by Mark Tufo
“Sick bastard. How is it that you make Deneaux look like a viable traveling companion?”
“That hurts, man.”
The difficulty was going to be compounded because the door opened outward and a good
ten or twelve zombies were huddled up against it. The person or persons pushing the
door open was going to be exposed to the zombies while those behind him would be shooting.
It was not an enviable position.
“Maybe we should have Gary go back down the stairs to ease the pressure,” Tracy suggested.
“Good idea. I hope he can make it back up, though,” I told her. I empathized with
my brother. That thing was like strapping a human on your back, and not a little baby
one.
I was about to tell him when his singing (dare I call it that) cut short and he shouted
out, “MJ, this thing is blinking.”
“What color? Because if it’s a green, that’s alright, just the box doing a self-diagnostic.
Now if it’s yellow that’s still okay, it means the box has detected a problem, but
it’s fairly certain it can self-correct.”
“Fairly fucking certain,” I mumbled. “I’m going to kill him.”
“But if it’s red—” he was continuing.
“It’s red!” Gary replied.
“Um…erm…I would suggest running,” Mad-Jack shouted to him.
BT and I were already heading for the door. Our combined momentum drove some of the
zombies clear off the small landing where I hoped they dashed their skulls against
any hard object below. I had slammed into the door, shoulder first, thinking I wasn’t
going to get much movement, but when the freight train that is BT also crashed into
it, the thing opened easily enough. I found myself falling, the steel grate of the
landing rushing up to meet me. Just where I wanted to be—by the feet of zombies. That’s
sarcasm, although in hindsight, it beat the hell out of being by their mouths.
BT was screaming a war cry. I’d like to think my scream sounded fierce as well, but
mine was more fear driven. I could hear rounds being fired above me. I was on eye
level with a zombie that was in serious need of an anti-fungal medication. Mini brown
cauliflower pustules were erupting from its toenails, and trust me when I tell you,
I was fixated on that. I was deathly afraid it was going to shuffle those growths
right up to my nose. If they touched me, odds were I’d go into shock. I felt hands
wrap around my lower legs, and I kicked out thinking it was zombies.
“Talbot, if you kick me, you’ll be sleeping alone for years,” Tracy told me. She and
Travis yanked me back into the sanctuary of the library.
BT had a good four or five zombies pinned behind the door and the railing. Justin
and Tommy were clearing the few remaining ones away from him. MJ’s machine had done
more than just repel, now the zombies fixated their attention on it. They were in
such a rush to get away from it that they weren’t even bothering with the food literally
a mouth’s span away. Gary had just made the landing as Tommy put a knife I didn’t
know he was carrying straight through the eye socket of the last remaining zombie.
Shooting anything alive is nightmare worthy, but there’s something about a knife that
just ratchets up that gross factor. It’s a much more personal way to dispose of a
life (such as a zombie’s is). The knife easily slid into the soft tissue of the eyeball,
cracking through the delicate orbital bones, and then finally coming to a rest in
its brain. The zombie stilled as its headquarters were breeched. Tommy had a fierce
grimace on his face as he pulled the knife free and kicked the zombie over the rail.
The zombie sailed a good fifteen feet in the air—sometimes I forgot just how strong
Tommy was—before the thing’s forward progress was stopped by a strategically placed
elm. If not for the tree, the zombie may have broken some flight records for his kind.
Even Gary’s panting couldn’t drown out the sickening sounds of shattering bones.
“You alright?” BT asked Gary, not stopping for a response as he physically picked
him up and into the library. Travis grabbed the handle to the door and pulled it shut
before a new wave of zombies heading up the stairs could get in.
“Well that sucked,” I said as I watched zombies smack into the now closed entryway.
I didn’t watch long enough to see if history would repeat itself. (The whole glass
licking thing.) Tracy had grabbed a chair and dragged it over to Gary who looked like
he was on the verge of collapsing. BT and I helped him out of MJ’s contraption. I
think the hundred and thirty pound estimate was a little light. Even with BT’s strength
and my enhancements, we struggled. I’d swear I saw the floor sag when we put it down.
“How the hell did you carry that thing?” BT asked Gary, looking at him with newfound
amazement.
“Nice outfit,” I told him.
He was too tired to grin.
There was a light on top of the unit that was now shining a steady red, but was dimming
rapidly as I watched it.
I went back to the window that overlooked our ‘saviors’ and spoke into the radio we
had salvaged from our now defunct ride. “The light was a steady red and then went
out. How do we fix it?”
“Oh dear,” I heard MJ say.
“Oh dear? Any chance you could be more specific?” I asked.
“Batteries are dead.”
“Dead? It was barely on for five minutes,” I told him.
“Forty-five.”
“MJ, unless we were in some sort of time warp, that thing wasn’t on for more than
five minutes. Six, tops,” I told him.
“I performed tests,” he said. I could see his head sag from my vantage point.
I’m not the quickest thinking man on the planet, although considering there were way
less men, I was probably gaining on that ladder. Sorry, errant thought. Then realization
hit. “Really, MJ, you didn’t think to change the batteries after your tests?”
“It never occurred to me,” he said reluctantly.
“You have got to be shitting me.” I moved away from the window.
“What’s up?” BT asked, he kept muscling the heavy box up and looking over at Gary
like he couldn’t figure out how he had done it.
“Well you’re now doing curls with the world’s largest and most likely heaviest paperweight.”
“It’s broken?” he asked.
“Dead batteries.” I would have kicked the thing, but I liked the configuration of
my foot bones just the way they were.
“I carried that thing for nothing?” Gary moaned.
“Not for nothing, brother. You got to show off your new outfit.” He smiled at that
and immediately fell asleep, his legs twitching spasmodically from the stress they
had been under.
“Mike,” BT said, lifting the box again. “This thing is closer to two hundred and fifty
pounds.”
“I wonder. Let’s see if we can get this thing open.”
Chapter 7 – Stephanie and Trip
“Stephanie, we can’t afford any dead weight,” Curtez Riggs, the self-appointed leader
of the group, said. “We’re barely holding on here and he doesn’t contribute at all.”
Curtez didn’t relish his role, but with his stint in the Army, he felt he was the
best qualified to keep his work mates alive when t
hey had become trapped in the hotel
offices. It was his fast thinking that had kept the majority of them safe even when
their supervisor had rushed headlong into the zombies in a panic to get back to his
home.
Curtez had kept them alive and they had gone out on multiple successful foraging raids
to get weapons and supplies. They’d made due in an increasingly hostile world. Everyone
had a part to do in that success…save one.
“He’s my husband, Curtez. What do you expect me to do?” When he didn’t immediately
respond, she continued, “I know he’s a little eccentric.”
Curtez’ eyebrow arched at ‘little’.
“Okay, a lot eccentric, but if nothing else, he brings a lot of entertainment value.”
Stephanie was trying to diffuse a topic that had been building the last week. Curtez
did not take kindly to those that didn’t assist directly in their survival.
“I’m done listening to how many times he dosed to the Grateful Dead, and that sometimes
he thinks he has seven fingers on each hand, Stephanie. That’s just not going to cut
it anymore. He eats more than a man that skinny has a right to. It’s like he’s perpetually
stoned.”
That might not be so far from the truth, Stephanie thought. “Let’s cut through the BS, Curtez. What are you suggesting?”
“Do I really need to say it?” he asked.
“I think maybe you do. I think maybe you need to tell me that you want to kick my
husband out of our little corner of the world.”
Curtez was struggling. He felt that he was being pushed to the brink of something
he did not want to attempt to cross. His true hope was that Stephanie would talk to
Trip and get some action from him, not this. “Fine, Stephanie, I want him gone.”
She really didn’t think he’d say those words and they hurt as much as if he had physically
slapped her. “I can’t, Curtez, I can’t make him go out there alone.”
When Curtez didn’t say anything, she knew what his silence was implying.
“We’ll umm…we’ll leave in the morning. I hope you can sleep with your decision,” she
told him. “Hello, John.” She walked over to her husband who was furiously working
at something.
“Who?” he asked, looking up.
“Oh, Trip, I love you so much.” She bent down to kiss the top of his head.
“I made you something.” He beamed proudly. “Been working on my Origami.” He handed
over something that looked strikingly like a rolled up wad of paper used in an office
basketball game.
“It’s lovely,” she said, turning it around and over, trying her best to see what hidden
wonders it held, like her husband obviously did.
“You have it upside down,” he told her.
“Oh, I see it now,” she lied. “Tomorrow morning I thought you and I should go for
a walk.”
“Perfect, I think we’re out of Genoa salami.”
She cocked her head. Not once had they had salami since they’d been holed up—Genoa
or otherwise—and for the life of her, she couldn’t ever remember him eating it.
“Well then we should probably get some.” She smiled.
John the Tripper slept peacefully that night, dreaming of Pop-Tarts and some strange
man he felt like he should know wearing a poncho that looked eerily familiar. His
wife, on the other hand, paced throughout the night keeping a watchful eye on the
street below them, looking for any signs of trouble.
Stephanie gently shook her husband awake the moment light began to seep into the office.
Curtez was watching her, his dark eyes never wavering. She wondered if, and hoped
that, he was rethinking his position from the night before. He came over as John arose
and stretched.
“I’m starving,” John said as he scratched his nether regions. “Hey, Diggs.”
“It’s Riggs. Here Stephanie, I packed you some supplies.” He handed her a backpack.
“I hope there’s a deli slicer in there,” Trip said, taking the bag and putting it
on.
“Trip, you’re in your underwear. Don’t you think you should dress first?” his wife
asked.
“We going to be gone that long?” he asked. “These underwear are very comfortable.
I bought them in Spokane back in ‘88 when the Dead were in town.”
Curtez knew he had to stay strong; he had just handed down a death sentence to these
two. It was for the betterment of the entire group though. The sacrifice of the few
for the good of the many was the Army way.
The group gathered around the trio when they began to figure out what was going on.
Stephanie was pelted with questions and pleas not to go. She knew if she told the
group why she was leaving that enough of them might rally to her side, but she wasn’t
overly confident. Quite a few of them had surrendered all of their decision making
to Curtez. She couldn’t take it if her friends turned on her as well. Even if they
did, she would make an enemy of Curtez and it was very likely that he would find her
more and more difficult missions to undertake until finally one day she wouldn’t come
back, and at that point, her beautiful, wonderful Trip would be completely at his
mercy.
Although, better than Curtez had tried, yet somehow her husband had always come out
on top. She smiled at that. She could see Trip getting to Riggs so badly he would
just walk out, but that wasn’t fair to the rest of the group. Riggs had made some
hard choices for the group. Ultimately, he had kept them alive. What was the point,
though? They were marking time here and nothing more. This wasn’t life; life was meant to be lived. As Stephanie said her tearful goodbyes, Trip promised
them hard roll salami sandwiches when he returned.
Steph’s heart dropped as she heard the latch from the fire door close behind her.
She and Trip were descending the stairs while three people from their group where
coming up, bags of supplies in all of their hands.
“Where you guys heading?” Hal asked. “We got plenty of stuff, medication, bandages,
food, even found some beer,” he said beaming.
“Any salami?” Trip asked.
“Huh?” Hal asked.
“We’re going to try and find other survivors,” Steph told him solemnly.
“Stephanie, you can’t leave,” Melissa, her closest friend even before the zombies
came, said. She had since hooked up with Hal, even though they had made fun of his
constant advances, when the world of man ruled.
“I need someone,” Melissa had confided with her one night…after.
“I understand completely,” Stephanie had answered her back.
“We ran into a nest on our last foraging mission,” the third, Lisa Evans, said.
Easily the second toughest survivor in the group after Curtez, Lisa and Curtez often
butted heads. Stephanie thought for a moment about dropping to her knees and pleading
with Lisa to be her champion, to save them from the insanity of this adventure.
“They’re not too far behind, if you’re going…you need to do it quickly. Are you sure?”
Lisa asked, resting her hand gently on Steph’s forearm and looking deep into her eyes
for the truth the woman was hiding from her.
“We have to, I already promised everyone salami,” Trip responded.