Gallows Humour | Watty's 2023

The Ragamuffin

Another day, another street full of dead bodies. True jimmied the lock on the front door of the first house on a pathetic little cul-de-sac. It was faster to smash a window, but it was also louder and they'd been carting around a bad gut feeling all day. With the creak and shudder of hinges that had forgotten their purpose, the door yielded.

Inside, the house told a story True had read a thousand times before. A broken coatrack laying on the floor, papers strewn across the office, and the empty shells of eviscerated electronics left to gather thick layers of dust wherever they had been tossed by first or second-wave raiders. True ran a finger over a dent in the drywall, a phone lay on the floor beneath it.

They moved through the kitchen, where cabinets had been flung open. The fridge had been left wide open, a carpet of green and black coated the insides and the floor all around it, and speckled the wall. A bit of pink plastic from the milk jug that had detonated and given the mold splatter life poked out of the slime. They left the kitchen untouched. First-generation scavengers would have cleaned out anything useable, no point disturbing that brand-new ecosystem.

They cut through a living room with a couch that looked like mouse central, and into a hallway that had lonely nails jutting out where pictures had once hung. All the doors branching from the hall were wide open, except one.

Bingo. Families always left the door closed.

Maybe out of respect, but probably out of guilt. Nobody wanted to watch, or be watched by, a dying loved one while hurrying to abandon them. True hesitated at the mouth of the hall, their skin prickling with apprehension. The living room was empty, except for them. There were no flickers of motion in the windows or the kitchen doorway. They were alone. They pressed their tongue to their canine. Just them and the corpse, and the sprouting civilization in the kitchen. They turned their attention back to the closed door.

A gust of warm wind hustled out of the room in the wake of the door opening. True replaced it as resident intruder of the corpse's room.

It was tidy, the eye of the storm that had hit the rest of the house. Lime green walls glowed out of the gloom. Stickers had been stuck at random on the wall, the dresser shoved in the corner, the lamp on the bedside table. True had the decency to pause when they saw the shelf of children's toys. But not for long. Kids died, viruses didn't discriminate, and True had to eat. They couldn't undo the loss. They could only make the best of what remained.

This one was tidy, at least. Surprisingly so. As if someone had come in after the passing to clean up the usual mess. An unopened bottle of water and two neatly stacked granola bars had been set beside the door. Loved ones left final gifts like that often. Tokens of hope that the person in the room might somehow regain enough strength to flee, too. They never did.

True ignored the instinct to grab those precious commodities. They had made the mistake of drinking from a sealed death room water bottle, once. They'd spent the next week on the brink of death, shitting their brains out. So it was safe to say they weren't keen on trying again anytime soon. Those tokens were cursed.

They opened the blinds to let the light in and check for any nosy problems outside. The coast remained clear. So far.

Alright, well, time for the corpse then.

Someone—a parent probably—had tucked it in with blankets up to its nose, and it had evidently stayed mostly still after that. There was none of the usual blood splatter on the wall from coughing out liquidated lung tissue either. Signs of the end stages of the disease that had decimated the planet were not subtle. It wasn't like the Shadow Dweller sicknesses that slowly hollowed sufferers out until only a thin husk remained. The Black Lung had snapped victims up and shaken the life out of them quick and violent. True remembered more of those early days of the apocalypse than they cared to.

So, what, had the family tucked in an already dead body?

True's gaze fell on the bottles stacked on the bedside table. They picked up the orange prescription bottle first, pleased to hear it rattled. Its label read vancomycin. Jackpot. They'd make a fortune off this, everyone and their cat wanted antibiotics these days. They shoved it deep in their loot bag, then on second thought, they took it out and tucked it into a secret inner pocket of their well-worn coat. Best to keep those close. Other scavengers would kill—literally—to have these drugs.

They checked the other bottle too. It was cough syrup. Adult strength. Empty. The label looked as new as anything did these days. Suddenly the mystery of the über tidy death room was becoming clearer.

Setting the cough syrup down, True pinched a corner of the sheets and lifted. The blankets crackled as they were peeled away from the mouth of the corpse, its grey decaying skin peeling away with it in chunks. Well, there was the last piece of that puzzle.

Dried vomit of a strange purple shade stuck to everything from the nose to the collarbones. The kid hadn't even turned its head, it had probably been unconscious. Knocked out by the cold medicine. It was kind of a peaceful way to die, at least for the kid. Mommy gives you an icky drink and tucks you in and then you just dream until you don't anymore. Wouldn't even hurt. Not how True would pick to go out, but they weren't a suffering child.

They checked the corpse's ears for jewelry and found nothing in the dried-up remnants of the lobes. No pockets on the pajamas. They unstuck the remaining lips from each other and pulled the jaw open. Decay had released the body from rigor mortis long since, rendering it pliable and fragile. They had to be careful with how they moved things, or parts were liable to break. Gently they rubber the purple stain from the molars. No evidence of fillings. Too bad, there was nothing else to harvest from the body. They gave the rest of the room a once-over but came up empty-handed. Children's rooms rarely had much tradeable content. Oh well, the vanco was more than enough to make up for this empty room, and the next few to come.

They retrieved a sheet from the unmade bed in the master bedroom, shook out the evidence of critter life, and laid it on the corpse's bedroom floor. Again, while they were crouched over the sheet, that bad gut feeling bubbled to the surface. Stronger than before. They reached for their shovel. Steady, steady. They glanced at the window. No one there. They unclipped the shovel. A floorboard creaked. True sprang like a startled cat. Whirling to face the sound, swinging their shovel about before them.

The intruder stumbled back, missing the knife edge of the shovel by a hair. A moment of tense stand-off passed with True glaring down the shovel handle at the cowering mass of blackened rags and sad eyes. Sighing, they lowered the shovel.

"Damn it, Radio, I told you to quit creeping around."

The pile of rags grinned.

"Told you to quit following me, too."

It shrugged, earning itself an irritated eye roll.

Radio, short for Radio Silent—which wasn't its name, but it was so fucking quiet all the time. They must have missed the signal for the telepathic tune-in. It was a dogged little shit. True had slipped off in increasingly sneaky ways, the last time even slinking away in the most dangerous hour of the day, right before the sun had risen, in hopes of giving it the slip.

Scavengers sometimes fathered schools of other vultures. Remoras that followed them around, feeding off the algae under the scavenger's fins. Some scavengers ignored them, some encouraged them by tossing chum, but True preferred to stomp on their little fish heads and scare them off.

"This is my shit, don't you try and take it." True lifted the shovel again in warning. Not that Radio ever touched their stuff, and its eyes didn't dance, and it didn't wear a medic patch, which meant enough for True to not whack it over the head. But man, they were over the stalking. They returned to finish their task of wrapping the body. Talk about a mood killer. How many more times were they gonna have to dodge that fucker before it got the hint? They worked alone, and for good reason: Everyone left on the planet sucked fat donkey balls. The end.