This, like all of the prose I post here, is a few years old (newer writing is in constant revision for possible future publication). I think I wrote it around the time the swine flu was spreading, and people were talking about pandemics and such. Since the end of the world has been pushed back (again…) until this October, let’s continue to explore possible post-apocalyptic worlds, shall we?

SCAVENGERS

© Joanna Parypinski

I had to walk through the tunnel to get home. It was a dark metal tube about fifty yards long that connected the east side to the west side. At one point it had been for cars, but now it was just a useless husk. Not a lot of people drove cars anymore, anyway.

It was usually dark already when I walked through the tunnel. I worked as a computerist, calculating the fluctuations in the population for official records. It was a pretty high-up job, but the pay was still a pittance, hence I didn’t even have anything with a motor to convey me through the tunnel. Whenever I came to the entrance I kissed my fingertips and pressed them against the metal wall, a gesture hoping for good luck and safe passage.

The walk to get to the tunnel wasn’t that bad. I passed others on their way home from work—the other immunes—and I usually passed by the local Mortician, who buzzed around in his motorized cart and dragged along, in the bed behind him, the bodies he’d picked up. He still never seemed to get them all, even though he was out from dawn to dusk, as I always found myself having to sidestep the corpses lying in my way so as not to put my foot onto the stiffening flesh. I usually avoided looking at the bodies in the cart and on the street.

Today the sky was a cloudy gray, dulling to navy as the sun set somewhere in the distance. I walked along the street, stepping around the rubble of broken glass, fluttering old newspapers, and the stray trash can rolling on its side. I could hear the creaking crunch of wheels behind me, and I knew that the Mortician was coming up on my left. I turned toward the sound to nod hello to him, as was the polite thing to do. He did, after all, have the most important and most revolting job of anyone around. The Mortician was a middle-aged man with silvering hair and a pale, drawn face. He had worked at a funeral parlor once, back when those were still around.

His cart pulled up alongside me, and he tipped his head in my direction. I couldn’t muster a smile back, and my eyes wandered to the bed of his cart, spotting the piled-up bodies. They were clad only in rags, if anything at all: it was custom for clothes to be stolen off bodies before they were snatched up by the Mortician. Clothes were very expensive. The skin of the bodies was stretched over skeletal frames and covered with gaping oval sores that burned bright crimson and black against the deathly gray flesh. Their eyes were sunken deep into their skulls, and occasionally they were missing fingers or toes, which had turned black, died, and fallen off before their hearts had stopped.

Then the cart was gone, rolling away from me down the street and down a corner around an empty building.

The Mortician didn’t go near the tunnel. It was no surprise. I had heard that he was paid per body. It wouldn’t do at all to go near the tunnel, or the alley on the other side of the city, or the abandoned warehouse five miles down the road. I didn’t encounter any of these places except for the tunnel, but I wished I didn’t have to go in there, either. It was just unnerving.

The large black mouth loomed up ahead of me, and I slowed as I approached. I usually had to steel myself to enter because once I was in, there was no escape for fifty yards. There was one day that I stood outside of the tunnel for forty-five minutes before I could make myself step inside. That had been the day I’d spotted my cousin on the Mortician’s cart walking to work. It had unnerved me all day. She was seven years younger than me. I had considered inviting her to stay with me when her parents contracted the pandemic, but I never did. My mind had instantly gone through my finances. I couldn’t be taking care of a sixteen-year-old who didn’t have a job and who would be eating one half of my food. I was pretty malnourished as it was. Sometimes one found it hard to blame the Scavengers.

So when I’d seen her on the cart, I had actually felt relieved, because I had obviously made the right choice. If she was just going to get the pandemic and be put out of her misery anyway, then it was good I hadn’t wasted my food on her. This, of course, had made me feel sick, and I’d ended up standing outside of the tunnel for forty-five minutes.

In my defense, inviting her to stay with me wouldn’t have done anything. It wouldn’t have saved her. She already had the pandemic—we all do. But some of us are immune, maybe, and for some of us it takes longer to incubate. It doesn’t really matter who’s immune, or if there’s even such a thing. If I wasn’t immune, then it was too late anyway, I already had it and sooner or later it would get me. And if I was immune, then there was no point worrying about it.

There was an old Chinese woman who everyone suspected was evidence of immunity. She had been in Beijing eight years ago during the first outbreak. Seventy years old or so, her immune system couldn’t have been that great, but she’d survived and emigrated over here, probably because we had still been flourishing at that time. Nine-tenths of China had been wiped out. Then, a year and a half later when it hit here, she survived again. She was still alive, working as a medic. There was no respect in that institution. Medics ran around trying to stop people from dying, which was stupid. Whoever was going to die, was going to die. Most people thought medics were a waste. I thought they were all right, but pretty useless.

I was still standing outside of the tunnel. Pressing the fingertips of my right hand to my mouth, I brought them up to the cold metal wall of the tunnel. Good luck and safe passage. I stepped into the darkness, the chill of the tunnel already weighing damply on my bare arms. It was silent at the moment, but I knew they were in there. I started walking.

It wasn’t very far in that I heard it. A horrible ripping sound—flesh torn from muscle and bone. It echoed in the enclosed structure, and I breathed in through my nose and kept walking. They were up ahead somewhere, but I couldn’t see them. It was pitch dark in the tunnel. My shoes clacked against the concrete. I walked with my hand trailing against the right wall so that I didn’t wander off course and into the Scavengers.

The ripping sounds grew louder. It was feeding time. I could now hear chomping and squishing as the raw, diseased meat was crushed under their teeth. Sucking sounds echoed next as they slurped the fluids. My stomach turned over.

My inner mantra rocketed into my mind, repeating the same hope over and over: that I would not die in the tunnel. If I were to die, I hoped it would be at home, or at work, or even on the street walking to either of those places. But not in the tunnel. I knew that it wouldn’t matter; I would be dead, my body would be empty, I wouldn’t be at all aware of what was happening. Still, I would much rather be picked up by the Mortician’s cart than left in the tunnel. Those who died in the tunnel became food for those who lived there. In a few short hours there would be nothing left of me but bones.

With this thought, I was suddenly acutely aware of where I was stepping. Occasionally my foot would kick a hard object and send it clattering across the ground. I knew what these objects were, but I tried not to think about it. I also tried to make as little noise as possible, even though I knew that nine times of out ten, Scavengers didn’t go for the living. They weren’t completely without morals. They only ate the dead, and suffered the consequences of it. Eating flesh of those who had died of the pandemic did something to them. I wasn’t sure what—perhaps it deformed them, or gave them sores similar to the ones those suffering from the pandemic got. I wasn’t sure. I’d never actually seen a Scavenger. I passed so close to them every day, and I heard them, but it was always too dark in the tunnel.

The sounds grew louder still until I knew that they were feasting right up ahead on my left, not far from my path. I heard a crunch as someone bit down on a bone so hard that it broke. I heard several grunts and that squishing, chomping sound from as many as twelve mouths.

I should have been speeding up my walk in order to pass them quickly without incident, but instead I found myself slowing, as I did every day. I thought about what would happen if I let go of the wall and wandered off to the left, into the midst of them, and grabbed an organ from within the body they were eating. By this time in the evening I was starving, having eaten nothing all day except for a small breakfast of stale bread. I was always starving. My stomach growled as I sniffed the air of the damp, sewage-laden tunnel for the sweet scent of rot, and I thought about going over there and eating with them, eating until I was full. I would live in the tunnel. Then someone else would walk through on their way to work, listening to the sound of my teeth tearing flesh, hoping to get safely to the other side.

Now I had slowed so much that I stopped altogether. They were directly to my left, on the other side of the tunnel. My right hand was ice as I pressed it hard against the wall, fighting temptation.

I could live with them. They were just people, after all. They were just very poor, very hungry people.

A bone clattered on the ground, cast aside.

Someone grunted and swallowed loudly.

The darkness pressed against my blinded eyes as I listened to the sound of them eating.

Then the desire faded away, as it always did, and I thought of my cousin on the Mortician’s cart, and I thought that my first choice was to die and be picked up by the Mortician, and my second choice was to die in the tunnel. My third choice was to run out of food at home and eventually be driven to eat pandemic-ridden flesh in the tunnel.

I didn’t really think anyone was immune. Eventually, that Chinese medic was probably going to die. But if I was immune, that was okay too.

I kept walking, the sounds behind me growing quiet and distant, the desire to join them dwindling with every step. I had once again made it past the Scavengers.