by Mark Tufo
My grief was heavy as I shouldered my weapon and did my part to eradicate the world of what evolution had now deemed the dominant species. Three magazines of carefully aimed shots later I called for a cease fire. Three shouts later my command was heeded. Not much stood save a smallish boy, maybe ten years old. I turned my head away just as I saw a green laser dot clearly outlined on the boy’s throat. I didn’t know which hit the ground first, the boy’s body or his decapitated head. Both rang hollowly in my ears.
“We showed them!” Denmark barked. His jubilation was joined by the others.
“Showed them what!’ I bellowed in rage. “Do you think they give a shit? Do you think some other zombies are going to stumble across this and think ‘Hum, maybe we shouldn’t fuck with those humans, they’re bad ass. They don’t care. They’ll just keep coming, our former friends, our relatives, our post men.” I looked directly at Denmark and his gaze dropped. “They’re not going to build a memorial for their fallen comrades. They’re just going to keep coming until there’s nothing left.” Well, I guess I had finished what I had started. I had completely wiped out any satisfaction we may have gained in our ‘victory.’ What a fucken killjoy I turned out to be.
“Way to mellow our high, Talbot,” BT threw out there.
Not a sound was made, not even a stirring zombie. Nobody was sure in which direction I was going to go from BT’s barb. The tension in the air was palpable. Finally I was able to spit out, “Fucker.” And then I started laughing, joined in by the rest of the group. It seemed impossible that we would laugh amidst all the destruction below us but stress finds its own necessary release.
Stragglers, to prove my earlier point, kept coming in only to be met with unmitigated leaden justice. A more pressing concern lodged in my head as I watched the newest interloper go down in a cacophony of bullets, actually a couple of concerns. Our minivans were completely encased in the shards of zombie remains. This wasn’t Alex’s truck, we would never be able to just drive over them or push them out of the way. The Terrible Teal machine would spin in place like a washing machine. Clearing out an exit for the cars wouldn’t take an abnormally long amount of time but touching and dragging the bodies out of the way was not a palatable mission. Anything less than a Level 5 biohazard suit seemed to me to make the whole endeavor a nearly impossible assignment.
Secondly, and just as important, while we could clear a path and be on the road in the next half hour once our ammo and food were back in the cars, what kind of ungrateful bastard guests would we be if we had just made the world’s worst mess and then abruptly left. The zombies had come for the Talbot party, table of eight. To leave this horrendous display of death for Denmark was incomprehensible to me. Moving the bloody, stinking mess of demolished bodies to a safe enough distance whilst also keeping a vigilant eye out for others of their kind was going to take hours.
I vomited four times that morning. The first was as my misplaced step off the ladder landed squarely on an eyeball. The resounding pop and ooze of viscous liquid from beneath my boot propelled anything worth digesting out of my mouth and onto the rungs of the ladder.
"Oh fucking Talbot!” BT lamented, as he was higher up the ladder and following me down.
“Sorry about that.” I wiped my mouth, my agitated stomach letting me know just how much it was displeased with this course of events.
In such a confined area with that many bodies it was absolutely impossible to not keep stepping on THINGS. Yeah, hold onto that thought. They are NOT fingers and forearms and skull plates. They are THINGS. Oh, who am I kidding! This looked like the world’s largest blender had been filled with humans and someone had held down the blend button for about a half second. Not nearly enough time to puree the contents, but merely chop down the bigger pieces. You thought liver smelled bad when your mom cooked it? Try stepping on one fresh out of a corpse. Vomit number two did nothing to mask the putrification around me. BT wasn’t faring much better than I. If not for Jen’s lead and our need to competitively ‘keep up’ with her, it might have been a job that didn’t get done, no matter how much guilt I might feel for leaving Denmark in such a lurch. She set about the burden with a grim willpower.
Denmark and Travis stood watch over us as we dragged the human odds and ends out of the parking lot. If this were a real job that demanded compensation, I don’t think there would be a sum worthy. But survival has its own price, one that we couldn’t pay enough to satisfy. Occasionally a shot would ring out, hampering any more visitors from coming in for an afternoon meal. As we stacked the bodies behind a close by Dairy Queen like cordwood, we took the time to watch each other’s backs. We were not under the watchful eye of our lookouts from that vantage point. The distance, I hoped, would keep the majority of stench from wafting into the motel but more importantly was the old adage, “out of sight, out of mind.” Although anything less than Noah’s Ark type floodwaters was not going to wash away the gallons upon gallons of blood that had overrun everything.
My third mouth breaching came as I grabbed onto some kid’s jacket. He was wedged under the body of a female that suspiciously bore a family resemblance. The family that eats together, stays together, you know. Whether in life, in walking death or in absolute death, there was something about killing a family that tore something free from within me. I wanted to be out of this split femur soup. I reached under and grabbed the thing from underneath the armpits. I pulled with more exertion than the task demanded. I was rewarded with a wet tearing sound as the boy’s top half came loose from the disengorged innards that spilled like night crawlers from a broken bait box. I fell over, still holding tight to the top half of the boy’s remains. Luckily, my fall was broken by the ample carcass of Frita, the IHOP waitress. Her nameplate was quickly lost under my voluminous cascade of bile. I stood up quickly, a dizzying spell nearly bringing me to my knees again. Flesh saturated with bodily fluids slapped against my blood soaked jeans. I dropped the boy to the ground. When I felt the worst of the attack had passed I reached down and grabbed the boy’s hand, not in a gesture of good will, it was what allowed me the greatest grip. I did not turn around as I dragged the boy to his final resting spot.
Jen had somewhere acquired a snow shovel and had cleaned up what had spilled out of the boy. My burden had been getting lighter as I walked but I would not turn to detect the reason why. One more violent stomach outburst like the previous one and I would have left my spleen on that parking lot pavement. For the next hour I went through my duties like an automaton, bend, lift, drag, bend, lift, drag. I had become more like our enemy than I would have ever thought possible. BT for all his bravado was two pukes ahead of me. Fine by me he was welcome to that trophy. ‘And winner of the 2010 Lord Upchucks Cup goes to Big Tiny! Huge applause!’ I grinned madly. Nuggets of some distant forgotten meal bracketed my goatee. Pain wrenched my gut. My knee was on the verge of collapse and my smile resembled something closer to a grimace. But still I soldiered on.
Tracy, Nicole and Brendon had spent the better part of the morning getting our belongings back into the minivans. They had just about finished by the time the death detail was down to single figure leftovers to remove. Just then, Denmark’s warning came.
“Michael, you best come up here and take a look.”
I hobbled over to the ladder. The blood of a hundred bodies was solidifying on every article of clothing I was wearing. Between my knee and the inflexibility of the frozen blood, my navigation of the ladder was haphazard at best. ‘If this is the way I die I am going to be seriously pissed off.’
"You say something?” Denmark asked as he reached out to help me up and over and then abruptly thought better of his gesture. He warred within himself, the disgust of possibly touching anything that was attached to me or the common courtesy of helping me up the ladder. Courtesy won out as he reached his hand out again.
“I’ve got it, don’t worry Denmark.” I wanted to laugh as I watched the relief on his countenance.
“Dad, hurry!” Travis yell
ed.
Denmark went to clap me on the shoulder in an act of shared camaraderie and then pulled back as not even that innocuous part of me was free from debris. Within a few moments of caked blood cracking movement I was standing next to my son. I saw… nothing. Nicole and Tracy had packed the rest of the food into the back of the minivan. Brendon was finishing strapping something to the top of his minivan. BT and Jen were sharing a smoke that looked good, the savory tobacco smoke wisping up into the cold winter air. Even from this distance I could tell BT’s hands were shaking. Jen had to try and time her placement as she went to hand him the cigarette.
“What?” I asked perplexed.
Travis’ pointing finger led my vision higher up the horizon. I saw a black smudge, a stain upon the skyline. I saw a plague upon my family. Hundreds, no thousands, tens of thousands of zombies blotted out the distant boundaries of my vision as they marched forward toward us.
“My God.” Denmark noted in a hushed voice.
“Time to go Mr. T,” Tommy said as he reached to grab my hand.
I pulled away before he could make contact. “Oh Tommy, I don’t think I could stand it if I passed on what I’ve been touching.” He understood, even if he wasn’t a tenth as concerned about it as I was.
“We leaving now?” he begged.
The scene, while not nearly as heroic and without the accompanying foreboding music, reminded me of the movie Lord of the Rings when the orcs and cave trolls descended on Helm’s Deep. I was transfixed. Stay and fight or just run. I looked to Denmark’s fear lined face and the consternation of his wife Maggie as she looked on, and even to a lesser extent the misery that was etched on Greta’s face. My mind was made up. These people had opened their home and their hearts to us. What right did I have to bring this grisly end upon them?
“We’re leaving, Tommy.” I said. Tommy was relieved.
“Michael.” Denmark peeled his eyes away from the abysmal vista and looked at me in rebuke. “I thought you were more of an admiral man than that.”
“What? Did you mean admirable?” I asked. I didn’t have the foggiest clue about what he was talking about.
“You are just going to leave me and Maggie and Greta like this?” he asked.
“Oh,” I started. “Denmark, it’s not like that at all.” His arched eyebrow let me know exactly what he thought of that response. “First off, you’re welcome to join us, although I don’t see any benefits for you if you make that decision. Secondly, we’re not leaving because we’re afraid of a fight. We’re leaving so that there won’t be one.”
“Huh?” Now it was his turn to question my words.
“Denmark, do you really think it was a coincidence that we had that assembly of zombies here this morning?” He was not following the general drift of the conversation. I was going to have to forcibly show him the way. “Denmark, we’ve been singled out. We’re being hunted. Some lower power has decided that our time on this glorious planet must soon be concluded.”
“Michael, I know this event has caused a lot of strain on folks, better men than you have folded under the pressure, but what makes you so special? Why would the zombies ‘hunt’ you?” Denmark begged.
I wanted to tell him that I was merely a by-product of the hunt, maybe a 6-point stag. The prize 12-point trophy was Tommy. Eliza wanted Tommy. I didn’t know if the kid knew it for sure or not but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. Denmark was about to pepper me with more accusations when Maggie interceded.
“It’s true, Denny,” she said, placing her hand on his taut shoulder.
“What are you talking about Maggie? All I see here is a coward, a man that runs from his responsibilities. Oh, he’s all bluster when he’s sitting by a stove eating a home cooked meal. Put the iron in the fire though and you can test the true strength of the metal.”
I knew his words were borne from fear and desperation. They didn’t even contain an iota of truth but still they cut to the bone, if only because he believed what he said.
“Look at him Maggie! He can’t even defend himself now! How much do my words hurt, Michael? Will you be able to sleep tonight while my wife and I fight for our lives? Probably won’t be a problem for the likes of you!”
“Dammit Denny! Stop it!” Maggie grabbed him by the waist and turned him so that he could see the rage coursing through her body. “Justin! Justin told me everything!” she screamed.
“What are you talking about!?” The anger that mired his capacity to reason was blinding him.
“Since they left their home in Colorado they have been followed. The one who calls herself Eliza has some sort of hold on the zombies.” Denmark was looking at his wife as if trying to figure out how hard it would be to get a hold of some anti-schizophrenic pills, iffen there was such a thing. “Justin knew they were coming, he just didn’t know that they were this close.” Maggie slowly closed her eyes and melted into her husband’s comforting embrace.
Justin silently cried behind her. “I’m so sorry Dad.”
“This isn’t your fault, Justin, you’re caught up in it just like the rest of us,” I told him. It was of small solace to him but he accepted it like a stranded wanderer in the desert accepts water, greedily.
“What is going on?” Denmark cried, the whites of his eyes threatening to become the dominant force on his strained features.
“I’m trying to tell you, Denmark. That if we leave, odds are that horde out there won’t even stop here,” I told him. He understood the words. He was just having a difficult time reconciling the validity of them. “Denmark, I swear to you, as much as you can trust a man in these dark days, trust me now. You are welcome to come with us. Hell, with the firepower you carry I’d be thrilled if you came with us. But that would be the worst decision of your life. I’m not going to guarantee to you that zombies aren’t going to come your way eventually but that legion out there…” We all turned to look. “That’s especially for us.”
Denmark looked to the gathering, then back to my face and back to the mob. He licked his lips and then the next words out of his mouth nearly crippled me.
“Any chance you could take Greta?”
Maggie slapped the shit out of his head.
“BT, Jen come on!” I yelled down to them. “We’ve got to get going soon.”
“Come on Mike.” Jen pleaded. “I’m covered in gore. I was hoping to boil some water and wash up, thoroughly.”
“Sure you can, but come up the ladder a few rungs and then turn around.” Even from this distance, I could see the confusion on her face. She did as I asked though.
It took her about half a second. “Right, I’ll go grab my things,” she said. I’ll give her this, her face paled some, but she didn’t go into panic mode.
Rabid pack of cannibalistic, disease infested man-eaters or not, there was no way I was leaving without scraping the heavy layers of dirt, sweat, blood, excrement and the multitude of body bits off of me. I grabbed my Ka-Bar knife and cut my clothes off of my body. The blood had congealed into body armor. I stood naked in that dark motel room, looking in the full-length mirror. A month of zombies had done for me what no intense workout regiment could. Damn it, I looked good; I had the beginning signs of a six-pack on my stomach. My love handles were a thing of the past. My body looked lean and strong. Even the chunks of matter I could not identify stuck at odd angles and in strange places could not disguise how much my body had changed. I was close to the condition I had been over twenty years previously. Killing apparently had its perks. My brown eyes betrayed no mirth in that thought.
I turned the shower on, waiting a few seconds before sticking my hand under the sand-blast force liquid. Waiting a few seconds for the water to heat up was a conditioned response but I was not going to receive a favorable reply. I braced for the icy needles of pain that were about to lance my body. There isn’t a one of you out there that doesn’t know what I’m talking about. You can psyche yourself up all you want, maybe even slap yourself a few times in the face to try and
forget the torture you are about to inflict on yourself. Doesn’t matter, the moment that cold water hits anything above your knees the shock starts to set in. Catching a breath all of a sudden becomes the most difficult thing in the world. You breath in these little ragged strips of air through clenched teeth. You cross your arms over your chest as if that is going to alleviate the immense discomfort bordering on psychotic pain that you are feeling. At this point you can’t even begin to understand why you are subjugating yourself to this. A failed water heater should be the most perfect reason in the world to not go into work.
This time though was not normal. I was already numb. Numb to pain and numb to the world. I placed my hands on the shower stall wall and bathed in the bitter water as it flayed my soul into the drain. Soap was an afterthought. I watched as the man that was/is Michael Talbot spread the tiny bar across his semi-exposed rib cage. Shampoo intermingled with viscera. The humanity stew clogged the drain. The Michael man did not notice as he stepped out of the ice sharded water. The part of me that was mostly me, but not all of me, took this opportune time to reunite with the more primitive side. I gently reminded that side that he should dry his freezing ass off before he caught pneumonia.
Tracy had come in with new clothes while I had been wringing out my soul. I stood once again in front of the mirror shivering, partly from the cold, partly from the pain and mostly from the sense of loss. My body had adapted to the harsh conditions of this new life much quicker than my mind. Once that happened though, would I still be the man I wanted to be or just the man I needed to be?
Tracy’s hand seared my flesh as she touched my side. The heat from her hand flooded my senses. That mere, sheer, sensuous touch reeled me back in. My body reacted in the way it had been meant to since the beginning of evolution (or the Garden of Eden, I don’t want to deny anyone their due).