by Mark Tufo
Ben spoke up verbally this time instead of any more unnatural synchronized motions. “I don’t want to take the chance of puncturing the radiator or a tire or having the damn fence hang up underneath. ‘Sides, they’re all across the street.”
I looked at Carl for some sympathy but didn’t find any.
“That’s what you get for being younger,” he quipped.
“Son of a bitch,” I said as I opened the door and jumped down. Jen immediately reached up and locked the door.
I heard Carl mumble something to her as he undid the latch. The zombies weren’t moving forward, but every set of eyes turned to me as I walked towards the gate. I was deeply unnerved. I once had illusions of being a rock star, but if this was what it felt like to have all eyes on you, then fame could find a different resting spot. There was jostling in the back as some of the zombies in the rear were trying to gain a better vantage point to see what was on the menu. Not one of them stepped into the street. It was as if they were made of wood and the street flowed with lava. I could have most likely recited the Gettysburg Address, done a little dance, possibly a crossword puzzle or two, and even relieved my aching bladder before the fastest of the zombies could cover the distance to the gate. I swung open the gate and spun back toward the truck. I walked quickly, proud that I hadn’t broken out into a panicked run, but it was close. I hopped back up into the cab, thankful the door wasn’t locked, and still nothing stirred, not even a mouse.
As the truck swung on to Buckley Avenue, the zombies’ heads turned in unison. As we passed, they began to step out onto the street. For the first quarter mile of our trip, zombies began piling out of every imaginable nook and cranny. There had to have been thousands of them as they ganged up behind us. It looked like the beginning of the world’s slowest marathon.
Ben laughed as he said. “The dead sons of bitches aren’t going to catch us!”
“Yeah at least for another seven miles,” came my pensive reply.
Ben’s smile dropped off his face; even the stoic Carl looked like he had eaten something that didn’t sit well. Jen, however, was clueless.
“What….what’s in seven miles?” came her quavering question.
“Home,” I answered, as I looked in the side mirrors.
“Oh God,” Jen groaned.
Except for the occasional gear grind, the remainder of the journey home was unremarkable. Each of us in his or her own way was contemplating the reality which had just been driven home, no pun intended.
“Ben, stop,” I said. No response. “Ben, stop this truck!” I yelled a little louder. How Ben was even concentrating on driving, I don’t know; he was so far down deep in thought. Carl nudged him.
“What?” Ben asked, sounding a little irritable.
“Talbot wants you to stop the truck,” Carl said, for which I was grateful. I might have yelled it a little louder than was considered polite if I had to ask for a third time.
Ben shrugged. “Fine,” he muttered. “But I ain’t turnin’ her off.”
“Fine, fine,” I said over the rumble of the engine. “What if we don’t go back?”
Ben and Carl looked at me both with expressions of confusion on their face. I didn’t bother to check Jen. I knew she still had her face buried in her hands.
“We saw those zombies,” I went on to explain. “They’re following us to see where we’re going. If we don’t go home they can’t get to our loved ones.”
Jen sobbed in response.
“Now hold on, Talbot, I only saw a bunch of zombies milling about in a street. You can’t for sure say they were following us,” Ben said in reply.
Carl forged on. “And even if they were following us, and I said ‘if,’ what makes you think they can track us to our home. They’re stupid brain-dead flesh eaters!” he yelled. It was the most emotion I’d seen out of him all day. He might be trying his best to not look riled, but this development was getting under his feathers.
“You saw Hector and the pliers, they’re not completely brain-dead,” I said evenly.
Carl’s face smoldered. Ben was looking from Carl to me in an attempt to garner some much needed information.
“Who’s Hector and what does a pair of pliers got to do with anything?” Ben asked.
Carl began anew, but not in response to Ben. “That still doesn’t make them Einstein wannabes, or Davy Crockett trail tracker wannabes for that matter.” Carl was going to take some serious persuading.
“Listen, Carl,” I directed my dialogue towards him. Where Carl led, Ben would follow. “There’s something different about these zombies.”
Carl arched his eyebrow. “Different how? And what exactly does a zombie act like?”
I spent the next fifteen minutes relating everything I knew about zombies, learned from movies, books and comics. Sure, it was an imperfect argument, how could I possibly make an informed judgment about our fact-based reality when I was using fiction-based perceptions. The only hard facts I could give them were my observations of that woman zombie, the one that had killed Spindler. None of them had been there; my explanations fell on deaf ears.
Carl was of the mind to give me the benefit of the doubt, but I hadn’t given him anything solid enough to leave what was left of his family and friends behind. Without Carl my words fell on the deaf ears of Ben. Jen was no one’s ally.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” Carl said. “The zombies, them I believe in. Hector was just an aberration, some legacy memory. The girl? I think she was a specter of an imagination in overdrive.”
I was pissed. “Carl, I’ll admit, I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life and I went to war. But I’m not a hysterical person. I did not imagine that girl showing me Spindler’s head and nodding. I’m sure she was repaying a favor. That shows intelligence.”
“You’re pretty sure, Mike, but you’re not absolutely sure,” he fired back.
“Of course I’m not absolutely sure. How the hell could I be? They’re zombies!” Anger filled my voice.
“Maybe they are following us and maybe they’re not. I’m not about to give up the rest of my life on a hunch. And I’d rather be with my family if this is the end than traveling the highways waiting for this truck to run out of gas. Are you so ready to leave your family behind?” he finished.
Those words stung. “If it meant they’d be safe,” I said, although without much conviction.
“Odds are, Talbot, some group of flesh eaters are going to find our little haven sooner or later. I’d rather be there to help defend, than up by the Nebraska border,” Carl finished with a softer tone.
I had nothing left to say. He was right, and now I felt crummy for arguing against him.
“We good now?” Ben asked. When Carl nodded in agreement, Ben put the truck back in gear. The small heave forward brought forth another small sob from Jen.
I could not help feeling like we were the Pied Pipers of Death as we rolled towards home. Instead of leading rats away, we were leading the zombies to their promised land. This was a funeral procession, of that I had no doubt, whatever Carl thought. The truck had no sooner pulled in to the complex when I hopped off, it was still rolling. I headed out to find Jed. It didn’t take me long. He didn’t usually wander too far off from the clubhouse. I was relieved to see the old fart.
“Welcome back, Talbot,” Jed said. I could tell he had some sort of jest to say but when he saw the look of consternation on my face he held his tongue.
“We’ve got to call an emergency meeting, Jed!” My voice was forced from the adrenaline.
“Now hold on, Talbot, it’s getting late and folks have been working hard all day. And that’s not even including the ones that buried their kin, neighbors, or friends. They need time to mourn,” Jed finished.
“Jed, I’m not trying to be an ass or an alarmist, but if we don’t have a meeting and real soon, we might be burying a lot more people. I don’t necessarily want the whole population, just essential personnel,” I said.
That go
t Jed going, he wasn’t thrilled about it, but he would have an assembly together within the hour.
“Thanks, Jed, and make sure Alex is one of those essentials,” I told him.
“I’ll try, Talbot, but he looked exhausted,” Jed added resignedly.
These are the stories that happened AFTER I left to go to the armory, you don’t even want to know how pissed off I got when I found out.
Chapter 13
Justin woke as soon as he heard the front door open. He had always been a light sleeper, and now, with the way things were, it had only gotten worse. He came upstairs and watched as his father walked off towards the clubhouse in the predawn quiet. He thought about following him, but first off it wasn’t much above five degrees out and he was in shorts and a tank top, and second, if his father wanted him along he would have come and gotten him. Justin’s dad was a former Marine, a strong disciplinarian and an anal compulsive man. If he wanted something done, he was not afraid to tell any of his kids to ‘get it done and get it done now.’ Knowing his dad like he did, Justin always thought it was funny how his father always deferred to his mother. Dad was the boss of the kids and Mom was the boss of Dad. That was the hierarchy. For the most part Mike Talbot had mellowed with age, but when something got him riled, all hell broke loose, and it would take all of Tracy’s calm demeanor to put the genie back in the bottle.
Justin turned back towards the kitchen to get a bottle of water when he noticed his father’s Blackberry lying on the table next to the sofa. Back in the ‘normal’ days, his dad had the Blackberry almost surgically attached to his hip. To see the phone was to see the man. Nowadays the phone was not much better than a paperweight. Cell service was sketchy at best. It wasn’t even worth carrying it. That was why Justin was puzzled when he saw a red light blinking, the telltale sign of a message waiting. This was intriguing to Justin. Sure, they still had electricity, thanks to a network of generators. But television was, for the most part, nonexistent, except for some news, and they weren’t broadcasting anything new. Telephones and cell phones were rapidly becoming instruments of the past.
Justin was tempted to wake his mother and see if she would listen to the message, but if it was a spectral collection call and he woke her for that, there would be hell to pay. He decided to wait a few minutes for his dad to return. When it didn’t look like that was going to happen right away, he figured he’d get some clothes on and track him down. Justin no sooner came up from the basement wearing more respectable seasonable clothing when he heard and then saw the tractor trailer head out the front gate. Without actually seeing his dad, he knew for a fact his father was on that truck.
“Dammit,” he muttered. This meant it was going to be the better part of the day before he found out what the message was…or from whom.
What if it’s Pops? he thought. Pops was his grandfather from back East. Nobody had heard from any of the East Coast Talbots since the zombie plague had begun. All the kids loved Pops. Where Dad was hard and angular, Pops was soft and easygoing. Not one of the kids could ever remember Pops raising his voice, unless of course it was to tell everyone that dinner was ready.
Only Mike knew differently. Pops Talbot had also been a Marine. If anything, Mike at this age was infinitely calmer than his father had been. Mike remembered the days of his youth. If he had been caught doing any one of the myriad of things his father considered inappropriate, his hands would be bleeding from the task of digging holes and then filling them back in. The kids thought Pops was a saint and Mike had no wish to smash their illusions. He loved the old man more than the Man Code would allow him to say, but the fact remained, he knew another side of the old man the kids didn’t.
Justin had never messed with his father’s phone, first because of the privacy issue. Mike had striven to drive that into all of his offspring. Trust is a sacred institution, and once it is shattered it is nearly impossible to put back together with the same integrity again. And second, because Mike probably would have been able to tell Justin was trying to listen to his messages by the way Justin would have had to position himself with his ear next to his dad’s hip pocket.
Mike also knew kids were curious by nature, if given the chance they would find all sorts of new and unusual ways to get into trouble. His goal had always been to remove as many opportunities as possible and, well, the rest will follow.
Justin didn’t think it would be a big breach of trust if he just checked the call log, and if it was Pop’s he could have his mom breach the code. Fumbling with the phone, Justin had a frozen moment of guilt and almost put the phone down, but his inquisitive mind wanted to know. What he saw disappointed him more than he thought possible. Something had been lost in the electronic netherworlds because the Blackberry screen only showed: “**u* **r* 7***2***5*”
Oh, that’s crap! he thought. He had finally built up enough pluck to even look at the screen and his reward was gibberish. Justin didn’t hesitate long—in for a dime, in for a dollar—so he pressed the voice mail button.
“…(Garble)…(static)…can’t…(static)….want….(garble)…fell…(dial tone).” ‘End of message, to save message press 7, to delete, press 9’. Without even thinking, Justin pressed 9. ‘Message deleted’, came the officious voice. ‘There are no new messages.’
Justin broke out into a cold sweat when he realized what he had just done. Oh crap, the old man’s gonna have my ass for this. He was half tempted to erase the call log and further hide his evidence of tampering, but he couldn’t do it.
The message may have been incomprehensible, but the voice was not. It was his Uncle Paul, not by blood ties…but maybe by something even stronger. His dad had known Uncle Paul for almost thirty years. They had grown up together in a small suburb outside of Boston. They had done everything together from playing football and baseball on the city and school teams to exploring an old Indian Burial ground aptly named Indian Hill. So when Paul’s family moved away in their sophomore year of high school, they had vowed to remain friends forever. But things for teens happen at a different pace than the rest of the world. There are girls and Friday nights and football and countless other distractions to keep them occupied. Sometimes the two friends would go for months at a time without communicating, always able to pick up the easy flow of conversation as if only hours had passed. So it was almost not even a surprise when the two realized that unbeknownst to the other, they had both applied for the same college, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. For four years they did not so much ‘attend’ the school as they ‘frequented’ it. The two were much more interested in the social aspects of college rather than any educational benefits.
When Paul went on the five-year degree program, the two parted ways again. Mike, under some heavy lobbying from his then girlfriend, Laurie, moved to Colorado. After a few months of the ‘we are so grown up and in love’ phase, Laurie and Mike’s relationship soured by degrees until finally they broke up.
The break up affected Mike more than he had known. Booze was becoming more and more of a crutch to get through the lonely nights. After one intense drinking session and a 3:00 a.m. call to his friend, Paul flew out to Colorado. It had been eighteen months since they had seen each other but it might as well have been eighteen minutes. The deal was sealed. Mike packed up everything and drove back East to live with his friend Paul who now lived in New Hampshire.
Mike knew without a shadow of a doubt that Paul had saved his life by flying out to Colorado, just as surely as Mike had saved Paul’s by pulling him out of a burning car some years before. Living with Paul had begun Mike’s healing, but still the booze beckoned. Five years with the love of his life suddenly over was not easily forgotten. Mike knew he had to make a radical change, so when he came home one night and told Paul he had enlisted in the Marines. Paul nodded in understanding but internally was conflicted, if anything the two of them were peaceniks or, at worst, apathetic.
So once again the brothers from a different mother went their separate ways. For five year
s Mike lived in dirt and battled foreign enemies. Whenever he could, he would contact his friend Paul, just so he could be reminded there was a world still out there where being shot at every day was not the norm. If anything, this separation strengthened their bond.
It was during the Marines Corps days that Mike met, married and began a family with Tracy. Paul had also married and moved back to Massachusetts. So when Mike told Paul that he was bringing his family back to Massachusetts once his current tour was over, Paul had nearly giggled with glee, or at least as much as was acceptable by the Man Code. Mike was two months away from his discharge from the Marines when he received a disappointing call from Paul. Paul’s marriage had acidified. The break up was imminent. Paul decided he needed the comfort of his family, who had in the meantime moved to North Carolina. Mike was understandably disheartened.
For a couple of years Mike toiled at the family business in downtown Boston while Paul attempted what Humpty Dumpty had tried many years before. He began to put the pieces of his life back together. The two miscreants were able to get together a couple of times during this period and subsequently just tore the living crap out of their livers, reveling in the ‘good old days.’ It was after one of those lost weekends that Tracy announced to Mike that her father was terminally ill and she was moving back to her home state of Colorado with or without him. (Flash back to the part about who’s the boss.) The house was on the market the next day. Within a week the U-Haul was packed and the Talbots were heading out West.
Mike and Paul kept in more communication than they had during their previous hiatuses, so Mike knew almost right away when Paul became serious with his on again-off again girlfriend Erin. Erin was good people. She saw some excellent qualities in Paul and knew this was the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Paul, after already going through a nasty divorce, was not in so much of a rush. Erin, however, was skilled and patient in the ways of the heart. She didn’t push Paul, but she was wily enough to keep him on the hook. For three years they played this game of cat and mouse, Paul always thinking he was a word away from being able to break up and Erin believing she was a word away from getting his commitment.