by Mark Tufo
Fritzy was laughing, it was a blood-filled sound, but it was a laugh nonetheless. “Oh you liked her, huh?” he said laughing. “She was so good.” He was fighting through the pain, trying to hold his insides in place. “Umm, that cold pussy. She was so special. The others always lost the will to live after a little while, but she was already dead.” He laughed again, and blood spilled from his mouth.
I had to get out of here. My head was starting to spin from the smell of the zombie, the discharges, and the insanity issuing forward from Fritzy. The music, the lights, it was all too much. Vertigo was making my head swim. I fought to find a wall to lean against. My breath was coming out in raggedy gasps and still he laughed. I had my head and shoulder leaning against the wall as I pushed to the stairs and potential freedom from this ‘house of horrors.’
Panic began to well up in Fritzy as he realized I was heading out. “You’re going to get help right?” he pleaded. “You can’t leave me like this,” he cried. Now the idiot was seeing the light. I don’t know if he was repenting or fearful his secret would be exposed. “Fuck you!” he shouted, spittle and blood flying forward. “Talbot!” he yelled. I stopped halfway on the landing, thankful that I had got this far. “Yeah I know who you are, the mighty Talbot. I’m only sad I never got a chance to get a hold of your lovely wife or maybe your dau...”
I shot him in the head. Gouts of bile dispensed forth from my overworked stomach, so much for not leaving any DNA evidence. I staggered up and out of the house. The sun still shone brightly, the weather still felt cold, but I felt so different. This was another stain on my soul. I hope they have some version of soul Tide when you die.
I walked through the gate and out onto the back alleyway, my thoughts running rampant. I was trying in vain to steer them anywhere but back to that denizen of death. But like trying not to think of a pink elephant…you get the point.
I’m not exactly sure when Bear fell in next to me, probably the moment I left the small carport at the back of Fritzy’s house. All I knew was that my hand on his back was the most comforting feeling I had felt in a longtime. After the nightmare we’d both been through I think we were going to be co-dependent on each other for a while.
Chapter 23
Journal Entry – 20
* * *
Tracy didn’t say a word when I walked in, my face sheet white, my Glock still out, and my hand shaking. But she about had a coronary when my new friend padded in behind me.
Tommy came running from the couch. “BEAR!” he yelled happily as he threw his arms around the dog. I don’t know if he knew the dog, yelled out what he thought it was, or was expecting it a la Ryan Seacrest. When the dog started licking Tommy’s face, Tracy visibly relaxed.
I walked upstairs, put my gun away, burned my hands clean under scalding water and laid down on my bed, boots and all. The knock on the door came a lot sooner than I had expected. I got up from the bed and stood at the top of the stairs as Tracy answered the door.
“Hi, Jed, want some coffee?” I heard her ask.
“Is Mike here, Tracy?” Jed asked.
“Jed, what’s going on? You look upset…and why are these two guards with you?”
“I told them it wasn’t necessary, but they insisted,” Jed answered.
“Who insisted? What’s going on, Jed?” Tracy’s pitch began to elevate.
I walked down the stairs. “Jed,” I said as I nodded. He nodded in reply. “He had it coming.”
“Maybe so, Mike, but that wasn’t your call.”
“Who had what coming? Mike, what is this all about?” Tracy was nervous the situation was becoming volatile.
“Mike, can you step outside?” Jed asked. I had never seen him so downtrodden. The guards tensed for action. Bear had padded up beside me and was bristling. A low menacing growl issued from him. One of the guards began to move his hands towards his sidearm; he was nervous. Couldn’t say I blamed him.
I laid my hand on Bear’s neck, “It’s all right, boy.” The growling stopped, but the menacing posture didn’t. I brushed by Tracy, giving her arm a small squeeze. “I’ll be back,” I said to her.
I opened the door, and was facing my small escort party. “Turn around, please,” one of the guards demanded. I was going to protest. I have a thing about authority, but Tracy was rattled enough, I didn’t figure she needed to see me get beat down, too.
I felt the cold steel of the handcuffs close around my wrists, not for the first time, but it was the worst time.
“Where are you taking him, Jed?” Tracy nearly sobbed.
“The holding cell down at the clubhouse.” From his demeanor, Jed must have witnessed firsthand the scene at Fritz’ house. I could tell he fundamentally agreed with my handling of the situation, but laws were laws.
The walk to the clubhouse was silent. I waited until I was in my ‘cell’ and the guards had gone before I talked with Jed.
“He was a piece of shit, Jed!”
“I know, Talbot, I went over there. But you killed him. You broke into his house and killed the man.”
“But he had kidnapped and was raping…” I stopped. What did it matter what he was doing to a zombie? If it had been a human girl I would be paraded around as a hero. “How bad is it, Jed?”
Jed’s head bowed, “A council was being set up to deal with Durgan, and now they’ll be hearing your case, too. Talbot, they’re talking about Capital Punishment.”
My head snapped up. I wanted to scream to the heavens. “Oh that’s fair, my life for that piece of shit. I saw his set-up, this wasn’t the first time.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Jed solemnly answered. “We checked out the whole basement. He had a ‘trophy room’ full of pictures and other things…” Jed shuddered, “…of all his other victims.”
“They weren’t all zombies, right?” I grasped.
“Not by a long shot.” Jed looked a little green around the gills.
“But that’s not going to help me?” I asked downcast. Jed just shook his head.
“I’ll be back in a little bit with some food.”
“Don’t sweat it, it’ll be a long time before I’m ready to eat again.”
“Me too,” Jed said as he retreated out of the holding area.
“Welcome to Shangri-La,” Durgan said as he sat up on his makeshift bed, then stood up with the assistance of a crutch.
“Oh this day just keeps getting better and better,” I answered sarcastically. When I turned around, I was face to belly button with one of the biggest men I had ever seen in my life. Even with only one leg, he outweighed me by a hundred pounds, easily.
“It looks like I’m going to make good on that promise I made,” his voice boomed from above.
“What’s that? Not wearing white after Labor Day?”
“No, you little fuck, killing you!”
Did he think it was necessary to clarify himself? I saw no choice. My Marine Corps training clicked on. I pivoted sideways and struck out with my right foot as hard as was humanly possible and was rewarded with the audible pop of Durgan’s only knee being crushed backward. He fell in a heap. The only thing worse than Fritz’ thumping techno music were the shrieking wails of Durgan in blind, blistering pain.
The expletives he issued forth, while colorful, are too long and complicated for this narrative. Suffice it to say, he left nothing to the imagination. He even had the audacity to include my grandmother in some of the more long-winded diatribes. If Durgan was going to kill me now, he was going to have to start at my ankles. I hopped up onto the now empty bunk and watched detachedly as a medical team came in and took him away. I rolled over and immediately went to sleep. It had been a long day and I was bushed.
Who ordered the Molotov cocktails, nobody knows. This is a small fact that will be forever lost in the annals of human history, should there be any humans to bear witness. Was it the result of some bored guards or the initiative of a defense tribunal? It doesn’t matter; the result would have been the same no matter who pulled th
e trigger. It was common knowledge the brain of the infected had to be destroyed in order to stop the zombie, what was not known was what effect fire would have. Could a zombie be cooked to the point where they would be inoperative? Somebody decided to find out. The result was disastrous.
The first cocktail was served three hours after I was incarcerated. The guard had the presence of mind to realize that a bottle lofted into the air would have great difficulty finding open ground upon which to shatter and spread its fuel. At one time in his life, the guard had been a pitcher and a Triple A prospect for a minor league team. A drinking problem had nipped any chances of a pro career in the bud. He called upon all his skills to deliver an old Budweiser bottle at ninety-three miles per hour into the unsuspecting skull of a zombie. Ironically, had it been measured it would have been discovered the zombie was sixty feet six inches away. The zombie fell hard, its skull crushed beyond repair, but it had held together long enough to shatter the bottle and let the accelerant spread to seven or eight of his best zombie friends. The effect was immediate. The zombies burned quietly, the crackling of skin and hair reminiscent of a cold winter night and reading a good book curled up on the couch by the roaring hearth. Because of the crowded conditions, the fire rapidly spread among the besiegers, but the desired outcome of disbursement was not what happened. Again, maybe history would have the luxury of discerning the truth, but the immediate was not concerned with the future. Instead of tucking tail and running away, the milling zombies coalesced and began pushing…into the barrier that kept them away from their desired prize. The guards could only watch on with increasing alarm as the first couple of rows of zombies were quite literally pressed into nonexistence from the pressures being exerted on them. Zombies were erupting like eggs left too long in a microwave. Sheets of viscous bodily fluids flew high in the air. Nearby personnel were covered in the gore; more than one lost their respective lunches.
Between the crushing force of the zombies and the retaining wall, something had to give. Reinforcement two-by-fours creaked and groaned under the added pressure, and cracks began to manifest near knotholes. Boards began to pop with the sound as loud as rifle shots, first one and then a cacophony of explosions.
Guns fired wildly trying to stem the tide of the onslaught, but like trying to bale water out of a sinking ship with a thimble, it was too late. Many, realizing the end was near, took off for their homes. Some stood in shock watching as hairline fissures began to form in the seemingly indestructible wall before them. Some of the residents rallied together, the air trembled with the cumulative shots being fired. The effect was like one continuous clap of thunder.
Chapter 24
Journal Entry – 21
* * *
I had been dreaming a particularly vivid dream before I was so rudely interrupted. The sound of booming thunder had cut through all semblances of sleep. I had no sooner come to full consciousness than the klaxon of alarm erupted. All hell was breaking loose; although, at the time, I had no idea how close to reality I was. I was trying my best to look out the window and find the source of the clamor, but the angle wasn’t right. Unless the problem was in the pool I wasn’t going to find out much information this way.
“Talbot, get your ass over here!” Jed was yelling from the locked door, fumbling frantically with the keys trying to find the right one.
Flashbacks of every horror movie I had ever seen ran through my mind. You know the part where the person that is about to die fumbles with his or her keys, giving the monster in the flick the needed time to catch up with and dispatch the lowest paid actor in the movie. As I neared the door I could see the tremors in Jed’s hands, and this wasn’t the advancing age palsy either; this was the full-blown San Andreas type.
“Jed, take a deep breath, breathe for a sec,” I said to him, trying to instill a calm in him that I wasn’t feeling, and I wasn’t even sure what was going on. Jed looked up at me, and my heart sank. His face couldn’t even be considered ashen, transparent was a better descriptive, I could see every blue vein perfectly etched in his features.
“Jed, what’s going on?” I asked in alarm.
“The end, Talbot, the end,” he answered sadly.
I had never seen him so resigned. I wasn’t so sure now that I wanted him to open that door, maybe I could just ride it out right here. That was an option I didn’t have the luxury of exploring. The lock rattled open, and Jed jerked the door open.
“Get home, Talbot,” Jed said without much inflection. Jed might not be a zombie, but he was dying inside.
“What about the trial?” I had to ask. I didn’t want attempted escape added to my offenses.
“I don’t think there’ll be enough people left in a couple of hours to worry about that,” Jed said, his shoulders slumping even further.
“Oh shit, Jed, it’s that bad?” I asked as I felt my heart drop.
“The wall has been breached in at least a dozen places. If you don’t get out of here and home now, you’ll spend your last time on earth with him,” Jed said as he pointed to the far corner of the rec room slash converted cell where a drugged Durgan was recovering from the ad hoc surgery done on his shattered knee.
Sometime while I had been sleeping, Durgan had been wheeled in on a gurney. It was clear that he was not getting anywhere soon under his own volition. It was also clear, to me at least, that I couldn’t leave him. Yes, he was a murdering scumbag who had personally threatened to kill me and would have carried out his plan if given the opportunity, but even then I couldn’t just leave him. I looked longingly over Jed’s shoulder and the way out and back towards Durgan and the Christian-like thing to do. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t even a practicing worshipper. I was more like a pretend worshipper. I couldn’t even do what the vast majority of other pretenders did and go to church on Christmas Eve. Despite all that, I still went back to get Durgan. He jerked awake as I disengaged the foot brake on his gurney. His murderous black eyes quickly lost their postoperative haze and locked onto mine.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he mumbled. Even half asleep he was an asshole.
“Getting you out of here, the zombies have gotten into the complex,” I hastily explained.
A small smile curved across his lips. He was pulling out of his stupor by leaps and bounds. I was halfway across the room pushing the gurney when Durgan spoke.
“You know I’ll kill you the first chance I get, right?”
“We’ve already been through this, why don’t you give it a rest.”
That seemed to piss him off to no end. Durgan’s body had been reduced to a shell of its previous self, but this was something that his mind had not yet grasped. He was a bully in the truest nature of the word and was ALWAYS used to getting what he wanted, how he wanted it, when he wanted it. Physical intimidation wasn’t just a means to an end for him, it was a lifestyle, so what issued forth next was pretty much par for the course for him.
“And then when I’m done with you, I’ll kill every one you’re close to,” he said as he croaked out a laugh, his throat unnaturally dry from the anesthesia.
I didn’t even respond, I took my hands off the gurney, walked past Durgan and out the door.
“Wait, where you going?” Durgan yelled. “I was kidding, you can’t leave me here. Wait!” he screamed in fear for maybe the first time in his life.
“You’re an idiot,” Jed said to Durgan as he pulled the door shut and locked it.
“Old man, you can’t leave me here.”
“Son, if I were so inclined to help you, which I’m not, I don’t have the strength to push what’s left of you out of here. Your best chance of survival just walked through this door. And to be honest, I’m glad you opened that big mouth of yours, because if you hadn’t, and Talbot had tried to save your worthless life, he might’ve lost his in the effort. There would have been no justice in that.” Jed walked away, not feeling bad in the least as Durgan’s insults faded away into blubbering incoherence.
“Fuck me,” was
all I could think to say as I walked out of the clubhouse.
Zombies were everywhere. Some of the townhomes were on fire. I would later learn it was from the zombies that had been firebombed. The few residents of Little Turtle that weren’t hunkered up in their homes were running for their lives, most without much success. Ravenous zombies were making short work of their unlucky catches. More than one victim would be busy looking over his or her shoulder at their pursuer only to run headlong into the loving arms of another zombie.
I stared in fascinated horror as I watched what was once a guard (I could only tell by the uniform) literally have his face peeled off. The zombie had grabbed a piece of the guard’s chin in its teeth and pulled straight up. By some sheer witless luck his entire face had come off as neatly as a banana peel. The muscles underneath contorted into a scream but were cut short as another zombie ripped out his Adam’s apple. The ragged hole in the man’s neck leeched off what would have been an earsplitting shriek. Blood flowed freely from the faceless man’s eyes. My mind was in denial. It looked more like special effects in a low budget movie. I could not recognize what was happening as truth. This was an impossibility. People don’t get their faces ripped off. This wasn’t Silence of the Lambs. The guard’s eyes locked on mine, which brought me back to the here and now. I would later convince myself that in that state, the man was not capable of higher cerebral thought; he had to be in shock. But in that moment I was sure that he knew who he was, what was happening, and what was about to transpire. The moment was broken when another zombie stepped between our line of sight and honed in on its after dinner parfait…me.
Run! my mind screamed. I obliged. I had to pull out all of my high school football running back moves. At forty-three years old I was lucky not to pull anything else. For every zombie I dodged, two took its place. I figured at this geometric rate I would have to get past 64,000 of them by the time I got to my front door. This was not going to be easy. To my right, the remnants of the wall were being pushed over as the main body of zombies fought to get their fair share of fresh meat. None of them wanted to be late for the party. I was twenty-five or so yards from the front of my house when I realized I would never have enough time to knock and convince who was ever on the other side to open the door before I was swarmed over. And my moments of having enough maneuverability were rapidly diminishing.