“Let’s go,” I said, pulling open the gate.
Mom and Dad had deer-in-the-headlights looks about them, no doubt at me erasing Otis’s face. They really needed to get over it. I was pretty sure Otis had generators in his bunker. If so, maybe I could put some horror movies on a loop to desensitize them a bit, because goddamn it, otherwise this was gonna get old fast. “I said move!”
They finally shuffled past me, followed by Darlene. I was hoping she’d be in tears following what I’d done, maybe give me a chance to rub it in her face. But she merely stepped over him and said, “He’s still not funny.”
“Neither are you,” I muttered as I walked in behind her.
♦ ♦ ♦
“What now?” Mom asked, nervously.
“Now, we lock the gate and shut ourselves in before anything else can find us. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have to take a piss, and I’d prefer to do it in a place where nothing is likely to bite my dick off.”
“Hah!” my sister shouted. “Your birdie is gonna get bitten.”
God, how I hated her.
I had other matters to dwell on at that moment, though. Off to the side was a heavy length of chain with an even heavier lock hanging from it. Bingo!
“Jimmy, don’t you think...”
“Not now, Dad.” I grabbed the chain, wrapped it around the now closed gate, and clicked the lock shut. Not a moment too soon either, as the sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard from somewhere close by in the surrounding neighborhood.
I kept watch, wanting to see how many we were up against. “Search Otis’s body,” I said over my shoulder, not really caring who did it so long as it got done.
“He’s already dead,” Mom unhelpfully pointed out.
“You don’t say. Search his pockets. See if he has anything of use on him.” I lowered the gun. There were only a few shots left, and I didn’t want to waste them, especially now that we were safely locked in the junkyard.
A lurching figure stepped into view, headed our way. Thinning hair, glasses, a tweed vest, and pale dead skin. Heh. He kinda looked like Mr. Sandusky, my social studies teacher. Hmm, the closer he got, the more I became certain he actually was Mr. Sandusky. Sucked to be him. Useless class anyway. No real purpose to it so far as I could...
“What’s that on his arms?”
“They look like bite marks.”
I turned toward my parents. “Of course, they’re bite marks. It’s not like he just spontaneously turned into a... FUCK!” I’d been so goddamned smug, thinking I had my shit together, that I’d missed the bleeding obvious.
The gate was shut when we got here. Otis’s walking corpse was already waiting for us. And I’d just locked us in...with whatever the fuck had bitten him.
I stepped in, barking orders. “Back off, let me see. Dad, you keep an eye on the gate. Don’t get within reach of anything that comes close to it. Mom, you keep watch on the junkyard while I check Otis. Darlene...stand there and look edible.”
I bent down to inspect Otis’s corpse.
“Hey, I think that’s Joe Sandusky,” Dad said. “Hey, Joe! Over here. You can hide with us if you want.”
I somehow managed to resist the urge to put a slug through my father’s head. What I was doing was more important, though, at least for the moment.
Sure enough, my parents had been right. Tiny bite marks covered the discolored flesh on Otis’s arms. Had he been overrun by zombie toddlers? That seemed a hell of a way to go. But what would a bunch of babies be doing in a junkyard? That struck me as one of those things that moms usually freaked out about?
“Joe, are you okay?”
Idiot! I examined Otis’s wounds more closely. I was no expert, but I’d have bet my left nut that they hadn’t been made by human teeth. I remembered what happened to our neighbor before I’d plugged him. Then there were the Curtis twins.
I stood up and looked around. In a junkyard, rats were the most likely culprit. But Otis had been more than aware of that issue, especially in light of his paranoid nature. “Fucking things are nature’s illegal immigrants,” he used to say. No matter what you did to keep them out, they found a way in. Otis had compensated by making it a point to feed all the stray... Oh crap!
“What a cute little kitty!”
I slowly turned toward the sound of my sister’s vacuous voice.
“Ooh! Another one! Here, kitty kitty!”
“Honey,” our mother chided, “remember what I said about strange animals. They could have all sorts of nasty diseases.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
7
DAY OF THE DEAD ANIMALS
Anyone with half a brain could see the cat was about to pounce.
Needless to say, my sister didn’t.
I was already on the move, even as fantasies of leaving her to a well-deserved fate played through my mind. Tempting, but I’d never hear the end of it from my parents. Sadly, my plans called for keeping them around for at least as long as it took to dig in and get our new accommodations fortified.
The cat, its eyes red and glazed, leapt at my sister. Fortunately for her, fate smiles upon fools and stupid children. The cat wasn’t much different than the Curtis twins had been. Physically, it was still functional, but the signals between its body and rotting brain were kinda fucked. Whereas a normal feline would have been all over my sister’s face like something hatched from an alien egg, this one was sloppy and uncoordinated—enough so that I was able to connect with SPAZ first.
The cat’s head exploded with a solid thwack, and the rest of it went flying end over end. Before I could relax, though, I realized it wasn’t alone.
Unblinking red eyes began to appear from seemingly every crevice in the place. Shit. “Move!”
“You hurt kitty!”
I swear, taking a swing at the hollow pumpkin she called a head was almost tempting enough to risk being overrun by zombie cats. But I hadn’t waited all my life for this day just to die before the sun could even set. “Kitty enjoyed it. He’s into the rough stuff.”
Without waiting to see if the others were following or not, I turned and headed deeper into the junkyard. The entrance to Otis’s bunker was near the center, hidden within a sea of scrap iron and junked cars. Luckily, I had the way memorized. Once inside, we could take five and get our shit together enough to sort things out.
But first we had to get there.
The thing with stray cats is you never really notice how many there are until they’re actively trying to kill you. It was like they were coming out of every nook and cranny, of which there wasn’t a small amount in a scrapyard.
Several leapt out at me as I made my way toward Otis’s bunker, but all they got for their trouble was a mouthful of reinforced plastic followed by their skulls being cracked hard enough to fuck up all nine of their lives.
Despite this, a small sliver of worry still managed to worm its way into my gut. I’d designed my survival gear with human zombies in mind, not furry little ankle biters. As if to drive this point home, one of the little fuckers tried to scramble up my leg to take a bite out of my crotch.
“Sorry, Fluffy.” I grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, pried it off, and threw it against the engine block of a junked Ford Taurus. “But I ain’t no scratching post and those aren’t balls of yarn.”
Fuck me! Otis was covered in bite marks. Chances are that’s how the virus was transmitted, but if it spread via scratching, too, then we were all as good as fucked.
If I got so much as a case of the sniffles from the claw marks up and down my leg, I’d make sure I ate a bullet before I could sink my teeth into someone else. Those were the rules in a zombie apocalypse. So far as I was concerned, there was nothing worse than compromising the team by ignoring the fact that you were dead meat walking.
That was a bridge to cross later, though. For now, our main concern was finding a place where these things couldn’t hunt us down like human catnip.
“Wait up, Jim
my! I’ll tell Mom if you don’t.”
I turned and saw Darlene hot on my heels, her arms still full of stupid fucking dolls and nary a scratch on her. How the fuck was she still alive? Maybe the cats found her as repulsive as I did.
Mom was coming up behind her, shrieking loud enough to alert every zombie within a mile as to where we were. Farther back, Dad brought up the rear, but I could see he wasn’t doing so hot. Go figure. A sledgehammer was fine for human vermin, but even dead cats were nimble enough to bypass a swing from one.
Finally! Up ahead, I spotted the hidden entrance to Otis’s bunker—the front of an old El Camino sticking halfway out of a pile of crushed cars. Hopefully it wasn’t locked, but the fact that Otis had been out and about made me hopeful that wasn’t the case. Because if it was, this junkyard was going to turn into the world’s goriest litter box.
I reached the El Camino and was just about to hand SPAZ to Darlene so she could cover me, but then I thought better of it. With my luck, her idiocy would rub off on it. Instead, I leaned it against the front bumper and told her, “Stand there and try to look like a bowl of Friskies while I take care of this.”
“Cars are stupid.”
“You’re stupid.”
I reached beneath the hood. Otis had modified the release mechanism so someone couldn’t just randomly pop it open. Come on. Where is the stupid thing?
After what seemed like an eternity, my finger finally found the latch. The hood popped open, revealing not an engine block but a set of wooden stairs leading down. Now to hope the interior wasn’t crawling with more of those rotting fleabags. “You go first, Darlene.”
She stepped in and looked down into the darkness. “It smells funny.”
“So do you.”
“What’s down there?”
“Um...a secret clubhouse.”
“Neat!” She took one step then stopped. “Are you sure? It looks gross.”
“Not as gross as it’s going to be if I throw you down the stairs face-first. Now get in!”
Finally, she did, complaining to her dolls about what a meanie I was. I kept listening as she descended. If the place wasn’t empty, then at least I wouldn’t have to hear her bitch about it for long.
I retrieved SPAZ and kept guard while my parents caught up. Make that parent, singular. Mom ran my way, zombie cats harassing her at every step. But through some minor miracle—coupled with her swinging her shovel around like a lunatic—she kept them at bay.
“Let’s go!” I shouted at her, drawing some of the attention my way. SPAZ had been designed for human-sized zombies. It was a lot less effective against things at ground level, but it was good enough to... “OOF!”
Mom, in her blind panic, swung the flat end of the shovel right into my face, knocking me on my ass and leaving a crack in the visor of my helmet. Goddamn it!
She didn’t even bother to stop to see if I was okay before racing down the steps into the shelter. What a bitch.
Through some combination of good fortune and hard plastic, I was only slightly dazed. Good thing, too, because I recovered just in time to kick out at two cats that seemed intent on following her downstairs, sending them tumbling off to the side instead.
This was not going as planned. I mean, let’s be honest, everyone knows mankind is gonna get knocked off the top of the food chain during the zombie apocalypse. But I, for one, sure as shit didn’t think it would be by Garfield and friends.
“Help me!”
Fuck! I rolled to my feet, making sure no feline trespassers got past, and looked toward the sound of Dad’s cry. I could see from where I stood that it was too late for him.
At least half a dozen cats were crawling all over him, using him as the world’s largest toy mouse. “Get them off!”
There was nothing to be done. Poor bastard was destined to go out like Otis, a walking pile of Whiskas. Rather than delay the inevitable and doom us all, I climbed into the El Camino’s hood and started to close it behind me.
“Please, Jimmy!”
“Sorry,” I called back. “But it’s too late. You’re already infected.”
I expected to be cursed out, or for him to maybe try to make a desperate dash for safety, but instead, he surprised me.
He dropped to his knees, as even more cats swarmed him, and simply said, “I love you, son.”
Had I been a lesser man, I would have been touched, maybe would have even teared up long enough to hold the door and let him in...effectively ass-fucking us all.
But I wasn’t.
“Of course you do, Dad,” I replied, pulling the door shut and latching it from the inside. “I’m an awesome kid.”
8
A COLD DAY IN HELL
Three months of canned beans, chemical toilets, potted meat, and the constant underlying smell of garbage would have been enough to break most men.
Personally, I found it invigorating. That said, being locked up with my sister was definitely starting to grate on my nerves.
As expected, Otis’s bunker was fully stocked. The dude had been expecting a long, onerous apocalypse—a lonely one, too, judging by all the creepy-ass photos we found. Guess that explained why he kept asking me to take my shirt off.
Skeevy shit aside, the place had almost everything—food, clothing, fresh water, solar panels atop the mountains of cars for nominal electricity, and weapons. There were guns, piles of ammo, and more. Otis had been a man after my own heart, minus the part about being a wannabe pedophile.
Mom still wasn’t quite over Dad being eaten by cats, but I figured acceptance would come with time. And we had a lot of that on our hands. I tried to help by attempting to teach her how to defend herself, or at least cover me well enough so I wouldn’t get blindsided the second I turned my back. Not surprisingly, it was mostly an exercise in futility.
Fortunately, there was plenty of mom stuff to keep her busy—namely cooking, cleaning, and keeping Darlene the fuck away from me.
As for my darling sister, I mostly left her to mindlessly play with her dolls and hopefully contract tetanus from all the sharp metal.
I made the occasional sojourn to the surface. The scrapyard was our new home, and I fully intended to make it a fortress. But in order to do that, I needed to make sure it was ours and ours alone.
Dad was the first issue that needed taking care of. On the upside, he wasn’t any more adept at being a zombie than he had been at being a man. I pulped his head, burnt his body, and then stuffed the remains into a junked car on the far side of the yard. With any luck, Mom wouldn’t wake up one morning with an overwhelming need to check out trashed Suzuki Samurais. If so, that could be awkward.
The cats, I was somewhat horrified to learn, seemed to have retained some rudimentary instinct. Following our first encounter with them, they seemed to become wary, at least in small groups. That was worrisome, for it told me that some parts of their cold dead brains were still firing.
It also made me wonder who or what patient zero was in this mess. Had the apocalypse started with people and then somehow spread to cats? Didn’t seem to make much sense, unless the first victims were really stupid cats. But if that wasn’t the case, then how? Did someone accidentally feed the neighborhood strays a can of radioactive tuna?
Regardless, it wasn’t until the weather turned and winter set in that I was able to properly kill some kittens. When the first big freeze of the season hit, I was overjoyed to find the junkyard full of frozen zombie cats, their cold undead bodies stuck fast to the ground. Suffice it to say, the tide of our ongoing game of cat and mouse quickly turned.
Soon enough, I felt confident enough to declare our perimeter secure.
Not long after, I began to explore outside the yard. The outings gave me a chance to get away from my sister’s constant stupidity. The snow on the ground slowed my movement, but it hampered the dead even more, making them easy pickings as I cleared an ever-widening circle around the scrapyard. Soon, the silence of the surrounding streets was broken only by the o
ccasional chitter from the trees, squirrels no doubt storing extra provisions while the pickings were good.
My trips out doubled as a chance to do some scavenging. Otis had stocked the place well. Nearest I could tell, we had enough supplies to last three years or more. Problem was, it was the same shit over and over again. Would it have hurt the guy to stockpile a few fucking boxes of Pop-Tarts to break up the monotony?
So it was that the next phase of the apocalypse began—reconquering the domain of man and taking whatever shit had been left behind.
♦ ♦ ♦
The winter passed slowly, and as it began to wane, I realized so too would pass something I’d come to appreciate—the smell of fresh air, since everything dead was pretty well frozen.
Spring brought with it the stink of defrosting flesh, filling the air with a stench that made me long for the chemical toilet in our humble abode.
Sadly, though half a year had passed since the collapse of civilization, my sister didn’t seem to have gotten any smarter or become less of a burden upon my soul. Her dolls had broken and been mended with duct tape enough times by then that they resembled pieces of shit with arms and legs, but that still didn’t stop her from inviting me to a tea party with them on a daily basis.
As the temperature increased, so did the danger because the undead once more became mobile. Nevertheless, I welcomed it, along with the putrid smell hanging over the town, so long as it got me away from Darlene for a few hours.
♦ ♦ ♦
It was a nice day, if one didn’t mind the stench of rotting ass and the clouds of black flies hovering just about everywhere. The chittering of squirrels in the trees broke up the otherwise monotonous silence, making the day slightly less morbid. I didn’t see any undead in the immediate vicinity, so I’d allowed myself the indulgence of stealing a skateboard from someone’s porch—not like they needed it anymore—and had ridden it downtown, debating where to scavenge next.
The Legend of Jimmy Headshot (Shingles Book 6) Page 4