Tic-Tac-Toe

[GRAPHIC ZOMBIE WARNING! If you don't like zombies, don't whimper, I'll give you something livelier next week.]

I scratched at a flake of skin that was peeling off my calf. I'd last a lot longer if I didn't scratch but by this point, it really didn't matter. And Jeck wasn't watching. He was lying on his back in the long sunray that had miraculously bled through the brown fog. The sun made even the dust look pretty.

But not my friend.

He was a worse scratcher than I, and he'd taken to eating his flakes to ease the hunger, like paper mints before the world blew. I caught his flicker of pain each time I crumbled one in my fingers and watched it blow away in the wind. I could offer him mine, but that was against our rules.

But our rules hadn't helped us much. Whole chunks of cheek had fallen off my face like hard marbles, and Jeck was mostly corroding muscle. He didn't even have eyelids.

The nice thing about this disease was that it left your mind dull, so you didn't think about things too much. In this landscape, there was nothing left to really think about, anyway.

"You trying to embalm yourself?" I asked my friend. His eyes rolled to mine.

"The sun feels good. Like it'll clean me out if I get hot enough."

I almost said he'd make some good jerky but thought better of it. The hunger didn't bother me as much, I'd felt hollow for long enough it didn't matter.

Everyone else had eaten each other but Jeck and I refused and escaped. Maybe that's why we rotted so slowly, because we'd never injested anyone else's bacteria. Who knew? Here we were, the last two humans in Arizona and even the bacteria, it seemed, were dead.

"Come play tic-tac-toe," I said.

He said nothing and I sighed, done with the whole drama. We were the longest, boring-est performance on the after-life of the planet. Carefully, I pulled off a toe. The place it'd hung throbbed with a dull and nagging ache. I shrugged. I tossed the toe onto Jeck's chest.

He caught it and rolled his eyes back up to me. "What the crap, Mutt?"

"We're playing with real toes. Let's have some fun."

I wasn't sure how many limbs I'd have to lose to get out of here, but if it made my buddy a little happier in the end, then it made me happier, too. I drew the cross in the sand.