by Mark Tufo
Tracy looked over to me when it stopped. She was trying to comfort the kids. The pain did not linger, but the remembrance of it had.
“I don’t know.” Tommy answered before I could ask.
“Payne?” BT asked.
“She’s leaving, and in a hurry.” Tommy said.
The Lost Chapters #19
Tiffany
* * *
“I need to stop for the night.” She was leaning against a sign that said “Searsport.” Night was coming quickly, and she was wholly uncertain about exactly where she needed to go. A used book and antique store was not more than a hundred yards up and on her right. She could hear the sounds of battle, but it was far away and she certainly was not going to come up on it in the middle of the night not knowing which side, if any, she should be on. After a quick but thorough examination of the building, she found no one either living, dead, or undead, and for that she was grateful.
Tiffany read a lot those next couple of weeks. Foraging for food and water had not been difficult, as the store had a five gallon water dispenser with three untapped containers and the owner was apparently a fan of nut bars—he or she had an entire drawer stuffed full of them. An old bed that creaked loudly every time she moved had been the most comfortable thing she’d ever slept on. Even still, she couldn’t stay here forever. She just had no direction to go in; the battle she’d heard previously had long ago ended.
“Maybe I should just get back to my car and go.” Her hand was on the door handle when she heard the approach of a truck engine coming from her right. She moved away from the door and ducked down by a window. The truck rolled past quickly, so she couldn’t be sure, but she thought it was the same people from the day she saw the heads on the road. She didn’t know why, but she was glad they were still alive. Less than an hour later, a bigger truck rolled by, going back the way they’d come, the large man behind the wheel this time. She did not see the one with the goatee.
She’d got back on her bed and had been reading a first edition print of Moby Dick when she heard another engine. “Lot going on today,” she said as she got back to her window. The same white truck as earlier was heading back, the man with the goatee driving. “I wonder if I can trust you?” she asked before going back to her book. It was another two weeks before she was forced to make a decision. Even with some serious rationing, she was down to the last of the candy bars and she was officially sick of the wild blueberries she’d been harvesting in the back.
“Forwards or backwards, what are you going to do Tiffany?” She was standing on the “welcome” mat looking up and down the street for some sort of sign. It was the prehistoric cry of a loon up ahead that made her move forward and helped shape Michael Talbot’s fate. She’d wished she’d started off sooner in the day; by the time she figured she was in the center of town it was already getting dark. It seemed this part of the world had a penchant for losing light at an unnatural pace.
She was literally at a crossroad as she stared upon a small grocery store called Tozier’s. She could either take a left onto Mt. Ephraim road or stay straight on Route 1. Whichever way she went, it would have to wait until the morning. The grocery store looked entirely too dark and foreboding to go in there. She figured the laundromat to her immediate left was the better choice. Not many people cleaning clothes during the apocalypse, whether like her, they really had wanted to. Two of the large floor to ceiling windows had been broken out. She could see in about halfway. Rows of washing machines were on her right and dryers on her left. Besides a small pile of discarded clothing and some shattered glass, the place looked as if it could open back up for business tomorrow morning. She entered. Tiffany pulled and pushed three of the large washing machines in the middle of the row away from the wall, far enough that she would have enough room to sleep and be safe; in theory, no zombie would be able to get to her while she did so.
“Oh, gross.” At first, she thought she was looking at dead rats on the newly cleared space. Her view of the matter didn’t get much better when she realized that they were dust bunnies bigger than actual rabbits. She brushed some of them away, then started checking machines, finally getting a better idea as she looked upon the hundreds of garments of clothing hanging in plastic wrap. She grabbed armloads of the cleaned clothes and lined the bottom of her makeshift bed, hiding the dirt and debris while also giving her a comfortable place to sleep. She felt relatively secure in her hidey-hole, although as tired as she was feeling, she thought she could have laid down on the street and fallen asleep. It was pure blackness out when she awoke. She felt as if she’d slept for a fair amount of hours, yet she was not completely caught up. She was uncertain as to what had disturbed her. When she realized what it was, she could not help but to hold her breath.
There was no sound. No crickets, no birds, not even the wind had the fortitude to stir. She had been convinced that the vacuum of space would be louder. She stirred just enough to grab her rifle, and even that sounded like a fire alarm in the stillness. She wished she’d checked her inventory of bedding a little better; one of the jackets was made of a nylon type substance, and every time she shifted, it sounded like the rustling of a large pile of leaves. She moved slowly at first, sitting up and then slowly rising so that her head was up over the lip of the machine. She could see nothing outside, although her other senses were letting her know that the danger was real. The smell was first, then the sound of clothes moving—of feet walking. The occasional soft moan of the dead as they passed. Zombies were walking by, hundreds, maybe thousands. She wasn’t even aware when her knees began shake. She had to rest her elbows on the machine top to keep from collapsing back down.
A half-hour passed, an hour, and still they moved past. From time to time, a sliver of moonlight would break through the cloud cover and illuminate the nightmare. The zombies were within feet of the entrance to the laundromat. They were cutting through the parking lot and heading down Mt. Ephraim road as they got off the main drag. She did not believe her terror could get much sharper, then she realized just how wrong she was. Just as the zombies began to tail off, she saw two vampires walking in silence behind. She dug down for enough courage to sight one of them in, hoping that she would have enough time to kill them all before they could return the favor. She was applying pressure to the trigger just as the moon was blanketed over. The last thing she saw was the eye shine of one of the vampires as she turned her head to peer into the inky blackness of the laundromat.
Tiffany didn’t know if she could handle any more adrenaline surging through her system. The vampire had somehow looked directly at her, somehow seeing her. But she knew that couldn’t be the case or she’d already be dead. She waited until her heart had stopped beating like a hummingbird’s and crawled over the machine to go outside. She didn’t venture far before retreating back to her spot in the hopes she would ever be able to fall asleep again. She awoke to a small sparrow looking down upon her. After the horrors of the previous night, the inquisitive stare of the bird was welcome. She wondered if perhaps this was the bird’s first glimpse of a human and it was trying to determine if the rarely encountered beast was dangerous. The bird flitted away as she arose. A quick glimpse of the roadway showed that she was alone. She could almost believe that last night was a dream if not for the bloody footprints along the roadway.
“Follow the red stained asphalt,” she sang in mockery of the Yellow Brick Road song. “And then what, Tiffany? What the hell are you going to do when you get there? As if two vampires weren’t bad enough, now there are a thousand zombies. You owe Pappy. You don’t owe him that much, though.” She was convinced now that the earlier truck she’d seen filled with people was the target of the vampires. It had to be. Where else would they be going? “Screw this.” She turned to go back to the Mustang. “But.” She paused. “If that much evil is gathering to oppose them, just how good are those people? No, you can’t think like that. Odds are the vampires and the zombies are going to join up with them.” She thought back to th
e inhabitants of the truck; there had been women and children and none of them seemed in distress. In fact, some were laughing. “The devil laughs. Get a grip, Tiffany. I’m just going to leave, find myself some little house to call my own.” She was about to turn and go when the sun burst through the clouds and perfectly illuminated the roadway the zombies had gone down.
“Could you be any more obvious?” she asked the heavens as she followed the light. An hour later, she heard shooting. Sounded like a full-scale invasion. “I guess that answers the question about them being on the same side. Doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good, but they’re enemies of my enemies, so that’s at least good.”
She stood in the middle of the roadway for a few minutes, figuring out exactly what she was going to do. She wanted to stay where she was, but the exposure was too great. “Awesome.” She said as she looked into the thick Maine woods. “I just got my hair done.” Tiffany hiked roughly a mile, in a more or less straight line, to get closer to the sounds of battle. She’d had to make a few detour adjustments around a small body of water and an impregnable briar patch. She thought she was getting close, but she couldn’t see much more than fifteen feet in any direction. The concussion from an explosion nearly knocked her off her feet. Her ears were ringing when she stood.
“I think this might be close enough.” She was in a small clearing under the umbrella of a large pine. The battle waxed and waned as the day wore on. Hunger, thirst, and the constant waving off of biting insects were beginning to take their toll on the girl. “Should I stay or should I go? And I definitely need to stop singing small snippets of songs.” She stayed, gathering up as much of the pine needles as she could in an attempt to build a bed. She sat back and tried to rest while a battle ensued, then fell asleep just as it was dying down. She awoke hours later, once again to an unnatural stillness that blanketed the area. The fight was over. There had been multiple explosions and more bullets fired than at any time she figured wasn’t a World War, yet still, she did not think the humans survived. Her first, second, and part of her third instinct said she should just leave, turn around and go. In fact, never even think upon this place again.
It was the damn quiet that got her moving. Unlike the previous night, the sky was cloudless and the moon bright. Within five minutes, she was at the edge of a clearing. She could see a house not too far off, and much like she figured, it was still completely surrounded by more zombies than she had ever seen in one place. There’s nothing I can do here except die, she thought, looking out upon the field covered with zombies. “Why am I still here then?” she breathed out quietly. Movement on the deck above the zombies caught her eye. The being walked slowly along the length of the structure, sometimes pausing and looking skyward. “That’s no zombie, that’s for sure.” Of that, she was convinced. She rested her rifle on a small branch. She had the being lined up perfectly in her sights. What she wasn’t completely sure of was whether or not the person was an occupant of the house or not. All she could tell with a fair degree of reliability was that the figure was a female. That wasn’t enough. She could not risk the chance of killing an innocent.
“Just give me a sign; you’ve been doing it for the last two days, so why stop now?” She was not expecting her request to be express delivered quite so quickly. The figure on the deck whipped her head around and stared directly at her. The moon had reflected off the creature’s eyes, giving off a pale red color that nearly froze Tiffany’s blood in mid-transit. It was eerily similar to what had happened the previous night. Tiffany didn’t hesitate as she pulled the trigger. Tiffany thought she saw the bullet impact the vampire’s head but she couldn’t be sure as a blinding white spoke of pain bore its way through the center of her skull. She dropped the rifle, and in the process of falling to the ground, struck her head against the trunk and a large rock. She was unconscious before her head came to a complete rest.
Epilogue 4
It’s amazing how your mind wanders right before you’re about to fall asleep. Why it wandered to this recent passage I don’t know. Must be the stress of being stuck inside a bomb shelter.
It was early morning. I’d gone outside to take a piss. Yeah, I don’t know why I do it outside. I just like to. There’s something back to nature about it, I suppose. I don’t tell Tracy I do it because it absolutely drives her nuts, and I already do enough things that test the limits of her love for me, so why add another? Anyway, this isn’t about what pisses my wife off (pun intended I guess), this has to do with Trip and Stephanie. I was walking into the house and Stephanie had just tossed a plastic cup at Trip, who was hastily retreating. It had hit him in the shoulder with enough force to spin him sideways. I keep reminding you that Stephanie is a big woman. This is just one more example.
“I can’t believe you, Trip!” she shouted loud enough that if we still had neighbors, they would be calling in a domestic disturbance.
“Do I even ask?” I directed my question to BT, who was sitting at the kitchen table.
“You can, but you might not believe it. Maybe, wait a second and see how it plays out.”
“Any more juice?” I asked as I sat next to him.
He picked up the cup that had fortuitously spun back into the kitchen. He placed it on the table and poured me some. Stephanie was ranting and raving. Trip was apologizing profusely. She had cornered him in the living room and was beating him mercilessly with a throw pillow.
“How could you!” she just kept repeating, over and over.
I took a nice, long drink. “Okay, man I need to know,” I said as I placed my nearly empty cup down.
“He took a shit.”
“What?”
“He took a shit,” BT repeated.
“What, like on their bed or something?”
“No, in the bathroom.”
“In the toilet?” I mean, it’s a damn shame I had to ask for clarification, but with Trip, there’s no real safe assumption. BT nodded. “Okay, just give me the whole story.”
BT had a bemused smile on his face. “Trip goes into the bathroom about twenty minutes ago, I thought maybe a zombie or two had gone in with him because he was grunting and groaning like he was fending off the enemy. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I get it. Maybe if he stopped eating cheese snacks, he wouldn’t be so stopped up.” He’d been complaining about not being able to go for the last few days.
“Well, he went. And went, and went. His words, not mine. Said it was like a gravy train was shooting out his—”
“Okay, I get it. Did he stop the toilet up?”
“No, but he went and grabbed Stephanie, who was already coming down to brush her teeth. Said he had to show her something.”
“No … he did not.”
“Yup, said he was so proud of his food babies that he had to show her. She of course didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, at least until the pungent funk of three-day old colon-festering processed cheese food punched her in the nose.”
“Is there really a need to be that graphic?”
“I gotta admit it was pretty impressive.”
“You went and looked?”
“It was the color of a canary and the size of a small eagle. Of course I had to.”
“What the hell is wrong with the people in this house? So basically Stephanie is yelling at Trip for taking a shit in the bathroom?”
“That’s about the gist of it. Said she wanted to brush her teeth and now she wouldn’t be able to for at least another hour because of the reek.”
“This is why I piss outside.”
“What?” Tracy had a look of alarm on her face as she walked into the room.
“Dammit.” I mumbled.
The Lost Chapters #20
Mike Journal Entry 15
* * *
After the psychic stabbing in all of our skulls, there was nothing. Well, I mean my wife will argue that there is generally nothing going on in my head at any time. But I was referring more specifically to vampires or zombies.
A day had gone by, and we could hear nothing. We were getting close to opening the door and checking when a soft knocking came on the door.
“Hey,” a female voice called out.
We all stayed silent within. I held my hand up to keep it that way.
“Hey, is there anyone in there?” There was more knocking.
“Answer her,” Tracy said softly.
“What if she’s a zombie?” BT asked.
“Really?” the voice on the other side of the door responded. BT shrugged.
“Who’s out there?” I called out.
There was a pause on her end. “Who’s in there?”
“Fair enough, I suppose. My name is Michael Talbot.”
“I’m Tiffany. Tiffany Churchill.”
“As in Winston?” Trip asked.
“Yeah, of the Kentucky chapter.” I could tell she said it sarcastically. She was endearing herself to me already and I hadn’t even seen her.
“So there are no zombies?” I asked before Trip could start to question her about the famous leader.
“Well, I think I’d be dead if there were. They pretty much left after I shot one of the vampires.”
So that’s what happened. That made sense, to a degree. Charity seemed to be the one directing the zombies, and when she’d been injured, and hopefully killed, that connection had been removed. Zombies rely on smell and sight to hunt, and now, apparently, echo location, but if no food was present, these new zombies won’t stick around long. They went in search of greener pastures. Or what the hell do I know? Maybe Charity’s mind ripping scream had sent them off. In the end, who gives a shit as long as they were gone?
I keyed in the code, looked over to BT and Tracy, who both had their weapons ready. I pulled the door open quickly. There was a waif of a woman standing there holding a large hunting rifle. She looked a little worse for the wear.