Two jars spaghetti sauce, I read over her shoulder.
She ignored me while Tad lined up packaged food like he was going to open a store. Even facing jars and cans the same way.
Are you playing Grocery? Look, you even got the kid in on it. Hey Tad, what aisle’s shampoo on?
We have to do the bathroom, too, Marisol said to Tad.
Besides how she avoided eye contact with me, I also noticed her hair. Not only was her Mohawk down, like it might’ve been after sleeping on the couch with Tad—-she refused the spare room—-but it was a different kind of off-black color. The bleach streak was gone.
You must’ve found my mom’s stuff, I said, surprised that she used my mother’s hair dye.
I think it gets less attention, Marisol said.
You always wanted attention. Your bleach streak.
If we have to run somewhere on foot, I won’t stand out. Those goddamned freaks will see a bleach streak in the woods.
Why run anywhere? We have a car, I reminded her.
With a half-tank of gas.
You checked? Listen, we can’t panic. That’s a mistake and so is all this inventory shit.
Is it?
Marisol lost her parents to a junta or whatever and she lived in a part of town where cops treated the residents like criminals. That made her paranoid, I told myself. And she didn’t say anything else to me that morning and she and Tad played Grocery and then they inventoried the bathroom and closets and every last thing we had.
***
I wanted grilled Spam for dinner, but Marisol said we needed to ration food. Anyway, we could eat America’s favorite potable meat product out of the can without cooking. I said a little char on the Spam made it taste better.
Then we should grill during the day, Marisol said, so nobody can see the fire at night.
We’ll grill dinner in the garage. I have charcoal.
Charcoal makes carbon monoxide fumes, she said. We’ll be poisoned if we use it in a closed space.
I can use some old newspaper then.
Paper won’t get hot enough.
Or I can break up a chair or something. Anyway, I’m not asking your permission. It’s my cabin, Marisol.
Marisol and Tad just looked at me then.
***
I had a secret. It didn’t appear on Marisol’s inventory either. My father liked to keep a fifth of second-rate whiskey in the den behind a volume of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. His sense of humor. It reminded me how last year he started staying out late at comedy club open mics because he thought that being an accountant wasn’t his true calling. Staying out didn’t make him a standup sensation, but his marriage to my mother did start falling apart.
And now I was slugging his cheap whiskey and my mood was getting fouler and fouler on account of something Marisol had said to me earlier that day.
End of the world isn’t so bad, I had joked, trying to get past the awkwardness of our Spam Argument.
You think?
We’ll have to repopulate if everything ends up falling apart, I said, not really believing the world was ending. At least we have that to look forward to.
Repopulate?
Yeah. You and me. Tad can get some brothers and sisters.
Fuck you. I’ll wait until he’s old enough, have his babies. That or humans can die off.
Tad? Really?
Anyone but you.
It hurt. I could see she really meant it. And the rest of the day there was that wounded quiet between us and a holding back in their faces and voices around me. Hell, Tad who was there during the argument was probably trying to figure out how sex was supposed to work.
So the Repopulate Argument drove me to whiskey in this cabin where my parents once had so many of their arguments.
And that led to The End.
***
We were on the deck grilling Spam in broad daylight and Marisol was making stink-faces at me because I was using batteries in my boombox to play a Social Distortion tape. It made me feel better, being a little secretly drunk, listening to some tunes, and having a half-assed barbecue.
Bill. We need the batteries.
What? I said, trying not to slur.
We can drive out of the valley tomorrow and see if we can get radio reception.
I didn’t reply for a moment, thinking that my car radio was broken, so using the boombox to listen to the news wasn’t bad as far as plans go. But it also bothered me.
You’re not my boss, Marisol. By the way, I need my keys now that you’re done inventorying my things in my car.
Goddamnit Bill, don’t be a dick. Marisol sniffed me. Are you drunk? Where did you find—?
Never mind your inventorying head. Here’s another thing your inventory didn’t catch.
And then I produced a softball I’d found and I grabbed the baseball bat. I was still mad that Marisol said she was making babies with Tad and now I wanted him to see me knock this ball out into the middle of nowhere. I was originally going to play catch with him to cheer him up, but now fuck them both.
And then I tossed that softball in the air and smacked it with the bat, but I pulled my swing at the last second.
I guess I knew I was being an ass.
They didn’t say a word to me as I hopped the deck railing to go down the slope to where I had pop-flied the ball. Save me some Spam, I shouted over my shoulder. I heard them shut off the music before I went ten steps. I’d make it up to them. Their faces told me I’d gone too far. Goddamnit, Marisol was right. We’d have Spam tonight, but tomorrow we’d leave the valley to listen to radio news. I used the bat as kind of a walking stick, muttering these promises to myself and still enjoying the warmth in my head of Canadian whiskey.
But the sounds of shuffling ahead broke through my haze. Someone approached. This possibility had always existed, but I guess I just now recognized it.
I dropped back behind a tree and waited.
She came into view then. I clenched the baseball bat tightly by my side, studying the torn flesh in her neck. Her track suit was ripped and blood-soaked and dried stiff. I didn’t know what surprised me more; that she was still walking or that she had that much blood in her to begin with.
In front of her, like a holy icon, she held the softball, glowing white. Her eyes were glassed over and her chin looked sticky with blood. She walked up the slope toward the cabin.
She didn’t see me, but the guy behind her did.
He was lanky, older, with mutton chops, a comb-over, and wearing a mint-green, three-piece suit. He turned his head, then put out a shaky long-fingered hand for me. I smashed it down with a swing of the bat, but also noted that blank look in his face and the blood on his clothes. Hitting him had no effect, no howl, no changed expression; he put out his other hand for me and I smashed that one down, too. And then he put both those flopping broken hands out for me and opened his mouth to bite. Somehow I shoved him back and then I swung for his head and he went down, blood sprinkling the front of my clothes on impact. Now was not the time to consider what I’d just done because the woman dropped the softball she was holding and came for me. She was one of them. And I broke her head, too. Then I heard rustling in the underbrush behind me and there were several more freaks limping my way.
Even if I’d wanted to lead the freaks to the cabin—I didn’t—I couldn’t run back up the slope because another of the freaks had cut me off.
Then I got busy swinging. I swung until sweat ran down my face along with the freak blood. I shoved them back and swung until I thought my arms would break. I never hurt so bad and swung so hard even when I used to play little league. Then the bat broke. Now I stabbed with it, but nothing took them down except a blow to the head. Not a heart stab or strike to the neck or groin, nothing. They didn’t feel anything, like people on a drug. Filthy and bloody and trying to bite me, they were like no other addicts I’d ever seen.
JUST SAY NO, YOU ASSHOLES! JUST SAY NO! I shouted, and speared their heads.
When I finally managed to break past the ring of attackers around me, I bolted to the cabin. Blood-drenched and sore-limbed, I found a broken-headed freak sprawled on the deck and pieces of Spam scattered underfoot. No sign of Marisol and Tad. Cursing, I found a cast iron pan and raced back down the slope and I smashed in their heads as they climbed the single-file path to the cabin. I don’t know how long it took, but I got them all at last just as the sun went down.
I found the note the next day, taped to the fridge.
I’M SORRY.
Tad and Marisol didn’t leave empty-handed. The car, the batteries, and half the food—gone. I told myself they would make it out of the valley and send help. It’s been a week. I’ve since rolled all of the dead freaks into a ravine. Into the ravine for the birds and critters to eat, all of the Johnny Rottens and Ritchie Daggers and Janie Joneses. Hah. I live alone. I read encyclopedias by day, then I sit to wait for the stars. Last night I heard gunshots from a few miles off and watched what must’ve been somebody’s vacation home burning in the distance. Eating pineapple chunks out of a can, I shook my head and watched the blaze flicker a long time, inhaling the cinder smell, that smell of all vacations past and to come.
12 Stuck in the Middle with You by Lou Antonelli
It had been over a year since President Trump made the last emergency broadcast, and the electricity failed.
When the zombie plague first struck, I lived in the Oak Lawn neighborhood of Dallas. For some reason, it burned through the gay population there especially fast, and after a few weeks there were only three of us in our apartment building.
I had been able to plunder a nearby bodega and I had canned food to last me a long time. Thankfully, the water line from the tank atop the apartment building had been turned off by someone when the crisis first struck, and there was still water.
Every morning I went on the roof and drew off cans of water. I tossed buckets of shit and piss out the window.
Even after the power went off, satellite cell phones still worked for a couple of weeks, and I was able to talk to my brother in the small town in east Texas two hours east of Dallas.
Our parents had died early on—he’d had to euth them—but he seemed to be one of the lucky people with natural immunity, same as me. He was holed up in the small town we grew up in, where a militia defended it against all intruders. He said if I could make it there, they would let me in and protect me.
On our final call, the crackling on the cell phone indicated that the satellite system was failing, too. I vowed to him I would work my way back home and meet up with him.
“Great plan, dude, but be careful sneaking out of Dallas,” he said.
I was safe where I was holed up. But…
“Yes, I know. I figure if I wait a while the zombies are going to rot and fall apart, and I’ll have better odds. How are thing there?
(Crackle)
“The sheriff is a ’muni, and he’s got a good posse, but the shamblers are streaming out of the big cities and into the country looking for fresh meat,” he said. “They’re not only coming from Dallas, some are coming south, from Houston.”
“How are y’all holding out?”
“We dynamited the bridges into the county last week, across the Red River and the Sulphur River, but that is only slowing them down.”
He said something else but I couldn’t make out what he said.
“Everyone has their own little hideout set up. If the shamblers infest the county, we all have some place to retreat. Or will have,” he said. “I’m still working on mine.”
“If you are not at the old home place, where will you be?”
The connection was fading and he asked me to speak up.
I shouted. “If you’re not at home, where will you be? Speak up, I think the phones are finally going down.”
“If I have to abandon the house, I’ll…”
(Crackle)
“What? What?” I shouted.
“I’ll hide someplace and leave a clue only you will recog…”
The line went dead.
I held the cell phone in front and stared at it. Somebody had done a great job keeping the system operational as long as they had. I put the cell phone down on the table. Despite all I had gone through, I felt so lonely right then.
I looked outside the window. There were a handful of “jerkies” propped up in doorways and alleys.
The handful of us left in the neighborhood after the first year picked up the term—which apparently had proliferated across the remains of Dallas—because of their appearance after the Dallas summer heat.
The zombie flu had started during the late winter, and as things warmed up the rotting increased exponentially. That summer the temperature was between 90 and 100 degrees from June through August in the daytime.
Some of the dead were left as writhing piles of maggots in the streets and sidewalks, looking like heaps of boiling rice. Some days the swarms of flies almost blotted out the sun.
What were left after the summer were called “jerkies” —not only because of the way they moved, but because of their appearance, like dried-out beef jerky.
’ Munis like me then faced the problem that the zombies that were still mobile after the summer were that much tougher to kill. There had been three other people holed up in their apartments in the same building as me by last September—but they had been killed that fall by shamblers as they went scavenging.
By New Year’s I was the only one left there.
Now it was July 4th, a year after President’s Trump pathetic last address on Independence Day. I never knew what to make of the man—people had mocked and excoriated him—and he seemed so over his head as the disaster had spread earlier in the year. But who could have handled such a catastrophe? I remember thinking, “Happy Birthday, America. Good-bye, America.”
Trump’s last Presidential Order was to dissolve the federal government and disperse its resources to states and local governments as they tried to fight the disaster at hand. That wasn’t a bad move for Texas, with all its military bases.
The City of Dallas itself tried to maintain order as long as it could, but the sheer number of zombies overwhelmed its efforts. The only reason the few of us ’munis survived in the apartment building was that we did the obvious thing, the same thing my brother said he was doing back home in Pittston.
We set up our own defensive position. We demolished the staircase and disabled the elevator. We only lowered the fire escape to enter and leave the building. It was secured by a chain with a strong combination lock.
Zombies can’t fly, climb walls, or work combination locks, thank God. Or figure out how to pull down a fire escape, for that matter.
Still, people were getting ambushed when they ventured outside their rat holes to scavenge for supplies. That’s why the other people in the building had died by the end of last year.
But now it was July 4 and the city was heating up again. The only reason I survived the previous summer heat was because I had all the water I needed. There were times I lay for days in a full tub of water and thought cool thoughts.
But all indications from the flow at the spigot on the tank on the roof was that the water supply was going to run out soon.
It was time to vamoose.
***
The morning I left the building to head out of Dallas there had been a cool snap and the temperature at noon was only 95. My plan was to try to get at least outside the city and into some leafy suburbs by nightfall.
I packed some of the last canned food, three full canteens, and, most importantly, a half dozen shotguns and rifles. This being Texas, it had been easier to scavenge for firearms than anything else in the wake of the zombie apocalypse.
The jerkies tended to roam alone now, simply because there were so few of them. There had been vicious packs of zombies right after the outbreak, but I hadn’t seen a pack of any kind from my window for months.
Still, I ran into a jerkie just three blocks away as
I headed towards the interstate. She has been a large young lady, with bleached hair. The remains of a t-shirt lying across her deflated breasts said “Jars of Clay.” Her shorts had rotted away.
The only sound a zombie would usually make was a loud sniffing when they got a hold of your scent. I heard that before I saw her, as she came around the corner of an old diner. It was unnerving to see something had once been human—up close—turn its head like it was looking at you, but with dead sightless eyes.
It made what would pass—for a zombie—as a charge towards me, barely able to stay upright. As it lurched and staggered at me, I pulled out a handgun.
I also had scavenged a bunch of handguns, and I wanted to save the ammo for the long guns if possible.
The best advice I had gotten, when I was part of the neighborhood posse fighting off the zombies in the first months after the outbreak, was from a former Marine sergeant.
You didn’t find many veterans in Oak Lawn, but he had been forced to retire when the military brass learned he was gay.
He said, “When you know you have to shoot someone coming right at you, don’t panic but hold your fire until they are close enough that you’re sure of your shot.”
A variation of “Don’t shoot until you can see the white off their eyes,” I suppose.
I had seen people panic and start shooting when the shamblers were far away, and if they missed, they’d get so nervous that by the time the zombie was upon them they couldn’t have hit it with a howitzer.
Then we’d have to shoot the zombie—and shoot the victim, too.
As the Jars of Clay girl came at me, I popped a shot square at her face. You could see the black remains of her brain shoot out the back of her skull. She had actually been staggering forward fast enough that she continued forward a few feet and dropped not six feet from me.
Dammit, that was too close for comfort, I thought.
Unfortunately, the reverb from the gunshot was sure to attract other zombies, and I was at least a mile from the interstate.
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 24