by Mark Tufo
and her lost child. Yeah, fire and dehumanization would have been great just about
then. I stood and walked away from the stairs—or more correctly, what was left of
them, I may have heard something fall into the basement over my sniffling.
“You alright?” BT asked, never looking up at me. He was busy concentrating on the
box innards.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“We’ve been hanging around long enough now for me to get a bead on you, plus I saw
you wiping your nose.” He smiled, looking up. “They’re zombies, Mike,” he said seriously.
“They weren’t always.”
“And Nazi soldiers were once small children playing just like American kids You can’t
go down that road.”
“I get it, BT, I get it. I’m not going soft on the zombies, just a momentary twang
for the lost humans.”
“Let me know when your period bleeds out.”
I don’t think I said anything for a full minute. First, I was in shock at his words,
then I wanted to laugh uncontrollably, and then—most importantly—I wanted to make
sure Tracy had absolutely not heard a word. When I cycled through all of those thoughts
and emotions, I merely made a fist and thrust it out to BT who again, without even
looking, raised his own fist and bumped mine.
“Good one, man, good one,” I said, walking away. “Get the box working.”
“I think Uncle Ronnie is coming back,” Travis said from the mezzanine level above
me.
I went up to him. He was right. I could see the truck swinging onto the road that
led to us and it looked like he had a stadium worth of admirers following.
“MIKE!” he shouted as he approached.
I waved and shouted back. “Up here!”
“This isn’t working so well. I think we’ve awoken every hibernating cell this side
of Portland. You’re going to have to try an escape soon.”
“Ask MJ how to turn the box on, we found batteries,” I added, not wanting to waste
the time and explain.
Ron had the truck rolling slowly. I could see him talking to MJ in the cab. He was
running out of real estate in which to drive on, soon he would be out of earshot and
he would have to loop around again.
“He says behind a group of small wires there is a switch labeled in Russian. It looks
like an H and an A. He said it’s very important that you make sure to—” And then he
was around a bend.
“Why doesn’t he use the radio?” Tracy asked.
“It’s just static,” Travis told her.
“MJ probably fixed it,” BT threw in.
“What do you think that last part was?” Travis asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it was nothing or incredibly imperative.”
“Not helpful, Dad,” Travis said.
“We’ll just wait until they come back around. Knowing MJ, if we do something wrong,
the box probably has a self-destruct on it.”
“Do you think?” Travis asked.
I really wanted to tell him that I was just kidding, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“Hey, BT, Mad Jack says that there is a button behind a bunch of cables labeled with—”
“HA,” he finished for me. “I thought it was some sort of nerd joke.”
“Apparently it’s Russian.”
“Why would he label something in Russian?”
“Maybe the part came that way?” I tried to explain.
“It’s done with a sharpie,” BT said. “Damn nerds. Should I push it?”
“Umm…”
“What the hell does ‘umm’ mean? Is there more to it?”
“Yeah, but then we couldn’t hear them. Plus, I’m not sure if there is an off button.”
“I could always pull the battery lead.”
“There was more to it. I think we should just wait…no sense in possibly damaging it.”
“You doubting my tech skills?” he asked.
“No. I’m doubting the way in which MJ engineered this thing. For all we know, he has
it booby-trapped.”
“Booby trapped?” BT stepped away from the box. “I’ve been inside that thing for an
hour!” he said hotly.
“Relax, I’m sure the yield couldn’t be much more than a megaton or two.”
“I’ve never liked you.” He went to sit down.
I went back to the window, waiting for the return of MJ and his additional instructions.
“You hear that?” Justin asked. He was on the far side of the mezzanine.
I looked to Tommy who, besides a bat, had the best hearing among us. “No,” he said.
“Maybe the library is haunted,” Travis said.
“Oh, that would be wonderful,” Tracy replied.
“I’d rather have zombies than ghosts,” I said to no one in particular.
“Let’s hear it,” BT said.
“You can shoot zombies,” was my more than common-sense reply.
“That’s really your argument?” BT asked, sitting up. “Never had a damn ghost bite
me. Afraid of a little ‘boo’ in the night?”
“Who the hell isn’t? Ghosts freak me out.”
“Ghosts don’t have germs,” Tracy added.
I had to think about that for a second; she did have a valid point. “That’s not a
proven,” I told her. “Who knows what nasty things they have on the other side.”
“Oh, Talbot, sometimes I feel sorry for you,” Tracy said.
“You should be feeling sorrier for yourself,” BT said to her.
“Alright…there’s no reason to get personal.” I tried to diffuse the line of conversation.
“Zombies!” Justin screamed. At first I thought he was just weighing in, right up until
his rifle fired.
Zombies were coming up out of the basement. What the hell? I thought, my mind trying to reconcile the impossible.
Travis joined his brother in the firing. They were spilling onto the first floor,
getting dangerously close to where Henry and Gary had been slumbering, both of them
now missing from the couch.
“Gary!” I yelled.
“Above you, Mike! I’ve got Henry, was trying to see if they had the new Koontz book.
I’m really enjoying his Frankenstein series.”
That was one less thing to worry about. Now there was only the zombie repeller to
think about. The territory it was in was quickly falling to the advancing army of
undead. Tommy came out from a stack of books. I want to say it was the Self-Help section,
but I wasn’t positive. He took two incredibly long strides to the table and, with
one arm, scooped the heavy box up. He turned, took another two strides, and then was
air-borne. He made Air Jordan’s famous leap look like something kids did on a sidewalk
when they were playing hop-scotch.
“Holy shit,” was all I could manage to get out.
BT had taken the more traditional approach of running up the stairs. “How are they
getting up here?” he asked as he got his rifle to his shoulder.
“Maybe they have a carpenter,” I said as I took my first shot. I caught the zombie
high in the neck. The arterial spray lasted only a few moments as the thick fluid
that arced out either congealed or dried around the wound.
“Ghosts are more scary, huh?” BT taunted as he fired rounds.
“Kiss my ass,” I said as I finished off what I had started with the first zombie.
This round caught it on the side of the skull, and then the bullet exited and scraped
down the front of the face to remove a fair amount of features
along with it. “Who
needs ghosts? That will haunt me for a long while,” I said as the zombie fell to the
ground; the charge immediately brought forward by the next one. We held them at bay
for a little bit, but more and more began to die on the stairs leading up to our level.
“This can’t be happening,” I said softly even as I kept shooting them.
They’d obviously found another way inside. We were no longer shooting at the small
and malnourished. Full-grown speeders were coming our way.
“Ammo check!” I yelled as I sat down to start stuffing 5.56 rounds into my saved magazine.
I had a little over a hundred. When everyone checked in, I figured we had somewhere
in the neighborhood of five hundred. At one shot one kill, I thought we might make
it. In a traditional combat scenario, it’s probably a hundred rounds per kill. With
zombies, that number dropped significantly because they just didn’t give a shit. With
good shooters and close quarters, the number probably went down to four or five bullets
per kill. Maybe even as good as three; beyond that was pushing it. These zombies were
fast, and nerves would always play a factor. Add in more than one rifle trained on
a target and you start to see the problem. We’d be able to stop a hundred to a hundred
and fifty of them. Then what? We still needed to get to the truck.
“Tommy, hit the switch!” I told him from the other side of the atrium.
“What about MJ’s warning?” he asked.
“Running out of options…we need to make it to Gary’s truck. Everyone get to Tommy.”
We were a tight ball of humanity within moments. The problem was, none of us were
all that confident in MJ’s box, and zombies were streaming towards us. This was the
ultimate game of chicken. This was harrowing; the twenty feet of distance we had to
wait for the zombies to traverse was among some of the longest in my entire life.
It’s one thing to fight the enemy to the end; it’s a completely different feeling
to just let them come on in. I had a rough estimate of where ten feet was, and if
the first zombie crossed it, I was ready to give the order to start shooting again.
Of course it would be entirely too late, but I wanted to go out with a swirl of smoke
around my head. I’d been born into a warrior’s family and I wanted to die with one.
I had my rifle up (as did we all). The zombie in the lead was snarling, blood and
drool dripped from his mouth. Jagged teeth were exposed as his lips were pulled back
in a snarl. Its arms were extended halfway. If this was the Revolutionary War and
the battle for Bunker Hill, I’d never have been able to fire given the now famous
orders to shoot only when you can see the whites of their eyes. The zombie’s eyes
blazed a bright red as if he’d burnt them gazing at the sun too long. His footfall
came down a good seven or eight inches closer than I figured it should have. His left
eye blew out in a viscous spray of material as I neatly punched a hole into its skull.
“Dad?” Travis asked nervously.
“Not yet. Itchy trigger finger,” I told him.
We had to wait a bit longer. There was one more zombie that must have been faster
than the group, after him…it was a horde. He was going to be our test dummy. How close
could he get, though? This wasn’t a force field; nothing was physically going to push
him back. He was running full tilt at us. Even if he absolutely could not stand what
the box was emanating, he’d cover that distance to us easily before he could shift
gears and get away from us.
“Tommy, grab the box! Everyone to the stairs!”
We had to bring it to them. They would be moving slower as a mass on the stairs, thereby
giving them more time to be repelled. I shot our test subject. The zombies were three-quarters
up the stairs by the time we reached the edge. We were now in ‘supposed’ effective
range and they had not yet stopped, although strange looks began to crease some of
their features. Three stairs became two, their mouths were gnashing wildly, looking
for something with which to sink their teeth into.
It wasn’t until they were in hugging range that they faltered. They were scrabbling
trying to get away from us. The issue was the press from behind. The zombies closest
to us were being forced towards us. This was too close for comfort.
“Fire!”
I had to use the barrel of my weapon to push the zombie away that I wanted to kill.
Fifty or sixty rounds later, we had created the bridge in distance we had been seeking.
The downed zombies had sufficiently slowed up the ones following enough so that they
had time to feel the effects of the box and give us our full ten feet. I would have
been much happier with a hundred yards, but I’d take what was given. We’d asked for
and received a reprieve. Now we just needed to use it to our advantage. We descended
the stairs slowly—agonizingly slow to be honest. It wasn’t that the box was not working,
it was just the press of zombies was so dense as we moved, that it took longer for
the ripple effect to reach them. At some points during our escape, our protective
radius was reduced to half because the zombies nearest us just couldn’t push back
hard enough.
If you thought the stench of a zombie was bad, you haven’t yet had the wonder of experiencing
its breath. Maggot-infused meat, bursting with pustules of pungent pus, capped off
with crusty skin growth was preferable. We’d mostly kept the zombies in a hundred
and eighty degree arc around us, always keeping a wall to our backs. That was about
to change as we filed out of a side entrance. The zombies outside who had as of yet
not discovered the secret entrance couldn’t believe their luck when they thought lunch
was being delivered. We weren’t more than fifteen feet down the sidewalk when we found
ourselves completely surrounded by snarling, swiping, biting zombies. I’d been in
some torturous situations since this crap had started, and I’ll tell you right now,
this one was right up there with the best of them.
“You smell something?” BT asked.
“You’re kidding right?” I asked back.
Anything less than a fully stocked Yankee Candle store was not going to break through
what the zombies had to offer. Who hasn’t been to a mall with one of those stores?
You can smell the damn thing from the food court on the other side of the building.
I’d been dragged in a few times only to have my head begin to pound from the sickeningly
sweet cloying smell of sandstone and petunia. I think in order to work there you have
to have your olfactory senses removed.
“Smells like plastic,” BT pressed on.
And yeah, there it was. Subtle, compared to our surroundings, but it was there, that
sharp smell of plastic heating up. And there was only one thing capable of doing that
right now.
“Gonna have to move a little faster,” I told everyone, trying my damnedest not to
instill any more panic than we had going on at that moment.
Tracy glanced over at me and thought better of asking ‘Why?’ when she saw my face.