The first story, Taco Tim, appeared in Carnage House Issue #7.

The second story, Taco Tim Too: With Hot Sauce, appeared in Issue #8.

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SKANDS STARED AT THE search engine and its ever-spinning hourglass and massaged his temples. His head throbbed in a sort of low internal ebb and flow, synchronized with his heartbeat. “Four minutes remaining, my ass,” he muttered under his breath, then sighed.

He withdrew to the kitchen, poured a cup of cold coffee from the day-old, eternally stained, crusty glass pot, and downed it in one long, bitter swig. The caffeine provided some respite from the migraine, which retreated to a murmured humming sensation behind his right eye. “That’s better,” he said.

The computer had completed its search by the time he returned, and Skands hunched over the keyboard, studying what the screen had to offer. Taking it in, he scrolled madly, with the relentless fervor of a maze rat that had figured out how to press the button at the sliding glass window to dispense the food therein. Blurry photographs of meat tacos whizzed by, along with various firsthand accounts of a shifty, disgusting, but otherwise nondescript greaser. There were several images of the dirty bearded man holding the same taco, with the foodstuffs always out of focus. Even in their pixelated, fogged state, the tacos practically begged to be eaten. “Bingo,” Skands exclaimed. “It’s all coming together.”

He rushed from the computer desk to the far side of the room. There, a myriad images—newspaper clippings, low-resolution inkjet printouts, and other random ephemera—told the story of Taco Tim. The pandemic. The containment clinics. Files on Doctor “Dysentery” Dean Dyson and Nurse Mary Smith, and sales records for their recently purchased mansion in the Bahamas. World leaders and politicians. The human digestive tract. Personal poop journals gleaned from web pages and health records. Diagrams of countless bus and subway stations. Maps of Mexico, China, London, Mumbai, New Orleans, New York City, and Tallahassee, Florida (of all places). And a bunch of website jargon. Everything vomited across the wall like some kind of bad self-reflective therapy-dream-goal-resolution styled collage, all with red string tethering them to one another in various crisscrossing patterns. He scoffed at the would-be haters who might brand him nuts in the old-school police drama sense; he knew he was totally onto something.

Skands tugged several threads from their pinpoints, reweaving their tangled tapestry of connections across circumstantial and anomalous evidence to bear witness to newly revealed truths. His green eyes grew wide and sparkled with accomplishment, and an enlightened smile crossed his lips. He backed away slowly from his work, nodding in approval.

“So, it was a taco, yes,” Skands muttered to himself. “But it couldn’t have started in Mexico, just as the Kung Pao mutation didn’t originate in China. It actually began at the New York City Port Authority—that was Ground Zero. I have to go to the source…”

***

The Amtrak arrived in New York City after a five-hour delay, most of which Skands spent crammed into a somewhat sticky, too-tight, rigid-backed seat with questionable stains that could have been coffee, shit, vomit, or some combination thereof. The trip from Rochester to NYC had been long, but was nothing compared to the torturous fourteen-hour journey from Chicago to Rochester. For most of that first leg, Skands shared a row with a screaming two-year-old and her half-awake and only mildly attentive mother, who fed the toddler some kind of gloppy gruel-like cereal concoction that reeked of curdling milk and brown banana mush, which led to an unwelcome projectile-vomiting bad Exorcist impression. The nightmare duo finally disembarked at Buffalo, and none too soon.

Finally rolling into Penn Station, still hunched in the too-small seat, Skands glanced down at his ragged tennis shoes and shuddered at the evidence of the kid’s barf, the yellow-brown crust of that vile yogurt-like substance sprayed all over the saloon floor. He rolled his shoulders, emitting a loud popping crack from his contorted neck, and hoisted his oversized black duffel bag to his lap, relishing its weight. The tote reeked of the toddler’s gruel, but this became less obvious the longer he sat with it.

As his ride barreled down the metal and stone shaft, the station loomed all around like an abandoned carnie ride in a haunted theme park. Normally the whole of the historic building swelled and teemed with life, ever at the ready to gorge its insatiable hunger on trains only to vomit them back out in massive swells of metal, transports thrusting in and out of its entrances like too many prostitutes servicing too many sailors on leave. But, now the beast was quiet. Too quiet.

Hell, after the toddler and her mother exited the train, not a single new passenger boarded his car. Skands hadn’t thought much of it at the time, save to mutter “Good riddance” under his breath. But now, the second thoughts were finally starting to sink in. Here he was, in an Amtrak pulling in to New York City, and he was alone in the railcar, the train having lost its few remaining passengers at the connection at Albany. He disembarked in the second-fastest dismount of his lifetime—the fastest being that time in high school when his girlfriend’s father walked in on them.

Now, he peered around the nearly boneyard-dead station, and the weirdness of the scene settled. The New York Transit Authority security made a show of scanning everyone and everything from behind their acrylic shields, but their sparsely attended choke points didn’t amount to even a minor clusterfuck. Skands approached the checkpoint and passed through uneventfully, casually clutching the duffel bag to his chest and shuffling out the side door onto Eighth Avenue. He looked for an oncoming bus, but there were none that he could see going in either direction. From Penn Station to the Port Authority was less than ten city blocks, and Skands desperately needed to stretch his jellified legs and soak in some city smog-infused sun. He decided to walk.

A few minutes into his hike, it became apparent how eerily empty the streets were, void of pedestrians and food carts and street vendors selling glossy-paged magazines, souvenir tchotchkes, and cheap imitation swank. A lone commuter rushed by in a daze, wrapped up in a nondescript tan trench coat despite the sweltering July heat. The figure swept past Skands without pausing—like a ghost. Up and down the street, restaurants, bars, and stores stood still, absent of life or movement, many with vestiges of sun-bleached signs proclaiming “Back in Five Minutes” peering from within their dusty, smoky windows. The city…slumbered, far from the bustling metropolis it was known to be—everywhere bearing the impact of the pandemic.

Shadowy figures lurked in alleyways, not transients but something far more sinister.

Skands was rounding a bend when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a scraggy beard. A slump of a man perked up from the matted paper pulp debris left in the wake of an abandoned newspaper stand and rose, crusty and covered in dirt. The man’s grimy fist clenched hard around an immaculate taco, and in spite of everything Skands knew, he found its heavenly aroma nearly impossible to resist. “Hey!” the bearded man yelled accusingly.

Skands took off in a sprint like a man spotted by his wife in a strip club with his pants down. He slid into an empty alleyway, dropped the duffel bag, and fell to his knees, breath heaving, eyes wide, mouth still watering from the lure of the taco held aloft, tauntingly, in the stranger’s hand. “You got this,” he muttered to himself. “You can do it.” His stomach rumbled its displeasure, fixated against his will on the ground beef and cheese prize he had so narrowly evaded. He hefted his tote to his shoulder and peered out from the alley. The street was quiet—no one in sight.

He trotted on down the avenue to the Port Authority and ducked inside. A handful of people milled around the bus station—more than in the train depot, mostly hanging around. Then he spotted it…a taco cart! A young woman sauntered past with her purchase. If pressed, even in a court of law, Skands couldn’t have recalled a single detail about her, whether she had her blonde hair up in a ponytail or a bun, if her sundress was blue or purple, or if she wore lipstick… the only noteworthy thing about her was the Mexicali-Asian fusion fare Kung Pao taco in her possession. The fluffy tortilla shell wrapped perfectly around a bed of breaded fried chicken with thick, gooey glaze. The odd mix, given the recent and catastrophic spread of the pandemic, looked revoltingly disgusting and irresistibly enticing at the same time.

Skands drifted toward the food cart, enthralled. The clientele, if you could call them that, ravaged the taco stand, devouring anything and everything they could get their hands on. A Tamil man with sparkling black eyes and a neatly trimmed full beard attended the hungry hoard, shuffling around and dishing out foodstuffs faster than he could wipe his greasy gloved hand across his gray apron.

“This is it,” Skands muttered. “Ground Zero, Point Blank… There’s no turning back—I’ve got one shot at this.”

As if sensing a shift in the air, the small crowd dissipated, receding into the bus station with their prizes, their eyes alight with an inhuman hunger. The taco vendor turned to Skands and spoke. “There’s no resisting the fusion fare—it’s all the rage. So, here, try a Kung Pao taco with extra ghost pepper sauce on me. It’s to die for.” The words slid off the manicured man’s tongue like silvered barbs, his thin lips arced in a sly, knowing grin.

“No!” Skands reached into his duffel bag and procured an AR-15. In a swift, fluid motion, he raised the assault rifle and released a barrage of bullets into the food cart. The street vendor shook and lurched as his body filled with holes, expanding circles of red-black blood oozing through his gray apron. His crumpled form fell face-first into the Kung Pao chicken, sending the metal spoon clattering to the floor in a spray of sticky, greasy sauce. The utensil slid, trailing a long orange streak across the dingy tile in its wake, and the food cart careened to the floor with a loud clang! The metal serving tray of Kung Pao chicken erupted from the wreckage, spraying its contents in a wide arc that spattered the vile substance across Skands’s already yellow-crusted sneakers. It glistened, mockingly, in the flickering fluorescent light.

Security was on the scene faster than you could yell “Free donuts!” Skands took refuge behind the upended taco cart as a single bullet whizzed past his shoulder, burning a streak through his short sleeve and grazing his arm, where a raised red welt immediately bloomed. Instinctively, he dropped his rifle and grabbed his shoulder. A second bullet struck him above the left eye, strewing his own brains and skull fragments across the carnage he himself had wrought.

Skands’s body fell in a heap, belly-flopping into the puddle left by the vender’s food cart, splattering nastiness all along the walls in a spray of greasy, sticky sauce, blood, bone, brains, and bile in a crime scene straight out of a food fight from Hell.

Brad found the aftermath delectably disgusting, and the dripping Kung Pao chicken still looked damn good enough to eat, or inhale as it were. He sighed and relaxed, his back to the wall from whence he had just sniped the lone gunman. He massaged his temples and stared at his hand, picking at his infected pinky, crusty yellow pus oozing from what was left of a gnawed hangnail. He spoke softly. “Another one. And not even a week after the Frazzle Gate Pizza Parlor fire. They’re taking out the best eats in town, one at a time.”

“Yep,” Stu sighed. “It’s those damn viral videos. Such a crock of bullshit, and yet these asshole vigilantes keep buyin’ in an’ takin’ matters into their own hands. Hell, most of ‘em aren’t even from around here. If they were they’d know better.”

“D’ya think there’s anything real to it—this pandemic scare?” Brad asked. He glanced up at his partner, who swiped a finger through the sticky sauce on the floor and plunged it, sucking greedily, into his mouth.

“Nah,” Stu replied. “Not unless it causes the crazies with all the red-pill-rabbit-hole nonsense.” He stroked the bridge of his nose, his lips curling in a less-than-satisfied smile, then took another finger-swipe from the carnage. This time when he sucked it down, his eyes rolled back in his head. When he recovered, he said to Brad, “How ‘bout we get somethin’ to eat? I’m starved and a beef ‘n cheese taco would sure hit the spot. I know a little hole in the wall not far from here, still operating out the back until all of this blows over.”

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