Journal Entry 12
December 13th
I woke up early, dressed, and got out of the house as quickly as I could. I had made up my mind last night that I wasn’t bringing the boys, but I hadn’t told them yet. This was going to bite me in the ass. I could already feel the teeth marks. The added stress of having to look out for their welfare weighed heavily on me, and I was looking forward to not having that burden. Yeah, they were better under pressure than me, at least for this situation, and their aim was nearly equal to mine. The idea of zombies being real had not completely set in to my reality. Justin and Travis, however, had not only grasped the implications of this corporeality, they were easily sliding into this new lifestyle. I take no small measure of responsibility for their transitional ease. My psychoses had to have spilled over. I’d been preparing for some form of Armageddon for the better part of three decades. And the other factor has to be the video games that are rife with otherworldly monsters, including but not limited to zombies. They’d been prepared and partially desensitized. I trusted them implicitly. I just couldn’t handle the apprehensiveness of looking out for them. Besides, truth be told, if anything ever happened to one of the kids Tracy would kill me, and I’m not talking that ‘ha, ha’ figurative shit either.
So I left the house early, my breath leaving vapor trails behind. I carried enough ammo to almost be a hindrance, but it was a comforting weight all the same. Looking back on this day, I wish I had volunteered for the grave digging party. That would have been a clambake by comparison. The truck was already idling with the heat going, for which I was thankful. I was beginning to feel the bite of the cold through my thin gloves. I wasn’t going to wear anything heavier that might hinder my access to the trigger. I walked up to the four people that were huddled by the front grille of the truck. I rightfully assumed they were the wire gathering team. I didn’t ‘know’ any of them, even though I’d seen them around the complex in one fashion or another.
There was Jen, the ‘feminine’ partner in the pairing with Jo(e)—the neighbor we had slaughtered coming out of my garage. (That nightmare still ranked in the top three). She wasn’t nearly as outgoing as her former lover, and I had never said more than pleasantries to her. I always thought it was a waste that she was a lesbian. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why she avoided me. Maybe she had been able to pick up on my lascivious thoughts. She wasn’t looking so good these days, though. The deliberation she was giving the mourning process had aged her considerably. Her elfish features had diminished. If I’m being honest it’s not so much that her looks weren’t still there, it was more like her soul was hanging by a thread. The light behind her eyes had dulled leaving nothing more than two dimmed irises. The blackness that threatened to envelope them was not more than a heartbeat away.
Next was Carl, who nodded to me. He was an older guy, mid-fifties maybe, always in his garage working on his motorcycle with the door open whether it was ninety-five or negative five degrees out. He was quick with a wave and a smile, come to think of it I’ve probably waved to this guy a couple of hundred times in the months I’ve lived here and never once have I said hello. Strange. He had two pearl-handled revolvers holstered to his belt. He looked like he knew how to use them but I would have hoped that he was carrying more firepower. Oh well, his call. Next was Ben, he was older than Carl, he was probably pushing sixty-five or seventy—great. I was now dreading my decision to not bring the boys. I’d seen Ben around a few times. I don’t think he went out too much. He was always walking his Golden Retriever who looked older than him. I’m not sure which one of them went slower, neither one was in any great rush to get anywhere. I’m no Carl Lewis, but if we had to run for it, I’m not sure Ben—or Carl for that matter—could outpace the zombies.
Last but not least, okay by sizing him up maybe he was least, was someone’s nephew. He muttered something about an uncle or maybe elephant trunk, but I wasn’t able to pick it up and I wasn’t concerned enough to get clarification. His name was Tipper. I know! What kind of name is that? Tipper looked like a cokehead. He twitched more than Tom Arnold when Roseanne was yelling at him. I didn’t trust any of them. Even though this was my idea, I now didn’t want to go. I was more than half-tempted to turn around until Ben started to speak.
“Got the truck all warmed up for us,” he drawled.
Everyone in our small party turned and deferred to me. I just wanted to go home and eat one of Tommy’s Pop-Tarts. “Let’s get going,” I said instead. I inadvertently shivered, whether from the cold or someone walking over my grave; I wasn’t sure but it seemed more the latter.
The truck rumbled by Don Griffin’s small burial detail. They were headed out the northern gate, shovels in hand and a small Cat backhoe trailing with a cart in tow. It wasn’t until I actually saw the cart that the impact of what Don was doing hit. I hadn’t thought about where the bodies would be buried although it seemed logical that they shouldn’t be interred in the complex. There was a small field across the street well within the protective firing zone of the guards. Still I didn’t think it was wise to leave without weapons, I mean who would go and bury the burial team if something happened to them? We swung out and away from the group, heading first east and then north. It would, in a normal world, be about a fifteen minute drive with traffic and lights, though we now had neither of those to contend with. We had switched them out for zombies and bandits, a shitty exchange rate if you ask me. The drive was relatively uneventful, if not almost downright enjoyable. Ben knew how to handle the truck. Now if I could just get Tipper to shut up I might be able to think.
“Hey, Mike,” I winced. Tipper kept going. “Do you think we’ll get to kill some zombies? Huh? I want to kill me some zombies. I was pretty messed up the night it went down, I mean I slept through the whole thing.” He grinned sheepishly.
“My friends call me Mike,” I said, lacing as much menace as I could through each word.
“Hey, Mike, so how come there aren’t any more zombies around? Huh? Where do you think they all went? Do you think they died? Or do you think they went somewhere else like Seattle? Huh?” Tipper kept at this pace for most of the ride until, mercifully, Jen spoke.
“Oh shut up, you little twit!” she yelled. “Decent people stop between questions so the person they are talking to has an opportunity to answer.”
“Huh?” Tipper said, tilting his head like a dog.
“But then I guess there’s nothing to worry about, is there?” she continued mockingly.
Tipper finally shut up maybe he was coming down. Now that I knew I had less of a chance of being interrupted I figured I might as well pass the time talking. I looked longingly over at Carl who was fast asleep and wished I were, too. “I’ve been wondering the same thing, I mean, if these are ‘traditional’ zombies.”
Jen arched an eyebrow.
“I know! What the hell is a ‘traditional’ zombie?” I snorted. “Sorry, if these zombies are like the ones in stories, then they are not going to die without a little assistance from us.”
As I hefted up my rifle to show as an exclamation point, Jen’s grip tightened on her own. Tipper had his back towards us, attempting to hide his habit. The telltale sniffing gave him away, that and his acerbic personality. Jen shook her head in disgust. I would have been amused if we weren’t heading to a potential hot zone.
“More like a lukewarm zone,” I said as I stepped off the truck and into the parking lot of what used to be Rocky Mountain National Guard Armory 17.
“Huh?” Jen asked quizzically as she shouldered on by.
“Uh, nothing, and let me know if I’m in your way,” I said cheekily.
“I will,” she responded without turning around.
Someone’s sense of humor had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, I thought.
Carl was rousing himself out of sleep, buttoning his pants back up and putting his jacket on before he stepped out. Ben was busy securing the truck. Okay, I thought, three out of four accounted for. Then I had a slight panic attack.
“Where’s Twitchy?” I said louder than I meant to. In the cold still air of the morning it sounded like a shout.
Jen turned. “Who?” she asked
“Twitch…I mean Tipper,” I clarified. The reply was quick and forthcoming but not the one I wanted.
“Look…arghhh, oh fuck! Get it off!” Tipper screamed.
Jen and I both turned in horror. Carl was just coming down off the truck and gaped along with us. Tipper had walked up to the front door of the armory, which looked like it had been blasted off its hinges with a tank. Who knows, maybe it had been. But what was captivating our attention was the zombie attached to Tipper’s head. Blood was streaming down the side of his face as he howled in a combination of terror and pain; the two of them staggering from side to side in a macabre dance. I brought my rifle up, but I knew at this distance and their co-mingled movement that I could not get a clean shot off. I never would have guessed if I hadn’t seen it myself, but Carl was moving with all the speed and agility of a man half his age, unholstering his pistol as he went. Within moments he was within safe firing distance of Tipper and his new dance partner. The zombie paid no attention to Carl as the pistol was neatly placed against its head. If I thought my voice was loud, the Colt .45 shattered any of those illusions. The open entryway to the armory amplified the affect. The noise was deafening, but not to Tipper, his right ear went down with the zombie. Tipper was clutching at the gaping bloody hole where his ear used to be, screaming for all he was worth.
“Shut him up!” Ben was saying frantically. “He’ll have half the zombie population here in a minute.”
“Yeah, as opposed to that small cannon fire,” I said sarcastically.
Jen was walking over to Tipper to try and console him, but Tipper was having none of it. He kept pushing her away. She had finally had enough.
“Either let me see the damn wound, or I’m going to have Carl finish you off!” Jen yelled.
Carl was busy wiping the gore off his gun and didn’t notice that he had been involved in Jen’s plan. But it was effective enough to shut Tipper up. He was sniffling and close to blubbering. I wanted to call him a baby and tell him to shut up, but when Jen finally calmed him enough so she could examine the wound, I didn’t say anything. I was too busy holding my bile down. The zombie had bitten the ear clean off, but the ear had not come off without collateral damage. It had stayed mostly attached to his face when the zombie went down. The force had torn half of Tipper’s cheek off. So not only was there the exposed ear hole but also the muscles that lined the side of his face. He looked worse than the poor bastard lying on the ground. Torn tissue sprayed blood as he swung his head from side to side in obvious agony. I thought the best thing we could do for him was to shoot him and put him out of our misery…I mean his misery.
“Ben!” Jen yelled. “Are there any rags in the truck?”
I didn’t see the point and I let my opinion be known. “Move away, Jen.” I motioned with my rifle.
“Are you crazy!” she spat back.
“What good is a bandage,” I said dismally. “He’ll be one of them in a few hours.”
“You coward!” she screamed. “I can stop the bleeding, and I have some aspirin.”
“And then?” I said lowering my rifle. I just didn’t have the stomach for it.
Tipper was doing his best to hide his tall wiry frame behind Jen’s petiteness, his misery forgotten for a moment under this much bigger threat. Ben was watching the stand-off when, for the second time that day, I thought my eardrums were going to burst. Jen stood stock still as blood and gore from Tipper’s demolished head sprayed all over her.
“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST DO?” she was screaming at me.
I was looking down at my rifle. ‘I didn’t do a damn thing, did I?’
Carl was walking into the armory. “He would have been one of them soon enough, I did what I had to do.” And he offered no further explanation.
Jen still had not moved, at least not in a lateral direction. Even from this distance I could see her shivering, from either fear or rage. Ben hopped back up into the truck looking for a rag, but now for a different reason than before. He came down from the cab with a roll of paper towels. I grabbed his arm lightly before he passed by.
“Uh, Ben, after you get her cleaned up, could you stay out here on guard duty?”
He nodded sternly. I think Ben was doing his best to not let the situation affect him. If so, he was doing better than I was. I hastily passed Jen who was too intent on the gore running down her face to pay me any attention. I wanted to catch up with Carl before something else happened.
The blown apart doors were only the beginning of the destruction to the armory. The inside looked as if an F5 tornado had swept through. Um, maybe that isn’t right, it was more like an F3. There was still SOME stuff lying around. Rows upon rows of empty racks that at one time contained M-16’s were now empty. As I walked to the left, I discovered even more foreboding news, the heavy stuff was gone, too. You could see where there had been a few .50 caliber machine guns, about 10 SAWs (light machine guns) and two rocket launchers that were now missing. Just wonderful, there was a band of somebodies out there more heavily armed than an average battalion. Getting razor wire seemed like less of a priority; whoever had all this stuff wasn’t going to be stopped by any glorified chicken wire.
“Hey, Talbot,” Carl beckoned. “Could you come over here and help me with these?”
I walked over to the armory repair station. Carl was rounding up about a dozen or so M-16’s in various states of disrepair. I looked at him questioningly.
“We should be able to get at least a couple of these working with all these parts,” he answered me without even looking up.
Seemed like a worthwhile venture to me. I shouldered my weapon and grabbed a handful of rifles. There was loose ammo all over the place. Whoever had been here before us must have been in a hurry. Maybe they were leaving town. That would be awesome. They had spent enough time to clean out every working weapon and the vast majority of ammo, but it appeared as if some of the cartons had fallen and spilled out on the floor. They hadn’t warranted those bullets important enough to pick up. There had to have been at least a few thousand rounds on the ground alone. God, how many did they take with them?
As I walked out into the brightness it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Ben was just finishing getting most of the viscous material off Jen. They both looked more than a little green-tinged.
“Jen, when you’re done here, could you go into the armory and start grabbing all the ammunition that’s on the floor?” I asked. I’m not a psych major. I didn’t know if I should approach her in a caring tone or a conciliatory one or any other damn method. I needed a job done and that’s how I went about it.
“No,” came her monosyballic reply.
I stopped short, one of the rifles threatening to fall out of my arms.
She started back up again. “I’m not going in there and I’m not staying out here. I’m getting back in the truck and lying down.”
I wanted to throttle her. We were all a little thrown off by what had just happened, but we had a mission to think about. That’s what you get when you take civilians on a military endeavor.
“Jen, we have more to think about here than what just happened to Tipper. He messed up by running ahead and trying to be a hero. We have to get the remainder of this ammo and wire for the people back home,” I almost pleaded. We were already one person short; if Jen flaked out now, we’d be out here for hours longer than I had expected.
She turned to look at me, and fire flashed across her eyes. It was more likely sunlight reflecting off her sky blue irises, but the effect was staggering nonetheless. “See, that’s where you’re wrong, Talbot! I don’t have anyone at home! There’s nothing for me there! I lost everything! I don’t care whether we all live or die, I just don’t care!”
“Then what the hell did you come out here for!” I yelled back. She flinched a little but nothing worth writing home about.
“Revenge! I thought I could exact some sort of pay back for what they did to Jo and to me! But I know that’s useless now. They just don’t care. No, it’s even worse than that, they just don’t know. They are mindless, one-track mind, killing and eating machines. They’re almost as bad as MEN!” she shouted.
Wow, I guess there isn’t going to be any hetero conversion there. Men and zombies were near enough equals in her mind. I didn’t want anything more to do with Jen. She was a pulse away from going into shock, and I had enough problems. I didn’t bother answering her as I headed for the back of the truck.
A few seconds later, I heard the cab door shut as I exited the rear of the trailer. I hurried over to Ben.
“You have the keys?” I asked him apprehensively.
“Oh, you betcha,” he replied.
“Any chance you could pick up the stray ammo?” I pleaded.
“I’d love to, Talbot, but I’ve got a bad back, I couldn’t bend over to save my life,” he replied.
“Wonderful,” I said scornfully. Ben looked a little taken aback. I had no desire to stroke his bruised feelings. “Keep guard then.”
Carl had made a stack of rifles that he wanted to take with us. I guess I was the muscle. Carl had at least understood the necessity to grab all the strewn ammo and was down on his hands and knees pushing a large ammunition container in front of him as he filled it. Damn that thing was going to be heavy when he was done. I had grabbed another stack of weaponry when I heard Ben’s shrill cry. I rushed out into the blinding light. Ben was pointing and trying to speak, but I couldn’t make it out yet. He was about as useless as Tipper, and as we all know, Tipper was dead.
“Zombies!” Ben finally vocalized. My sight was catching up. I saw a small contingent angling our way. The noise or the smell of meat must have garnered their attention, didn’t matter which at this point. Jen sat up in the truck and locked the doors.
What have I got myself into?
Ben was shaking so bad I thought his pants were going to fall off. Carl had followed me out when we heard Ben scream.
Thank God for Carl, of all the people here, he was going to be my only true ally. He assessed the situation in a crack.
“Talbot, why don’t you shut the gate. I’m going to finish gathering the bullets,” he said and then turned and walked back into the armory.
“I love that guy,” I said out loud.
There were six zombies heading towards us. If I crawled backwards on my back to the gate I would still have had plenty of time to roll the gate closed. But zombies were zombies and they still scared the bejesus out of me. I jogged over to the gate and closed it. Then I wrapped the remnants of the remaining chain around the fence, just in case that, by some grace of the devil, they were able to figure out how to roll it back from where it came. We were effectively down three out of the five people we had started with, but I wasn’t going home empty-handed.
I went back into the tractor-trailer and grabbed the small ladder that we had placed in there so I could start the job. I cautiously approached the fence. The zombies didn’t seem discernibly closer. I climbed the ladder and fished out the wire cutters that I had in my jacket. This was not going to be an easy task considering the thinness of the gloves I had put on for protection (or lack thereof). That, and the fact that my goggles kept fogging up, was making this a difficult venture. I had learned over the years that it is infinitely better to wear protection, no matter how cumbersome, rather than find ways to staunch the flow of blood from one’s body.
Over the years as a handyman, a do-it-yourselfer and a general klutz, I had racked up more emergency room time than Tim the Tool Man Taylor. Please tell me you know who he was? Let’s see, where do I start? I have broken a rib from installing an attic fan. I nearly cut off my index finger with a compound miter saw installing flooring. Put a drill bit through my thumb. Bruised my eyeball throwing a bunch of trash away at the dump when the errant cord from a toaster hit me. Cut a vein in my hand and sliced my head open while changing a light bulb. Sliced my leg open with a box cutter, you guessed it, while cutting a box. There are a least a dozen more instances over the years. I’m just listing the lowlights. So these days, most of the time, I like to err on the side of caution. If there is some sort of safety gear for the task at hand, I want it. I’ll take fogging up goggles over loss of sight any day.
I was busy wiping said goggles for the third time, and had already cut loose almost fifty feet of wire, when I felt the impact of the first zombie hitting the fence. My ladder shuddered, and my heart skipped a beat or two. I had almost forgotten about the persistent little buggers. Now Hector was looking up at me, arms outstretched, mouth agape. He was a heavyset Mexican man, small mustache, big belly. I’m not being racist. His name was Hector, it said as much on his name tag. That and he used to work at Tire Discount and he smelled as if he hadn’t showered after five shifts at the physically demanding job. Flies were buzzing around him, but notably not on him. The flies seemed to be attracted to the sweet smell of decaying meat that emanated from his mouth, but they were not enticed enough to get any closer. The oddest fact that struck me was not that a zombie was less than five feet from me, it was that flies were still around in December.
I wanted to put a round in Hector’s bloated melon, if for nothing more than to get his putrid-smelling ass away from me. But I had no inclination to see if the noise would attract more of his kind…or anybody else’s kind for that matter. So I kept cutting with the wire clippers, stepping down from my ladder to shift it over every five feet and climbing back up. And always, Hector followed like a lovelorn puppy. Hector’s friends had stayed at the gate to try their luck with Ben, who had only moved enough to get a better look at the zombies that wanted to eat him. For all intents and purposes it looked like a world-class staring competition.
On and on it went like this for another couple of hundred yards, Mr. Shuffles keeping consistent pace with my wire removal. My goggles had fogged for the umpteenth time, so this time I took my gloves off to get a better wipe down of the insistent miasma. After completing my job to a satisfactory level, I put my goggles back on and then began to pull my gloves on. The cold was having an adverse affect on me and I lost my grip on the second glove. As I reached over to try to grab the falling glove, I compounded my troubles. The wire cutters that I had stowed in my jacket’s breast pocket also fell as I leaned away from the ladder at an angle, and both items hit the ground and bounced, tumbling under the fence, they ended up at Hector’s feet. I swear, if I didn’t have bad luck I’d have no luck at all.
“Any chance you could hand those back to me?” I asked Hector. He only replied with a soft moan. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
I climbed down the ladder. His eyes never broke contact with mine. The glove and the cutters were less than six inches away on the other side of the fence. I could easily reach under and grab them, but if I somehow got hung up, Hector would get his mid-morning snack after all. Noise be damned, I was going to shoot him. I’d learned enough painful lessons over the years to not tempt fate.
I began to un-sling my rifle, when Hector did something I was not expecting. He bent and recovered the glove and the cutters. With some motor skill difficulty he brought the glove to his nose and sniffed. Maybe he still smelled meat on them. He took a bite, ripping right through the thumb. He chewed for a moment and swallowed, then realized to his disappointment that it wasn’t his desired nourishment, he dropped the glove. The wire cutters became Hector’s next fascination. He started turning them over and over in his hands. He handled them like a newborn wearing mittens might, but I couldn’t help thinking that this tool was somehow stirring some long forgotten memory in what used to pass as a human mind. His bluish-purple hands finally got the tool into a potentially usable fashion. He then began to thrust the cutters at the fence. I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real or not. Was he trying to cut the fence? My mind whirled as the implications started setting in.
“Hey, Carl, umm, could you come here for a minute?” I yelled over my shoulder. I was afraid that if I looked away for more than a fraction of a second, Hector would miraculously figure out how to use the cutters and make his way through the fence before I could turn back around.
“Talbot, I’m a little busy,” Carl shouted back. Seems there were more rounds than I had expected, Carl had been busy picking them up and loading them into the trailer.
“Yeah, still you might want to see this,” I said determinedly, still not taking my eyes off Hector.
At one point the cutters made contact with the fence, but Hector did not have the dexterity to close the pliers to do any damage. He moaned at that point, and I would have sworn it was because of frustration.
Carl was walking over, wiping the sweat from his brow with a bandanna. “Lost your pliers?” he said matter-of-factly.
“You know, you and my son, Captain Obvious, have a lot in common,” I said dryly.
“Just shoot the bastard and get them back,” he said as he began to turn around.
“Yeah I figured out that part all on my own, Dad,” I said dryly. “Look at what he’s doing.”
Carl got closer. “Well I’ll be damned. He’s trying to cut the fence. Well ain’t that a kick in the pants. Shoot him and get your pliers back.”
“Still right about that, but don’t you find that just a little freakin’ scary?” I asked him.
“What? Look at him, he can’t even make the damn things close. He’s not getting in here anytime soon,” Carl pointed out.
“It’s not whether he can operate the cutters, it’s that he is trying at all. It’s like he’s remembering a lost skill or trying to attain a new one,” I answered.
“So what?” Carl asked impatiently.
“So what?!” I retorted sharply. “If they have the ability to learn…”
The statement was left verbally unanswered but literally answered as we both turned to look when we heard the telltale twang of a chain link being cut. Hector appeared to be attempting to smile, but his rigor mortis-locked lips would not upturn no matter how hard he tried. What was not difficult to see was the light of accomplishment in his dead flat black eyes.
“Well doesn’t that beat all!” Carl said as he approached Hector. For the third time today I thought I was going to go deaf as Carl’s Magnum went off.
Any excitement that Hector felt was short-lived as his head exploded. It happened so fast he never even dropped the cutters. Brain matter showered down hitting the hard ground. It sounded like the beginning of a sleet storm. An eye lazily rolled on the ground, finally coming to rest and perpetually looking to the heavens. Carl was halfway back to the truck when Hector’s body finally slumped and partially rested up against the fence.
I was beginning to feel a lot like Ben, I was having a hard time moving. A couple of the gate zombies started heading my way. It would be a minute or two before they got here, but still I rushed to pry my pliers out of the cold dead hands of Hector. It would be ironic if he had one of those old NRA bumper stickers, although I didn’t think it applied to hand tools. Was this the first sign of shock? How the hell would I know? I’m the one asking myself the questions. My lost glove was within retrieval distance. But it was covered in quickly freezing viscera. I was going to have to take my chances with frostbite and the Dannert wire, the germaphobe in me couldn’t stomach the thought of putting that glove on again. I shakily climbed back on the ladder and began anew.
Carl had forced Ben back into action. Ben was using zip ties to bundle up the wire on the ground. This would make it easier to put into the truck and then install once we got back to Little Turtle. Jen had yet to come out of the truck, hell as far as I knew she hadn’t even peeked over the dashboard. Carl relieved me after he finished loading the rest of the ammo and any salvageable gun parts he could get his hands on. I was thankful for the opportunity to rest. My ungloved hand was frozen, but what was worse were the multiple cuts on my hand. The pain was irksome, sure, but the frenzy it caused in the zombies, that was worse. Every time one of the fat globules of hemoglobin splashed to the frozen tundra, the zombies would fall to the ground and tear up divots of sod to eat my offering. It was more than a little disturbing.
“Get your hand warmed up and then get rid of those things,” Carl said with no more compunction than if he had asked me to take out the trash.
“What about the noise?” I asked with some dread. Killing zombies to save my ass was one thing, killing them like that made my blood run cold.
“What about it? Use your little pea shooter,” he said pointing to my M-16. “It’s a lot quieter than my Colts are, and we’ve been here for over an hour and we still only have five of the original six here.”
I saw his point. It’s just that I didn’t want to.
“Besides,” he continued, “we now have way more ammunition in your caliber than we do in mine.”
Again I understood his damn point. I grabbed the keys from Ben and headed for the truck. Jen looked pissed that I was invading her space as I climbed into the cab to turn on the heater. I couldn’t have cared less. Those that didn’t pull their own weight were chattel and didn’t deserve my consideration.
“Are we leaving now?” Jen asked hopefully.
I merely revved the engine a little more hoping the heat would kick on sooner rather than later.
“Are we leaving?” she asked again. This time she leaned over, grabbed the gearshift and shoved it into gear. The truck lurched forward and stalled. I was thrown forward and almost broke my damn nose on the steering column as I was already leaning forward trying to garner some heat. Both Carl and Ben were looking up at me, puzzlement on their features. I shrugged an over-exaggerated ‘sorry’ gesture.
I hissed at Jen, “You touch that shift box again and I’ll break your fucking wrist!”
She pulled back as if I had slapped her.
“If you’re so concerned about getting out of here quicker maybe you should be helping instead of hiding.”
Defiance was on her face, but defeat was in her features. She wanted to lash out, but she didn’t have the intrepidity to go through with it. She settled back into her uneasy crouch, this time, however, she sat with her back to me. My hands began to unfreeze by small degrees. The pins and needles effect gave way to nails and tacks…and then finally to spikes and stakes. The pain was more intense than I was expecting. I must have been close to frostbite. As the torture began to subside, I looked around the cab; I knew I had seen a pair of work gloves. They were cheaply made and would do little to stop the bite of the wire, but I hoped that it would at least keep some of the bitter sting of the cold away. I stayed a few minutes longer than I needed to, gathering my reserves to go deal with our unwanted transients.
“Dammit,” I said as I shut off the truck. Jen jumped a bit but didn’t turn around. My feet had no sooner hit the ground, when I heard the telltale sound of the lock being engaged. “Useless!” I said a little louder than I needed to.
I was having a difficult time empathizing with her. Here we were in the fight of our lives and she had just given up.
The side of me that didn’t want to kill, not even zombies, spoke up, How would you feel if Tracy had become a zombie?
Don’t even think it! my internal dialogue continued.
Or one of your kids?
I’m telling you! Shut up!
Well?
Damn you! I’d probably want to curl up into a ball and die, my masculine side finally iterated.
Hmm, my feminine side mocked.
You can still kiss my ass. I aimed my rifle and fired off five rounds, killing all of our nonhuman visitors. My feminine side had been stilled.
The ensuing quiet was only briefly interrupted by the twang of wire cutters severing through wire holders. Carl hadn’t so much as turned to look as I had mowed down the noxious audience. My breathing had quickened as if from heavy exertion. Sweat formed and quickly began to freeze on my brow. I had yet to put the rifle down, gravity finally taking over and pushed the barrel towards the ground.
Ben, noticing my distress, came over. “You all right, Talbot?” he asked with concern.
It took a moment for me to acknowledge his presence. I turned towards him, my pupils dilated, my face as pale as the breath I exhaled.
“I could get real philosophical with that question, Ben.” And that was my only answer to his inquiry as I went to the ladder to see if Carl needed any assistance. Ben scratched his head and began zip tying the coils again.
Not much was said as the three of us worked. I know, at least for me, I was thankful for the lack of speech. It was much nicer to be lost in the hard work. Carl and I switched off on climbing the ladder. My legs were burning from the strain of going up and down and I would have said something but Carl didn’t so much as utter a heavy sigh, and the guy had a decade or so on me. There was no way I was going to let him know I was hurting. Between my shifts on top I would help Ben coil and then pull the coil into the truck. We had a system and it was going well. I was thinking at this point we wouldn’t have to spend the night.
The remainder of the day was eerily quiet, no more zombies, no other people and not even any animals. I could understand why there were no people, either they were zombies, dead, or fled. The animals had most likely taken off, too—please don’t let there be zombie rabbits! But if the animals had fled because of the zombies, where were they? And as if my questions materialized into reality, I smelled them first. At first I had thought Carl had let one rip, but unless he had eaten rotten fish tacos the previous night, it couldn’t be him. I must have turned a shade of green because Carl finally broke his vow of silence.
“What’s a matter, Talbot? You look like something’s disagreeing with you. It’s not all this hard work is it?” he asked, laughing a little at his own humor. I didn’t have to answer him, I watched as his face took on the same hue as mine. “Oh sweet Jesus!” He magically produced a bandanna, as only people of his generation can, and began to tie it around his face to block at least some of the odor.
Ben had, at this point, just emerged from the back of the trailer. “Oh geez! What is that smell!” he yelled.
“Talbot, we’ve got fifty more yards of wire to go,” Carl began. “Do we cut and run so to speak or stay and finish? But from that stench you know we’re not dealing with some onesy and twosy lost zombies. That smells like the mother lode.”
“Cut it,” I said as I made the executive decision. “All this wire does no good if we can’t get it there. I was wondering why there were no animals around here.”
My last words fell to the grounds without an ear to pick them up. Carl had already ascended the ladder to this time cut the wire itself and not the holders.
“Look out below!” Carl yelled a moment too late.
The Dannert wire sliced past my face at an alarming rate, a couple inches more to the right and my facial features would have been neatly severed from their resting place. I looked up at Carl more in shock than anything.
He shrugged a bit and said, “Eh, it didn’t get you did it? Quit your belly aching.”
I didn’t know which was worse, the close call or the smell. I wanted to give Carl a little ‘what for’, but speaking meant that I would have to suck in more of the foul stench-laden air. I flipped him the finger and he laughed; so much for making a statement.
The armory sat on a lot by itself and afforded luxurious views on all sides. The closest homes were across Buckley Avenue and a small greenway lay between the street and the houses. All in all it was about five hundred yards away, and it was from there the zombies began to spill forth. At first only a few ambled out, then half a dozen and almost within a blink of an eye there were hundreds. They stood in the greenway, some swaying like abhorrent stalks of corn. Their numbers swelled; standing room became a premium commodity as their numbers increased and still they didn’t move. We lost precious time as the three of us just stood in awe wondering what kind of manifestation we were witnessing. Of course it was at this point that Jen decided to peek her head over the dashboard. The détente was broken by her shrill screams. Like the prince’s kiss to Sleeping Beauty, the noise got the zombies moving, and, in turn, so did we. We had about a hundred and fifty yards of wire that still needed to be loaded into the truck and I was a moment away from having to cut it loose when the zombies made it to the sidewalk. Again they stopped.
“What are they doing? Are they afraid of traffic?” I said aloud.
“Maybe they’re looking for a crosswalk,” Carl snorted.
Of us all he looked the least nonplussed, as if this were just some normal ordinary occurrence. We kept loading the wire, and I kept a wary eye on the zombies waiting for any indication they would make their move. It didn’t happen.
Ben asked me what they were doing as we closed up the rear of the trailer. I wanted to scream at him, ‘How the hell would I know, do I look like a fucking zombie expert, you dumb hillbilly illiterate turd!!’ Instead civility got the better of me, and I shrugged. “Hell if I know,” I told him instead.
Jen’s cacophonous voice assaulted all of our ears as soon as we entered the cab. She was somewhere between sobbing and screaming her desire to vacate the premises as soon as possible.
“Oh for the love of God, girl, shut up!” Carl said evenly. His words had the desired effect; she shut up almost immediately, although she switched to an almost as bothersome half hiccup, half hushed sob. I think the screaming was better. This was the sound of the defeated.
The truck started on the very first turnover attempt. I was figuring that was good news. At least it wasn’t going to be like those low budget horror slasher flicks, where the heroine either can’t start her car or trips over a nonexistent tree root. Thank God for small favors.
The truck roared to life but we weren’t moving. “Please don’t tell me the transmission isn’t working?” I gave voice to my concern.
Carl and Ben both turned to me in unison as if on some unseen telepathic command.
“What?” I asked. Fear began to mount. A few more seconds of this and I might end up on the floor mat with Jen.
I don’t to this day know how they did it, but Ben and Carl, as if it was choreographed, simultaneously looked out the windshield at the same time. I followed the path of their gaze.
Realization dawned. “The gate? You want me to open the gate? Go through the damn thing,” I half yelled. Jen bawled a little louder.
Ben spoke up verbally this time instead of any more unnatural synchronized motions. “I don’t want to take the chance of puncturing the radiator or a tire or having the damn fence hang up underneath. ‘Sides, they’re all across the street.”
I looked at Carl for some sympathy but didn’t find any.
“That’s what you get for being younger,” he quipped.
“Son of a bitch,” I said as I opened the door and jumped down. Jen immediately reached up and locked the door.
I heard Carl mumble something to her as he undid the latch. The zombies weren’t moving forward, but every set of eyes turned to me as I walked towards the gate. I was deeply unnerved. I once had illusions of being a rock star, but if this was what it felt like to have all eyes on you, then fame could find a different resting spot. There was jostling in the back as some of the zombies in the rear were trying to gain a better vantage point to see what was on the menu. Not one of them stepped into the street. It was as if they were made of wood and the street flowed with lava. I could have most likely recited the Gettysburg Address, done a little dance, possibly a crossword puzzle or two, and even relieved my aching bladder before the fastest of the zombies could cover the distance to the gate. I swung open the gate and spun back toward the truck. I walked quickly, proud that I hadn’t broken out into a panicked run, but it was close. I hopped back up into the cab, thankful the door wasn’t locked, and still nothing stirred, not even a mouse.
As the truck swung on to Buckley Avenue, the zombies’ heads turned in unison. As we passed, they began to step out onto the street. For the first quarter mile of our trip, zombies began piling out of every imaginable nook and cranny. There had to have been thousands of them as they ganged up behind us. It looked like the beginning of the world’s slowest marathon.
Ben laughed as he said. “The dead sons of bitches aren’t going to catch us!”
“Yeah at least for another seven miles,” came my pensive reply.
Ben’s smile dropped off his face; even the stoic Carl looked like he had eaten something that didn’t sit well. Jen, however, was clueless.
“What….what’s in seven miles?” came her quavering question.
“Home,” I answered, as I looked in the side mirrors.
“Oh God,” Jen groaned.
Except for the occasional gear grind, the remainder of the journey home was unremarkable. Each of us in his or her own way was contemplating the reality which had just been driven home, no pun intended.
“Ben, stop,” I said. No response. “Ben, stop this truck!” I yelled a little louder. How Ben was even concentrating on driving, I don’t know; he was so far down deep in thought. Carl nudged him.
“What?” Ben asked, sounding a little irritable.
“Talbot wants you to stop the truck,” Carl said, for which I was grateful. I might have yelled it a little louder than was considered polite if I had to ask for a third time.
Ben shrugged. “Fine,” he muttered. “But I ain’t turnin’ her off.”
“Fine, fine,” I said over the rumble of the engine. “What if we don’t go back?”
Ben and Carl looked at me both with expressions of confusion on their face. I didn’t bother to check Jen. I knew she still had her face buried in her hands.
“We saw those zombies,” I went on to explain. “They’re following us to see where we’re going. If we don’t go home they can’t get to our loved ones.”
Jen sobbed in response.
“Now hold on, Talbot, I only saw a bunch of zombies milling about in a street. You can’t for sure say they were following us,” Ben said in reply.
Carl forged on. “And even if they were following us, and I said ‘if,’ what makes you think they can track us to our home. They’re stupid brain-dead flesh eaters!” he yelled. It was the most emotion I’d seen out of him all day. He might be trying his best to not look riled, but this development was getting under his feathers.
“You saw Hector and the pliers, they’re not completely brain-dead,” I said evenly.
Carl’s face smoldered. Ben was looking from Carl to me in an attempt to garner some much needed information.
“Who’s Hector and what does a pair of pliers got to do with anything?” Ben asked.
Carl began anew, but not in response to Ben. “That still doesn’t make them Einstein wannabes, or Davy Crockett trail tracker wannabes for that matter.” Carl was going to take some serious persuading.
“Listen, Carl,” I directed my dialogue towards him. Where Carl led, Ben would follow. “There’s something different about these zombies.”
Carl arched his eyebrow. “Different how? And what exactly does a zombie act like?”
I spent the next fifteen minutes relating everything I knew about zombies, learned from movies, books and comics. Sure, it was an imperfect argument, how could I possibly make an informed judgment about our fact-based reality when I was using fiction-based perceptions. The only hard facts I could give them were my observations of that woman zombie, the one that had killed Spindler. None of them had been there; my explanations fell on deaf ears.
Carl was of the mind to give me the benefit of the doubt, but I hadn’t given him anything solid enough to leave what was left of his family and friends behind. Without Carl my words fell on the deaf ears of Ben. Jen was no one’s ally.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” Carl said. “The zombies, them I believe in. Hector was just an aberration, some legacy memory. The girl? I think she was a specter of an imagination in overdrive.”
I was pissed. “Carl, I’ll admit, I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life and I went to war. But I’m not a hysterical person. I did not imagine that girl showing me Spindler’s head and nodding. I’m sure she was repaying a favor. That shows intelligence.”
“You’re pretty sure, Mike, but you’re not absolutely sure,” he fired back.
“Of course I’m not absolutely sure. How the hell could I be? They’re zombies!” Anger filled my voice.
“Maybe they are following us and maybe they’re not. I’m not about to give up the rest of my life on a hunch. And I’d rather be with my family if this is the end than traveling the highways waiting for this truck to run out of gas. Are you so ready to leave your family behind?” he finished.
Those words stung. “If it meant they’d be safe,” I said, although without much conviction.
“Odds are, Talbot, some group of flesh eaters are going to find our little haven sooner or later. I’d rather be there to help defend, than up by the Nebraska border,” Carl finished with a softer tone.
I had nothing left to say. He was right, and now I felt crummy for arguing against him.
“We good now?” Ben asked. When Carl nodded in agreement, Ben put the truck back in gear. The small heave forward brought forth another small sob from Jen.
I could not help feeling like we were the Pied Pipers of Death as we rolled towards home. Instead of leading rats away, we were leading the zombies to their promised land. This was a funeral procession, of that I had no doubt, whatever Carl thought. The truck had no sooner pulled in to the complex when I hopped off, it was still rolling. I headed out to find Jed. It didn’t take me long. He didn’t usually wander too far off from the clubhouse. I was relieved to see the old fart.
“Welcome back, Talbot,” Jed said. I could tell he had some sort of jest to say but when he saw the look of consternation on my face he held his tongue.
“We’ve got to call an emergency meeting, Jed!” My voice was forced from the adrenaline.
“Now hold on, Talbot, it’s getting late and folks have been working hard all day. And that’s not even including the ones that buried their kin, neighbors, or friends. They need time to mourn,” Jed finished.
“Jed, I’m not trying to be an ass or an alarmist, but if we don’t have a meeting and real soon, we might be burying a lot more people. I don’t necessarily want the whole population, just essential personnel,” I said.
That got Jed going, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he would have an assembly together within the hour.
“Thanks, Jed, and make sure Alex is one of those essentials,” I told him.
“I’ll try, Talbot, but he looked exhausted,” Jed added resignedly.
These are the stories that happened AFTER I left to go to the armory, you don’t even want to know how pissed off I got when I found out.