Eaters by Michelle DePaepe Page A

over the phone that it wasn’t safe to drink the tap water, though they didn’t know why. There was still soda in the machines, but it was starting to taste flat and stale. Cheryl drank it anyway. The sweet taste and caffeine was almost like a treat since the chocolate chip cookies were long gone.
    She envied the survivalists now, holed up in their shelters with a stockpile of rifles, ammunition, canned foods and assorted comforts. They must be laughing at all the naysayers now. She’d never taken much stock in the gloom and doom philosophy, but now she wished that she’d paid just a little more attention. Of course, a stockpile of rice and beans and jugs of water in her apartment wouldn’t be much good right now.
    With the stifling heat, people had begun to make fans out of the sandwich menus and the wannabe comedians in their crowd tried to lighten things up with jokes.
    “Hey, maybe this will make the trash companies obsolete. Every block will have its own composting zombie. You can just throw your scraps on your neighbor’s lawn, and he’ll eat ‘em right up. Of course, you have to make sure he doesn’t take your arm or your leg at the same time.”
    Cheryl laughed, doubling over in pain as another deranged thought came into her mind. “What if the Eaters become a new consumer group? There’ll be a new Eaters Food Network with recipes for bloody rotting steak, maggot soup, gourmet moldy cheese…”
    “Yeah,” someone else chimed in, “that would be great…until you find out the secret ingredient in their soup is stewed thigh bone and a cup of human brains.”
    Mark leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and grinned. “You’ve got a terribly sick mind.”
    “I’ve got to keep it going,” she admitted. “If I try to play this straight…I’ll lose it.”
    The conversation soon turned more serious when a man close by said, “There’s got to be authorities somewhere rounding them up. Why don’t they just take them out to the city dump and barricade them in? They could feast there…and leave everyone else alone.”
    “And then what?” someone replied. “Once they ran out of crap to eat, they wouldn’t stay there. They’d attack the guards and get loose again. Have you seen even one damn cop out there since the idiot who got himself killed? Maybe they’ve all split and we’re in an abandoned zone.”
    It was true. They hadn’t seen another police officer, no National Guard, no ambulances, not even a single car going down the street. Was it just this part of town? Or was the whole country in crisis?
    The first good news came in the afternoon. Gary found an old battery-operated radio in the supply room, hidden behind a stash of paper towels. It was unusual luck on top of that to actually find a few ‘C’ batteries that still had juice in them.
    At first, there was nothing but static, but he eventually found a station on the A.M. band that was still broadcasting. The announcer said that Governor Weiss had issued a State of Emergency, and there were Red Cross shelters being set up around the Denver area. When he mentioned one at the First Savior Church on 52nd & Taylor, the group huddled around the radio cheered.
    “That’s just three blocks away from here!” someone shouted.
    Cheryl wasn’t as optimistic. Three blocks. That was a lot further away than it sounded if you were trying to fend off mobs of infected flesh-eaters.
    The woman with the young girl on her hip—she was probably five or six years old, but was sucking her thumb to ease her stress—spoke up. “You know…we can’t stay here much longer. We’re going to have to take our chances and try to get to it.”
    “That’s a given,” the man behind her said.
    “Why don’t we try to go now? We could just run to our cars and drive away.”
    Mark was less optimistic. “There are eighteen of us. You want to take the chance that we’ll all make it? Besides, we heard a lot of glass breaking last night. For all we know, it