Feeders by Caleb Stephens

Author:Caleb Stephens [Stephens, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Ghost Press
Published: 2023-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

What we find is a graveyard. Bodies everywhere.

Groups of survivors caked in concrete dust and grime poke hopelessly through the rubble. Ashen-cheeked zombies that look like coal miners after a month trapped without sun—their faces skin-white, lips bloodless, as they squint up at the sky. Pitiful wails for help pepper the air. Dull, muffled cries I can’t place that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

We keep our distance from the chasm. The ground near it is vicious looking; a hungry mouth packed full of sharp, broken teeth. Every few minutes the earth groans, and my heart gives a painful twist, the sound eerie and alien—like a giant gargling rocks.

A woman with sunken cheeks cries out to me for help. We drag her husband from beneath a huge block of granite. His right leg is bent at an impossible angle, his chin dribbling a fountain of pink froth. He’s in shock, his pulse slow and weak, his skin sweaty-cold. I set the break and tell her to wait for help, that he’ll be okay, but he won’t.

He has thirty minutes. An hour at most.

More voices rise. I help where I can and clean wounds with the rubbing alcohol from the saddlebag. Dress them with the spare strips of clothing and towels their loved ones shove into my hands. Panicked men who beg for me to resuscitate their loved ones. Wives who plead, don’t let him die, please, don’t let him die. I soothe those I can and lie to those I can’t—tell them they’ll be fine, to be strong and to wait for help to come. But help won’t come, and right now, lies are the only comfort I can spare.

A woman in a tattered dress collapses at my feet. Her eyes shine with fear as she raises her arm and grasps my sweater. I gape in horror at the two angry puncture wounds in her shoulder and the sleeve of decaying flesh moldering beneath.

“Don’t leave me here,” she moans, clutching my sweater.

I open my mouth to respond and stop. Behind her, lying partially obscured in a rubble pile, I glimpse a tuft of straw-colored hair and a slice of freckled cheek.

Mac!

“I’m sorry,” I say as I shove past her.

For a moment, it’s him—the round face, the soft curve of the jaw—Mac resolving in bites as I pull the rocks free, my brother lying before me, lifeless and ruined. I’m ruined. Without him there’s no point in taking another breath, another step. But then I realize the eyes are too wide-set, the lips too thin, the hair a shade lighter than Mac’s weak blond. I lean back on my knees and moan in relief. Above me, the sky swirls ashen and hopeless.

God, Mac, where are you?

I move on, Alan following behind on the stallion as I dig through pile after pile of rock and dirt, digging, digging, digging until I can no longer feel my hands, digging until my fingers bleed.

“We have to go, Brynn. They’re not here,” Alan says, finally pulling me back.

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