The Hunger

The Mayor’s Office in the town hall was a dark place for Spring Valley Mayor David Bloom. He removed the barrel of the shotgun from his mouth, his hands trembling. The decorations of his office that had once brought the mayor feelings of pride and comfort, now made him feel very paranoid. The cold glazed glass stare of the stuffed duck in mid-flight on the mantle seemed to stare directly into his soul as if to pass judgment on him. He got the same feeling from the mounted moose head, which hung on the wall and was once his pride and joy, a reminder of a hunting trip with the president of the school board in Canada. Bloom felt lost in their judging eyes, almost as if his soul had been jaded. The glass eyes of his prized trophies seemed to burn a hole into his core. His constant unchanging fear was that much like the rest of the dead in Spring Valley, the once quite dead moose and duck would return to life in search for human flesh to quench an eternal hunger. Death meant nothing in this town. It was merely the end of consciousness as the living had come to know it.

“My sanity’s starting to slip…” Bloom said to himself. “Gotta keep it together…” Just then, he thought he heard a voice. At first he thought it was one of the dead animals through out his office. Bloom was convinced it was all in his mind. His mind had to be playing tricks on him… until he heard another voice. These voices were not like the whispers that had mocked him through out his stay in his office. They were more human. He could have sworn he heard the words ‘Police Station’. God no.

He slowly began to breathe heavier as he rose from his crouched position on the floor to get to the window. Then he remembered what happened to the last people who wandered the streets in an effort to find survivors.

The visions flashed in his head, as the paranoia started to take over, and he began to remember the twisted scene. They had been walking down the street. A man and his wife, no older than thirty. Bloom had yelled down to them to get help and that he was stranded there. He remembered feeling relief. He remembered feeling hope that this nightmare had ended. They had yelled back. The voices had fallen on dead ears. As if they were a swarm of ants to a piece of candy on the sidewalk, the carriers began to surround the couple. At first it was just one, then many began to come out of the alleys and climb out of the windows of other buildings like a pack of ravenous wolves. The couple had been eaten alive after being torn limb from limb by a sea of the living dead. Bloom had seen death in Vietnam, but nothing like what he had seen in his quiet town of Spring Valley. It was at that point, that the mayor had lost hope in saving others or being saved himself. It was then that he began to wait, in self-pity, to die.

Bloom began to think about the creatures and all that he knew about them. Perhaps it would all fit together somehow in his mind and help him come up with some kind of plan to survive. What he actually knew about the bloodthirsty bastards was much more than he wanted to, and more than most in his town. He never wanted it to go this far. He had done everything in his power to stop it, what little power he actually had. He knew they preferred night to daylight, were infested with the smell of rotting flesh (which made for a good warning sign), and would attack anything that moved or made a sound. He knew that in order to survive he had to rely on more than just his sense of sight. His guess was that after they were taken over by the parasite; they were driven by a primal urge to feed or spread the plague. He also knew that if bitten or scratched, you became one of them. Bloom would rather blow the back of his own head out, than become one of them. For this reason, he saved a shotgun shell in his wallet. He called it destiny.

By the time he had convinced himself to look outside, the men behind the voices were gone. The door to the station was closing so Bloom knew they had gone in, and probably would not come out. Why did I wait to look out? Why didn’t I warn them? I can’t let them die. Something has to be done.

Bloom reluctantly opened the window and the stench of death filled his lungs. He knew that one of them was near but had no idea where.