Caught in the Web

by Jason R Davis

  So why should he leave just because something strange was going on? Sure, some crazy stuff was happening out there, but was it strange enough to leave town? Who was to say it wasn’t worse outside of town? To up and just abandon his mom’s bar? And what about his sister? If they left town, would he really be able to get help for her? Was there any help for her?

  “Tina!” He didn’t see her in the group.

  Sullivan had turned toward him, and Jason could now make out who was there. That one angry, dirty guy was still there, and now there was also a thin woman who looked like she had done too much of too many and only the shell was left. Of course, with her blond, bleached hair and her orange spray-on tan, she probably thought she looked good. There was the trucker who had shown up just as Jason had been about to leave to get his sister. Mr. Jones, of course, who had actually gotten up from his stool and made it all the way to the other end of the bar. Then there was another man he didn’t recognize and couldn’t really make out. He was kind of behind everyone else, and the sun was bright behind him.

  It seemed like more people were showing up. Did they really want to leave? He thought briefly of what he had just seen at the Rowplex. The local cops… That had been them coming out and looking like those things, hadn’t it? Were there more of them out there? There had to be. It made sense to get out of there, didn’t it? But, again, he had that nagging feeling, the sagging in his shoulders that told him he was now safe.

  “She’s in the bathroom but, dude, you really need to come over here and check this out,” Sullivan said. Jason stopped studying the walls and looked at him. It was hard to read the expression on Sullivan’s face. Did his best friend actually seem to be excited?

  “In just a second,” Jason said as he turned to go towards the bathrooms.

  “Dude,” Sullivan said, rushing toward him, “you should really check this out, and I am going to have to kill you later over this shit.”

  The back door slammed again. The excitement Sullivan had shown quickly changed to panic and the big man was reaching under the bar and pulling out the fire extinguisher, holding up the bottom of it and getting ready to use it as a weapon.

  Jason stopped rushing to the bathroom and looked at the man that had always been his closest friend. He watched him, his friend that had been a slacker now standing as though he was a warrior ready to fight. He looked over at the group, noticing how they were all nervously standing there. The truck driver was leaning against one of the slot machines, drumming his fingers across the top.

  All of them had taken their eyes off of him and had turned their attention to Denise standing behind him. The strung out woman in the group was the first to show any recognition, then a guilty look and a downward glance let Jason know that she was trying to avoid the newcomer.

  “Hello, Nurse Winston,” the young woman said.

  Denise looked in her direction. Her eyes were open wide but then squinted as she fought to get used to the dimness of the bar.

  Once he confirmed she wasn’t a threat, Sullivan gave a little nod to her, then looked away, turning back to Jason. “Dude, you really have to see-” He was cut off by the sound of gunshots outside.

  Sullivan was already rushing back the length of the bar, but Jason hurried to catch up. The bar seemed darker than usual, and it seemed like the bright windows just pulled him over to them. He went there, and the rest of them parted, allowing him through. It was obvious they had had enough and didn’t care to watch what was out there anymore.

  He looked out and saw the people just under a block away. It looked like it was at least an eighth of the town right there, and they seemed to be storming into houses. There was something not right about them, and he immediately recognized what it was. He had seen enough of it to tell what they were.

  He closed his eyes and counted his breaths, fighting to keep it together. He couldn’t think about his sister anymore. He had to push it down, at least for now. He could think about her later. He could grieve about her later but, for now, they just had to get out of there.

  Sullivan had been saying something to him. Sullivan was having the time of his life and was repeating himself. Jason opened his eyes and looked at him.

  “Fucking zombies, man! I told you it would happen. Fucking zombies. Dude, there are fucking zombies out there.”

  Yeah, Sullivan was right. There were zombies out there. He realized that his life had turned into a horror movie, like the ones he had been watching all his life.

  Night of the Living Dead, the Romero version, was vivid in his mind. He had already been thinking it. The quiet streets, his little sis… All of it had been building up to it. He just couldn’t allow himself to believe it, not until someone started saying “We’re coming to get you, Barbara”, or unless someone actually put a name to it. Leave it to fucking Sullivan to put a name to it…to them. Zombies. They were real, and they were just outside.

  Jason thought about the end of Night of the Living Dead. With the man… What was his name? Ben? He wasn’t sure. He just remembered they had found him in the end. Jason could have sworn he had seen multiple versions of the movie, as that scene always played out differently in his head. In one memory of the ending, he saw the man as a zombie and they shot him, throwing his body on a pile of other zombies.

  The other ending he remembered was similar. The body was still thrown on a truck. The difference was that when they found the man, he had never turned into a zombie, but they still shot him. Zombie or not, when the outside world came in, they just cleaned up everything and didn’t wait to find out if you were dead or alive.

  Shit, they were all fucked. They were probably all going to fucking die.

  Sullivan was saying something else, but it wasn’t until he felt the hand on his back that he finally pulled himself out of his thoughts. He turned and looked at him…his friend, who he had given the radio host name of “Sullivan, the Zombie Hunter” as a joke to how Sullivan always had wild theories on how he would survive the zombie apocalypse. Well, the zombies had arrived.

  “Hey, man. You okay?” Sullivan asked.

  Jason blinked, wiping away the last of his internal thoughts for a while. He nodded. “Yeah,” he croaked out. He was sure if he said more, or put more effort into it, he would lose the battle of holding down the bile that was still trying to work its way out.

  “You kinda went away from me there. I was saying that they started showing up shortly after you left. With how vicious these things are, and watching how they act, I wasn’t sure you were going to make it back.”

  “Came in through the alley in the back. Didn’t see them out front.”

  “We watched the first one attack a guy. Then there was this crazy priest. Other people came out of their houses to see what was going on. You know, a large group of your friends and neighbors are out in the street, you want to see what’s up. Well, the zombies attacked the people, then went into their homes, going after families.

  “The people that didn’t come out, who just were ignoring things outside, well…they weren’t too smart, either. We could see some of them watching out their windows, like we were, but they didn’t close their front doors. They only had the screen doors closed. Screen doors don’t do shit against zombies. I don’t know how the zombies figured out to go into the houses. Maybe they have some of their former memories.

  “Man, that’s fucked up if they do, but they were trampling over each other and into the houses. Now, the ones that did have closed doors, well… enough zombies hitting the front door of a house, and most these houses were just built cheaply, it doesn’t take too much pressure to force them in.”

  Sullivan was rambling on. Jason wasn’t sure if he was stopping for short breaths, or if he could just talk in such a stream that after doing it for weeks during his broadcasts, he had built the ability to not need air. It was hard to catch everything the man was saying.

  After a second, though, he did catch on to what he had said about the doors. The zombies had trampled throug
h the screen doors?

  Jason looked at the front door. When he had left, the large metal door had been open to have fresh air come in through the screen door. His mother hated to pay for air conditioning and always wanted the front door open. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that they had closed the door, put the large metal security bar across it, and had moved the shuffleboard table against it. It would take a damn tank to get through the steel door to begin with. He knew that just because of the scratches on the front of the door where burglars had tried crowbars and everything else, and the best they had been able to do was bend up a couple corners of the door.

  Of course, there were the front windows, which were eight feet off the ground, but unless the zombies learned how to fly, they should be safe in there.

  In fact, the more he thought about it, thanks to his mom’s paranoia, the bar was probably one of the safest places in town. The damned place was the Fort Knox of Hammond. Every time someone had tried to break in, or there had been something strange happening that got her a late night phone call, she would take more security measures. When someone had tried to force their way in, and almost succeeded, two years ago, the large metal fire doors had been added. The new doors were damn near impenetrable.

  A faint smile crossed his lips as he looked at the door, then back at Sullivan. “There ain’t shit getting in here,” he said in a mocking redneck accent. It was supposed to come up as Texas slang but, as soon as he said it, he knew it had just come out wrong. He could tell just how bad it was by how Sullivan rolled his eyes at him.

  “You know, ya bastard, I got my guns and stockpile at fucking home. At fucking home! And here is the zombie invasion. The shit I’ve been preparing for, and you have me fucking watching your mom’s bar when it happens? I fucking hate you,” Sullivan said, but his smile betrayed any actual frustration. Jason knew that, in his own sadistic way, Sullivan was just too happy that he was proven right to actually be upset.

  Jason looked at the rest of them standing in the bar. They weren’t excited. They were scared, and he understood why. While he had been smiling at his insane friend, he felt their fear and shared it.

  Then he remembered his sister, and he remembered why he felt it.

  He looked back at Sullivan. “Lisa is one of them,” Jason whispered.

  There was a moment of confusion, then he saw it hit Sullivan. That eager look on his face fell and Jason saw his color drain. “Dude…”

  It was amazing how one word always seemed to have so many meanings. Jason once saw a movie where they had a whole conversation with just using the word “dude”. As Sullivan said it now, Jason saw and heard the sadness in it. The word conveyed “Hey, man. I’m sorry, and I’m here for you” Just one word, but Jason knew that in their friendship, all that was relayed.

  “We’re fucked,” Jason said.

  Something inside Jason just snapped, and he barely noticed as he felt himself fall away, the world around him spinning.

  * * * *

  Jaime had been watching the kid that had come in, followed by the nurse. The bartender had been calling him “Dude” so often, she almost thought it was his name. Now he was just a heap, crying on the floor. What a damn baby, she thought.

  When she heard more crying, she remembered that she had a baby of her own there, and that damned thing was now wailing, as well. Nadine, the baby who had ruined their lives, was sitting on the table and one of these losers must have fucking woken her up. Now she would probably never get the screaming creature back to sleep.

  Jaime tried to remember the last time her diaper had been changed, or when she had fed her. She thought it had been just a couple hours ago, but wasn’t sure. She had done it when she got up this morning, right? She was pretty sure she had.

  She turned from the adult sobbing behind the bar and started to walk towards her own little monster, but stopped when she saw Denise, the woman Jaime knew as Nurse Winston from her infrequent visits to the doctor’s office, holding her baby. She was singing to the little child, and the beautiful voice had calmed her.

  With trepidation in her step, Jaime walked up to the nurse. “I’m sorry for missing my appointment this week,” Jaime said. She wasn’t sorry. She hated going, unless she was in pain and wanted to get more Vicodin, but the nurse probably already knew that. Still, she thought she needed to say it, as the woman was holding her little beast in her arms.

  “You actually got her to stop. That’s amazing,” Jaime said nervously. She still wasn’t sure how to react to seeing the woman out of the doctor’s office. Somewhere deep inside, and she wasn’t sure why, this woman made her antsy, and she could feel the end of her fingers start to twitch a little.

  Denise looked up at the woman and gave her a weak smile. Jaime saw something there, something she had never seen on the woman’s face before. The woman seemed to have bags under eyes, and the darkness in the bar cast shadows across her expression to make it look both haunted and possessive. That smile, with the barest hint of Denise’s teeth showing, seemed almost to claim Jaime’s baby as her own.

  Maybe it was that way. Maybe the woman did want to take her child. Most days, Jaime would wish for that, for the screaming monster to just disappear; however, with this woman holding her little girl and giving her that look, she wasn’t sure anymore. She had the sudden overwhelming urge to grab her child and hold her.

  It had to be the light. After all, this woman had cared for her child and had nursed her through fever and sickness. This was the doctor’s wife, the one everyone trusted. There was nothing mischievous there. It was just all in the lighting of the dim bar. It makes the woman look like a witch, Jaime thought. Maybe that was what it was. The light made the woman look…evil.

  Still, it made her uncomfortable.

  “Go find a couple of towels,” the woman was saying. “We need to set her down on the table so we can get her diaper changed, but I don’t want to lay her down on the cold, hard table without something soft.”

  Jaime found herself turning away, while still keeping a wary gaze on the woman.

  * * * *

  Jaime had been walking back to the table when Travis, her “always great for fucking things up” husband, walked over to her and whispered, “We need to get out of here.”

  Jaime hadn’t realized how much she was lost in her own thoughts until she heard his voice and jumped a little at the sound of it.

  “What?” She turned and looked into his eyes.

  “We need to get the fuck out of here.” He was trying to whisper, but it was too harsh and she was sure everyone else had probably heard it. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away from everyone, giving them only a quick look as he did.

  “What? Why?” she said, looking back over her shoulder towards the woman holding her baby. Her banshee was quiet now, and the woman was changing her like she had done it a thousand times.

  “I think she’s planning on keeping our baby,” Jaime said in an astonished whisper.

  Travis shook her, bringing her focus back to him. His eyes were drilling into her, and she found herself not able to look into them for too long. Was this really the man she had come up here to yell at? The man she had felt had lost his backbone just after he had lost his job? The man who would get mad at people, only to drink that madness away? He didn’t look like that man now.

  Was she glad about that? She wasn’t sure.

  What was happening to her? Was she losing it, as well? There were fucking zombies outside, but she had been fine. She had watched them tear apart people out in the street, but she had been fine. The rest of them had been nervous and scared, but she had been fine.

  So why couldn’t she be focused now?

  She hadn’t been thinking about Nadine, so when did that change? That little monster had done nothing but terrorize them, causing them nothing but grief. Their life would have been so much easier without the creature screaming through the night, her husband yelling at her for not shutting the damned thing up. How many nights ha
d she gone into that room, thinking just how easy it would be to take a pillow and cover the monster’s mouth for a few minutes?

  So why did Nadine change things and make her start to lose it?

  “Where would we go?” she finally heard herself asking. She surprised herself with how weak she sounded. Where had this mouse come from?

  Her gaze turned back to the nurse, who was now finished putting on a new, makeshift diaper…a bar rag. Suddenly, she realized it was because of the nurse. She had always had that affect. The woman had always been nice to her, but she knew the woman always thought badly of her. She thought she was trash. The nurse thought Jaime was a terrible mother and didn’t deserve to have kids. Every time she saw Nurse Winston look at her, it was in her eyes. She thought Jaime was just another piece of trash, and Nurse Winston was so much better than everyone else. She lived in that nice big house just behind the doctor’s office, that lavish house that was so much nicer than most the other houses in the town, while they lived in a trailer.

  Well, the trailer was paid for, and it was theirs, and that nurse was not better than them.

  She could feel the fire she often had, that chip she always carried on her shoulder for those snobs around town that thought they were better…her boss, the doctor, the nurse. The ones who all had it so easy. That anger at how they always looked down at her rekindled and she could feel the heat spreading throughout her chest.