by Mark Tufo
“BT, just overdose me, man. Please just kill me.” I begged.
The big man stepped back, shock and confusion on his face. “What? How the fuck do you know my name?” He shook his massive head. “Doesn’t matter. One of the nurses must have slipped.”
Chapter 1
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 1
It was six a.m. and I was standing on the deck looking out over the yard. Normally I avoided getting up this early, but I’d been doing it more and more. At first, I was able to blame it on the very real threat that the vampires or zombies would come back, but the real enemy was even more insidious. I was sneaking cigarettes. One to be exact. I had to have it like a supermodel needs her celery stalk. I know it’s idiotic but of all the things that had great potential to kill me, this fucking stick was pretty low on the list. Even so, I snuck them; they somehow tasted better that way. Not sure who didn’t know about it by this point, though. When you live in a house with, like, five hundred and forty-two people, there are very few secrets.
Trip and Stephanie had sex every night. I mean every fucking night. I’ve heard quieter howler monkeys. I don’t know what she was doing to him but Trip seemed to be a mighty big fan. I’d asked him to keep it down one day but by the third attempt at telling him why, I’d given up. Ron cried his way to sleep; these were the times Trip’s howls were welcome. Gary hardly slept, pacing the floors looking for trouble. I appreciated the gesture, I really did. I just wish he would wear more than his tighty whities and black dress socks as he went out on patrol. Our newest person, Tiffany, fit in fairly well, since she was just as damaged as the rest of us.
It was going to be a good long time before the kids, Sty, Ryan, and Angel got over the death of their friend, Dizz. Nicole was adapting to motherhood as best she could under the circumstances. The only problem was she was running herself ragged. She was too paranoid to let the baby out of her sight, and as such, was not getting much sleep. The baby that Justin and I had rescued was doing well. Or at least, I thought she was. Babies and teenagers freak me out and I try to have minimal contact with both. It’s amazing that I was somehow able to raise three of my own. If not for Tracy I...my thought was cut off.
“Give me a hit of that.” It was Tracy.
“You know about this?” I asked as I handed it over.
She looked at me like she knew everything about me, which was probably true. She took a long drag but did not hand it back. She leaned her elbows on the deck railing.
“You’re going to bogart that aren’t you?”
“What do you think?” She took another drag. “There’s something wrong with that baby,” she finally said, after a moment of introspection.
I immediately got alarmed thinking Wesley was sick or something. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Not him, her.”
“What?”
“Have you ever watched her?”
“She’s a baby. They don’t do a whole hell of a lot and you know I avoid them.”
“She hardly cries and she’s always watching—like she knows what’s going on. It’s unnerving.”
“You’re saying a week-old baby is giving you the willy-nillys? Don’t look at me that way. I’m not giving you a hard time, I’m just trying to get down to what is going on. We already know the baby is different; just look at where she came from. Not in a million years would I discount something weird happening in this day and age. Putting blinders on and hoping for ignorance...that attitude will get you killed.”
“God I hate these things,” she said as she snubbed it out and threw the butt in a trash can.
“Didn’t stop you from smoking the whole damn thing.”
“Get another one and stop being a baby.”
“I can’t—two makes me an addict.”
“This coming from the man that says he snorted lines of coke off the table at the local Papa Gino’s.”
“I was eighteen.”
“So what about the baby?”
“What about her? Not like we take her to a doctor and have an MRI done to see if she has evil inside.”
“She’s going to have teeth sooner or later,” Tracy said. As she stood back up, she was looking at me.
We’d talked about this before. Even if Avalyn was not a zombie, there was a good chance she carried zombie-infected blood within her. The chances she could infect someone were pretty high.
“Tracy, I don’t know what you’re asking of me. Do you want me to get rid of the baby?”
“If she’s a threat, Michael, we can’t have her here.”
“Yeah, I get that. But how do we determine if she is or is not? Certainly can’t ask for volunteers.”
“Mad Jack thinks if he had the right equipment he could test her blood and maybe even be able to look at some slides.”
“Let me guess. The stuff he needs is at the hospital?”
“Sort of. There’s actually a lab about a mile away that has everything he would need.”
I let my head bow down a bit. Going out on runs didn’t usually work out all that well. “I guess before dawn we could…”
“HELP! HELP ME PLEASE!” It was Trip, but his shriek was so loud and high pitched— he was definitely in intense distress. People were converging from all around the house, rifles at the ready. We were a well-oiled killing machine, that was beyond doubt. We had converged on the living room when the next blood-curdling scream came.
“Bathroom.” BT said.
There were now easily ten guns pointed at that closed door.
I put my hand up and addressed the aimed barrels. “Nobody shoot me. I’m going to open that door and then step back.” I knew I was in trouble the moment my hand got near that door. A thick wet stench was leaking out and around the doorframe. Something had mostly definitely died in there. I twisted the handle; it was locked. Ron wasn’t going to be thrilled, but it sounded like Trip was in a fight for his life. I kicked the door in. I don’t know if the door was just solid enough to push me back or if it was the malfeasant emanation that bounced me to the ground. I thought I was going to be sick as what looked like green fog rolled out.
“I can see! I can see!” It was Trip. He was in all his naked glory sitting atop his throne.
“What the hell are you talking about crazy man?” BT still had his handgun up looking for a threat. Knowing BT like I did, he might just pop a cap in Trip for the hell of it. It was safe to say the big man was not a fan of the Tripster.
Trip had huge tears flowing from his eyes. “I was cracking off an oily mud hen when I heard a loud pop and that’s when I thought my eyeballs had burst!”
“What the fuck is an oily mud hen?” I asked. I was still on the floor.
“Goddammit! What is that smell!” It was Gary; he immediately turned away and started to gag.
“It’s the damn lightbulb, Trip.” Stephanie had got closer and flipped the switch a couple of times. I could only think about how many Trip shit-molecules were on that thing. I wouldn’t doubt if her fingers were sticky now. “The light burned out.”
“Kind of like him,” BT said in disgust before turning to head outside.
Folks started to dissipate pretty quickly, unlike whatever bio-hazard Trip had sprayed. I understood why no one took the time to help me up; in situations like this, it truly is every person for themselves. I could blame none of them. It’s just, I mean, there're some things you can never truly un-see, or un-smell, for that matter. Steph had stepped away. Apparently, even she needed a fresh breath or two. Trip stood up, I got the joy of being able to gaze upon his manhood (please tell me you know that’s sarcasm), but that’s not the worst of it. In fact, his glorious joystick didn’t even register on the scale after what I saw poking out of that bowl.
First of all, it was blue. No, not the water or some sort of chemical Tydee Bowl. His fucking turd was a fluorescent neon-blue. Yeah. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you need to remember I was on the floor, some ten feet away. Want to know how I saw it? Sure you do. The thing was up and h
anging over the rim like he had coiled a fifty-foot rope in that bowl and left enough outside to attach a grappler. How is something like that even possible? It was like he’d rented out a few surrogate colons to help birth that thing. I scrambled backward on that floor like the toilet monster was going to come out after me.
“Gonna need a little help here,” Trip said when he turned to gaze upon his creation.
It’s amazing how fast you can move in an emergency situation. I nearly took out BT when I crashed into the backs of his legs.
“Shut the door!” I was referring to the sliding glass doors that led back inside.
BT didn’t hesitate when he saw a nude Trip walking toward us. He just shook his head back and forth as he slammed that thing home. “Go find someone else!” BT shouted.
Trip walked straight into the door like he hadn’t just watched BT shut it. Now I got to add pressed junk to the nightmare image file I was creating today. And even after he finally got the hint that BT wasn’t opening up and left, the clear imprint of Trip’s pork and beans clung like an oil portrait painted on the glass.
“I ain’t cleaning that,” I said as BT reached down and pulled me up by my shoulder.
“Maybe five percent of the human population is alive...maybe. And he’s one of them, Talbot. How does that kind of thing happen?”
“Got nothing for you. He’s good for comic relief, if nothing else.”
“That’s funny to you? Forget it. I forgot I was talking to a man with the mental capacity of a six-year-old.”
There was a silence between us, a relatively uneasy one. Things were very much up in the air and no one knew when they would settle or what that would even look like. BT was taking it hard. Hell, everyone was.
“I know you’ve got something cooking in that head of yours, Mike. Let’s hear it,” he finally said. We were both looking out into the yard.
“Nobody’s going to like it,” I said after a moment of deliberation; I wasn’t sure I even wanted to say anything at all.
“Spill it. Not like anyone else is beating down the door.” We simultaneously turned our heads to make sure Trip hadn’t returned. “See, now that shit is funny.” He smiled.
“We need to move. Like, away from here.” He still wasn’t getting it, but that had more to do with how unclear I was being than how dense he was. “All of us, every single one of us, needs to leave this house, to find someplace else to be—and this is where it gets really hinky—wherever that is, Tommy and I can’t be there.”
“The fuck you saying?” He looked pissed.
“They know we’re here. We in agreement?”
“This one of those arguments where you’re going to make me agree with every point until you get to the end? I hate those kinds, man.”
“Yeah, me too.” I was remembering back to a time I went on a job interview. I hated my current job, shocker. So I found this start-up company that was hiring; figured I’d give it a shot. I’m sure my boss knew something was up when I came to work that morning in a suit. At lunch, I went on the interview. The receptionist looked like she’d spent every spare nickel she had on plastic surgery and unfortunately, she’d gone to cut-rate doctors. It’s okay to have surgically enhanced breasts, I’m alright with that, but these were so uneven as to be unsettling. Whatever—that’s not what I was getting at. The man doing the interview came out to greet me; his suit was nearly as shiny as his greased back hair. Is it like a trademark of shady people to oil their hair? You’d think they’d do more to disguise themselves. Already I was not feeling great about my future job prospects.
“Hey, Mitchell! My name is Dan.”
“It’s Mike.”
“Sit, sit. Can I have Candy get you something to drink? A Perrier, perhaps?”
“I’m good, thank you.”
“You working, Mitchell?”
“It’s Mike.”
“Of course you are, a sharp guy like you. But do you like your job? I mean do you love it? You don’t, and that’s why you’re here. Am I right?”
How the fuck else could I answer that but with a “Yes.”
“Do you like to make money, Mitchell?”
Again I said, “Yes,” because to do otherwise made me look like an idiot.
“I see you have a ring on. You’re married, right? Wouldn’t you like to be able to get that special lady in your life everything she ever wanted?”
The anger meter was beginning to peg. I felt like a donkey being pulled down a path.
“Of course, you do. Happy wife, happy life. Am I right?” He was talking like we were best buds and also like I didn’t want to break his fucking nose for wasting my lunch hour.
“Do you like clean water, Mitchell?” He was reaching under his desk; I was already moving to stand as he pulled out a water filtration system. He had a confused look on his face.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I told him. Fingers of red were traveling up my neck. “I hate being dragged around by my nose. You can take your little water-filter Ponzi scheme and shove it up your ass.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but this is no Ponzi scheme.” He put the filter on the desk.
“Okay, so let me guess how this goes. I sign up and work for you and part of the money I make goes up the chain, to you, to Candy out there, to the asshole you signed up with. Then it’s my job to go and find people that come in below me and their job is to sell more water filters which I make money from and also some of that money keeps trickling upward. Is that the gist of it?”
“Pretty much,” Dan said.
“That’s pretty much the definition of a Ponzi scheme, dumbass.”
“Mitchell, Mitchell, Mitchell! I need people like you. You could sell the hell out of these things.”
“Do they even work? Is there even a filter in that stupid thing?”
“That’s the beauty of the scam—I mean scheme. The filters are only good for a month and then they have to keep buying them from you for $29.99.”
“I cannot believe I wasted my time for this. Your ad looked so professional.” I walked out of his office.
“Wait, wait!” It was Candy. She was standing up from a five-gallon water bucket refilling a Perrier bottle. She was screwing the cap back on as she jiggled her way over. “I have your water!”
“You don’t even trust your own filters in the office?” I asked, not taking the bottle she was trying to hand over.
“We have to pay for them if we use them and they’re real expensive...I should know—I have five at home.”
“You have five faucets?”
“No, silly.” she giggled. “I put them on my toilets as well.”
I just shook my head and left. I was still shaking my head, thinking about it all these years later. “Sorry,” I told BT. “I won’t do it again.”
He nodded. “You can keep going.”
“We can’t stay here—none of us, I mean. They’ll be back. There’s no way they are going to forget the damage we inflicted on them. Even if Tommy and I leave.”
BT “ahemed”.
“And whoever else came with us,” I amended. “They will still destroy everything and everyone left here.”
“Your brother is never going to go for that.”
“I know that, BT, but you’re going to have to convince him otherwise.”
“Me? Why me? I get scared dealing with any of you Talbots.”
“We’re hardly getting along. He’ll do the opposite of whatever I suggest and probably not even realize that’s why he’s doing it.”
“You get scarier when you make sense. The problem is, I don’t know if you are truly making sense or I am just slipping down into your realm. You know things didn’t work out so well when we split up, right? You already forgetting about your pickle juice incident? Sometimes when you walk by at a certain angle or the wind is just right, I can still catch a whiff of dill and vinegar coming off of you.”
“I’ve always hated you,” I told him. “How is it that I’m the one trying
to be serious?”
BT shrugged his shoulders.
“Just hear me out and you can beat me about the head and shoulders afterward.”
“Fair enough,” he responded.
“Tommy and I are beacons; they, or she, can lock on to us. Either we kill them or they kill us. Otherwise, we’re always looking over our shoulders.”
“We whipped their asses, Mike. The one that could command the zombies we cut into twelve different pieces and burned in separate piles. I don’t think she’s coming back.”
That had been a particularly bad experience. Dismembering a body is one of the singularly most disturbing things I have ever done. “Yeah, she’s not.” I had to swallow down a little bile threatening to say hello. “Still, leaves two.”
“Maybe. Tiffany said she popped one in the head.”
“Not a confirmed kill, though.”
“She shot her in the head.”
“How many times did the bad guy’s henchmen swear that they had killed James Bond?”
“Making sense with a spy movie reference? Damn near brilliant,” he said, raising his meaty hand. We fist bumped. “Okay. One, two, who gives a shit. I can’t imagine they are going to want to have anything to do with us.”
“Revenge is a pretty powerful motivator. We can’t just stick around here wondering and waiting for the next time they come. This one will be a lot sneakier, quicker—lightning strikes. Next month, someone will be out planting tomatoes and they’ll just disappear. We’ll be on edge for months...extra vigilant for a while, then a year, maybe even two goes by, one of us will be in the woods collecting berries and...”
“Yeah—I get it,” he stopped me.
“They have until the end of days to hunt us. Striking when we least expect it. We’re like a human Costco superstore sitting here. You don’t go overly often but it’s always stocked high and waiting right where you left it.”
“Did you just equate me to a family size pack of paper towels?”
“Better than a double case of malt liquor.”