Three Smokes and the End of the World

“Can I get one, Mary?” Cindy asked as Mar pulled a smoke from the pack. Cindy smiled as she dropped her backpack onto the ground, so she could adjust her almost illegally short skirt.

“It’s Mar, now,” she corrected, as she pushed her jet black bangs back behind her ear.

“Mar, oh you’re so Goth.”

 Ignoring her statement, Mar continued, “And if you wanna smoke, try buying your own pack sometime. These cigs are worth like fifty cents each these days.”

 “It’s only because you buy those snob cigarettes,” Jenny said. “Mine don’t cost that much.” She blew out a thin steam on smoke through her trim nostrils and Mar wondered for the three hundredth time if her parents had already started buying Jenny plastic surgery treatments at sixteen, as if being a petite blonde with perfect teeth wasn’t enough.

“And you just smoke menthols, because no one in their right mind wants to bum one of those foul things,” Cindy said.

Mar was just lighting up her smoke when a loud yell cut through her annoying friend’s chatter.

“What the hell was that?” Cindy asked, posing like some fashion model with her smoke dangling. Mar figured she’d be posing even if the end of the world came. When the scream sounded again it wasn’t like a cry for help as much as sounding like someone being torn in half.

“Oh my God,” Jenny said. “Should we call someone?”

“Yeah, do that,” Mar said, as she peeked her head around the dumpster that obscured them. What she saw caused the cigarette to tumble from her mouth. 

Just on the other side of the school’s fence, a woman had been walking her dog. What might have been a homeless guy looked like he was tried to kiss her neck, but as Mar watched, his head came away with a big bloody chunk of the woman’s flesh in his mouth. The woman stumbled away as a torrent of viscera streamed from her torn neck. The dog moved in to protect its master and the grimy, and now blood covered man, reached down, picked up the dog, and bit one of its eyeballs out.

“What’s going on over here…?” Cindy started to say until Mar emptied the contents over her stomach all over her Cindy’s new strapless heels. “I my God! You freak of nature.”

Neither of the two other girls had focused enough to really see what had happened yet and Jenny said, “I’m like trying to call nine-one-one, but the lines are busy. Is that even possible?”

“What’s the matter, can’t find eleven on the phone,” Cindy said, before turning to Mar. “And what about my shoes. You’re going to have to—what’s that man doing to her?” was followed by Cindy erupting into the highest pitched scream Mar had ever heard.

Where Mar found the courage to look back at the scene she’d never know, but once she saw what happened there, she would forever wish she hadn’t. The man was on top of the woman, just eating her. His victim’s arms flapped with insane violence, but they had already begun to slow down.

Cindy pushed past her, running toward the school and that was when the fire alarm went off. It could have been the only thing that would have caused Cindy to hold up.

“What now?” Jenny began, but then finally had her eyes leave her cell for long enough to see the man on the street and what he was doing. Her scream sounded girly and cute even at its volume and though her terror, Mar still thought, it figures.

Mar went back to watching the woman. After not moving and looking quite dead, she started to sit up and almost casually pushed the homeless man away. Despite his earlier violent ways and fighting through her frantic struggles, this time he allowed her to move him away and didn’t stop her when she began to struggle to her feet.

Mar felt torn over what to do, but since they were required to enter the courtyard and they were already there, she looked back at the man on the street. And she saw something strange.

Her eyes opened wider and her face clenched with terror. She didn’t even notice that Jenny was screaming again.

Before her eyes, the woman stood up as though having twenty bites taken out of her was just an average day. But what drew in Mar’s gaze was how her bowels and internal organs fell from her torn open stomach. Intestines flopped onto the ground like greasy ropes, but the woman kept walking.

Mar knew she should run, run home and never leave her house again, but something made her watch.

The man joined her as though they had become best friends and both of them lumbered to the fence. The man proved faster, but Mar’s eyes stayed glued to the woman.

Jenny joined Mar in vomiting up her lunch when the woman tripped over her own intestines and fell to the ground. With her right hand, she violently tore away the offending organs and began to open her mouth in the most horrid way. The man had made it to the fence and rattled it while his milky eyes met Mar’s gaze. Then, opening his mouth, he let out a hollow moan.

Soon the woman had joined him as the fence. Jenny tried to shake her and yelled something and that was when Mar heard the first screams come from the courtyard.

Check in next Saturday for the final chapter of Lock Down Bite Down!

You can explore more of the Eternal Aftermath here!