Corn, Cows, and the Apocalypse

So It Begins

There's always a starting point to every story. The story of my training with Garrett should have started two weeks ago, but it didn't. I hadn't realized that he didn't believe in me any more than I believed in myself. His efforts to groom my fighting skills had thus far been perfunctory, a torpid attempt to induce the use of my natural survival skills: kick, punch, bite, run. After the kitchen incident, he started to see my underlying skill—albeit unrefined—at thinking on my feet. That was when Garrett decided to start training me for real.

When I came downstairs and found the couch empty, I wasn't surprised. Garrett was an early riser and rarely out-slept me. He had taken to sleeping on the couch instead of a room upstairs. His excuse was that without a nightly watch rotation he needed to be our first line of defense against the grim, but I think he just wanted to keep me from sneaking off in the middle of the night.

I did however find the lack of breakfast odd. He wasn't much of a housekeeper, but either out of graciousness or expediting progress, he had been making breakfast for us. Since I didn't see him or smelled spam frying, I went to the back door to see if he was battling a trespassing grim outside.

I reached for the doorknob but it was gone. Locked or unlocked, it made no difference; the hardware within kept the door shut. Aside from the gaping hole that allowed free admission to bugs, I assumed that it was an attempt at securing the house, since we were without a proper night watch. I headed to the side door in the kitchen, but that knob was gone also.

It took a lot to scare me, especially these days, but the thought of being trapped in a confined space was ranking on my "pee your pants" level. "Garrett?" I said quietly, hoping that he was going to jump out and attack soon, so I could fold like a weak chair and disappoint his efforts.

I heard movement from the laundry room, just off the back of the living room. The room had nothing to be frightened of, except that it led to the basement, the place where our deceased resident was stored.

The former elderly man should have been subdued by my holy water, but the process did require fairly regular updates to prevent emergence. It was the downside of keeping bodies in the home, but it was just an unwritten rule that if we took a house, we had to protect the residents from changing. It seemed noble—past tense included.

I decided, with the little bravery that I had, to go check it out. I was confident the resident was secure. I assumed it was Garrett, planning a sneak attack.

As I rounded the corner to the little room, I discovered that I was right and wrong. The resident of the house was still securely padlocked in the basement. The crystallized man before me was a completely different grim.

The one thing difficult to agree on when it came to grim was how to deal with them. Many people argued that the bodies of the risen should be preserved. These type of people usually stayed hidden in their homes 23 hours a day, living on whatever creature happened to wander into their traps. They were also the type of people that, despite their conviction to protect the grim, would freely shoot living trespassers like they were part of a carnival game.

Damn hicks.

August and the others took to killing the grim for sport. The only rule: the grim had to be animated. They considered it unethical to dismantle a body that hadn't tried to hurt anyone yet. It was a strange morality, especially since all the crystalline dead had the potential to become grim. But, once again, in a world without social taboos, we started to develop our own criteria for behavior. We unwittingly wanted to be restricted. It was the only thing that kept us out of the dangerous Lord of the Flies territory.

Which brings me back to the growling, glaring, human-wearing demon that stood between me and my washing machine. My sympathies for the consecrated body he inhabited went right out the window the moment he exposed his teeth. The fine-pointed, jagged dentition in his mouth was handcrafted. It told me this demon was especially maniacal. It also told me that it had full control over the faculties of this body.

Screaming would have been an appropriate response, but in situations where legs are far more vital than voice boxes, you tend to forget that part.

I ran from the room just missing whatever was thrown after me. I rounded the corner with only three thoughts: knife, screwdriver, and bedroom.

To break that down for you, I gave myself three options to survive. The first of course was to fight—yeah right. The second was to find a screwdriver and twist the remaining hardware in the door in order to escape—not enough time. The third option was to run up to my bedroom and hide behind a locked door.

In truth, I wanted to go hide. Two weeks ago, and maybe even one day ago, I might still have done that, but I already knew the only weapons I had up there were toxic hairsprays and girdles. If they hadn't killed women this far in, they weren't likely to kill a grim.

My hair snagged on something as I changed directions at the last second to head to the kitchen. The pain was easily ignored. I didn't bother turning to see how close he was. I was already moving at the impossible speed of Mach-holy shit.

I reached the knife block and found the only knife left in it. Garrett had most likely removed the others so the grim didn't follow my lead. I flung the block behind me, unsheathing my weapon in the process. As I rounded the island, I grabbed the skillet drying by the sink.

There was no guarantee of anything at that point, but I knew my speed wouldn't hold out. Getting trapped in a smaller room upstairs wasn't going to help me either. I needed to turn around and face the grim truth. Pun intended.

I swung the skillet as I turned. The pan chipped the grim's face. With my retreat at an end, he reached for me, but I dodged his grasp and stabbed his hand. Though the grim didn't feel pain, he did take the slightest inventory of his now missing finger.

While he was preoccupied, I kicked out his knee. He stumbled back on his damaged leg. I flung the skillet at his head. His skull fractured, but it wasn't enough to displace the demon. I toppled onto him, pinned him to the floor, and proceeded to stab him every which way I could manage. At some point his neck crumbled away and his growl quieted.

I panted over my bloodless kill with a strange satisfaction. A slow clap brought my attention back to the room. Garrett had returned and was standing over me like a proud teacher. His mouth wasn't smiling, but his eyes were.

I dove at him, sans knife. He must have expected the attack, because he caught my arms and hastened my descent to the floor on the other side of him. He didn't retaliate, but he did ready himself for another round. "You're not ready to fight me," he said flatly when I gripped the skillet on the floor beside me.

"I hate you," I snarled.

He relaxed his stance and offered me a hand up. "That's okay."

I took the proffered hand out of some sense of truce, and he pulled me up. I started to walk away, but he didn't let go of my arm. I expected to see a coy smile on his face, something indicating that he wasn't ready to let go of my hand.

A few too many romance novel scenes later, and I was twisted up in his arms with one of the missing kitchen knives at my throat. "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" he murmured in my ear. Apparently, breakfast wasn't just postponed, but canceled.