Westmarket

Daily Special

Matthew sat at the corner of the diner counter, nursing a miserable scotch. In the recesses of the restaurant, he could hear the bang and clang of pots as the Westmarket Blobs (What were their names? He was sure that girl Cheryl had told him.) prepared a lunch of hamburgers and greasy fries all topped with streams of thick, fattening gravy. It was a meal that was pleasantly vile. He caught one the misshapen human being's attention and with a nod of his head conveyed his wish for them to make a third helping. The Blob smiled widely and got to work, slapping another burger on the grill for his benefit.

He glanced at the large windows that lined the restaurant, giving a good view of the progression of the undead disease that had captured the rest of the city. Thick piles of corpses lay against the glass in layers of once human sediment, the grey flesh decomposing quickly beneath the onslaught of radioactive sunlight. They were layered a good three feet deep and as Matthew watched he could see tendrils of grey human dust carried on the rare breeze, eddying upward to the corner of the box store, where the ashen remnants of people circled in a halo against the beige bricks. He took a larger gulp of his scotch and turned away, nausea only partially quelled.

"It's something, isn't it?" his companion said, and Matthew tipped his glass to Robert, bidding the former trucker to pour him another. Robert made his way behind the counter, his fingers searching out the booze stock that Matthew himself had put in place. He found sherry next to the register, and since Matthew wasn't feeling fussy, he nodded and allowed Robert to pour the cherry red liquid into his glass tumbler. He filled it to the brim, and Matthew had to keep his hand steady lest he spill a drop. "They've all scattered off like roaches, but they'll be back at dusk and at daybreak when the sun doesn't shine on this side of the store. See that one in the corner, there?" He pointed with a fat, pink finger at the window in the centre, a skull glaring back at them with its open mouth screaming dissent. "That one tripped and didn't make it out of the shadow. The sun just fried him up and he couldn't do nothing about it. Like a dried up worm on a sunny sidewalk after a rainstorm, you know what I mean?"

"I guess so," Matthew said, not really caring about dried up things outside that should have been dead anyway. He sipped at his sherry and made a face. It was worse than the scotch.

"You taking a break from taking care of your friend?" Robert asked.

"Dan is upstairs with him for now," Matthew said. "Beatrice said he needs to be watched since he's not fully out of his delirium. So far what he's saying still isn't making much sense."

"I heard what he said about Strome," Robert replied, concerned. "About how he fell apart--snapped in half, isn't that what he said?--That it gets so cold out there at night you freeze solid where you stand. But he made it back and he's saying it was the strobe light that saved him. I don't know, how can that even be scientifically possible?" Robert shuddered and pushed the bottle of sherry back under the counter, as though it were responsible for bad dreams. "Do you believe what he said? Do you really think that's what's going on out there?"

"We can always open the doors and find out," Matthew said, and drained the rest of his glass.

Robert was pensive. He walked out from behind the diner counter and pulled up a stool next to Matthew, and watched the Blobs as they worked hard in the kitchen, greasy smoke rising up from the grill as the hamburgers seared. "They got a real aptitude for this," he said, envious in his praise. "Cheryl says one of them is an IT specialist, can't remember which one."

"What are their names?" Matthew asked.

"Not sure. Dunno. Cheryl told me, but I suck at remembering names. Faces, sure, but not names." He picked at a crack in the counter top, his dirty nail still stained with grease from long years spent alone with nothing but a dog and a truck. He kept his baseball cap low, his shoulders hunched forward. He looked to Matthew like a man who wanted to say something but wasn't sure it was safe to. He'd been in that position more times in his own life than he cared to examine but he wasn't about to the be the one to break the shell of secrecy. Robert wasn't as good at it as Matthew had been.