by Mark Tufo
“I’m so hungry I could eat….”
My mind went into overdrive as I begged the gods that he wouldn’t finish that sentence with ‘brains.’
“… Mom’s meat loaf,” he concluded.
And then I rushed over and hugged him for all he was worth. Not even a desperate zombie would be prepared to eat Tracy’s meat loaf.
I wailed in his arms. I should have been the one comforting him, but I found solace in his embrace. Tracy must have at some point in the night wandered back into the hallway because she flew into the room like a mom on a mission. How had she gotten through the lock? When she saw that her son was still alive and not chewing on his father’s face, she joined in the embrace.
I still had the Glock in my hand; when I finally put it down, it felt dirty. I couldn’t get rid of it quick enough. Within moments the room was once again filled to the brim, only this was a much more merry occasion. We probably could have restocked our water supply with the faucet works going on. I was wrung out when I finally disengaged myself from the fray. My face was puffed out like I had been stung by a hive of pissed off bees; although that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, if a bee stings you, then, by nature, he’s pissed off. Right? Like I said, I was wrung out. I left the array of family and friends tending to Justin’s needs. I staggered to my room and fell face-first onto my pillow. I won’t lie and say I fell asleep before I made contact. I was, however, unconscious before I was able to register the pain of drilling my nose into my ultrathin pillow.
Chapter 16
Journal Entry – 14
* * *
I awoke about ten hours later, more so because of the overwhelming thirst that had even permeated my dreams than from the loud incessant snoring next to me. Now don’t get me wrong, after twenty-something years of marriage, this wouldn’t be the first time Tracy had sawed a log, but it was usually few and far between and usually related to a cold or allergy. This sounded like Paul Bunyan was going for the world record in tree felling. I reached out my hand to gently shake her when I was mildly surprised to make contact with fur. I couldn’t figure out which amazed me more, the fact that a sixty-five pound dog that didn’t stand more than a foot tall could somehow jump onto my king-size bed; or that the impact of his landing hadn’t woken me up. Henry sneezed in my face for my effort. Not the ideal way to be awoken, and I let him know as I pinched his face gently. Henry again sneezed, but I was already on the move. He bounded down off the bed next to me as I groped for the doorknob, doing my best not to wake Tracy. Henry’s stub of a tail began to rapidly sway at the offer of a cookie. That is, if he stayed awake long enough to get downstairs with me to retrieve it.
The house was quiet, not the preternatural quiet before a loud escalating disruption, but one of peace. It made for a nice change. Henry silently padded alongside me as I went down the stairs and to the kitchen, him for his cookie, me for a drink of water. Henry seemed nonplussed as I turned the kitchen light on to find Paul at the table working on what appeared to be his seventh or eighth beer. He startled the hell out of me. Henry was upset about how long it was taking to get his proffered biscuit.
Paul looked liked shit, but what was much more disturbing was how fast he was going through my rapidly diminishing beer supply. Paul offered me one of my own beers. What the hell, it’s mostly water, I thought as I said my thanks and sat down at the table with him. Henry barked indignantly. Oops, I got up and got him his cookie; he was asleep before he finished it. Half the biscuit fell to the floor as his head drooped and his body followed suit.
“Too tired to eat, Henry?” I laughed. “That’s a new low even for you.” Paul took no notice. I sat back down with him.
“Dude, I am so sorry,” he half sobbed.
I wanted to simultaneously kick his ass, hug him, tell him everything was all right and tell him he was an idiot. If I could have somehow pulled all that off, I would have. Instead, I kept quiet, taking a long pull from my beer. He wasn’t finished talking, and I wasn’t finished listening.
“Man, I knew something was going on when I stopped for gas on the way home from work. I was just about to start pumping when I saw what I thought was a homeless guy heading my way. All I could think was that this guy was ‘effed’ up. I mean, he was staggering and even from twenty feet away he reeked.
“I was like ‘hurry up and accept my credit card already.’ I didn’t want the guy to come up and ask for change. If his breath was anything like his body odor I would have puked. So the guy is still stumbling my way and the pump finally authorizes my card but I said ‘screw it’ and hopped into my car to get away from him. I didn’t even care if the next guy to get gas used my card, that’s how spooked this guy had me. I was so happy to be done with him, I figured as soon as I shut my door he would veer off and go bother someone else, but he didn’t. He walked straight into my door. I was about to get out and give him a tongue-lashing but I…I couldn’t get out of the car. This hobo bum, a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, scared the crap out of me. Something wasn’t right about him. He never asked for change, he just kept looking me in the eye. His mouth was moving, but no words were coming out. And his…his skin, I couldn’t tell if it was from the twilight or the crappy lighting at the gas station, but his skin looked blue and streaked with veins. His eyes looked like every capillary in them had burst at the same time. I couldn’t get my keys in the ignition fast enough.
“When I finally sped away, he started walking the way I had gone, like he was going to follow me. I was still shaking when I got to the house. Erin was in the shower, and I had time to collect my nerves and get some liquid courage (cognac) in me. By the time Erin had got out of the bathroom, dried off and changed, it all seemed like a bad nightmare that was rapidly diminishing from my memory. You know we don’t have a television in the house.”
(I so wanted to stop him there and ask him how in the hell that was possible, hadn’t he ever heard of ESPN? How do you not have a TV in this day and age? That’s like a Stone Age man not having a cave. It’s just not natural, but again this didn’t seem the appropriate time to interject.)
“So we didn’t get any news reports. We were just sitting in the living room talking about the day and listening to one of my CDs when I heard this thud.” (I knew that thud.) “It wasn’t at the front door…it was at the living room window. So I’m figuring it’s some bird that smashed into the window, but how stupid does the bird have to be to smash into a shade drawn window? I guess that’s why they call people bird-brained.” He strained a small laugh through his teeth.
“It wasn’t a bird, though,” I finished for him. The memory was traumatic for him and he was having difficulty relating it.
“No,” he choked out. “It was the guy/thing from the gas station and he was holding what was left of Rebel.” Rebel was Paul and Erin’s beagle, about as mellow a dog as ever lived, quick to wag a tail and give a lick. I felt bad for his loss. “I could hear Erin screaming behind me as she was looking at the same thing I was. At first I wasn’t sure what he was holding. It was just a jumble of fur, splintered bone and blood. It could have been anything, I guess,” he sobbed.
After a few minutes he continued. “I had just let him out. He...he was adamant about going outside. I thought he really had to pee, so I let him out. Even with Erin screaming and the horror of what that thing was holding beginning to dawn on me, I was still with it enough to notice there were about six or seven more things rummaging around in my yard.
“My blood was boiling, I wanted to go out and start swinging a bat at these people to get out of my yard, and then Gas Station Guy took a big sinewy bite out of Rebel’s back, he was eating Reb like he was a corn on the cob.” Paul stopped and sobbed for a moment, then gathered himself together to finish his story. “Dude I FUCKIN’ heard him crunching Reb’s spine, he pulled strands of flesh away from Reb’s back. My blood froze. I pulled the shade so hard I ripped it off its moorings. Gas Station Guy was looking right at me. Erin had gone to get her gun. She ca
me running back into the living room waving the thing wildly around like the thing was on fire and she was trying to put it out. I turned to grab her gun hand before she put a bullet in my ass. She was sobbing about how she had to save Rebel. That train had already left the station minutes earlier.
“Dude, I couldn’t think of what to do. I was shaking like a leaf in a gale. I turned off all the lights on the main floor and half dragged Erin upstairs. I was able to finally let her arm go when I realized in her haste she hadn’t even put a clip in the damn thing. So for about half an hour we’re up on our bed in the dark just holding each other. Every couple of minutes I start thinking that we need to get out of here, we need to go be with Mike.” At this point he looked up at me and gave me an anemic smile. “But, dude, every time I thought of leaving, my next thought was of opening the door to the Gas Station Man. Staying at the house seemed like a much better and much easier thing to do,” he admitted reluctantly.
“After a while the thudding on the house got more and more frequent, it was to the point where the house was vibrating from the impacts. By the time the glass started breaking downstairs it was way too late to leave. I grabbed Erin and pulled the attic stairs down and that’s where we’ve been since I called.”
That was news to me. “You called?”
“Yeah I didn’t think I got through, I must have tried a couple of hundred times. I was on my last bar of battery when it finally rang on your side.”
“When?!” I asked incredulously.
“Damn, must have been yesterday morning,” he answered.
“When I went to the armory,” I finished more to myself than him.
“When…when I saw the boys across the street, I thought the cavalry had shown up. When I realized you weren’t with them, I wanted them to leave…I really did. But I also wanted to live. I wanted to be able to protect Erin. You know how that is, right? Trying to protect a loved one I mean,” he said as he looked up at me from his beer.
I nodded in agreement. I know that feeling all too well; and I also knew how it felt to feel as if you had failed. I couldn’t blame my friend for wanting to get help. I was pissed my kids thought it would be a good idea to go and get him though. He stood up and swayed back a bit. He was looking for a hug, which I was all too willing to give. I told him I loved him and that he should go sleep it off, not so much because he was drunk, but because I wanted him to stop drinking my damn beers. Paul felt absolved as he stumbled to the couch. A small smile spread across his lips as he pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell into a relaxed sleep uninterrupted by the interminable pounding of dead flesh against his abode.
I finished my beer and another three as I pondered what would happen when the zombies did break through our defenses. That they would break through was never in doubt as far as I was concerned. How I was going to be prepared for it was another matter. I had no desire to be trapped in my unfinished attic waiting to starve or freeze to death while a bunch of pus-mongers roamed freely through my house. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to immediately implement, but the loud, boisterous snoring of Henry reminded me that perhaps now wasn’t the time to be doing home alterations. There was one thing I could do. I went back upstairs and grabbed my jacket, flashlight, crowbar, and rifle.
It was kind of nice falling asleep fully dressed, it made getting ready a lot quicker proposition. The cold nearly snapped me out of my mild inebriation. What it actually did, though, was a much more pleasant sensation of awakening me fully while letting me keep my burgeoning buzz. Maybe there was an angle I could exploit here if the world ever returned to normal. “Drink Arctic Blast Beer, Be Fully Awake When You Say Something Inappropriate!” I could have a guy give a wide-eyed thumbs up as he grins to the camera after having received a slap from an attractive young lady. “Arctic Blast—When You Need To Know When You’ve Said Something Stupid! Remember Every Offending Remark! Every Hilarious Antic! Every I Love You, Man!”
So, maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!
Chapter 17
Journal Entry – 15
* * *
I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys. I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here.
After some serious prying, I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.
If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.
I went back into the house, grabbed another beer, and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.
Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any, but I still hadn’t finished it, and with the thing now being body temperature-warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!
Paul was in the kitchen getting a glass of water as I walked in and dumped the remains of my beer into the sink.
“I see nothing’s changed since college,” Paul said with a small laugh.
I wasn’t awake enough to catch the barb.
Paul moved on. “So what’s the plan for today?” he asked.
“Ass,” I said to him. I had finally caught his meaning.
Now it was his turn to be lost. “Don’t get me wrong, buddy, I’m always up for a good time, but I’m not sure this is the right time,” he answered.
At first I didn’t garner his meaning. It was going to be a long day if we were always one sentence apart in our communications. I stopped for a second and thought about restarting the whole conversation. It just didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do. I started on a whole new subject instead.
“Well, Alex is going to be using about every able-bodied person he can find to begin setting up defenses.”
Paul looked perplexed, so I explained everything that had happened the previous day with the assembly of zombies.
Paul didn’t look overly concerned, but he was a master of disguising his true feelings. That’s why I never played poker with him. I had every intention of bringing Paul, the boys and myself to go help Alex, but first I was going to need a few hours to take care of some things at the house.
My wife blanched at a few of my suggestions and made me alter a few of the mo
re, well ‘altering’ ideas. First things first, I had Travis go scrounge me up a couple of ladders. I would have sent Justin, too, except that he was still extremely weak from his ordeal. I needed a couple of ladders, lightweight and strong. Two of the longest that he could find should suit my purposes just fine. I grabbed some food supplies and extra water and placed them in my Jeep. I then got Brendon to follow me in his truck outside the complex. When we came back ten minutes later on foot, the guard looked like he wanted to ask us what we were doing, but he just shook his head and let us in. The next thing I did couldn’t have been a bigger waste of a half hour of my life unless I had watched What Not To Wear on HGTV. I reinforced the gate in my back yard to the point where a charging rhino couldn’t have busted through. I didn’t nearly get the return on investment that I had hoped for. I’d like to think that I noticed a hole in my defenses, but at this point I was much too busy patting myself on the back.
The next thing I did had my wife ranting throughout the house that I had completely lost my mind. I don’t know, I thought it was one of the coolest ideas I had come up with. I was under the complete false sense of security that my house was now impregnable. Yeah right, but that is the ultimate beauty of being paranoid…I mean prepared…there’s always something more you can do. Tracy was pissed that I was about to devalue our home. I honestly couldn’t understand where she was coming from. First off I didn’t think we would be retiring here and second, REALLY? Resale value? Who’s gonna buy? I don’t think there is a zombie family down the street looking for an extra bedroom. I could be wrong, as I usually am with Tracy, but I didn’t think so. So I went ahead with my plan and in the midst of it I think Tracy went to the clubhouse to see if there was any rum for her coke.