by Zuko, Joseph
Where were the little ones? Where was Jim? He asked himself.
Karen could feel the heat coming off the barrel of Troy’s shotgun. He sported two bandoliers full of shotgun shells. They crisscrossed his torso and held a hundred shells total. He looked like a freedom fighter from south of the border.
“I hid the girls in the closet,” Karen said as she pulled away from him and ran back to the bedroom.
“Where’s Jim?” Troy asked as he reloaded the shotgun.
“He called and said he was crossing the 205. That was about fifteen minutes ago.” Karen opened the closet door. The two little ones jumped from fright. Then they rushed out from under the clothes when they saw their Mama.
“It’s okay girls. It’s okay.” Karen knelt to embrace them. “Look who’s here?”
They looked up as Troy entered the bedroom.
“Uncle Troy!” They said it together, let go of their Mama to give him a squeeze. He propped his gun into the corner of the room and picked up both girls.
“What’s this?” Valerie pointed at the bandoliers.
“It holds the shells for my gun,” he said as his rough beard brushed against their soft cheeks as he gave each one a kiss.
“I peed on towel.” Robin gave him a big smile.
“Okay?” he looked to Karen for an explanation.
“We were hiding in the closet, so I improvised.”
“We need to go.” Troy nodded for the door.
“Where?”
“Mom’s.”
“Mom’s safe? I’ve been calling her all day.”
“I got her after I ran into a pack of those biters. We left her work in a hurry and she forgot her phone. She’s back at home. Grab your stuff.”
“I have to wait for Jim.”
“We don’t have a lot of-” Troy was cut off by the sound of breaking glass. The sliding glass door at the back of the apartment just shattered. Troy dropped the girls on the mattress and picked up his gun.
“Stay here!” Karen commanded the girls. She followed her brother into the living room. Seven nasty infected old folks stomped into the girls play area. The leader was an obese man topping four hundred and fifty pounds. Globs of fat fell from his open wounds that crossed his stomach and chest. It dripped out onto the floor with every step it took.
The shards of glass popped like peanut brittle under their bloody shoes. Troy racked his shotgun as he stepped past the kitchen.
BOOM!
The gun echoed loudly in the small living space. The big man’s face was cleaned of its features. Its dead body fell on top of a toy castle. The weight of it destroyed the pink palace. Karen joined her brother and frantically opened fire. Her first shot exploded through an old woman’s cheek. Her body smeared a black stain down the wall as her flailing arms pulled down the children’s taped up artwork.
The space filled with gun smoke. Muzzle flashes lit up the dark apartment. The rounds ripped in and out of the soft bodies and peppered the wall behind the infected. Black blood drained out onto the linoleum and pooled around the new Lego set Karen and Jim bought the girls last Christmas.
They dry fired their guns as the last body dropped onto the pile. Karen quickly exchanged her spent magazine for the full one in her back pocket. Troy worked another six rounds into his gun as he stepped up to the window and checked for more of them.
It was clear. For now. They hustled back to the children. Karen pulled her purse strap over her head and picked up the box of ammo from the closet. She crammed it into the already full purse and forced the zipper closed.
Troy loaded the last round into his shotgun and racked it. Karen dug in the closet and found a red leather dog bag that she used to carry Botchy around in before she had Valerie. She scooped up the sleeping old deaf dog and pushed Botchy into the opening, pulled the flap closed, the Velcro locked the little pouch inside. Karen slid her arm through the strap and tossed it up onto her shoulder.
“I packed all this food,” she said as she pointed down at the backpack she filled earlier.
“I can’t carry it and Valerie. Mama’s got food. We need to get out of here,” Troy said as he wiped off his drenched forehead.
Karen plucked the crying toddler from the bed and propped her up on her hip.
“Alright buddy, you have to hold onto Uncle Troy’s back!” He faced away from Valerie as she stood on the bed and he backed up into her. She leaped up on to his shoulders. “Dig your shoes into my belt and use it like a step.” He gave directions as he headed for the front door. She got her little arms around his neck and her shoes on his belt. Valerie was as secure as she could be. Troy was ready to charge out the front door.
“Wait!” Karen changed direction and entered the kitchen. She sat Robin on the counter and dug through the junk drawer until she found a pen and a notepad. She scribbled down the words “Went to Mom’s”
“Okay, let’s go!”
A group of dead people knocked politely at the front door. They wished to come in and make themselves at home. Troy took a look through the peephole and five crusty infected fuckers stared blankly at the door. They bumped shoulder to shoulder and jammed up the exit.
When they got closer to the door they stumbled over the dead bodies on the ground. Troy would have to empty his gun just to step one foot out the door. Karen rejoined him at the door and nodded for him to open it.
“It’s blocked.”
“Out the back!” Karen pivoted on a dime and headed for the sliding glass door. “Girls, don’t look!” She pulled Robin in tight so her face was tucked against her neck. Troy hunched over to give Valerie a better place to lie on his back. The two of them danced over the disgusting bodies that littered the playroom floor.
Valerie couldn’t help herself. She looked at the devastation and gore splayed out on her precious toys. She let out an ear-piercing scream and buried her face into her Uncle’s back.
Karen stepped out onto the small back porch, and over the dog fence and into the soft grass of the backyard. She was greeted by a pack of infected. At the front of the group was a sad looking old granny. Her black eyes were sunk deep into her skull and her neck was covered in dark purple bruises. A chunk of meat hung out the side of her brown polyester pants. It looked like she was bitten on the calf. She wore a gray sweatshirt that read “World’s Best Grandma”. Troy blasted a shot at the group. The pellets shredded the grandma. Her out stretched hands were destroyed, leaving only stumps. The words on her shirt were blacked out with blood. The force of the shot knocked her to the ground and her limp body tripped up the others.
Karen ran to the far side of the apartment building. She raced across a patch of grass that separated her building from the next building over. The coast was clear on this side of the unit. As she rounded the corner she spied Troy’s red truck. He had left his driver side door open.
Thank god.
She picked up speed as she headed for the open door. The sun felt so warm on her skin. There was a nice breeze in the air. It was a perfect spring day in the northwest, except for the smell. Every one of the infected in the parking lot must have evacuated their bowels. The stink of nasty shit hung heavy in the air.
Karen’s bicep burned and her lungs were on fire. She wanted to switch Robin to the other arm, but that would mean she would have to shoot with her non-dominant hand. It was better to be in pain than miss a shot.
Old infected creatures milled about in the parking lot separating them from the truck.
“Fuck!” she cursed.
“Bad word.” Robin let her Mama know she was disappointed in her. Troy was half a second behind his sister. He racked another shell. The weight of the two full bandoliers plus the forty-five pound kid on his back made this dash a nightmare. The two decades of smoking wasn’t doing him any favors either. The last thing he needed right now was for the lace on his boot to become untied. The plastic tips of the laces danced on the concrete as he moved onto the sidewalk. Two steps later Troy got hung up on the shoelaces. His ye
ll alerted Karen to the problem.
She turned in time to see him crash to the ground. The shotgun went off and the pellets just missed Karen’s knees. The misfire crossed over the entire lot and punched out the back window of a sedan. The gun fell out of his hands and slid across the ground. Valerie panicked and squeezed tighter around his neck. Her forearms choked him and made Troy cough violently.
He forced the words out through the coughs, “Let up!” he tapped her arm.
Karen ran back and hovered over the two of them. Her gun was trained on the forehead of the next closest infected man.
“Get up Troy!” Karen’s voice was strained. Pain radiated all over the man’s body. He pushed himself up to his knees and reached back with his hand to raise Valerie up higher onto his back.
“You okay girl? Goddamn that hurt!”
“I’m okay!” she said as she kept her face buried deep between his shoulder blades.
The infected encircled them. Troy’s shotgun had slid ten-feet from where he landed on his belly. Two infected old folks crossed over the steel barrel and wood stock of Troy’s gun. The monsters looked like an old couple visiting Hawaii. Flower shirts and shorts. The only thing missing was a set of colorful leis around their necks.
“What are we going to do?!” Karen panicked. They were completely cut off from Troy’s weapon. The thirteen-ish rounds in Karen’s gun were no match for the twenty plus ghouls that surrounded them. Karen wished she were back in the closet.
Chapter 14
Robin tried to crawl farther up onto Karen’s shoulder. As if being on top of her Mama would save her. Karen fought to keep the girl on her hip and her gun aimed at the closest infected man. Troy pulled at Valerie’s arm to get her to stop choking him.
“Troy?” The dire situation has crippled her ability to string a sentence together.
“I…don’t…” Troy got to one knee. There was no clear path to make their escape and without his shotgun they were all dead. The grandma with the missing hands had regrouped with her gang of creeps and had closed off the way they had come. There was no retreat and they couldn’t move forward. Maybe if Karen had a lucky clover shoved deep up her ass she might hit a bullseye with every shot and clear a path to the truck, but she forgot to shove it up there this morning.
The closest infected was now only five feet away, close enough for Karen to smell the man’s coffee breath. She was about to pop off a round and take stinky breath down when a scream screeched out above them.
The high-pitched yell blasted across the parking lot. Karen and Troy turned quickly to see from where it was originating. It came from Cliff and Tina’s second floor window; Eve was carrying on like a banshee. Once her voice gave out she punched a hole in the screen and tossed down a toy. It was a plush mechanical teddy bear that sung and danced to the song “Wild Thing”. It kept dancing and singing when it hit the flowerbed at the front of the apartment. Over the singing bear Eve kept screaming and slapping her hand at the siding outside the window.
Karen and Troy looked back over the approaching infected. The monsters were easily distracted and the nine-year-old now had a captive audience. The dead shuffled past Karen and Troy and they made for the noise.
The brother and sister stood still and kept their mouths shut. It did not take long for some space to clear up around them. A few more voices joined Eve’s.
Tina and Cliff yelled out and loudly clapped their hands, “HEY! ASSHOLES! UP HERE!”
“Bad word.” Robin shook her head against Karen’s neck. A gap was made for Troy’s shotgun. They sprinted for it. The gun had a few new scratches down its side, crisscrossing the dark blue metal finish of the barrel. Troy swallowed a grunt as he squatted to pick up the Remington.
The infected clustered under the second floor window, their torn blood covered wrinkled arms reached up and futilely clawed at the building’s siding. One of them had stepped on the teddy bear and the digital sounding old rock song started over again. It made the whole scene look like a pathetic rock concert with the worst audience ever.
Troy retrieved his weapon and they bolted for the open truck door. One of the infected, suffering from a busted up leg, was limping behind and staggered by the front of Troy’s ride. It was late for the concert. Even with one of its eyes dangling by a thread of tissue it spotted the fast moving Karen and charged at her. It was on a collision course with the fleeing humans. Karen didn’t break her stride as she aimed her pistol at the infected.
BOOM!
She nailed a direct hit at fifteen paces. Maybe she did put that lucky clover up her ass this morning. The gunshot pulled the attention of the infected back onto them. No matter how loud Tina and Cliff shouted down at the monsters, the moving target was much more appealing.
Karen’s body slammed into the truck door and she pushed Robin up onto the bench seat.
Troy stood guard by the open door. He pumped a few rounds into the closest infected. Once Karen was fully into the truck cab Troy took a step back and Karen pulled Valerie off of him.
The infected were so close together Troy was able to take down a group with each of his shots. Karen got the girls set up next to her and clicked both girls into the center seatbelt.
“Let’s move,” Karen pulled the belt tight across their laps. Troy backed up into his vehicle and slid his shotgun across the floorboard. He slammed the door shut and cranked up the window. A sloppy set of fingers crashed into the glass. Black sludge squeezed out of the bite marks on its hands. They lay down a thick coat of gunk on the window making it look tinted. Troy breathed out a rough lung full of air. He wasted no time getting out his keys and jammed them into the ignition. Troy cranked over the engine and they took off.
“Uncle Troy’s truck?” Robin looked up at her Mama and pointed at the dash. Her little brown eyes red with tears, but she still had to tell her Mama the newest update.
“Yeah baby, it’s Uncle Troy’s truck,” Karen said as she dropped a kiss down on to both kids’ heads. She did an internal prayer and was thankful for the extra couple of minutes she now had on this Earth with her children.
Blessings and curses. Peaks and Valleys. Each move they made felt like both. They were still alive, but she was leaving her home. The place Jim was fighting to get back to. She squashed the thought that Jim could be here any second. It was a waste of a thought. It didn’t help her to dwell on possibilities. She could only focus on what was happening right now. No matter how much she hated the reality, there was no way they could have stayed in the apartment and kept the girls safe. Jim would have told her she needed to go. Her mother’s house was the right move. As he got the truck turned around in the lot he knocked over half a dozen infected, but never got one of them under the wheel to squash them dead. Karen waved up at the Morgan family. She gave them a nod of gratitude for the help.
The Morgan’s waved back at her.
“Where the hell are they going?” Tina asked her husband.
Cliff shook his head and gave his daughter a loving pat on her back. It was his way of telling her how proud he was of her quick thinking to help save the neighbors.
Troy left a set of rubber stripes on the asphalt as he peeled out of the parking lot. A white cloud of smoke followed the speeding truck. Maybe it was all of the adrenaline spikes Karen had been receiving for the last few hours, but the ride with her brother felt surreal. It felt more like a snippet from a bad dream. The one detail of the nightmare you can remember when you wake up in the morning. Seeing her brother behind the wheel reminded her of something from her childhood.
As the sister and brother grew up in their home, the battle lines were clearly drawn. It was always them versus the parents. Team kid versus team adult. The family had to move every couple of years for their father’s work. A large chunk of their early teens was spent in a big house outside of Spokane, Washington. They had a lot of firsts in that house. Troy lost his virginity in the decked out party basement the Halloween after he turned sixteen. Karen kissed her first boyfrien
d at the age of twelve in her bedroom. It was also the house they lived in when they learned that their parents were going to get a divorce. When Karen was eighteen she got an email from an old neighbor friend from Spokane that told her the house was about to be demolished.
She and the then twenty-one-year old Troy packed up some camping gear and a twelve pack of beer and took a road trip from Vancouver to Spokane to see the old house one last time. They got there about eleven o’clock at night, broke in, and drank themselves to sleep in the living room. That morning they woke to the sounds of bulldozers. They had just enough time to grab the car keys and escape out the window they busted open to get inside. The construction crew chased them a hundred yards before the workers gave up and went back to bulldozing.
The siblings watched from a small hill on the property as the house was knocked over with their camping gear still inside. They held hands and cried openly as they watched a part of their childhood get crushed and sorted into different piles.
Lumber, metal pipes, carpet and roofing all piled up on the dirt that was once their home. They waited until the work team called it a day before they could get back to their car. They were certain they would get arrested for breaking and entering if they came back to get their ride too soon.
It was a long, quiet trip back to Vancouver. They both suffered from hangovers, but even with a splitting headache it was the best, and last trip, they ever took together. The memory splashed across Karen’s mind as she watched her brother hammer through the gears. It seemed impossible to her that it had been over a decade since the last time she went anywhere with Troy.
There wasn’t time to daydream, she had to focus and think about her next move. Karen pulled out her box of ammo and the spent magazine. Her fingers were already sore from the last time she loaded the damn thing. She worked through the pain and refilled both of her magazines.
Only ten rounds remained in the box when she was done reloading her gun. She popped the magazine back in, racked the slide and put it back in her holster. Since she was in the mood to reload she picked up Troy’s gun from the floorboard, flipped it over and stuck out her hand towards her brother, “Shells.”