The Feeders

16 - Stolen Life

Alarmed, I gasp and drop everything. Salem takes control and slams Carly's head with the severed arm, which is mainly bone at this point. She hisses and he slams the appendage down again, with more force. She swipes with her gnarly remaining hand, missing him by an inch. Salem takes a different approach, and instead of beating Carly, he slams the jagged end of the severed bone straight through her eye socket. 

I turn away to hurl, thankfully spared from whatever else he has to do. Vomit splatters the floor in a swampy puddle, splashing on my Converse shoes. My eyes and face are damp with tears. My mouth tastes like some sick mixture orange juice and pickles. 

"Take those jeans off," Salem demands. 

I'm still sobbing and spitting. 

"Hurry, go change," he says. "You've gotten infected blood all over your jeans."

I notice that I put my blood covered gloved hands on my knees. Good thing Salem is looking out for me. Me and....them, I think as I rush by my parents and back upstairs. Already I can tell that their health has improved since eating the meat. Carly, I remind myself. Carly is "the meat" my brain is referring to. I try to separate the results from what we did, but there's really no way around it. We fed a girl to zombies. She wasn't the most amazing person in the world. She talked too much and she was clingy, but she had just as much right to live as anyone else. I feel terrible for her, but at the same time, I would be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little pleased that it helped my parents regain a little bit of themselves as they were before this sickness ever happened.

I throw the jeans away. I never really liked how they fit me anyway. They were too tight around the inseam and too lose at the waist. To know they will soon be lost in a sea of garbage in the city dump doesn't bother me at all. I have worse issues. 

More.

That's the exact word that Salem had used. More. He actually wants to do this again. This whole thing was intentional to him, but for me, it was one giant fluke. I never meant to feed anyone to anybody. I'm not a killer. I don't even like killing insects. 

I'm sitting on our sectional, deep in thought, when Salem comes in.

"I got rid of her," he says. 

In a way, we both had. 

"Are you okay?" he asks. 

"No," I say, heated. "I'm not okay. What the hell did we just do, Salem? This is not okay."

"Nothing is okay anymore, Jan," he says. He sits next to me. "It's not okay for this virus to come in and destroy everything that we have." 

"We still have each other," I say, even though I'm mad at him. 

"True, but are you ready to be without them?" he asks. 

I already know I'm not. Up until mom got sick, she was still fixing my hair in the mornings before I went to school. My dad was still my hero. My mom was my comfort. They were both such a source of love and guidance in my life. 

"We can't just let them die," he says, "not if we can do something about it."

I struggle a moment. Torn between my love and need for them and with the thought of killing or luring someone to their death for them. This is not a normal decision for any teenage girl to make. I should be dreaming of my first love and school dances, not my parents rotting and having to eat people I bring to them. 

"How?" I say. "I mean, how do we determine who?" It's hard to say any more. I can't believe I'm even considering this. 

"We need to choose people that won't necessarily be linked back to us. I made a lot of effort to be sure nobody knew Carly was coming here today."

I remember how Carly slipped into the car in the empty parking lot at school, and how Salem told her to hide from Cap'n so our parents wouldn't know we'd had company. He had thought things through quite well, the way Salem always thinks things through. My chest is heavy, because of what I'm considering. If someone had mentioned this scenario to me months ago, I would have shut it down right then. Except now, I've seen them suffer. I've watched them dying for days. It takes a toll. It makes me desperate to take their pain away and give them life. I can't ignore the elated feeling I got when I saw their improvement. It was like they were coming back to life...even if it's stolen life from another person.

"So who then?" I say. 

"I've got some plans," Salem says.