by Mark Clodi
Veronica, coming downstairs in a white fluffy towel, called out, “Hmm, that almost smells good! What are you doing? Seeing if we can eat old style food?” She stopped as she observed Nancy holding her finger against the burner. “What..”
Nancy gestured with her right hand sharply, cutting her off. Both women watched as Nancy’s finger blistered and blackened over the heat of the burner, with more burn appearing on other parts of Nancy’s hands. Sweat was running out of the pours in Nancy’s face, dripping onto the stove in wet, slightly pink drops. Finally Nancy pulled her hand back and held it up between her and Veronica. As they watched the flesh on her finger grew pink and the splits in the skin sealed over. A blackened fragment of charred flesh fell to the floor and as the smoke alarm started to go off they continued to watch Nancy’s hand repair itself. In three minutes you would not have known anything had happened, except for the smoke in the air and the blacked bit of skin that had fallen off as Nancy’s wounds had healed. Both women stared past Nancy’s hand at each other, their eyes locking. Finally Nancy dropped it, the smoke alarm stopped chirping and she said, “I had to know Veronica, I had to know. My scars are gone, from my appendicitis when I was sixteen. I had that scar all my life. And it disappeared sometime since I became” she waved her hand up and down along her body, “this. What are we now?”
Veronica took Nancy’s hand and held it, examining it closely then looked back into the other woman's eyes and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know Nancy.”
Chapter 29
Tom lowered the bat instead of swinging it. “Who is firing down there?” He demanded of the half naked, bald man.
“Probably Joe and the boys. And I gotta tell ya not a moment too soon too. You are both dead, you know that right? Fagot Jews with one shotgun between ya, my boys have my back and they got more than one shotgun. We have REAL weapons, you might as well shoot yourselves now and save us some bullets.”
Tom looked at Max, then turned back to the bald headed man, “How many are there?”
The man said nothing. Tom poked him in the testicles with the end of the bat and shouted, “How many?” The bald man fell half onto the bed before tumbling to the floor.
“Oooh!” groaned the man, clutching his groin with both hands and smearing blood from his head wound everywhere, “Thirty, alright, thirty brothers to kill your butt fucking asses.”
“Thanks.” said Tom. He turned as if to exit, Max backed up with him, then Tom turned around and lurched towards the man on the floor, hitting him repeatedly about the head and shoulders with the bat, screaming, “This is for my roommates you fuck!”
The shots continued outside and were joined by the sound of a horn honking urgently.
“Tom, Tom! We ain’t got time for this man, we gotta get out of here. Tom! C’mon!” Max said as he pulled Tom out of the room, away from the bald man who was probably dead. Max turned Tom around, gestured towards his stuff and pushed him towards it. Tom gathered it up, slinging the big pack over his back and onto both shoulders, grabbing the smaller bag in one hand and keeping the baseball bat in the other. He went out the door into the hall and turned into the bathroom, instead of into the living room, a move that may have saved his life.
A bullet cracked out, whistling down the hallway and into the hollow core door of the bathroom. Max, half out of the bedroom door, ducked down and let off a shot towards the flash of light he had seen in the kitchen. Loud screaming was his reward, followed by the sounds of one, or maybe two guns, with bullets hitting the walls and piercing through them into Tom’s bedroom. Max was not nearly as shielded as he would have liked, the drywall did not seem to be stopping the bullets at all. Tom’s bat lay in the hallway and Max could see enough of the bathroom to know that Tom had probably pulled himself into the tub, meaning he was alive, but was he wounded?
The fusillade stopped and Max remained very, very quiet. A voice shouted out over the moaning in the kitchen, “Throw out yer weapons and we won’t kill you! Do it now!”
Max remained deadly quiet, the shotgun still pointed towards the door, somehow, during the firing he had gone from standing up, to crouching, to lying prone on the floor. A minute later he heard voices in the living room softly talking amongst them; unfortunately Max could not hear what they said due to the crying man in the kitchen.
Then he heard movement and the crying in the kitchen got worse, then the screaming receded towards the front door, Max though now would be a great time to take some sort of action, as he was sure anyone in the living room would be watching the screaming guy being pulled out of the front door.
He regained his feet and in a crouch moved fast and low towards the living room. He saw three men at the front door, one was carrying the man Max had wounded in the kitchen, the other was at an extreme disadvantage as he had picked that moment to assist his friends out the door, leaving no one to watch the hallway. Max leveled the shotgun and fired on that man, then switched targets and fired at the other man, who was fumbling for his weapon, while his screaming friend grappled with him. Both men went down and the screaming mercifully stopped too. Max reloaded the shotgun.
“Tom, you okay? Tom?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am okay, I am fine.” Tom emerged from the bathroom, a towel in his hand, which he was using to wipe off the blood that had splattered on him when he was hitting the man in his bedroom with the bat.
Tom stopped in the living room, “Holy shit, you killed them all!”
Max just looked at Tom, his look saying, ‘And just why are you wiping blood off your face mister?’ Tom shrugged sheepishly, then said, “Oh shit you are bleeding!” while raising his hand to point at Max’s stomach.
Max shook his head incredulously, “No. No, seriously I am okay! This must be from one of them.”
However when he looked down his shirt was matted in blood and it was dripping onto the wood floor of Tom’s hallway. He immediately fell to his knees, dropping the gun while pulling up his shirt and babbling, “No, no, no!”
Tom ran forward and grabbed, not Max, but the gun pointing it towards the door, the firing outside had dwindled to a random shot now and again, the car horn was still blaring, though it sounded more distant.
“How bad is it Max? How bad?”
“Fucking bad Tom, very bad!” Max had pulled his shirt off revealing a mass of bloody tissue across the front of his stomach, blood was pouring out of it between Max’s fingers.
Tom threw the towel to Max and said, “Can you walk? You were walking, can you walk some more?”
Max picked up the towel, his first instinct was not to mix blood with blood, the old AIDS and Hepatitis fears welling up inside of him, then he figured bleeding to death took precedent and pushed the wadded up towel contaminated with the bald man’s blood to his stomach. It hurt now, like a fire across his stomach. Still he knew he had to move, to get up, to leave. Tom was not going to fireman carry him out of here, in full clothing, completely wet Tom maybe weighed one hundred sixty pounds, whereas Max was a good two hundred, no way Tom could carry him, at least not for long anyway. Besides Max had gotten up from the bedroom floor and had walked into the living room and he had shot the three guys…oh, the realization of what he had done just snapped to the forefront of his mind. He had killed three men. Not zombies, not former men, three living humans. He leaned over on his hands and knees and vomited on the floor.
“Max! Oh man Max, are you gonna make it? You gotta make it man! Get up! Get up!”
“No Tom, it ain’t that, it is..” Max regained his knees, sat back on his legs and gestured towards the three unmoving men near the front door.
“Fuck. You had me worried there, get up. Can you walk?”
“Yeah, yeah, nag, nag, nag. I am going.” Max slowly regain his feet and steadied himself on the counter. “Get their guns Tom, we might as well bring Stewart and Steve a present or two, eh? I will take this guys pistol from the kitchen.” The pistol was actually a revolver, Max was not intimately familiar with revolvers,
but after a moments thought he managed to break it open and take out the rounds, he had three remaining. Checking the first wounded guys pockets he came up with a black belt. ‘Christ!’, he thought, ‘No wonder the guy carrying was so damn slow.’ The black leather belt with fringes had two pouches, which fell off when Max took the belt off, and continued taking it off, it must have been around ninety inches around, the screamer had been a very fat man. Max grabbed the two pouches, strung them back onto the belt, opened one and found loose rounds, in the other he found four round disks, that extended into the depths of the pouch, pulling one out Max could see each cylinder held six bullets, he pressed the back tip of the cylinder, which looked like a button, and all the bullets fell out. “Shit.” Bending over he gathered up the bullets with one hand and figured out how they went back onto the cylinder. It did not take a genius to figure out that when you used all your bullets you dumped the empty ones out and used this cylinder to quick load the gun. Max tucked the cylinder back away, reloaded the revolver from the other pouch and then slung the belt over his shoulder, bandoleer style, he tightened it until it was snug. He then went into the hallway and pulled up the linen closet and grabbed the largest towel he could see, he used both hands to slowly peel his current bandage back and then secured the fresh one around his middle, tucking the ends in as good as he could. He was ready to go.
Meanwhile Tom had gathered two pistols off the other men and had a few boxes of ammo for each weapon, he tucked one into his back pack’s drink holder and handed the smaller one to Max, “A back up weapon.” Max took it and slipped it into his pocket without a word. The honking car was a block or two away, there were no more shots from within the apartment complex.
“I figure I know this place and the area pretty good, we can go down the stairs and instead of going towards the parking lot, duck back over the railing on the opposite side, coming out towards the street side, I see the kids around here to it all the time. Then we head towards the honking and try to keep things between us and the building. Are you ready?” Max nodded yes and they headed cautiously out the front door.
Chapter 30
Getting on the highway had been a bad idea. Merging onto the road it had looked clear, but all too soon the entire road was blocked in a major pile up. Worse Amelia was afraid to turn the car around and go back, a half mile earlier they had spotted a car that had hit another one heading the opposite direction. Someone had obviously encountered the same wreck and then turned around and hit somebody else coming this direction. Amelia had not survived the horror of MAC Co. to die in a traffic accident.
“I gotta know something.” Diane said suddenly into the silence between them, “I always wondered, and it is not any of my business, but were you sleeping with him?”
“What?” Amelia was flabbergasted, here they were, on the run from zombies, the world crashing around their ears and Diane wanted to know if she was sleeping with her boss? Kirkpatrick? She let out an ironic laugh, “No.” more laughter, “ No! Did you ever meet his wife?”
Diane just looked at her, as if realizing she had not quite thought of all the parts in the equation, before she smiled and shook her head, “Sorry. Yeah, I should have considered that, his wife was there a lot and you and her got along pretty well. Were you sleeping with his wife?” This last was said in jest, but it shocked Amelia, her mouth made a small ‘o’ and then she started laughing, as did Diane.
“Oh, no, oh no! That is so wrong. I mean no! You are not a very nice lady!”
“Well, dear, you know the rumors were all over the place, you had gone on several trips with him and were very attentive to him, very respectful. And he treated you, well, now that I think about it, he treated you like a daughter, not a lover. I am sorry. I really should have put a stop to the talk ages ago. Maybe I lived this long just to apologize? Can you forgive me?”
“If it were even a normal day I suppose I could, but as you are the only human I currently know, and we are in your car, I will say I wholeheartedly forgive you. Just don’t make any passes at me okay?”
It was Diane’s turn to be surprised and after another fit of the giggles the two went back to looking at the wreckage in front of them.
“I think you could get by on the right shoulder, you might scrape the paint, but who the hell cares?” said Diane.
Amelia looked to the right, not at all certain of Diane’s assessment. She backed the car up and then slowly pulled it forward towards the gap near the very far edge of the freeway. The highways tended to be either above the surrounding communities or down below them, either way they always had very stout metal railings behind which were six to twelve foot high metal walls to help reduce sound to the surrounding communities. When Amelia pulled up to the gap in the wreckage she thought Diane was right, the wreck was about three cars deep and looked clear after that. There was no movement anyway. She eased the car forward, the Cadillac purred along, like a jungle cat getting ready to pounce. They made it through the gap touching only once, when the car barely brushed against a mirror on one of the upright cars, causing it to bend outwards and remain at an odd angle after they passed.
There were bodies in the wrecks too, some of them were not dead, Amelia was not certain, but some looked undead too, trapped in the confines of the wreck unable to sate their appetites or free themselves. Amelia shuddered and made the sign of the cross, her ancient Catholic upbringing coming to the surface of her thoughts in a spurt of religiosity she had not felt since junior high. She did not even consider stopping to help those still living in their metal tombs.
Once beyond the first wreck they made another mile or perhaps a mile and a half towards the interstate seventy exchange before they were again slowed by wreckage. This one had brought down the railing between the eight lanes of highway and Amelia floored the caddy and hopped over the fencing onto the other lanes, beyond the wreck there was no way back to the ‘right’ way until the next exit, she went down the ‘on’ ramp traveled under the highway to the correct ‘on’ ramp and continued her journey.
“Should I just go through town, you think?” she asked Diane.
“Really dear it is up to you, I did not want to leave Mac Co. at all, you know that, but we had to and now I am just not sure where to go or how to get there. I think the highways will be faster, maybe take highway six west and then get back on interstate seventy east and loop around?”
“We-ell, I dunno. Highway six Has all those low spots, if there is a wreck there we won’t have any chance of getting by. Of course if there is a wreck on this highway we probably won’t get by either. I think we need to be prepared to walk at some point.”
“No, never that, we can’t, they are out there.”
“Diane, a good wreck and we are done, you know that, the gas will only last so long and I will drive us as long as we can, but we might not make it through even then. You know side streets might be better, if we have to we can always drive up on the lawns or go down a block, we might make it that way.”
“Well lets get up to highway six and see how it is, west is west, right? If we can make it a couple miles west we could back track onto other roads and get through. I bet seventy and twenty are totally snarled up.”
Amelia bit her lip and looked pensive, “Okay, I think that will work, we could take six to Wadsworth or Kipling and then use side streets to get around any accidents. I hope there are no wrecks on any bridges. This is no good Diane, we have no way of knowing which way to go.”
Diane reached out and turned on the radio, setting it on ‘scan’, it stopped a couple times on ‘canned’ stations before stopping on a news channel where a dj was taking calls. The caller was sobbing hysterically, demanding to know what to do, what to do? He hung up on her after a couple of moments, the next call was a man preaching God and hellfire, stating the end of the world had come and all sinners must repent now that judgment was at hand. He too was cut off in mid spiel. The next caller was a woman who was calming asking what she should do, she and her kids
were hiding in their house and had seen several zombies wandering the streets outside, she did not have any weapons and did not think her house could stand up to a serious assault by anyone. Her husband had taken the car to work and she had no transportation, anyway where would she go?
The dj responded calmly and said that she might consider opening her doors slightly, maybe making it appear that the house had already been broken into, there were reports that that tactic had saved more than one person before. Then she should take her kids and her self into the attic with as much food and water as she should carry, in fact get the attic squared away first, then ransack the house a bit before hiding. His further advice was just to wait, he was sure the military or National Guard would be on the scene soon.
After that call he gave the station id, the phone number and said that he would take callers with serious questions, he could not accept calls from end of the world zealots, or hysterical people, he was taking calls straight from the phone lines as he was not really a dj, the real one was currently sleeping, and the other people at the station were trying to secure the building as best they could.
Diane had her cell phone out and was dialing the stations number repeatedly trying to get through as Amelia crept her car along towards the six exit.
After about forty five minutes she finally got through. Amelia saw Diane go from a frantic, scared older woman into the dominatrix of steel that she remembered in her few dealings with her at Mac Co.