Postmortem

They were after me, chasing me down the dirt path. I could hear the dogs barking and the yells of everyone. Every once and a while someone would fire a shot in some random direction hoping to hit me. I’d been staggering for hours covering miles and miles of ground, not quite running though. Whenever I tried to run, I fell down. My stiff and bloated legs couldn’t move that fast. They were closing in. I could see the beams of their flash lights. The river blocked my path, and wading it was out of the question. The waters were raging from the week long downpour.

“There it is! There! Shoot it!” someone screamed. The sound of the gunshots all mixed together into one deafening explosive noise. A slug slammed into my left leg, but all I felt was a little pressure. Another round entered my back and burst through my chest, ripping a hole open the size of my fist.

I dove in the water.

“He’s hit! He jumped in the river!” Someone else shouted. The water seized me and pulled me faster and faster. I heard my ribs crack when I crashed into a rock downstream, but again I felt nothing. Just pressure. I must have floated for hours. The part of my brain that dealt with boredom and fear must have rotted away. After a while, the sun was climbing the sky. I looked down at my mangled body that was beginning to bloat. My stomach looked like an airport for flies. If I squinted just right, I could see a few maggots wiggling around inside my eyeballs. Thankfully, I had no sense of smell.

I crawled out onto the bank and stood up. There were no signs of life around, just trees and mud. I tore my way through the thicket of thorns and briers. There was a road on the other side. I walked down it, careful to always remain in the edge of the woods so no one driving could get a good look at me. A few miles later, I saw some houses. The occupants must have still been asleep. I walked up onto their porch and picked up the newspaper that lay there.

Wildman On The Loose! read the front page. There was a blurry little picture of me below the article. “The man must have been on some drug, maybe PCP or a huge dose of cocaine,” say’s Sergeant Peters, the article read. There was more in the article. No one wanted to believe that I was what they all knew I was. They all wanted to believe that the dead never come back. That shit’s for the movies…hell, even I thought that.

Someone was stirring in the house. I jumped off the porch as two little kids bumbled out of the house to wait for the school bus.

“Ew, what’s that smell?” one of the little girls asked.

“Oh, man!” the other grabbed her nose and ran towards the bus stop. The girl that remained on the porch must have been curious because she stayed. As she descended the porch steps, I saw her skinning little legs poking out from her shorts, and a feeling overcame me.

At first I was stunned. I didn’t think that I could feel anything anymore, much less something as human as hunger, but hunger it was. I suddenly realized that I was more hungry than I had ever been in my entire life. It was as though I had never in my life eaten anything…and this tender little child and her equally tender little sister were standing in front of me. Breakfast was served, and the voice of reason in my rotten head was easily snuffed out by that overwhelming need, that most basic need.

She screamed. The shrill sound echoed long after I wrapped my hands around her little neck and crushed her windpipe. I picked her up and took a bite out of her like I once would have bit into an apple. Blood squirted out of the hole, and I reached into that hole and tore away more and more of her, stuffing it all into my mouth. She wiggled the whole time, bleeding and bleeding. I didn’t know there could be that much blood in a little girl. Neither did I know that I could fit that much meat into my belly in the course of about five minutes. When the hunger pains stopped, about the only thing left of her was a skeleton with a little red gristle here and there. Her mother’s scream brought me out of my trance.

I slinked off into the woods. The reality of what I had just done began to sink in. I was a murderer, but it wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t control myself. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they started looking for me again. In a way, I wanted them to find me and kill me, but how could they kill me? What if all they could do was, perhaps, dismember me, reduce me to a pile of festered maggot food?

The day was warming, and the flies were gathering by the second. My senses were dulled but never nonexistent. The girl’s blood was beginning to harden into a thick crust around my lips and face. I must have been miles in the forest because I had been walking since I ate the little girl, and the sun was beginning to fall. I sat down on a stump and tried to think. More and more I felt like puking. Everyone that had been chasing me were now justified.

How long I had been sitting there before I heard them is impossible to say, but they were nearing. I got up and ducked down between some pine trees before they had a chance to see me. I waited as they approached and tried to swallow back the hunger that was once again climbing up into my gullet.

“Holy Christ, do you smell that?” one deputy said.

“He’s close!” the sheriff yelled. Guns were cocked and shouldered. One young man in civilian cloths was so close to me I could have reached out and grabbed him.

I did.

His scream was cut short when I sank my teeth into his throat, and the mob began firing in every direction. I grabbed the man around the neck, put one foot on his shoulder and pulled. His head came off with a pop, and I hurled it at the sheriff. The head hit him squarely in the chest, and he hit the ground gasping. On cue, I felt bullets and buckshot tearing through what was left of me. One huge woman fired her shotgun at me five times and then began reloading, spewing curses the whole time, totally unaware that I was advancing upon her. “Fuck no!” she screamed. I tackled her, broke her neck like a dry twig, and bit into her shoulder just before I was knocked off by a point blank shotgun blast to my side.

I looked up and the barrel of a shotgun came into focus. A flash of light later, everything went wobbly. The world began to fade away. Was it the end? I hoped so. I hoped so much. I’d spent my entire life fearing and avoiding death, so much so that I refused to die…completely. Who knew that a CEO could end up a walking, flesh eating monster…though, I must admit, in reflection it isn’t that much of a stretch.

As I began sinking deeper and deeper into death, I saw something behind the mob of people crowded around me. I saw three people advancing, and one was headless. The mob didn’t see the three people I had bitten sneaking up behind them. The fat lady had laid down her shotgun in favor of her hands and teeth, her head lolled around on her broken neck. The headless man walked forward, perhaps driven by some unknown sense, and what was left of the meatless little girl led them all. Her one remaining eyeball hung down her face by the nerve. All of her dripped blood.

All of them were so very hungry, and, worst of all, they all were contagious. I died listening to the horrible screams of the mob that had put me out of my misery.