by Mark Tufo
“Open the gate,” I told the guard. The voice didn’t sound like my own, it was distant and small, so much so he looked at me to see if I had even spoken. Or maybe he had heard me but thought I was out of my gourd.
“Open the gate,” I said with a little more force, but still this wasn’t much above a whisper. At least I knew he had heard me because he responded.
“No way, man.”
Awesome, I thought. I guess I don’t have to go and meet my waking nightmare. I wanted to kiss the guard, even though he wasn’t my type.
“Dad, where are you going?” Travis asked in alarm.
I could no more respond to him than I could control my motor skills. Why was I climbing over the fence? What is wrong with me? Two decades of smoking pot did this to me. I should have listened more carefully to those reefer madness movies. They seemed much more relevant at this moment. Why wasn’t this asshole guard trying to pull me off the fence? Dick wad!
Fortuitously, or unfortuitously, the razor wire had not been in enough supply to cover the fenced gates. This was made up for with more armed personnel, but that fact was not going to stop my ascent. I literally sat on the fence for a moment, semi-safe haven of normalcy on one side, crazy disastrous immoral face of all that is unholy on the other.
“I’m going to get mom!” Travis yelled, hoping that this inherent threat would awaken me from this possession. It didn’t.
If it wasn’t for the cold protrusions of the top threatening to pierce my favorite unmentionables I might have stayed there for a significant amount of time. I climbed down. As I began to walk away, the guard thrust a small Smith and Wesson .38 caliber pistol through the gate.
“Take this,” he pleaded.
“I don’t think it would do any good,” I answered him. My eyes locked on to his, still hoping that he would find a way to stop me.
Damn legs of betrayal, I had never been so let down by a body part…except for that one time in college (whole different story). I slowly trudged my way to her. She had finally dropped her arm. The smile that formed on her face made every hair on my body stand on end. I looked like I had been struck by lightning. Fear didn’t creep up on me. It ran rampant through my soul. She was not of this earth, at least not from aboveground.
My limbs did not move of their own volition, how could they? What would MAKE me go willingly toward a zombie? My mind raced in circles while my legs plodded on. To the non-discerning eye I most likely had the gait of a zombie. ‘Zombies in the night, exchanging eyeballs…’Zombies in the Night, sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night. I mean no disrespect to Frankie, it was just what was going through my mind.
The ravages of the disease had not been good to her. As I approached, I could see all sorts of parasites had taken up residency. There was a caravan of maggots that trailed from her ripped open left cheek to the top of her semi-scalped head. The cold did little to prevent the waft of her presence. Her dark eyes were almost invisible, sunken into the black flesh that surrounded them. What I could see did not bode well for mercy. The depths in those eyes only led to one place, and it was a lot colder than where I was now.
This was insane. Why was I doing this? Was I hypnotized? Was I curious? Did I have a death wish? I used every fiber of my being to make my steps stop their imminent treachery. It was not any easy process. The zombie girl’s smile faltered. That more than anything made my sphincter slam shut. Hey listen, I’m about as proud to write that as you are happy to read it. What had previously seemed just the cold reptilian stare of predator to prey turned sinister. The fathoms of hell peered into my spirit. It was a good thing my ass puckered up, because I might have rivaled her stink. Again I’m not proud of this.
I could stop my forward progress. The ability to turn around, however, was still being an elusive SOB. The zombie girl watched intently as I tried to impose my will on my own body. Her arm came back up. The pointing finger was back, but it was not directed at me. This time it was pointed towards the mountains. What the hell does that mean? Her arm slowly tracked over to me and then back towards the mountains.
“What? Me?” I asked, being the brilliant conversationalist that I am. “You want me to go to the mountains?”
And then it happened, the soulless sound of the dead, a ghostly whispered keening issued forth from the fissure in her face. “Go,” it hissed out. It was more an exhalation of air escaping from a tightly sealed crypt than anything resembling speech.
“You want me to go? Go where? Away?” I asked in rapid succession. I think I asked so many questions because I didn’t want to hear the rasp of her response. The pulling of dry fingernails down a new chalkboard was infinitely more appealing than to hear one more utterance from this detestation.
“Can I get my family?” And still her arm pointed westward. “Can I get my friends?” Come on, even I knew this wasn’t going to fly. She wasn’t here for prime real estate. She was here for prime beef. For some reason I couldn’t even begin to fathom, I was being given a free pass. Who knows, maybe she thought I’d be too stringy, no, more like gamey. Without a shadow of a doubt I knew this was a one-time offer and it was for me only. If I turned and walked back to the complex all deals were off.
“Why me?” I begged. Her silence only confounded my bewilderment. “I can’t.”
The thin wisp of what some may construe as a smile vanished. As her arm came back down, I could feel the reneging of the offer. She approached slowly. I was going from freedom to food. My brain screamed for flight, the fight portion was nonexistent. This was no battle of wills, I was helpless, like a fear-frozen marmot I waited for the screaming eagle to descend and sink its claws deep into my flesh. I did not even have enough control to close my eyes. I watched in increasing horror as she approached; death would not be swift. My bladder burned to be released. I was denied even that last suffrage of indignity. A fly crawled into her nose. She paid it no more intent than the lice that swung freely from her dirty matted hair. A beetle plowed its way through a small hole in her neck holding a small nugget of meat, a trophy garnered from who knows where. The only thing still working was my olfactory sensors. This had to have been done on purpose. Gorge tried in vain to roar up and out of my stomach. The fetid odor was so palpable, I could see it, I could taste it. Like Campbell’s Chunky Soup, it was so thick I could eat it with a fork. Yeah, she hadn’t cut off my sense of sarcasm either.
Thin strips of flesh that used to be lips parted, revealing black cracked teeth from which strings of meat hung in decaying strands. Her charcoal gray tongue flicked over them, attempting to pull away some of the tastier morsels. She stood toe-to-toe with me, not six inches from my face. Sweat coursed down my body. I shook from impotence and then that stilled. I wouldn’t die fighting, but at least I’d be standing, small consolation. It’s like ‘winning’ a participation trophy in Little League baseball. Who gives a shit.
What would it feel like to have your face ripped open? Would she still my pain centers? Doubtful. I couldn’t tell much from her near frozen features, but still I sensed that she was taking some form of perverse satisfaction from these events. She moved in closer; I would have offered her a mint if I had one. My eyes still were not allowed to close. My vision of her blurred as she moved in even closer. A fly landed on my eyeball. It was singularly up to this point in my life, the most disgusting thing that had ever happened to me. Then my zombie girl topped it, she kissed me.
My innards roiled in protest, my guts churned like a washing machine on spin cycle. If I wasn’t allowed output through my intake or outlet valves this was going to blow a hole through my midsection a la Ripley’s Alien. The kiss was not so surprisingly, very cold, but very surprisingly tender. It was literally the kiss of death from the dead. It doesn’t get much more ironic than that, does it? A Brillo pad wrapped around coarse grit sandpaper applied at 190 revolutions per minute under skin-scalding hot water would never allow me to feel clean again. I was tainted, for fuck’s sake. A zombie is kissing me. Didn’
t she get my bio? I’m a card-carrying germaphobe! As she slowly pulled away, a dark viscous fluid kept us tenuously connected.
The fly finally descended from my eye to land on this small bridge. Her tongue shot out, incredibly long, and pulled the fly into her canines. I swear I could hear the small crunching of its delicate exoskeleton. The spin cycle was in full throttle. A whoosh of haunted air escaped her lips. She was laughing, she had known exactly what she had done and she found humor in her dark actions. She pulled back another foot and let loose her controls.
I fell to the ground, afflicted with crippling cramps. I rolled into a protective fetal position hugging my midsection. Mount Vesuvius erupted. Hot refuse steamed on the cold ground; the whoosh of air that accompanied her amusement persisted. Glad I could be her entertainment. For long minutes I alternated between evacuating my stomach and pulling in long cold drags of air. How long this happened I’m not sure. The pain lessened minutely, by small fractions of degrees is the best way I can explain it. Each breath was better than the previous but only in infinitesimally small measures. It might have been minutes or days, all reference to time was lost, although my cheek touching the ground was rapidly becoming cold and my refused refuse was not steaming anymore.
“Mike?” I heard a tenuously thin voice try to break through the paralyzing grip of insanity that was beginning to blanket my mind.
“Mike?” There it was again, a disassociated voice speaking an incoherent word. “Grab his legs, I’ll get his head.”
I felt myself being lifted and then mercifully blackness sheathed my capacity for thought. I was floating in a white void, but I was not afraid, I was free, free from burden, free from sin, free from responsibility, and then I think I puked again. Not because I could ‘feel’ the sensation, but because I heard the disgust from one of the people carrying me. I found it funny the same way an insane person finds humor in slinging shit at walls. How different was this from that? I was close to the edge, maybe I had even taken that first perilous step over and gravity had finally worked its magic. I was being pulled down into the abyss. There wasn’t a drug invented that would raise this sinking ship. I spiraled down. Whiteness faded to black, cognitive thought became an illusion.
Chapter 19
Mike’s return 12/17
Tracy’s Journal Entry – 1
* * *
Hi reader, this is Tracy. Mike’s journal has not been touched in three days, since he has finally come back to me, to us. I now have the strength and will to fill in the events as they have been unfolding since that thing did whatever it was she had done to Mike.
That fateful morning, Justin had finally arisen and seemed to be getting better. After the initial bliss had passed, the stress of everything came back two-fold. I went out to the garage to try and calm my shattered nerves. Mike had caught me smoking once or twice, but I don’t think it made a connection with him. He looked like he was trying to assimilate his own set of nightmares. At this point, I went to the clubhouse to get some rum. It was that or suck down another pack of smokes to make my quaking hand stop its palsied movements.
I ended up running into a bunch of other wives sitting near the fire drinking some Chablis. The talk was animated, and at first I was reluctant to join in, but I found the conversing and the wine to be calming influences. Hours passed as we talked of all sorts of things, and thankfully none of them involved team sports. My head was swimming in a sea of bliss when I heard a huge commotion from outside the clubhouse. There were three men in the back of a pick-up truck applying ministrations to some poor soul laid down in the truck bed. I stood up as my glass shattered to the floor.
“Mike!” I screamed. How I knew I don’t know. That I knew it was him was unquestionable. I darted for the front doors.
The women stared at my retreating back. “Talk about drama queen,” I heard one of them say. I think it was Cindy. She was a heavyset, dirty blond. I hoped she was a smoker, I was going to make sure she paid double the going price. Bitch, I thought viciously.
They kept talking, but I was already through the doors and into the howling wind. All that mattered now was what had happened to Mike. As I expected, the truck pulled up to our front door. The three men jumped down. One of them undid the tailgate and the other two pulled the prone form of my husband from the bed. I nearly collapsed right there and then as I saw the pallor of his skin. I honestly thought he was dead. The cold air burned in my lungs as I struggled to keep black dots from growing in my vision. As I got closer, though, my initial fear was relieved as I saw his mouth moving. It was, however, replaced with a different sense of dread. Mike was uttering the Lord’s Prayer, which in itself would be scary considering he hadn’t been to church in over thirty years. No, the real problem was that he was saying it BACKWARDS! IN LATIN! My soul was scared!
“What’s he saying?” one of his bearers asked.
“I don’t know. He must have hit his head hard when he collapsed. It’s just gibberish,” answered the second man.
But I could tell he knew this wasn’t gibberish. There was a cadence and a tone to the words that made them sound unholy, and just because he didn’t know, that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel it. They wanted to unload this package as fast as they could; Mike had the greasy feel of evil all over him.
“What happened to him!” I screamed as I opened the front door.
The men rushed past me, quickly depositing their load onto the couch. Both absently wiped their hands on their jackets as if they were wiping off some foul contaminant. They were both backing out of the house as they answered. I got the gist of the story before their eagerness to be done with this foul deed was completed.
I asked if he had been bitten, but his mere presence within the compound answered that question outright. I could find nothing physically wrong with him except for some tar-like substance adhered to his lips. Vaseline, warm water, soap and a face towel finally removed the sticky substance, but I couldn’t help but feel that he had been poisoned. By whom, or for what reason, I didn’t know. What kind of poison can make you speak in a language you’ve never spoken before? The only reason I recognized it was because of the six years I had spent in Catholic school. I had never told Mike about my time there and I had never let him know I could speak and read Latin. What was the point? It’s a dead language…or the language of the dead? My thoughts reared up in one of those ‘aha!’ moments.
Some color had returned to his features, but that was more the flush of the fever setting in than anything healthy. For three days Mike ran to the edge of death and then slowly retreated. Each brush to the proximity of the other side seemed to drain more and more energy from him. The kids and I held constant vigil; each of us at one point or another saying our goodbyes.
Tommy remained silent throughout the entire ordeal. Apparently even Ryan Seacrest didn’t know the outcome. Thankfully, Mike never broke out into prayer again, I honestly don’t think I could have taken it. As close as Mike was to death, was as close as I was to insanity. Our kids were inches away from being orphans, where Mike would be leaving physically I would be leaving mentally. Three times during those three days Mike’s fever spiked to 105 degrees and each time it broke, he shouted a word. It wasn’t until later that I thought to put it altogether, and even then I could make no sense of it…at least not until much later.
She.
Is.
Death.
Mike shouted the word “Death!” and sat up just as the first shot was fired in the fight for Little Turtle. His gaze crossed over the room as he tried to orient himself to his surroundings. How different a normal living room must look like compared with the gates of oblivion. Recognition didn’t dawn on his features until his eyes rested on mine. It was long moments before the glaze peeled away from his visage.
“Tracy?” he asked tentatively.
My chest heaved. A sob involuntarily forced its way through my lips.
“Tracy?” he asked again.
He was still a-sea and I had not y
et thrown him a lifeline. My throat was clenched closed with emotion. I managed to choke out the words that it was indeed me. I saw a beacon of hope shoot through the fog of the war Mike was battling through. I watched in fascination as Mike clawed and inched his way back from the brink degree by degree.
I hugged him fiercely. I kissed him tenderly. I willed him forward, talking softly in his ear, yelling when I thought he might be slipping. Hand over hand he pulled forward, as seemingly eons passed by. Invisibly summoned, all the kids came to bear witness to the unnatural scene unfolding before them.
Mike shattered through the veil like a drowning man might come through a thin skein of ice from the depths of a winter lake. A ghost of cold breath issued forward from him, even though the house was at seventy degrees. His lungs were expanding and contracting with the force equivalent to a man who had just completed a fifteen hundred meter sprint in world record time. Sweat seeped into and dampened the covers he was wearing. His teeth chattered for a few seconds. I thought the force would crack them. And then it was over; his eyes fixated on my own and he looked into the depths of my soul. It was Mike, thank God…and it wasn’t. I couldn’t put my finger on it. He had either lost or gained something in the internal war that had raged in him for three days. The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath, just ask Led Zeppelin.
“Thank you,” he uttered, and he kissed me softly on the lips. He stood up with not the slightest sign of vertigo or ill effects from his sickness.
“Boys, get your guns.” And that was it. He went upstairs to get dressed.
It would be a long time before we talked about what happened. He was reluctant to revisit it; that much was for sure. Even still, there were more pressing things happening and we did not find much time to sit down and idly chat about anything. Survival is an all-consuming event within its own right.