in her pocket, and a mask of flesh clenched in her fist.  Lear's pamphlet rested in his own pocket and he loitered beside the road periodically, gazing on its pages and promises and condemnations.

END