“Now that performance was your best yet! Seriously! Had you put on a show like that before, we wouldn’t be here right now. But…when you are a performer, you want to leave people with your best work. You, sir, have done your best work, and now it is time to take your bow.”
He struggled, but eventually I got the entire chair with him in it on top of the riding lawnmower. It wasn’t my riding lawnmower. It was actually Pete’s. He loaned it to me six months ago, and I’ve always been really bad about giving things back. Once the chair was securely strapped with bungees and plenty of my precious duct tape, I fired it up and opened the garage door. No power, so I had to manually pull that bad boy up. Every zombie turned their head at the roaring of the bright red riding lawnmower. I used the last of my duct tape and a brick to hold the pedal down, and I aimed it directly towards Pete’s garage door. I quickly pulled the gag out of Jackson’s mouth and slapped him on the shoulder as he passed by. I slammed the garage door once I saw he was well on his way. Then, I ran to the living room window where Sara and Jack were quickly making their way.
“What did you do?” Jack demanded.
“I’m giving Axel his brother back, and returning Pete’s lawnmower at the same time.” We looked out the window as Jackson screamed and shouted as his makeshift transport vehicle made its way down my driveway and into the street. Zombies clawed at him as he passed, but none were quite quick enough to get a bite from a moving target. One unlucky corpse didn’t know to move out of the way, and he went under the lawnmower and into the blades. I thought for a second it might stall out, but it worked like a champ.
Jackson’s screams along with the loud engine of the lawnmower made every zombie within earshot follow it directly to Pete’s garage door. I knew full well that the lawnmower wouldn’t break the metal garage door, but what I was hoping for shouldn’t have been too far along. The zombies immediately took advantage of the stopped machine and began to chomp away on the screaming Jackson. Dozens upon dozens of zombies jockeyed for a spot in the feeding line. All of them pressing against the garage door, trying to get a bite of the tasty trailer trash caused the garage door to begin to buckle. Two of Axel’s men on the roof started firing down into the hoard of zombies, but the gunfire only attracted more. Jackson kept screaming. I was really surprised that he lasted this long.
Good for him. I thought. Good for him.
Axel climbed up onto the roof from one of the upstairs bedrooms, and also started to fire into the crowd. The moans of the dead became much louder than the lawnmower. But even over that, I could here Axel scream.
“Whoever did this is dead! FUCKING DEAD!”
Then, the garage door couldn’t take any more abuse. It collapsed to the ground, and within moments, the entire garage became overrun by nasty squatters. But, luck was in my favor even more then I could have hoped. The lawnmower caught some traction and plunged deeper into the garage. It was only a few minutes after that that we started hearing gunshots from inside the house. Axel and the other two from the roof went back inside, and we heard even more gunshots. After a few more minutes, everything was silent.
Jack turned to look at me with all of the blood having left his face. “What did you do?”
“I saved our lives, Jack! They were going to come for us. They were going to come for Sara!” I only added that last part because I could tell he cared for her. Maybe not in a sexual way, but he looked after her like a daughter.
“But…You killed him,” he said.
“No.” I answered. “I gave him a chance to leave, and he told me that they would kill us anyway. Then he said he would take what he wanted from Sara before putting a bullet in her head.” Okay, so I embellished that last part, but I got the point across. Then I drove it all home with a slight break down. “You think I wanted to kill him? Do you really think I wanted any of them to die? Do you think I want to go to sleep at night knowing what I had to do to keep us all safe?!” I squeezed a single tear out of my left eye. My right was always selfish in these situations.
And the academy award goes to…
He ran to Sara and hugged her.
“You’re safe now,” he whispered.
I did my best job at acting distraught for the rest of the night, but to be honest, I had the same feeling of accomplishment as when I correctly assembled an IKEA dresser on the first try. I was pretty happy with myself.
Jack and Sara kept watch as I went into the bedroom to sleep. Rex jumped up onto the bed and just stared at me.
“What?” I asked him. Obviously, he said nothing, but he was looking quite judgmental. “What was I supposed to do?” I whispered. “They really would have come here to kill us. You think they would have let you go because you’re a dog?” He didn’t give any sort of response, but after a few minutes of starring at me some more, he climbed up and licked my cheek. “Please don’t do that,” I said. “You can sleep here next to me, but I’ve seen you lick your ass and balls, and I don’t want that shit on my face.”
Rex sighed heavily, and I could smell the sweet cinnamon of Hot Tamales on his breath. I don’t know how he got them, and at this point I was too tired to care. Within seconds, I could hear his breathing change into a gentle whirr. A minute after that, the gentle whirr turned into a full fledged snore. I slowly drifted off to my dreamless wonderland a little easier than normal, as Rex made small happy sounds on the pillow next to me.
Chapter 16
My bedroom door cracked open quietly, and my ear immediately began to alert me of everything. I laid there pretending to be asleep in hopes that If this was an attacker, I would get the advantage by surprising him when he got closer. I could hear the door being pushed closed, and whoever was doing the pushing was doing a very good job of being quiet. Rex was still snoring away, so any thought of keeping him around as a “guard dog” instantly lost credibility. Although, if he did start barking, the attacker would know he was caught and would strike immediately. Maybe the dog was performing the same ruse as myself. Maybe he was waiting for the right moment to make his move. Then as if answering my question, Rex stretched and squeaked out the tiniest of dog farts before he went back to snoring.
Okay, he’s actually asleep. I thought.
I could tell by the sound of the steps that my attacker was walking toe to heel to try and be quieter. He had to be right next to the bed now. This was my moment. I opened my eyes quickly and jumped up only to feel a hand on my chest pushing me back down along with a finger across my lips. It was Sara. Her expression was baffling. On one hand, her eyes showed deep concern, but the slight wrinkles of her eyebrows looked like fear.
She stood there with her finger over my lips until she was sure I wasn’t going to scream. In that long second of silence, we both analyzed each other. Then, she dove in with a kiss and planted it firmly on my lips. Her lips were amazingly warm and much softer than I could have imagined. Each passionate kiss was followed by a much smaller and more direct kiss. I imagined her kisses like a battlefield. She would go in with a big one to wipe out most of the ground forces, and then she would send in the reserves to mop up any stragglers. I don’t know why I envisioned her act of passion like a meticulous act of war, but I wasn’t complaining.
She stopped kissing me long enough to sit up and cradle my face in both of her hands. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she began to cry.
“Thank you…” She said before diving back into a passionate kiss attack. I could feel her tears streaming down her face, and they were making her kisses salty. Then, I felt a new sensation entirely. While she was kissing me, I began to feel a warmth spreading across the left side of my face. It was warm and moist, and it moved from my temple down past my jaw. Then this new sensation started to make a sound. A terrifying sound. Lapping. I opened my eyes to see Rex dragging his tongue down my neck. His eyes were closed as though he were caught up in the same moment as Sara and myself. Before I could react, Sara gave a healthy shove to the dog, and he rolled off the side of the bed and dropped
to the floor with a thud.
“Sorry.” She whispered with a hint of a smile.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I said, pulling her face back to mine.
She climbed under the covers, and I could feel her body against mine. That night, something unusual happened.
We had sex.
That wasn’t the unusual part. What was strange, was that while we were having sex, we were both being as absolutely silent as possible.
Now, I’m going to tell you this, and you might think I’m being crazy…I actually felt something that night. Not love. Certainly not that impossibility. I’m not even sure what it was I was…feeling. There was a comfort. A connection that I have never felt with the probable hundreds of women I’ve been with in my life. Maybe it’s a lingering “feeling” from getting rid of Jackson. Maybe it’s indigestion. I don’t know why I was feeling anything at all. I looked over at one point and saw Rex’s face resting on the side of the bed. He was observing us in a way that I could totally relate with. This was like when I would watch Animal Planet and saw two lions fucking. My initial instinct was to throw a pillow at the dog to preserve the privacy of this moment, but in that moment, I didn’t really care. I was actually enjoying myself. Sara was on top of me. I looked up at her and admired her beauty. No make up plastered on her face like every other woman I’ve lured into my bed. Her eyes never left mine, and for the briefest of moments, I thought I could see myself in her eyes.
Then, the moment passed. She kissed me one last time and crawled out of the bed. She silently put her clothes back on and snuck out of my room. The feeling that I was experiencing was indeed fleeting. It faded quickly into the cold emptiness of my brain. I did enjoy myself, but the magic that I felt earlier had passed. The connection was broken. Rex sniffed the door after Sara left, and then snorted a sneeze before jumping back into the bed.
He looked at me with even more judgement than after I killed Jackson.
“Oh, come on…” I said. “If you were me, you would have done it too.”
Rex pawed at his nose and shook his head like he was avoiding another sneeze.
“You’re just jealous,” I said as I rolled onto my side. He didn’t move, but I did hear another disapproving snort. Sleep came quickly again, and so did the empty darkness of my dreamless sleep.
Chapter 17
Off in the distance of my sensory deprivation slumber, I thought I could hear the sound of glass breaking off in the distance. Like someone in a bar dropped their Heineken. I was just starting to return to the waking world when my bedroom door flung open so hard I could hear the hinges cracking out of the door frame.
“Trouble outside!” Jack screamed.
Adrenaline shot through me as quickly as the confusion of his words.
“Huh?” I asked pulling pants on to cover my nakedness. But, before Jack could answer, I heard another shattering glass sound. This time I could distinguish its approximate location as being somewhere outside in the street. Then another sound came, and it was unmistakeable. The hoarse voice of an angry redneck. It was Axel.
“You’re gonna die in there, mother fuckers!!” I could hear him scream.
I ran into the living room to the window to see what I could see. The street was on fire in small patches. I could see Axel pacing back and forth on Pete’s roof as he tried lighting another molotov cocktail. Once he got the wick lit, he overhand threw it in a high arc that landed just on the edge of my lawn. “DIE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!!” He shouted so loud I could hear his voice cracking.
Jack thrust the barrel of a rifle out through the pane of glass and fired of two shots quickly. I screamed at the top of my lungs to try and stop him.
“Jack no!” but it was too late.
“He jumped back inside.” Jack said looking down his sights. “If he sticks his head out again, I’ll get him.”
“It’s too late, we have to go,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You fired the gun.”
“So?”
“Soooo…” I said motioning my head towards the street. “They heard you. He wasn’t trying to set my house on fire.”
“Then what?” He asked with absolute confusion.
I gestured towards the street. What we saw was right out of a horror movie. The zombies came walking toward the sound of Jack’s gunshots, but to get to us, they had to pass through the flames of Axel’s molotov cocktails. Zombie after zombie came marching through the flames, bringing the deadly fire with them. Burning zombies began to make their way through my front yard, setting fire to almost everything they touched. These unwanted assholes were attempting to throw a literal housewarming party.
“Shit.” Jack gasped. Sara was already feverishly packing all of the essential food that she could. My bag was already packed and still right by the back door. Jack walked over to the giant black gun bag, and I ran to him. “It’s too heavy,” I said. “Just take what you think we’ll need.”
Without saying a word, Jack lifted the entire bag as though it was full of teddybears and pixie dust.
“Okay, good.” I said. “We can use them all…”
A thud against the front of my house made us all jump and turn. They were here, and one burning zombie was going to attract more. I didn’t know how long it would take for them to work their way through the vinyl siding of my home, and I really didn’t want to find out. As we were gathering the last of our supplies, the smell began to waft in.
Look, rotting zombie was already an awful smell on its own. Add fire to that equation, and what we had was the worst smelling barbecue in history.
Rex barked loudly each time a new flaming zombie thudded into the front of the house. Eventually, smoke started to filter in and irritate my nostrils and lungs. I heard Axel laughing across the street.
“BURN FUCKERS!! HAHAHAHAHA!!”
I really want to kill that guy.
We were packed to the gills and making our way out the back door when the front wall started to collapse. The odd thing was that in my eyes, this was just a structure. It didn’t matter to me how long I had lived here, or what happened in my life as I lived here. It was just my shelter for the past ten years, and now I had to leave. Sure, there were things in there I hated walking away from. I had an eighty inch HDTV mounted in my living room that was my pride and joy. But with no power in the house, and an ongoing zombie apocalypse, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be making anymore episodes of Family Guy for me to watch.
Then an absurd thought hit me.
Was Seth MacFarlane dead?
I don’t know why, at that particular moment the question of the survival of the creator of an animated series popped in my head, but it quickly spawned other questions.
Is the retarded janitor from the shopping mall dead? Again, I don’t know why HE popped in my head. The fact is, I never really thought about the death of anyone. Not once while I was going through this checklist of possible survivors, did any living family member or actual person that I know on a first name basis come into question. Not that I assumed they were either dead or alive, I just didn’t think of them.
We walked out into my backyard, and Rex sprinted excited circles around us. I could still hear Axel’s inbred laugh coming from Pete’s roof.
Now, I don’t have all of your fancy emotions, but I don’t like losing. Call me competitive. Where a military man would call our escape a “tactical withdraw,” I called it a “big fucking loss.”
I don’t like losing.
I dropped my bags and started to shimmy up the drainage pipes on the back of my house to get to the roof.
“What are you doing?!” Sara yelled.
I didn’t answer. I made my way to the roof and then belly crawled to the top of the ridge. I pulled out my yet to be fired glock and tried to find Axel in my sights. The smoke of dozens of burning zombies made it difficult to see Pete’s roof, but occasionally a slight breeze would blow and thin out the smelly haze. Then I saw him, standing there holding a r
ifle and looking out at the damage he had caused. A disgusting smile was plastered on his greasy grime covered face, and he truly looked happy with what he had done. I controlled my breathing like Jack showed me and lined the redneck up in my front sites. Zombies need head shots, and lucky for me, this asshole isn’t a zombie. Center mass would be a much easier target to hit. The sights of my gun floated gently over Axel’s chest. I held my breath and squeezed the trigger completely for the very first time.
The Inhuman Chronicles (Book 1): Inhuman Page 14