John Savoie by The Zombie Chronicles

Author:The Zombie Chronicles [Chronicles, The Zombie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: John Savoie
Published: 2012-06-01T13:08:49+00:00

Food For the Dead

By Meghan Jurado

It’s over, man. People are eating each other.

But not in the way you would think.

It started, funny enough, with a stock report. The beef industry was in an uproar, seems cows were coming onto the slaughterhouse lines so decayed and bloated that they were almost exploding from the gases in their bellies when they were cut into.

Workers were being splattered with flying tripe. There was an outrage, the cattle people blamed the slaughterhouses for trying to butcher cows that were already dead, the slaughterhouses blamed the beef people, saying the cows were up, walking and wriggling when they were attached to the chains and hoisted.

There was a lot of name-calling, a couple of corporate vandalism incidents, and on one memorable occasion, a fistfight, caught on the local news for posterity. The beef guy won, in case you were interested. Got his big cowboy hat knocked off though.

So, after a bunch of finger pointing and budget wrangling, someone finally looked into it. Turns out, the cows were dead- or more accurately, undead.

I’ll give you a moment to digest that. (So to speak.)

A good cross section of the cattle population were showing the same symptoms: glassy, sticky eyes, lack of appetite (expect for when they took bites from each other- but that wasn’t released until much later, when most of us were too panicked or shell-shocked to care) bloating with gases usually reserved for corpses… the list went on and on.

Soon it was ALL of the cattle.

The beef industry went belly up, there were bankruptcies and suicides from the major stockholders, and suddenly there were all these cows, wandering through the streets. The cattle industry couldn’t afford to house them; they didn’t have the money to kill them either, even if they could figure how to do it.

They were rancid smelling and creepy, and it gave you quite a start to see your first undead cow, but they didn’t try to attack anyone or anything dumb like that. Kids even dared each other to ride them, and it was common to see a cow corpse lurching down the street covered in teenage riders. We just couldn’t eat them anymore.

But there are lots of animals to eat, right?

It hit the chickens and pigs next.

Poultry farms had been on the lookout for whatever infected the cows, and were optimistic, at least publicly. But when it came, it came fast, and one day the news was showing rows and rows of cages, filled with dead hens, and then they would start to twitch and cluck again, and then it was business as usual for the hens, but you couldn’t eat them either, the meat was as black and rotten as could be.

The brood hens wouldn’t lay either, eggs just built up inside, spoiling in a nest of cooling guts. When the chickens were let loose to peck their decayed little hearts out among we regular folk, children would often chuck rocks at the dead broody hens to make the egg clutch inside explode.

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