“Did your dad ever come back into town?” She looked into his eyes and sat down close to him.
“No, I’m wondering if he got stopped outside of town because of the quarantine,” he said.
There was doubt in his voice, and doubt all around the room. Justin had been trying to calm himself by making lewd comments and eyeing Lisa’s marvelous features, but it wasn’t working. Deep down in the pit of his stomach he knew people were going to start dying, and he would likely be one of them. There was a voice that had been clicking on and off in his head telling him so.
Mommy and Daddy are dead, Justin. And you will be too.
He didn’t say anything. He just held his face in his hands and tried to ignore it. Only crazies were supposed hear voices.
But when there were gunshots outside, he jolted back in his seat. Russ and Lisa did the same. None of them got up to look. Justin counted the shots. Eight in all. Then the sound of a police siren swooped by the house about ten seconds after.
“Jesus,” Lisa muttered.
“I don’t like this,” Justin got up from the couch and walked over to the window. He could hear the sound of more shots being fired in the distance, but the police car was out of view.
Russ was silent. Lisa wrapped her arms around him like a scared child.
12
“Just stay out of it, Randall, you hear me?” Agnes used her metal walker, complete with sliced open tennis balls, to get across the floor. Randall Grossman was standing outside the door with a loaded shotgun resting on his shoulder, watching the men around the FBI trailer.
“You shut yer yap, Agnes. I don’t trust them FBI guys.”
“Donahue told you to stay put, honey. Can’t you just leave them be?”
“Donahue also said un-American things were gonna happen. I can’t allow that, honey. I gotta defend my country.”
“This isn’t Vietnam anymore, Randall!”
He pulled some chewing tobacco out of his front pocket and stuffed a wad in his mouth. Agnes cringed. She hated it when he chewed. It smelled, and he was never conscience of where he spat. Sometimes he’d do it right on the carpet.
“Why don’t you come inside?” she said.
Randall shook his head. “I think I’ll stay right here.” He grabbed a rusty lawn chair that had been leaning against the house and unfolded it.
“Donahue said for us to stay inside.”
“Donahue is lettin them take over our town.”
Agnes sighed. “You’re impossible.”
Randall sat down in the chair and listened to the shouting going on at the trailer. Some guy in a business suit was walking up and down the line of soldiers like they were at boot camp. There were ten, maybe twelve. Randall counted them again. Twelve.
I’mma watch those bastards. They do anything, my little shotgun will have a word with someone’s face, damnit!
It was hot outside, even if there was a gentle breeze that caressed him. He welcomed the breeze, but as his daddy always said you were going nowhere fast unless you was sweatin. He drug his hand across his forehead and smiled when it came back wet. A bug buzzed by his face. He shooed it away with his John Deere hat, and it joined the others by the nearby porch light.
“Randall, don’t you remember what that helicopter said?” Agnes poked her head out the door again.
He remembered. They said some word he couldn’t pronounce. But he did remember them telling him to go inside and stay there. Well, goddamnit, he wasn’t about to do that. It was a free goddamn country and he could do whatever the hell he wanted to on his property. The government wasn’t supposed to boss people around. If a hardnosed buck like Nixon would have been in office none of this would have happened. That’s for sure. Nixon had balls. Randall liked a man with balls. This goddamn Obama Democrat was a different story.
“Just go back inside, woman. Let the men handle this business,” he said.
Agnes sighed and walked back in, leaving Randall with the smile of a toddler on his face. He’d won that battle. America would be safe again soon. Now all he had to do was fend off these FBI bastards.
The tall man walking around the soldiers had made brief eye contact with him as his wife left. The man in the suit whispered something into a soldier’s ear and pointed toward Randall, who happily cradled for his shotgun and smiled at them.
The man in the suit began to walk toward him. He was a tall scrawny fella, and Randall would have thought of him as a pansy, but he looked pretty strong in that black suit. But if he told him to go inside he was going to have to talk to his gun.
“Sir, I’m sorry. I have to ask you to go inside.”
“You can ask me anything, son. That doesn’t mean I’ll do it.”
The man sighed, then looked directly into Randall’s eyes. His face was stern, and Randall guessed that this buck had been in the force too at one time. Maybe even ‘Nam. He was probably a bit too young for that, but maybe.
“You’re interfering with a government operation.”
“Government operation, my ass. You can’t do this. You can’t tell people not to sit on their front porch.”
The man turned around and nodded at someone. One of the soldiers began to jog over.
“Get your ass off my property!” Randall held up his shot gun, not pointing it at the man, but waving it in front of his face.
“You don’t want to do that, sir.”
“Randall! What’s all the commotion out there?” Agnes cried from inside the house.
“Shut yer yap!” he screamed.
The soldier ran up beside the agent man.
“Last chance sir. Go inside.”
“You can kiss my ass!”
The soldier smirked. The smile made Randall madder than hell. He cocked his shotgun and placed his finger on the trigger. The agent nodded at the soldier.
Before Randall could even tell what was going on, the soldier drew a funny looking pistol from behind his back and fired a dart into Randall's chest. Randall stumbled back, screaming obscenities.
“You made the choice, sir,” the agent said.
Randall fell over.
* * * * *
The men had just gotten into the Humvees and were waiting to be dispatched to the woods. Lt. Evan Brown was as nervous as he had ever been in his military career. Fighting people was one thing, but fighting space aliens was an entire different ball park. The kid next to him looked completely green, Brown could tell by his eyes. But at the same time he couldn’t blame the kid, this was probably his first PMD mission too. Seeing the lieutenant all jittery and nervous didn’t help the kid either.
The uncomfortable silence was finally broken when he heard sirens in the distance followed by gunshots. The shots weren’t coming from anything huge, just a small pistol of some kind –maybe a glock. Brown took a peek out his window and saw a police car screech to a stop. Some of the sirens on top of the car were broken out, and the windshield was partially shattered. There were also splotches of blood all over the hood of the car.
Hawking approached the vehicle and was talking to whoever was inside.
“I got a bad feeling about that,” someone said from the back seat.
“Have any of you actually fought these things before?” Brown asked.
There was a short silence and then someone spoke. “No sir.”
Oh Christ, he thought. All of the uneasy feelings returned. Hell, he couldn’t remember what had helped him feel more comfortable in the first place. He found himself wishing that he was back home with his wife, or maybe even in the jungles of Colombia fighting drug lords. Not this. Jesus, not this.
Agent Hawking motioned for Evan to step out of the vehicle and he did, hoping to God that nothing too horrible had happened. But as he looked over at the smashed up police car his stomach did a flip inside of him. Hawking pulled him uncomfortably close.
“There’s more than we thought. We can’t really call for backup right now because the radios and phones are out,” he whispered.
&nb
sp; Evan’s heart cramped up into his throat. It was supposed to be an easy mission. That is why they selected him, right? An easy mission with a minimal number of enemies. There were three of them: one alien, one man, and one woman.
“What?” he asked. His eyes widened.
Hawking sighed. “Go get Agent Johnson for me.”
Brown made haste and ran over to the trailer as Hawking returned to the sheriff.
“How many do you think there were?” Hawking asked.
“Five.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. There were five that attacked me.”
Hawking turned away for a moment and stared at the ground. He paced in a quick circle with his hands behind his back. Agent Johnson came walking out alongside the lieutenant.
“Tell him what you told me,” Hawking said.
“I just got attacked by five…things,” Donahue said. “They looked like people but they were weird and deformed. They ran pretty damn fast too. I was at sixty and they were still on my ass.”
“Hawking,” Agent Johnson turned around and Hawking followed. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we had reason to believe that the incident was primarily focused in the south. The woods.”
“Yes, as far as we knew.”
“How could this have happened?”
Hawking looked at the ground and took a deep breath. “Well, we assumed that the lady and the E.T. had both gone south. Something is obviously wrong with that assumption.”
Johnson lit a cigarette and took a quick puff before he spoke. “One of them went north.”
“Or both of them.”
“What made us assume they had gone south in the first place?”
Hawking stiffened as if he was being personally attacked, and he probably was. In eight years of tracking these goddamn things this had never happened.
“Listen, goddamnit!” he screamed. “ From past experiences they flock toward trees for safe haven after they land. I was wrong, but we don’t have time to argue about that bullshit now! If we don’t come up with a plan people are going to die!”
Lt. Brown and the sheriff, who was still in the car, exchanged glances when they saw them arguing, but didn’t say anything.
“You’re right, Hawking. I just wanted to establish that you’ve realized your error.”
“Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do? I screwed it up,” Hawking said. “I suppose you think you know how to fix this?”
Johnson hesitated, but went ahead and said it. “We have to walk through every house and building in this town and take them out. All of them.”
“Do you think our men will last through it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the ones in the wooded area?”
“I don’t know.”
Hawking scratched his forehead. “We could call for backup.”
“The people at the Northern border have the order to block radio and phone transmissions for at least another day. You know that.”
Hawking nodded. “I guess we have no choice then. The only thing we can do is go into the town and eliminate these fuckers house by house. We’ll try to avoid civilian casualties, but…we’ll do what we can.”
Johnson agreed. “I guess I’ll tell Lt. Brown and the men our plans have changed. You talk to Mr. Donahue.”
“Should I tell him how to stop these things and what they are?”
“Just tell him to shoot them in the head. He doesn’t need to know anything more.”
Hawking nodded and walked over to the sheriff while Johnson approached Lt. Brown.
13
“I just don’t know what to do,” Justin muttered. Reality had finally pried through the dying effect of the marijuana. And even though the truth of his parents' death had his stomach doing flips inside of his belly, it wasn’t bothering him as much as the chaos in the street.
Justin walked away from the window and took a seat on the couch. Lisa was still sitting close to Russ, although she wasn’t clinging to him in fright anymore. Russ had a look of indifference on his face. Probably a forced look. Russ was looking to score, Justin thought, and he wondered how anyone could have pussy on their mind right now.
What Justin didn’t think about was that Russ had worries just the same. He kept thinking about the dream with Jessica and his parents, and worse, the hallucination he had with her stabbing Lisa in the back. It had been so goddamn real. That horrid look in Lisa’s eyes sent a depressing jolt through him. Whenever he looked into Lisa’s face he saw that image. Her eyes were watering; the tip of a knife stuck out of her gut and blood was dripping onto the floor. Jessica was standing behind her, smiling.
Lisa had thought about her trip out too. The vomit was still at the bottom of the stair case. She was in too much shock to clean it up. But there had been blood, and a great deal of it. She had seen it, but it wasn’t there. Her mother had been talking to her as well. It was a different voice, though. It was almost the same, but not quite right.
“Are we going to do anything?” Justin asked as he stared at the floor.
“I don’t know what,” Lisa said.
“What do you think is out there?” Justin asked.
“How am I supposed to know?”
“I’m just trying to start a conversation. Don’t have to throw me down, Lisa. It’s too quiet in here. It doesn’t feel normal.”
She shrugged.
“I’ve been having…” Russ started to talk but he stopped himself. He was thinking of telling them about the hallucination and the dream. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to tell Lisa that he had just seen her with a knife rammed through her back.
“What?” Lisa said.
“I don’t know.” He looked over at Lisa’s face and although she wasn’t exactly cringing with pain or even resembling the feeling that she was going through in the hallucination, Russ could see it. He placed his hand over his forehead and sat back.
“Hallucinations,” he said.
Lisa looked at him with confirmation and curiosity.
“I had a dream last night that seemed real. It was like I was there.”
Lisa’s forehead crinkled in the center and her eyes were processing something that made Russ think she had had one too.
“Something wrong?” Russ asked.
“I had one, too.”
They both stared into each other's eyes in fear. Lisa wanted to tell Russ about her problem, and Russ wanted to tell her about the dream and hallucination. They were both afraid of the other’s reaction.
“It was about Jessica Welch,” Russ said. “She was in her prom dress, dancing around in my living room. My parents were lying in the recliners, dead with bullet holes in the centers of their foreheads. She kept asking for me to be with her. Then both of my parents got up and started telling me to shoot her.”
There was no immediate reaction from Lisa, and he saw Justin pick his nose out of the corner of his eye. So he continued.
“Then when I got home,” he took a breath, “I found blood on the kitchen floor, and the window above the sink was broken out. I took a few steps in and I heard Jessica talking behind me. I turned around and sure enough there she was. But this time was different. I wasn’t sleeping, and I didn’t think there was any possible way it could be fake.” His voice shuddered. “You were standing next to her. She held a knife in your back. You were silent and struggled to breathe. I charged her but she disappeared.”
Lisa hunched over and stared at the floor. What Russ had said scared her without a doubt, but it wasn’t in the way a normal girl would have taken it. A normal girl would probably have run away to the other side of the room and declared Russ a psycho. Hell, she probably would have done it too if she hadn’t had the bloody vomit episode. And if it weren’t for the feeling.
“You all right?” He put his hand on her shoulder.
She nodded.
“That’s pretty fucked up man,” Justin said. “Tell him about you’re little episode Lisa.”
I’m bulimic, she thought. Just say it.
“I have a problem,” she whispered.
“What?”
Lisa avoided his eyes and stared down toward the couch. “I’m bulimic.” She whispered it just loud enough for him to hear and soft enough for Justin to not.
Russ didn’t say anything.
“I’ve never told anyone that. Not even my mother, but she, or something that resembled her, spoke to me and knew about it. I couldn’t see her though. The voice was in my head or something but she was there. Then I began to feel sick, and I started throwing up blood.”
“When was this?” he asked.
“Probably an hour ago.”
“I don’t think that was your mother talking to you.”
“Who was it then?”
“I don’t know. This definitely has to do with this quarantine though.”
She nodded. Justin had walked over to the window again.
“Someone’s out here, man,” he said.
“Where?” Lisa asked.
“In the middle of the road, staring at me. Russ?”
“Yeah?” He got up from the couch.
“I think it’s your mom.”
Russ rushed over and saw her. It was his mom, but she looked hideous. Her skin was a horrid gray and there was blood dripping from her stomach and chest. Her eyes were red.
This isn’t real, Russ thought. This is another hallucination.
He stepped back from the window and turned around. “This isn’t real.”
“I don’t know man. I can see her,” Justin said.
Lisa got up from the couch and took a peak for herself. “She’s there.” Lisa slid her arm over Russ’s shoulder. “It’s real.”
“She’s coming to do the door,” Justin blurted.
Lisa ran over to the front door and made sure that it was locked.
Russ.
“Go away.”
I’m at the door Russ. Won’t you let me in?
He walked over to the couch and sat down, holding his head in his hands. She was fake, and he knew it.
It’s real this time Russ. I know what you’re thinking.
Super Zombies from Outer-Space Page 7