“I don’t like it in here.” Stephanie was shaking.
“It’s all good, I have snacks,” Trip said as he pulled various half-eaten cellophane bags from his pockets. Stephanie winced at the excessive sound he was making.
Porkchop, Mark, and Sty looked longingly at the chip bags. Trip looked at the boys then slowly began to put them away.
“John,” Stephanie urged.
“Yeah?” He never took his eyes off the kids as he tucked all the snacks away.
She nodded her head to the boys.
Trip did the same thing. “What are we doing?” he asked her.
“I’m telling you to give the boys the chips without having to tell you to give them the chips.”
“How’s that working out for you?” he asked.
“Not so good.”
“Didn’t think it would,” he told her then turned away.
“John!”
“What?” He snapped his attention back to her.
“Give them the chips.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?” He pulled some bags out and handed them over.
She looked fairly exasperated.
“We should have stayed with Uncle Mike,” Mark said as he took a bag that Trip was reluctant to let go of.
“He thought we’d be safer here sweetheart,” Stephanie told him.
“Uh huh.”
For every snack bag Trip doled out, he grabbed something from the shelter’s ample food supply and replaced the emptiness. It was irrelevant what he grabbed; power bar, bag of beef stew, napkins, he didn’t care. Just as long as he had something in place. As if his pockets abhorred a vacuum.
“Shh…you hear that?” Porkchop asked.
“Can’t hear anything over your munching,” Sty ribbed him.
The bunker was a lot of things; airtight was not one of them. A malignant odor drifted in. It was so thick, Porkchop put his bag down, even went so far as to let it drop to the ground, but that had more to do with fright.
“You lost your mind?” Trip whispered as he bent down to pick it up. Trip threw his head back, as the first of the screeches ripped through his brains. When it stopped, Trip turned to the side. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were open wide in a wild, animalistic stare. Zach was screaming his lungs out; any chance they had of going undetected had long since slipped by.
A rhythmic thrumming began on the door. One of the zombies that had not yet climbed up the evolutionary ladder was using its skull to knock.
“What are we going to do?” Porkchop asked.
“We’re going to stay right here,” Stephanie said as calmly as she could manage. She was attempting to get Zach to stop crying; she’d been close to succeeding until another burst shot across their minds.
When it stopped, Trip had his head against the wall. Blood was flowing from his nose. “Going to rip our minds in half,” he breathed out with difficulty.
“Nonsense,” Stephanie said without conviction.
“Come out.”
Trip’s head first swiveled to the door, followed by the other inhabitants of the shelter. They had all heard it, and he didn’t know if he was sad or relieved.
“Do you think my uncle will come back?” Mark asked.
“Right now we are all we have,” Stephanie told him. Except for Zach, they were all armed, but what good was that? Trip preferred his slingshot, and she was reluctant to fire her revolver while holding the baby. That left three barely pubescent boys to do all the heavy lifting. She became irrationally angry at Mike for leaving them this vulnerable, even if he’d thought it was for the best, and so had she at the time, but things had changed, and so had her mind. It wasn’t fair to him, but this was their lives hanging in the balance; fair was out of the equation now.
Trip began to click his tongue. Stephanie looked over to him, his eyes were closed. He’d been skirting the edge of insanity for so long she figured the shrieker had finally finished off what traveling through realms and ingesting enough drugs to sedate a third world country had begun.
“Oh no, no, no, honey.” She reached up with her free hand to caress the side of his head.
“Echolocation,” he told her before resuming his clicks.
“What?”
“Shh…I’m figuring out where the asshole is at.”
Mark twirled his finger by the side of his head; Porkchop wasn’t so sure, though he wondered how the man was getting any return signals through the door.
“There’s ten of them; asshole is fifteen feet to the left.” Trip finally opened his eyes.
“No,” Stephanie told him. “You can’t possibly know that, and we’re not going out there.”
“Only ten?” Sty asked.
“No,” Stephanie admonished him.
“They’ll get more if we don’t,” Mark observed astutely.
“You’re not a dolphin!” she said to her husband.
“I watched Flipper when I was younger,” he offered as way of an explanation.
“We take them before they get a bulker,” Porkchop said.
“You too?” Stephanie seemed lost. “Is that what having testosterone is like? We have a baby here.”
“Lady, what do you think that shrieker is doing to his little baby mind?” Sty asked.
Trip was digging in his pockets for steel ball bearings. He grabbed the largest one splayed out in his hand; it was roughly the size of a super ball, but weighed significantly more.
“This’ll do, rabbit.” He held it up to the small flickering ceiling light, the batteries of which were starting to die. Stephanie could not help but think it was doing its utmost to mirror their own lives.
“Are you sure?” Stephanie asked Trip.
“About what?” His look of confusion only added to her fears. “Check your rounds and make sure your safeties are off, boys! The charge of the light brigade is about to begin.”
“Hold on.” Stephanie ripped part of her shirt off and wrapped it around Zach’s ears as many times as she could. “I love you, John, but I’m not relying on a slingshot to get us out of here.”
“Oh, it won’t, they will,” he whispered pointing to the boys.
Porkchop gulped heavily, a sour mash of taste rising from his stomach. He wished he’d not eaten any of the salty snacks he had received from Trip, as they were now blistering his throat with acid reflux.
“We’ve got this.” Sty was trying to psyche them all up; it wasn’t even working on himself.
“Steph, I need you to open the door then step back. Mark, Sty, there will be two very surprised zombies standing there; one is most likely going to fall right in.”
“The knocker,” Porkchop said.
Trip touched his knee like one might their nose in a rousing game of charades.
“There will be no shooting until my blushing bride is completely out of the way, is that clear?” Trip made sure to look each boy in the eye. When he was satisfied with their non-verbal affirmation, he continued with his plan. “With those two down, I am going to put this giant metal ball straight into the eyeball of the shrieker; I plan to give him some karmic justice–firstly, and hopefully, not lastly.” He quickly produced a half-smoked joint and a match.
“Not this close to the baby or the boys,” Stephanie protested.
He eyed her, his left eyebrow arching high. “Fine, edibles it is,” he said as he swallowed it down.
“That’s just gross,” Sty said.
“Now we wait,” Trip replied.
“Wait for what?” Porkchop asked.
“Takes about twenty minutes for that to kick in. If I should fall, I’m not going down unstoned.”
“Unstoned? You mean straight?” Mark asked.
“Straight is for squares.” Trip drew a circle in the air. “Whoa, maybe that kicked in quicker than I thought, or maybe the quaaludes weren’t quite done.” Trip exhaled a big breath of air while also leaning back. “Let’s get this done.”
“Right now?” Sty asked.
“Trust me, this is the best time,” Stephanie said as she moved nearer to the door. “Boys?”
“Yup,” Mark said.
“Shit,” was Sty’s reply as he fumbled with the safety.
The door opened quickly, and just as Trip predicted, the head banger fell straight in, the top of its head landing squarely on Mark’s boots. Sty had jumped back and Mark was busy placing three hastily shot rounds into the other zombie who had not yet, nor ever would, move into the shelter. Porkchop picked up the slack as he placed the muzzle of his small caliber pistol up against the fallen zombie’s skull and pulled the trigger hoping that the bullet didn’t go from skull, squishy stuff, skull, boot, to more squishy stuff, thus rendering Mark unable to move quickly. Mark, after killing the zombie directly in front of him, moved away just as Porkchop finished off the one at his feet.
Trip had moved with a quickness not normally attributed to him; the smoke had not stopped coming from Mark’s barrel as he stepped out of the enclosure. He raised the ball bearing-laden slingshot as he did so. The shrieker, seeing that his life was in jeopardy, was preparing for his aria just as the ball struck his eyeball at high-velocity. The gelatinous mass ruptured completely; eye fragments blew out to the sides as the ball dug further in. The shrieker’s head snapped back as the ball broke through his orbital socket and splintered the optic nerve. From there, the ball traveled another two inches, lodging deep into the frontal lobe and pressing hard on the temporal lobe. But none of that mattered, least of all to the shrieker, as he fell over, dead.
“That’ll teach you to try and screw with this brain!” Trip was touching his jaw. Stephanie came up beside him, her revolver roaring as she fired.
“Boys! Come on!” Mark and Porkchop were quick to follow. Sty had frozen in fear and indecision, not daring to come out.
“No!” He was shaking his head back and forth; Stephanie had thought he’d finally relented as he moved quickly; she thought to catch up to them as they moved and continually fired, taking care of the majority of zombies inside the house. Instead, he shut the door and threw the lock.
“Sty!” Stephanie begged.
“Mrs. Trip look!” Porkchop pointed to a window that looked upon a scene that would have been difficult to miss. A murder of zombies was coming down the road after hearing the shots.
“Sty, open the door!” Stephanie begged.
“I’m, I’m so sorry…I can’t!” She could hear him crying.
“Get out here!” she urged. She could hear him whimpering and possibly shuffling backward, though it was impossible to tell. What he wasn’t doing was opening the door and any avenue of retreat was quickly fading.
Trip looked at her solemnly. “Backdoor,” he told her.
“We can’t leave him here.”
“We can come back. We need to get away first.”
Her husband was withholding some information, but none of them had the time for her to decipher exactly what it was. He was right, and she was pissed about it.
“We’re coming back!” she made sure to point out.
“Of course we are,” he told her as they dashed for the kitchen and the door to the backyard. They quickly scaled the six-foot privacy fence, Stephanie handing Zach over before joining the rest of the small group. They found themselves in a small, but well-landscaped, yard that had a beautiful rock wall and a koi pond which had long since gone green. A swimming pool dominated the rest of the area; five zombies bobbed around in the now viscous-looking swamp. They watched with hungry eyes as the group inched away from them and around the other side. A small, female zombie puzzled out that she would not be able to get at them from the deep end, so headed to the shallows where the scalloped steps led out.
Porkchop had moved toward the house and the gate by the side; he opened it a few inches before closing it quietly. “Zombies,” he whispered. They were not only surrounded, they had some within the perimeter. Shooting the ones here would only bring the rest down upon them. The small female’s progress had slowed as she got into the shallower water and had nearly halted as her foot came down upon the first step. The rot and ruin below her head was not a sight any of them would soon forget. Brownish-black muscle shown through her translucent skin, where there was skin at all. Some of the muscles in her arms and legs had detached from the tendons that held them in place, hanging loosely against her body as if she were wearing a macabre gown of streamers. She could not raise her right arm at all, and her legs did not appear to be able to support her weight. Still, she tried to make it out of the pool.
She gripped the metal handrail to keep from slipping and left a trail of bloody mucus from the contact. On her next step ahead, she pitched forward, her jaw smacking loudly onto the concrete edge. Chunks of teeth rattled away like hard cast dice. Two of the zombies in the pool with her, after hearing the noise, chose to investigate.
“I don’t think I can watch that again.” Stephanie’s voice quivered with horror. They were spared the sight as their attention was diverted; heavy gunfire was happening off to the east. It was getting closer and hope surged in her heart as she thought help might be coming. Then, as high as her thoughts had gone, they crashed down doubly far as the sound began to trail off and stop completely. There was a loud crashing sound immediately to their rear. Try as she might, she could not shake the knowledge of what it was. A bulker had broken through the doorway to the house they had just vacated; Sty’s refuge was next. She thought she might go mad with the knowledge of it.
“Come.” Trip had gently grabbed her shirt and was urging her toward the garage. Porkchop took hold of her other sleeve and got her moving. She knew they were going to lose one, but she had to look out for the other four. She unwillingly went with them. “I…I think we were meant to be here.” There was a tear in Trip’s eye as he looked at the restored VW van sitting parked in the garage.
“Have you already forgotten about Sty?” Stephanie cried.
“I will never forget about him or his sacrifice. If not for that boy, we would not have had the opportunity to escape.” He said it so tenderly and so heartfelt, she could not doubt the sincerity of his words. “You need to drive; I don’t want to get another DUH,” he told her.
“A duh?” Porkchop asked.
“Driving under hallucination,” Trip explained.
“What about the keys?” she asked as she got in.
Trip opened the glove box. “That worked?” he asked as he pulled a small key ring out.
Stephanie turned the ignition; the vehicle backfired once and started. She took note that the fuel level hovered at three-quarters full. One small bright spot in a day filled with bleakness.
“I’ve got it. Just get ready to go.” Mark was looking out the garage door window; he had pulled the electric opener handle, releasing it from the machine’s engagement. He had one hand on the garage door handle and was going to open it fast then dive for the van. Porkchop was manning the sliding rear door to shut it as soon as the other was inside.
Stephanie put the van in reverse and nodded to Mark, who was watching her through the side-view mirror. He pulled the door open and could not help but notice the trio of zombies coming to investigate the small explosion that had happened. He spared them not a second glance as he turned and climbed inside. Porkchop immediately closed and locked the door. Stephanie gunned the van backward, she and the passengers bouncing about wildly as she did so. There was one agonizing moment as she reached the roadway and threw the transmission into drive; the car sputtered and nearly stalled. And then they were off. West; they were heading west.