It pisses people off when the groom’s prettier than the bride.

A ceremony of bitten off questions. All that chewing. Notions caught between teeth. A man can be funny but—was she rich? Was he disabled? No, that was never how it worked. It’s the beast and his pretty saint not the other way ‘round.

“She must be a really good cook.”

Looking womanly enough, shrink-wrapped into that dress, slip-cast in makeup. A happenstance reflection in handsome, dewy eyes. Clutching paper daisies as she went.

“Hold onto him,” a friend (likely dead by now) had said, “He thinks you’re gorgeous.”

He was just supposed to show up suited and act happy. And he was the happiest man alive. His curly hair clean-cut for the first time in their lives. His lips a bow, pinched up at their corners, smiling that entire day. He planted one on her mid-sentence, impatient, giddy. A juvenile vow of eternity pressed into her upper lip. Kissing him on their wedding day will be the highlight of her life.

The end of that kiss is her apocalypse.

There was a photo on the mantle, back when fire was a vanity. Back when a house was more than open doors to run out of. In that photo he looked like a prince and she looked like a cupcake. Her groom drew eyes wherever he went. Maybe his bride would’ve noticed, had she taken the time to look away. So caught up in each other that they’d missed the ship for kids. Never did get around to getting a damn dog.

It’s why they survived.

He still grieves The Kids Thing. So she keeps notions like that to herself. He hasn’t spoken in weeks. She leads him by the right hand he still has. Two silver bands on her finger are now too tarnished to glimmer.

A setting sun carpets broken, neglected asphalt in orange light. The couple hides behind an overturned car to watch a beast up the road hunt down a dog. This beast began its chase with only front legs, a lower jaw, some horns. Now, watching it chow down on a mutt’s rear… she appreciates her own apathy.

Beasts don’t chew, even the ones with teeth. Instead, they suckle at chosen limbs and slowly swallow bones whole with dumb stubbornness. Some have figured out that a hand or hoof can spread a body out into smaller, more manageable bits. This one hasn’t, so it’ll be a while.

Wife pulls her husband away from the scene. No need to be near when it graduates to four legs.

Click. Click.

It’s still so warm out. The two could spend their night in the lush grass if it weren’t for what lived there.

She doesn’t look like a cupcake anymore. But if her husband would just eat a little more, he’d be back to himself. The crutch under his left arm clicks like a metronome as they walk. She keeps him balanced, her soft grip on his hand ready to tighten at any moment.

They’ve built a rhythm; a marriage, a home out of the tent on her back and three sneakered feet.

Click. Click.

They haven’t spoken since he lost the foot, but they aren’t fighting. Domesticity, isn’t it? They pass trees, he looks over his shoulder. Which tree could it be behind? There’s no way Little Brother slipped ahead of them. She’s keeping an eye out for a broken gas station or an open car to spend the night in when she spots something else.

At first, she thinks it’s the sun glaring against a speed limit sign. But it doesn’t disappear when the sun sets.

There is a light up ahead. That’s never good.

A porch light set aglow, with a silhouette at home beneath it.

There had been a photo in their foyer... back when they had people to welcome. That photo was just of her husband. It’d disappear at night in the glare of the porch light. His graduation greeted everyone.

Trees inch higher and the sun hides. These woods house a constant scuffling. Brush reaches up towards her waist. There have never been more birds. Starlings have replaced the clouds. At dusk, they consume the sky. Seeds used to fall this time of year. Now the birds eat them. Persistent pop of growth underfoot [like chewing cartilage]. Chittering of birds above [like grinding teeth], fighting for space across too few branches [like maggots between ribs]. Forest is so much more alive since the world ended.

Click.

It’s impossible to hear the approach against the noise of life.

It’s insulting. She’s one of the last people she knows with both ears.

Click.

This carcass has two hands [both rights] that reach out of dense grass. It grabs her backpack and pant leg. So many of them have hands. The hands of stupid people reaching out to save themselves. She raises her hands above her head.

The skull is human, but too small. It stole the skull of a child, wedged too deep into its neck. No eyes, no nose, just twin cavities down the center of its face slipping down into an open, flabby, jawless throat all red with exertion.

Whose hands are those? Were those two people already dead or defending something? It has the skull. But no eyes. Did they succeed? It drags a purposeless hind leg, scavenged from a deer but without a pelvis. Dead weight, stuck in the mud. It has not a body but a bag of incongruent bones built to hide a stomach.

Hands are cold and soft as butter as it grabs her jaw and pulls. Fingers lodge into her cheek and hook behind her jaw-joint. The beast tries to drag itself up or pull her down into itself.

Wife presses her own fingers between its palm and her face, her nails scratch her own skin. She kicks it; which is a mistake, gets her foot too close to its mouth and it doesn’t have one of those. Forget her jaw, it grabs her foot with both hands.

Her husband’s right hand comes into view and she yells.

“Get back!”

She kicks forward, swatting her husband back and falling forwards. Her shoe catches into the pocket of its ‘mouth’ as they tumble down. The beast is euphoric, both spindly arms around her leg and it doesn’t have teeth, doesn’t know how to chew, it just pulls her foot deeper inside itself tearing and cracking through its own skin to accomplish it.

Husband falls to his knees and starts pulling free her foot from her shoe. She lands with a knee in the middle of its bloated abdomen and her trapped leg crooked. She unsheaths her machete; chops.

Her foot slips free from the shoe. Her husband holds the beast down as best he can with one hand, his fingers pressing into empty sockets, akin to a bowling ball.

The beast bleeds lazily: brown and borrowed, cloying and blocking her path to the stomach. It contains bodily junk, fat, mucus and oil. When the stomach is extracted it still won’t die, but it becomes preoccupied. The stomach contracts, convulses across the scant space from its newly discarded body to re-consume it. This process would take hours. If another beast doesn’t intervene and swipe up the good bits first.

The stomach writhes like it wants to fight back. It’s the only part of the body with any survival instincts. She cuts it from its holdings. It stings in her grip. Jagged ends of the esophagus and beginnings of the bowels twist themselves to nurse her fingers. As always, she hurls it as fast as she can, as far from anything faunal as possible. It lands in the middle of the road, far from any bones, splat. It immediately begins to undulate, seeking out meat.

She shoos her husband away from the mouth, now lifeless and floppy like some prop and pulls out her sneaker, bits of meaty pulp still tangled in the weave. She tries to help him up but he shoos her right back. While he shakily stands, she hovers. She pushes the stomach’s previous body back into the brush. Skin so delicate, it spits when she shoves. Every inch buys them time.

Eventually, it’s not worth the calories, not worth closing the gap with what’s behind them. They walk.

“Thank you,” she says.

He stares at the road ahead, his effort put into keeping balance. Every time he looks back he trips, shakes.

Most beasts are aptly named. Mindless amalgamations of roadkill who climb their way up the ladder. They’ve got four different legs, or maybe two and two. One antler, one cat ear.

Lots of them have hands. Often two right hands. Rarely a left.

A man with two of his own hands is harder to trust nowadays.

Night sneaks up on them. Still walking towards that light. He steps past her and points, his ring catching in the electric glare. There’s a shadow on the porch, begging for help.

“Please!” The shadow calls. “My baby, help my baby.”

But there are a few not-so-mindless.

There are picky eaters.

He looks back at his wife. “A baby?” he says.

He steps up onto the porch. In health, she follows.

The mother is skin and bones. She hugs strangers. Husband allows the embrace; wife does not. Mother is tattered, she’s tear-stained. Skin hangs from her cheeks the same way her dirty dress runs down her sharp shoulders.

The house is shockingly clean, with exceptions. There are two rooms. What must be the bedroom is hidden around the corner. And then everything else. Mother’s life exists in piles. A pile of sticks that was a coffee table. A pile of trash once a kitchen.

The couple can’t fault her. Where are their piles?

“He doesn’t cry,” the mother says.

Mother turns the corner, every step creaks. Wife is slow to follow, but refuses to let her husband slip out of sight. The bedroom rots. The bed itself is a knot of beige sheets, brown blood. It smells like birth. Saccharine with yeast and tallow.

A bassinet sits beneath the window. Clean, pristine and cared for. True to the woman’s word, there’s not a cry. Wife expects a dead baby. She lingers in the doorway. Mother leans above the crib, doting. She glows with blind love and new sweat across her face.

“But he’s so strong,” mother says. “He’s survived so much.”

Husband freezes. Seems he wasn’t prepared, even after everything.

Wife leans forward.

A stomach lies in the bassinet, contracting and expanding as if sleeping. The crazed mother croons as she grabs husband by the hair. She drags him into the crib’s open maw before he has a chance to shout…