Ryan pulled up in front of CWI Meat Processors, the ice cream truck’s headlights illuminating the steel entrance doors.
“Go around to the side,” Kevin said. “There’s a door over there all the employees use when they go out for smoke breaks.”
Ryan pulled the truck around the left side of the building. The east side of the building had aluminum siding, a vast blank sea of it, except for a set of concrete steps that led to a single steel door. Kevin jumped out of the truck and tried the handle. It was unlocked. “Some things never change,” he said. “The night manager was always getting written up for forgetting to lock the damn thing.”
When they were inside, they moved down a narrow hallway that led them past the administration offices. Kevin paused at a door on their right with a magnetic placard that said SUPPLY CLOSET. “Give me a sec,” he said as he opened the door and disappeared inside. He came out thirty seconds later. “Okay, let’s keep moving.”
The inside of the slaughterhouse was enormous. Even in the dark, they felt the presence of a huge open space. They switched on their flashlights.
“What’s that sound?” Becky asked.
“Sounds like women screaming.”
“Pigs,” Kevin said. “
Squealing
. It’s not so bad with a wall between us and them, but when you’re up close…let’s just say a minute or two of hearing them squeal like that is enough to drive a person bonkers. Makes it harder to be sympathetic to the fact that they’re on their way to that fabled hog heaven in the sky.”
Ryan shined the beam of the flashlight around. He could see rows and rows of chutes with long metal gates. It looked like a labyrinth.
“Stinks like shit in here,” Fred said.
“That’s because it
is
shit. Damn things shit all over.
“Tell us again what exactly we’re doing here,” Ryan said.
“This was the worst job I ever had,” Kevin said. “By far. But it was the only place hiring when I moved back from Boulder.”
“Fifty bucks says this turns into another Angela story,” Fred whispered to Rhonda. She didn’t find it amusing.
“Shut up,” Kevin said as he led them past the chutes and into another room. The stink of shit was stronger in this adjoining room, and the squealing sounds were amplified. Ryan shined his light to the left and saw hundreds of pigs standing in cramped corrals.
The next room was much like the one before it, except instead of pigs, it was filled with cattle.
“It’s so cruel,” Rhonda said. “Makes me want to go vegan.”
Kevin glanced back at her. “I guarantee if you saw what they do to them, you’d go vegan in a heartbeat. Come on. It isn’t far.”
Kevin led them past another room, this one with a tiled floor and walls of shiny polished steel. There was a large drain in the floor.
That’s where the blood drains,”
Rhonda thought.
When they hose off the floors, it all goes down there.
In her mind, she imagined an impossibly large pit of blood hidden beneath their feet; an ocean of crimson that had been collecting for years and years by the sacrifice of countless innocent animals. “I don’t know how you could stand to work here.”
“I couldn’t. That’s why I started the store.”
They stopped in front of a thick metal door. Kevin yanked back on the handle and pulled it open. Frigid air formed a pall of mist as it poured out from the adjoining room. “Almost there,” Kevin said, leading them into the walk-in freezer. Huge sides of beef dangled on chains, ribs and muscle visible.
“This is almost worse than the zombies,” Derek said.
At the rear of the meat locker, they stepped into another room. There were several metal racks on wheels, each with five shelves.
“You’re kidding?” Rhonda said.
“They keep them separate from the other meat,” Kevin said. “They aren’t popular in the States, but there’s a big market for them overseas.”
“Brains?” Becky said.
The pinkish-gray mounds were arranged neatly on the racks, at least a dozen to a shelf. To Ryan, they looked like strange organic artifacts, excavated from an alien planet. There was something about looking at them up close like this that made him feel funny inside, as if he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to.
“
Bait
,” Kevin said.
“Derek gave me the idea,” Kevin said. “He said that stuff about hive minds, and then I thought there must be a way to lure all those things away from the convention center. Get them all together, and then find a way to blow them up or something. But then the question becomes, ‘how do you get a thousand brain-eating zombies to go where you want them to?’ The answer seemed pretty simple. They did the same thing in
Return of the Living Dead 2.
”
“How are we going to carry them all?”
“Got it covered. Grabbed these from the supply closet,” he said, holding up a box of Hefty 30-gallon trashbags.
“There’s a flaw in your theory,” Fred said. “How do you know they’ll eat pig brains? What if they only eat human brains?”
“You really think they’re picky?”
“I don’t know. But what if they are?”
“Pigs are a lot like people. Their brains are similar, only smaller.”
“You’re making a big assumption.”
“I’m open to ideas.” When Fred didn’t respond, Kevin pulled a trashbag from the roll and handed it to him. “Then start bagging.”
“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Fred said as they drove back toward town. “You wanna get the attention of a thousand or more brain-eating zombies, leave them a trail of breadcrumbs, only using pig brains instead of breadcrumbs, lead them to the other side of town, and then kill all of them by blowing up the State’s second largest oil refinery? Does that about sum it up?”
“Pretty much,” Kevin said.
Derek fiddled with a zit on his left cheek. He still held the rifle in his right hand. “Piece of cake,” he said.
“Okay,” Fred said, rolling his eyes. “Just checking.”
“It’s a viable solution.”
Becky was in the passenger seat, her head leaned back into the headrest, eyes closed. Ryan said, “Napping?”
She answered him without opening her eyes. “I feel like I haven’t slept for a week, but I’m afraid I’ll never be able to again. Not after this.”
“We’re heading into the homestretch,” Ryan said. “It’ll be all over by morning.”
“But over for who?”
“You can’t think like that. It’s a little unbelievable, but we’ve got a sound plan. I think it’ll work.”
Becky opened her eyes. She raised her head from the backrest and stared out the window, watching the yellow centerline. “What if it doesn’t, Ryan? I’m trying to be optimistic, but after everything I’ve seen today, it’s hard. I just don’t see things…having a good outcome. Can you really say you do?”
Ryan found that he
could
see a positive outcome if he focused hard enough, but it was a dim and fuzzy image compared to the alternative, which seemed all too easy to imagine. It was difficult to comprehend what they were about to do.
But no more difficult than it is to believe every other thing that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours,
he thought.
“I’ll tell you what I see,” Ryan said. In the back of his brain, he knew he might be going a little too far, might be pushing it, showing his cards too soon, but he told himself none of that really mattered now. If there was ever a time that he didn’t have anything to lose, this was it. “I see the two of us. Married. Big house with the white picket fence, maybe on a few acres in the country. Drinking iced tea on the porch. Two kids, a boy and a girl. An overweight German Shepherd.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“All that on a cop’s salary?”
“Well, you’d be working too.”
“I see.”
“And the house is a wedding gift from your father.”
Becky giggled. “Ha! Now I know you’re full of it.”
“Okay, so maybe it’s an alternate reality.”
“But in this alternate reality, we’re happy?”
“As happy as two people can be.”
“It sounds nice.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Ryan said, feeling a lump form in his throat. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking. “Assuming we make it through the night, tomorrow I’m going to propose to you. And you’re going to say yes.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
“Just like that? You’re not even going to think about it?”
“I don’t need to. If you can keep us alive until tomorrow, then I’ll marry you.”
“Your dad’s going to be pissed.”
“He’ll get over it,” Becky said.
“There’s the daddy’s little rebel I fell in love with.”
Becky was smiling as she stared out the window.
Ryan said, “You’re being serious, right? You’d actually go through with it?”
“I said I would.”
Ryan took his right hand off the wheel and held up his pinky finger. “Pinky swear?”
Becky curled her pinky finger around Ryan’s. “I pinky swear.”
“I’m gonna barf,” Fred said. “Fuck, Carver, do you pee sitting down, too? Move over, I’ve gotta do something before you actually grow a pussy.”
Ryan chuckled. It had been a long time since he had heard Fred talk like that. Fred was crude most of the time, that hadn’t changed, but the way Fred had said it reminded Ryan of the Fred he had known back when they were in high school.
Fred took the mix tape from his pocket, loaded it into the truck’s cassette player, and turned up the volume knob. AC/DC’s
Highway to Hell
blasted from the truck’s overhead speakers.
As they approached the downtown area, Ryan turned the cassette player’s volume down. They couldn’t take any chances; they only had one shot at getting this right. He drove up the same street they had taken earlier, but this time approached from the side rather than going around the block.
The convention center’s doors were scratched and chipped. They didn’t look like they could take much more.
Much longer,
Ryan thought,
and they’ll have dug their way right through them.
He thought about all the people inside. How much of the town was in there? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand?
He could imagine them stuffed in there liked canned sardines, the only face that was clear in his mind was Peggy’s because he knew for a fact that she was inside. Probably Cindy, too.
“Is it just me, or are there more of them now?” Rhonda asked.
Kevin said, “Maybe we should split up.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“In case they don’t all take the bait. Or if stragglers show up. You can see as well as I can those doors won’t hold much longer regardless of what they’ve done to reinforce them from the inside.”
Ryan thought it over. He didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but Kevin had a point. If not all the zombies took the bait, they needed someone on the ground to keep them from getting into the convention center. It was also insurance that somebody would be left if the plan failed. “Are you volunteering?”
“I guess so.”
“Then I’m staying too,” Rhonda said and smiled at Kevin.
Derek said, “Me too.”
Ryan nodded. “That puts us in even groups. Let’s just be clear on what your job is. Stay out of sight and make sure none of them get into the convention center. I don’t want any of you playing the hero. If something happens, if the plan goes to shit, I’ll call Kevin on his cell.”
“And if that happens?”
“Then we’ll have at least bought you enough time to evacuate everyone in there. Get them out, then call the military.”
“Sure, because I’ve got them on speed dial,” Kevin said.
“Then use 411,” Ryan said. “We need to keep this contained. If this thing spreads, it won’t matter what we do. It’s game over. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen. It starts and ends right here. In Trudy.”
“Bad hero speech number two,” Fred said. “You’re full of them tonight.”
“Be careful,” Ryan said.
“You too.” Kevin opened the truck’s back door and jumped down. Rhonda and Derek followed after him. They stuck close to the buildings, ducking down behind a car parked half a block from the convention center.
Ryan turned the truck around and drove toward the convention center in reverse. Fred opened one of the back doors, sat down, and held it open with his foot. He pulled the trashbags full of brains close to him.
“What should I do?” Becky asked.
“Keep him covered.”
Ryan backed the truck up to the convention center, stopping when they were close enough to smell the stench of decaying flesh. Fred opened one of the trash bags, reached in and pulled out a pig brain. He didn’t care for its moist and springy texture. He lifted it over his head and threw it, launching it out of the truck as though he were passing a basketball. It made a wet thud when it hit the street.
At first, nothing happened.
I knew it,
Fred thought.
They could give a shit less about pig brains.
But then he watched as the zombies at the rear of the crowd began to twist around, their heads tilted upward as they sniffed at the air.
“
Brainsss,
” one of the zombies hissed, its one remaining eye locking onto the brain where it lay on the street. Others followed.
“Crank the music,” Fred said.
Ryan hit the play button and Boy George’s rendition of
The Crying Game
poured from the speakers. Ryan craned his head around to look at Fred. Fred stared back guiltily. “What? It’s a classic,” he said.
The zombies came toward them. First the rear peeled away from the larger group, and then the ones that were closer to the convention center followed.
“Let’s roll,” Fred said and tossed another brain onto the ground as the truck began to move.