Horror Within : 8 Book Boxed Set

by Mark Tufo

  “When I finally sped away, he started walking the way I had gone, like he was going to follow me. I was still shaking when I got to the house. Erin was in the shower, and I had time to collect my nerves and get some liquid courage (cognac) in me. By the time Erin had got out of the bathroom, dried off and changed, it all seemed like a bad nightmare that was rapidly diminishing from my memory. You know we don’t have a television in the house.”

  (I so wanted to stop him there and ask him how in the hell that was possible, hadn’t he ever heard of ESPN? How do you not have a TV in this day and age? That’s like a Stone Age man not having a cave. It’s just not natural, but again this didn’t seem the appropriate time to interject.)

  “So we didn’t get any news reports. We were just sitting in the living room talking about the day and listening to one of my CDs when I heard this thud.” (I knew that thud.) “It wasn’t at the front door…it was at the living room window. So I’m figuring it’s some bird that smashed into the window, but how stupid does the bird have to be to smash into a shade drawn window? I guess that’s why they call people bird-brained.” He strained a small laugh through his teeth.

  “It wasn’t a bird, though,” I finished for him. The memory was traumatic for him and he was having difficulty relating it.

  “No,” he choked out. “It was the guy/thing from the gas station and he was holding what was left of Rebel.” Rebel was Paul and Erin’s beagle, about as mellow a dog as ever lived, quick to wag a tail and give a lick. I felt bad for his loss. “I could hear Erin screaming behind me as she was looking at the same thing I was. At first I wasn’t sure what he was holding. It was just a jumble of fur, splintered bone and blood. It could have been anything, I guess,” he sobbed.

  After a few minutes he continued. “I had just let him out. He...he was adamant about going outside. I thought he really had to pee, so I let him out. Even with Erin screaming and the horror of what that thing was holding beginning to dawn on me, I was still with it enough to notice there were about six or seven more things rummaging around in my yard.

  “My blood was boiling, I wanted to go out and start swinging a bat at these people to get out of my yard, and then Gas Station Guy took a big sinewy bite out of Rebel’s back, he was eating Reb like he was a corn on the cob.” Paul stopped and sobbed for a moment, then gathered himself together to finish his story. “Dude I FUCKIN’ heard him crunching Reb’s spine, he pulled strands of flesh away from Reb’s back. My blood froze. I pulled the shade so hard I ripped it off its moorings. Gas Station Guy was looking right at me. Erin had gone to get her gun. She came running back into the living room waving the thing wildly around like the thing was on fire and she was trying to put it out. I turned to grab her gun hand before she put a bullet in my ass. She was sobbing about how she had to save Rebel. That train had already left the station minutes earlier.

  “Dude, I couldn’t think of what to do. I was shaking like a leaf in a gale. I turned off all the lights on the main floor and half dragged Erin upstairs. I was able to finally let her arm go when I realized in her haste she hadn’t even put a clip in the damn thing. So for about half an hour we’re up on our bed in the dark just holding each other. Every couple of minutes I start thinking that we need to get out of here, we need to go be with Mike.” At this point he looked up at me and gave me an anemic smile. “But, dude, every time I thought of leaving, my next thought was of opening the door to the Gas Station Man. Staying at the house seemed like a much better and much easier thing to do,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “After a while the thudding on the house got more and more frequent, it was to the point where the house was vibrating from the impacts. By the time the glass started breaking downstairs it was way too late to leave. I grabbed Erin and pulled the attic stairs down and that’s where we’ve been since I called.”

  That was news to me. “You called?”

  “Yeah I didn’t think I got through, I must have tried a couple of hundred times. I was on my last bar of battery when it finally rang on your side.”

  “When?!” I asked incredulously.

  “Damn, must have been yesterday morning,” he answered.

  “When I went to the armory,” I finished more to myself than him.

  “When…when I saw the boys across the street, I thought the cavalry had shown up. When I realized you weren’t with them, I wanted them to leave…I really did. But I also wanted to live. I wanted to be able to protect Erin. You know how that is, right? Trying to protect a loved one I mean,” he said as he looked up at me from his beer.

  I nodded in agreement. I know that feeling all too well; and I also knew how it felt to feel as if you had failed. I couldn’t blame my friend for wanting to get help. I was pissed my kids thought it would be a good idea to go and get him though. He stood up and swayed back a bit. He was looking for a hug, which I was all too willing to give. I told him I loved him and that he should go sleep it off, not so much because he was drunk, but because I wanted him to stop drinking my damn beers. Paul felt absolved as he stumbled to the couch. A small smile spread across his lips as he pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell into a relaxed sleep uninterrupted by the interminable pounding of dead flesh against his abode.

  I finished my beer and another three as I pondered what would happen when the zombies did break through our defenses. That they would break through was never in doubt as far as I was concerned. How I was going to be prepared for it was another matter. I had no desire to be trapped in my unfinished attic waiting to starve or freeze to death while a bunch of pus-mongers roamed freely through my house. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to immediately implement, but the loud, boisterous snoring of Henry reminded me that perhaps now wasn’t the time to be doing home alterations. There was one thing I could do. I went back upstairs and grabbed my jacket, flashlight, crowbar, and rifle.

  It was kind of nice falling asleep fully dressed, it made getting ready a lot quicker proposition. The cold nearly snapped me out of my mild inebriation. What it actually did, though, was a much more pleasant sensation of awakening me fully while letting me keep my burgeoning buzz. Maybe there was an angle I could exploit here if the world ever returned to normal. “Drink Arctic Blast Beer, Be Fully Awake When You Say Something Inappropriate!” I could have a guy give a wide-eyed thumbs up as he grins to the camera after having received a slap from an attractive young lady. “Arctic Blast—When You Need To Know When You’ve Said Something Stupid! Remember Every Offending Remark! Every Hilarious Antic! Every I Love You, Man!”

  So, maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!

  CHAPTER 17

  Journal Entry – 15

  I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys. I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here.

  After some serious prying, I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so
much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.

  If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.

  I went back into the house, grabbed another beer, and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.

  Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any, but I still hadn’t finished it, and with the thing now being body temperature-warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!

  Paul was in the kitchen getting a glass of water as I walked in and dumped the remains of my beer into the sink.

  “I see nothing’s changed since college,” Paul said with a small laugh.

  I wasn’t awake enough to catch the barb.

  Paul moved on. “So what’s the plan for today?” he asked.

  “Ass,” I said to him. I had finally caught his meaning.

  Now it was his turn to be lost. “Don’t get me wrong, buddy, I’m always up for a good time, but I’m not sure this is the right time,” he answered.

  At first I didn’t garner his meaning. It was going to be a long day if we were always one sentence apart in our communications. I stopped for a second and thought about restarting the whole conversation. It just didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do. I started on a whole new subject instead.

  “Well, Alex is going to be using about every able-bodied person he can find to begin setting up defenses.”

  Paul looked perplexed, so I explained everything that had happened the previous day with the assembly of zombies.

  Paul didn’t look overly concerned, but he was a master of disguising his true feelings. That’s why I never played poker with him. I had every intention of bringing Paul, the boys and myself to go help Alex, but first I was going to need a few hours to take care of some things at the house.

  My wife blanched at a few of my suggestions and made me alter a few of the more, well ‘altering’ ideas. First things first, I had Travis go scrounge me up a couple of ladders. I would have sent Justin, too, except that he was still extremely weak from his ordeal. I needed a couple of ladders, lightweight and strong. Two of the longest that he could find should suit my purposes just fine. I grabbed some food supplies and extra water and placed them in my Jeep. I then got Brendon to follow me in his truck outside the complex. When we came back ten minutes later on foot, the guard looked like he wanted to ask us what we were doing, but he just shook his head and let us in. The next thing I did couldn’t have been a bigger waste of a half hour of my life unless I had watched What Not To Wear on HGTV. I reinforced the gate in my back yard to the point where a charging rhino couldn’t have busted through. I didn’t nearly get the return on investment that I had hoped for. I’d like to think that I noticed a hole in my defenses, but at this point I was much too busy patting myself on the back.

  The next thing I did had my wife ranting throughout the house that I had completely lost my mind. I don’t know, I thought it was one of the coolest ideas I had come up with. I was under the complete false sense of security that my house was now impregnable. Yeah right, but that is the ultimate beauty of being paranoid…I mean prepared…there’s always something more you can do. Tracy was pissed that I was about to devalue our home. I honestly couldn’t understand where she was coming from. First off I didn’t think we would be retiring here and second, REALLY? Resale value? Who’s gonna buy? I don’t think there is a zombie family down the street looking for an extra bedroom. I could be wrong, as I usually am with Tracy, but I didn’t think so. So I went ahead with my plan and in the midst of it I think Tracy went to the clubhouse to see if there was any rum for her coke.

  I went halfway down the basement steps and, looking up, I cut away most of the drywall above my head exposing the stairs that led to the second story. I then went back up the basement stairs and then onto the second floor risers. I cut away the carpet and pad. (It was old anyway; at least that’s what I told Tracy as I tried to calm her.) With a five-pound hammer and crowbar I removed four treads and four risers effectively leaving a four-foot by three-foot wide gaping wound in the middle of the stairs. All the noise had brought Nicole out from her shower prematurely. Her face had a look of bewilderment on it as she looked down at me and then at what remained of the stairs.

  “Does Mom know?” she asked with concern in her eyes. “You know she’s going to kill you?” she answered when I didn’t respond immediately.

  Nicole was privy to some of my more insane (or inane) ideas. Mostly her mom was able to get me to rein in the horses before they roamed too far away from the stable but not always. There was that one time in Canada when the Royal Mounted Police were involved. It almost became an international incident, but that’s ancient history, I was never charged.

  “I know what I’m doing,” I answered huffily, a little ticked that she had the audacity to rain on my parade.

  Now that I looked at my handiwork, I realized that I did sort of forget that this was still a functioning household. I couldn’t expect everyone to have to jump over this gap. If someone woke in the middle of the night and forgot, they’d find themselves in the basement in a heartbeat.

  I went and snagged my circular saw and proceeded to flatten out the stringers. Those are the supports that hold the tread and the risers. They go up and across in the same fashion as the stairs. They are basically the frame and the stairs are the shelving. So I just took the saw and cut off four triangles on each side, effectively making the stringers flat.

  The next thing I needed I didn’t have. I sent Travis out on his second scavenging trip. I hoped to hell Tracy was having a difficult time finding some rum, if she came home now with this giant perforation on her stairs my only hope was going to be getting on the other side of the hole and hoping she wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap. Thank God the boy beat his mother home. I would have taken him for ice cream if I had the time and there was any ice cream anywhere. He didn’t find exactly what I requested but under such a short gun, beggars couldn’t be choosers. What he brought was a piece of countertop from one of the abandoned units. It was about six feet by two-and-a-half feet. I trimmed a foot off the bottom, and then turned it over so the Formica top was now on the bottom. Then I attached four two-and-a-half inch lengths of two-inch-by-two-inch wood slats onto the counter bottom so there would be some sort of foothold. Obviously this would never pass a home inspection but I honestly didn’t think that was my biggest concern.

  To finish off my wonderful contraption, I anchored two large eyehooks on either side of the end of the countertop that would be facing the top of the stairs. I then anchored two equally large eyehooks at the top of the stairs, one as close to the wall as possible and the other as close to the railing as possible.

  The next thing was to tie it off. I needed to run rope from the ‘new’ stairs to the eye hooks at the top. I would like to say I knew how to tie these fancy quick release knots that would take a mere snap of the fingers to release, but that wasn’t the case. After my fourth granny knot on each side I figured prudence was the best course of action for the day. I got my fifth and last eyehook and made sure that I found a stud in the wall as I anchored it. I then took a length of rope and tied a utility knife to the eyehook. So if needed, one would only need to get the knife and cut both ends of the rope releasing the ‘faux’ stairs. Now that I was
almost done there was only one thing left to do, try the stairs. The stairs seemed a lot sturdier ‘in theory.’

  “Hey, Trav!” I yelled.

  Travis came up from the basement where he and Tommy had been wrestling with Henry, who had gotten a whiff of Tommy’s secret stash of Pop-Tarts and was hell-bent on getting away with his prize.

  “Yeah, Dad?” Travis asked as he appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  He’s young, if anything happens he’d heal faster. “Aw shit,” I mumbled to myself. Guilt got the better of me. “I want you to stand there and get help if anything happens to me.”

  Travis looked at me like I was nuts until I pointed at my makeshift stair sled. This wouldn’t be the first emergency room visit Travis had to make with his father. Travis even had the presence of mind to step off the landing and into the foyer in case I went tobogganing. I white-knuckled the handrail as I placed my first foot down on the makeshift tread. Not so bad. It was when I placed my second foot onto the ‘stairs’ that the swaying began. With the combination of being secured only by rope, and three inches of play on each side, I had successfully made the first in-home carnival ride. Travis laughed as my face turned the same shade as my knuckles. This was going to take some serious getting used to. Nicole had come to the top of the stairs just in time to view the festivities.