Scarecrows

She gulped the last dregs of the condensed milk, tipping the can back and sliding a tongue around the inside. It had been such a long time since she'd had anything remotely resembling a luxury. She inserted a finger into the can, sliding it around it an attempt to capture what had been missed.

She needed calcium, any kind of calcium. The livestock had all long since died in the first attacks or been slaughtered. Two weeks ago she'd risked the journey to the local store, trying to find a bottle of milk. They had all soured, but she'd attempted to drink some anyway. She'd done her best not to vomit, but she threw it all back up anyway, rancid milk on her shoes.

She had been so happy to salvage the condensed milk, even if it was sweetened with caramel and thus defeated the purpose. Her mouth was rotting away before her very eyes; a tooth had fallen out the other day. One of her eyes had a cataract. She'd woken up three days ago with maggots in her armpits.

It was becoming harder and harder to pull herself together. There was a pestilence here, and she was succumbing to it, little by little.

She was still alive, though, wasn’t she?

She couldn't remember the hours, the days since it happened, but she remembered the news reports.The increasingly frantic voices on the radios, the last, useless town meeting.

Keep the doors locked. If you can't survive on your own, join up with another house.

They'd asked her, come and stay with us. Better to be together.

But she wasn't stupid.

Humans were the problem, had always been the problem, and would always be the problem.

In the days following, she watched the houses on the hilltops surrounding her farm. Imagined the members enclosed within turning on each other, the result of the inevitable tribal system that would have sprung up in the absence of sanity and hope.  

Survival of the fittest. What the hell was that supposed to mean? It was just an elegant way to communicate the oldest and shittiest truth there was: kill, or be killed. That’s all it came down to in the end.

She put the empty can down on the table and swatted away the flies that were by now her constant companions.

Getting up from the kitchen table, she pressed her face against the glass window atop the sink to observe the surrounding landscape.

A huge field of yellowed grass and several scarecrows standing proud on their posts stretched across the acres of her property. There weren't that many birds to scare off these days, nor were there crops to protect, but the scarecrows served an alternate purpose: they made her feel as if life were continuing normally.

It was the one thing left in her life that made any sort of sense: the ritual of tending to the scarecrows. Over time, her scarecrows had become more and more elaborate. By now it had become a sort of art form in her own mind, and she was proud of her creations. It had become quite an involved process.

First, she had to select something for the scarecrow to wear. She liked to imagine stories for them, create a little life for them. She used wax, staples and thread to arrange their faces, their hair. She picked out poses for them and nailed them onto their props. She wanted to create the most realistic and beautiful scarecrows in the entire world.

And the way she saw it, since all of the artists had gone to hell like everyone else, why shouldn't a simple woman like herself step up and give beauty back to the people? The people, of course, being her audience of 14 scarecrows and counting, a motley crew of secret agents, adventurers, poets, victims of unrequited love, all playing out the backstories she had created for them.

She walked outside into the field, not bothering to take her shotgun with her. She wasn’t afraid of scarecrows. The collapsed wheat stalks, their scent acrid in the heat, scratched her bloated belly as she shambled across the dry earth.

She stepped up to the scarecrow that had caught her notice. She'd named him Michael, admired his good looks. In her mind, his story had already been played out. He was a great actor but he couldn't get any work. Too generic, the casting directors kept on saying.  Luckily, she was around to remedy all of that and give him the applause he so richly deserved.

It was a shame then, that when she was nailing him into the pole, all he did was keep on screaming that his name was Billy or something else dreadfully common, spitting in her face when she put the wax on his eyelids.

He’d stopped screaming when she sewed his mouth shut, painted it with the pink lipstick she'd stolen from the woman who was with him. The woman couldn't be a scarecrow, far too fat, but at least she had been a good meal. It was strange, really.

Before the flies and rotting of her own body, she would have abhorred the consumption of Human meat. Before the changes had caught up with her. Now, though, well, it was fair to say that her tastes had changed.

Michael had been standing out here for at least 18 days, definitely the oldest member of the group so far. He'd stopped making noises from behind his closed lips but he was beginning to sag, and his skin wasn't smooth and beautiful anymore. Definitely not good for the collective aesthetic.

She stepped up towards his body and grabbed his shoulders, and with her bare hands, pulled him free of the impalements used to keep him upright. She then effortlessly slung him over her shoulder, ignoring the noises all the other scarecrows were making, the futile attempts at escape.

A sound like a bone breaking, a muffled sob.

She carried Michael's body to the shack where she used to keep her farming implements but which had now become a little tomb for scarecrows that had made their debuts and done their adieux. She added Michael to the gory pile, and returned to the house.

As soon as she entered the threshold however, she heard distant cries from the field behind her house. She crossed the room quickly, peering out through the hole in the wall. Four people, two adults and two children, were coming towards the farm, probably trying to find some sanctuary.

Maybe they’d come from the house at the far end of the Pickerton lot, or maybe they’d just come to retrieve their missing comrades. She smiled as best she could with her lips half gone, and picked up her shotgun.

She'd been meaning to create a scarecrow family for some time now.