A light was plugged into an outlet. “All the comforts of home,” he said with a grin.
“How long have you been holed up here?” I asked.
“Fifteen months. Even with the bridges down, we had too many zombies infiltrating, and after a real hard-fought battle downtown, the sheriff said we should all go to our own hiding places. I told him I was willing to hide out here. He said ‘It’s cramped. But you can have it if you want it,’ and as a last favor, he blew this bridge up, too.”
“You mean you’ve been here all this time?”
“Sure. I have plenty of water, obviously, and all the fish I can catch. Thanks to the solar panels, I have power, too.”
“But can we both sleep in here?”
“Sure, head to foot, a little diagonally.” He reached up into a cabinet on the wall. “I even saved a sleeping bag for you.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we won’t be here all that long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a radio. Regular broadcasts have started up again, from D.C. The government is getting back together. The military is conducting mopping up operations against the zombies. General Mattis is now president.”
He plugged in the hot plate. “I’ll start cooking dinner.”
I grimaced. “I suppose it’s fish, then.”
“Nope, I saved something special for this day,” he said with a big smile as he took a can out of the cabinet.
Grilled Spam never tasted so good.
13 A Walk in the Park by Chad Vincent
Gilbert Grant pulled himself out of his worn-down Chevy Malibu. His knees creaked almost as loud as the rust-riddled door as it slammed shut. Dangling from his finger was a yellow plastic bag from his night shift as a stockman at the local CPS Pharmacy. Reaching in as he walked, he peeled open a box of rat poison and threw the blocks through a gap in the trailer’s skirting that was poorly hidden by a tall tuft of weeds. It was a difficult shot under the one working street light. Two of the four brown bricks missed the hole and bounced back into the yard like an evil pair of house dice. He did not care. His chair was calling him by name through the door and walls.
The grainy groan of cinderblock steps accompanied him to the door, which looked as thin as tinfoil. Wiping his hand on his pants, he flipped through a motley ring of keys. Dangling off the ring in blackened metal was a sharp-edged letter A, an eagle head cut through the background. A similar tattoo showed on his forearm, an artistic variation of his 101st Airborne patch permanently embedded on his skin and mind. That life was long ago, yet still fresh enough to haunt his memories and dreams. Now he worked part-time, got one monthly social security check and one disability check, and drank just enough to coast through life.
With a flick of his finger, a set of lamps burst to life in mismatched wattage. On the base of one lamp, ceramic wolves hunted through the snow, while the rest of the pack circled on the lampshade in attitudes of chase and silent howls. The overhead bulb smiled through blackened teeth from above.
The living space was sparse. Milk crates served as end tables, one draped in a camouflage hand towel. A wolf tapestry hung on the far wall, and a single La-Z-Boy held together with military grade engineer’s tape along the arm rests filled in the room. Gilbert plopped into the chair and set his feet up on a footlocker that served as a coffee table. More accurately, a beer table. Cans towered upwards like a ziggurat. Beside his chair he slid out a can of Blue Beard from between sheets of cardboard. The can and its winking pirate were room temperature, yet he popped the top and took an “I’m off work for two days” guzzle. With his other hand, he clicked the TV to life. This was not the flat screen with usb ports type, but the set in a yard with a “free” sign type. His one splurge beyond the cases of Blue Beard was cable. Gotta have huntin’ and fishin’ shows.
Things were better when his wife was alive. She followed him when he joined the Army and stayed for nine years, and then through some under-the-table construction jobs until his knee gave out the rest of the way. It was her strength and vibrancy that kept life worth living. She was a good woman. Then the cancer took her, took her quick. The last two years had been, well, blurry.
Outside, the neighbor’s dog began barking. Four a.m. and the dog was going bat-shit crazy. Not unheard-of in the trailer park but unappreciated each time it happens. Meth heads, alcoholic blackouts, and other deformed addicts came out at all hours, more so at night, sending canine home defense systems into full alert. No Brinks or ADT here, more like German Shepherd, Rottweiler, and Pit Bull incorporated. That’s why there was a .38 hiding in the beer box at his ankles, a boot knife behind the curtain, and a replica police baton on nails above the front door. Those were just the quick grips. Other measures were in place throughout. Inside the locked footlocker was his money pit, his arsenal. One .12 gauge for birds, a Russian 7.62 for illegal venison, a .22 for rabbits and squirrels, and a .9 mm with one box of hollow points. This one was not for animals. There was plenty of ammo for all. For years, he had supplemented the table with animals from various local state parks, conservation lands, rivers, streams, and other heavily wooded areas within a short drive in his worn-out Chevy.
Outside, the dog barking turned from fierce warning to engagement, biting at something or someone. Gilbert considered going to the window, but a commercial with a shiny red truck climbing over a field of boulders sucked him back. Dream, dream, dream.
The dog yelped and fell silent.
Gilbert pressed the show to mute and pulled the .38. The chair swiveled to face the door, barrel resting along his bad leg, forward. A moment passed with nothing but an eerie silence. He heard his neighbor open the door and scold the dog in a loud rant from the front porch. A very short, quick scream, and he too grew silent.
This is getting serious, he thought. Time for wishing on commercials was over.
As he started to stand, the window near the kitchen shattered under a single slap of a hand. Gilbert raced over. Four hands surprised him, slapping and grabbing at the weak, slatted opening, slivers of glass scattering onto the thick carpet and raking into the hands’ own skin. The weak metal of the trailer’s window mold bent just a little with the continuing blows of the hands. Coming out of the dark tree line were two more figures, falling in right behind like inconsiderate Black Friday shoppers.
Behind him, causing him to pivot once more, the front door began to reverberate from slap after slap, as if there were more than a few drunken callers. Putting his back into the short hallway he eyed both locations, not sure where to point the barrel. Turning, he rushed to the three rooms back in the darkness of the hallway and locked each one shut. He returned to the edge of the living room to the increasing commotion of beings trying to gain entry.
A short, dreamy time passed and the door began to wobble. With an appalling crunch, the lower hinge gave. The aluminum entry bent inward like a giant doggie door. One creature slid in to its waist, pawing at the dirty carpet, then another two wriggled their way in behind to knock over a pair of dirt-caked work boots. Their arms worked feverishly at pulling down some invisible curtain that spread out before them.
Blam! Blam! Blam! The first three intruders went down and he seized the break. Scattering cans to the wind, he kicked the bodies back outside, slid the footlocker to the door, folded it back down into a semblance of cover, and braced the footlocker at the floor. Drawing the keys out of his pocket, he fitted the key in the lock; the lid flew up and away. The .12 gauge was pulled from its leather wrappings. He knew it to be loaded and fingered the safety off. The rest of a near-full box went into his right front pocket.
He kicked over the La-Z-boy onto its back beside the locker, which added weight to help keep the door closed. This was unorthodox, but so was having three dead bodies on his makeshift steps. He edged to the back window and held the stock to his shoulder, double-checked the safety, and looked down the sights to take in as many targets as possible. Blam! Blam! Just to left center and right center. Four m
ore dead. Another two approached from twenty feet away, tearing through a worn hedge. He waited until their shadowy shapes overlapped in his sights. Blam! One fell, one staggered. Blam! The second toppled across the weathered air conditioner. Backyard secure.
“I hope those weren’t just some drunks passing between the hedges,” he said, in hindsight, but he felt little concern.
The front door now was about to fall behind more slamming hands and pressing bodies. Gilbert reloaded as he turned. Crunch! The door began to fold from the top down. The sound of the intruders drummed in his head.
“Crappy, coreless, aluminum doors,” he muttered.
There were at least five outside now, but the fallen door and footlocker were still in the way, even if only as obstacles. Blam! Chachink. Blam! Chachink. Blam! He took care of the front yard with three well-placed shots. Five bodies fell. He racked the chamber and fed the loading port from his pocket.
Stepping to the doorway, he saw nothing stirring. Stay? Go? He’d always harbored a plan of paranoia, figured he’d just hunker down, but now that it was here? No, not really. Acting fast, he threw every scrap of food, every beer he had left into the footlocker. Shotgun on his back, he grabbed the cracked leather handles, and dragged the locker over the wrecked door and down each cinderblock step. The locker’s corners dug parallel ruts in the yard and then it went into the back seat. One body with a gaping neck wound raised an arm towards his ankle as he passed, but he did not notice in his haste. Two bodies rounded the far corner, returned from death beneath the back window. Something lifted its head from the neighbor’s porch; blood and tissue glistened in the street light.
The .12-gauge was slung in the seat beside him as he got in. The .38 hung just below the dashboard in his left hand. He started the engine with shaking hands, and the car sputtered before cranking a hit. Two bald tires sprayed gravel and dirt over the garden of dead bodies as it snorted onto the road.
“Where to, where to?” he asked himself. Hundreds of locations sprinted through his mind, grocery store, pawn shop, gun store, police station, water tower…. That last thought was pressed aside as four wanderers stepped into his path on the road. Stepped might be the wrong description—more like ran with hands out like claws. His initial inference of druggies was losing to out to roaming bands of alcoholics. He felt better shooting people smacked out of their head with drugs, not drunks like himself. Gilbert slammed on the brakes, of which at least three gave protest and very little pressure. Mrs. Norris from two doors down stepped beneath a lamp pole light in the middle of the street. Her shoulders slumped over her walker without regard to his screeching halt.
“Gladys, I almost hit you,” he said angrily over the dashboard.
A hand palmed onto the window behind his head, dividing his attention. While he paused but a moment, switching his focus from Mrs. Norris to the hand behind, a crowd had encircled the car from the rear. These were some fast drunks.
“Gladys, get out of the way,” he yelled through the glass over the increased hammering at the windows and the sound of rusty panels giving way at his rear.
Gilbert made an executive decision. He slipped the shift into reverse and not-so-gently pressed through the throng. At some point through the throng became over the throng.
Wham! Out of the darkness, as he was looking over his shoulder while in reverse, another car jumped onto the narrow trailer park road. Mrs. Norris was no match for the compact’s bumper and neither was the Malibu when taking the metal monster full on the nose.
The impact jerked Gilbert sideways and backwards, causing him to drop the .38. In the back, the footlocker rattled and remained relatively in place, but the shotgun slid onto the floorboard, in the darkness. Steam hissed from beneath the crumpled hood. Pistons ground and whined in contorted protest, but a strange absence of sound replaced everything in Gilbert’s foggy mind.
The breaking of glass soon penetrated the nothingness in a slow progression of sound. Glass struck his collar, his neck, and hands reached in behind. He slid away, feeling the floor for either weapon. With luck, he found one resting atop the other. When he came up with them, the driver’s side window was a crowd of hands and dark faces pressing through.
Out the passenger door with a kick, he didn’t even attempt to close it. Before him was a single assailant, arms outstretched towards his face. The pistol rested in his waistband, so, raising the shotgun to his shoulder, he fired. Never shoot from the hip when you could aim.
“Meth head drunks!” he grumbled, and rushed forward into the dark. Something deep inside him knew it must be more than a rampant outbreak from a tainted batch of hooch or ill-prepared batch of painkillers, but his mind needed an explanation, even a poor one.
Before him now was the only building that wasn’t a trailer for another mile or more. The pool house and manager’s office looked like a fortress compared the the thin-walled trailers everywhere else. Locked. The butt of the shotgun opened the door with two strokes. Quick, shambling footsteps behind warned that figures were closing in, too many shadows to count beneath the parking lot light and front motion sensor. He ducked inside and hit the lights. Thinking fast, he wedged a chair under the handle and leaned a long couch partly across the window for good measure. Hands found the door as he took a step backwards.
He glanced at the window. Instead of seeing the rowdy degenerates outside, his own dirty stare and part of the couch glared back at him in a tell-tale reflection created by the light in the glass. “How stupid, Gil, turn on the lighthouse. Bring ’em all in,” he said shaking his head, abusing himself with sarcasm. With a snap, the lights were out again and he was done with self-accusations and focused on living.
A look around revealed nothing that hadn’t been here two days ago. The backyard light shone in from the rear above the pool outside, giving all the light he needed to explore the room. He started rifling the paper-littered desk, and gazed across four windows, the door to a closet that held pool supplies, the front door, a back door leading out to the pool, and rear access to thirty mailboxes.
His mind brought him to another place, one his body fought to forget. An interior of a darkened building, a weapon slung across his back, he was transported back to a shelled-out dwelling. Separated from his platoon, an unknown number of adversaries controlling the immediate area, and he was all alone. Fear drizzled down his Kevlar vest quicker than the sweat ever would. Some internal strength beckoned him back. He kicked back against the wall and listened to the grind of fingers on wood, metal, and plastic as he returned to the world.
Tonight he was only one beer in and still had his whole mind. How depressing. What a way to attend such an event, completely sober.
Wheels turned; he took inventory. That was just what you did. No need to give up yet. In a flash he was past the interior door, tearing through pool supplies, looking for the “flame” symbol. Hefting a heavy 5-gallon bucket, he dragged it along to the door. Outside, hands were already drumming a persistent cadence on the door and around the window.
He flipped out the box knife he carried from work and cut open the hard, plastic top. Before pouring anything, he rammed a dust pan under the door. This was to ensure that most of the liquid would flow outside and under people’s feet. He was still relatively sure they were people, even if part of his mind protested the thought. The broken top leaked eye-burning vapors into the room, but Gilbert held his breath, pinched his eyes closed, and poured the bucket’s contents under the door.
Throwing the empty bucket into the far corner, he took a long-nosed grill lighter from a hook on the wall beside a restroom key. It slid beneath the door and he clicked. This set off a whoosh of flames that lit up the night. Yet, to his dismay, in spite of all the flames at their feet, the mob persisted. They ignored the flames completely: no screaming, no running in pain, just a sickening barbeque smell mingled with heavy chemicals. A small flame licked on this side of the door and he suffocated it with an old denim jacket from the back of the desk chair. Eventually, the fr
ont would burn through. This would be a concern soon.
Gilbert grabbed the shotgun and moved towards the door at the rear which led to the pool. Pungent aromas of cooked meat seeped into the room, as at the entrance of a reputable steak house. Strange, it didn’t smell half bad if you could have cut out the underlay of hot chlorine and hints of nose hair burners in it. Beyond the pool door, the sight was grim beneath the yellow security light and high-set backyard light. The pool had been closed all summer for various reasons, namely laziness. The concrete bowl of the pool, which was poured about the time President Kennedy had the worst day ever, was low on water and what was there was full of trash and debris. Luckily, the whole thing was surrounded by a privacy fence.
The fence, the locked door, all kept these supposed crackheads at bay. It also had kept the manager inside. Rather than being asleep in the adjoining trailer, the little old man with “super” stenciled on his right lapel rose from the knee-deep water of the deep end. A deflated pool raft from two seasons back hung off his shoulder like the edge of a rainbow cape. Rising from the water like some lake monster, his eyes locked onto Gilbert with ferocity.
That feral stare cut Gilbert’s bravado to the bone, and momentarily muscles twitched to sight the shotgun down on poor Mr. Danson. But years of practice prevailed. You never alert the enemy to your position with unneeded sound. This reasoning had kept him alive in the field and would do so here.
During that night in the bombed-out shell of a home, the same one that still sneaked into his nightmares, when a dark figure had entered the building with a Chinese model AK-47, it was silence and cold steel that had kept him safe. So when his focus returned from the land of terror, it was the cold steel of his box cutter that wavered before him to keep him safe from Mr. Danson.
The ex-superintendent of the park splashed the scummy water to a froth, but the slant of the slick, blue walls of the deep end ensured that there was no escape. Still, never leave an enemy at your back, or in this case, your backyard. Gilbert made the decision that, under the circumstances, Mr. Danson had to go.
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 26