by William Bebb
He closed his eyes and could see her long light blond hair, sparkling green eyes, and shuddered as he remembered the day she had turned up missing. The lemonade stand was still in front of her parent’s trailer, yet the pitcher was empty and the paper cups were scattered around the yard and street as he walked over. Kim had been yelling for the last twenty minutes, for her daughter Sarah to come home. She had a scared nervous look on her face as he walked over and asked what was wrong.
“It's Sarah. I haven't seen her for hours. We came back from the grocery store around noon. Sarah had been selling lemonade all morning. She used up all the lemons and we went to the store to get more, but where is she now? Have you seen her?” Kim asked, looking around nervously.
“I haven't seen her since this morning when I bought two cups of lemonade. Did you look for her inside the trailer, everywhere?”
She gave a withering look that made him step back, then let loose a loud yell, “Sarah Dania Mendez! You come home right now!”
It wasn't as bad then as it is nowadays with perverts seemingly on every street corner, but after a while with neighbors and their kids fruitlessly looking everywhere for the little girl Kim finally phoned the police and her husband Jake. As the sun began to set, people began whispering “kidnapping” and deputies asked neighbors to let them search their houses. Most agreed readily and those who didn't were considered possible suspects. He had let the Sheriff set up a command post in his trailer and offered to help in any way he could. She was a sweet girl who reminded him of his own daughter Cheryl, when she had been little. The bloodhounds eventually arrived and began sniffing for any signs of the missing girl.
Jake asked Kim if there was any more lemonade still in the house, gesturing to the empty pitcher sitting on the small wooden table with the sign still taped to the front Lemonaids 25 cents a cup. She gave him a look like she wanted to kill him.
“It's not for me, honey. The police have been searching for hours and they’ve got to be thirsty.” Jake said defensively. Kim picked up the pitcher and went in the trailer. She was gone for only a minute when she came back out again, still holding the empty pitcher, staring at her car in the driveway. She had the most horrible look on her face as she gazed at the car with impossibly wide eyes.
He had been talking with Jake when a bloodhound sniffed at the car and howled. The howl was loud, long and mournful but it was overpowered by Kim's scream as she ran to the trunk and unlocked it still clutching the empty pitcher in her other hand. Turning the flashlight he was holding, he saw Sarah huddled in the trunk with a bag of spilled lemons scattered around her body. He only had a second to glimpse her before the deputies pushed him back.
Colonel Lester had seen more than his share of dead people from his time in the service. He thought he'd seen the worst ways to die imaginable- Men blown, literally, to shreds of little more than strips of smoking flesh. Others burned, stabbed, and maybe hundreds shot to death yet none shocked him more than seeing Sarah. Her skin was a dark mottled purple blue and her open eyes were glazed over grayish white. It wasn't her face that still sometimes haunted his dreams, it was her fingers. She must have tried clawing open the trunk. Later he heard through a neighbor, the police found scratches, scrapes, and long paint like smears of blood on the inside of the trunk lid.
The same neighbor was good friends with one of the detectives who worked on the investigation. The official theory was that the girl had climbed into the trunk, to retrieve the bag of lemons, while her mother carried the other groceries into the trailer. As she climbed in the trunk lid slammed shut, maybe by a stray breeze, possibly knocking her unconscious for a period of time. Evidence found during the autopsy indicated she had received a concussion. How long she managed to stay alive, after regaining consciousness, was estimated to be no more than thirty minutes.
Staring at the empty lot where their trailer used to be, he watched a few men stagger around chasing after some of the birds that had taken up residence since last Friday. He looked at his Colt .45 semiautomatic strapped to his hip with it's last three bullets, and pushed back the thought that sometimes made him feel he'd gone insane. If the murderous people outside managed to break into the trailer he'd have to shoot his own grandson. He may be old, but he was no old fool. After hearing Maria's story about everything that had happened and after watching them wandering, screaming, fighting and prowling around for the last few days, he knew what they were. As hard as it was for him to come to grips with, he knew they weren't just insane, homicidal, people- they were zombies or at least some of them were.
He trembled, taking his hand off the pistol, and ate a spoonful of warm oatmeal, smiling at Billy, afraid the boy might somehow know he was saving the last bullets for him. An uninvited image came to him, as he swallowed, and he nearly choked. He saw Billy with a bullet hole in his angelic face.
“You alright Grandpa?” Billy asked, from across the table.
“Fine as frog hair.” He lied, looking out the window as he sipped some water, again wishing he hadn't listened to Cheryl about the guns. If he hadn't found his old service pistol they would surely have been dead or undead days ago. If I just had more bullets for it, he thought bitterly, just a box of frigging bullets, I could sit here inside and put an end to this living nightmare within twenty, maybe thirty minutes. He glanced over the darkened TV and saw some of the awards he'd earned for marksmanship hanging from the wall.
While true he hadn't entered a shooting contest since Ronald Reagan had served his first term, he had practiced target shooting up until about ten years ago. He absently fiddled with the leather strap on the gun holster and his eyes drifted shut.
He had tried calling the police, but as soon as he realized the power and phone lines were down he went and dug through his old steamer trunk. He hadn't been sure if he'd given his pistol to Cheryl as well. After a few frantic minutes, he found it tucked in its leather holster under some racy National Geographic magazines he hadn't looked at for thirty years and strapped it on. It felt heavier than he had remembered, yet it also felt very good and reassuring.
Maria had been jabbering rapidly in Spanish pointing out the window. His eyesight hadn't improved with age, and he looked on the shelf where he kept his binoculars. They hadn't been there, right next to the porcelain figurines his wife had collected over thirty years of marriage. Then he remembered Billy had been playing with them the night before. Quietly, he sneaked into the spare room and saw him asleep with them on his bedside table. Billy muttered in his sleep and, again, he silently cursed Cheryl for having taken all his other rifles and guns.
He’d trained his binoculars on the front of the park and saw two cars smashed together, with steam rising from one of them, and a broken utility pole leaning atop a rusty cargo van. But he couldn't make sense of what else he was seeing. It looked like there were people on the ground giving others CPR, but the people on the ground were struggling trying to push off their rescuers. He remembered staring, still trying to comprehend what he was seeing, when Maria started talking slowly. “Monsters. Juan is a monster. Now the others are monsters. What can we do?”
Her brother Miguel woke up confused about that time and looked around, surprised to be in the colonel's trailer. She began speaking to him quickly in Spanish and Miguel kept saying “No.” while shaking his head. He was sweaty and from the look of him he had been up all night working in one of the factories downtown, probably the infamous Beaumont Bio-Chemical Industries.
He looked apologetic and said “We go home now. I'm so sorry we bothered you colonel.” Miguel stood and took Maria's hand. He tried to pull her toward the door, but she was in tears speaking faster and pointing to where the wrecked cars were.
“Listen Miguel, I think maybe you should go over first and see what’s going on. It’s probably nothing except a car wreck, but she seems pretty scared. She can stay here, while you go check it out, if you want.” While he'd spoken, she seized his hand and wouldn't let go. “I really think she wants to stay.�
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He shrugged and walked to the door, with Maria pleading. “No, no no.” and some other things in Spanish, he couldn't understand.
Miguel smiled down at her, and said “Do not fear. I'll be right back.”
The colonel had watched through his binoculars while she sat on the couch praying. She held her Crucifix reciting prayers quickly and fervently, as he watched Miguel walk toward the wrecked cars. He went quickly until he got within about a hundred feet, then he slowed down and eventually stopped. Miguel scratched his head, turned and looked back at the trailer. Bending over, he picked up a big piece of wood and went forward slower holding it like he was ready to hit someone. But he couldn't see anyone moving toward Miguel. He walked a few steps closer. Some of the men that had been kneeling on the ground by the bodies stood up and started running and screaming at him. He was a smart young man and ran back to the trailer.
He looked at the old almost comically inadequate four foot chain link fence that encircled his front yard. It was mainly bought so his poodle Gretchen could be let outside to do her business, as his wife Barbara used to say. Plus, she had been nearly blind and even older in dog years than he was. Gretchen also had a habit of wandering around the trailer park and getting lost. The fence wasn't even close to being the best barricade in the world, yet the zombies didn't seem smart enough to devise a way to climb over or break through it.
A couple had been running after Miguel and flipped over it into his yard. Under other circumstances he would have laughed as they flipped over the fence, but their growls and screams kept it from being funny. As the men who tumbled over the fence jumped up and ran toward him, he fired twice. With the first two shots he had aimed center mass and hit them, but they just staggered back for a second and then kept coming. The next two shots took them down permanently as he aimed for their heads.
Miguel made it back and ran through the open gate in the fence. He was pursued by several fast moving men. As he ran into the yard, holding a broken baseball bat, Gretchen ran out of the trailer attacking and distracted the pursuers who had come through the gate before Miguel had a chance to shut it.
The old man looked out the window at his beloved Gretchen's remains, which consisted of just a few tufts of blindingly white fur, blowing in the breeze. She must have been the stupidest dog in the world. But she probably saved Miguel's life. He thought, sadly. She had gone outside barking and running circles around the other zombies as they got closer. The few zombies who had made it into the yard were confused and distracted by the dog while Miguel dispatched one with a tremendous swing of the broken baseball bat, shattering its skull in a spray of blood, bones, and brains. He almost shot the man that was tearing his dog to pieces, but didn't knowing he had only a few bullets left. The dog’s howls and cries still echoed in his ears, as he knew they would until the day he died. He had kept an eye on Gretchen’s remains, afraid she might come back from the dead too. Thankfully, what was left of her body just rotted in the dirt as others came and ate her.
They had been staying quiet and hadn’t gone outside at all for the last few days. It had been hard on them both but for his grandson it had been agony. In addition to everything else, Billy was almost ten years old which is a hard age to remember to be quiet under the best of circumstances- But when you're stuck in a trailer with nothing to do except sweat and listen to monsters prowling around outside, it's got to be nothing less than torture. He had tried every trick he could think of to keep the boy's spirits up, even filling the bathtub with cool water and letting him sit in it during the hottest part of the day.
He tried telling him some of his war stories about how hot it was in North Africa during the war. “And we don't even have people shooting at us here.” He'd tried joking with Billy. The boy wasn't amused. All he knew was there were bad guys outside and that he and his grandpa had to stay inside all day, every day, and be extra quiet.
He was worried about him, wondering if he was going to be mentally alright even if they were eventually rescued. Sometimes the boy would just stare out the window for hours watching the undead. Billy scared him yesterday when he started laughing and pointing to where a man, with a missing arm and several missing fingers on his other hand, chased a vulture that had a broken wing.
It reminded him, a little, of when he was a boy and visited his aunt and uncle's farm in Kansas. He always volunteered to help with dinner, if a chicken was on the evening menu. Back then, there were no corner supermarkets, if you wanted chicken for dinner you had to chop its head off with a hatchet. His aunt would always watch to make sure he didn't accidentally hack off his fingers or hands. Sometimes after he made the cut, the headless bird would start to run around the barnyard. When that happened, she would always scream and run back into the house while, he would laugh like it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen- which it was.
Billy had finished his oatmeal and was playing with his blocks, on the kitchen table. This was fine to do as long as he didn’t build a tower of blocks that would crash to the table and inevitably attract attention from outside. He looked at the boy as he played with his blocks building a house with a ring of blocks around it. Billy put a little plastic soldier on top of the blocks. It was one of those green plastic army men aiming forward with a rifle, as the soldier was on one knee.
He then placed several plastic Indian figures around the ring of blocks and started scooting them slowly around them, making soft grunting noises. Then he had the Indian figures push through the ring of blocks and pointed the army man at each of them in turn.
Billy whispered “Pow, pow, pow.” And with each pow he thumped one of the Indians over with his finger.
Colonel William Lester, retired, recipient of the Bronze Star, survivor of three years of duty fighting to put an end to the plans of the Third Reich, father of three grown children and five grandchildren, turned his head away before his grandson could see the tears of frustration and self loathing trickling down his face.
CHAPTER 3
Nicotine gum. Was there ever a nastier substitute for a cigarette? Josey wondered, as he chewed. It tasted like an old sock, like the ones he'd find sometimes that fell behind the dryer months earlier, or so he imagined. It was better than nothing, but Josey still wished he'd thought to grab the cigarettes that were in the truck's glove box. As far as he was concerned, The United States Surgeon General could kiss his pimply ass because this morning, lung cancer was the least of his worries.
Sitting on a rusty washing machine he leaned back, and rested his head against the cinder block wall, looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Birds flew by, and made loud cawing noises, as the grunts and growls continued from outside the doorway. He thought of all those years wasted playing video games, some including battling zombies which in the present situation didn't seem particularly helpful; ironic yes- helpful no. In games and movies there were always plenty of guns, ammunition, and first aid kits, just waiting for someone to pick them up. In reality all he had to work with was a ruined building minus a roof, a few rusting major appliances, and a rusty crowbar. All things considered, I'd rather be at home with, my air conditioner, maybe a pizza, and the monsters safely trapped inside my TV, he thought.
He reached into his coveralls pocket and pulled out his cell phone despite knowing what he would see. He looked at the words No Signal on the phones tiny screen and laughed. He stared at the phone, wishing that guy from those commercials for some cell phone company that asked Can you hear me now? was here. He'd shove the damn phone down his throat and smile while doing it. He closed his meaty fist around the phone and was ready to throw it at the barricaded door when it started to ring.
His heart pumped hard as he flipped it open, and shouted “Hello! Hello!” He listened, but heard no voice at the other end. He looked at the screen and felt like an idiot. It was a reminder alarm that had gone off, not a call. The message said 'Take pills w/lunch'. A simple task if he could stroll to the truck and open the glove box where the pills were and grab his lunchb
ox. He felt tempted to throw the phone again, but decided to give it a reprieve and slid it back in his pocket. The nearest cell tower was probably twenty miles away and the fact he was sitting in a deep valley didn't help reception either.
I'm only twenty four years old. Whoever heard of a guy in his twenties taking blood pressure medicine anyway? What I really need is some beer, or a bottle of brandy, or a case of beer and brandy. I could get drunk as the proverbial skunk and wait for the cops or army to come in and deal with this mess, he thought smiling. He pictured it as he closed his eyes- A flight of helicopters, a few tanks and a mess of soldiers with some bad ass zombie blasting guns. When the shooting was done he'd come out as a heroic survivor of an undead uprising. Maybe girls would send him love letters, perhaps a few enclosing photos of themselves naked. People had been made into heroes for a lot less. The newspapers would probably show him holding his trusty four foot long crowbar, with his bandaged knee under a big headline reading- Truck driver wins battle against army of undead.
Gradually the smile faded as he considered a few other far more likely possibilities. I could rot here with no food or water. I could be dead in just a couple of days. Wishing he had grabbed his lunchbox, he heard and felt his stomach grumble. How long did it take to die of starvation and dehydration? A day, maybe two? he wondered and felt his hunger grow more intense.