Our story so far...
Kaveh woke up cottonmouthed. His head was throbbing, his stomach hurt, and he was hungry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.
He looked around. He was on the floor of a bank, but he didn't know how he'd gotten there or why he was so hungry. He got up, and something fell on the floor. It looked like sausages. He'd never been this hung over in his life.
Everything seemed far away, like he was looking at the world through a dirty window. His body was heavy, and moving took his full concentration. Still, his feet dragged on the floor, and his arms propped themselves rigidly in front of him.
There were more people on the floor, but none of them moved. He stepped around them and went to the door. There was a desk in the way, so he moved it. The door was locked, so he tore it open and stepped out into the night.
The parking lot was on his right, three cars sitting silently. He knew there was something missing, something of his, but he couldn't remember what it was. He put one foot in front of the other, keeping his eyes on the edge of the sidewalk as his feet swerved crooked lines down the street.
He wandered without a destination. Each time he came to an intersection, he would turn in a random direction.
Somewhere, his feet stumbled off the curb in front of a car. He tried to get out of the way. He expected the panic and adrenaline to make him move faster, but they never came. He couldn't avoid the crash, but that didn't come either. The car wasn't moving, and nobody was at the wheel.
As he shuffled out of the street, he looked up at the building in front of him. He remembered this place. It was going to be his restaurant. The doors were boarded up, but he'd never gone in through the front. He stumbled around to the kitchen entrance in the back and stopped so he could search his pockets. He couldn't find his keys. He couldn't remember, couldn't think where they might be.
He looked at the door and saw the padlock was gone. He pulled the door open and stepped inside. It was dark in the kitchen, but he felt something just ahead. There was something in here he wanted.
"Kaveh?"
Someone had spoken. Kaveh stumbled towards the source of the voice.
"What happened to you?" said the voice. Kaveh got closer and saw the speaker, a fat man with white hair. "Did you get the money?" asked the man.
Kaveh tried to answer him. Something inside him made him think the answer was important, but the only noise that came out was a long dull moan.
The man backed away. "They got you?" he said. Kaveh followed him. He couldn't say why, but there was something he needed. The man backed himself up against the wall. He reached for the shelf above his head, found an eight inch sauce pot and brought it down on Kaveh's head. Kaveh doubled over, but he didn't feel the blow. All he could feel was hunger. The old man's ample stomach was right in front of him. He leaned forward and bit. The man screamed.
Kaveh chewed as blood poured out of the stomach, soaking the man's apron. He needed more.
The man tried to shove him away, but Kaveh grabbed his hands, got a hold on the sauce pot and yanked it away.
The man groped along the wall and found a paring knife, but Kaveh hit him with the sauce pot. The man's skull caved in, his body went limp, and he fell straight down. The pot warped into something unrecognizable, so Kaveh let it go and knelt over the white haired corpse. He couldn't stop. His hunger consumed him.
He ripped off bits of flesh and devoured them, but nothing came close to his hunger. He ate the stomach, the liver and intestines by the yard, which might have worked if he added a little cilantro or saffron, but he wasn't satisfied. He reached into the fractured skull, got a handful of the brain and took a bite.
It was a revelation. He finished what was in his hand and went back for more. He could do something with this, make something delicious.
He stood up, remembering where they kept the spices, and went to the stove. The shelf was empty except for a sprung empty rat trap. All the ingredients were gone. What had happened here? He remembered the room clearly being full of tomatoes and flour and hundreds of strands of slowly drying homemade pasta, but this wasn't his restaurant, it was the place he wanted to buy. He worked across town. This was Tony's.
Tony. That was it. He went back to the corpse on the ground. It was Tony, the man who was selling him the restaurant. What had he done? He tried to apologize to the man, but he could only moan.
Kaveh looked at Tony's face and waited for the guilt to drag him down, but he didn't feel it. He saw the look that was frozen in Tony's eyes, the look he'd always seen from him, that he was something different, something to be feared. Kaveh had wanted to show him how wrong he was, but there would never be another chance, and those intestines were looking tastier by the second.
A distant moan caught Kaveh's ear.
He stood up. The moan continued, making the same noise Kaveh's throat made when he tried to communicate. Someone else was out there in the same predicament. Some instinct awakened inside him, and he followed the noise. Kaveh left the restaurant and stumbled down the street in the direction of the moans. His limbs didn't seem as heavy, and the world didn't seem as far away. Tony had raised his spirits, the way a good meal usually did, but he wanted more. Wherever the voice led him, he hoped there would be something good to eat.
He followed the noise for blocks. When he got closer, he realized it wasn't a single person moaning but an entire group going at the same pitch. He rounded the corner and saw them, dozens of them, moaning, limbs rigid, dragging their feet. It was all like something he'd seen before, but he couldn't think where. These people were just like him, except that they were fighting to get into Earl's Taco Shack. Kaveh wouldn't be caught dead eating in a place like that.
Still, he was hungry, and seeing everyone else trying to get inside made him want what was in there. He stumbled forward. Even though the neon "open" sign was lit, the windows were boarded up from inside. There was a crescent moon shaped hole in the door with a gun barrel poking out of it. Everyone was so eager to get in, they didn't seem to care, but the gun went off, and the person in front of the door fell to the ground. Kaveh was shocked, but the crowd kept pushing forward and moaning.
Kaveh shuffled along the edge of the group. The gun went off again, and someone else went down, horrifying Kaveh. Whatever was happening to him was happening to them, too. He hadn't had a sense of community this strong since leaving Iran, and he'd be damned if anyone was going to threaten these people. He called out to the others with the only sound he could make, giving the moan all his urgency and intensity.
A woman turned her head and moaned in his direction. He moaned louder, and she followed the noise. Their combined voices lured more people from the crowd, and when they had a good number, Kaveh rounded the edge of the building, moaning for the rest of them to follow.
There were no windows to board up on the side of the building, no obvious ways in, but when they got to the back, they found the loading dock. Kaveh grabbed the doorknob and pulled. It ripped clear of the door. He tried to get his finger in the doorknob hole, but his hands wouldn't work right.
The group he'd gathered shoved in behind him and pushed him against the door. It needed to open out, and they weren't giving him room. He gestured them to back up, but they kept shoving. He shoved back, but they outnumbered him.
Soon his group were clustered in front of the door, pounding with their hands. It was a disorganized mess. Kaveh slammed his shoulder against the door, but it held fast. He rotated the man next to him and rocked him back and forth until he slammed into the door, which the man continued to do mindlessly. Kaveh grabbed someone else and pushed them to slam their weight against the door in the same rhythm.
Soon, the whole group was smashing into the door together, and it was starting to buckle. Kaveh went to join them, but he stopped when something fell out of his stomach.
All other thoughts went out of his head. He stood there staring at a pile of ground meat covering his shoes, with a rhythmic pounding coming from nearby. He was so hungry. He heard a crash and looked up. A doorway was open, and the others were going through. He followed their moans.
There were people inside, but they weren't like Kaveh and his group. When he looked at them, all he saw was food. He moved forward, keeping pace with his friends. A loud noise rang out, and one of them fell, but they pressed forward together. When they closed in on their targets, Kaveh thrashed with his arms, and the fight was over. He started eating.
It wasn't bad. From the apron, this girl had worked the grill, and he appreciated the light basting of grease it gave her, but he wanted more. He saw the gouge in her head, reached inside and took a bite of brains.
This brain wasn't the same as Tony's. It had more gristle, more white matter, but it was just as delicious in an entirely different way. He kept eating. Every bite was a new taste experience, like fireworks going off in his mouth. It made him think of France, of cordon bleu and beouf en daube. He needed a different brain, to see what other flavors he might find. He went to another Earl's Taco Shack employee, where his new friends were eating the muscles and torso. They were missing the best part. These people would eat anything.
He pulled off the head and smashed it into the ground, but the skull didn't open. That could have been why the others ignored it, but Kaveh knew it'd be worth the effort. There was a whole new brain trapped in there. He cracked it against the edge of the counter and was rewarded with an outpouring of sweet delicious brains.
He closed his eyes, savored the aroma and the texture. The intricately folded pink organ tried to fall apart in his hands, so he moved it quickly to his mouth and managed to have it unravel across his tongue as he chewed. It was delicate and juicy at the same time. It was the most delicious brain yet. The taste awakened thoughts and images that flooded his mind, a gravel road snaking up the side of a mountain, cups of coffee over the faded counter of a late night diner, the smiling face of a beautiful woman he'd never seen before. Where were these thoughts coming from?
He wanted to share this flavor and fought the urge to keep eating. He opened his eyes and looked around, and that's when he realized he was surrounded by zombies. He stood up, but they ignored him, continuing to feed on the dead humans around him. He looked closer at the zombies and realized these were the same people he'd led inside, his new friends. He looked at his own hands to find them pale and bloodless. He saw the festering bite mark on his shoulder, and he remembered what'd happened.
He remembered leaving the vault to protect his friends, rushing through the zombies to get more bullets, then turning and shooting them one by one. He'd kept a count in his mind to make sure there'd be a bullet left for himself, but he hadn't been able to use it. He looked down and remembered what had happened to his stomach, the zombie that had eaten his intestines as he was dying and couldn't stop it. He cupped his spilling guts and pushed them back inside. He took the apron from the body of the griller and wrapped it tightly around his stomach.
He couldn't believe it. He was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it. He hadn't really expected death to be jannah or heaven, but he never thought it would be like this. He didn't feel bliss or torment, not even regret. All he felt was hungry.
There were some brains left, but he wanted to share those. All he'd ever really wanted in life was to share the foods he loved with those around him. These were his people now, and he wanted that sense of community. He took a handful of brains and offered them to the nearest zombie. The zombie lifted his face from the arm he was eating, his face red with blood. He looked at the brains and went back to eating the arm, his eyes showing no awareness at all. Without brains, it was all he could do.
Kaveh went around the room, but none of the other zombies were interested either. They just looked up with the same vacant looks on their faces. He heard the moaning from outside, where the rest of the crowd was waiting, so he opened the door.
The rest of the zombies poured in. He held up the brains in his hand and waited for one of them to take it. The crowd ignored him and gathered around the remains of the humans. It turned out they wouldn't eat anything, that they were just as wary of his food as they had been when they were alive.
Kaveh refused to accept that. These were his people, and he wanted them to see the world the way he did. If they didn't appreciate skull-fresh brains, he'd have to come up with a better recipe.
There was a kitchen here. He might use their ingredients to make something appealing, but his supplies were gone. The crowd of zombies had eaten every last scrap of human and were starting to wander off in search of new victims. They must have eaten brains in the course of it, but it hadn't affected their behavior. They were mindless killing machines, and they would only confirm people's prejudices.
A zombie came up and took the last bit of brains from Kaveh's hand. It was the bank manager, Mister Shankly, with the same dull look in his eyes. As the manager ate, Kaveh searched his face for any hint of recognition, even a smile at the taste of it. There might have been something, but then it was gone, and the manager walked away.
If Kaveh was going to perfect the recipe, he needed more brains, which meant finding more of the living. He moaned, and the zombies looked at him. He went out the front door and moaned again. The zombies followed, moaning in response and attracting more of them. Kaveh and his new friends set off in search of fresh ingredients.
Up next, Chapter Five - Anarchy Strikes Back
Or take a break from the story and read my thoughts on the politics and economics of the walking dead or on the influence of a certain king of the impossible.
