Bloodboots: A Breadcrumbs For The Nasties Short by Steven Novak Page B

and write a paper. His pain held the prospect of income, fame, maybe an award. If there was anyone who actually wanted to help, I never met them. When they’d written everything they could write, they went away. 

    Patrick stood out because he was different. When strangers met him, they pitied him. When they learned I was his brother they pitied me. 

    I was twenty-three when my parents died, a car crash. Some drunk sideswiped them, crushed my mother’s chest, and drove a piece of metal through my father’s skull. And that was that. The care of Patrick fell to me. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it. There was no one else. Instead of dealing with my brother I hid him away, pretended he didn’t exist. It was easier for both of us. 

    I’m not entirely sure why I picked him up when everything went to shit. Maybe I felt bad. Maybe I just couldn’t let him die. I don’t know. Maybe it was just something I did.

    I spent so many years in the company of assholes; maybe I wanted to be near something different.

    Locked away in our barracks without the proper medication, Patrick’s Berthold’s became impossible to manage. He was always in pain. He needed pills the soldiers were no longer offering. The sympathy they showed earlier in the year was gone. When they looked at him they whispered, heads shaking, eyes rolling. He was a drag on their resources, useless in the reality of the new world. We all were. 

    Unfortunately, leaving wasn’t an option. During the first year the base was under constant attack. All day long the gimps clawed the fences and scraped the walls, sunken faces, eyes without pupils, milky white and distant. More arrived by the hour, the reanimated dead. They never stopped coming, groups of a hundred and more, packed together, desperately searching for a way inside, hungry. Confident the walls would hold and desperate to conserve ammunition, the soldiers eventually stopped shooting. The gunfire was only drawing the nasties in. Instead they patrolled the fences in groups, stabbing through chain links with knives, bodies piled atop bodies, everything rotting. At first the stench was unbearable. In time it became the norm.

    The bastards never stopped moaning and screeching in that low, guttural way they screeched. I hated that screech. 

    Between Patrick and the gimps, sleeping was impossible. I’d lie awake at night, listening to them scratch, rotten fingernails snapping, teeth scraping concrete. Every night was a repeat of the last, unending, unchanging, as constant as the moon. After a while I was able to pick specific voices from the crowd and gave them names: Fred was a deep moaner. Mark hit the high notes. There was something almost sexual about Janice—high-pitched, building to something she could never reach, a frustrated housewife in need of a spanking. I liked Janice. Things went on like this for months, everything the same—until the night it was different.

    One night, something new joined the chorus.

    The howling came from the forest to the west; it was unlike anything we’d heard, louder and more guttural, almost like a dog if a dog could scream. Whatever they were, they weren’t gimps. The next morning the guards were on edge, weapons higher than normal, fingers dancing along triggers. 

    I was waiting in line for water rations when I overheard two of them talking. I shouldn’t have been listening; I was asking for trouble, so I did my best to remain discreet.

    “Cap wants to send someone out there.”

    “Fuck that. Ain’t no one doing that shit.”

    “Says he wants to know what it is, thinks it’s worth checking out.”

    “Cap’s lost his fucking mind if he th—”

    I wasn’t discreet enough. Suddenly there was a rifle in my back, hot breath in my ear. The instant the pair surrounded me the line for water ceased to exist. I was alone. 

    The guy behind me was massive: dark skin, darker beard, a mountain of hormones and muscle with a four-inch scar across his