Keep Busy

1.

A/N: Hello friends. This is an early draft and still needs a bit of work. I am open to all constructive criticism and welcome any ideas to help the story advance. I will be posting new chapters on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WARNING: This story contains a whole lot of swearing, violence, gore, references to suicide, sex and more unsavory topics. If you are easily offended, please move on. Happy reading...

Just keep going. Frank told himself.

He stopped, leaned over and exhaled hard, scratching his unruly beard. A bead of sweat dripped off the end of his nose dotting the sun-worn asphalt a darker grey.

He took a few additional deep breaths, then told himself again. Just keep busy. Keep fucking going.

The decomposing corpse he was laboriously dragging to the open hatch of his '99 4 Runner reeked like rancid beef jerky and was much heavier than he'd anticipated.

The body left a two-foot-wide shiny trail of dark brown goo on the road.

The person had been dead for months. The woman. The bloated, juice-heavy body was in a pretty accelerated state of decay, but he could still make out the breasts—scabbed, peeling, leaking—just fucking disgusting—hanging flaccid and wobbly like oranges at the end of a sock.

Whatever blouse or shirt she'd probably been wearing on the day she'd died had long since been torn away, snagged on a tree branch or fence or picked away by scavenger birds. Now there was just mottled grey skin and those drooping sweater cows which he was certain were female breasts.

Not man-boobs.

Man-boobs looked different. They were more like fleshy rolls stuffed with cottage cheese, creeping around the torso to cling to a wedge of back-fat. They had a different type of heft.

Frank momentarily experienced a slight twinge of self-consciousness as he regarded his own body. An unfortunate subconscious tick from the old days. He'd, at one time, been a little on the heavy side of the spectrum. Not a fat man—just a guy who really liked his beer. But now, since the world had come apart, the fast-food restaurants were non-operational and beer was a lot harder to come by, he'd unintentionally dropped a good 25 pounds with very little effort.

Not that there was anyone around to appreciate the new slimmed-down Frank.

As far as he knew, there wasn't anyone around anywhere.

He glanced back at the body he was lugging. But these... these were definitely girl-boobs. Natural female boobs. If they'd been implants, they'd still have some kind of structural rigidity. These did not. These were teetering on the edge of either becoming soup or dust.

There was no real way to determine the gender by looking at the thing's face—or the smashed-up pile of purple-black mush and splintered, pale yellow bone where a face had once been.

Of course, he could have peeked beneath the waistline of her torn, crusted jeans, but he was sure there'd be untold horrors down there. Just the thought of pulling off those denim rags, stiff with grime and filth, sent the bile lurching up the back of his throat.

Whatever was left down there was sure to be wretched and ugly.

He'd seen countless horrifically mutilated bodies since the beginning of the outbreak and over time, had gotten used to them, but every time he'd catch a glimpse of genitalia expanding in the heat, bruised and rotting—looking like a pile of slugs about to burst in a microwave, he'd instantly vomit.

He'd never understood the nudist community. Those fragile bits of the human anatomy weren't meant to be exposed to the elements. They needed to be protected and sheltered—locked away in some cotton stronghold—tucked in tightly, anchored down.