Chicken of the Woods

I’m pulled from a ghost-filled nightmare by the crack of thunder, loud enough, as they say, to wake the dead.

If only that were true.

In the deep, moonless night, the dim glow of embers shows me I am completely alone. I look around wildly, my heart staccato-pounding loud enough for a friendly neighborhood wolf or bear to hear. Damn. They really left me. I was afraid this might happen, ever since the night we drank that bottle of whisky, and I made the mistake of telling them. Confessing. They seemed so nice compared to the human animals I had just escaped, and these pristine woods seemed so removed from the corpse-filled city canyons we’d left behind that I just…told them.

I’m going to die alone, either slowly and painfully from lack of food, by being torn apart by a hungry predator, or enslaved and eaten piecemeal by cannibals. While there’s plenty of food in theory, a few people were very quick to stockpile, making the rest of us fight over scraps. Hunger is at the root of all our evils these days, sins driven by this most basic, animalistic need. I’ve sinned plenty at the altar of hunger in the last four months. And, ironically, starvation in one form or another will probably be my judge, juror, and executioner in the end.

I definitely deserve it. Some days I long for it.

But not today. I look up to the tree where we hung our food last night, and it appears their higher angels won out. I untie, pull down and unwrap the bundle they’ve left me. A couple of mystery meals (cans without labels), a 12 oz bottle of boiled lake water, three protein bars, some beef jerky, a flashlight, matches, an extra blanket, a compass, and a bowie knife.

Enough for two days. More than I deserve.

I throw their paltry offerings into my backpack, then on second thought, pull everything out to take stock. Along with what they left me, I have another four protein bars, three cans of Dinty Moore stew, a bruised and sad-looking apple, half a 12 oz bottle of water, a can-opener and a spoon. Should, in toto, last about five days if I keep my meals small and infrequent.

I need to head back to former civilization to restock. Maybe I can find another group to join since being alone out here now…well, it’s not a good thing. This time, I’ll keep my mouth shut.

The sky’s beginning to purple with the dawn, so I pack up my supplies and bed roll, kick dirt on the dying embers and consult the compass. The city is northeast of here. One foot in front of the other.

~

I’m not a bad person, though, like I said, I have done some terrible things to survive lately. I didn’t mean for what happened to happen that day. But the leak from my lab was unintentional. Avoidable, yes, but intentional, no. I keep telling myself over and over it wasn’t my fault. I was a low-level researcher with no power. I did my job, as instructed, five days a week, eight hours a day.

I’ve been over it a million times. I’d sell my soul if I could do it differently.

On that day (a Tuesday, I think?), I came in as usual, maybe a little hungover, but not drunk, never drunk, showered in the men’s locker room, changed into my cleansuit, put on my mask, cap, nitrile gloves, and goggles, and entered the lab. Stan heard me and looked up from his microscope, acknowledging me with a nod and a grunt before lowering his head again.

Like I said, a regular Tuesday. I pipetted that day’s solution of the hybrid virus we’d dubbed Marbola-27 into a petri dish in the biosafety cabinet, covered the petri dish (I swear to God I thought it was tight enough) and stuck it under my microscope.

“Holy crap.”

“What?” asked Stan.

“Holy, holy crap,” I said again. “It’s out of control.”

“Lemme see.” Stan sounded put out. Anything that required him to interact or move from his hunched position put him out.

I edged out of his way. He was bearlike, big and hirsute, seemingly indomitable, but what he saw made him rear back and take a deep breath.

“This isn’t possible, Mike.” He crossed his arms, shaking his head as if his pronouncement were the end of it. “It must be contaminated. Chuck it and start over.”

And then he coughed. Just a little bark of a cough, nothing to write home about at first. Then a volley of coughing. He held up his forefinger as if telling me to hold on, then vomited pints of blood and slid to the floor, convulsing. Panicked, I punched the emergency button. My scared rabbit brain won out, and before the hazmat team could get there, I ran out the door, trailing the virus in my wake, not affected but probably contagious as hell. Every day, every minute of every day, I wish to god I’d done something different.

After that, the virus went global fast. Too fast and too virulent for the masking, sheltering in place, or handwashing we did in the last pandemic to make a goddamned difference. It killed all our domesticated animals but strangely spared the wild ones. Not all humans were affected—it turns out about two percent of us have a gene that protects us, but for the rest, it was one-hundred percent deadly. And for half of the survivors it affected them, did some kind of brain-damage that made them crave human flesh. I’m the only one in my family who was completely spared. My parents didn’t die but were among the affected. I had to flee them one awful night.

The irony, right?

Things fell apart as expected. The Marbola-27 is a democratic mass murderer, not judging its victims based on the color of their skin, the content of their character, intelligence, socio-economic status, or religious affiliation. It struck down our president, his cabinet, the majority of our government. It crippled every country in the world, stalled-out their economies, food production, transportation, and communications before it ran its course.

In effect, it cleaned house. Stopped the global warming, dying oceans, and clean water issues in their tracks. Maybe a rationalization on my part, but sometimes, when it’s a particularly clear day, the air fresh and sweet out here in the woods, and I’m able to blame my higher-ups for the accident (why were we messing with a killer virus anyway?), I can almost convince myself it wasn’t such a bad thing.

But on most days, when I have to work hard at assigning fault elsewhere, the clean, crisp air and self-reproach jab at my lungs like daggers. I’m not sure how long I can live with this planet-sized guilt.

~

Two days since they left. I’m guesstimating four days out from the city limits if I haven’t veered deeper into the wilderness by accident. Meanwhile, I’m foraging to stretch my supplies and vary my nutrition. I found some chestnuts, and a few leftover summer raspberries this morning. It’s the beginning of mushroom season, too, and while I’m not an expert, I know enough not to kill myself. Or the opposite if I’m ever inclined. The chicken of the woods mushrooms I found and cooked up tonight with the chestnuts in an empty can almost tastes like chicken, which only makes me crave the real thing.

Chickens…a species that has mostly died out. Best not to think about all that. Best not to think.

Another night, another morning. Three days alone with my thoughts crowding in on me, without sighting a single other human. Plenty of crows, though. A fox. A flock of turkeys.

Finally, through the trees, glimpses of cultivated farmland. Potatoes, it looks like. My body relaxes a little. I’m running so low on food that even neglected, overgrown potatoes make my mouth water.

Movement out of corner of my eye stops me dead. I turn toward the movement fast, but there’s a loud pop, and I crumple to the ground with the impact of a sharp, stinging bite in my right leg.

“Gotcha!” a reedy voice cries. “Don’t move, or I’ll kill you!”

“I can’t move, you motherfucker! What did you do, shoot me?!”

“Sure as shit did! I won’t have you raiding my fields.”

“Me and what army? Jesus, that hurts.”

“Lemme take a look.”

A skeletal man peers at me from above. I can’t make out his features through the haze of pain and because he’s backlit against the clear blue.

“Just grazed the leg, which was my aim. You’ll be fine.” He offers me a large, bony hand. “What doesn’t kill you, doncha’ know.”

I glare up at him as best I can through my grimace. “So that’s your policy? Shoot first and say howdy do later?”

He snorts. “Now you say it, I guess it is. You don’t look like you been affected.” He offers his hand again. “C’mon, lemme get you to Jeanne. She’ll fix you right up.”

I allow him to pull me up, and he slips my arm over his shoulder. He’s older than I thought, and has to hunch, so we hobble awkwardly to the farmhouse, a large, white clapboard affair that looms ahead like the subject of a Wyeth painting. A young woman, younger than I am, is standing on the porch with her dark hair pulled back, a dishtowel stuck in the straining waistband of her jeans, not quite hiding her pregnant belly, looking so normal and pre-pandemic that I want to cry. She rushes over and slips her shoulder under my other arm.

“Poor thing! Did Dad do this to you?! I swear to the Almighty, Dad, you are too trigger happy for your own good!”

The two practically carry me into the house. She has to rip the bottom of my jeans to the knee to get to the wound, then expertly cleans it, telling me she was a nurse at a nearby clinic. Her words fill the sullen silence between me and her father, who she introduces as Karl.

I tell her my name, ignoring Karl’s hooded glare, and ask, “Is it just the two of you out here?”

She nods. “After my husband died, Mom passed, too, and I moved back in. I discovered I was at least two months pregnant at that point…I won’t know if the baby’s immune until it’s born. Dad must have passed the gene to me, so let’s just hope and pray…” She glances up to the heavens, letting the unfinished end of that sentence float up to whoever might be listening.

After bandaging me up, Jeanne feeds me potato soup, hearty and delicious, then, wonder of wonders, a slice of homemade apple pie. Apple pie! My leg feels okay, and with a full meal in my stomach, I’m starting to feel a little too comfortable for my own comfort. The thought that they could be cannibals flits through my drowsy brain. They seem too cogent to be among the affected, and besides, they wouldn’t have taken care of my leg if they intended to eat me, right?

I yawn.

“You and me both,” Jeanne says, her hand resting on her belly. “You can have the cot on the front porch. It’s screened-in, and we’ve got plenty of quilts. Hope you understand?”

I do. Can’t have a stranger sleeping in the house no matter how amiable he seems.

She sets me up on the porch, and the two of them drift into the house, Karl leaving me with a curt nod.

I wake to the sound of howling. Not canine.

Human.

I shiver. Shit. I know that howl. It’s the hallmark of that cannibal gang I escaped before I met up with my last group. They’ve moved into the country, too, I guess.

I bang on my hosts’ door, yelling, “Wake up! Trouble’s coming! Wake up!”

Finally, Karl comes down, an oil burning lamp in hand. “What the hell, man!”

“I heard a human howl,” I say. “I know that sound. It’s a roving gang of the affected. We’ve got to prepare.”

As if on cue, a howl rises up, closer now. Every hair on my head raises. “That’s them.”

Karl’s eyes widen. He nods. “Right. Get in here. I’ve got a couple more guns, and plenty of ammo. Know how to use one?”

I bob my head in a slight nod, though in truth I’ve only ever shot a gun once, and that was when I escaped those assholes a month ago.

We three formulate a quick plan. Each of us will be stationed by a window, Jeanne upstairs, Karl and me at the front and back respectively. Karl hands us binoculars, long-range rifles and plenty of ammo. My face must betray something, because he says, “First thing I scavenged when all this went down. Now, all you gotta’ do is what I would do.”

“Shoot first and say howdy do after?” I say.

Jeanne guffaws. “He’s got you there, Dad.”

Karl wrestles with a smile. “Yup.”

I park myself at the back window to watch for movement outside. Thankfully, it’s cloudless and windless, and nearly a full moon, so visibility is excellent. The small vegetable garden and fields beyond are silver-limned, almost glowing.

Movement. I train my binocs on the far field, on something that begins to look like a moving wall coming toward the house. Closer and closer it comes, until I make out details. People. With their hands up. As they draw closer, I see the chains binding them together. A freaking chain gang.

“Karl! Jeanne!” I yell. “A group is coming from the back, but I don’t think they’re coming voluntarily.”

I hear Karl clomp from the other side of the house to join me. He trains his binoculars where I point. “Well, shit. A human shield. We can’t fire on ‘em.”

I glance at him, his warm, sympathetic eyes trained on the prisoners. Despite his gruffness, he’s a good man. They are good people, and suddenly, I know what to do. It’s clear, crystalline, beautiful, with what might be a glimmer of redemption embedded in it.

“Do you have a storm cellar, somewhere you can hide?” I ask.

“There’s an ancient cellar we can access in the living room. Trap door is under the rug. You really think we should hide out? They know we’re here—they’d eventually flush us out.”

“Not if they think they’ve flushed us out already.”

Karl looks at me quizzically but calls out, “Jeanne, c’mon down. Mike here’s got an idea.”

She joins us, and I quickly explain that if we make the house look like it’s just me here, the two of them will be safe down there. They protest at first, but I’m firm. “I want to do this. I need to do this. If you knew why, you’d be glad to see the back of me. Now, let’s get you down there.”

I help Karl move the furniture and rug while Jeanne clears evidence of two people living in the house. Eventually they climb down the rickety ladder bearing enough supplies to last a couple days. They look up at me from the bottom, and in the gloom all I can see is the whites of their eyes. “You sure about this, Mike?” Jeanne has a slight tremble in her voice.

“Never surer about anything,” I say. “Now stay down there and keep quiet. They’ll take what they want and move on, but it might be a bit. They’ll probably trash the place, sorry to say. That’s what they do.”

“No worries, son. We can rebuild.” Karl clears his throat, looks me in the eye. “This is, well, everything. Wish we could repay you.”

“You already have,” I say with a grin. “Just keep that baby safe. You guys are the future.”

I close the trapdoor, cover it with the rug and furniture, and with my gun slung over my shoulder, limp to the back door to meet my fate head on.

What sweet, sweet relief it finally is.