A sad little weakling stared back at him. Pale skin, matted hair and sunken, bloodshot eyes. He was naked. His janitor uniform didn’t fit anymore. His body was living off its own fat.
Loser. No muscle, just fat.
Pussy. Hairy skin hung in blotched, deflated rolls.
Pathetic piece of shit!
Behind him, on the opposite wall were the other marks he’d made. Day Two, when he’d stopped trying to widen the twelve-by-twelve-inch window with fingernails and teeth. Day Four, when he’d taken his last solid crap. Day Five, when he’d stopped screaming for help. Day Eight when he’d tried to eat his leather belt because he’d seen some Pilgrims do it in a movie. It was a nice thick belt, birthday present from-
No, don’t go there.
Day Thirteen, when the vomiting and diarrhea had ended. What the hell was in that leather? Day Seventeen, when he became too weak to masturbate. And every day, filled with crying and begging, silent deals with God and whimpering calls for-
Don’t.
Every day that ended, fittingly, huddled in the fetal position because there wasn’t any room to stretch out.
DON’T THINK ABOUT HER!
But of course he did. He thought about her every day. He thought about her every minute. He talked to her in his dreams, and in the no-man’s-land between dreams and reality.
She was okay. She had to be. She knew how to take care of herself. She was still taking care of him, wasn’t she? That’s why he was still living at home. He needed her, not the other way around. She would be fine. Of course she would.
He tried not to think about her, but he always did, and of course, the other thoughts always followed.
Failure! Didn’t listen to the warnings! Didn’t get out when you could!
Failure! Let yourself get trapped in this little room, not even the whole bathroom, just the closet-sized toilet box, drinking out of the goddamn shitter!
Failure! Didn’t even have the fuckin’ balls to break the mirror and do the honorable thing you should have done! And now if they get in, you don’t even have the fuckin’ strength!
Failure, FAILURE!
“FAILURE!”
He’d said that out loud. Fuck.
The loud thumping against the door sent him crumpling against the far corner. There were more of them; he could hear their moans echoing back down the hall. They matched those coming from the street below. They’d looked like an ocean down there, the last time he’d stood on the toilet to look. Nine floors down they roiled like a solid mass, stretching almost out of sight. The hotel must be entirely infested now, every floor, every room. The first week he’d heard shuffling through the ceiling above him. The first night, he’d heard the screams.
At least they didn’t understand how to open a pocket door. He’d been lucky there: If it had been the kind of door that swung instead of slid shut; if the wood had been hollow instead of solid; if they’d been smart enough to figure out how to open it; if the doorway had been in the back of the outer bathroom, instead of off to the side…
The more the ones in the bedroom pushed, the more they pinned others in the bathroom helplessly against the rear wall. If it had been a straight line, their collective weight, their sheer numbers…
He was safe. They couldn’t get in, no matter how much they clawed and struggled and moaned… and moaned. The toilet paper in his ears wasn’t working as well anymore. Too much wax, too much oil had flattened them against the sides of the canals. If only he’d saved some more, and not tried to eat it.
Maybe its not the worst thing. He reassured himself, again. When a rescue comes, you need to hear the chopper.
It was better this way. When the moans got too bad, Fred reached for the book, one more bit of good luck he’d found by running in here. When he got out of here, he’d have to track down the original owner, somehow, and thank him for forgetting it next to the toilet. “Dude, it totally kept me sane all that time!” he’d say. Well, maybe not quite like that. He’d rehearsed at least a hundred more eloquent speeches, all delivered over a couple of cool ones, or probably more likely a couple of MREs. That’s what they’d been called on page 238: “Meals Ready to Eat.” Did they really make them with chemical cookers right in the packaging? He’d have to go back and reread that part again. Tomorrow, though. Page 361 was his favorite; 361 to 379.
It was getting dark. He’d stop this time before his head hurt too much. Then maybe a few sips of water, and he’d make it an early night. Fred’s thumb found the dog-eared page.
“There’s too many of them!” Naomi shrieked, the sound perfectly matching the skidding of the motorcycle’s tires.
The Rapeworm by Charles Coleman Finlay
Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of the novels The Prodigal Troll, The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. Finlay’s short fiction-most of which appears in his collection, Wild Things-has been published in several magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Black Gate, and in anthologies, such as The Best of All Flesh and my own By Blood We Live. He has twice been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has also been nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sidewise Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Radiation, a new and exotic phenomena for much of the twentieth century, was seized on by writers as a pretext for all manner of unlikely but exciting developments, everything from giant monsters to Spider-Man. Zombies too, of course: In Night of the Living Dead, it’s suggested that the recently deceased are brought back as zombies due to strange radiation from a passing comet.
The idea of extraterrestrial influence being responsible for an exponentially expanding plague that transforms ordinary people into a sinister menace is an old one in science fiction. Perhaps the best known example is Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, filmed in 1956 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and remade several times since), in which lurking alien seed pods grow perfect simulacra of your friends and neighbors, and the impersonators then proceed to murder and replace the originals. Another well-known example is Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, about sluglike aliens that attach themselves to the backs of human hosts and take control of them. (The novel, which taps into the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, makes explicit analogies between the alien menace and the Soviet Union.)
For whatever reason, zombie stories of recent decades have tended to eschew cosmic explanations and have typically blamed zombies on man-made superviruses or else just left the question open. Our next story harkens back to this grand old tradition of zombies from outer space, and reminds us that we should never, ever forget to watch the skies.
When the rapeworms began to rain from the Ohio skies, I tossed my two boys in the truck with cases of canned food and all our camping gear, and we headed south for the Hocking Hills, far away from Columbus and the other big cities.
Too many other folks had the same idea. We found a small colony in and around Old Man’s Cave, clusters of tents spilling down the gorge from the shelter of the cave all the way to the Devil’s Bathtub. There were men and women both, which was just plain stupid with the rains coming this far north. Some folks were hostile, but a couple of college kids offered to help us pitch camp.
Josh hung back at my elbow, fidgeting. When the college kids weren’t looking, he bumped into me and whispered, “Dad, we have to get farther away than this.”
I looked down at his face, and saw the way he was trying to look mean and strong, and I hoped he wasn’t imitating me. He was only thirteen, and his face still had a few soft edges to it.