Die On Your Feet

By Warren Benedetto

If you were to ask me to list the Top Ways I Might Die Someday, “decapitation in a Safeway parking lot” wouldn’t have been at the top of the list.

What a difference a couple of days makes.

I looked around at the gaggle of survivors huddled in the safety of a shallow drainage culvert at the edge of the parking lot, thankful for the extra twelve inches of headroom afforded by the dip in the pavement. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to allow everyone to sleep with relative ease for the first time since this whole nightmare began. The signs of the survivors’ struggle were everywhere: holes worn through the elbows and knees of their clothes, shirtfronts blackened with mud and dust, the skin underneath scraped and scabbed. There was a pregnant woman. An elderly couple. A sickly-looking child. A trio of homeless teens. And… Grady?

Where’s Grady?

I rolled onto my side and tried to see as far across the parking lot as possible, hoping that maybe he had crawled back into the Safeway to scavenge for more supplies. I couldn’t imagine there was anything else worth taking—anything that could be safely reached, anyway. The fog flooded into the store through its shattered windows and made it impossible to safely grab anything more than two feet off the ground. The lower shelves were already picked clean. I used the hockey stick I scavenged from a sporting goods store to sweep the higher shelves in hopes of finding something—anything—still up there, but with no luck. At one point, I touched the edge of what might have been a can of food, but I couldn’t get a good enough angle on it to sweep it off the shelf to the floor, where we could safely retrieve it.

There was no sign of Grady in the direction of the Safeway, so I rolled over and looked out toward the road. A blur of motion caught my eye. A faded red baseball cap flashed beyond the wheels of an abandoned minivan. And it was rising.

“Grady!” I hissed. “What are you doing?”

The red hat turned in my direction. Grady’s pale, haggard face stared back at me from where he was lying belly-down on the asphalt. He smiled, though there was no joy in his expression. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’ll see.” He struggled onto his elbows and knees.

“No!” I belly-crawled frantically out of the culvert and onto the parking lot, staying as low to the ground as possible. The scabs on my elbows and knees blossomed with fresh blood. “Stay down!”

Grady hesitated. He turned toward me as I scrambled to catch up with him. His head was only inches from the bottom edge of the fog. “Don’t you get it?” His eyes blazed with defiance. “They’re doing this. It’s all part of their plan.”

I reached Grady’s position and pulled him down. “There is no they! And this,” I motioned to fog overhead, “is everywhere. It’s not just here. It’s all over the world right now.”

I wasn’t making that up. There were enough news reports from around the globe to know that the fog wasn’t isolated to just our city, or even to our country. But to know that, you had to be watching the right channels, reading the right websites, following the right people on Twitter or Facebook. If you weren’t, it was likely you heard an entirely different story. You got the conspiracies. The propaganda. The lies.

The TV stations and internet went offline after the first few days, but the damage had already been done. Whatever information a person got when the whole thing started cemented their interpretation of everything they experienced from then on. No amount of contradictory information could change that. It was like they were living in a completely different reality.

“Everywhere? Really?” Grady barked out a laugh. “That’s exactly what they want you to believe. Keep your head down, don’t stand up for yourself. Literally!” He scoffed and shook his head. “Well, that’s not how we do things around here.” He tapped the bill of his red baseball cap. “I’m tired of having a boot on my face. If I want to stand, I’ll stand.”

I gestured around the empty parking lot. “There’s no boot on your face. We’re just trying to stop you from dying.”

Grady jerked his arm out of my grip. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Damn it, Grady! It’s not just about you! You could draw attention to them too.” I pointed to where the other survivors were huddled. “You could get us all killed.”

“It ain’t real,” Grady insisted. “Think! Have you ever actually seen one of the things up there?”

“No, but I’ve seen what it does to people.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You saw what happened to Cheryl.” I noticed a brief flicker of doubt cross Grady’s face. Then it dimmed, replaced with something else, something darker: denial.

“I don’t know what I saw.”

I stared at him in disbelief. Even after watching his wife die in front of his eyes, he still wasn’t willing to accept the truth.

“It’s like my dad used to say,” he announced as he began to stand. “It’s better to die on your feet…” His head and shoulders disappeared into the fog. “…than to live on your knees.”

Suddenly, an inhuman screech pierced the air, like a radial saw striking sheet metal. A hulking shadow swung through the fog, swooping past with a shriek, and taking Grady along with it. All that remained was a fine mist of atomized blood hanging in the air.

A moment later, something red and wet thudded to the ground nearby. Grady’s hat.

Well, Grady, I thought. Maybe your dad was right. Maybe it’s better to die on your feet. But you know what?

I’ll take my chances.

Then I crawled back toward the remaining survivors. On my knees. Alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Warren Benedetto writes short fiction about horrible people doing horrible things. He has a Master’s degree in Film/TV Writing from USC. He is also the developer of StayFocusd, the world’s most popular anti-procrastination app for writers. He built it while procrastinating.

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