Jars

There are 285 mason Jars in Sandra Billings basement. Three weeks ago, 150 of them were filled with red raspberry preserves, 60 with Strawberry Jam, 40 with homemade applesauce and the remaining 35 were awaiting their contents at about the same time Sandra was attacked in her garden by a group of rather ravenous corpses.

Billy blundered into the scene two days later. Billy is a rather fat kid. It's sad to say but it's true. Morbidly obese doesn't cut it and quite frankly, pleasantly plump is better used to describe someone who still fits in clothes that don't resemble Sails from seagoing vessels. He escaped the living dead by finding a car with keys in it and driving until the gas gave out, which it did directly in front of Sandra Billings front yard and two days after her attackers, and she, had left.

Billy had been hungry which had been no great surprise especially to Billy. He knew the house had to have something in it to eat, anything in it. He'd gone through his supply of snickers bars and there were Seven, two liter bottles of Soda Pop in the back that had been emptied by one end of him and refilled by the other. He was hungry and thirsty and he needed to find some new drawers to boot.

Billy had found the house unlocked and abandoned. There were many pictures of Sandra Billing's friends and family on the walls, some with her and some without her but Billy couldn't have cared less. He was interested in what the house had to offer his stomach.

He didn't bother with the refrigerator, it was obvious that the power had gone out here when it had gone out everywhere else so whatever might be in there was long past useful to him. The cupboards were not bare but little more than that. He found some Rice noodles, stale crackers, a handful of peanuts and some Wasabi peas that he was not too sure about since he had no idea what "Wasabi" was.

He avoided the basement. Basements are dark, dreary places and he'd seen enough of what was going on in the world right now to realize that nightmares could be real, monsters existed and despite what his father had always told him, he was not one of them. In a land of the hungry, Billy was a strange sort of minority.

So he stayed in the living room, admiring the comforts of a home long in the making and wondering only a little about it's former occupants. Instead, he searched the house for anything edible. He found a small box of Chocolates in the master bedroom that he ate so quickly he barely had the chance to register the sweetness of them before they had joined the crackers, peanuts and rice noodles in his prodigious gut. It was there that he looked out the bedroom window onto a rather nice if a bit discheveled garden and he realized that vegetable were food too.

All in all, Billy lasted a total of 3 hours from the time that he found the first of the food in the house to the time that the Wasabi Peas finally did him in. He had nearly gorged himself on the spoils of the garden, barely noticing that the dark, brownish red stains, Sandra's last contribution to her valued vegetable patch. He ate heartily of the well kept garden and then returned inside, unsatiated and sat on the couch deciding whether or not he should move to another house. He realized then that he was not in good shape. The car had no gas which meant he would have to walk. He was in the country and the next house was too far away for him to walk safely. Perhaps he would find out about Wasabi Peas while he decided what to do.

A quick look at the can gave him little in the way of what to expect and opening the can revealed peas that were far too green to be normal dried peas. What Billy did know is that they must be edible since they were in the same cabinet with the Peanuts. There were plenty of tasty green snack foods...guacamole is green. He tipped the can to his lips and poored them into his hungry mouth while he stared absentmindedly out the window. He imagined himself to look pensive, as though he is a man contemplating important things and nodded his head a little while his eager mouth made quick work of the dried and seasoned vegetation.

Billy had always had allergies. Something the Doctor suggested, when speaking to Billy's mom, was partly a result of Billy's respiratory system having to work much harder than it was designed for. For Billy, it was not a huge surprise to have his eyes watering so much as he chewed on the Wasabi Peas and he felt the burning sensation in the back of his throat. He thought he might be having an allergy attack. No big deal.

Of course, within moments of that little nugget of wisdom, Billy was gagging, and choking. He shot up off the couch spilling Wasabi Peas around the living room and then mashing them into the floor in a hurried flight for the kitchen...the tap had stopped working and none of the precious water he sought to put out the burning in his throat came forth to release him from this sudden and horrifying turn of events. He spun, several times in fact, finding nothing that would provide him with the key to escape this hell he had caused himself.

In a fit of desperation, Billy had screamed, gagged and then wretched up everything that was in his stomach, casting it out over the kitchen in a spray of oddly colored viscous liquid and unrecognizable chunks of solid matter that may or may not be a combination of vegetation and Snicker's bars.