by Mark Tufo
Dizz solved her problem as he came walking around the side of the Arby's. "You forgot your gun," he said. "So I brought it to you," he added needlessly.
"Dizz, you were supposed to stay in the car!"
"I figured you were going to need this," he said defensively.
Angel and Ryan rounded next.
"Guys?" Tracy asked exasperatedly.
"Eyean said he would look to see if they had any toys," Angel said excitedly. Ryan didn’t look Tracy in the face. He figured his sister could do the dirty work.
Sty came around last. "Don’t look at me lady, I wasn't gonna stay in there by myself."
"Fine! Dizz, give me the gun,” Tracy said, “We'll all go in and see if there’s anything we can use in there and then all of you are getting back in that car!"
Dizz looked thrilled that he didn’t have to go back just yet.
Tracy hoped the store was locked as she approached. The sun was at high noon and was doing little to shine any light into the store. The interior looked darker than it had a right to. It didn’t feel menacing, but 'inviting' was also another adjective she would not have used as a descriptor. The door swung open easily as she pulled on it. "Of course," she said sourly.
It was when she opened the second set of doors that reality made itself known. The air that poured around the group was thick with stench. Tracy was physically repelled; she stepped on Sty's foot as she retreated. He didn’t seem to notice as he was doing his best to get away also.
"Never really liked roast beef," Dizz said, almost removing himself to the other side of the parking lot.
"I don’t really want a toy Eyean!" Angel said as she rushed to meet up with Dizz.
Sty and Tracy pushed the first door closed in an attempt to stem the tide of poisoned air. Ryan placed his hands on the glass of the store front. Head bowed, he did his best to calm the currents in his stomach. He spat puddles as his salivary glands were working overtime.
Sty went over to egg his friend on and see if he could push him over the edge. "Man, that was almost as bad as if you went into a porta-potty and started dunking your head in for turds."
Ryan gagged again. Sty was loving it, a little more and victory would be his!
"It's like someone blended old moldy fish with road kill cat and then made…" Sty stopped short as Ryan's hands bounced off the glass from the impact of the zombie that slammed into the partition from the other side. Ryan jumped back.
"FUCK!" Ryan yelled in surprise, his stomach's earlier unrest completely forgotten.
"Eyean, Mom says you can't say Fuck!" Angel yelled across the lot.
The zombie slammed into the glass again. Tracy came up beside with the boys. Another zombie came up to the glass. This one didn’t slam up like its partner. Its eyes slid over towards the door.
"Whoa!" Sty said. "Did you guys see that? It looked over towards the door!"
"Did we pull or push that door open?" Tracy asked as she started to grab the kids’ shoulders and herd them back to the car.
"Pull," Dizz said as he grabbed Angel's hand.
"Thought so. Kids, run for the car NOW!"
The kids bolting for the car triggered some subliminal remembrance in the zombie’s rudimentary brain. Chase and pursue. The hunt for food, the most basic of all animalistic instincts and zombie thought. Tracy was rooted to her spot as the zombie met her in the eye – and then it bolted for the door.
‘Great, speeder!’ Tracy thought as the zombie began its pursuit which triggered in her the second oldest response known to all living kind, the need to save one's own ass!
Tracy didn’t stop to check on the advance of her enemy but the smell as it escaped the now defunct fast food restaurant told her all she needed to know. This was going to be a lot closer than she had hoped.
Ron watched as Tracy's car passed by. "She must have been able to get away," he said to his dad. Tony nodded once.
"Meredith and that big son of a bitch BT will be fine," Tony said. "We'll make sure of it."
"Thanks Dad." ‘The old man is determined, I'll give him that,’ Ron thought.
Ron was within a minute or so away from the Route 3, Route 1 interchange. "Dad, can you get on the radio and see if they've passed yet?"
Tony did as he was asked. When no response was received, Ron's hope began to spiral downward. If he drove forward and they hadn't passed yet, he would not be able to lay a trap. If he waited and they were already gone , h e didn’t want to dwell on that thought.
As they drove up the on ramp, Tony saved him the trouble of making a difficult decision. "Is that a cop car?" he asked.
"I don’t even see a car, Dad, much less what kind,” Ron responded. “Oh wait, there it is. How the hell did you see that?"
"Vitamins," Tony answered.
Ron stopped the truck and opened his door so he could prop the barrel of his Winchester 308 on the windowsill. Tony got out and placed his Browning 30-30 on the hood.
"Wrong family to mess with," Tony said as he adjusted his scope for the outgoing projectile.
"Is that them?" Kyle asked Job, pointing to the truck parked on the ramp.
"Yeah dipshit, she traded her red Subaru in for a silver pickup," Job said.
"Really?"
"No, not really." Job didn’t like this at all. He was traveling well over a hundred miles an hour; there was no margin for error. He could not maneuver at this speed, and something about the way that truck was just waiting there was unsettling. "Probably nothing," Job said, doing his damnedest to keep his eyes on the road, on the silver truck, and look for the car he was chasing.
Kyle noticed it first. "They got guns, Job," he said as he gripped the dashboard roll handle. "Turn around man, I don’t feel good about this," he said in a near state of panic.
"I can't, by the time I slow down to a safe enough speed we'll be sitting ducks."
"Job, I don't want to die a virgin."
Job couldn’t help it. With everything that was going on, he had to a spare a second to look at his friend. "No way, what the hell are you talking about? You went out with Vickie Johannsen for almost a year."
"She was saving herself for marriage."
Job knew that was a lie. He had bedded Vickie on more than one occasion and most were while his friend was dating her. Kyle may have made a startling revelation, but Job felt no such compulsion.
"We'll get through this…" the live Job started to tell his friend. "…buddy," was what his incorporeal soul finished. Job exited the world of the living and into the plane of the dead so fast that he did not even realize there was a transition.
He watched from the roof of the car as his own head was thrust back, the right side having caved from the impact of a high velocity 30-30 hollow tip round. His cheek was the first to accept the molten metal. Next, muscle and nerve endings separated as the bullet burrowed further. The impact into his jaw shattered it in four places. Eleven teeth crumbled under the assault and still the bullet pushed on. The back of his skull finally released the offending impact as the bullet came to a stop in the head rest.
Job watched with some detachment as his friend first screamed frantically and then tried to wrest the wheel from the twitching hands of the steering corpse, Job’s foot had lodged down on the accelerator, causing the car to top out at 130 miles per hour. The essence that was Job moved a few feet higher from the scene just as the car began the first of its twelve somersaults. It was the fourth spin that sent Kyle hurtling away. Job was finding it more and more difficult to relate to the events that were unfolding before him. A higher calling was beckoning. And then he found himself in the Field of Flowers, an inner peace that every man strived for settled on him like a warm blanket. He took two steps to the comforting light before the serenity was ripped from his shoulders. Light faded to Dark. He ran as far and as fast as he could away from the hate, the pain, the misery, and the torment, but it was not quickly enough as his world faded to black.
Ron watched in awe as the police car finished t
he last of its death throes, screeching metal succumbing to the pissed off caws of disturbed crows. He didn’t know what they were bitching about, they'd dine well tonight.
Tony ejected the spent shell casing from his rifle and with the bolt action drove another into place.
"Dad! Wow!" Ron said with true amazement.
"Keep your focus, your daughter is still out there."
"Yeah, but still…"
"We'll celebrate when this is over," Tony told his son. It had damn near been sixty years since he had shot a human and it sucked now as much as it had then. The Japanese on Tarawa had been a ruthless enemy committed to the extermination of the Americans who had the audacity to land on their soil. Tony and a platoon of fellow Marines, due to intense shelling from the Japanese, had become separated from the larger battle group they were assigned to. For four days those forty men had held on to a knoll roughly the size of a football field. The Marines had not slept the entire time as the Japanese sent everything they could at the detachment.
The Marines had bloodied their hands as they dug down as deep as they could with their small shovels. Mortars, grenades and withering machine gun fire rained down on their position almost the entire time. The only breaks in the devastating arsenal assault were when the Japanese would launch a charge. Seven times they came and seven times the Marines had rallied. Their dogged persistence and crippling marksmanship repelled the Japanese.
After the third assault, grumblings of Tuefelhunden came to the fore in the ranks of the Japanese troops, the German word for Marines which quite literally translated into Devil Dog. For what demon must they be fighting that could survive the shellings and the hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese soldiers that kept assaulting their position.
Tony, a mere corporal, found himself in charge of the remnants of his platoon as his lieutenant was killed and the gunnery sergeant was incapacitated by a gunshot wound to his abdomen. The snot-nosed 19-year-old was going to do his damnedest to keep the remaining twenty-two of his fellow Marines alive. He kept his word to fifteen of them. A battalion of Marines had finally pushed far enough inland to encapsulate the ‘Fighting Fifteen’ as they became known in the papers back home. The Japanese initially feared that the gates of Hell had been ripped open as thousands of Marines poured out of that small hill; they turned tail and ran as if their very souls depended on it. Tony had always hated the moniker the newspaper thrust upon them. Twenty-five of the finest men he had ever known had lost their lives in a land God had forgotten, and apparently so would the people back home.
"I see Meredith!" Ron said excitedly.
Tony once more brought his eye down to the sighting aperture.
Even at 110 miles per hour, Officer Gibson took in all the information around him. He had been a good cop once and those skills made the leap into psychosis with him. He first noted the pickup truck strategically parked on the on-ramp. He also noticed the smoldering wreckage that was Job and Kyle. Most disconcerting though were the two riflemen taking aim on his position. He had absolutely no hope of returning any sort of covering fire, his only hope was to use the car in front of him as a shield.
"There's Dad!" Meredith exclaimed.
"Not yet girl!" BT yelled as Meredith pulled a hand off the steering wheel to wave at her father. BT looked back at the cop, hoping that he had been too focused on them to notice the cavalry, but it wasn't to be. The cop car started to shift over to Meredith's left, and then the cop gunned it so that his front quarter panel was even with Meredith's rear.
"BT, I'm sorry he got past me," Meredith said frantically as she looked at the police cruiser in her side view mirror creeping up.
"Let him," BT said coldly.
"You said to not let him," Meredith responded.
"If I learned nothing else from your uncle, I will now be able to go the grave with the ability to adapt."
"The grave?"
"Figure of speech. I hope," BT mumbled.
"Did you just say, 'I hope'?"
"I did not say that out loud."
"You're right, I just made that up. I'm driving 110 miles per hour down a highway with a psycho cop chasing our asses and I needed to add a little more flavor to the mix."
"Sorry," BT said, looking over his shoulder at the cop car which was just a few feet from pulling even.
Officer Gibson liked his position, he was damn near parallel to the bitch and her black boyfriend, another quarter mile and they'd be past the other pick-up truck. Then he'd shoot the life out of the both of them, repeatedly. He'd be long gone before that other truck would ever be able to catch up. Screw it, maybe he'd wait for them too, death did not discriminate. "Should almost be past them," he said to himself, doing the calculations in his head. The bigger truck to his right had him completely shielded.
"NOW!" BT shouted.
"Now what?!" Meredith screamed, looking around for some new threat.
"Slam your brakes! Put your foot through the floor board!"
"Don’t you yell at me!" Meredith shot back, even as she used her entire frame to stand on the brake pedal. The truck bucked, the ass fishtailed, tortured brake pads melted under the intense heat. BT had to brace himself against the dashboard from the forces applied to his body. Smoke shot out from all four braking points and the rear end threatened to come completely off the ground.
Officer Gibson took a second longer to react as he was already enjoying the mythical killing fields. As the front end of the truck slid past him he was awarded the view of two of the largest rifle barrels he thought he had ever seen in his entire life. "Fuck…"
The smell of burnt pads hung in the air as Meredith's truck limped to a stop. The screech of metal on metal thankfully came to a halt in another three hundred feet. The right rear wheel having completely seized up contributed to the quickness of their stop.
Meredith was first out, running to her father. Ron put his rifle back into the cab and met his daughter halfway. Tony, not knowing if the initial threat was over or if another threat were to soon present itself, grabbed the rifle from the bench seat.
"I thought I taught him better," Tony said, shaking his head as he went up to check on his granddaughter.
Tracy could hear the distant sound of a horrific car crash but it might as well have been the miniscule pleadings of an ant under a sun intensifying magnifying glass for all the attention she paid it. What was magnitudes louder was the slap of bare feet on pavement as her pursuers chased her down. At 5’2”, Tracy was never going to be a world class sprinter, but the prick behind her sure was.
Tracy could tell from the faces of the children in the car staring back at her that she wasn't going to make it. She first saw her reflection in the glass and then that of the tortured soul that chased her. Ryan, Dizz, Angel and Sty were all pressed up against the far side of the interior, wide eyed expressions of fear on their faces. Tracy could feel the pull of fingers that grasped out to latch on to the hood of her sweatshirt. Angel squealed and buried her head into her brother's shoulder. Tracy knew she would never be able to open the driver's side door and close it before the damn track star got in with her, and then she'd be exposing the kids to danger. Either way the kids were doomed as she felt the press of the keys in her right pant leg; Dizz had given them to her when he had gotten out of the car.
Tracy almost ruptured her ankle as she got within two feet of the car and thrust off to the right with all her force. Her ankle screamed in pain. ‘I will not be a cheap B movie heroine that sprains an ankle and gets pounced upon by (insert movie monster here). I lived with Mike too long, ’ was her next thought.
The zombie slammed headlong into the car. The door creased significantly to the point where it might never be able to open again. The zombie did not stop or even address the injury to its leg. Its knee cap had shattered in three places and what remained had shifted a full two inches to the left. Tracy was saved by this very damage. The zombie's left leg had locked completely up. His decathlon days were gone, but that wouldn't stop any of his
peers from cutting in line.
Dizz hopped into the back seat just as Tracy opened the driver's side door. The car rocked from multiple zombie impacts. Angel shrieked with each one, Sty only every other. Tracy slid over as far as she could and still remain in the driver's seat. Zombies were pressed up against the glass. She could not keep her eyes from them as she tried in desperation to start the keyless car.
"Hells bells!” she said as she raised her butt off the seat to fish the almost forgotten keys from her pocket. 'This is where the B Movie Queen drops the keys, ’ she thought sourly. "Mike, stop it!!!" she yelled.
Diz was scared shitless. It looked like their driver lost her mind and now he was going to have to drive. They might as well open the doors; it would be quicker and less painful.
Tracy's inner ramblings did not come to fruition. The implosion of the window masked the sound of the engine. Eager fingers reached in just as Tracy jerked back and placed the car in drive, not knowing whether it was running or not. Blood-crusted broken nails clawed through the air seeking to gain purchase, but were denied as the car leapt forward. She almost crashed headlong into the junipers and that would have been the end. The small Subaru would have hung on the large plants like a shiny bulb on a Christmas tree. Fortunately she jinked at the last moment and floored it. A small contingent of zombies chased them as Tracy headed back towards Route 3.
Eliza and Tommy - Interlude
"Do you feel it brother?" Eliza asked as she ran her fingers through his hair.
"I feel pain, Lizzie," Tommy answered back.