Alex snuck back to where he had originally been. He arose and spoke, “When you see an opening, you run. Do not hesitate, do not stop, the Jeep is running. Get in it and get out of here. Do you understand?”
He started firing, not waiting for her nearly imperceptible nodded response. The zombies turned to look at Alex who was shooting as he moved to the left, pulling the zombies away from the front of the tree. His shots were ineffectual in that they weren’t finding kill zones, but they were wildly successful in garnering the zombies’ attention away from Jess.
“RUN!” He yelled, his hand shaking wildly as he tried to put more bullets in his pistol while he ran.
Jess wanted to cry out after him, to help him, to get him to follow her, but that had never been his plan from the onset. “Thank you,” she sobbed even as she was mid-flight.
Two zombies turned when they heard her loud thud as she hit the ground; the pursuit was on. She was grasping at weeds and small saplings to help pull her up the ravine quicker. The two zombies chasing her were less than ten feet away. Alex’ screams of pain urged her forward.
A zombie stepped on her left foot as it slipped on a loose rock; pain rocketed up her leg. It felt a lot like the sprain she had suffered in last year’s championship soccer game. She’d gritted the rest of that contest out and she sure wasn’t going to quit now, not with the ultimate prize on the line.
An aching roar traveled up the length of her leg and lodged in the bottom of her skull with each step. She hardly noticed.
“Marta the kids look good.” Alex gurgled out with his last breath.
***
“It’s Jess!” Ben-Ben yipped excitedly.
“And she’s got company,” Patches added.
“She’s not going to make it! I need to be out there!” I thought I was going to go crazy. Jess was in trouble and I could do little more than watch.
“We can do nothing, Riley,” Patches told me.
“Patches, if she dies, we all die.”
Making sure she realized the dire straits that she was in personally was the only way I could sometimes get the cat involved. She got it; with no way out of the car, we’d die of thirst. I don’t think she’d die of starvation, though. I’m pretty sure she’d feast on all of us before she’d let that happen.
Jess’ head whipped back as a zombie grabbed a fistful of hair. She screamed out in pain and terror. She lurched forward, nearly losing her footing as she was losing her balance.
“Come on, Jess,” I said, watching.
The zombie kept a handful of her hair as she wrenched herself free.
“That’s it…RUN!” Patches was getting into it now. Whatever her reasons, it was welcome.
The wheeler rocked as Jess slammed into it. She had been running so fast that she hadn’t the time to slow down. The zombies were upon her as she opened the door and was sliding into the seat. Jess screamed. She was being pulled from the wheeler as a zombie gripped her shoulder and was trying to get her back out.
As soon as I saw daylight, I jumped out. I crashed into the chest of the zombie that had Jess, sending him to the ground, fingernails popping free from his hand as it was torn from Jess. I ripped through what remained of his fake furs on his chest before moving up to wrap my muzzle around his throat. His hands encircled my neck and simultaneously began to squeeze and try to push me away. His grip was so tight I was beginning to lose air. I felt something punch through the side of my muzzle; it felt like I was on fire. The second zombie had taken a bite of me! I heard the door to the wheeler close. All that mattered now was that I had given Jess enough time. That was my last thought as the world lost its color.
“George, is that really you? I’ve missed you so much,” I told my old friend. “Where are we?” He turned silently and led the way.
***
“Riley! OH, GOD, NO!” Jess was in hysterics.
“Let me out!!!” Ben-Ben was screaming. “I’ve got to help her! I promise I’ll never ask for bacon again, please, please just let me out!”
Patches watched silently, her twitching tail belying her calm demeanor.
“Oh, Riley, I will miss you.” Zach was crying.
The zombie that had ripped into Riley stood up, a large swath of fur-covered skin in his mouth. He turned his gaze on Jess. He lowered his head and ran into the Jeep window; the glass spider webbed.
Jess slid the Jeep into gear. It bucked for twenty or so feet before stalling. The zombie was running next to her window, when she stopped, he head-butted the glass again. The cracks widened and lengthened.
Ben-Ben had hopped onto the seat to look out the back window. “She’s still there!! Get her!”
“Ben-Ben, she’s gone,” Patches said in an attempt to calm the dog down.
“You’d like that wouldn’t you?!”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Patches said as she stood next to him.
Jess got the car moving. The zombie ran after them for a quarter mile before they could no longer see him.
Jess’ sobs dominated the remainder of the ride. “She gave her life for mine.”
“That is what friends do,” Patches said. “Goodbye and dog’s speed, Riley.”
***
“Nicole, tell Dad we have company,” Mark Talbot, Mike’s nephew, said from his lofty guard post.
Nicole had been bringing him lunch when they heard the crunch of tires on gravel. She shielded her eyes from the setting sun to see a red Jeep swing onto the long driveway.
“Dad?” she asked as she looked upon the truck. “It can’t be. We lost that in Colorado.” Nicole, even though she knew the impossibility that her father had gotten his Jeep back and had come home, was still inexplicably drawn to it.
“Nicole, what are you doing?” her over-protective Uncle Ron shouted out from the deck.
“Someone’s here!” she shouted, moving closer.
“I can see that, but we don’t know who it is!”
The door opened and a young female got out, tears streaked her face.
Nicole paused and hesitated. “Jess? Jessica, is that you?” And then she ran to the girl.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, places and events are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual names, characters and places are entirely coincidental. The reproduction of this work in full or part is forbidden without written consent from the author.
Copyright 2013 Mark Tufo
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“Hey honey, you’re home early. How was work?” Julie asked as she placed her gardening gloves by the sink. She had a large satchel full of tomatoes and cucumbers which she hefted onto the counter.
“It was good, normal stuff. You know, trying to create universes and God particles and such,” Sam said, he was the leading scientist at the Super Collider facility at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
“Any luck with that?” Julie asked, brushing the dirt off her knees.
“Well…no black holes, so I consider that a victory. How’s the garden?”
“We may get a melon or two out of it if I can get the bugs to stay off of them. Speaking of which, I think I gave a good pint or two of blood to the local mosquito population. Look.” She pulled her shirt up slightly so he could see the angry red welts.
“Whereas I am happy that you are showing me all that skin, I wish it were for other reasons.” Sam leaned down and kissed her stomach.
“Yeah, well maybe if you figured out a way to keep the bugs away from me, I wouldn’t have to go soak in an oatmeal bath to get the itch to go away. I’ll get dinner ready when I get out.”
“No rush,” Sam said as he headed to the garage.
“Hey! No weapons of mass destruction, okay?”
“It was one time.” He smiled at her. Sam opened up the door that led to the garage; Radio Shack would have been envious of all the circuitry and electronic tools he had warehoused there. Building and testing new types of gear was a hobby Sam had enjoyed since he was old enough to learn how to wield a soldering gun.
“Bugs,” he said aloud. “The problem is bugs. Do I build another giant bug zapper?” Julie had made him dismantle the last one when a sparrow had flown into it, the poor thing had vibrated and fried for half a minute before finally dying. “Yeah, that didn’t work so good, plus I think it only attracted more bugs into the area. So I don’t want an attractant…I want a repellant. How about something that shoots out a citronella-based fog? No, I hate that smell,” he said to his muse.
“What about a pitch or a vibration?” He wondered if there would be a universal pitch or vibration that would cause bugs to move away. Some bugs, like ticks and spiders, were attracted to vibrations; that was their primary hunting technique. “Chemicals? No, Julie is allergic to DEET. Shit, this may be a little harder than I thought.”
Sam began to doodle on his iPad. What he absently drew looked a lot like an old RCA tower complete with the lightning bolts emanating from it—which in actuality signified radio waves.
“That’s interesting,” he said, looking at his picture. “What kind of current am I talking about to get that kind of signal? A few capacitors in series…hmmm I wonder.”
***
“Are you coming to bed?” Julie asked from the doorway.
“Bed? What happened to dinner?” Sam asked, looking up, his eyes red-laced.
“Honey, that was five hours ago. You said you’d come and get some in a minute. I’ve seen that look in your eyes before so I brought you some instead. It’s that full plate of lasagna next to you.”
Sam looked over at the cold dish like he was seeing it for the first time.
“Do you want me to re-heat it for you?”
“The what now?”
“I’ll see you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.” Julie closed the door.
***
“Sam, please tell me that at some point you came to bed last night,” Julie said with a yawn. The sun was streaming in from a window on the far side of the workroom.
“I did it, Julie!” Sam said excitedly.
“What did you do, honey, besides pull an all-nighter? You can’t go to work after staying up all night, you’re bound to create a vacuum in space or something that will suck the entire universe into it.”
“That’s always a possibility,” he said to her honestly.
Julie shuddered.” Sometimes I wish you had just kept that professorial position instead of going into applied sciences.”
“When’s the last time a professor won the Noble prize?”
“When’s the last time a professor threatened to rip the fabric of the time-space continuum?”
“Well, there’s that. But that’s not what I wanted to show you. I think I may have fixed your bug problem.”
“You’re still on that? I thought for sure you would have moved on to time travel or something.”
“That’s tomorrow. Come on.” He grabbed a small two-foot tower.
“What’s that?” Julie asked.
“It’s a solution. Now, when I can have more time to work with it, I’ll be able to produce a version that works off a portable power pack,” Sam said as he plugged in a long extension cord.
“Batteries? Are you saying a model that runs on batteries?”
“Yes a portable power supply.”
“Okay.”
“You may want to step back a little,” Sam urged his wife as he placed the mechanism next to Julie’s garden and plugged it in.
“Sam?” Julie asked nervously.
“Further,” he told her.
“I’m not going anywhere unless you are as well.”
“Fine, fine…let me hit the power switch. It takes up to a minute until the capacitors hit full wattage anyway.”
Same clicked the on/off toggle and quickly moved away; grabbing his wife as he did so. A large swarm of black flies hovered near the device, they were illuminated by the early morning sun. A minute clicked by, then two.
“Does it kill them through sheer amount of elapsed time?” Julie asked with a smile.
“You’re funny. I wonder what’s happening.” Sam took two steps towards the machine. “Wow did you feel that?” he asked.
“No, but I saw a faint blue pulse of something come from the top of it. Sam, look!” Julie said excitedly.
“At what? I don’t see anything.”
“Look above your machine.”
It took him a moment. “The black flies are gone.”
“Not gone, Sam, they’re dead. I saw them fall to the ground in one massive heap.”
Sam approached the device cautiously. He reached around; fumbling with the toggle switch until turning it off. “It’s okay now.” He motioned to his wife. “You’re right.” He was getting down onto his hands and knees. “They’re all dead.” He picked some up and was holding them out for his wife to see, but she had already moved past and into her garden.
“Look!” she said. She was holding a Japanese beetle. “It’s dead too. I’ve been trying to get rid of them for a month!”
They were both in awe as they found all manner of dead insects: spiders, ants, flies, and mosquitoes.
“What about grubs?” Julie asked.
“I…I honestly don’t know. Let’s find out.” He went over to his wife’s shed and grabbed a small handheld garden hoe. He turned over the soft earth until he found what he was looking for. He ran his finger over the thick white worm looking for any signs of life, there were none.
“This…this is amazing!” Julie shrieked.
Something niggled deeper in the back of Sam’s mind, but the excitement from his wife drowned it out. He barely noticed that the beneficial earthworm had perished alongside his more troublesome cousin.
“You made this last night?”
Sam nodded, smiling like an idiot.
“You need to patent this. We’ll be fabulously rich! I’ll finally be able to afford the brand-name macaroni and cheese!”
“You’re always living beyond your means, Julie, and now you’re just talking gibberish. Do you really think I should seek a patent?”
“Are you kidding me? Home gardeners around the world will be groveling at your feet to get a hold of one of these,” she said as she lightly tapped the top. “Is it dangerous?” She pulled her hand away quickly.
“I don’t think so,” he responded haltingly.
“You don’t think so? Pretty sure the EPA is going to want something more than ‘I don’t think so.’ When I saw the flash, you asked me if I had felt something. What did you feel?”
Sam thought about it for a second. “Well…the hair on my arms started to stand, and then I felt something like a mild electric shock travel over the surface of my skin. Which makes sense, every living being has a current of low voltage electricity running through it. I created a transmitter that will disrupt that signal. And you didn’t feel anything from where you where and I did, so that makes the effective range about twenty-five feet…give or take a foot.”
“A twenty-five foot diameter bubble?”
“To the sides and up yes, the signal is severely hampered by the ground. I’d have to run tests, but at this voltage and amperage I can’t imagine it going more than a foot or so down.”
“And it won’t harm the plants?”
“Can’t see why.”
“What about using it in a home?”
“I’m not sure, Julie. Why?”
“Sam, if people didn’t have to use pesticides anymore, just think of the benefits in that alone.”
Sam could see all the good that Julie spoke of, and coming from her, it made perfect sense; but then again, she didn’t have a mean bone in her body.
“Alright, alright. I’ll draw up a schematic and a description of what it can do. We’ll get a lawyer and file a patent. Happy now?” he asked, but the way his wife was twirling around in her bug-free zone was proof enough.
***
“Hi, Sam, Julie,” Arnie Bassenger Attorney-at-Law and family friend greeted his clients. He waited until he got them in his office before he gave them both hugs. “I don’t want everyone out there thinking I do this with all my clients,” he said with a smile. “Sit, sit, you guys want a soda or something? I’ll have my secretary grab you one.”
Sam shook his head in the negative. “I’d love a water,” Julie said.
“Jen, can you get a bottle of water please?” he asked into his intercom.
Julie was halfway through with drink when Arnie looked up from the papers in front of him.
“Um, I want to be as candid as possible.” He looked at the couple.
“Go ahead,” Sam urged.
“Does this do what you say it can?”
“Without a doubt Arnie. I’ve built three working models and have tried them in a variety of locales on all manner of bugs, and to a one, it has killed them all.”
“Sam, does anyone else know about this?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“Just us three.”
“Wow.” Arnie sat back. “This thing…this thing is gold, Sam. Maybe more so. What’s it cost to make?”
“I’ve tinkered with a few of the designs, but each of the three has been under a hundred bucks.”
“Under a hundred?” Arnie ran his hand through his hair. “What’s your target price?”
“I haven’t really thought about it, Arnie.”
“I have,” Julie said, “I figured we could sell them for around three hundred and fifty bucks a piece.”
“What?” Arnie and Sam asked simultaneously and for differing reasons. Arnie thought the price too low, Sam too high.
“Listen, both of you,” she explained. “I got the parts list from Sam’s diagrams and did some virtual bulk shopping for the parts. And I also got quotes for fabrication of some of the base and support structures.”
“You’ve been busy,” Sam said to his wife in amazement.
“Well now that I’m not fighting a Japanese beetle infestation I’ve found that I have way more time on my hands…and stop distracting me. So, with buying parts in bulk and outsourcing some of the fabrication, right now I figure the Pulsinator…” She got some quizzical looks with her name. “We can work on that. Anyway, I’ve got it to fifty-five seventy-two to build each one.”
“And if we get a factory set-up, there will obviously be an additional start up fee, but eventually the cost per unit will go down significantly,” Arnie chimed in. “I want in on this, ground floor, Sam, I’ll invest everything I’ve got. You’ve discovered something revolutionary and I want to be a part of it. I’ve got a few questions.”
“Go ahead.” Sam was fidgeting. It was not that he was adverse to making money, it had just never been his main priority in life, and the way Arnie was talking, people were going to start lining up to throw it at him.
“How big can you make this thing? Sorry, sorry…let me clarify. Would a farmer in Kansas be able to use say a giant tower version of these?” Arnie was also excited, large end models could be the Cadillac of the line, earning huge bucks and even getting subsidized by the government so that Joe Farmer would be able to have larger yields of crops.
“I don’t think so, Arnie, not without having a series of them. All of the tests I’ve done on this smaller model yield a sphere twenty-five feet across. It has to do with the pulse as it travels through the air and is met with resistance and gravity. I’ve done the math, no matter how large the tower gets or how much power is run through it, in theory the maximum it would be able to send a signal is a hundred yards, although I have not built one to those specifications. I didn’t figure there would be too many home gardeners with an area that large.”
“Okay, we’ll revisit that one.”
“Arnie, I’m not sure what you want to revisit. Physics isn’t going to change because you want to sell to farmers.”
Arnie’s expression downturned for a moment until he realized the opportunity for hundreds of millions was staring him in the face. Damn shame it wasn’t going to be billions though, he thought. “Okay, what about the power supply.”
“What about it?”
“It says here your first two prototypes used hundred and twenty volt home power and the third used a car battery. Will there be a possibility for a model that does not need an extension cord or a forty pound battery? Having a hard time seeing seventy-two-year-old Gloria-the-gardener lugging a cord or a battery around.”
“It’s possible, Arnie, but we’re not talking about an LED light here. This thing needs a fair amount of juice to operate properly. I mean, it will send out a pulse with a nine volt battery…although only about a foot or so.”
“Portable models for hiking! Oh, my God, I’m a genius!”
“I’m not sure that’s feasible,” Sam started.
“I actually think it’s genius,” Julie stated. “A smaller model, maybe mounted to a backpack, running off a couple of cell phone or tablet batteries…I would think that’d be enough. Even if it only went out ten feet or so, time it so it goes off every couple of seconds so that the way is always clear for the hiker.”
“I…I guess that’s possible, but I’d have to do studies on if it’s harmful to people in the long term.”
“That was my last question. Is Chester Chipmunk or Billy Blue Jay going to be affected by this? PETA will be down our throats in less time than it takes to cash our first check if so much as a sparrow falls from the sky.”
“With the current circuitry, I can’t imagine one burst, or even two hurting anything bigger than a field mouse.” A lone sentence reverberated in his subconscious and was quickly buried over. ‘With the current circuitry’.
“This is incredible!” Arnie stated. “I’ll get on this right away. I’ll even have a real estate friend of mine look into some warehouse space.
Sam was beginning to blanch as Arnie talked.
“That would be fabulous. This is so exciting!” Julie exclaimed. “Sam, are you alright?”
“He’s fine,” Arnie interjected. “Anybody faced with this type of success can be overwhelmed…I know I am. Now go celebrate, I’ll take care of everything.”
Julie was slightly concerned as she led her husband out of the posh office.