I’ve never seen someone break down before — not in real life. It’s hard to watch, but at the same time, it’s entertaining. Knowing Freddy Huber is a momma’s boy comforts me. At least I got my own place. The bastard might have a mean right hook, but I got a two-bedroom apartment.
“I love her, you know. I love my wife. She’s my best friend. I just…I just get bored. Her tits are saggy. She’s wrinkling. I can’t remember the last time she shaved her legs,” Pat continues. “If I can pop one without a Viagra around her, it’s a damned miracle.”
“Okay, too much information, man,” Isaiah says.
“You don’t like it? Then confess, Isaiah!” Pat says. “Tell us about your stint in prison or the drug dealers you’ve popped.”
“You better cut that shit out,” Isaiah snaps. “I ain’t never been to prison. I was in the Army. Five years. Saw some action in Iraq…” his voice trails off. He blinks slowly, then brings his hand up to swipe his bald scalp. “Maybe I should be in prison, man. I saw some fucked up things. I did fucked up things. All for what? For some oil? To stop some terrorists? That’s five years of my life I ain’t never gonna get back. I missed the birth of my kid. I lost the love of my life. Now she won’t even let me see the kid. They live in California, all the way across the country.”
“Good, good,” Pat says. “Let it out. Might as well if Miss Fox is right and God is listening. Come clean and we’ll be saved, right?”
She ignores him, just stares straight ahead of her, past me and Abby.
“How about you, Jupiter? What do you got to come clean about?” Pat asks me. He’s smiling, and the gun is still in his hand. My eyes scan over it. He sees me do it, then flashes it to me.
Everyone looks either stunned or deep in thought with the exception of Ryan who’s taken to a slight variation of the death rattle. His eyes are open, but I don’t think he sees much.
“I don’t have anything to get off of my chest,” I say.
“Bullshit. Anything, Jupiter. A toy you stole in kindergarten. The fat kid you used to pick on in high school.”
He’s trying to get a rise out of me, but I won’t let him.
“I killed my cat when I was younger,” Abby says.
Her words are like a slap in the face to us all. Even Miss Fox is shaken out of her pouty trance. Ryan stirs, too, but I don’t think it was because of what Abby said. I think he’s just in so much pain.
“He liked to climb the tree behind the shed in my backyard. I liked to climb it, too. I was always scared to go past a certain point. It was really high, like maybe fifty feet, I don’t know, but as a nine-year-old, that’s like a million stories. My friend said cats always land on their feet. One day, that dumb cat was up there so high, I wanted to save him. I wanted to be like the firefighters in the movies and stuff. So I did it. I got all the way up there, but he wouldn’t let go of the bark. He was glued to it with his nails, I tried and tried to pry him free. Finally, he gave in. But there was no way I was climbing back down with him in my hand, and Shelly said cats always landed on their feet.”
She cringes. Fidgets a bit with the memory fresh inside of her head.
“I tossed him off. He didn’t…he didn’t die instantly. But he broke all of his legs when he hit the concrete, and he was bleeding internally. My mom had to take him to one of those emergency vets. They said he was suffering. I named him Simba even though he was black, you know, like from The Lion King. Simba had to be put down. I never said I threw him. I said he jumped or fell, I don’t know. No one knows about this but me, and now you guys. God, I’m a piece of shit,” she says and breaks into another burst of tears.
Pat stands there with his mouth hanging wide open. “Wow. Now I’m stuck on a roof with not only a war criminal, a thief, and an adulterer, but also a cat killer. Jesus Christ, today is my lucky day.”
“It was an accident!” Abby cries. “I was only nine.”
“Bullshit. Nine-year-olds aren’t that stupid.”
She nods as if Pat is right. Seeing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
“All right, Jupiter, try to top that one,” Pat says. He crosses his arms and stares at me. The rest of them stare, too, as if it’s expected of me to confess my sins. All their eyes just show the whites. The peer pressure is real, but I’m not a bad person. Am I? I have nothing to contribute.
Of course, that’s what all the bad people tell themselves: I’m not a bad person. I never fantasized about killing all the assholes who picked on me as a kid, never thought about raiding my grandpa’s basement gun rack for something small enough for me to hide in my backpack, never thought about storming Mrs. Grant’s sophomore homeroom and making Freddy Huber eat lead. Yeah, that’s right, Pat, your own damn son and his stupid friends, too.
No, I’m a good person.
“Come clean, Jupiter, and be saved. Right, Fiona?” Pat says. I don’t have to look at him to know that his shit-eating grin is painted on his face like clown’s makeup.
“It’s okay, Jack,” Abby says. “We won’t judge you.”
“Speak for yourself, sister,” Pat says.
“It’s nothing…” I say.
“Can’t be worse than killing people, man,” Isaiah says. He shakes his head. “That shit will be with me for the rest of my life.”
I think of Earl. That old man I barely knew. I think of him clawing into the tile floor, shouting for us to help him, for the pain to go away, of his wife winning the Bake-Off. I think of Kevin, of the dead covering him and tearing away at his flesh so I could go on. I think of these things because deep down I blame myself. I could’ve done something. I could’ve been better. We can always be better, even when we say we can’t. We can dedicate our lives to improving, but we’re too busy thinking of ourselves to do that. Ironic, right?
Maybe if I got out and talked to people I’d have friends, but I hate people. I’m too shy.
Maybe if I had swung the barbell harder and killed that cowboy hat wearing zombie before he got Earl’s leg then he’d still be alive. I could’ve double-checked. Could’ve made sure there were no longer any threats. Isn’t that what Johnny Deadslayer would’ve done?
Maybe if I would’ve never called Kevin, he wouldn’t have been here today. Maybe he’d be at home watching his favorite movie, eating healthy snacks.
Maybe if I stayed closer to home, never left my mom, she would still be alive. Maybe she would’ve quit smoking. Maybe she wouldn’t have gone out to Everson’s to get that pack of Marlboros that ultimately killed her.
I say none of this and shrug instead. Because they wouldn’t understand. They’d say they do, but they’d never truly understand. That’s what makes us different from each other, and I don’t mind that one bit.
“I guess you’ll never be saved then,” Pat says. He turns to Ryan. “What about you, kid?” And Ryan says nothing in return besides letting out a small grunt from between his pursed lips. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
There’s a silence — an eerie silence that hangs over our heads.
Pat tilts his head up to the sky, mocking Miss Fox from earlier. “Well, God…now’s the time to save us.”
Nothing happens.
“Thought not. Well, I’m getting the hell off of this roof,” Pat says. “I suggest you follow me because I’m the one with the — ”
A thud like a sledgehammer pounding against the hatch cuts him off.
Another thud. This one creaks the hinges, lifts the hatch an inch into the air. I see the lines of emergency lights leaking out from the inside.
A finger snakes through the crack. It’s a bloody finger. The nail hangs off like a tilted crescent moon. Dirty skin.
This is the end. There’s nowhere to go but off the roof. I see that flash of Darlene in my mind’s eye again. So vivid. I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.
Twenty-Four
“I thought you said they couldn’t climb the ladder!” Abby shouts at me.
I was thinking of the zombies from my book, but what the
hell did I know?
They roll out of the hatch. Bodies and limbs, greasy with Kevin’s blood. Their eyes burn yellow and they still look so hungry.
Pat aims at the first one to come out and pulls the trigger. It’s a woman with hair that may have once been blonde, but the bullet takes off the top half of her head. Brains leak down her sallow skin, staining her face. She slumps forward, dead…again.
There’s more.
They didn’t climb the ladder, I’m realizing. There’s just so many of them and they’re so hungry that they piled up beneath the hatch until they created a mound of zombies which had no choice but to overflow and spill onto the roof.
Pat fires again. I don’t move as the gun cracks. I swear I can feel the bullet whiz right by my face. This shot is wide and hits the roof with a high-pitched whine. A brief spark lights up the snarling faces.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Abby screams. She cowers behind Pat, who is standing with the gun pointed at the hatch, both hands on the weapon.
Another shot goes off. Another spray of blood. The body — an older man wearing his navy-blue service outfit — falls in just the right place for the others to use him as a stepladder. Three of them spill onto the roof, they get up. Pat pulls off two more shots in quick succession. Both miss their heads. One is struck in the stomach, but that doesn’t slow him down. He lumbers over to me. I’ve frozen again, a million thoughts racing through my mind. Darlene, my mom, my books, my brother, Freddy Huber. I feel like I’m going to explode.
“Jack! C’mon, man!” Isaiah says. I hear him faintly as if he’s yelling at the far end of a long corridor. My ears ring from the gunshots. There’s growling and snarling. Wet mouths smacking their lips at me, teeth gnashing.
Blood.
Darkness.
Someone grips me hard. I wince and look up to see Isaiah with a twisted look on his face. He pulls me away, and about a second later, one of the zombies lunge at the spot where I was standing.
I shake my head, slowly coming back into the moment. More have broken through the hatch. I count ten on the roof, lumbering to us. Each step they take backs our group up to the edge. We are surrounded by 360 degrees of blacktop with only a faint strip of bushes and shrubs near the front doors. Oh, and we’re two stories up.
“Fire escape?” I yell at Abby.
She shakes her head.
“Anything? Parachute? Trampol — ”
Pat squeezes the trigger, and in the faint ringing and silence between shots, I hear a soft moan. It’s not inhuman like these monsters who are coming for our flesh. It’s Ryan. He’s trying to pull himself up, but he looks so sick, so pained. There’s no way that leg will be able to hold him and get him to safety.
The monsters are about five feet from him as I make up my mind. I won’t lose him like I lost Kevin. I just won’t.
I grab him, scooping him up in my arms as best I can. It’s not pretty, but it’s effective. He shrieks with pain as I do it.
Miss Fox and Abby watch me with wide eyes. Pat has a perpetual frown on his face, the gun still up and aiming at the legion of dead behind me. I’m a few steps away from being behind him when he looks at me as if I’m the only one on the roof. The gun follows his gaze.
“Drop him,” he says.
“What?”
“Drop the kid, Jupiter.”
Isaiah keeps looking behind him, seeing how close to the edge they all are.
“If you want to live, you will drop the fucking kid.” His voice is eerily calm and his eyes mean business. A couple shades darker and I might confuse him with one of the dead.
“Or what?” I say.
Pat Huber, just another bully.
“Or I shoot you both. I got enough ammunition to do it, son. Don’t make me.”
I don’t believe him, and the zombies are too close for me to go anywhere else but forward.
Pat doesn’t lie.
The gun goes off, and my whole body shudders. My eyes jam shut. I think I’m dead, I think a hole in my stomach will start spewing hot blood.
It doesn’t.
Instead, I hear the high thump of skin and bones smacking the roof. Pat shot one of the things that had gotten too close to me.
“Drop him!” he screams. “I don’t want to kill you both.”
I shake my head, and with Ryan in my arms, I walk forward. He’ll have to shoot me.
Somewhere above us, a cloud moves, revealing white moonlight glinting off the gun’s metal. I can see him shaking.
Then I see a flash from the muzzle. A bullet whines off of the roof about a foot in front of me.
“I mean it, Jupiter! I’ll shoot you both!”
He shoots again. This shot is close enough for me to feel the heat from the slug. But still, I don’t slow down. His aim flicks to my right. I turn to look, see a fat woman in a straw hat drop, then the aim is back at me.
“Stop!” Abby shouts.
My arms shake with the strain of Ryan’s weight. I want nothing but to put him down, but I can’t. If I do that, they’ll be on him like they were on Kevin and Earl. I don’t care if that would buy us some time.
“Pat, cut the shit,” Isaiah says.
“I’m just trying to save us. We can’t carry around some cripple.”
“I’m not leaving him behind!” I shout.
Ryan moans with pain. His eyes flicker. Chapped lips start to move as if to speak. A weak string of words escape his lips, “T-Thank you,” he wheezes.
“Jack, look out!” Abby yells.
A gnarled hand swipes right by my face.
Pat shoots again, and the hand dissolves into a mess of blood and shattered bones. I keep moving, each step a pain.
Pat shoots for the last time, and by the pain in my chest, the wrenching fear caused by this close call, I think I’ve been shot, when really the bullet dings off the roof inches away from my feet. In all the fear, I drop Ryan.
Before I can bend down to pick him up, an older zombie’s wispy, white beard turns red with fresh blood and guts.
Ryan screams. It’s easily the most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard, worse than Kevin, worse than Toby and Earl. Worse than whatever played in my head when I wrote The Deadslayer.
I stare in awe — pure, utter shock — as the others who’ve made their way onto the roof by way of the dead limb ladder pounce on the poor kid. Intestines stretch like putty from his open stomach before they snap and wind up in between their gnashing teeth.
Ryan screams and cries.
The gun goes off, putting an end to his whimpers. His face is not a face anymore. What was once a young man, peach fuzz on his upper lip, acne scars on his cheeks, is now something resembling a stepped-in cherry pie.
I failed again. Damn it, I failed again.
Someone is behind me. Someone grabs me and yanks me up.
“C’mon, kid,” Isaiah says. “Gotta find a way off of the roof. Gotta go.”
The dead swarm Ryan’s body and they will munch and claw at him until he is nothing…until he is no more.
Pat still holds up the gun. He aims at the pile of corpse’s wearing tattered clothes, blood and flesh hanging from their chins in goopy strings.
How much time do we have? I wonder. How long before they pick the kid clean? How long until he is nothing but bones?
The rage takes me as easily as the fear does, but the rage is louder. Pat sees me coming, so he turns his aim back at my head. He might shoot me. He might end my quest for Darlene, but I’m not thinking straight.
I cock my fist back, and as it whistles through the air, Pat drops the weapon down to his side. I slug him the same way his son slugged me. My knuckles crack the loose skin around his jaw, and it feels better than I could ever imagine.
He doubles over but doesn’t fall.
“This is your fault!” I shout. “We could’ve saved him.”
“I did the poor bastard a favor.” His hand finds the spot where I hit him, fingers swipe away a fresh trickle of blood from the corner of
his mouth. “You could learn a thing or two from me, Jupiter! In this world, the way it is now, you don’t have time to think and worry about everyone else. You gotta act, or you gotta die.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “That’s just an excuse. No matter what’s happened out there, we have to be civilized. We have to protect each other.”
Pat slowly straightens himself, one hand still clutching the gun, the other holding the spot where I punched him. “And that, my friend, is why you’re gonna die,” he says, then the gun comes up as he points it straight at my face, and this time, I see the murder in his eyes, I see the underlying cowardice vanish.
I see death.
Darlene, I think as the gun goes off.
Twenty-Five
The gun doesn’t shoot at me, at least I don’t think it does because Isaiah tackles Pat around the waist as it goes off. I don’t see the flash from the muzzle. The bodies are too entwined for that.
Miss Fox lets out a scream.
Isaiah cries out in pain.
I rush over to the two men. There’s a steady stream of blood pouring out of one of them. I follow the trail, hoping it isn’t Isaiah. I grab him by the shoulders and roll him off of Pat, and sure enough, Isaiah’s shirt is slowly soaking through with blood. He clutches at a sizzling hole in his stomach. Tears and sweat roll down his face.
“You shot him!” Abby screams. “You monster, you shot him!”
Pat scrambles away from Isaiah.
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