Cameron Pierce - Abortion Arcade

Faint stars are visible through the numerous holes in the ceiling. We must have fallen through a hole in the darkness.

I look over at Robbie. He is drenched in blood.

“Where are we?” he asks.

I gesture toward a huge vat of brains.

I manage to limp over to it. Maybe my leg isn’t broken after all, but it hurts like shit.

Some of the brains have disintegrated. Others look fresh.

They are al a reddish-gray and marinating in blood. Robbie must have landed in a spilled puddle of that blood.

Past the vat, there is a giant wooden hand.

Robbie walks over to it. A trail of little red footprints follows him.

“Robbie, come over here.” I pull a pair of yellow boots and overalls from a cabinet on the wall. I slip the overalls over my tattered clothes. Robbie takes a pair of boots and overalls for himself.

I pull down another pair of overalls from the cabinet, return to the brain vat, and pile the freshest-looking brains into the overalls, then fold them up to form a sack.

“What are you doing?”

“We might need food during our escape. After we rescue Pym and make our escape, we might not come across food for a long time.”

“What if the brains turn into houses in our stomachs?”

“You retard,” I say, but I’m cut off because a zombie grabs me from behind.

Taken by surprise, I throw Robbie at the shambling dead person.

Robbie shrieks and lowers his head in fear. Rotten fangs bared, the zombie grabs for Robbie’s skull, but Robbie charges with his little horns, knocking the dead person down.

Robbie stomps on the zombie’s skull until his foot is just splashing around in a puddle of blood, brain juice, teeth, and broken skull.

I learn two things from this encounter. When zombies attack, throw Robbie at them. Also, never piss Robbie off.

That means never calling him a retard again, if I can resist.

We look around, expecting more dead people, but everything is quiet and deserted.

“Maybe he was working late,” I say.

“Maybe.”

We proceed through the inner circle, puzzling over each new strange device.

“What do you think this one is for?” Robbie asks, gesturing toward a colossal upright rock slab engraved with symbols. “Do they flatten people under it?”

“No, I don’t think this is meant to flatten people. The engravings must mean something. It could be a code of the dead.”

“A code?”

“Rules to live by.”

“The dead live by rules?”

I nod my head.

“Does that mean they’re alive like you and me?”

“Well, they’re industrious enough to farm and smart enough to utilize written language. I would say they’re a lot like you and me.”

Robbie is banging around in the shadows ahead. I try to keep my weight off my bad leg, but every step is murder.

I wonder if I should stop and try to set it, make a splint or a cast out of brains, but we need to keep moving. Who knows when all these wooden hands will come alive.

We have entered a section of the underground where the walls are lined with glass troughs. The troughs hold brains in various stages of growth. Some of the brains are shaped like people.

Robbie gags. He spits out a mouthful of brain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“These brains you grabbed are bad,” he says, leaning against an empty trough covered in white dust. He drops melty, pulsing brain goop in my hand. I lick a little from my palm.

I spit it out. The brain tastes earthy and sour, like the decay that grows in the nooks and crannies of the body.

These brains are past the edible point. I try to wipe the taste off my tongue and look disgustedly at the overalls bulging with brains.

“Don’t the dead people eat these?” Robbie asks, dropping the makeshift brain sack and wiping his bloody hand on the leg of his own too-large overalls.

“There must be a difference between house quality brains and edible ones. These brains were obviously meant to be turned into houses.”

“Yeah, well they’re nasty.”

“And you eat your own shit.”

We move along.

The ground is a little lighter now that gray light is seeping in through the holes in the ceiling. It is almost dawn.

The brain pods and wooden hands appear older, greasier, and more rusted as we move along. A hairy layer of dust coats everything.

Robbie halts several feet in front of me, gazing straight up. I follow his gaze. He is peering through a hole in the ceiling. Through the hole, the head of an enormous zombie house can be seen: luminescent eyes and a gaping, glowing mouth. It is looking straight at us.

We stare up at the zombie house for a little while. The sky framing it is bluish brown.

“Look,” Robbie whispers, pointing.

A wooden arm stretches out before us. It holds several lumpy objects.

In its palm, a human brain quivers and convulses.

Bundles of red and blue cords flutter from the brainstem like tentacles. It is a half-formed circulatory system. The cord bundles are huge, huge enough to form the veins and arteries of a massive zombie.

“Is it alive?” Robbie is looking up at the zombie house again.

It hasn’t moved. “No,” I say, hoping I’m right. “Let’s move on.”

I shudder, imagining them rewiring my brain, growing it into a lifeless, gigantic

replica of myself. And there’s no way my bad brain is fit for consumption.

We search for an exit, trying to keep out of direct view of the holes in the ceiling, afraid to be seen by the zombie houses even though they might not be alive.

The factory looks desolate, as if few workers have been here in years, and yet brains are everywhere. There are brains splattered on the floor, impaled on hooks, and even brains dried to the ceiling, as if someone threw them up there and they never came down.

Finally, we discover a gap in the wall large enough to crawl through. I shove Robbie through first. The sky is pinkish now. The zombies will be opening the wedding chamber soon. They will find two dead women and no man to harvest.

Maybe they will choose some random person from the crowd to harvest instead.

I hope it’s that mustachioed bastard.

Outside the slaughterhouse, we’re surrounded by giant zombies. I can no longer see the brick wall, only giant zombies in every direction.

Something sticky touches my hand and I jerk away.

It is only Robbie, reaching for me. I let him hold one finger as we look up at the giant zombies.

Every giant is rooted to the ground by mushy brain feet. Between the feet of the nearest zombie rises a spiral staircase, leading up into a little fissure between the legs.

There are some windows in the torso, scattered haphazardly across the back of the structure. The arms of each zombie are stretched out similarly, forming a thin canopy above us. The heads are massive, some with huge black holes for eyes, some yellow circles in the distance. These zombies are taller than the wedding tower, but not as the brick wall, which explains why we could not see them from the farm. Their hands are helicopter pads.

I wonder if everything I’m seeing is true, or if what I know of the world is entirely wrong and zombies do not live inside of giant zombies, but everything I think and see and feel tells me that yes, zombies do live inside of giant zombies.

It makes me so sick.

I wonder if anyone on the farm knows where brains truly go once they are harvested.

As we stand frozen with our backs to the brain factory, a faint whirring echoes off the giant zombies. I recognize it soon enough as the sound of a helicopter.

I know what we have to do.

All my life, I have felt that everything is doomed, but Pym has always given me a little bit of hope. Now she is far from me, bleeding to death alone. Was the hope she instilled in me a monstrous illusion? Is she herself a monstrous illusion?