by Mark Tufo
She said ‘no’ half a beat too quick. Great, now I would spend half the night in a fruitless attempt to try to figure out where I knew her from.
Joann smiled, and the two women began to talk animatedly. When BT stepped from behind the tractor-trailer, Joann looked up with a worrisome expression across her face.
I laughed a little. “Don’t worry, he’s harmless,” I yelled back as I added extra speed to my step to get the hell out of there.
I could hear Big Tiny growl behind me.
Chapter 10
Journal Entry – 10
* * *
I opened the front door to our home. Tommy was waiting by the door.
“Hey, Tommy, how you doing, bud?” I said, smiling at him. It was impossible not to, with his giant grin to match.
“Hey, Mr. T, how you doing? Everything go all right?” he asked expectantly.
I had no wish to recap the horrific events of the day with Tommy, and he didn’t need to know either way. This was all just small talk anyway. I knew what he was fishing for.
“Yeah not so bad, bud,” I said as I pulled off my small rucksack. I thought for a second he was going to start dancing on his tippy-toes. That alone would have made the trip worthwhile.
“Hey, Tommy, I found these while we were getting ready to leave,” I said nonchalantly as I tossed him a Yoo-Hoo and a Butterfinger. In all reality it was the first two items I had sought out.
“Thanks, Mr. T!” he said as he wrapped his arms around me. It was a hug of the innocent, something that was going to be sorely missed in this brave new reality.
“Please call me Mike, Tommy,” I pleaded.
“Okay, Mr. T,” he answered as he took a bite of his Butterfinger right next to my ear.
The noise was loud enough to startle Henry who had been sleeping on the couch. The same couch I wasn’t allowed on if I even looked dirty.
I waited for Tommy to finish his Yoo-Hoo, which he was gleefully slugging away on before I asked him a question that had been bothering me the better part of the day.
“Tommy,” I said. He looked up. “Do you have family?”
The merriment in his eyes clouded over in distress with the swiftness of a storm at 14,000 feet. I was sorry I had asked. If I had known the pain I was going to put the boy through I would have left it alone.
“My parents are dead, Mr. T,” he said solemnly.
With the finality and certainty with which he had answered, I was wrongly under the impression that it had happened years ago in some tragic fashion, like a car accident or a building fire. I didn’t press. I had all the answer I wanted even though it wasn’t the right one.
But Tommy continued. “I sent a message and I haven’t heard anything back.”
I stared hard at him for a second, straining to bring my thoughts back in focus, and then I let out a small whoosh through my teeth.
“Tommy, that’s all right,” I said happily. “Cell phones are not working. They probably just didn’t get your message.”
I felt hopeful. I couldn’t stand the thought of this big happy-go-lucky kid being depressed. That would be like the sun wearing a veil.Tommy stared at me like I was going nuts.
“I don’t have a cell phone, Mr. T. I kept losing them, so Mom said to save my money.”
I had a dozen questions I wanted to ask him, but Tommy fixed all of his attention on his Butterfinger, as if to say in a passive aggressive manner that he was done discussing the matter. When I saw the sunshine come back into his eyes, I let it go. I walked into the kitchen, shaking my head a bit trying to get a grasp on the conversation Tommy and I had just had. I chalked up our miscommunication on intellectual lack—mine, not his. I figured while I was heading this way I might as well get a kiss from Tracy.
“Get out of here,” she begged. “I could smell you coming! You’re going to make the food spoil.” And then she flicked a noodle at me.
“Yeah it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I said dejectedly as I turned around to head upstairs and take a shower.
I took a shower hot enough to melt skin, well maybe only on a wax figurine, but it was still plenty hot. I toweled off and changed into some clothes that weren’t going to need to be destroyed. I caught the aroma of dinner cooking and it smelled heavenly, but the pull of my bed was stronger.
You know how people say that they were asleep before they hit the pillow? I never believed a word of it, at least until tonight when it happened to me. Right behind sleep came the nightmares. I dreamed of my daughter (not Nicole, of course it was the woman in the field). She was wearing the tattered blue dress from the little girl at Walmart. She was running to greet me. I had been away but couldn’t remember where I’d been. As she approached, her mouth began to grow disproportionately to her size, and lined in the gigantic maw were razor-sharp teeth. She kept getting closer. I wanted to scream, but it was frozen in my throat.
Spindler walked up beside me and asked, ‘Do you want me to cut her head off?’ I was shocked. He was holding a sword.
I was nodding yes but mouthing, ‘No…she’s my daughter.’
‘Wimp,’ he said as he walked away, twirling the blade in the air. I couldn’t peel my eyes away as I watched the blade twist faster and faster catching and reflecting the sunlight. (Weren’t we just inside?) The blade had ascended as far as it was going to go and began its long graceful descent.
I shouted to Spindler, ‘Get out of the way!’
I distracted him long enough for the blade to do its work. I watched his head roll on the floor, trying to ascertain how so sharp of an instrument could leave such a jagged edge. I looked up at my daughter who was not my daughter. She was right in front of me. Her breath was noxious as she stood eye-to-eye with me, although I knew she was at least a half-foot shorter than I was. Her arms reached out to grab my hands. I was frozen. I accepted her cold embrace.
‘Do you want to play?’
Nothing was frozen this time, I awoke screaming, but my distress was covered up by the sound of small arms fire.
Justin was halfway up the stairs when I got to the bedroom doorway.
“You get your brother and keep watch on the house,” I said to Justin. “And tell Brendon to get his boots on, me and him are going out to see what’s going on.” Justin was about to say something and I had a gist of what it was going to be. “No,” I shook my head, “you and Travis have had enough excitement for the day and I need to know your mom, sister, and Tommy are safe.”
That soothed him, but it didn’t appease him. Rifle fire was still chattering away, something was even more amiss than you would normally derive from gunfire at night. Nobody had sounded the alarm. Jed was going to have someone’s ass for this lack of discipline. Then I heard a sound that was almost as nightmarish as the nightmare I had just woken from. It was undeniably the sound of a machine gun, something that none of us besides me had access to in this complex, and I was holding mine.
“Shit!” I yelled. “Everyone but Brendon upstairs. It’s a raid! If anyone comes in this house without announcing themselves, you shoot first! You got that, boys? I’ll lock up on the way out. No one is getting in without making a lot of noise.”
Quasi-intelligent zombies were one issue to deal with; determined humans with weapons were another. The ‘brrrrpppp’ of the machineguns went off again. I could hear screaming and the sounds of confusion coming from the direction of the clubhouse. Well, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to tell where to look for stuff to raid, with that giant semi sitting out there. And then it hit me, I knew without a shadow of a doubt Durgan and his merry band of insane idiots were behind this. The machinegun I was hearing must be that menacing looking Gatling gun Durgan had been toting. Obviously it wasn’t for show as I had hoped.
Brendon and I were halfway to the clubhouse when we came across our first victim. I didn’t know him well but he was at all the meetings, usually in the back, I think his name was Bob or Hank, Ted maybe. Oh, who gives a crap, his neck looked like i
t was cut with a machete. Whoever had done this was incredibly strong and had been trying to sneak in silently. Damn Durgan, I’m going to blow his head off, I thought viciously.
As we crept in closer we could hear the moans of the wounded, some crying out for their moms. I knew from my previous combat tours that those would be the ones that wouldn’t make it through the night.
Durgan’s Gatling gun lit up the sky like a Christmas tree on ‘roids, it was impossible not to find him. He was about forty feet away from me and looking in the other direction, so when I stepped out from behind my tree, I didn’t expect him to wheel on me with such precision. I watched in hyper-slow-motion as the barrels began their circular route. Bullets began to blaze, first into the grass next to the tree I had been hiding behind, and then into the tree Brendon was cuddling like it was his long lost lover. I heard the discernible sound of the tree snapping; it was coming down but for the life of me I couldn’t remember how big it was and if it would crush me should it hit me. The only thing that saved me was my Marine Corps training; the moment I stepped from behind that tree I had started firing.
My bullets found their mark a moment before Durgan’s had. It wasn’t a head shot, but it was just as effective. I had sheared his right leg off right above the knee. Blood gushed from the wound as he went down hard.
The bigger they are the harder they fall.
Is there any chance I could get a CAT scan in this post-apocalyptic world, FOCUS! My introspection and celebration were short-lived as I felt the buzz of hot lead incredibly close to my head. Brendon began to pop off rounds with his .380, but with an effective range of about twenty-five feet, odds were we were in more trouble than our opposition. My magazine was empty, and I wasn’t even sure of much more than our assailant’s general direction. I pulled Brendon down behind the small fallen pine tree. The branches wouldn’t do much to stop a bullet but it kept our positions concealed.
“Brendon, I only brought one magazine and it’s gone,” I told him. The look on his face was a Kodak moment.
Dejected, he turned to me and said. “Yeah, I popped off about five or six rounds. I’ve only got about four rounds left myself.”
We could hear more screaming. Most of it was coming from the clubhouse, but the majority of it was coming from Durgan himself. The language he was using was making me blush. I wanted to take Brendon and back away so we could first off get out of harm’s way and secondly to go get more ammo and preferably a better gun for him. I looked up just high enough to see over the trunk and was welcomed by an angry assault of hornets, well, more like MK-46 7.62 rounds, but you get the general idea. One of Durgan’s flunkies had us pinned.
I tried not to let my apprehension show in my voice. “Umm, I think moving out of here isn’t going to be an option,” I told Brendon.
“I kinda figured,” he replied cynically.
We were pinned, low on ammo and the damn cavalry was nowhere in sight.
“Where the hell is Jed?” I asked of no one in particular.
“Oh, no!” Brendon said as I watched his face fall.
“What? What’s the matter?” I asked. Unless the zombies were taking this opportune time to attack, I couldn’t understand what had him in such a funk. I then followed his line of sight.
“OH NO, you have got to be kidding me!” I yelled. I think I said something that more resembled Durgan’s vernacular than my own, but it got lost in the translation.
Coming towards us was Tommy. He was advancing as stealthily as a two hundred-and-fifty-pound, hulking kid can. Needless to say he sounded like a bull in a china shop during an earthquake with cowbells strapped to its back, am I making myself clear enough?
“Is that a…a bow and arrow?” I asked incredulously.
I knew what it was, it just wasn’t registering. We had been vacationing in Estes Park, oh man, had to have been ten years ago, back when Justin was the ripe old age of nine. We had gone into a sporting goods store and Justin had fallen in love with a kid’s bow and arrow set. It was the type with the practice arrow tips. It was a safe ‘toy’ unless of course you played William Tell. When we got back to the cabin and Tracy saw what I had bought him, she ripped me a new one. It sucked that I had to wipe two holes for a couple of weeks, but Justin was stoked. Was that too graphic? Sorry.
Anyway back to my backfill story, like any kid he played with it for a good two weeks before he became sick of it. I think there were two arrows left that weren’t either broken or lost. I had put it up in the garage almost a decade ago and hadn’t thought about it since. How Tommy found it and why he was coming to ‘help’ us was a different story.
I so desperately wanted to yell out to him to stop and go home, but I didn’t want to bring undue attention to him either. But how the hell they didn’t see him coming was beyond my comprehension. I was already mourning his passing in my head; I was going to miss the kid. He was like a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and desolate world. He got to within ten feet of our location. I was frantically gesturing for him to come and hide with us. I even rose a little to get him when the angry hornets came back. He just looked over at us and was smiling, Butterfinger mess spread all over his face. He then pulled the drawstring back so far on that little bow I thought it was going to snap in half. He let go, the arrow flew. I knew without a doubt in my mind that arrow was going to hit home. It was divine intervention, pure and simple. I heard the telltale thud of impact. Whoever that arrow had hit hadn’t even had time to cry out in surprise.
“Hey, Mr. T!” Tommy yelled, waving happily. “Do you think they have any Twinkies in there?” He gestured toward the clubhouse.
I stood up slowly, still half-crouching and waiting for someone else to pepper my location. When no one did, I turned back to Tommy. I didn’t know whether to kick his ass or kiss it. I know he wouldn’t have understood either gesture. So I just held out my arms wide. He rushed forward for the offered hug and nearly toppled me over which would have completed the mission the raiders had attempted. I so wanted to yell at him, but that huge grin and the fact that he had saved our lives, well that factored into my decision not to.
“Yeah, there’s Twinkies. Come on.” I put my arm around him and led him past the worst of the carnage so we could rummage through the food.
Little Turtle residents were now scrambling in the aftermath to help the wounded or offer solace to the dying. I wasn’t a medic or a priest, so I stayed with Tommy while the whirlwind of activity swirled around me.
Jed came in a few minutes later to assess the situation. “Good work, Talbot,” he said as he slapped me on the back. “I heard what you did. Most of these snot-nosed hard asses,” he sneered as he said that, “were running in the other direction. I’m glad you’ve got some mettle in you, we wouldn’t have made it through the night, much less anything further.”
I nodded my head slightly in acknowledgment. But then pointed to Tommy, who was gleefully stuffing two Twinkies in his face simultaneously, crumbs littered the floor at his feet. “He’s the real hero, Jed, he took out a machine-gunner with a bow and arrow.”
“Holy cow!” Jed whooped. He shook Tommy’s hand and was a little taken aback by the stickiness of the crème filled Twinkie center that cemented the shake. “You’re a hero, boy,” Jed finished as he wiped his hand on his pants.
“Fank you!” Tommy said, spitting blonde orts, smiling with his teeth all sugar-coated and gummed up.
“Let’s get you home, Tommy. I’m sure Mrs. T is worried about you,” I said.
“Youf toof,” he finished.
“Yeah probably a little worried about me, too,” I concluded.
Jed called out to us while we were leaving. “Emergency meeting in about an hour. I’d like to get this area cleaned up a little first.”
I waved over my back letting him know I had heard. I wouldn’t be sleeping much tonight anyway.
Tracy almost ripped the front door from its hinges when we came back up the walkway. Brendon had already come home to tell them wh
ere Tommy was and that we were all right.
“Are you crazy? What were you thinking? Are you hurt? Why didn’t you just get your Yoo-Hoo? Where did you find that damned bow and arrow?” She was rapid firing questions so fast I couldn’t even keep up.
Tommy’s eyes at first furrowed and then began to water. It was safe to assume he wasn’t liking Tracy berating him.
“Don’t worry, kid,” I said as an aside. “She’ll peter out in a minute.” It was funny watching this waif of a woman tongue-lash a person more than twice her size.
The glistening in Tommy’s eyes broke Tracy’s anguish. She immediately rushed forward, giving Tommy a big hug, getting swallowed up in his arms.
“What, no hug for me?” I asked dejectedly.
She pulled away from Tommy and directed the full force of her assault at me. “How could you? You’re a grown man, you should have known better. What were you thinking? Oh that’s right…you weren’t thinking at all, were you.”
I was backpedaling as fast as I could to avoid the finger of doom she kept thrusting at me.
Tommy’s words of encouragement did little to help me. “Don’t worry, Mr. T, she’ll peter out in a minute!” he yelled as he began to dig into his pockets for another sugary snack.
When Tracy finally looked like she wasn’t going to thrust her finger through my sternum, I pulled Justin aside.
“Justin, how do you know Tommy?” I asked. There were questions that needed answering. Whether Justin was going to be able to answer them was a different story.
“He’s just the retar…” He saw the scowl forming on my face, so he amended his words. “He’s just the door greeter, and I mean, you already know he’s a little slow.”
“Yeah I figured that part out, but there’s something more to him, too,” I said.
Now it was Justin’s turn to look perplexed. Good, now I wouldn’t be alone.
“Did you go and get him when the zombies started attacking the Walmart?” I asked