MicroHorror

He shambled into the restaurant at the end of another futile day pursuing fresh human meat. The humans were fewer than ever, and the few he could find, cowering behind barricaded doors and ensconced in root cellars, were so scrawny as to be barely worth the effort of dragging them out of their bolt holes.

The kitchen door swung open as he seated himself at the counter, and the rotting figure of the waitress approached him, order book in one hand, pencil poised in the other. She scribbled his order, not an easy task since some of her fingers were missing, along with a gouged-out eyeball. The rusted red rents and tears in her uniform suggested she was missing several once-vital organs as well. She lurched her way back into the kitchen, and presently the wonderful odor of his meal being prepared wafted through the swinging door. He clenched the edge of the countertop in anticipation, ripping off what was left of his fingernails in the process.

He thanked the Lord, or whatever deity that brought down the plague that reanimated the dead into ravenous ghouls, that he had enough intact brain cells to remember this restaurant. Most of the walking dead didn’t.

As the waitress returned with his order and presented it before him steaming, he considered how a certain pudgy, gavel-wielding politico went from Speaker of the House to its specialty, an individual who had the foresight to implement his orphanage program just as the plague struck. Unfortunately for him, the former speaker was a plump and tempting dish, too tempting, as it turned out, for his colleagues who, stripped of their already thin veneer of feigned humanity by the plague, were finally allowed to express, at last, their true predatory natures. Happily, though, the legacy of Newt’s vision lived on.

After all, thought the restaurant patron as his decayed corn-nub teeth tore into the succulent entree before him, there was nothing in the Dead World like the taste of deep-fried baby.