Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope

by Flint Maxwell

  “I hope so,” I say, knowing my hope is misplaced. If a zombie apocalypse can’t wake her up, then I don’t know what can. There’s mourning, that’s okay. Things happen and you get upset about them, but you keep moving on, and so far, Darlene has showed me she’s not moving at all, not even trying to move on.

  “Don’t worry, little bro,” he says, then turns to look to the dark forest.

  I can’t help but think of the creatures lurking around out there, watching us with golden eyes. It brings goosebumps up all over my flesh. Zombies are one thing in the Florida daylight, but at night, they are a different beast. At night, all your courage disappears, your past zombie slaying experience with it.

  I turn away from the forest, leaning my back up against the railing.

  There’s a drawn out silence. A calm, perhaps. I turn to Norm, already feeling the words bubbling from my lips, already mentally preparing myself for a right-handed slug in the chin or a sucker punch to the gut.

  “Why did you leave?” I ask.

  He arches an eyebrow. “What are you talking about? I never left. God knows I wanted to after the shit we saw in Woodhaven and Indianapolis.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I say. Now, I can’t help myself. The words just come pouring out. Over a decade of questions sit inside of my head, piling on top of each other. I’ve been quiet for the six months we’ve been together, but now the damn bursts. “I’m talking about me and Mother. Why did you leave us? Why did you leave me?”

  Norm snorts, rolls his eyes. “Oh please, Jack, you didn’t like me. I was a shit brother.”

  “No, I didn’t like you. I loved you. You’re family. I’d love you no matter what. But you didn’t have to leave. You didn’t even say goodbye! You just left. Do you remember? Do you remember, Norm?”

  He recoils, the overconfidence usually lighting his eyes up dimming.

  “Do you realize what you did to Mother, to our little family unit? Dad left us, you left us, then I left Mother.”

  “I had to, Jacky. You don’t understand.”

  I don’t know whether to be sad or angry or plain-fucking-ecstatic that I’m finally broaching this subject. So I must look like a madman. My fists clenched, ready for a fight, a misplaced smile on my face, tears threatening to spill down my cheeks.

  “Make me understand,” I say. “Make me!” My voice is loud. If there are any zombies in the woods looking for their next meal, I pretty much give them an open invitation.

  “I can’t,” he says.

  “Was it Mom? Was it me? Was it that fucking town?” I say, my voice shaking. It’s now I realize I’m inches away from Norm’s face. He is taller than me, not by much, but it’s as if I’m towering over him, looking down at a scared, sheltered, seventeen-year-old version of himself.

  “Jack, I can’t…it’s too — ”

  “What? Embarrassing? Painful? Stressful? Open your eyes, Norm, this whole world is all of those things and more.”

  Norm takes a deep breath and looks away from me to the wet wood of the back deck. I’m beginning to feel like a grade-A asshole. Like a bully. Freddy and Pat Huber come to mind. Norm over a decade ago. I’m not that. I strive to not be that.

  My arm reaches out to Norm, but he turns his back on me. “Fine,” he says. “You really want to know? You want to know my deepest, darkest secret? The reason I had to get away from Mom and you—from Woodhaven?”

  “Norm, I — ” I start to say, but he cuts me off.

  “You remember Tim Lancaster?” he asks me. The overconfidence usually in his eyes is not back, but is replaced with a fire instead. The same fire that fills his eyes before a kill.

  Tim Lancaster, I think. That’s a blast from the past if I’ve ever heard one, but it’s a name that brings up a wave of emotions. He was Norm’s best friend for as long as I remember. They were inseparable in middle school. Late-night Nintendo, guzzling Mountain Dew and shoveling pizza, sleeping over all weekend at each other’s houses type of buddies. Then when they got to high school and people started to sort off into different social factions — the nerds, the geeks, the jocks, the drama queens — like I experienced first-hand a year after Norm left us, Tim and my older brother remained as inseparable as they always had been. I remember Tim coming over the day after Norm had gone, long before the first letter from basic training in Fort Benning arrived. He asked why Norm wasn’t answering his calls, why he stood him up for basketball at Red’s Park. I said I thought you knew. Knew what? That Norm left. I handed him the scrap of paper he left on the kitchen table, the paper that mentioned nothing of Tim Lancaster. And Tim nodded as if he understood all of this, then he started crying. I was thirteen. I wouldn’t cry, though I wanted to. I was stuck in that weird limbo between childhood and manhood. Too afraid to show my emotions. That was the last time I saw Tim Lancaster. He moved that summer to stay with his grandparents in Lansing, Michigan. Last I heard, he had gone on to an art school in New York. I hope that worked out for him. I hope he had a decent life before all of this happened.

  “Yes, I remember,” I say. My voice is weak. A million scenarios are playing out in my head. Maybe Norm and Tim killed someone. I know in high school they’d picked up another hobby — drinking — and Tim had a pretty nifty, hand-me-down, shit-brown Mercury they cruised around in. Maybe they were drunk driving, struck a homeless man, buried him, and Norm’s guilt and fear caused him to run. Maybe —

  “I was in love with him,” Norm says.

  This is a very confusing slap to the face. Love?

  “Like friends?” I say.

  Norm shakes his head. He looks ashamed, now. There’s a chair a few steps behind him, rain pooled in the cushion. He falls onto it, crumpling his normally rigid, soldier-like stature into a ball, and sending small sprays of water in every direction. “No, I was in love with him. Love, Jack. Love like you and Darlene’s love.”

  “Norm…you’re gay?” I feel my brain practically explode. My macho older brother…gay. Who would’ve thought?

  “Yeah. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo.”

  “I-I’m not judging. I’m just — ”

  “Surprised? Yeah, I bet. There, are you happy?”

  I hate to shake my head, but I do. “What does that have to do with you leaving?”

  Norm sits up, his elbows on his thighs, face in his hands. He pinches the bridge of his nose as if whatever he’s about to tell me is so obvious that I must have developed a mental handicap after he left.

  “You know Mom — Mother, ” he corrects himself. “She would shove the closest sharp object in her ears if you said the word ‘Penis’ around her. Don’t you remember that one Thanksgiving at Grandma and Grandpa Dean’s house when we were all going around saying what we were thankful for, and I got you to say you were thankful for big tits?”

  “Yeah, you told me they called grandparents big tits in France and everyone would be impressed with me knowing a second language. Mother just about passed out, then she whooped my ass out in the garage, hitting me and clicking the automatic door opener over and over again to drown out the sounds of my screams. I was only six, dude!”

  Norm is beside himself laughing. If the sun was out, I think I’d see tears streaming from his face. I can’t help but smile with him.

  “Exactly,” he says. “She was uppity. I wanted to tell her for the longest time how I felt about men, but I had no one to talk to. No one would understand. And then one Saturday when she was working a double at Gerry’s Diner — or so I thought — she caught me and Tim with our pants around our ankles.”

  I try not to picture this.

  “She didn’t react how I’d expected,” he continues. “Hell, if I caught my son doing that with another fella, I’d probably cut his balls off.” He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands as if trying to rub the image of our mother’s silent fury from his retinas.

  I inch forward. “Well,” I say, “what did she do?”

  “She didn’t do anything. Her jaw didn’
t drop to the floor, her eyes didn’t catch fire and melt from their sockets, she didn’t scream. She kind of just stood there shaking her head, giving us that look — you know the look I’m talking about — while me and Tim tried to cover ourselves up.

  Then for the next couple weeks, months, she wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t hear my apologies. I was lost, Jack. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, I just knew I had to get the fuck out of there and away from her.”

  I feel a spark of anger, remembering how my mother was when Norm left. But I can’t blame Norm. There were times when I wanted to leave, too. Ultimately, I did.

  Norm stands up now. He stands like his normal self. Rigid. Poised. “I know,” he says. “I know I fucked up. I was young and stupid. Scared. Impressionable. One of those Army recruiters stopped me at the mall not long after Mother caught us. I’d just graduated high school — barely, I mean by the skin of my teeth, Jack — and I knew I wasn’t going to college. I wasn’t like you, man. I don’t have a way with words. I ain’t a math geek. The world map to me is the USA, Mexicans, Blacks, sissy Europeans, and Terrorists. I can’t tell you where Iraq is or where the Queen of England sits on her throne. I’m dumb, and the Army had a lot of great benefits for a dummy like me. I met some great people, went to some great places, but I also did some bad shit. Shit I’m never going to live down. If I could go back in time, I would, Jacky, believe me.”

  I don’t know whether to feel angry or sorry for my older brother. So I don’t speak anymore. It doesn’t bother me that Norm is gay; it just bothers me that he left us out to dry. I look him square in the eyes, and I can tell he’s expecting me to punch him in the jaw. Maybe he’d accept that punch graciously, I don’t know, but I have no urge to do it.

  Instead, I hug him, and he hugs me back.

  “You gonna be okay to stand watch?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Abby will take over pretty soon.”

  “Good,” I say.

  Norm and I split up. He must linger on the back deck for awhile because I don’t hear him come back inside. I go upstairs.

  Darlene turns her head to me, says in a sleepy voice: “Everything okay? I heard shouting.”

  “Yeah, darling, it’s okay, go back to sleep.”

  She does.

  I stare up at the ceiling, thinking of Tim Lancaster, of my mother, and of my brother. Sleep comes easier once Darlene’s steady breathing fills the quiet. She no longer murmurs. I fall asleep feeling better than I ever have because I know Norm and I have cleared the air. There are no more secrets. It’s a good feeling.

  7

  When I wake up, Norm isn’t on the back deck anymore. It is early morning, sunlight streams in through the blinds. Dust floats around the entire room, like small snowflakes in the middle of a hot, Florida summer.

  Darlene is gone. I hear footsteps downstairs, laughter. Dishes clank off on another. The girls are fixing a breakfast, out of what, I have no idea. If I had to guess, I’d say it was stale Doritos and flat Coca-Cola. Gone are the days of fresh bacon and eggs and orange juice. None of these sounds are what caused me to wake up. What did it was the sound coming above me.

  Clunky footsteps and out of tune whistling.

  My heart drops to my stomach for a second, thinking the real owner of this farmhouse has come back, then I hear Norm’s gruff voice. “Fuck me,” he says.

  I cross over to the window, open it. It squeals slightly but other than that opens just fine. Norm is sitting near the red chimney, his pants covered in powdery rust, legs almost hanging off the roof.

  “What are you doing?” I say.

  He smiles goofily at me. His eyes are red. I doubt he got much sleep last night. “I’m just enjoying the sunshine, little brother,” he says, then hiccups.

  “Who’s on watch?” I ask, feeling that anger bubbling inside of me again.

  There’s an empty bottle leaning against the bricks next to him. I point to it.

  “I am,” he says.

  “Where did you get that?” I ask, pointing to the bottle.

  He shakes his head. “Which one of you said that?” His finger points at me, but slowly moves back and forth as if he is seeing double.

  “The booze, Norm, where did you get the booze?”

  He looks to the empty bottle, picks it up, closes one eye and peers into it. Then he’s patting it on the bottom, trying to get the last drop out with no such luck.

  “Found it,” he says. “Found a whole bunch of them in the shed. Food, too. But booze first. Glug, glug, glug.” He squints his eyes, then puts a hand on his brow to shield the sunlight. He’s already deeply tanned, but I can see his skin starting to blister.

  “Don’t move, Norm. I’m gonna get you off of there before you fall and break your neck.”

  He shoots up, one foot slipping down the sloped roof. He stumbles, almost falls, and has to grab the chimney to steady himself. “Wait! We’re saved! Look! Look! It’s a car. We’re saved, Jacky!”

  I lean out the window, hoping my brother is just having some kind of drunk hallucination.

  But Norm is not wrong. A car has just turned off the distant road and into the dirt driveway that leads to the farmhouse. Clouds of dust billow around the back tires. It’s a car I wouldn’t expect a farmer to own. A souped-up Dodge Challenger as black as the tar that pours out of the zombie’s mouths.

  Norm jumps up and down, waving his arms. I lean out of the window and try to grab him, but he’s too far. “We’re over here!” Norm shouts. “Over here!”

  “Everything okay?” Darlene says from the first floor. “We got food, Jack. Norm found a freezer running on a generator. Eggs and steak. Fresh. You hungry, Jack?”

  I don’t answer, and I hear her coming up the wooden steps. When she sees me almost fully out the window and Norm parading around on a sloped roof, she screams. Her hand grabs at the elastic waistband of my underwear. The stitches stretch as my body leans forward. I may have survived a similar fall of a roof half a year ago, but I had Pat Huber and bushes to soften the blow. There’s nothing but hard ground to cushion this one.

  The Dodge’s engine revs.

  Another hand grips me around the shoulders, dainty but strong. It’s Abby, and with her help, I land on the bedroom’s thin carpet.

  “We have to go,” I say. “We have to get out of here. There’s a car. They saw us. Norm is drunk and he’s gonna get us killed.”

  “Wait, hold on, what?” Abby asks. “Slow down.”

  A gun goes off. The bullet strikes the chimney in an explosion of red dust.

  Norm wavers, his hand still around the brick, and brings his own gun out with his other hand. He pulls the Magnum’s trigger.

  I hear the tires squeal, the spray of rocks dinging the house below.

  “Yeah, that’s right!” Norm shouts. “You better run!”

  But they don’t.

  I look out the window in time to see another bullet slam into the chimney. Too close. Norm loses his balance, bellowing, and starts sliding down the shingles.

  “Norm!” I shout, and I lunge for the window again.

  8

  Norm’s head is bleeding, his eyes are wide. His voice no longer has that drunken, syrupy sound to it. But somehow, he hangs on to the gutter running along the edge of the roof. “Help me! Help!”

  “I’m coming!” I shout.

  I go out the window, this time more carefully. The shingles are slippery, but my bare feet grip them as well as they can. I jump the gap between this wing of the house and the wing Norm hangs from, and I land with a jarring thunk.

  Norm whimpers. The gutters creak and groan, threatening to collapse and sending him splattering on the concrete.

  I wrap my arms around the chimney and lay on my stomach, all while outstretching my underwear clad legs.

  Another gunshot thwaps, and before the shot’s muted echo leaves my head, I’m showered in a storm of brick-dust. This was probably not the brightest idea, but I can’t let my brother die.


  Norm grips my ankle, but his hands are sweaty. I feel them slipping. The Dodge has pulled up to the side of the farmhouse, parked horizontally. I see gray hair poking out from the open driver’s side door. I see the gun raise, and another shot goes off, silent. It misses me and does the same as the two before it. This bullet strikes dangerously close to my fingers. I can feel the heat radiating from the hole.

  Norm’s Magnum has long since fallen off and I’m too busy hanging on for dear life to shoot a gun right now.

  “Don’t shoot!” I yell. “We aren’t your enemy!” As if I really know that.

  From the corner of my eye, I see Abby hang out the window. For a split second, I think she’s going to start shooting, but she doesn’t. She has a pillowcase in hand and she’s waving it like a surrender flag. It’s not white. It’s yellow. It’ll have to do.

  I think the guy gets the hint because the shots stop.

  Norm crawls up my leg, his fingers digging into my flesh, then pulling on my underwear. My bare ass is visible to God and everyone else, but Norm makes it up the roof.

  His eyes are clear, his breathing ragged. Yeah, plummeting to your death will sober you up real quick.

  “Who are you?” the man from the Dodge shouts. From up here, I can see his mane of silver hair shining in the Florida sunlight. “What the hell are you doing in my house?” He leans into the car and says something in a quiet voice. I catch the last bit of what is said. “Go! Go!” The windows are tinted and I can’t seem to see who it is, but someone gets out, and rushes around the front of the house.

  I scramble to the window, ready to jump, ready to put myself between Darlene and Abby, to protect my family.

  “I want whoever is in the house to come out. No weapons. No tricks. No funny business. I mean it! I got my sights set on both of your friends’s heads, and I won’t hesitate to repaint my roof with their blood. Understood?” the silver-haired man says.

  Abby and I catch eyes. I nod to her. It pains me to not put up a fight, but I’ve already done one stupid thing today, and the day is pretty young. I don’t need anymore blood on my hands.