Happy Thanksgiving - "GOBBLE" (part 2) - November 28, 2024
A heated Thanksgiving dinner turns violent as an outbreak reaches inside the home...
Every Thursday, Silver Gecko Publishing highlights one of my stories, either a work of short fiction, a novel, or an audiobook. This week’s selection is a sample from the novelette “GOBBLE,” available on Kindle.
If you read the Silver Gecko Substack or checked out the newsletter two weeks ago, you’ll remember I already offered an except from GOBBLE: A Thanksgiving Novelette of the Zombie Apocalypse.
Because today is Thanksgiving, I figured it would be appropriate to let you all have a second helping of this story, which picks up right where we left off two weeks ago. I mean… this is where things really start getting good!
Enjoy your second helping, and pick up the Kindle version if you like what you’re reading.
-Kevin Carr
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Illustration by Pixabay
“GOBBLE: A Thanksgiving Novelette of the Zombie Apocalypse” by Kevin Carr
…Then Gail smiled, but it wasn’t a normal smile. She bared her teeth and squinted her eyes. A noise escaped from her throat like a laugh, and she patted her husband’s hands with her own, still clutching a knitting needle.
“Gail, honey,” Steven said softly, and he reached out to touch her face. She smiled more and leaned her cheek into his palm.
“Dad...” Sheryl started.
“Call 911,” Steven said curtly.
He ran his hand across her face and pressed his palm against her forehead.
“Is she okay?” Sheryl said, her voice cracking with emotion.
“I said call 911!” Steven replied, not taking his eyes off his wife.
Sheryl obediently pulled her phone from her pocket and dialed.
“Is she warm?” Mark asked.
“No,” Steven replied, pulling his hand away from her face and pressing his finger against the inside of her wrist. “She’s stone cold. And her pulse is very weak.”
Sheryl stepped behind her father and held out her phone.
“They’re busy,” she said.
“Busy?” Steven asked. “How is 911 busy?”
Sheryl put her hand on her father’s shoulder. “I think you should move away from her,” she said, her voice wavering.
“Keep trying,” Steven said. He kept looking into Gail’s milky eyes. She continued to smile back, adoring him in her own grotesque way. It was almost like a child looking at its mother with unconditional love.
“Dad,” Sheryl said. “You need to step away.”
Gail dropped her knitting needle and looked suddenly surprised. She then reached by her chair for it, fumbled past it, and ended up picking up a copy of Catholic Digest. She then tried to hand it to Steven, grunting slightly. Steven wrapped his fingers around the magazine and held it with her.
Sheryl turned to Mark. “We need to tie her up,” she said.
“What?” Mark asked.
“Trust me,” she said. “We need to restrain her now while she’s docile.”
“Docile?” Mark asked. “What are you talking about?”
Sheryl stepped close to him and looked him right in the eye. She was clinically serious. No emotion. This wasn’t her still being pissed off at him like she was earlier in the day. This was her taking control of the situation.
“Look,” Sheryl said softly so only Mark could hear. “We just ate, so she will be passive for the time being. But if she gets hungry, or we agitate her too much, then things are going to get very ugly.”
A look of realization washed across Mark’s face. “You’ve seen this before,” he said, shocked. “You know what this is.”
“Maybe,” she said. “And if there was ever a time to start praying, now’s the time to pray that I’m wrong.”
At this moment, Jesse came around the table to where Sheryl and Mark were talking. His look of jovial mischief was gone, and he wore a serious face.
“What the hell is going on here, kids?” he asked. “What happened to Gail?”
Sheryl turned to Jesse and said, “We’re going to find out. But first we need to restrain mom. It’s for her own good. And we need to keep dad back from her. I don’t want her...”
Sheryl’s voice trailed off. Jesse looked at her askance. “You don’t want her doing what?”
“Biting him,” she said softly.
Mark and Jesse did not respond. As absurd as that sounded, they had no reply.
“There’s some rope in the pantry,” Sheryl said. “Let me get that, and you two can come around behind her to tie her up. Me and Sammi will get dad away from her.”
“Sammi...” Jesse said and then turned towards the corner of the room, suddenly realizing that she had kept to herself this whole time. “Oh shit,” he said when he finally looked at her.
Sheryl and Mark turned to look at the corner of the room. Sammi still sat in her chair, her nose buried in her smart phone and her mess of curly hair partly covering her face. She was furiously swiping and tapping on the screen, making soft grunts as she did so.
“Sammi...” Jesse said, stepping towards her.
“No...” Sheryl said, reaching for Jesse’s shirt.
But it was too late.
Sammi looked up from her phone, and they all saw her eyes, milky and bloodshot. Her head hung forward, with her messy hair obscuring part of her face, but even through the hair, they could see her bared teeth. Only she wasn’t baring them in the nice, friendly way her mother had. She was practically drooling.
Sammi locked eyes with Jesse and screeched! The sound was so loud, Mark almost felt physically assaulted. Sheryl grabbed his sleeve and pulled him backwards into the kitchen.
Screaming like a banshee, Sammi leaped over the furniture and pounced on Jesse’s chest. He made an “Oof!” sound and tumbled backwards, between the sofa and the coffee table, a bright crimson spray of blood splattering across the upholstery. The two landed with a crash, and then it was Jesse who started screaming.
Under Jesse’s screams, they heard the sound of eating.
Steven stumbled backwards, almost tripping over the loveseat, a look of horror painted across his face. Sheryl took this moment of pause to step into the living room and pull him away.
“Dad!” Sheryl said, grabbing his arm and steadying him. “We have to fall back.”
Mark waited to make sure Steven wasn’t in shock. When he saw the man responding, he rushed through the kitchen to the back door.
But Sheryl was too quick for him. Just as he was fumbling with the door handle and opened it a crack, Sheryl struck her hand against it and slammed it shut. The frosted window rattled in its pane in protest.
“No,” she hissed. “We can’t.”
“What?”
“We need to quarantine ourselves. Or we risk spreading it.”
Mark looked at her in shock. “You know what this is,” he said with sudden realization.
Sheryl nodded solemnly. “At least I think I do,” she confirmed.
Mark felt cold all of a sudden. Her research project, he thought. Sheryl had not talked about the project much. He figured it involved a communicable disease because that was her area of expertise, and he knew the university was keeping it under wraps because that’s the standard for cutting-edge research. Sheryl had been extremely tight-lipped, and he assumed she had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Mark had assumed it was for something rather mundane to the layman. He never imagined it would be something like this.
“What’s happening?” Steven asked, tears welling up in his eyes. “What’s happening to my baby girl?”
Sheryl looked over his shoulder into the living room. She saw Sammi’s skinny body rise from behind the loveseat, her face wearing a beard of blood. Sammi grinned through crimson-stained teeth and made a huffing sound. Then she turned and walked slowly over to the china cabinet.
As Sheryl spoke, she kept her eyes on Sammi – and also on Gail, who had slumped back in her chair and was tangling her fingers in her knitting yarn, like a child pantomiming its mother.
“I can’t be sure,” Sheryl began, “but they appear to be exhibiting behavior indicative of the virus we have been studying.”
“What virus?” Steven asked.
“It’s the Somatic Involuntary Response Infection virus, or SIRI for short. We’ve only studied its effects on lower mammals, but this is what we have observed: loss of cognitive function, violent outbursts, distant behavior, confusion...” Sheryl took a deep breath before continuing: “...and cannibalism.”
“Cannibalism...” Mark said softly, letting the idea sink in as he remembered the beard of blood Sammi now wore.
Steven appeared to push his emotions aside and became more clinical, something his experience as a doctor had taught him. “It’s not species specific?”
“Not entirely,” Sheryl said. “Depends on the species. Dogs, no, but it will affect cats. Oddly enough, it doesn’t affect mice, but in a rat population, it will spread fast. We learned this the hard way in the lab.”
Mark shuddered. He didn’t want to know what “the hard way” was.
“So it’s contagious?” Mark asked.
“Yes, but only under specific circumstances. However, like Ebola, if those conditions are met, it’s extremely infectious.”
Steven nodded, understanding the jargon. Mark just looked at her, confused.
Sheryl saw this and quickly explained: “The disease will spread only with the transfer of bodily fluids – blood, saliva, feces. It’s not airborne, but if you get the pathogen inside you, like from a bite or ingesting tainted food, the chance of infection is alarmingly high.”
“Why did your sister attack like that?” Mark asked.
“She was hungry,” Steven said flatly.
Sheryl nodded slightly. “She didn’t eat much at dinner.”
“She never eats much,” Steven said, his voice cracking.
Mark looked over towards Sammi. She was staring at herself in the mirror of the china cabinet. It looked like she was making faces at herself and smiling, like a child who just discovered her father’s video camera.
Sheryl pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911 again. She got the same busy signal.
“Shit!” she said, shoving the phone back in her pocket. Then she turned to her father. “Do you still have your guns in the house?”
Steven nodded. “But... I can’t shoot her.”
Sheryl shook her head. “You saw what she did to Jesse.”
“But I can’t...”
“You might have to, Daddy. Not to kill her, but to stop her.” She looked her dad in the eye and said, “Shoot her in the leg if you have to.”
Steven nodded and turned to head to the back of the house. When he was gone, Sheryl said to Mark, “We need to find out how this spread here.”
“You think we brought this here?” Mark asked, shocked.
“I’m certain of it,” she said.
“But we’ve only been here a couple hours.”
“Sometimes that’s all it takes. Other times the incubation period lasts days. It’s different in every case.”
Mark kept checking back to the living room. Gail sat, looking confused, her hands knotted up in the yarn. Sammi continued to admire herself in the mirror, posing and squealing with glee.
“You’ve been sick,” Mark said accusingly. “You’ve been coughing all the way from Boston. And you were handling the food.”
Sheryl nodded and bit her bottom lip. The thought had already occurred to her.
Before she could speak, Steven returned holding two formidable automatic pistols. He handed one to Sheryl. “Here,” he said. “It’s loaded with one already in the chamber.” He then paused for a moment and said, “Please don’t kill her.”
Sheryl took the gun from her father. “I promise, Daddy.” Steven kept the other gun for himself, and Mark felt naked without one.
Steven turned back to look at his wife and daughter. Sheryl looked back at Mark and shook her head. “I hate these things,” she said and set the gun next to her on the counter.
Steven never did say why he only had two guns and not a third for him. Was it because he didn’t trust Mark yet? Was it because he only had two easily accessible?
However, Mark’s paranoid thinking was suddenly broken by the sound of cackling.
All three turned to the living room. Both Sammi and Gail heard it too. Gail froze in her chair, looking forward, and Sammi finally had her attention drawn away from herself in the mirror.
The cackling continued, and the family watched in horror as Jesse slowly sat up by the loveseat. Part of his face was missing, peeled away to expose his white skull. His suit was stained with a tongue of blood in the shape of Florida, dripping down his sizeable belly. One of his eyes was hanging from its socket.
Yet, he didn’t seem to be in pain. Instead, he was laughing.
The sound cut through the room, high-pitched and staccato. He leaned forward and made eye contact with Gail, then laughed louder.
“Holy shit,” Mark whispered.
“I told you it can spread fast,” Sheryl said.
Jesse stood, grunts interspersed in his cackle. As he rose, blood started to seep from his massive facial wound. The blood spread down his front, obscuring the almost perfect image of Florida into a massive blotch.
Sammi grunted at him, then turned back to the mirror, softly cooing to herself as she posed and grinned. Gail barked at him but still didn’t stand up.
Jesse hadn’t noticed them in the kitchen just yet, and they stood in stunned silence as they watched him move around the room. Eventually, he settled on the mantle, which had been covered in too many framed photographs of family.
Jesse picked up one of the frames and looked at it, curiously. Then he looked up suddenly and cackled again. He dropped it, breaking the glass in the frame, and he grabbed another. This one made him laugh just as hard, only he didn’t drop this one. He threw it. Right at Gail…