Free APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead by K Helms Page B

she peeked through the nicotine stained venetian blinds to see Carl standing at the steel core door. He was looking around like he was making sure the cops weren’t after him then he hammered at the door again, harder this time.
                  “Hold on!” she screamed. “Malik, go to your room!” Beth figured that Carl had scored the dope and she didn’t want Malik standing there watching and asking a bunch of stupid questions. She slid the security chain and turned the lock in the doorknob, opening it for her boyfriend.
                  Carl burst into the room, slamming the door behind him. He fumbled for the chain, dropped it, picked it up again and this time slid it into its track, securing it.
                  “Carl…what the fush is wrong with you?” Crystal always slurred the word, drunk, tweaked or jonesin'; her missing teeth made the word sort of whistle from her decaying mouth.
                  He turned to her, his eyes wide and round. “Some weird shit’s going on Beth.”
                  “Crystal,” she corrected. His left eye twitched once then he back handed her across the mouth making her head snap sideways. She looked back at him as if he’d given her a playful slap on the rump.
                  “Shhh…shut up, shut up….” he said holding up a finger and peeked out the blinds. She waited quietly as the scrawny, unshaven, middle-aged man turned back to her. “People are biting each other out there.”
                  “I like to bite,” she said in her sexiest voice, as she dug with her broken nails at a scab on the side of her neck. Carl looked at her, twitching again. He contemplated smacking her again, but decided not to.
                  “Are you stupid? I just told you that people are biting each other… eating each other.”
                  “You can eat me if you want,” she said. The scab broke open and blood trickled down her neck. He backhanded her hard this time, leaving a red welt across her cheek and stinging his hand.
                  “Hey….” she said with an exaggerated pout.
                  Something heavy banged against the glass of the large living room window. A shadow of a man’s silhouette filled the center of the picture window and they heard it groan loud and long like the Gloom, Despair, and Agony guys from Hee Haw.
                  Carl hurried to the back door that led to the alley. He jerked it open, looked both ways up the alley and ran, leaving her standing by the couch, bleeding, confused and angry that the only ‘smack’ she had gotten was five across the face. She turned back to the window.
                  “Get offa my window you asshole!” she screamed, veins standing out on her neck and forehead.
                  “Mommy?” It was Malik; he looked scared and was holding his infant sister Candy in his arms. “Candy stinks.”
                  “Fush!” Beth yelled and angrily snatched the baby from his arms. She smacked the small boy in the back of the head. “You’re fushin' worthless!”
                  The window shattered and Malik cried out. He ran back to his room, crying and slamming the door shut behind him. Beth spun and saw a disheveled man that she didn’t recognize climb over the window sill. His head became entangled in the blinds and he fell clumsily to the floor. She could see that he was covered in blood and the smell that he exuded was putrid, even by her standards. The man thrashed his arms wildly as he stood again and shook off the blinds. He tilted his head back and yelled incoherently in a deep guttural baritone. From outside she could hear a chorus of groans, as if in reply.
                  She cradled the baby against her withered chest as Candy jerked her arms and kicked her legs, screaming in red-faced fury.