Necrophobia - 01

by Jack Hamlyn

  “Get ready,” Tuck said.

  I turned away from the gunport, sweat running down my face, my shirt stuck to my back. I waited. It seemed to take forever and then, “HAVE A TASTE!” Tuck screamed and fired the Claymores. There was a resounding boom and when I looked out the gunport there was more smoke and flames, the stink of burnt ordinance. But the wall of zombies was just…gone.

  “ALL RIGHT!” Tuck said. “LET’S MOVE!”

  “Get down into the crib!” I called over the walkie-talkie.

  Tuck keyed open the door and we charged out, knocking three or four zombies out of our way. Before they could recover, we capped them in the heads with our CAR-15s. We saw a few stragglers and dropped them, too. The smoke and heat of the advancing fire was unbelievable, absolutely disorienting. I wasn’t sure in which direction to move. We tied neckerchiefs over our mouths so we didn’t breathe in those caustic fumes. Tuck seemed to know which way to go and I followed him. I saw one zombie and Tuck took it out with a fast, perfect killshot.

  We hadn’t made it more than fifteen feet from the tower when we heard the sound of the F/A-18 Hornets coming in for another airstrike. I couldn’t imagine why. It made no sense. We heard them dropping more clusterbombs in the distance. WHAP! WHAP! WHAP-WHAP-WHAP! The ground shook and more debris was sent airborne. The shock waves cleared the smoke long enough for us to see a missile come screaming through the air and hit one of the pole buildings. Tuck knocked me down as the building collapsed and fiery bits of sheet metal flew through the air like shrapnel. There was a concussive WHAM-WHAM-WHAM! as the drums of gasoline stored inside went up, a rolling fire cloud rising above the wreckage.

  “THEY’RE TAREGETING US!” Tuck cried over the noise. “THEY’RE ATTACKING THE COMPOUND! WE GOTTA MOVE!”

  We climbed to our feet and started running towards the barn before it, too, got hit. The good thing was that we saw no more zombies. The bad thing was that the barn was burning and there were kerosene and fuel oil stores in it. Fighting through the heat and black clouds of smoke, coughing and gagging, we found the vehicles, got in and were rolling.

  Tuck was in the Jeep and I was in the Tahoe.

  I followed the Jeep through the haze, calling out on the walkie-talkie for everyone to get ready. Behind us there was a series of rolling concussions that made the Tahoe bounce on its springs. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought a Hornet had just targeted the barn and the other pole building. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the tower wouldn’t be hit within the next few moments.

  We pulled in front and the door opened and out came Jimmy leading the troops. And as they came out, the zombies moved in. There was so much smoke drifting around that by the time they emerged from it, they were scarce feet away. I opened up on full auto and I heard the others doing the same. I drove them back, dropped four of them with headshots as another took me from behind. I felt its cold slimy arms ring around my throat and I acted instinctively: I jabbed my elbow back and felt it sink into something soft. Then I reached back and flipped my attacker over my shoulder as we’d been taught in infantry school.

  It was a man and I popped him in the head.

  The others moved in for the kill.

  I blew the face off another man and shattered the head of a little girl and then two women were on me. Their faces were like white pulp. One of them grabbed me and I gave her the stock of the CAR-15 in the face. It was like hitting a water balloon. Her face seemed to splash off the bone beneath in a spray of rot. The other woman had my arm and as she made to bite it, I lashed out and stomped her knee with my boot. It cracked and she fell backwards. A man rushed in and I put a round right between his eyes, a purely lucky shot.

  There were more explosions in the distance and they were getting closer all the time. A wave of heat knocked me off my feet and lit the hair of a zombie woman on fire.

  The others were having it no better.

  I saw Jimmy shooting into an approaching pack as Diane and Ricki got the kids into the Tahoe. Tuck was a wild man. He was shooting, using his weapon like a club. Kicking zombies, smashing through their numbers, hitting them, and stomping them. I saw him grab a man and throw him into three others and they all went over like bowling pins.

  But I had no time to watch.

  The women I had put down were on me again. The one I’d smashed in the face came at me, clawing for my eyes and I jabbed out with the barrel of the CAR-15. As luck would have it, I stuck the barrel right in her mouth. I gave her a quick three-round burst and her head flew apart. At the same moment, the other woman grabbed my ankle and I saw her teeth going for my leg. Too late. She would have had me, but she bit my combat boot. I smashed her head to sauce with the butt of the CAR-15.

  I turned and dropped two more.

  I saw Diane kill a couple zombies and Ricki start climbing into the Jeep and it was at that point that twenty or thirty of the dead rushed in out of the smoke. I saw them go after Diane. Jimmy dropped a few and so did she. I knocked a few stragglers out of my way, shooting and kicking my way to the Jeep. I killed three, then four and five. They were dropping everywhere and I wasn’t watching where I was going. I tripped over a corpse and saw Jimmy jump into the Jeep, calling to me. Tuck got into the thick of it and drove off a pack that were closing on Diane.

  Then…then as Ricki tried to get in, five or six of them grabbed her and started to drag her off.

  I heard her screaming.

  I launched myself forward, shooting and clubbing but they had her and they were biting into her. I screamed myself as the dead hemmed me in and I heard my CAR-15 click on an empty chamber. I used it like a club and then hands were pulling me back and away. It was Tuck. He was trying to pull me into the Jeep. I saw Paul crying and fighting in there, Diane holding tight onto him. Tuck pulled at me. I swung at him. I hit him and made to go after my wife and then I heard his voice say something like, “I’m sorry, my brother, I’m so sorry.” Then something hit me in the back of the neck and I went down, lost in a dark haze.

  And that was the last time I saw my wife.

  RUN FOR THE HILLS

  I came to about ten minutes later as Jimmy pulled the Jeep out onto the cratered main road, everyone bumping and jumping and being thrown around. I saw the tower through the haze. I saw it take a direct hit from an air-to-surface missile and collapse into itself.

  But Ricki was gone.

  I had the desire, the need, to go completely haywire and start shouting and screaming and raising a stink. But I controlled myself because I knew I had to. Tuck had hit me. He had knocked me out to save me. He knew I would have committed suicide trying to save my wife. Maybe he thought that one parent for Paul was better than no parent at all. I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or hate him. I was in the backseat with Paul. Diane was holding him. He was pale and shaking, tears running down his face. I took hold of him and he started fighting and shouting, “MY MOTHER’S DEAD! YOU LET MY MOTHER DIE! YOU LET HER! YOU LET THEM KILL MY MOM YOU DID YOU DID YOU DID—”

  I held him until he collapsed against me, worn and trembling and limp.

  Guilt?

  Oh yes, there was guilt. Oceans of guilt. Universes of it. From a rational perspective I knew I had done all that I could…yet, I was tortured by the idea that I could have done more, a lot more. If I hadn’t tripped over that corpse I would have reached her in time. If I hadn’t have brought us to the goddamn tower she’d probably still be alive. If I’d been more concerned with protecting my family and less with playing perimeter guard she would still be alive. Paul would have a mother. I would have a wife. We would not both be ripped open and bleeding. I would not be seeing my wife’s screaming face as she was engulfed by the living dead.

  I tried to hold onto that rational perspective, to cancel out all the guilt, but grief does not understand rationality. It deals in loss. It deals in pain. Its politics are those of suffering. So I suffered. God knows, I suffered. And God? Well, if my faith was shaky before it was now a black void of emptiness. I believed i
n nothing.

  I wanted to fall into a depressed heap. I wanted to seize up and retreat into myself. But I did not have that luxury. When you have a child and you lose your spouse you cannot afford to be anything less than the solid rock that child needs to cling to. So I was a rock. I shut myself down and felt nothing. I only cared about my son. He slept on my lap for nearly two hours and when he came awake he looked up at me and said, “I didn’t dream it, did I?”

  “No,” I said.

  He nodded, gathering himself, trying to be tough like I was. A boy feels that he has to do two things in life: protect his mother and garner his father’s respect. He had lost the one and he would not sacrifice the other. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t important, that we would grieve together, that pain was okay…but I couldn’t. And I couldn’t because I knew how much he needed right then to be a man in my eyes. It was important to him. It was all he had and I couldn’t take it away from him.

  He patted my arm and said, “It’ll be okay, Dad…I think it’ll be okay. I just hope they didn’t…” he took a deep breath “…hurt her too much.”

  “It went fast,” Jimmy told him. “I’m sure it went fast.”

  But we didn’t believe that. Being torn apart is not painless and it does not go fast. I just hoped they rendered her to nothing. I don’t want to think that she might be walking around out there somewhere with them, as them. I don’t think she would have made a very good zombie. It just wasn’t in her.

  Diane was watching both Paul and I very closely. I guess I had forgotten that she had just lost her kid sister, too. Our eyes met, pain acknowledged and shared. We both looked away. She was holding Maria on her lap. Maria was sucking her thumb. She looked shattered. So much loss, so much despair, so much tragedy. I was worried that we would not survive this one.

  I heard Jimmy and Tuck discussing what to do and I knew right then that good old Tuck had no back-up plan and he was not a guy who liked to be caught with his pants down. But, honestly, there had been no need for a back-up plan. The compound should have been the end. The perfect secure location. I couldn’t even really, truly blame the zombies for destroying our shelter.

  They had the minds of animals.

  They knew only prey and feeding.

  The ones to blame were the assholes in the F/A-18 Hornets. Why in the Christ did they attack us? Why did they ignore Tuck’s distress call? Why did they have to flatten everything? Why? Why? Why?

  As if reading my mind, Paul said, “Why did those jets want to blow us up, Dad?”

  I had no answers but Jimmy did. “Son, I been mulling that over and I have a funny feeling that we were attacked by mistake. I think the Air Force or Air Guard or the Navy or whoever the hell that was were given a bombing mission. Those helicopters scouted us out and the fighter pilots were just carrying out their orders. Somebody out there thought we were a threat. So we were targeted.”

  “If I ever get my hands on those flyboys,” Tuck said.

  We drove around without any direction for hours. We saw the state of our world and it was not very reassuring. There were small towns that were either burning or burnt out, nothing but collections of blackened buildings and rubble. We saw craters from bombings. Abandoned vehicles on the sides of the roads. Corpses in the fields that were being fed on by dogs and crows. And zombies, of course. They were walking everywhere, watching us as we drove by or simply ignoring us. The smell of death was on the wind. In the distance we could see plumes of black smoke like smudges of charcoal against the pale blue sky.

  Finally, about ten miles east of Scarsdale, we found an abandoned airfield. It looked like it had been closed up a long time. It wasn’t much. A couple old runways with weeds growing from the cracks, a few rusting hangars, and Quonset huts. It was enclosed by a chain link fence which was good. Tuck blew the lock off and we went in. The hangars had huge holes in their roofs and pigeons roosting in the rafters. One of the Quonsets was piled with rusting machine parts. The other had no door and was full of birds. Then we found a little office with a garage hooked to it. The garage had no windows. It was locked but we found the key in the office which Tuck got into it after forcing a window. The garage was mostly empty save for a few old drums of fuel and hydraulic grease. It was a little dusty, but not bad. We set about cleaning it up the best we could and then fortifying the office so nothing could get at us. Jimmy and Tuck found some lumber and nailed it over the windows.

  It was a start.

  Over the next few days we settled in. There was no zombie activity and that was a good thing. We laid our sleeping bags on the floor. Jimmy found a rolled carpet in the office and we spread that out. It was a little musty-smelling but it was better than sleeping on the concrete. We missed our fresh vegetables from Tuck’s gardens and his variety of frozen meats. We ate mostly MREs which are all right now and again—much better than the old C-Rations, I’m told—but I’d gotten very sick of them in Iraq where we were in the field. Paul thought they were the coolest thing in the world and Maria loved how the ration heater cooked up the spaghetti and meat sauce when you pulled the tab.

  Paul and Maria amazed me.

  Even with the loss they’d both suffered, they did not retreat into themselves. They worked hard and I was impressed. We all worked hard. For the time being this was home. We made it as livable and safe as possible. Paul and I mourned together. The others left us alone save for Diane. One day Maria saw me brooding. She went outside with Jimmy and returned with a daisy.

  She handed it to me. “This will make you feel better,” she said.

  And you know what? It really did.

  Once we were safe, we explored the other buildings to see what we could scavenge. We didn’t find much. Our fourth day there, it poured buckets and we took advantage of this by going out there and soaping up…Maria and Diane did theirs privately, of course. It felt good to be clean. My mother used to say, “Never underestimate the power of a good shower.” She was right as always. Being clean made us all feel a little more human.

  The next day, Diane and I searched one of the hangars and, suddenly, out of pure impulse I took hold of her and started kissing her. She responded at first and then pushed me away.

  “No,” she said.

  I didn’t know what came over me. “I’m sorry. I’m losing my mind.”

  “Grief will do that to you.”

  “I’m not like that,” I said. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Grief.”

  She told me a story about some teenage pal of hers who was shattered by her father’s death when she was sixteen. She ended up getting high out in the alley behind the funeral home with her best friend’s boyfriend. They ended up in the backseat of his car. She did not know why. She did not understand why. It just happened. Good story and relevant, but it didn’t make me feel any less of a heel. What would have happened if Diane hadn’t stopped it? Would we have ended up doing it right there on the dusty floor? Would I have even been able to perform? I was an absolute fucking mess. It seemed like the world was spinning so fast I couldn’t get back on.

  We didn’t talk about it again.

  What was there to say? I told myself it was grief. I was trying to escape it. I was trying to shield myself from it. Was that what it was? I just didn’t know and it gave me something else to feel like shit about.

  When I made to leave, Diane made me sit on a pile of lumber. “I have a confession to make,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “I’m out of dope. I’m out of pills. I don’t have anything and my brain is starting to act funny.”

  I was tempted to tell her that, no, your brain is just functioning normally for the first time in years. But I couldn’t say that.

  “I had a dream last night,” she said.

  Now let me preface this by saying that Diane very often had dreams and she loved to talk about them. She was into things like prophetic dreaming, lots of weird New Age shit that made absolutely no sense to a hard-headed Agnostic like
me.

  “You know me,” she said. “I’ve always had some strange dreams and sometimes I wonder if that’s why I like to get stoned and drunk as if, you know, there’s something in my brain that I need to tone down. Something I need to keep sluggish and sedated. Does that make sense? Probably not. Fuck it. Now here’s something you don’t know: this weird dreaming thing runs in the family. It really does. I bet Ricki never told you about that. She didn’t have it, so she rejected it. But I have it and so did our mom. Here’s something else you don’t know, something else Ricki didn’t tell you: a week before you two hooked up, Della had a dream that you would come. She never said if it was your face she saw, but she dreamed that a man came into Ricki’s life and gave her the security she needed because, you know, Ricki was a basket case. I loved her, man, but she was a basket case.”

  No, Ricki had never mentioned any of that and if she did I imagine my reaction would be pretty similar to the one I was having now.

  “There’s other things, too, but they’re not important. Not right now. Let’s just say that Della dreamed that Ricki was pregnant a month before Ricki knew and Della saw the face of her grandchild. We’ll leave it at that.” Diane lit a cigarette and blew out a column of smoke. “My dreams have been getting very weird and intense since I ran out of stash. Last night—this one’s freaky—last night I dreamed of Cadillacs and God. Really. I saw Cadillacs lined-up like in one of those deserts where they bury the rich guys in their cars. I saw that, rows and rows and rows of them and I saw myself there and then…wow…I saw the eye of God looking at me from the horizon: it was bright orange and red and burning, sending out plumes of yellow light. It was an eye of hate, an eye that was opening and when it did it would scorch the world with its heat. I woke up, thinking: hey, maybe that’s not the eye of God but maybe the Devil or maybe something like the Devil. That was my dream and you probably think I’m nuts but I’ll tell you one thing, Steve: I’m not. What I saw will come to pass next week or next year, who knows?”