by Mark Tufo
“Alex, get about twenty feet away and let’s see what’s going on,” I said.
“This doesn’t feel right, Mike,” Alex said, echoing what we were all thinking.
As we got closer I could tell that in life, this woman had been downright beautiful. Even in death there was a certain majesty to her. Her long raven-black hair hid the majority of sores on her face, but her uncovered arms showed the ravages of the disease she was carrying. I could see her arms rippling even though ‘it’ didn’t move a muscle.
Justin had lined up his shot. “Dad, do you want me to kill it?” he asked.
I knew deep down in my subconscious that she was dangerous, as any beautiful woman was, and she felt worse, much worse. But I couldn’t find it in my humanity to kill if we weren’t in danger. She made no threatening move whatsoever, her eyes watching us warily; that shook me, because I knew there was more than some rudimentary intelligence going on. We sat there and just stared.
“Dad?” Justin asked again. He wanted this standoff done.
“Put the gun down. Alex, get us the fuck out of here,” I said, never tearing my eyes from her.
I heard Spindler gasp, so I know he saw what I did. The zombie woman nodded once, as in ‘thank you’ for not killing her. I shuddered, but nobody else in the van was the wiser. Looking back just a few short weeks later, I wish I had let Justin shoot her.
When I got my composure back, I was able to rationalize the nod as stress-induced or just perception problems. I knew better, though, I’d wished Spindler hadn’t seen it, too. It would have made it a lot easier to brush this away if there hadn’t been a corroborating witness.
“Alex, drive behind the Lowe’s store,” I said with a quaver in my voice. Luckily, everyone else was too busy scanning the area to notice the octave change.
“Mike, you heard Jed, we need to get food first, and then worry about the wood for the turrets,” Alex bemoaned.
“Yeah, Jed would say that. The old geezer hasn’t done one shift on those god-awful things. I can barely sleep because of the pain in my legs.”
Alex opened his mouth to say something but I cut him off. “Come on, Alex, I know what I’m doing. How much food do you think we’re going to fit in here anyway? Go to the back of the store, I can almost guarantee they’ll have a big rig there, we’ll fill it with all the supplies and food we’d need for a year.”
“Mike, I don’t know how to drive a rig,” Alex pleaded.
“No sweat,” I said as I put on my best bull-shitting smile. “I drove one back in my Marine Corps days.”
He eyed me a little dubiously; if he had stared at me a little longer I would have cracked and just forgotten the whole damn plan.
My whole half-hour of driving a big rig had started as a dare from a fellow Marine friend of mine. We had been drinking all night at the base watering hole and had just started walking home to the barracks. We had passed the armory and a giant camouflaged truck sat in the parking lot.
“Betcha can’t drive us home in that,” my drinking buddy Chuck Blaylock dared.
“Can so,” I blustered as I began to squeeze my way through the locked gate.
“What the fuck are ya doing?” Chuck asked, almost as if he had already forgotten what he had dared me about.
He had; unfortunately, my short-term memory wasn’t as bad. I got up into the cab and turned over the ignition, which allowed the glow plugs to warm up. There was no need for keys, like all military vehicles there was no such thing as keys. It would do no good if in the heat of battle the driver was killed or blown apart and the keys disappeared with him. You get my point, right? So within half a minute of getting through the gate, the truck roared to life. I lurched the truck forward.
“Crap, there’s a bunch of gears,” I mumbled. I was paying more attention to the shift box than I was the gate. I barely looked up as I crashed through it. The truck stalled, Chuck hopped into the cab from the passenger side.
“‘Bout time,” he said, and then started snoring softly.
The barracks was only two streets over. but I was so inebriated that I had lost all sense of direction. When the eight trailing military police Hummers had pulled us over, I was ten miles from home, had destroyed three cars and one guard shack. All in all, not a great ending to a great night. At my court-martial, the officer in charge of the proceedings, Colonel Laret, went easy on me. First off, because the truck I was driving hadn’t blown half the state away. Unbeknownst to us, the truck was packed with C-4 explosive. I could have served life in prison at Leavenworth for that alone. When it was all said and done, I had lost two stripes (demoted from sergeant to lance corporal), three months’ pay, and one year of confinement to the barracks. Chuck lost a stripe just for getting in the cab. They also sent him to another duty station—Okinawa, Japan—so we couldn’t be together to cause any more havoc. I was going to miss Chuck to no end, but this beat a life sentence at Leavenworth, and because of the hard labor, a life sentence at Leavenworth equated to seven years. So, long story short, technically I had driven a big rig…even if I had no recollection of it.
As it was, there were three trucks parked at Lowe’s. Two were still mostly full, and the third looked as if it had just finished off-loading. That was going to be the one we wanted. We fanned out on the loading bay, thankful that this one was lit up like a spring day. The light was welcome, the sights however weren’t. There had been a brief but intense fight here. Some zombies had re-died and so had a bunch of truckers and dock crew. They had fought with tire-irons, chains, and even a floor tile stripper. Gore littered the floor.
The only thing alive in here was the incessant buzzing of the flies. Curiously the flies, which I thought of as one of the nastiest creatures on the planet next to cockroaches, wanted nothing to do with the zombies. They covered the remains of the humans, but not a one alit on any of the zombies. Even flying cockroaches knew better. I was thankful that it was early December and not a hot sweltering day in August; the smell was already fetid. I couldn’t begin to imagine what the smell would be like heated up to ninety-eight degrees. I would have liked to have pulled the bodies out of the bay and onto the parking lot, but I didn’t see the point. There were bound to be a lot more bodies in the store itself, and stopping to dispose of all of them would just be eating into precious time.
I left Spindler to guard our rear echelon while the rest of us went forward to check out the store. When I swung open the large swinging doors, I soon discovered the inside was much more malodorous than the airy bay. I motioned for the small party to retreat. Confusion and fear crossed their features. I calmed my tumbling stomach by pulling in great breaths of the air I had previously thought was fetid.
“We’re going to need Vicks or something like that to put under our noses,” I said, when I felt like I could finally speak without bits of discharge intermingling with my words.
We hunted for a couple of minutes, never finding the coveted Vicks. Travis discovered some cologne in one of the metal desks that lined every bay. We made some makeshift bandannas and soaked them in the cologne. So we went back to the swinging doors looking like the best smelling bandits this side of the Mississippi. The redolence of Eau de Death will haunt my olfactory nerves for the rest of my days. The one good thing about the swinging doors, besides being able to prop them open and get air, was that it had allowed the zombies to escape. In the long run that may have been bad, but for right now it was a welcome blessing. We did, however, do a thorough search of the entire store before we began our supply run, just in case there were undead lurkers still roaming about.
I had the unenviable task of finding the keys to the big rig. My biggest fear was that the drivers were all zombified and had just walked off, keys and all. The dockworkers were all dressed the same; blue jeans, light colored shirts, and blue smocks. All I needed to do was find some fat men with jackets on. It’s stereotypical, but I was in a hurry. After a few minutes of looking I was rewarded, or more likely punished. I had found my quarry. The
re were two men on the loading bay that fit the description. I was looking for the one that was a little less decomposed than the other. I flipped the first guy over. The left side of his face had been removed. Jagged strips of flesh were all that remained. His left eye had been chewed in half like a bad Entenmann’s chocolate. Something had bitten into it and decided they didn’t like the flavor and had left it for someone else. My stomach wasn’t going to be right for a week after this.
‘Stop looking at his face!’ I silently screamed at myself. This was much worse than the impersonality of passing an accident on the side of the road. This was High Def death brought to you in 1080dpi. What is wrong with you? Does that mean I’m in trouble when I refer to myself in the third person, isn’t that some form of psychosis? I think I was trying to stall with myself. I’m a borderline germaphobe. I didn’t want to have to touch what was left of this person. There’s no telling what diseases he was carrying. If I had been someone else, I would have punched them and told them to get moving. This internal dialogue was not getting my family or me out of danger any quicker. That thought got me moving, but when I plunged my hand into his pocket I was compensated with the liquefaction of Jared’s (I had to name him something, it somehow seemed easier than fat dead guy) fat tissue. I pulled my hand out only to find it attached to a two-foot long, sinewy, snot-like substance.
All the Clorox wipes in Lowe’s weren’t ever going to make me feel clean again. I did, however, have the luck of the Irish on my side. Clutched in my disgusting, disease-riddled paw were keys, and hopefully not to some stupid little Hyundai out front. I stiffly walked into the store and found the cleaning supplies. I felt like I was on autopilot. I was moving but no one was steering the ship. I dumped a bottle of Pine-Sol on my arm. It smelled horrible, it burned my skin, it was bliss. When I had emptied the bottle, I wiped off most of the gunk with clean-up towels, just a fancy name for paper towels. I then dug into the disinfectant wipes that promised to ‘kill 99.9 percent of all germs’ and even some viruses. I could only hope that zombieism wasn’t in that point-one percent.
I began to come back from the obsessive-compulsive abyss. I didn’t want to be THAT guy, the one that sits in a corner continuously rubbing at his now bleeding flesh with a small mountain of used wipes at his feet. It was close, but I felt like I had passed the worst of it. I went out to the truck that we were going to be using and tested the keys. They worked, which was a damn good thing, because I’m not sure if I could have stuck my hand into any more glistening, decaying flesh again today. I walked back past Spindler, my face just a few shades lighter green than it had been.
“Wimp,” he laughed. I think he thought he was being funny.
If I wasn’t concentrating so hard on not puking I would have responded. I didn’t even shake my head in disapproval. The vertigo would have been too much.
We were nearly completed at Lowe’s. I was on my last haul dragging a pallet mover loaded with wood, nails, caulking, and some other odds and ends when I saw Spindler toss his cigarette out the bay. His hands were shaking as he went to pick up his rifle.
“Useless,” I muttered. Who the hell stands on guard duty against a deadly enemy and puts his rifle down. I would remember next time to bring someone else.
I heard the engine long before the useless Spindler gave the warning. I stopped pulling on the pallet jack and started racing over to the open bay, unslinging my gun on the way, to assess the new threat. Spindler started to slide away. I knew it! I knew he’d be useless in a fight.
“Get your ass over here!” I said quietly, but laced with menace. “Or I’ll shoot you myself.”
He sneered, but grudgingly did as I ordered. I could tell from the self-serving calculation on his face that he was trying to gauge which threat was worse—me, or the incoming vehicle.
The Ford F-350 slowed to a stop about twenty-five feet from us. I couldn’t see into the windows because of the way the sun was shining. Why the hell were visions of Snoopy and the Red Baron racing through my head? The seconds ticked by, I could HEAR Spindler sweating. The drops were cascading to the floor. It wasn’t going to be long now, no matter how much he feared me, before he went running into the sunset.
“Why did you come on this raid?” I asked, not meaning to say anything out loud.
Spindler jumped at my words. “It’s my van,” was his response.
I looked at him, but when I realized he wasn’t going to continue I prodded him further. “So?”
He licked his lips nervously before he continued. “I had a Cadillac once, I loved that car, it caught fire.”
His choppy delivery was grating on my nerves. Again he didn’t elaborate; this time I didn’t care. I was saved from more ‘conversation’ when the passenger side door of the truck opened. My rifle wasn’t at the ready, but my grip intensified. Spindler began to bring his to the ready position. The foot that was stepping out, stopped suddenly. I grabbed Spindler’s barrel and shoved it towards the ground. He got the message, but that didn’t mean he was happy with it. The cowboy boot-clad foot once again began its descent to the pavement. The largest man I had ever seen in my life stepped out of that truck, not as in the fat man from the Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life, but rather of the Arnold Schwarzenegger variety from The Terminator.
He would have looked intimidating even if he hadn’t been carrying a Gatling gun. A Gatling gun? Who gets a Gatling gun? My brain asked in overdrive. It had to have weighed a couple hundred pounds, plus all the ammo, and he hefted it as if it were no more than a paint ball marker. If he opened fire, we’d be dead before we could think about it. While the gun mesmerized us, his friend stepped out of the crew cab door. He was a good-sized individual also, but compared with his steroid-induced partner, he looked like Pee-Wee Herman. He carried a more traditional weapon, if you can consider a SAW a traditional weapon. A SAW is a ‘light’ machine gun, but at sixty-five pounds it’s still no slouch to carry around. We were outgunned and nearly cut down when Spindler dropped his rifle. Lucky for us our two rivals weren’t prone to panic; they both tensed, but neither fired. The bigger man laughed. It was a mean laugh, though. His watchful eyes never left mine. Obviously he was sizing up the only threat left to him.
“That’s my store,” he said matter-of-factly.
Why I let my smart ass mouth rumble sometimes, I don’t even know. My mother always said it was going to get me in trouble. “Do you mean literally or figuratively?” I wanted to laugh when I saw him thinking about my words. He hadn’t a clue as to what I had just asked him.
“Umm, both,” he said, realizing he may have just said something stupid.
I was laughing inside, but I knew if I gave a hint of that internal merriment away, he would step over my blown-out brains to get into the store.
“Any chance we can share, big guy?” I asked, but I fathomed the sheer bulk of this guy let him get whatever he wanted.
“The name is Durgan,” he bellowed. “Not ‘big guy.’”
What the hell is his hang up? “Okay big…Durgan.” Is that a first or a last name, I wondered. “There’s plenty of store here for the both of us.”
“You don’t get it, puny man, this is MY store!” The veins in his forehead threatened to burst as he yelled.
Dammit, where’s a good zombie when you need one. It was then that I noticed the woman zombie we had seen at the church. She was standing a couple of hundred yards behind the men in the truck, seemingly watching this melodrama play out. I didn’t have time to waste worrying about her now; I had bigger fish to fry at the moment. I heard liquid pattering to the ground next to me. What I thought was more sweat from Spindler turned out to be piss plunging from his bladder.
“See! Your little friend agrees with me,” Durgan said, laughing his fake laugh again. “You have until the count of three to leave before I make you look like...” He turned to his friend and I heard him mumble, “what’s that cheese with all the holes in it?”
“Swiss,” came the stage-whisper reply.
Now I know why the brain-eating zombies left these two idiots alone.
“Before I make you look like Swiss cheese!” Durgan shouted triumphantly.
I knew I had to act fast…we needed these supplies and we needed this truck. But my time was running short; I was not convinced that Durgan could count as high as three.
“One!” he screamed.
Who the hell was he yelling at, we were twenty feet away. Spindler took off like a shot out the bay and away from Durgan.
“Pussy,” I sputtered.
“TWO!” Durgan yelled even louder.
Fight or flight, fight or flight, flight or... I stared in amazement as I watched Steroid Freak Number Two try to brush away a speck on his shirt. The laser dot didn’t move, and then a second one joined the first. Durgan also had two on him but was slower to realize it.
“Durgan,” Number Two groused. No response. “Durgan!” he bawled.
Durgan turned a little. “What, can’t you see I’m a little busy right now,” he growled.
“Look at my chest, man,” Number Two nearly cried. “Look at yours!”
Both men were painted with two laser sniping dots on their chests. I wasn’t sure where the help was coming from because none of our small party had laser scopes, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I seized on the opportunity.