Title: Yellow Bait
Author: Kassfinol
Genre: Apocalyptic fiction – Zombie horror
All rights reserved.
The first bite sounded like a broken rib. A dry, wet crack at the same time. Leo heard it from the closet where his mother had pushed him, whispering to him:
—Stay still, my love, stay still like in the game —with a voice so calm that, for a second, he believed everything was going to pass.
Then, the door burst open. Through the slats of the closet, Leo saw shadows struggling. His mother screamed while pushing against something that growled, something that didn’t sound human. Her arms moved desperately, trying to push it away, but the thing lunged at her shoulder. The crunch was worse up close.
His father appeared in the doorway. Leo saw the blood on his arm, the tear in his shirt sleeve. He saw his eyes, still his eyes, fixed on Mom.
The first shot made Leo cover his ears. The thing biting his mother fell to the floor.
The second shot was softer, as if his father no longer had strength left. His mother collapsed against the closet door, closing it with her own weight. Leo heard her last sigh, a sound he would never forget.
—Forgive me —his father’s voice sounded broken—. Take care of yourself, Leo.
The third shot echoed in the silence.
Leo didn’t know how much time passed. Hours, maybe days. He had no strength left, but the smell drove him out. A sweet, thick stench that made him gag. He pushed the door and his mother’s body slumped to the floor with a soft thud. He didn’t look back. He crossed the hallway, dodging the broken glass, the viscous puddle that was no longer red but almost black, and left through the kitchen window onto the deserted street.
The image of his bitten father, first killing the zombie, then his mother before she turned, and finally shooting himself, had been his father’s last kind gesture. Even so, the memory hit him again and again.
The world had gone quiet and noisy at the same time. The wind moved papers across the asphalt, but the low growls and dragging footsteps came from every direction. Leo ran. He didn’t know where to. His mind was a loop repeating:
It’s temporary. Like a big power outage. The police will come back, the firefighters. Someone will come.
Before, his life had been the color yellow. The yellow of the kitchen walls on Saturday mornings, of the apricot jam his mother made, of the sun on soccer afternoons with his father in the park.
His family was an exception to the rule, a bubble of laughter and hugs that sometimes embarrassed him a little in front of his friends, but inside made him feel like an impenetrable fortress. He dreamed, vaguely, of a future that was an extension of that present: a girl who would look at him the way his father looked at his mother, a house with a garden, the calm of knowing the world was, in essence, a benevolent place.
That naivety was now his burden and his engine. While hiding in an empty container, nibbling on a cereal bar he’d taken from his backpack, he thought:
This can’t be forever. It has to end. I just have to hold on.
A week later, he found them. Or they found him. There were three of them: Mara, a thin woman with eyes that never stopped moving; Jota, a big guy with a wrench always in his hand; and the Kid, a skinny teenager who coughed nonstop.
—Holy shit, a kid —Jota spat when he saw him hiding under an overturned car.
Mara looked at him with cold curiosity.
—He’s whole… Clean.
—So what? He weighs less than my shit and I’m sure he cries at night.
—Little ones fit in places we can’t —she said, and her smile didn’t reach her eyes—. Hey, kid, are you alone?
Leo nodded, distrustful. He told them, in pieces, about his parents. Mara pretended a sorrow she didn’t feel.
—Come with us. We have a safe place. We’ll wait together until all this calms down.
The safe place was a damp basement behind a looted supermarket. The first night, Jota gave him a dented can.
—You have to earn your food, shorty. Tomorrow, it’s your turn to go out.
Going out meant being the bait. Leo, with his small, agile body, had to distract the walkers —that’s what they called them— while Mara and Jota looted a pharmacy. They gave him a whistle.
—Run like the devil himself is behind you —Mara told him, adjusting his jacket with a false tenderness that grotesquely reminded him of his mother—. And blow it. Blow it hard.
He did. He ran as if his heart were going to burst, the whistle screaming in his ears, with half a dozen slow, persistent figures following him. Meanwhile, they went in and out of the pharmacy, filling their backpacks. When they finished, Jota shouted at him:
—That’s it, all done!
Leo had no choice but to take a detour, dodging gray hands and open mouths, to get back to the meeting point. When he arrived, panting, his legs trembling, Jota laughed.
—Well done, bait. You turned out to be quite useful.
That’s how it went for a few days. Leo was the decoy, the explorer, the small, disposable piece. One afternoon, looking for food in a house, Jota pushed him toward a room where something was moving.
—Go see what’s in there. You’re the fastest runner.
Leo opened the door. It was a walker, an old man in dirty pajamas, who lunged at him. Leo managed to slam the door shut, locking it inside, but not before a cold, stiff hand brushed his face. He collapsed against the wall, vomiting bile.
From outside, he heard Jota’s laugh.
—See? That’s what he’s for. So we don’t get our hands dirty.
At night, the Kid, the teenager who coughed, sometimes sat near him.
—Don’t mind them —he murmured once, while cleaning a rusty knife—. We’re all fucked. You’re just more fucked than us right now.
—Why do you stay with them? —Leo asked, in a thread of a voice.
The Kid coughed, a deep, wet sound. —Where the hell would I go? Before this I was already fucked. This… it’s just more of the same.
Leo didn’t understand him. For him, the before was paradise. The now was a temporary nightmare. The idea that someone could have been fucked before seemed as alien to him as the apocalypse itself.
The final plan was stupid. Jota had heard rumors of a shelter in a factory on the outskirts of the city, but the road was plagued with them.
—A pack, Mara said, her eyes shining with a dangerous idea.
—The kid leads them away. We go in, clean the place, and then we pick him up.
—And how do you think he’s going to escape? —the Kid asked, his voice firmer than usual.
—That’s his problem —Jota snapped—. Either he does it, or he stays outside. With his new friends.
Leo looked at them. He saw the indifference in Mara’s eyes, the contempt in Jota’s, and a shadow of something that could have been pity in the Kid’s. His mind, for the first time, accepted the raw truth: they weren’t going to come back for him. His hope was a factory defect, a luxury of someone who’d had a yellow-colored life.
—All right —Leo confirmed, and his own voice sounded strange to him, cold.
At dawn, he positioned himself at the entrance to the avenue, facing the slow, grumbling mass of dozens of zombies. On the other side, behind a fence, was the factory. Mara, Jota, and the Kid watched from a second floor of an adjacent building. They gave him the signal.
Leo took a deep breath. He no longer thought about the future, about the girl, about the house with a garden. He only thought about the dark stain on his mother’s shirt. He blew the whistle with all his strength.
The heads turned in unison. A chorus of growls rose from the crowd. And then, Leo didn’t run to lead them away. He ran toward them, dodging the first arms, zigzagging between the rotten bodies, straight toward the factory fence.
That wasn’t the plan. He wasn’t the bait. He was a missile.
—What the hell is the kid doing! —he heard Jota shout in the distance.
Leo climbed the fence with desperate agility. He fell on the other side and ran toward the factory’s main door, closely followed by the first walkers who, attracted by the noise, began to crowd against the fence. He had brought the plague right to their door.
From the window, Mara looked at him with pure hatred. Leo had ruined their clean play. Now they had to fight to get in and to get out.
The factory door gave way with a dry blow. It wasn’t as empty as they thought. The darkness inside began to boil with shapes. Leo didn’t wait. He turned on his heels and ran down the street, away from the chaos of screams and growls exploding behind him. He didn’t look back. He didn’t care.
He ran until the air burned his lungs. He took refuge in what was left of a shoe store, collapsing among a pile of empty boxes. He was alone. Completely alone… Again, and for the first time, he understood it.
The world hadn’t broken. It had simply always been like that for most people. The Kid knew it. Mara and Jota probably did too. His family, his yellow bubble, had been the anecdote, not the norm. Life wasn’t fair, nor benevolent, nor temporarily bad. It was this: a survival game where the weakest served as bait.
Two days later, hunger made him reckless. He went out to look for food in a restaurant with smashed windows. Inside, moving among the overturned tables, there was only one. A slow zombie, with a torn waiter’s uniform.
Leo thought he could handle him, because he was only one.
He slid toward the kitchen, looking for cans. He found a half-stepped-on pack of cookies. When he bent down to grab it, a hand shot out from under a table, grabbing his ankle with an iron grip. It was another one, one that had stayed still, lying on the floor. Leo screamed and struggled, but the grip was iron. The waiter turned slowly and started walking toward him, dragging his feet.
Leo looked at the one holding him. It was a boy about twelve years old. Not much older than him. His face was pale and dirty, but in his eyes, not empty, there showed an old, resigned anguish, and he saw the reflection of what the Kid had told him:
Before this I was already fucked.
There was no fight. No epic ending. Just the slow, inevitable approach of the waiter, and Leo’s final understanding. His suffering had been short. A brief misfortune compared to the life of misery this other boy, and millions like him, had led since their first breath. The fact that it was common didn’t make it normal. It only made it more terrible.
The bite, when it came, also sounded like a broken rib. And this time, there was no closet to hear it from. Only darkness, and the cold relief of no longer being the exception to the rule.
The End