by Mike Sutton
It was hot in the little house, hot like summer, though it was still only the middle of spring. Closer to June that they had been a month before, as his father had loved to say, but still only spring. Mama liked to keep it warm year round. The warmth reminded her of home she said.
Light from the setting sun filled the house, leaving an orangeish glow that burned through the smog of the city, making it feel later than it really was. The dirty air was hard to breath and made him miss the country that much more. He missed the quiet, and the stargazing and the pretty scenery. In town everything looked the same, all the houses and buildings, everything. None of it was very pretty either.
The television was out, and had been for quite some time. They had spent the entire day, and much of the previous one sitting huddled together in front of the TV watching as the entire world continued to decline. Sometime during the morning before, an emergency signal had been broadcast on all the stations. The government said that ‘for their safety they should all stay home and lock their doors.’
His family was sitting and staring at the television, as if they were waiting for an all clear sign or a signal to sound. The lack of news was nearly killing them. Both his girlfriend and his sister had called their friends to see what they knew. One of them had said that there were military blockades cutting off the highway out of the city. They were shooting at people who got too close. He preferred not to hear that kind of news.
Jésus paced around his house. Front to back. The floor plan was laid out in kind of a loop. Kitchen, living room, dining room. With the stairs to the second floor in the center of it all. He would walk around to one side of the living room, then turn around again and take the loop back to the other side so that he wouldn’t pass in front of the television. Finding all the squeaky spots in the floor as he went. It unconsciously became a game. Squeak, step, squeak, step. Step, step, squeak.
Midway through one of his laps, Jésus stopped to look out as the street from the front window in the dining room. Perhaps for the fifteenth time that night. This time what he was old Mr. Rodriguez, standing in the street alone. He was his mother’s friend and their neighbor from across the street and a little further down the block. He was staggering around in his bathrobe, like he was drunk again, something that he had done more often after his wife died a couple years ago.
Jésus was about to go out and help him back home, when a group of perhaps ten men, most of them young and carrying what looked like televisions and stereos in their arms. Looters. Some people took any chance they could get to take what they wanted. Even though televisions had become more worthless than they had been before. As the youths approached, one of them called out to him.
“Hey Mr. Rodriguez, you drunk again friend?”
A couple of them were carrying the clubs that they had gotten at the Salvation army for use in the game that they called Ghetto Golf, though none of them actually lived in a ghetto, they lived in a lower middle class neighborhood. Ghetto Golf involved hitting golf balls, though some times they used small rocks when they didn’t have any more golf balls, over the expressway, and into the empty field beyond. It wasn’t a long and difficult shot to make, and they usually made it, some times for impressively long drives. Sometimes they didn’t. The occasions that the ball didn’t reach the field made the game that much more interesting for everyone involved. Sometimes, when they were drunk or just angry at the people driving home in their expensive cars, they didn’t even bother aiming for the other side.
Jésus hadn’t played the game in a while now. He was too busy with work and school. More importantly, he didn’t want any trouble with the police, who had been keeping an eye on the hill that they usually used to tee off. Arresting some of the idiots who still went to play regardless. It was funny in a way, a game like Ghetto Golf was something to do, something to keep them out of trouble, more serious trouble anyway. But the game they invented to keep out of trouble, got them into trouble.
Mr. Rodriguez turned their way, and stumbled towards them, swaying back and forth with each step. The young men watched him and laughed, “Friend, you’re drunk again, give us your wallet and your keys, and we’ll take you home safely.” They all laughed again. Stepping closer. They were within arms reach, when Mr. Rodriguez leaned forward and took a bite out of the speakers neck.
Mr. Rodriguez bit him!
The man screamed, pushed him away and clamped his hands down on his neck to try and stop the bleeding, or perhaps to make the pain go away.
Mr. Rodriguez had stumbled and fallen with the push. He rose back to his feet slowly before stumbling back towards the screaming man and his friends. They backed away, dragging wounded buddy. Mr. Rodriguez, followed.
Finally a one of them remembered that he was carrying a golf club, he stepped forward and took a swing. Jésus winced as he could hear the bone crack from where he stood, twenty feet away and behind a glass window. Mr. Rodriguez sagged for a second from the blow, but then continued on completely ignoring the pain that could only have been excruciating. He kept stumbling forward, reaching now for the man who has just tried to strike him down. The attacker backed up, with his club raised over his head, telling Mr. Rodriguez to stay back or else. Mr. Rodriguez didn’t hesitate.
Another blow landed and Mr. Rodriguez staggered again before tramping on. The clubman was praying now, loudly, as were his friends. Jésus doubted that any of them had been to church in years and was surprised that they could remember the words. Most of them. But still they prayed, like devout old women.
One more blow, it shattered Mr. Rodriguez’ skull and sent him to the pavement. He didn’t move again. Jésus felt like throwing up. And a couple of the looters actually did, before they all bolted, scattering in different directions, dropping what they had stolen as they went.
It was then that the television came back to life. His girlfriend called him in to watch.
Jésus stared at the TV, sweating has he watched. The sweat was as much from the heat, he tried to tell himself, not from what he was watching on the television.
The appliance in question was an old analog twenty inch Zenith that still had actual knobs that you had to turn in order to change the station and volume. None of those fancy buttons. A relic in the days of digital plasma screens. Where televisions were measured in feet rather than inches. But it was what the family had. They didn’t even get cable, all they had was whatever local stations that they could pick up with the giant antenna on the top of the house. Today the picture was unusually fuzzy, still it was clear enough to make the sweat pour out of him.
He was struck speechless by the news. The dead were rising up and eating the living. Maybe his mama was right and there was the end times, like in the bible. He suddenly wished that he had gone to church with her more often, and that he hadn’t gotten drunk as often as he did, or slept with his girlfriends out of wedlock. Jésus quickly tallied up a lifetime’s worth of crimes before God that he had committed and decided that he was defiantly going to hell. It wasn’t so much a ‘if’ as a ‘when’. He wondered briefly if it was too late to go to confessional. Probably. The priest would just laugh at him. That was his usual luck anyway.
Visions of Mr. Rodriguez lying on the ground with blood pouring from his wounds as he watched the television. The looters’ horror when he attacked. They all bunched up and clouded his mind’s eye, making paying attention to the news a difficult task. Off in the distance he heard a gun shot. Followed by several more, as if a battle fired up. It sounded a lot like a fourth of July fireworks display, as the explosions quickly rolled through their home. Then as quickly as it began it ended.
Figures that the world would end now. He had an ok job at Taco Bell. Tacos, what did those assholes know about tacos? God damned, there was another one to add to the list, Americanized food! He had gotten his G.E.D. and was working on getting a better degree at nights at the local community college. His grades were pretty good there too,
not straight A’s but still good. Better than anyone expected, least of all him.
He had even applied to better schools to go on and get a degree in engineering. His life was turning out to be like the movie, Stand and Deliver. His girlfriend had always told him that he looked like Lou Diamond Phillips. His sister insisted that he looked more like the teacher Edward James Olmos in his youth. Until her reminded her that they were twins and his looks reflected on her, no matter that she was so much more beautiful than he was. That shut her up. Her husband said Horatio Sanz to be funny, it just sounded really stupid. But then, it was George.
His English writing teacher at the community college had had a word to describe what was happening. Besides fucked up that was. She would have called it fucked up too, she was a crazy old bitch, but in a good way, the entire class had loved her. She would tell them stories about the wild times she had had as an English major. You wouldn’t expect that it make for a very exciting life, but it did. Or she was just a convincing story teller.
The woman had always been willing to help. She was just nuts. He stifled a grin at the thought of a seventy-year old woman, with crazy white hair, standing in front of the class and cursing like a sailor because she had forgotten her briefcase again.
What was the word? Oh yeah, ‘Ironic.’ Like in the one song, by that Canadian chick. Rain on your wedding day, and all that other stuff. He had just gotten his life together, and was about to start living the American dream, and then Satan decides that the Apocalypse is on. Just shit man, shit.
His sister and her husband and their two kids were in the living room with him, as was his mother and his girlfriend. They were watching the grainy footage of a mob of slow moving dead bodies get closer and closer to the camera when it finally struck him where he had seen this all before. It was in that movie, what was it called? Oh yeah Dawn of the Dead. It came out in the theatres a few years before. Yeah, that was the movie. A real weird one, scared the hell out of him. Though these fuckers were moving a lot slower than in the movie. Maybe they weren’t the same thing, but they were still eating people and Mr. Rodriguez had died when the punk busted his skull open.
More footage, some of New York. Some of London. Everywhere was the same.
He tried to remember the rest of the movie. He was pretty drunk when he had seen it at a friend’s house a few years before. The mall. The people hid at the mall. It had struck him as a dumb idea when he first watched the movie, especially since every of the dead walking dead people seemed to have the same idea. But they still had everything that they needed and they were safe. That was, until they did something stupid and left.
His mother was holding her rosary between her hands, and praying fervently, repeating Hail Mary’s at what must have been a record speed, rocking back and forth, clicking the beads madly as she went.
More footage of the zombies flickered on the screen, soldiers shooting onto mobs of the walking dead and having no effect. People rioting and screaming and looting. Others carrying signs and protesting that the end of the world had finally come. Sometimes, some people, just liked to state what was blatantly obvious to even a child.
Civilization had gone mad. His mother sounded more fervent and the beads clicked at a faster pace. Jésus wondered if she was getting an answer or if she ever would.