THURSDAY: Brainless

Halloween Week 2023

Runner Up

BY SARA PAUFF

Copyright is held by the author.

WATCH THE eyes. They are the windows to the soul, or no soul, in this case. It’s not like the movies; the virus actually slows down decay, so once infected, it can take weeks before you become a rotting animated corpse. But the eyes always tell the truth. If the eyes are lifeless, so is the body.

The eyes are the hardest to perfect when Persy and I dress up for supply runs. You can’t achieve the right amount of apathetic dullness with make-up alone. Dante would film the brainless through our scrap metal fence, then rewatch the videos over and over, imitating their dragging motions and groans of agony, until he became one of them. “Inhabit the part. Forget you even have a brain,” he used to say. Dante was a method actor.

My sister and I take the Hollywood route — the gorier, the better. We rip our old clothes and drag them through the dirt. Roadkill in our pockets provides a stench of decay. The lack of food makes us already half-dead, but to emphasize our gauntness, we smudge fire ash on our cheeks and under our eyes. To complete our costumes, I crush hibiscus flowers, add a handful of red clay and stir the mixture into melting beeswax over our camp stove.

“You’ve gotten good at that, Bea,” Persy says. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.”

“Wrong monster.” I add a little charcoal dust to the pot, and the concoction turns a deep mauve, like a bruise. Perfect. I tip the wax into a tin; it oozes like blood. Our transformation would be smoother if my professional make-up kit hadn’t run out months ago, but there is a satisfaction in DIY, like I’m working on a set for one of the old black and whites — Nosferatu or the original Night of the Living Dead, before modern prosthetics, computers and CGI. We don’t have those now either.

When my homemade make-up cools, my sister and I smear the coloured beeswax around the gashes and wounds I painted on our limbs earlier. “You’re right. The wax gives the injuries more depth,” Persy says, turning her arm this way and that in the lantern light. Letting her body go slack, she drags her right foot across the dirt. Spit dribbles out of her open mouth and a low groan echoes from her throat. She keeps her eyes down, half-shuttered like a drunk, and wobbles around, bouncing off the side of our RV, then a tree, until she finally slumps to the dirt.

I affect a slow clap. “And the Oscar goes to . . .”

Laughing, Persy stands and takes a bow. “Thank you, thank you. I’ve been rewatching some of Dante’s old footage. For pointers, you know.” She looks away, blinking back sudden tears.

My eyes fill with tears too, but I focus on the Hollywood sign, still a brilliant beacon in the dusty L.A. hills, and imagine my brother out there. The film industry was his and Persy’s dream, mine less so. But as the third triplet, stuck in between a budding star and an amateur screenwriter/director, I had to choose a craft or get left behind. So I’m set design, lighting, costumes and make-up, the devil in the details of our adventure tale turned horror film.

Satisfied with her costume, Persy goes inside the RV for her knapsack and baseball bat. I follow and grab my pack too, but as I’m reaching for the machete hanging over my bed, Persy shakes her head, her face grim beneath her ghoulish make-up.

“Not after yesterday,” she says, tucking her blonde hair underneath a ragged Dodgers cap. “Those brainless came out of nowhere and we can’t be sure you weren’t — ”

“I told you, I just got tangled in some barbed wire. I want to make another run,” I insist, taking a step toward her. Pain shoots up my right leg, but I grit my teeth and take another step. I’ve become a better actress since Dante died, better at hiding my pain. But I can’t fool Persy; we shared a womb and so much more these 19 years. With a swift motion, she bends down and jerks up the leg of my muddy jeans. The dirty, blood-crusted bandage around my calf oozes yellow pus.

Her dark eyes go wide. “Bea, it looks worse than it did this morning.”

“It’s fine, just healing.” Scabs sometimes turn yellow when they heal. You can replicate this look with Vaseline, liquid latex, flour and food colouring.

“It’s not safe. They’ll smell the fresh blood.” Persy nudges me until the backs of my knees hit my foldout bed. I fall backward, not bothering to hide my relief. Since this morning, standing has become more painful. This is the second raid we’ve had to make in two days. With more nomads like us escaping the cities, supplies are harder to steal. We both need a night of rest.

I tug on the torn sleeve of my sister’s hoodie. “Stay here. We can stretch our supplies for a couple more days. Then we’ll go out together.”

She presses her lips together in firm, unbending disagreement. Once Persy decides something, no one can persuade her otherwise. I think that’s why she’s survived so long. “You need medicine, Bea. I’ll be quick, I promise.”

I scoot back on the bed, hugging my pillow as I watch her grab supplies and tug on Dante’s hiking boots. Persy refused to take anything of Dante’s after he died, even his portion of our freeze-dried food. I only convinced her to keep his spare pair of boots because her own were falling apart and giving her blisters. Going on a raid with open wounds, real ones, is like dumping a chum bucket in a shark tank. We’d be brainless before we even reached downtown.

Before my sister leaves, she takes the hunting rifle off the hook above the driver’s seat and places it on the bed next to me. “You still have yours?”

I nod, drawing the 22-caliber bullet out of my pocket. It’s warm and smooth, my worry stone. “But I won’t need it.”

“Yeah. I won’t need mine either,” Persy says hoarsely, her eyes not meeting mine as she rises from the bed. “Be back soon.”

After she leaves, I try to sleep, and dream of when we were still three.

No sooner than the ink was dry on our high school diplomas, Dante, Persy and I pooled our savings to buy an RV, packed our belongings and charted a course for L.A., with promises to our parents we’d come home for Christmas. There had been rumours of a new virus, a more dangerous strain, for months, but only in other countries, far away. We were too young to worry about death, convinced it wouldn’t touch us before we could achieve our Hollywood dreams. Persy insisted we film our adventures, passing the handheld video camera back and forth as we navigated the swerving roads of the Appalachian Mountains, crossed the Mississippi River, and nearly drove into a tornado in Oklahoma.

The virus crossed the ocean when we were just outside of Amarillo and quickly hit its peak. There were quarantines, then a country-wide lockdown. For a while we tried to keep traveling, incorporating our new struggles into our daily vlogs: the looting at grocery stores, the long lines at guns and ammo shops, the never-ending quest for a steady Wi-Fi signal.

On the open road, we rarely ran into the brainless, but once we reached L.A., our final destination and the biggest city we’d ever seen, we encountered them in droves, like herds of slow-moving cattle — if cattle wanted to eat you.

None of the movie studios were open, no production offices were holding auditions, no agents were taking meetings. Dante became discouraged quickly, his dreams of stardom drying up in the desert air. I felt lost most of the time too, except when we scavenged for supplies; always a hoarder, I enjoyed the hunt. Only Persy, the youngest of us, remained continuously upbeat.

“Think of the film we’ll have when this is over, once life goes back to normal,” she said. “Studios will beg for this kind of real-life footage.”

“I thought you wanted to be the female Wes Craven, write your own horror film,” Dante said, picking at his MRE.

Persy raised one thin shoulder in a half-shrug and gestured to our makeshift camp. We’d spent the day erecting trip wires and a crude fence out of scrap metal to keep the brainless out. “Truth is stranger than fiction. Isn’t it?”

It was my idea to dress up like the brainless on our supply hunts. “We have almost everything we need here to make our own stage make-up,” I said, as we combed the landscape around our camp for edible plants and scraps to burn for heat. “And we’re already dirty enough. If we act like we’re infected, the other raiders will stay away from us, and the brainless will think we’re one of them.” I picked up the bloated corpse of a jackrabbit, swarming with flies. “Especially if we smell like them.”

Dante, starving for an audience, took to the idea immediately and covered up his blond heartthrob good looks with layers of dirt and my homemade fake gore. Once he’d mastered the walk and talk of the brainless, he taught Persy and me to do the same. As we posed for the camera, doing our best mindless shuffles, Dante clapped approvingly. “We’ll fit right in with the monsters.”

And we did fit in, with the brainless anyway. But not the monsters.

We snuck into the city at night. The brainless became more active after dark, so there were fewer gangs of looters to compete with. We’d heard rumours of survivors tearing each other apart over a day’s worth of food, and we’d always avoided violence, if possible.

During our last trip, Persy had found a row of recently built warehouses with Army vehicles parked outside. She was certain they were storage facilities for food, clean water, maybe even medicine. “Gonna get us our slice of government cheese,” she said, rubbing her hands together.

But as we approached the warehouses, a brainless mob swarmed down the highway, herded by two Army tanks and a helicopter with a spotlight. I tried to recall Dante’s instructions: don’t panic, stay in character, shuffle along until you can escape. But where was Dante? Where was Persy? In the melee, I lost my siblings, my heart, and my courage. As soon as I could slip out of the mob, I ran all the way to the RV and prayed my siblings would do the same.

Persy reappeared the next morning, stumbling into camp as the sun rose.

I rushed out to meet her, not having slept a wink. “Are you alright? Where’s Dante?”

She shuffled toward the RV, her limbs limp and eyes lifeless. Panic filled my chest. I grabbed Persy by the shoulders, shaking her as if I could throttle the virus out of her. “Persephone, did they bite you? Are you infected? Where’s Dante?”

Her dark eyes snapped toward mine and filled with angry tears, her cheeks flushing hot under her streaked makeup. “They took him,” she muttered, each word hard and bitten off.

“Who? The brainless?”

My baby sister wrenched herself out of my grasp, sunk down on the steps of the RV and wrapped her arms around her knees, rocking back and forth. I ran my eyes over her body, my fear easing. Only false wounds, make-up, and pretend. But what about Dante?

“He got bitten, or — or maybe not,” Persy murmured. “He was such a talented actor. The soldiers couldn’t tell.”

I knelt beside her. “Soldiers?”

“They herded them into a warehouse. I slipped out before they could lock the doors.” She took a sharp, whooshing breath, like a last gasp for air. “And then they turned on the gas.” Persy dropped her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking. “The screams. Their horrible screams. So much pain.”

I sat back on my heels, my mind swirling with confusion and grief. “But they don’t feel pain, Persy. Everyone knows that. They can’t. Their brains are gone.” If Dante was infected before he died, that was one blessing.

Persy glared at me, her voice turning to a shaking snarl, and she squeezed my hand hard. “They were people with families once. Even if they don’t remember it. They were just like us.”

This memory of my brother’s pain, my sister’s grief, wakes me, and I throw off the blankets. I feel hot, except for the wound on my leg, which is numb and cool, like it’s not even a part of me anymore. Hours must have passed since Persy left. She’s never been gone this long on her own before. Something’s wrong; she’s been attacked, infected. The screams of the brainless, my brother among them, echo in my mind. They morph into my baby sister, writhing in pain.

“If I’m infected, I don’t want to die like Dante. Trapped and in agony.” Persy said the morning after his death. She slipped a bullet, warm from her skin, into my hand. “Do you?”

I reach for the shotgun, but it’s not there. I turn in bed and my brother’s corpse looms over me, pointing a gun at my head.

“Dante?”

He lets out a high-pitched sob and removes the baseball cap, long blonde hair unwinding. It’s not Dante, but Persy, still in her bloody, tattered costume.

“I’m sorry, Beatrice. I’m so sorry, but I have to do this. Go back to sleep, OK?” She wipes her face with her hand and gestures to the pillow with the gun. “I promise I’ll be quick — just go back to sleep.”

“Persy, what happened out there? You’re not thinking clearly, were you — ” My stomach twists, my words swallowed by a groan. The sudden hunger is so painful, I can’t move. Food. I can smell it. It’s right there, pointing a shotgun at my head.

“It wasn’t barbed wire, was it?” Persy whispers.

I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for the blast, anything to end this awful craving emptiness, this consuming nothing. The silence screams so loud I can’t think, my brain already decaying.

A soft sigh breaks through the pain. “Oh.” The bed sinks down. The gun clatters to the floor.

Stretching out beside me, Persy holds out her forearm. The rich smell of her skin, like warm milk, makes my mouth water. Fresh meat. It’s been ages since I’ve eaten.

I bite down on instinct, moaning as the tang of her blood fills my mouth. Persy cries out, but doesn’t pull away, letting me feed until the craving ends, the emptiness fills, the screams stop.

“We run together, OK?” my sister says, stroking my hair with her free hand, her eyes full of love. “No matter what, we stay together. We won’t let those heartless bastards get us.”

***

Image of Sara Pauff

Sara Pauff is a professional communicator, part-time storyteller who primarily writes young adult fiction and is at work on her first novel. Her short fiction has been published in Half and One, and she placed first in her genre in Writing Battle’s 2023 Summer Nanofiction contest. She is also a regular participant in the #VSS365 challenge, in which writers craft micro stories based on a one-word prompt. You can find her on Instagram and Threads at @spauffwrites.