CLAIRE DAVON

Excerpt

Brains are overrated. They’re just a collection of squishy parts that didn’t resemble the good stuff. For one thing, they’re the wrong color. Meat should be red and dripping, not white and stringy. I understood that they were protein, but they weren’t what I favored. I craved the real thing. Juicy, delicious meat.

Brains were gross.

“Tastes like chicken,” one of my new zombie friends had joked—before his tongue had rotted and made speech impossible. Now he moaned and lolled his head as so many like us did. He’d been smart once, but the infection made him stupid and single minded. It would turn us all into idiots, in time. The virus followed a different path for each person, so I had anywhere from a week to a few months. I was hoping for the latter. It might give me time to figure a way out of this mess. That was a false hope, but I had nothing else.

Brains didn’t taste like chicken.  I ate those too, when I could find the little bastards. They were fast and as the disease took our fingers and toes, grabbing them was tough. I gobbled them up when I was lucky enough to catch one of the few that were left. Before the world ended, I would have cooked the thighs of pre-packaged birds with a variety of spices that made them flavorful and delicious. Now their feathers tickled my throat. In no time that flesh would decay and I would stop caring.

I was in the initial stages. My time was finite, as was all of us who had caught the damned strain. I’d seen my future and it wasn’t pretty, but that was tomorrow’s problem.