As if on cue, Abby looks at Brian, smiles and says, “Great way to put it…‘medical shit’.”
“You can help him? You swear?” Darlene asks.
“I’ll do my best to help your husband, ma’am. Just like he helped me,” Tony says.
She nods gratefully. I wonder what is going through her mind, whether she thinks I’ll actually die from a bullet graze or the fact that her and I never actually got married. We are perpetually engaged. There are not many working chapels these days nor are there many places where I can drop a bunch of money on a wedding ring.
“Besides,” Tony says, “I think owe all of you guys one.” He turns to face us again. The bottom of his eyes are wet, threatening tears. “You were right, Jack. I can’t keep living in the past. There is hope in the future.”
Brian puts his open hand on the back of his father’s neck and gives a little squeeze. Tony’s hand settles on top of his son’s.
“They are in a better place now. It was selfish of me to keep them around like that,” he says.
I can only nod. The anger and shock in my head is all but fizzling out, replacing with sadness. A deep, painful sadness not only for the Richards family, but for this world in general.
I think of Norm, then, and a man named Spike, cutting his fingers off, torturing him.
22
We get back to the farmhouse in what I would consider a blur. I blame fatigue and shock and all sorts of other emotions I never want to feel again.
Somehow, we all stuffed into the Richards’s Dodge. I actually had to sit on Darlene’s lap because she refused to sit on mine because of my injuries. Screw emasculation, it was comfortable. Brian had had a handkerchief in his back pocket. He tied it tight around the wound on my arm and confirmed that it was just a graze and I’d heal fine with the proper stitching and ointment application. He also told me he wrapped the wound with the side he doesn’t blow his nose on, then he gave me a wink.
I didn’t laugh. That was not a time for laughter.
Now, as I climb out of the Challenger, looking at the farmhouse’s roof where my brother had puked off the side, I do laugh. There is no humor in the laugh. It is the laughter of a man whose insanity has been hanging on by a thread and who has just realized that thread has snapped.
I laugh so hard, it hurts my stomach. I laugh so hard, more blood spurts from the wound on my arm.
Darlene gets out after me. She is concerned, she is always concerned.
“Come on, let’s get him into the house,” Tony says.
Someone grabs my arm and ushers me up the front steps.
The sunshine is gone, no longer roasting my skin, warming me, and I’m in the house, which is considerably cooler but still stuffy. I feel a sense of claustrophobia creeping up my throat as if I am choking.
Brian guides me to the same kitchen table where we had our first meeting — at gunpoint — not even a day ago, but that time I had Norm with me. Even if he was a little drunk, I still felt better. This time, my arm is burning, I am suffering from insanity, and my brother is nowhere to be seen.
“Lay your arm down,” Brian says.
I do.
He starts to work at the knot of the handkerchief. Soon, Darlene is at my side. She says, “You can squeeze my hand if you want. This might hurt a little, honey.” She uses the sweet voice that she always uses when she wants something, or when she wants to prepare me for bad news.
Tony rummages in the other room, throwing pots and pans and junk and books around like he’s a dog digging a hole in loose dirt. “Got it,” he says. “That brother of his didn’t drink all of it.” His voice wavers in my ears.
I feel like I am falling. I feel like a failure.
I remember Ryan, the janitor at the Woodhaven Rec Center, screaming and crying as Miss Fox poured peroxide on his wound. Granted, his wound was much deeper, but that doesn’t do much to calm me down.
“Herb, I’ma need you to hold him,” Brian says. He reaches his hand out to grab the clear bottle. When he pops the cap off, a smell of pure, diesel-grade alcohol explodes from the mouth. I’m talking the type of shit you pour into jet engines. It snaps me out of whatever fugue state I’m in. I see more clearly, think more clearly. It’s a miracle really, and a bit ironic because if I took a sip of that stuff, I’d be worse off than I was before.
“Darlene,” I say.
She looks at me, her face bunched up.
I hold out my hand. “I’ll take it now,” I say.
She smiles, and we lock hands.
“How cute,” Tony says, then, “Herb, come on,” as he points to my arm on the table. Herb is apprehensive. A big man trying to hide in the shadows and not doing a very good job, but he steps forward. His large hands pin my arm down at the elbow.
“Glad you asked for my permission,” I say to him. His eyes widen. “No, I’m just kidding,” I say.
“Ready?” Brian asks.
“Do your worst.”
He pours the alcohol on the wound. I scream so hard, my lungs burns. My knees clatter against the underside of the table and despite Herb putting all his weight on it, it still lifts up about six inches. Abby puts a hand over my mouth. I feel the skin around the wound bubbling and fizzling like one of those science fair baking soda and vinegar volcanoes.
Then, it’s over.
Brian is patting my arm with a bleach-white towel. The skin is numb. I wouldn’t know he was doing that if my eyes weren’t bugged out of my head. Tony produces a small, black leather bag and a pair of reading glasses from a case in his back pocket. He puts them on the end of his nose. He has never looked more like an old man than he does now. I’m just waiting for him to fall over and break his hip.
Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! Like those weird infomercials of the old world we all used to laugh at. I’d give anything to see one of those commercials again. Give anything for it to be three in the morning, Darlene sleeping in the room next to me, her soft snores acting as a soundtrack to the muted television playing while I finally finish that damn werewolf book I left back in Woodhaven. I know it’ll never happen, but a guy can dream, can’t he? Maybe even continue Johnny Deadslayer’s tale with all this real-life inspiration.
Tony sticks me with a sewing needle and I barely feel it at all. I have no idea how Norm could’ve drank a whole bottle of this liquor and not died.
“Are you okay?” Darlene asks.
Abby removes her hand from my mouth, thank God.
“Yeah,” I say, spitting a little, “I don’t feel a thing!”
“I think you can let go of Jack there, Herb,” Brian says. “The absinthe seems to have done the trick. Ain’t nothing like it, I tell ya. Dad should’ve sold it to hospitals all over the world. We’d be millionaires. Not that it matters anymore…” he trails off.
“Yeah, and airports, too. Goodbye gas and oil crisis,” I say.
This garners a few laughs from the group. Nervous laughs. Real laughter in this dead world is hard to come by.
“No, I’ll stick to drinking it,” Tony says after a moment of prolonged silence. He reaches out, grabs the bottle and swigs the last gulp.
“Do you think you should be drinking while you’re sewing up my fiancé?” Darlene asks.
Tony nods. “Helps steady the hands.” Then he’s back to work. Stitching me up and me not feeling it.
“Do you think we should really be sewing me up when my brother is out there with Major Asshole?” I say.
More chuckles, bleeding closer and closer to real laughter.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Son, you rush into Eden, even at full strength, they will eat you alive,” Tony says. “You would’ve gotten here six months ago when society was still kinda running and before Butch and Spike took over, you’d be looking at totally different story. You would’ve gotten a hot meal every night, the finest medical care, a warm bed to share with your lovely gal here, and whatever else you wanted, but not no more.”
We hadn’t heard ab
out Eden six months ago, or believe me, we would’ve been there. Of course, there are other places with the same promises as Eden. Places where the walls were high and the ammunition was endless. They would let us in because Norm was a much needed soldier, in the raging zombie war. But those places are usually overrun, the fences collapsed, the buildings burned to the ground by some martyr who thought they could save us all by burning themselves.
For some reason, Eden is different. It was our last vestige of hope and now it’s dashed.
“Won’t they know you live here?” I ask.
Tony shakes his head.
“No, this ain’t our house,” Brian says. “Well it is now, but it wasn’t before.”
Tony is too busy stitching me up. He is on the last half of the deep gash. Only a few more minutes of torture.
“But the picture,” I say. “I saw the picture on the mantle. That was you guys.”
“When you’re running for your life,” Tony says, “you grab only your most important possessions. That picture is one of them. We’re originally from Mississippi.” He squints his eye, his tongue lolling out from the corner of his mouth, and I feel a sharper burst of numbed pain than the ones before. He loops the thread and pulls.
I bite my tongue to avoid screaming like a little girl. The old Jack Jupiter would do that, not this new and improved zombie killer.
“There, all done,” Tony says.
I bring my arm back to my side, examining the wound. It hurts just to do that.
“Just need a bandage and it’ll heal up in about a week,” Tony says.
“Were you a doctor?” Abby asks.
Tony shakes his head. “I sold insurance. Terrible job,” he says. “I was close to killing myself every Monday through Friday.” He smiles as if he is joking, but somehow I don’t think he is. Everyone in the nine-to-five world is basically the same, at least in my experience. They’re looking for something to shake up the way things are so they can get that three day weekend or extended vacation. Snowstorm, power outage…plague.
Well, we got it.
“I went to the Mississippi State,” Brian says. “Graphic design.”
“Really? That’s cool,” Abby says. She blinks at him like a girl in love. I can already hear the wedding bells. “I was going to go to Ohio State. I’d actually almost be a sophomore now if none of…well, you know.”
“This is great and all,” I say, kind of annoyed. There’s bigger things here to worry about than our old lives. “But my brother is in the clutches of some crazy Army general and we are not there helping him.” I get up from the table, the pain from my wound barking as I do so.
“Uh-uh, soldier,” Tony says. “Going to Eden now would be suicide, especially hurt.”
“Then I’ll go alone,” I say.
Darlene grabs my bicep. “No,” she says. “I’m not going to lose you.”
“Darlene, I have to do what I have to do. You understand,” I say.
“Let us go with you, Jack,” Abby says. “But wait, just wait. Let us rest and regroup. We’ll hit them harder this way.”
“They won’t see us coming,” Darlene says. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
“They see everything,” Tony says.
Brian nods, his eyes fixated on me. All of their eyes are.
I just smile. I will leave them if I have to, gone while they’re sleeping, back before they wake up with my brother in hand.
The sun has started to go down, but I am still sweating. I shake, too. With pain, with anger, I don’t know. It’s a combination of a lot of emotions because I know my brother was there when I needed him the most back in Woodhaven. Forget all about him leaving Mother and I and joining the military. I know why he did it and he’s apologized, and he saved Darlene when I couldn’t. If it wasn’t for him being there that July 4th weekend, she would’ve been devoured by all the people I grew up hating. So I can’t leave him there, not even for a night.
“They won’t kill him if that’s what you’re worried about, Jack,” Tony says. “They’ll want all the information out of him they can get. Spike takes things extremely…personal.”
Herb leans away, back to the cover of the shadows he was in earlier. For a second, I think he is going to run. He doesn’t. Just the mention of Spike seems to bring him to his knees.
Still, I voice my opinion on that matter. “I’m not waiting for them to beat him to death. I am going in there and I’m going to kill every last one of those camouflaged bastards.” My voice is like a serrated blade sawing through bone.
Tony comes over to me. He puts both hands on my shoulder. There is a brief moment where I think he is going to wring my neck, maybe slap some sense into me.
“Listen to me, Jack,” he says, gripping me tighter, “you are not in your right mind. You have experienced a great stress. We all have. Norm will be hurt, I won’t lie to you, if I saw correctly, he was already shot in the leg. But Spike won’t kill him this quick. That, I promise.”
I take a deep, steady breath to calm myself, escaping Tony’s grasp as I do so. I lean up against a large cabinet that fits as perfectly as a Tetris piece into the corner of the kitchen. The fine China dishes inside jingle as I do so. Some dust drifts down from the top. My nose tickles like I’m about to sneeze and I really don’t want to cover my mouth with the burning sensation in my arm already revving up to its maximum intensity.
“You’re right,” I say, already planning my midnight escape.
“Just give it one more night. Let’s plan this out first before we go in there guns-a-blazing,” Tony says.
I nod. That is the smart choice, the right one. Then I cross the kitchen tile into the living room where the dead TV stares at me, the waning sun going down behind it.
Something moves outside, a shadow, a silhouette. Slow, lumbering movements.
I part the curtains to see glowing yellow eyes. It’s just the one at first. One that has strayed from its pack. One that has taken to hunting the night too early while its pack mates wobble from one dead foot to the other, decomposing quicker in the scorching Floridian sun.
Then, I see more. Their yellow eyes glinting with dying light. Each one flicks on like street lamps in an abandoned neighborhood as darkness grows closer.
I blink and they’re gone. Maybe I do need some rest.
23
“Are you feeling all right, Jack?” Darlene asks.
We sit in the upstairs bed, the covers still rumpled from our previous night’s stay.
I shake my head. I am not all right. My brother is gone. I am shot. Eden is lost. I am tired and hungry and sad.
“It’ll be okay,” she says.
Rarely, does Darlene have to console me.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes.
“We’ll get Norm back. You’re just not ready to start a war,” she says. “You saw that man. He held me at gunpoint, Jack. He is crazy. Worse than all the zombies.”
“I don’t think anyone is ever ready to start a war,” I say.
She leans forward and kisses me on the corner of my mouth. “You’re right,” she says. “I hate the constant violence. I hate having to be scared all the time.” Her eyes gleam with tears, but she won’t let them fall. I see that in her face. She wants to be the strong one here. She wants to be the rock. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die.”
“Me either,” I say, meaning it.
“We should get to sleep,” she says.
Sleep, that’s all we do in bed.
So far since the dead rose, there’s not been many times or places to do what engaged couples usually do. In the last few months, I can count how many times we made love undisturbed on one hand. Abby or Norm somehow always interrupted us. Zombies, too. Zombies more than anything. I’ve come to think of the act as a bad omen.
I lean forward, the wound prickling with a dull sort of pain, and I kiss her full on the mouth. The act is enough to get my blood pumping faster, but I refrain.
A creak outside of the door cause
s me to turn away from my fiancé’s beautiful eyes. Through the cracked door, I see a large, hunched figure.
It’s Herb.
“Herb,” I say.
He stops. In a small voice — much too small for a man as big as he is — he says, “Y-Yeah?”
“Come in here, please,” I say.
Darlene gives me a look and arches her eyebrow.
I nod: Don’t worry. It’s the kind of mental telepathy only soulmates can have.
“O-Okay,” Herb says.
I pat the end of the bed.
“What makes you so special?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Nothin,” he says.
I smile, try to ease the tension.
“C’mon, Herb, don’t be bashful,” I say.
“He’s a super-genius,” Darlene says.
Herb shies away as if he’s blushing. “No, I’m not a super genius, I’m just a man.”
“Then why does Butch want you back?” I ask.
“I’m really not supposed to say,” he says. He swallows hard enough for me to hear the gulp.
“Herb…I’m not the police. I’m not going to arrest you or anything like that.”
“I know…” he says, “I’m just not proud of it.”
Darlene smiles.
She pats Herb. “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of,” she says. “Especially now. It’s life. But we get through it, accept the responsibility, and move on. That’s exactly what you are doing, isn’t it, Herb? You didn’t like what they were trying to make you do, so you left. You moved on.”
Herb smiles — one of those smiles a man cracks in the fresh sunlight of a new day, the darkness behind him. “Yeah…I guess you’re right,” he says.
“You don’t have to tell if you don’t want to,” Darlene says. “It’s totally up to you, but we think you could help prepare us for what we are going to face in the next couple of days. As much as I’d like for my fiancé to stay in bed and get rest, he won’t.” She smiles at me and leans closer to Herb. In a loud whisper, she says, “He’s a stubborn little mule.”
Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope Page 10