by Gill, Bonnie
Dean pulls the dead guy off Star. Her eyes are wide, and she presses her lips together in a frown. She wipes at her face, slinging zombie goo in the air.
Daria carries her knife in one hand and a tire iron in the other. She jumps at a six-foot guy like a rabid ninja fairy. He goes down with barely a fight.
We leave no gabbies standing. We bend over, breathing hard. I sling some gabbie guts from my neck. Star sits down and wipes her bat on the ground. "I've always liked this bat. I wonder if there's a way to remove the bloodstains?" She rolls it around over the grass.
"Is everyone okay? Any of you get bit?" I try to see if there's any blood on them, but it's hard to tell with leather in the dark. Dean’s canvas coat and blue jeans are splattered with blackish-brown crud. I don’t think those stains are going to come out.
Daria and Star both shake their heads.
I look around, but I don't see any other gabbies. The stench is enough to gag a dung beetle. "Should we go inside?" I’m parched. I want to drink a tall glass of ice-cold water. My arms are sore, and my legs are numb. I work out a few times a week, but it didn't prepare me for this kind of combat.
"We should take off our coats before we go inside," Dean says.
All of our coats are covered in gabbie goo.
"We should douse them with bleach or peroxide," Star says. "The virus is contagious, and we're covered in it. I would love to study it under a microscope to see if it's temperature-sensitive. It may die in the cold.”
“Too bad we don’t have a microscope and some of those glass slides.”
Star shoots me her why-are-you-so-negative look.
I shrug. “I’m just saying.”
She exhales loudly. “You’re a total buzzkill, you know that?”
The bodies of our neighbors lay scattered around my home. How long is it going to take for the gabbies to decompose? "We should get rid of the bodies."
Mr. Washington opens the door, his face grim as he shakes his head. "What’s happening?" He points at the corpses.
"We had to do it," I say. "If we don't destroy their brains, they'll kill us and your children."
"Does anyone have a tarp?" Dean asks.
Mr. Washington snaps out of his daze. "Todd is, or was, a house painter. He might have some in the back of his SUV."
We look over at Todd. His head is mushy flesh with bone shards sticking out from it.
"I'll go get the tarps," Dean says.
"I'll go too." Daria steps up next to him. "I've got your back, partner." They head off down the street toward Todd's home.
"I don't really want to clean up this mess. It’s bad enough we had to kill them," Star says. She's a little green now. "Next time, let’s put the tarp down first. It'll make cleanup easier."
"Yeah, like that's going to happen." I search for Dean and Daria. They’re walking around Todd's SUV. She pulls on the door handles a few times and shakes her head.
“See if he has an extra set of keys inside,” I say under my breath. I know where this is going if they can't find those damn keys. I study at Todd's dead body. His legs are bent at a funky angle, and brains are leaking out of his head.
Daria opens the door to Todd's home, and Dean enters first.
"Do you think they'll find the keys?" Star looks at me and then glances down at dead Todd.
Yeah, she knows the next step. I won't put her through it though, she’s my little sister. "I sure hope so."
Daria and Dean come out of the mobile home. They shake their heads.
"Cover me," I say to Star. "Just in case he's not dead."
She looks at Todd. "Umm, I don't think you have to worry about that. Wow, brain matter really is gray. Do you see that?" She points to some spongy gelatin. "There's the white matter, but it has a brown tinge. Do you want me to get some new gloves for you?"
Mr. Washington calls to us from the doorway, "Hey, I've got a pair right here." He tosses them, and Star catches one but drops the other.
"Thank you." She says, picking up the glove she dropped before handing them to me.
I pull on the latex gloves and crouch by Todd's body. The stench of urine, poop, and death just about knocks me over, and I gag. Thank goodness I don’t puke. I tuck his arm close to the side of his body and heave. The heavy lug barely rolls over.
His eyes are milky, bloodshot, and stare up at me. A cluster of imaginary maggots crawls up my neck. I shiver.
I pat down his pockets, feeling a hard lump one of them. “Here goes nothing.” I reach into his pocket and feel the keys with my fingertips. A gurgling noise escapes from his mouth. I grasp the keys and pull them out just as Star brings her bat down on his face. Black stinky spatter speckles my jacket.
"Sorry." She drops her bat.
Mr. Washington runs over and holds out a towel. It’s one of my new white towels. I reluctantly take it from him and wipe off my face. "Thank you."
"I want to help clear our neighborhood. I can't stay inside while you women do all the hard work." From the look on his face, he won’t budge on this.
"Sure." I stand. My new towel is now full of gabbie sludge, so I toss it in the garbage can. “Why don’t you take these keys over to Dean and then help us clean up the dead?”
He jogs to Dean and Daria with keys in hand. I watch as they open the door to the SUV and rummage around inside. Dean carries blue tarps in his arms when they arrive back at my yard.
I look at the twenty or so of my dead neighbors lying about. Most have their skulls crushed. We did this. It feels like a boulder drops inside my stomach.
Just then, a car pulls up, and someone screams.
5
The familiar black-haired woman screams like her panties are on fire while she looks around at our gabbie massacre. I recognize the fifty-something year old as the woman I’ve seen driving around our neighborhood in her tiny car, reprimanding kids and cats alike. "You killed all of them!” Her hands shake while she's trying to dial her cell phone. "I'm calling the police."
“Good luck with that,” I mumble.
Dean walks up to her as if he were approaching a hungry wild bear that just woke from her winter nap. In a gentle voice, he says, "We had to do it. They’re zombies. If we don't destroy their brain, they will try to eat us."
"Zombies?” She gets this weird look on her face as if something clicks in her brain. “That makes sense.”
I join Dean. This close to the vehicle I can smell coolant, which always smells like money to me. Probably a cracked radiator or coolant reservoir. I notice a red blotch on her wrist. "Were you bitten?"
She looks away from her phone and at the blood. "Yes. I was helping a child standing in the middle of the street. He bit me. Was he a zombie?" She's so distracted by the dead gabbies that it'll be hard to make her focus.
Mr. Washington walks up and has a facade of calm demeanor "What’s it like out there?"
She lets out a long sigh. "They barricaded all of the Ninety-Four ramps with those orange plastic barrels. I was headed downtown by Wrigley Field to check on my daughter. I turned back and came down Route Twelve. Cars are stranded all over the road. I pulled into the grass to go around them. It took over three hours to get here from Barrington."
Mud and grass cake her wheel wells. She probably cracked her radiator when she went off-road.
She continues, "People are wandering all over the place. They don't look right. I saw a toddler in the street, so I got out of my car. His clothes were dirty, and his hair was coated in mud, or at least I thought it was mud. When I asked him where his parents were, the little brat bit me." She waves her wrist at us.
"The infected reanimate after death, like zombies. Dean says the message boards are calling them gabbies. Anyway, the only way to put them down for good is to destroy their brain," Star says.
The woman nods and looks over at the dead laying in my yard. Her eyes glaze over as if she's going to check out of reality for a moment. "How many of our neighbors are alive?" She lays her phone on the dash and hugs hers
elf.
"Us, Mrs. Garcia, Betty, and Clark's children. So far. We'll go house to house when we're done here to look for survivors," Dean says.
She looks at her wrist. "Will I become one of them?" She lets out a cough. Already her skin is getting a pasty grayish color.
Dean tilts his head and forces a sympathetic smile. "I think you should go home, and clean your wound. What's your address?"
Her hands start shaking again. "I'm at two-oh-five on the next street over."
"Good. We'll check on you in a little while," he says.
We watch her drive away.
"It'll be interesting to see if she catches it. If she does, we might be able to find out the timeline of how long each stage takes. I can stay with her," Star says.
"No." I know she's a nursing student and everything, but I don't want her anywhere near the infected.
"I'll go with Star.” Daria holds up her tire iron. "Don't worry, I'll keep an eye on her. Besides, I want to call my parents and check on them."
"Thank you." I'm grateful my sister has a friend she can depend on. Star is an adult and I have to treat her like one. She can gather important information while she's there. I still don't like it.
"I want to set up a scouting party to find out how many people are alive, and how many are sick. Star and Daria, you two can go over to check on her when we're done. We’ll need to know if she turns, and how long it takes to go from human to gabbie after being bitten," Dean says.
"What about the bodies?" Clark asks.
"We'll bring them over and put them in Todd's backyard for now." Dean looks puzzled. "Unless you think we should burn them?"
"I don’t know if the virus can be transmitted through smoke. We run the risk of E. coli and other diseases if we leave them lying around. They also stink." Star wrinkles her nose.
They do reek. I imagine a cloud of purple fog encompassing the neighborhood with the stench. "I'll be right back." I go inside and get my four bandanas. I wrap one around my face and hand the others to Star and Daria. I hold the last one up for Dean and Clark for them to choose who would get to wear it.
Dean gestures at Clark to take the bandana.
We put on several layers of gloves. It takes us about an hour to collect the bodies and drag them to Todd's yard.
Star and Daria leave to check on the lady who was bitten.
Dean, Clark, and I head off to search the rest of the area. It doesn't feel like the zombie apocalypse. Our little neighborhood is quiet and deserted.
"What if no one is left? They said the virus is super contagious. What if everyone dies?" Clark asks.
"We can figure out when to look for your wife after we secure this location. We'll make a plan, I promise," Dean says. Dean’s always been about planning, which is good because I sure don’t want to be the one to do it. At work, Dean plans out the order of the repairs and maintenance to be performed on the vehicles. We usually finish the ones he’s promised for the day and then some. It’s one of the reasons people return. That, and we fix the problem correctly the first time so we have very few redos.
The first mobile home we check is Jerry and Dominick's. They're in their twenties and work for a marina in town. When Dean knocks three times on the door, he hears someone talking inside. We wait a minute before knocking again.
"Do we go in?" I ask.
He nods and turns the door handle. When we step inside, we notice the kitchen table is overturned. There are dark, red blood streaks across the tiled floor. The television is playing the same newscast showing the riots. A creaking noise sounds behind a door off the main living area. Then moans. I’m not too sure I want to know what’s going on in there.
“This place gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's either a gabbie in the bathroom, or someone’s getting it on.” I lift my wrench so I’m ready to give a smackdown if needed.
Dean lays his hand on my shoulder. "Hold on there, Slugger. We need to make sure it’s a zombie before you storm in there with weapons raised." He cracks a small smile as if to reassure me, but it doesn't make me feel any better.
It's true. I'd feel horrible if I killed someone who wasn’t undead. But if it is a gabbie, I’m geared up and ready to go.
Someone moans, “Oh God.”
I raise my eyebrows. I really don’t want to see my neighbor flogging his log, or plunging his wonder wiener into someone.
Dean holds up one finger, and another. Then, he flings opens the bathroom door.
We both take a step back and almost trip over Clark.
“Dude. Don’t lurk behind us,” I scold.
“Sorry,” he whispers.
Inside, Jerry is sitting on the toilet, his hands covering his face. He doesn't seem to notice us.
"Jerry," Dean says as he places one foot in front of the other, almost as if he's navigating through a minefield. "What's going on?"
Jerry is in his late twenties and a couple of years older than me. He leaves early in the morning and doesn't come home until late evening. I've never really talked to him before. Star says he and Dominick frequent the bar where she works, but he doesn't say much to her either. He finally looks up at us. "Dean? Raven? What are you doing in my house?" His skin is an ashen color, but he is coherent. Not a zombie, yet.
I breathe out a long breath. At least I won't have to bash in his head tonight.
"We wanted to check on you. Are you all alright? Where did all the blood come from?" Dean puts his hand on Jerry's back to comfort him.
"It's Dominick's and mine. He was bitten. We didn't think much about it when it happened. Some crazy guy came into the marina and…” He pauses, his hands shaking. “We came home from work and Dominick was feeling ill. I made some soup, and he laid down. The next thing I know, he bit my leg." He pulls up his pant leg. Sure enough, a raw, jagged, circular bite mark mars his calf. The skin around the wound is purple and so swollen it's shiny. It stinks like spoiled meat that sat hours in the summer sun. Why does everything that has to do with this virus smell so bad?
"Where is Dominick?" I ask.
"I shoved him back into his bedroom. He didn't look right. He looked dead, just like that guy who bit him. I turned on the news to see if this is a symptom of the virus..." he trails off.
"How long ago did he bite you?" Dean asks.
"This afternoon. I should have known something was wrong." He drops his pant leg and stands. His marred leg collapses underneath him, and he falls to the floor.
Dean helps him up. "I’ll walk you to your bedroom."
“Thank you." One drop of blood drips from his nose and hits the ground. There's no way he's going to live through this. He's going to die, and there's nothing we can do about it. Within a day, we'll have to destroy his gabbie butt.
My head starts to pound by my temples.
Dean helps him to his room and tucks him into his bed. Even though Dean can be a little rough around the edges, he's a caring guy. We bring him a large glass of water and leave his home.
"I’ll come back and take care of him." Dean's eyes droop. He’s tired, too.
"Maybe we should leave. You know, for our sanity." I certainly don't want to have to kill more neighbors, even the ones I don’t know all that well.
"No, you were correct when you said we needed to stay awhile. I imagine most of the chaos will blow over soon," Dean says.
I hope he's right. Our little group could be doomed. I've made some poor choices in the past, and hopefully, this isn’t another.
We knock on the next door. No answer. Unlike last time, the door is locked. We go from home to home. We find a few healthy people, and they choose to stay inside. I don't blame them one bit. No one wants to be packed into one small mobile home with people they barely know. If we all keep in touch, and have lookouts, we should stay safe.
The sun rises as we walk back to my home. The pink and orange sky is a welcome sight. It's as if a new day will bring us hope.
"What are we going to do now?" Clark asks.
"I'm going
home to sleep." I'm totally exhausted. My legs and arms are throbbing from the zombie battle.
"I think we should set up a watch. I can take the first shift," Dean says. I'm all for that.
We come to the woman's home where Star and Daria are. "We should stop and check on them."
"I'll do that. You go home and get some rest," Dean says.
I go inside my trailer and see the boys sleeping on my couch. Thomas's head is laying on Jackson's arm. The middle child is sprawled out on the love seat. I feel bad because I forgot his name and didn't think to ask. Mrs. Garcia paces the floor looking weary. "Oh good, you're back."
I sit in a chair across from the television. The screen reveals white static.
"Sorry. The reports stopped about an hour ago. I think the white noise is relaxing." Mrs. Garcia turns off the television. "You need to eat something. How about some soup? There's a fresh pot on the stove." She waves me over to the kitchen and spoons some into a bowl.
There are fresh carrots, celery, and noodles floating around inside. I sip on a spoonful. Heaven. The taste brings me back to the diner where my mom used to work. They had the best soup with homemade noodles, roasted chicken, and vegetables. I miss my mom even though she worked so much. I’m convinced work is what killed her. She didn't have time to go to the doctor for an early diagnosis of breast cancer.
I’ll never forget that day. I was only nineteen when she found out. She told us it would be a simple operation, and then she'd have some chemo. She acted so nonchalantly about the whole thing, like it wasn't a big deal. The doctor couldn't get it all out. The cancer spread through the rest of her body, and she died five months later. We didn’t know our father. He had left long before.
Suddenly I lost my appetite. I place my spoon in the bowl and look at Mrs. Garcia. "Have you tried the radio?"
She shakes her head in a slow and weary sort of way. The evening has taken its toll on her as well. This apocalypse is beating the living crap out of everyone, and it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. She wasn't out there slaying gabbies, but I'm sure she saw to everyone's needs and kept them calm while we were gone. She has a motherly way that makes you feel like everything is going to be alright. I'm glad she is here to help.