by Mark Tufo
“These things are fucking delicious,” I said as I shook his lifeless body around. When I was done, I grabbed his former adversary and did the same to her.
She tried to run, but I had the closet blocked off like a goalie. Her claws sought purchase in my thighs and she was almost past before I snatched her up.
“Oh so close,” I told her. She ripped into my lip as I brought her up to my mouth. “Fucking bitch,” I said as I pulled her away with half of my old lip attached in her mouth.
She was doing her best to spit it out when I slammed her little streamlined head into the corner of the wall. She was much more docile being half unconscious. It was an hour or two before I had done my part to keep the world free from stray pets. I even checked twice.
“Not bad,” I said as I came up from the basement with what I had been looking for.
I strolled back to the Speight shelter or – the more aptly named – meat locker. I whistled as I did so, not a care in the world. I liked this life; it was easy to figure out what needed to be done. I didn’t need to rely on anybody or anything else in this world. Just pack food in the gullet and the rest would take care of itself, it really was that simple. It was with that happy thought I descended back down the set of stairs to the large door.
“Miss me?” I yelled. “I’ve been gone for hours, you guys could have left!”
“Fuck off,” wafted out from a female voice.
“Oh, Yorley, is that the best you have?” Then I slammed my five-pound hammer against the door with all the power I could muster. “Oh fuck,” I said, staggering back, “that was friggin’ loud. Holy shit, how bad was that in there?” I asked laughing. “I bet your fillings came loose!” The entire steel structure was still vibrating as I brought the hammer back down. Screams of confusion and crying children were the next sounds I heard.
It was after a good hour or so of slamming the dinner bell that I spoke. “I bet you guys are trying to cover your ears or shove stuff in them! Won’t work!” I shouted. “You see, what happens is that the noise is conducted through the bones in your head and then into your ear drum, completely circumventing the ear canal…so it doesn’t really matter. You could shove lead down there and you’d still hear this!” I gonged again.
“Fucking stop it!” Yorley screamed.
I gonged again and waited until the vibrations stopped. “Send one person out and I will.”
“Fuck you, Tim,” she said softly.
“Oh…you’re defiant now, but I can do this for days. I wonder what you’ll be like tomorrow morning when I make the same offer. Hell, you’ll probably come out yourself.”
“Fuck you, Tim,” she repeated.
I answered with a gonging.
I gave control of my left arm over to Hugh while I zoned out. He was pretty good, but he had the rhythm of a white guy. His beats were so random I thought he was tackling jazz. Next thing I knew, sunlight was streaming on my face and Hugh was still entertaining our guests.
“Maybe we should speed this process up a little bit,” I told him as I stood, my left arm swung out and smacked into the concrete wall. “You can probably stop now, Hugh. Hey! How’s it going in there?”
“Please stop,” Mr. Speight’s voice begged. “You’re killing us.”
“Well duh,” I told him.
“Please…for the sake of my kids.”
“Why don’t you come out as a ‘piece’ offering?”
He went silent.
“Not very altruistic of you, Mr. Speight. They are your kids, after all. All this noise must be doing some serious damage to their little ears. And that’s not even mentioning what it’s probably doing to your wife with her skull injury and all. Man, it probably feels like I’m banging this thing directly on her head every time it hits. You could stop all of this if you just came out.”
“Why did you ever let me go?” he replied. I think he was sobbing.
“How else was I going to figure out where you hid my little Yorley? Who knew you could take such a beating?”
“All you want is Yorley?” he asked, maybe a flicker of hope lining his question.
“Sure,” I responded, then added much quieter, “for now.”
“Get out!” he shouted. “Your presence has endangered my entire family!” He was screaming now, the ragged words were being torn from his throat.
“I’d go out there, Harold, if I thought it would do any good. What do you think he’s going to do once that door is open?” Yorley yelled back, but I think it had more to do with her loss of hearing.
“What are you saying, Harold? You can’t kick her out.” It was Scarlett and she didn’t sound so good. I can’t imagine the personal hell she was living through each and every time I banged that hammer. I was probably making her shattered skull plate swim around from the vibrations. “She saved me.”
“And look what that’s accomplished!” he was shrieking. “Our whole family is in danger now!”
“Would you rather I had not made it home?” she begged.
Through muffled sobbing and Hugh’s enhanced hearing I heard him mumble out a ‘Yes.’
“Scarlett, if you think it will help, I’ll leave.”
“No!” she said defiantly. “If anyone walks out that door, it’ll be me. At least I now know where I stand in Harold’s pecking order…his royal fucking highness, followed by everyone else!”
That’s right, kick him while he’s down, I thought.
I smacked the door just to let them know I was still around, and then I went back up the stairs and over to the shed. “I wonder if this will work?” I asked as I picked up the small gas can.
I popped the filter off the exhaust pipe, a black plume of smoke billowed out. “Here goes nothing,” I said as I dumped the remaining contents of the can into the opening.
The gas did what gas does under these circumstances, it ignited. The pipe began to burn as did my shirt and, by the smell of it, my hair. A fire trail was leading back into the can. I tossed it aside, fluid pouring out and onto the floor and walls of the small shed.
“Well that went bad fast,” I said as I patted my arm and head down, quashing out the flames.
I had to get out of the shed; it was a lost cause. It took a full half hour before the blaze consumed the structure and most of its contents. The generator seemed unaffected; I could still hear the hum of it over the cooling metal implements that had survived. My right sleeve was mostly gone and Hugh was doing a little damage control on my scalp and forearm, but otherwise, we were as right as rain – at least of the toxic variety.
“Really thought that would work,” I said, looking at the pipe. Inspiration came in from left field. “Well let’s see if that was just some more made up Hollywood bullshit,” I said as I tore up tufts of sod. I shoved them into the pipe a la Eddie Murphy and the infamous potato scene from Beverly Hills Cop or maybe it was a banana, or a child’s arm, like I give a shit. It was the third or fourth packing of dirt into the pipe that I heard it sputter and quit. I could only imagine their moment of panic when the lights and other implements shut off and then switched over to the emergency lighting. Batteries were only going to last so long.
“Let the games begin!” I shouted, raising my hands over my head in an approximation of a victory celebration. I went back over to the staircase and down. I grabbed my hammer and tapped lightly on the door. “Everyone alright in there?” I asked in as concerned of a tone as I could. “Will you guys be able to breathe once the batteries die?”
I hadn’t thought of that until just then, and it gave me a moment of trepidation. I didn’t want them to die in there unless I was the cause of it. And not indirectly responsible either. I still had my ace up my sleeve, my own private sleeper cell. My concern was, once unleashed, would he do as we asked or would he go rogue.
“Whatcha thinking, Yorley? I know you’re weighing your options. I fucked that generator up. No matter what Harold does down there, he’s not going to get it running. My guess is he’s a tax lawyer or so
me shit anyway, probably doesn’t even know how to turn a screwdriver. Is that the man you’re going to have your life depend on?”
“Are you the man that I should rely upon, Tim?” she replied.
“That’s my girl. Of course I’m the guy you should rely on. You know exactly where I stand on the matter.”
I could hear some coughing and crying. I think from Scarlett and the children, most likely Harold as well.
“Sorry about the smoke, a little bit of a mistake on my part,” I told them. “Oh, and you’re going to want to talk to your home owner’s insurance about the shed, it’s a total loss. I hope your deductible isn’t too high.”
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Harold screamed.
“Tax accountant with teeth. Ooooh, how scary. What’re you going to do, throw a calculator at me? Maybe a ledger. Yeah, the corner of it could catch me in the temple, it could be real bad!” I said with an amusing lilt.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” he replied impotently.
“Gonna be a little difficult from that side of the door, don’t you think?”
“Listen, Tim-Tim,” Yorley interceded, “I don’t know if you are what you claim to be, or just some sick fuck who jerks off thinking about hurting people. Either way, I know why you want us, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let that happen. I’ll gun everyone in here down before I let that door open.”
“Yorley!” Scarlett gasped.
“Scarlett, you saw what he did in the supermarket! Could you stand it if he did it to your babies? If he made you fucking watch?!”
Scarlett was bewailing inconsolably.
“I’d make it quick, I promise…no suffering.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said softly. She was throwing a wrench into my plans. “I’m listening!” I told her.
“Well, I don’t expect you to leave, that would be asking too much. I just want us to have a chance,” she said.
“A chance at what?” I asked, truly perplexed.
“A chance at life.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Why would I do that?” I questioned.
“We get a chance at getting away, or you get no chance at us at all.”
“Bullshit, you won’t shoot them!” I challenged.
“How sure of that can you be, Tim-Tim, because I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to be eaten no matter what. I’ll put a bullet in my brain long before that happens.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, banging my fist against my thigh.
“Not sitting so well with you?” she asked as if she had heard me.
“Fuck you, Yorley,” I told her.
She laughed! She had the fucking audacity to laugh at me. How the hell did this happen? She now had me over the barrel.
“Better hurry up, Tim-Tim, air’s getting a little thick in here,” Yorley prodded.
“Get the fuck out of my way, Yorley!” Harold shouted.
I heard Yorley chamber a round. “You move even an inch in my direction and I will spill your guts all over the floor and in front of your family,” she told him.
Nothing in her voice made me think she was saying anything but the absolute truth.
“What do you want, Yorley?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Well…normally under these conditions I would ask you to move and that you would be honor bound to comply. But I’m pretty sure you’ve got absolutely no moral compass, so even if you promised me you would move away, you wouldn’t. I’m as sure of that as I am of this rifle in my hands.
Smart girl, I thought. “Nailed me with your pop psychology, so now what?”
“You’re going to have to prove you’ve moved.”
“What do you want me to do, mail you a letter from a new location?”
“It’s not as far away as I would like, but you’re going to have to tap on the exhaust pipe.”
She nailed me again before I could even begin to formulate a trap.
“Now, before that ugly, oversized melon of yours gets any ideas, like maybe rigging something with a rope or tossing rocks, I’m going to want you to yell into the pipe.”
“It’s clogged, you dumb bitch.” She was really beginning to irritate the hell out of me.
“The sound will still travel clear enough down the metal. We going to play this game? And don’t stall; Harold says we’re running out of air. And to be honest, he looks like he’s about to panic…and if that happens I’ll have to shoot him.”
“Fine. We’ll play this your way,” I said, going up the stairs and across the yard to the smoldering ruins of the shed. “I’m here!” I yelled into the pipe.
“Keep tapping it and every time you do, count.”
“Just like Sesame Street.”
“Whatever.”
The tapping and the number remunerating made it extremely difficult to tell what was going on inside the shelter. And the more I thought about it, the less I liked the situation. Without the benefit of the limited shelter the shed offered I was in the wide open and Yorley had an effective fighting hole with which to dispatch me. How in the fuck had I been so completely waylaid into believing this to be a good idea? I mean, I get men and zombies think with their stomachs first, but at the cost of rational thought?
“This is your fucking fault!” I shouted to Hugh as I bolted for the neighbor’s house. Harold’s house was closer but that meant running straight back towards Yorley. Whose shot went wide right, by the way.
“You fell for that shit?” she yelled, following my running with a trail of bullets. More than one connected as I crashed through the back door.
“Did you kill him?” Scarlett asked hopefully.
“Not yet, but I will,” Yorley replied. I watched as she got up slowly.
“Hugh, we’re in trouble. Release the hounds.”
We almost died while he tried to figure out the reference. I could see Yorley advancing cautiously. However, I was too busy bleeding from a few life-threatening wounds. Luckily she missed my head, but she had nicked my neck. I had at least one in my thigh and one in my shin, which, if I could put pressure on it, would let me know it was broken. He finally got my message as I showed him a mental image of Harold and of himself.
I was pushing away on the floor, leaving a noticeable trail when Hugh ‘called out’ to our comrade in arms.
“Oh my God!” I heard Scarlett cry out. “Harold what’s the matt—” her question trailed off into a scream that pierced the day.
Yorley, who was within about five feet of seeing how incapacitated I was, turned to see what the matter was with her friend. Hugh was working his magic, but he was spread thin with so many injuries. Scarlett was screaming.
“What the fuck?” Yorley joined in.
Hugh was somehow linked to our clone zombie, and we watched through his eyes as Harold had come out of the shelter, immediately attacking his wife who had one child in each arm and was unable to defend herself. She had put up her forearm in an attempt to stop him and he had latched on, biting clean through the shirt she had been wearing. A strip of skin an inch wide and half an inch thick came loose as either Harold pulled away or Scarlett fell over. It was difficult to tell from this angle. The toddler she had been holding slipped to the ground. I think he was fine, but Harold didn’t care about him so we didn’t see. He was fixated on the blood leaking from his wife. She pushed as far back as she could in the small stairwell. He had just gone in for seconds when Yorley got to the top of the stairs.
Her cry of alarm had gotten Harold’s attention. He pivoted his head to look at the new Cuban cuisine and must have liked what he saw because he began to come up the stairs. Whatever surprise or shock Yorley felt, she got over it quickly as she placed two rounds in his head. Hugh wailed as his clone died and our connection was severed.
“What happened, Yorley?” Scarlett was crying.
I couldn’t tell from my location for sure, but from the tone of her words, she sounded like she was in shock and probably not even aware she had been bitten.
“
Give me the kids,” Yorley said, descending a step.
I had pulled myself over to the door and was peering out, making sure to keep as little of me exposed as possible. I would have shot the bitch if I hadn’t dropped my gun in an attempt to get away.
“What, Yorley! What are you going to do?” Scarlett was wailing. On some level she knew she was dead, but that’s a pretty hard notion to come to terms with.
“I’ll take care of them, Scarlett, I promise. Just hand them over.”
“I’m their mother.”
“You were,” Yorley answered sincerely. “Soon you’ll be trying to eat them. Give them to me before that happens.”
“I’m fine.”
“So was Harold,” she told her. “I knew that bastard wouldn’t just let him go. Must have infected him before he did. Son of a bitch…should have seen that coming. Come on, Scarlett, we don’t have much time.”
“I...I can’t. They’re all I have left.”
“I will shoot you if you make me,” Yorley said, raising her rifle to her shoulder.
“Wow, she is a cold bitch,” I said appreciatively and with more than a modicum of admiration.
“Food...” Hugh moaned.
“Fix us first! Then eat,” I told him. He wasn’t impressed with my answer.
At least he began to direct all of his focus to get us mobile again. At some point Yorley had retrieved the appetizers. She took one long look down at Scarlett and then a quick glance my way. Then she bounded off.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Food...leaving!” Hugh shouted, following my line of sight. He was abandoning his tasks and was beginning to wrest control from me.
“NO!” I told him. “Fix first!”
He was now less impressed. I felt my (our) broken leg start to twitch as he put locomotion on it. The pain was excruciating. Black spots at first danced in my eyes then began to blot out my vision. I knew if I passed out Hugh would take over and would be a lot less willing to yield the power once he possessed it.