Chapter I: The Living and The Dead
It was me and Evan's turn to make the trip out to Dearborn to pick up food for the gang back home. Detroit wasn't well stocked to begin with and you could guess there was a run to snatch up anything worth snatching when the government ordered everyone out of the city. So it was that "Little Riyadh" was the closest place we could go to get supplies. For certain things we would have to go farther out into the suburbs. That wasn't exactly a bad thing though, having no food meant you didn't have a lot of people around and not having a lot of people meant there wasn't much food in Old Detroit for the eaters. As you can guess there being not a lot of food meant you didn't have a lot of eaters and eaters, well they really were only a problem when you had a lot of them. One or two, that was nothing; they're slow, they're dumb, you can take 'em out with ease. Get yourself into the mix with a large crowd of 'em, then you're in a world of hurting. They're just like people in that regard; a thousand drooling morons are more dangerous than any one of us clever folk.
I drove our little baby blue Ford Fiesta into Dearborn on a humid as fuck Monday morning. There weren't too many eaters out; they don't start getting bad til you get more towards Ann Arbor. I looked over the storefronts as we passed through the city streets. There was a hookah bar and halal butcher shop on one side of the street and a civic center on the other side. Just a few blocks back there was some swanky strip club that had gotten itself burnt down. The signage here on the stores and billboards was as much in Arabic as it was in English. Going to Dearborn felt like I was taking a trip to a fucking foreign country every time even though it was just a few miles from the house. In the passenger seat next to me Chompers was stroking one of those aluminum baseball bats, like he was itching to use it. He was supposed to be keeping a lookout but that boy's mind was always in other places. Good thing I knew all the streets of Metro Detroit so well that I didn't need a navigator or we'd be getting lost as fuck on a regular basis. "Ya know T.T. we wouldn't be having all these problems with the motherfuckin' eaters if the motherfuckin' CIA would have just stopped testing their motherfuckin' germ weapons out in motherfuckin Africa." Evans complained just to make conversation. "Don't tell me you believe that nonsense boy." I retorted back to him. "It's the truth pops. It's just like the motherfuckin' AIDS virus. The CIA always be dumping toxic shit onto Africa, that's why there never was no peace over there." Evans replied. "You youngins' and your crazy conspiracies, you probably believe that JFK was killed by the Martians or something." I jokingly dismissed. "Naw man, that was the Cubans and the CIA; President Bush was a Martian." Evans replied. "Which one? You do know there were two Bushes." I asked. "Both of them, dumb and dumber. Now they weren't really dumb though, they were just lizards." Evans answered in all seriousness. "You a hoot boy! You a hoot!" I laughed.
We came to the place now, it was one of those sketchy bodegas with all the pornos and incense everywhere but they also were well stocked with can goods and beef jerky. You see jerky is one of the last sources of reliable meat these days. All the choice cuts they went bad early on when people abandoned the infrastructure. Damn corporate assholes wouldn't be keeping the lights on for free so they shut the grid down when their workers started to turn. You don't see animals running around here these days, not even stray cats and dogs, damn eaters ate them all. Hell I haven't even seen one fat rat in Detroit lately. Between jerky and peanut butter, that's how we got our protein. Thank God for canned fruit or we'd be having coming down with the sailors' disease too. Me and Evans went in and filled out bags up with whatever we could find. He grabbed a couple smut mags and cigars too but fuck it; I wasn't going to say anything. We loaded up the car with it and I went back in to fetch another sackful while Chompers stood guard outside. The eaters had started to take notice of our scent and a couple of them started across the street. I heard the clink of that metal bat contacting the skull of one of those things outside. That sound meant I had to hurry. I didn't have to worry about eaters inside however, the shop owner and his wife both committed suicide together a long time ago. I had done them the respects of burying their bodies out behind the dumpster. I believe when a man dies as a human he's owed the respect not to be left rotting out on the sidewalk like a festering eater. See we know how to stop them from coming back, you jab a spike or other sharp object into the base of their skull and that stops the germ from rebooting the brain, lets a man die as a human being. I heard the bat go clink again and again followed by the crunch of bones and Chompers shouting all sorts of profanity at a corpse. I wrapped up the run by grabbing some aspirin and paper towels then went out to the car.
Chompers had done good work; there were four eaters now on the ground because of his slugging away and no more seemed to be coming towards us. After I loaded up and got into the driver's seat Chompers ran off, chasing down an eater wearing a red bandana that wasn't even bothering us. He clubbed it in the back first, then the knees, which was all a waste of time in my eyes. Lastly he went for the head, smashing it into a bloody pulp on the sidewalk. Evans then came running back to the car and we drove off. "Seriously boy, the one brother walking around out there and you've got to go smash him to death. Waste of energy boy, waste of time." I chastised him. "That wasn't no brother, that was a Blood." Evans rebutted. "You need to can that gangbanging shit boy; that stuff is old news. We ain't got the luxury to be holding on to old hatreds; people is people, eaters are eaters, there's no more difference than that." I upbraided him. All this time and we still got knuckleheads in the world. Eventually they all got to learn to face reality if we're going to get through this. The reality is this, that there ain't but two kinds of people in the world these days, the living and the dead.