Life on Mars?

By nickie Rivers

Pepper stood in front of the bathroom sink and tried to apply eye makeup for a third time.  She was trying for something Egyptian looking, but the first two tries she had ended up looking like a Goth Lolita and that was the exact opposite look from what she had been trying for.  Her peach underwear blended into her pale skin.  From a distance she appeared naked.  She teased herself with the illusion that someone in the apartment across the street might be looking at her through a telescope.

She had lost weight the past few weeks.  She wasn’t eating right.  You would think that living off crisps and pints of bitter would be the window to weight gain and not a one way street to skeleton city.

Satisfied that her eye makeup had avoided dark and heavy and moved into subtle and exotic, she brushed her teeth with a tube of Crest and a bottled Dasani.  Dasani was the water bottled by Coke.  When they had first launched the product in England, they had used purified water from the Thames, ignoring the literal impossibility that was purifying water from the Thames.  She liked to drink it anyway.  The minerals added a crisp taste you couldn’t find in other bottled water.

There she went, thinking about crisps again.  She hated going to the market, which was why she had moved into the apartment above the pub in the first place.  In the landscape of your imagination, living off beer nuts, crisps and pints of bitter sounded really fantastic when you were seventeen.  The reality was that the food was greasy and heavy and stumbling around in the candlelight sloshed on Guinness and Harp Lager and pissing in the street was only amusing for a couple of months.

She could move, but it took a week to lug all the stuff from her Fat… from her Fath… from that other place the first time and she would be damned if she was going to pack up now.  Plus, as much as she griped about the morning after she still loved having the bar to herself at night.

She dressed quickly, throwing on white jeans, high topped black hiking boots and a Hello Kitty T-Shirt.  Pepper pinned on a diamond encrusted Hello Kitty broach she had found in the Macy’s display window.  For two hours she stood in the street staring at the broach, wondering how to bust the lock on the steel shutters blocking the store entrance.  As the sun winked down on her and she stared off into the empty street it finally occurred to her.  She picked up a trash can and tossed it through the window.

With the power off everywhere in London there wasn’t even an alarm sounding to make her feel false guilt.  She picked the broach out of the broken glass and went home and drank herself to sleep by candlelight wishing there were still Rashers to come and take her away.

Suitably dressed, Pepper picked up the tightly swaddled bundle from the middle of the bed and slung it around her neck.  She was making an early start, which was a good thing since it was easily a three hour walk to the station.

She made her way downstairs and through the hollow pub.  There were empty bottles strewn about the floor from the previous nights revelry.  She stepped gingerly over each brown and amber bottle.

“Brave little soldiers,” she whispered, “your service is done.  Salute.”

She closed the pub door behind her and locked it.  Best to be safe.  It wouldn’t do to have uninvited guests when she returned.

She turned around and sucked in a lung full of air with frightened bird chirp.  Waiting at the bottom of the stairs leading to the pub door was the parcel bouncer.

“Hello, Teddy,” Pepper said.

Teddy moaned a hello, black drool leaking down his chin.  Teddy wasn’t holding up.  His head lolled badly to the right and his jaw was cocked off center.  His skin had turned a moldy algae green and was beginning to flake off in spots like a diseased Dalmatian.  There was a gunshot wound under his left ear and a good chunk of his hair and skull was missing above his right ear.  The exposed brain was a vibrant pink and it wriggled slowly like leeches in a jar when he moved.

“Do I have mail today, Teddy?” Pepper asked.

Teddy rolled his head forward and fished around in his parcel bag with one hand.  He pulled out a crumpled letter and two peach colored Hallmark greeting cards, both addressed to a Linnea Kennington.

“Thank you, Teddy.” Pepper said, taking the post and tucking it into her back pocket.  She patted him on the shoulder and stepped around him and into the alley.  Teddy would wander away and return tomorrow with more letters.  If she hadn’t been distracted by the end of the world Pepper might have wondered where he got them.

Pepper skips to the corner of Old Barracks Yard and Wilton Mews, holding a pink Hello Kitty satchel tight against her chest with one hand.  The city is quiet today.  Missing is the sound of gunfire or the screams of the dying.  These alien sounds have become as familiar as the chirping of crickets under a wood porch.  Instead of these sounds Pepper looks at the sun which has become bleached white by a sea of cloudless blue.  She listens to a thunderous pounding hammering on her eardrums.  It stops when she realizes that the sound is her heartbeat pounding in her chest.

“I need to do this,” Pepper says aloud.  Her reply is a hungry moan from one of the abandoned buildings surrounding the pub she calls home.

It is a fifteen minute walk to the tube station.  As she walks Pepper is again entranced by the blistering silence.  It has been four weeks since she last left the pub and the landscape has changed.  Before the first pains started she hid in the pub while the world fell apart around her.  The sparse pantry in the pub held out until the electricity failed and after that she was able to capture all the rats she needed by stacking garbage in the alley behind the pub.

The window of the Virgin music store has been smashed and a female zombie in a dark blue business suit with a ‘too short’ skirt stands in the open window like a mannequin.  In one hand the zombie is holding a dead swan by the neck.  The bird’s feathers are ragged and edged with black where it has been dragged on the pavement.  Alive, the swans swim in the channel under the Kingsford bridge.  The woman waits in stillness, holding one hand to her ear as if she is listening for the music that played from overhead speakers before the power failed a week ago.

Pepper puts one arm under her pink bundle and rocks it, waiting silently for the female cannibal to move.  When it doesn’t, she resumes her walk.  The undead thing will wait in the window until the flesh rots off its bones.

At the tube station the white tile stairway leads down into total darkness.  Pepper tosses a pebble into the darkness and listens as it tumbles down the stairs.  She can hear the scurried rustling of rodent feet and she can see the flashes of tiny red eyes staring up at her.  Pepper doesn’t enter the tube station.  She doesn’t have a torch.  She makes a mental note that this will be an excellent hunting ground for rats if they stop raiding the garbage behind the pub.

As Pepper presses on she encounters a gang of three flesh eaters who have been fighting over the body of a dead cat.  Cat entrails are spread across the length of the street like the grasping arms of a giant squid.  The leader of the gang shuffles up to pepper, bent over like a gorilla.  The flesh on its back is split open.  The spine sticks up through the torn flesh like the armor plated ridges of a stegosaurus.  Head hung low the shirtless thing sniffs at Pepper as it passes a severed cat head from hand to hand.  Satisfied on a primal level, the dead flesh of its lips separates in a half grin.  It offers up the cat head to Pepper.  The ear twitching.

“Thank you no, Sam.  I had crisps before I left the pub.”

Sam nods at her and offers the cat head again.  The tongue twitches in the first spasm of reanimation.

“We both ate,” Pepper says.

Repeating her encounter with Teddy, Pepper pats Sam on the shoulder.  A shudder passes through him and he wanders back to his group.  The other two monsters, twin teenage girls with hair in ragged pigtails, have skinned the cat and divided the meat into three equal portions.  They hunch over bloody chunks, passing Sam a leg when he returns.

Pepper hasn’t seen this behavior before.  The three zombies have banded together in a cannibalistic clan.  Is this the first face of a new landscape, one where zombies have become the natives and flesh-and-blood humans flee from them in packs like wild gazelle?

Pepper walks among them unscathed, a pink satchel wrapped around her chest like the oxygen tank of an astronaut.  Her life has become a stranger to itself.  The act of waking, breathing, blood pumping in her veins has separated her from those she would call her kin.  She exists torn between two worlds, observing their strange life on mars like an alien visitor.

As morning becomes afternoon Pepper reaches the Wiltshire Police Station.  Her back is aching and her feet howl like stray dogs, but it is her heart that pulls down at her soul.

With a heavy sigh she enters.

A voice calls out to her from within the moment she unlocks the door.  She keeps the key on a shoelace tied around her neck.

“Pepper?” the voice calls.  “Pepper, please.”

She doesn’t answer.  She enters the station keeping a healthy distance between herself and the long hallway where the holding cells are located.

A shadow moves in the holding cell furthest from the door.

“I’m out of food.  I’m out of water.  I’m starving.  Did you bring me more food?  I’m sorry, Pepper, I’m so sorry.”

Pepper unwraps the pink bundle.  It is tightly swaddled.  “I brought someone to see you, Father.”

“I’m so sorry.  I know I can’t make it up to you.  You have to let me out of here.”

“It was so hard birthing her alone.  She was a breach and the cord cut off her oxygen.”

“No, Pepper, please, no more.”

“She wouldn’t take milk,” Pepper says, talking to herself, trying not to hear the cries, pleading and tears tumbling out of her Father.  “I had to use rat’s blood.  After that she started to grow and grow.”

“I want you to meet your daughter, Father.”

“I call her Mary Anna.”

The tiny body is pale white and the eyes are pale blue swimming in a sea of cloudy white.

“I think she is ready for solid food.”

“For the love of God, Pepper!”

“Yes, Father,” Pepper says, “for the love of God.”

# # #

Copyright © 2011 by nickie Rivers

Find her at: http://twitter.com/nickierivers

Cover and art copyright © 2011 by Alina Angisch.

Find her at: http://lilithschlangenauge.deviantart.com/

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead is entirely coincidental. All right reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from nickie Rivers.

October 2011.