This is a guest post by Melissa McCarthy. If you would like to submit short, episodic, or even flash fiction to be featured on Modern Pulp, please email your submission to matsumotobooks@gmail.com with the Subject Title: Submissions.

It took him a moment to realize it was dying of a heart attack.

It made sense. A chubby, middle-aged office worker’s body wasn’t made for sprinting and he estimated they’d run flat-out for at least three miles. Generally speaking, the body won’t let the mind push it to the point of breaking. He knew that from all the P.T. he’d had to do in the military. The pain, the burning in the lungs and the lactic acid in the legs… it was all a safety mechanism. All designed to dissuade the body from pushing itself too hard unless it absolutely had to. Absent pain… absent that feeling of whole-body exhaustion that came from running… animals would easily chase one another until their hearts gave out or their tendons exploded. Life couldn’t have happened that way. Evolution required pain.

But the thing on the ground beside him didn’t feel any of that.

Whatever it was, it had no built-in concerns for self-preservation. It had only wanted to kill him. And, right now, he also only mostly wanted to die.

A few years older. A few less trips to the gym and the treadmill every week and he probably would have. He was thirty-six and, so he’d thought, in reasonably good shape. Nonetheless a three-mile run for your life wasn’t something he’d been prepared for, and the thing beside him might not feel pain anymore but he still very much did. His legs were on fire. The ankles within his shoes swollen well beyond their natural size. He lay there on his side, in an empty tennis court, panting and clawing at the ground like a wounded animal, heart still pounding rapidly within his chest. He’d never run like that before. He honestly doubted that he ever could again. Only the sight of that… that thing closing in behind him had allowed him to push on. Only that had allowed his brain to override all the pain signals his body had been sending. Telling him he was redlining. Begging him to stop.

What was it?

They still didn’t know.

Beside him it convulsed and sputtered on the ground and, even now, in its death throes, reached out with gnarled hands to grab him. He noticed then that he was actually still kicking, albeit somewhat uselessly, the last remaining bits of glucose in his system being used to fend off the fingers pawing at his shoes. Forward motion now seemed beyond the creature at his feet but somehow it was still biting. Chomping at the air aimlessly in wiry contortions of muscle. Whatever it was, wanted him.

Wanted his flesh.

For the briefest of moments that made him smile. It was nice to be wanted. He hadn’t felt wanted in a long time.

Then the creature stopped moving. Two fingers and a thumb still resting on his shoe.

The face was a nightmare. Covered completely in weeping sores. Whatever caused the infection had created a thick scaly rash all over the victim’s body and the formerly living bald man lying in a lump looked as though he’d been struck by some Biblical plague.

Perhaps he had been.

The large, red-white boils covering the scalp were all open, yellow puss oozing out of them and pooling on the ground beside mucusy saliva from the open mouth. At the moment, lying still and dead, the creature did not seem so menacing and vaguely Noah wondered if perhaps he should have stood and fought it. The bald man was taller, true, by several inches in fact, and it outweighed him by a good bit. Still though… maybe that would’ve been easier. Maybe standing and fighting would have been less scary and less painful than running himself up to the knife’s edge of the grave.

He wasn’t sure.

The Apocalypse had been going on for three months now and he’d acquired more skill in hand-to-hand combat than he’d ever expected. Even so, the large chunks missing from his shoulder and his hip from a previous encounter had been enough to dissuade him from trying to take on another of the monsters head-on. Being bitten… having the flesh torn from your body by a set of teeth…

It wasn’t pleasant.

A fairly universal experience for animal life on Planet Earth, true. But it wasn’t one he ever wanted to relive. Such an experience apparently had the tendency to knock some of the predator out of you, as evidenced by the fact that today he’d chosen to run like prey.

How long he sat there he didn’t know, but the sun was well on its way to setting by the time he’d gathered enough energy to try and stand again. The air was cold, and the wind set the chain-link gate of the tennis court slowly, eerily creaking upon its hinges. He could hear a crow calling somewhere in the trees and, also, far away… a motor?

No.

No that wasn’t right.

Was he hallucinating?

For the first time he took a moment to scan the landscape and actually look at where he was. A park. A park next to an empty high school.

Several pavilions dotted the yard around him and on his left there was a playground and a softball field. On his right, a walking track. A walking track with a big sign declaring that it wasn’t for bicycles and that all pets should be leashed and behind that track he saw trees. The miles and miles of forest he’d run through to get here.

A fence rattled.

Noah gasped and jumped and spun round on his heels towards the sound, absolutely certain he would die.

It was only a buzzard.

A buzzard covered in boils flapping uselessly at him from the other side of the court’s fence.

He almost laughed. Almost. Birds weren’t a problem. The disease made everything that caught it fairly stupid and birds were already dumb enough as it was. They all seemed to forget how to fly by the time the symptoms set in and so when they did try to chase you it was as stupid and comical as being chased by any random duck or goose. Dogs on the other hand were a fantastic problem. In the past few months he’d seen more than one person torn apart by dogs. In fact, when the plague started so many dogs and cats were initially infected that everybody assumed they were dealing with some horrible mutation of rabies. If that were true though it was a variant for which none of the vaccines were even slightly effective. People also didn’t catch it by being bitten so, in Noah’s mind at least, the rabies theory had been effectively thrown out. That was unfortunate because, at least if it was rabies, then they’d know how you caught it. At the moment though, nobody knew how you got infected.

That made everything a lot worse.

One day you were fine, hole’d up in an apartment somewhere with your family, trying to ride out the end of the world…

The next?

Gnawing your partner’s leg off.

And you never knew when you might be next.

The disease came on so suddenly. That was the truly terrifying part. Within a matter of hours it went from fever to cannibalistic insanity and nowhere was safe. That’s why he’d left the camp. A decision he’d regretted ever since. He’d thought, or at least hoped, that out in the country-side things would be calmer. That was true, in a way, sure. But also the woods and the open fields provided no cover. Nothing in the way of shelter. In the forest there was no door to lock and nothing to hide behind and he’d not slept more than an hour at a time since he’d been gone. Every snapping twig, the chirp of a bird, the small rustle in the leaves made by a squirrel in the night… all of it was terrifying. All of it potential death. Every day, every hour, he wished again and again that he’d stayed at the FEMA camp with its big beautiful fence and all the guards with guns.

But everyone had been getting sick.

Everyone at the camp had been getting very, very sick.

His stomach growled.

Noah eyed the school. There were chains wrapped around the handles of the doors but he thought maybe there was still some way in. Maybe there was someone inside.

Maybe they had food.

He was thinking with his body. His lower consciousness, like an animal. The question of why someone would lock doors from the outside didn’t occur to him as the allure of four walls between himself and the outside world was more powerful than any rational thought. The specter of food too, however imaginary, drove him, as did a vague, not-quite-conscious feeling that he was horny. That was strange. All the erections. He’d honestly barely noticed them but it was as if something primal had switched on since he’d left the camp, a kind of evolutionary safety mechanism driving his reproductive urges to keep the species alive in the sudden threat of extinction.

Maybe there was a woman behind those doors.

He didn’t even notice that he thought this… It just kind of happened.

He stared through the glass into an empty gymnasium, dark, the floor of a basketball court littered with debris. Gently he tested the padlocked chains and they rattled and both of the doors shook slightly in his hands. Above the moon was rising, and around him the world grew darker and darker in weary silence save for the squawking of a single deranged bird.

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