She sighs and folds her arms, turning to her brother. “What are we gonna do with these guys?”
“Shouldn’t we kill them? What if they get in?”
“This place is a fortress, Addy. They can’t get in.”
“What if they climb up here?”
“Zombies can’t climb. They have a hard enough time walking.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve got to figure something out, though. They’ll still be there in the morning.”
The big man waits patiently. Nora can hear the new guy pacing anxiously behind the hedge.
“They’re probably just hungry, right?” Addis sht?e big manays. “That one was trying to eat that wolf.”
“They’re always hungry. But they have to eat people; animal energy doesn’t work. Maybe he hasn’t figured that out yet.”
“What about Carbtein?”
“What about it?”
“You said it was like life powder.”
Nora’s eyes drift. “Right…”
“So maybe we could feed some to them? And they’d get full and leave us alone?”
“Addis Horace Greene,” she says in a tone of pleasant surprise. “You are super smart.”
He grins.
“Let’s try it. Toss him one.”
Addis pulls a cube out of the backpack and unwraps it. “Hey!” he calls down to the man. “Eat this and leave us alone!” He throws the cube. It hits the man directly in the face. The man backs away, looking up at them in surprise.
Nora giggles. “That’s food, dumb-ass!” she says, pointing down to where the cube fell. “It’s human energy! You can eat it.”
He looks down at the cube. He looks up at Nora. He picks up the cube, sniffs it, and stuffs the entire thing in his mouth.
Addis laughs. “He likes it!”
Nora watches him chew. “This could be a big deal, Addy. They could put piles of it all over the city and keep the zombies fed. Then maybe they wouldn’t—”
The man spits out his mouthful in a gooey pile of white shards, then stares up at Nora as if waiting for more.
“What the f**k, man?” She pulls another cube out of her backpack and rubs it hard against her wrist, leaving red abrasions caked with white powder. “Swallow it!” She raises it over her head to throw. “It’s human life, it’s what you—”
Something clamps onto her wrist. A withered vise of leather and bone—a hand, but barely. She looks up into a face but finds no eyes, just gluey blobs stuck to the sides of empty sockets. A skeleton shrink-wrapped in flesh is crouching at the edge of the roof like a spider, bracing against the gutter with one hand and gripping Nora’s with the other. Only the tendrils of blonde hair dangling from its scalp tell her this was once a human woman. A warbling hum emanates from its bones.
Nora buckles her knees and yanks against the thing’s grip but it’s shockingly strong—her knees dangle above the balcony floor with her full weight grinding against her wrist. The creature bites the Carbtein cube out of her hand and chews briefly, then tilts its head and lets the chunks drop out in strings of brown saliva. It looks at the man far below on the ground. It looks at Nora. It shoves her hand in its mouth and bites off her ring finger.
What happens then happens so fast it barely reaches Nora’s brain: blurry, disjointed images in flickery black and white. Before the pain in her finger even registers, her brother is standing in front of her and jumping up and swinging his hatchet; the creature’s arm snaps off above the wrist. He is yanking her back into the house and slamming the balcony door and slapping her hand down on the floor and then he is spreading her fingers away from her ring finger and swinging his hatchet down hard. The remainder of her finger jumps away from her hand and rolls into one of the children’s rooms. She stares at it, and when the hoarse scream rises in her throat, she’s not sure if it’s from the pain—a deep, aching agony that radiates through her hand and up into her arm—or from watching her severed finger turn gray, black, then shrivel up and slough away to bone right there in front of her.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Addis is sobbing as he inches away from the blood pooling under Nora’s hand. She wants to tell him it’s okay; she wants to thank him and tell him she loves him so much, but she can see the creature through the balcony door’s windows, crouched on all fours and tearing apart her backpack, crunching greedy mouthfuls of Carbtein and drooling it back out in slimy piles. “Why?” she screams hysterically at the door, watching her and her brother’s future disappear into the thing’s gnarled jaws. The thing just glances at her briefly and keeps chewing, and Nora feels her mind sinking into a dark well.
She wobbles to her feet, squeezing her left wrist tight with her right hand. “Come on,” she hisses and staggers down the staircase. When she hits the bottom she pauses to listen. No breaking glass. No crunching wood. Even the sound of the thing’s frenzied chewing has stopped, and the house is silent. Where did it go? Surely one knuckle wasn’t enough to satisfy its hunger. That little nibble of finger food?
An unhinged giggle escapes her throat. Her head is swimming.
Addis dashes down hallways and sweeps his flashlight over doors and windows, checking the perimeter, but the house is still empty except for the family of skeletons reclining in the living room. Their yellowed faces sneer at Nora as Addis passes his light over them, casting all their awful edges in sharp relief.
She smells that burnt odor again. Plastic? Hair?