Scraps & Chum Read Free

w as time to get out of this town —I could use the reading material for traveling. Maybe I should leave tomorrow. The roads are still pretty jammed up with crashed cars and ambling Zees, and I can’t ride a motor cycle to save my life, but the b ike shop nearby has some good selections. Maybe Mexico would fare better for me. Maybe I could even keep riding down to Panama or something.
    Dropping to my belly, I reached underneath the car and grabbed hold of the dead man’s pant leg. His head was all jammed up in the pipes, his eyes still open and dry as chalk, and I had to pull pretty hard to get him out. ’ Course, once his leg hit the sunlight those Zees pushed me outta the way and went to town, big time.
    Hoping against hope, I thrust my arm into the feeding frenzy and felt one take a nibble on my pinky. Hurt like a bitch, but it felt so damn good to be wanted. But the sonofabitch pushed my arm outta the way like it was broccoli on a plate of chocolate cake. Fuckers didn’t want me after all. Same old same old.
    Yanking so me carnage from No-Arm’s mouth— i n case I needed some for later— I went into the bookstore and grabbed the paperback in the window. It was The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kozinski. I’d read it ages ago, and it depressed the shit outta me, but right now, I needed to know someone else felt my pain. Needed to know that someone else out there, even if he was fictional, was as unwanted as me. Rolling it up, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket, made my way back around the Zees, who were all on their knees ripping every last bit of flesh and sinew off that rotted cadaver, and headed back to the park.
    The pigtail girl was there again, just sitting on the bench, cradling an unopened can of Coke like it was a baby doll. Let me tell you, when you have no one to talk to, the walls become a real good audience. These Zees were no different than walls, and so I sat down beside her and looked in her eye, the good one that wasn’t swishing about on her cheek, and struck up a conversation.
    “Hi, Precious,” I said. “What you got there? That your baby? What’s its name?”
    If it had been a real baby it woulda been an unhappy one because she tossed it on the ground and growled at it as if it had ruined her life. Satisfied with that, she took up sniffing my coat again and discovered the meat I had in my pocket. Suddenly ravenous, she started to tear into the leather, her strength much greater that you’d expect, so I turned away from her and got my hand on the meat before she rendered me naked. Judging by the look of it, it was a head scrap: an ear and part of a scalp, some hair stuck to it on one end. When she saw it she lunged at me.
    “Hang on, hang on, Jesus you guys don’t know shit about patience, do ya?” 
    So I wrapped it around my fingers because, you know, I had to keep trying, right? Had to hope one of these times the bite would work for me.
    And you know what she did, a s I gave her my hand and said, “Here comes the plane, into the hanger.” Know what she did? She unwrapped it! Took it off my hand and wolfed it down and didn’t touch me at all.
    “Oh , come on!” I shouted. There was no way she was getting off that easy, so I grabbed her head and opened her mouth and stuck my nose in it and pushed her jaws closed until white light erupted behind my eyes and blood ran down my throat. Did that for about ten seconds until I realized I wasn’t going to do shit but lose a nose and have to walk around sounding like a teakettle as the wind blew through the new hole in my face. 
    Needless to say I gave up.
    Afterwards she sat there, blood streaked on her cheek, her dangling eyeball starting to droop a bit lower, and just kind of looked at me.
    “Brandy,” I said, calling her by my granddaughter’s name— it just came out of nowhere. She didn’t look like Brandy, who’d had blonde hair and freckles before she died, didn’t look like her at all, save for the age part. “I miss you.”
    And