by Mark Tufo
April focused her eyes on Cash. “Do me!” she said hungrily. Cash’s jaw dropped. April laughed at his reaction. “What are you a virgin or something?” Cash’s face reddened. “Oh my God?! You are!” she laughed again. Cash’s face burned from the chafing she was giving him. He turned dejectedly back towards the front door. “Well, let’s take care of that, lover,” she continued greedily.
Cash was not a Mensa member, but you didn’t need a high IQ to figure this puzzle out. Cash fumbled with his belt, his fingers suddenly losing all dexterity. Just as he got the clasp undone, he heard the shotgun roar in the distance. “We... we... we should go,” he said hastily.
“Oui, oui, oui, what are you, French now?” Her eyes never left his.
“But the gun...”
“Probably just target practice,” she answered.
Cash knew better. Target practice didn’t mean using something that was in diminishing supply, while also alerting anything nearby to your presence. He strained his ears to listen for any signs of trouble.
“I’m getting booorrreddd…” April drawled as she sat on the table. Her skirt hiked up and Cash could see that she wasn’t wearing any panties. As the blood rushed out of Cash’s brain and towards his groin, his higher reasoning flew out the window. He unzipped his pants and in one deft movement pushed his pants and underwear down. It was at this point that he realized his mistake. At ten feet away from his conquest, he would have to duck walk over to her, which was obviously not the sexiest move ever. As he began his waddling approach, a lone shot from the AR-15 rang out. It was too late. Cash’s lower brain was committed and its quarry was within striking distance. Cash finished his awkward shuffle over to the table, and like a heat seeking missile to a raging volcano he struck home.
“Oh my God!!!” April screamed. Cash was inwardly pleased with himself that he was eliciting this reaction from such a beautiful woman. “Get off me!” she screamed as she pounded on his chest. Cash was dejected, confused and hurt. “Get the fuck off me!” As she placed her foot on his chest and pushed him back, Cash fell into something, or more correctly, someone. He turned, simultaneously trying to say his apologies while pulling up his pants.
“Sir, I’m so, so sorry,” he stammered. “We... We thought this place was abandoned, we didn’t mean any harm, we were just looking for some food.” Although even a blind man would have known that wasn’t the case. “We’ll clean up the place… right, April?” Cash looked back towards April. She had got off the table and was slowly working her way towards the back door. “April... wait.” But April was having none of it. Her full attention was on this new man’s face and she was clearly terror stricken. Cash had finally gotten his pants up into a serviceable fashion when he was able to look up at the homeowner’s face. Two horrifying facts struck him at once. The stench was hideous, even the intense smell of the vinegar could not hide it. It wasn’t quite the unmistakable stench of death but it was damn close and making a case of its own for top dog. The face of the farmer for the most part looked hale, there was a slight pallor but nothing a day or two in the sun wouldn’t cure. The sun, however, would not be able to fix those two flat black orbs; a shark showed more humanity in its eyes. April reached behind her feeling for the door handle, all the while never taking her eyes off the man.
Everything happened in an instant. Cold air blew in from the back door, April lunged out, at a full tilt by the time she got down the three back stairs. Her screaming seemed to enrage the occupant of the house. The man reached out and grabbed a hold of Cash’s jacket. Cash didn’t think twice as he shucked his coat off and headed for the same egress April had used a moment before. Cash was down the stairs and barely away from the house when the first asthmatic asphyxiation struck. ‘Calm down, Cash,’ he thought to himself. ‘Just breathe, you got away, he can’t catch you. Breathe.’ Cash was halfway through his calming technique when the zombie appeared at the top of the small porch. ‘Okay, that was a little fast,’ Cash thought, ‘but I’ve been here for a few seconds trying to catch my breath.’ The zombie leaped over the three stairs, landed on the ground and stopped, looking intently at Cash. He was now no more than twenty feet away.
“Oh no!” Cash wheezed.
CHAPTER 6 Journal Entry Six
It was impossible not to hear the girl’s screams. Her shrieks pierced the air like a chorus of harpies. “I take it she’s one of the missing people?” I asked Alex.
He nodded, stress imprinted on his face. “Yeah, April was with that pimply kid, what the hell was his name? Moola? Dinero? Cash? Yeah, that’s it.”
“Not sure that matters right now, buddy,” I said as I peered through my sights looking for what was causing that much distress in the girl. April was no more than twenty-five yards away and still I saw no sign of trouble, was it just some contrived drama for our viewing pleasure? Possible, but I hadn’t seen acting that good since my daughter was caught sneaking out of the house and she tried to blame it on sleep walking. If I hadn’t been watching her the whole time and caught pieces of her conversation over her cell phone I almost would have given her the benefit of the doubt. Well…not really, I might be a guy but I’m not that stupid. Anyway, suffice to say it was an Oscar worthy performance none-the-less.
April never stopped shrieking as she hurdled up into the back of the truck.
“One down, three to go, Alex,” I said. “I guess I’m going to have to go see what’s going on.”
“Why?” he asked. “You have your family to look out for, Mike.”
“I know,” I said earnestly. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”
By now a small crowd was at the back of the truck looking expectantly in the direction from whence April had come.
“I’ll go with you, Talbot,” BT said. His deep bass voice startled me out of my thoughts. Any animosity between us seemed to have been swept completely away with that small gesture. Well I guess it wasn’t that small a gesture, he was putting his life on the line.
“I appreciate that BT, I really do, but I think our second wayward chick-a-dee is returning to the roost… look,” I said, pointing.
Cash swung around the corner of a row of houses at full speed, even from this distance I could tell his pants were doing their damnedest to fall. Cash was struggling with one hand to hold his pants up and with the other he was doing a motion that only someone with experience might be able to pick up on. He was taking mighty puffs from an inhaler. I turned to Alex and BT. “I think this is more a case of a date gone bad.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Don’t get me wrong, I understood the severity of the potential crime and Cash would be dealt with accordingly, but it still beat the hell out of the alternative.
“I don’t think so, Mike,” BT said warningly as he pointed with his finger. For the life of me, I did not want to follow the direction that offending digit indicated. Into the cold gates of hell it led. Not ten feet away from Cash was one of the new breed, fast and hungry. The kid was easily a couple of hundred feet away from us, and he was directly in my line of sight to the zombie. Between holding his pants up and the constant hits on his inhaler, he was losing more ground than the French in WWII. Like Icarus to the sun I flew. The outcome was a foregone conclusion and still I ran towards him, motioning him to drop down so I could take a shot. He was too panicked to understand my gestures. By the time the kid’s pants fell and brought him down in a gangly mash of elbows and knees, the zombie had pounced on him. It was all over except for the screaming. As the zombie took its first rending bite of meat, what was once that young man’s pride and joy hung in bloody shreds from its mouth. The high-pitched keening that issued from Cash was heart tearing. Every guy that witnessed the event winced in sympathy and subconsciously placed their hands over their own privates just to make sure their own house was in order. The first bullet should have been for Cash, just to put him out of his misery. Five shots later, my trembling hands were able to put a kill shot into the zombie’s head. I started to run over to the kid, what I was goi
ng to be able to do for him was beyond me. His all out wails had become more of a struggling wheeze. Blood vacated his body in gushes. I got down on my haunches by the kid’s head. I couldn’t look at the damage done, the chord it struck was entirely too fundamental to my existence. Cash’s hand grabbed mine, his fevered, pain addled eyes looked up at me beseechingly.
“Don’t let me die,” he begged. I wanted to answer him and tell him everything was going to be ok, but I wasn’t the actor my daughter was, my voice would betray me, my posture would belie me, my cadence would divulge the truth. I barely registered the staccato burst of firearms, but the angry hiss of displaced air as bullets passed dangerously close to my head got my attention. I looked back to BT who was firing what looked like a bazooka from this angle. I guess our earlier spat wasn’t completed yet, but this seemed a little extreme even for him. Then I looked past him and saw that Alex was gesticulating crazily. Everyone else seemed to be yelling incoherent strings of words and pointing towards me, but every once in a while I picked up the word “Run!” I looked behind me. Before my heart began to start the trip hammer routine, I thought for one short millisecond my heart might just stop from the shock. Twenty, maybe thirty zombies were running full bore towards me. I was seconds away from sharing the same fate as Cash, hopefully not in the same manner though. I grabbed the kid’s shoulder meaning to put him in a fireman’s carry, but the opaque glaze of his eyes let me know the futility of the maneuver.
“Run, you stupid shit!” I heard BT yell over the roar of his rifle. A zombie dropped no more than ten feet from me. More rifles took up the covering of my hasty retreat. Within three strides I was at full speed and still some of the zombies kept pace.
I made it back to the firing line without any undue incidents. The tattered remnants of the ones that were still pursuing me were quickly dispatched.
“Well that sucked!” I said as I stood up and surveyed the scene laid out before us. “Thanks BT, I owe you one.”
“What is going on, Talbot?” BT asked. He looked more shaken than I did, and I was the one that had been chased.
“No time BT!” I pointed. A larger contingent of speeders were heading our way. I already had enough excitement for the day. “Let’s go!”
“Mike, we can take them,” Brendon said. “There’s still two more of our own out there, we have to go get them.”
I understood the hero mentality, I truly did. But they were a lost cause, if they weren’t already dead they soon would be. “To what end, Brendon? We risk ourselves, our loved ones and we waste bullets. There is no honor in casually throwing away one’s life in a hollow attempt at bravery. They’re gone.” I was all for the eradication of this plague, but this was akin to trying to put out a seven-alarm blaze with a Super Soaker.
“Mike, what if it was one of your kids?” Brendon asked brazenly.
“Don’t you fucken dare Brendon!” I screamed. He backed up. He was bigger than me but I was definitely crazier, and in case you didn’t know, crazy out-trumps size every time. “I have done everything I possibly can to keep everyone around me safe! If you’re so fucking ready to die, go find them yourself. I’ll wait, but only for as long as I can still make a safe retreat!”
Brendon’s shoulders sagged as he looked back at Nicole who was witnessing the entire event. There was a look of unbridled shock on her face. I watched as the inner demons in Brendon wrestled for control. On one side was the overwhelming need to protect Nicole and on the other was the need to help someone in need.
“Not so easy now, huh?” I taunted.
“Fuck you, Mike,” he answered dejectedly.
I swung the Jeep past Alex’s big rig. Brendon was following closely. I was watching in my rearview mirror as some of the faster zombies, who looked mostly like high school kids, smashed headlong into the truck. I had no desire to see how many hits my Jeep could take. I flooded the engine with high-octane gas and I was rewarded with the desired result. I was putting this particular circle of hell behind us. Alex was finally getting the tractor-trailer up to a speed where even the track team couldn’t keep up. I had to look over my shoulder to get the full brunt of what my rear view mirror was trying to convey. I should have left it alone. Half the population of what had once been Bennett, Colorado was in one form or another in pursuit of our small caravan. Speeders bowled over their slower cousins, the deaders. So it looked like manners hadn’t made the cross over into death.
“I don’t think we should go back there, Mr. T,” Tommy said. “Is Cash going to be alright?”
I couldn’t fathom how to even begin to answer that question, because first off Cash was dead. He had bled out after having his genitals savagely ripped from his body. Was he going to turn into a zombie? Odds were against it, when I’d last seen Cash I had seen a small dog pile of the living dead making short work of his remains. Would he get to pass through St. Peter’s gate? If I were so inclined to believe in that path, I’d probably say yes, but then what God would allow this situation to be unfolding on its present course? Oh yeah, God can’t have direct involvement, how heretical of me. Wouldn’t want some omnipotent being that basically can control ALL of creation to lend a helping hand. God helps those who help themselves, you know. Okay, enough deity bashing, I had been under the false impression that once we got out of Denver we would have put the worst of it behind us. Silly me, the fun was just beginning.
CHAPTER 7
Justin slept on in the back seat of Brendon’s truck, barely acknowledging the quick jerky maneuvering as Brendon evaded first one and then another speeder that had raced out from a gas station at the outskirts of town. His dark dreams were bothered only by the incessant buzzing that pervaded every aspect of the tortured vista his fevered mind had drummed up. A brigade of zombies had stormed mankind’s last holdout. As they overwhelmed the humans’ piss poor defenses, the zombies planted a flag that consisted of an unnaturally large femur for a pole and a flag which when unfurled looked entirely too much like a weathered flap of human skin. Justin smiled in his sleep, the final victory of zombie kind resonating strongly in the deep recesses of his mind.
‘Justin…’ Justin jolted awake at the sound of his name being spoken out loud.
“What?” Justin answered groggily.
Nicole looked back, her features looking paler than should be right, even in the dead of winter. “Huh?” she answered back.
“What do you want?” Justin said, annoyed. “I was sleeping.”
“Nobody said anything,” Brendon chimed in, before his fiancée and his friend got into it. He’d known them long enough to realize it didn’t take much more than a cross-eyed look to get them at each other’s throat and right now he just couldn’t take it. This new development of fast zombies was fucking with his head and there was no room, at least not right now, for any more bullshit.
Tommy stared through the back window of the speeding Jeep and directly into the windshield of Brendon’s trailing Ford. “Oh no,” he muttered solemnly. He turned back around, his hands visibly twitching. The tic went completely unnoticed by the rest of the occupants in the car. The horror of Bennett was still fresh and everybody was doing their best to assimilate the new information in the best manner available to them.
“Fine,” Justin said as he laid his head back down.
“Justin.” Again with his name being called out. Even though the voice was loud this time, somehow Justin knew enough not to wake up. A warm breeze flitted through Justin’s hair; the sun as large as a ripe cantaloupe blazed high overhead. Justin spun in a slow circle, surrounded by chest high golden wheat which swayed all around in a gentle current of air. Curiously, the growth flowed in a different direction from the prevailing breeze, even Justin’s shadow stretched in the same direction as the wheat though the sun was at high noon. Something inside him knew enough that to stay here was dangerous but leaving might be worse. In the hazy mist of distance Justin saw something coming. It shimmered in the sun much like a mirage. Even as he watched it, no, her, come
closer, the wind at his back picked up in a vain attempt to try to slow her progress. The wheat arched further back in a futile attempt to get away; if the stalks could have miraculously grown legs it would have been the biggest crop exodus since the great Dust Bowl of the 20’s. Justin had legs and his shadow was showing him the way he should be going; his higher psyche just couldn’t get the transmission in gear, for all the revving the engine was doing.
Justin looked down at his feet wondering why they were betraying him so. When he looked up, death was inches from his face. That feeling was quickly replaced by euphoric feelings of love and devotion. The girl, no, the woman that stood before him was the epitome of beauty, grace, black bottomless cruelty, and grandeur. ‘Wait, go back one,’ Justin thought. But as soon as the doubt crept into his mind it was washed away in the glory that was Eliza. ‘Eliza! Eliza!’ his mind screamed in triumphant joy.
“Where are you going my love?” Eliza asked without moving her mouth. Her soft angelic hand caressed his cheek.
“How are you talking in my head?” Justin answered.
The sound of the loud crack was quickly followed by the sensation of pain in his cheek. She had moved so fast he hadn’t even seen her hand strike. Justin’s heart seized for the briefest of seconds as Eliza let her true visage show. Soft smooth skin faded into sallow pale cheeks, her sky blue eyes transformed into twin black pools of death and destruction. Her soft hand that a moment before had stroked his cheek was now a gnarled, calcified hideous claw of bone. In an instant she once again became the object of a cold ethereal beauty. Justin couldn’t hope to keep up with the transformations. His mind could not make sense of the events as they unfolded before him.
“I asked you a question, Justin.” Eliza smiled. Justin could tell it was not a gesture that came easily or willingly. A cobra would have had an easier time pulling that off.