by Mark Tufo
He looked at me, absorbing all that I was telling him. I could tell from the time it took him to process this information that he hadn’t thought of it like this yet. Paul had always had an unnaturally high fear of commitment. I still sometimes wondered how Erin was able to get him to marry her. She’d probably had to resort to blackmail.
“Paul,” I said trying to shake him out of whatever thought loop he was in. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
He nodded ever so slightly. I wasn’t overly thrilled with his response.
“Paul, YOU are the last line of defense here,” I told him. Paul weakly motioned towards Justin’s door. “Dude, I’m not sure he has enough strength to get out of bed if he needs to piss. If push comes to shove though, he will get up and do what he can when the time comes.” What I left unsaid was that I didn’t have that same faith in Paul. I think he got the underlying current of my meaning.
He looked hurt when he spoke. “You know I’d do anything for you Mike, and the kids… and Tracy,” he added hastily.
I eased up. “That’s all I needed to know, Paul. We’ll be back.”
Travis and Brendon were waiting impatiently by the door, rifles and ammunition cans by their sides. Tommy was on the couch doing a crossword puzzle. Not a lick of concern creased his features.
“Hey, Mr. T,” Tommy said from his seated position, looking up at me with a big smile across his face.
God I loved that kid, he knew what was going on and was in a great mood despite it. It was infectious. I smiled back. “Yeah, what’s up, Tommy?”
“What’s a four-letter word for ‘seven days?’”
At first I didn’t grasp the question, and then I noticed the puzzle book in his lap. My dim-watted bulb finally flickered on. “Week, Tommy, it’s a week,” I answered, happy to be able to help him.
His expression changed dramatically; he became extremely solemn when he replied. I would have almost thought he was a different person as he intoned, “Exactly.”
I know my face ashened. I could feel the blood running out of it. Tommy had just told us how long we had. I opened the door and headed out before anyone could see my betraying visage. We had enough to be worried about. I was hoping that nobody else hearing Tommy’s words had come to the same realization. If they did, nobody said anything. Brendon, Travis and I went to find the best vantage point to begin our beleaguered defense.
Before we climbed the guard tower, I got them into a small group huddle. “Listen to me, boys.” It was difficult to be heard over the cacophony of battle. I shouted again. “Boys! We do not separate. Do you understand?” I looked at each one in turn to get my confirmation nod. “If you need to take a piss or get something to eat or just take a rest, you go home and you go with each other, do you understand?” Again I looked for and received the confirmation nod. My words were having the desired effect. I wasn’t sure that they were getting the seriousness of the situation we were about to become engaged in. Fear rimmed their eyes as much as their male bravado tried to suppress it. Scared was good though. Scared kept people, soldiers, alive. It was fuckin’ heroics that got good people killed. I made it abundantly clear I didn’t want any heroes.
“Once these walls are breached…” I started.
Brendon’s eyes snapped to mine. “Breached?” he asked incredulously.
“Dad?” Travis asked.
My heart dropped, his fear was palpable.
They both looked like they wanted to bolt for home right now. Trust me, I wanted to join them.
“Holy shit, Mike,” Brendon said. He looked back towards the house. I knew what he was thinking. He wanted to get Nicole and get the hell out of Dodge while the getting was good.
I grabbed his arm to focus his attention back on me. “Brendon, you’ve seen what’s on the other side of that wall, right?” He nodded. “How far do you think you’d get?” He still wasn’t convinced. “There’s nowhere to go, yet.” He looked back at me, all of his hope fixated on that one small word, ‘yet.’
“Now listen,” I said to them both, “I have a plan for when...” And I stressed ‘when.’ “…this wall is breached, but it depends on all of us making it back to the house. Once the zombies are in the compound it’s going to be everyone for themselves. As hard as it might be, I don’t give a shit what else is happening, when I tell you to get your asses back to the house, you’ll do just that. Don’t stop for anything or anybody. You two are my responsibility. If one of you decides to take matters into his own hands, I will have to go and find you. Now if something happens to one of you and to me, all of my plans go down the shitter.” This is when I drove my point home. “Now if I’m gone, you’ve sealed Mom’s, Nicole’s, Justin’s, and Tommy’s fate…not to mention Henry. When I say home, we ALL go!”
For the moment, the boys crowded so close to that me we looked like some humanoid form of octopi. That was just fine with me. We climbed up the nearest tower. It was forty yards from the house. Even at a slow trot we should be able to make it home in under ten seconds. That was little solace as I turned my gaze away from my home and into the crevice of psychosis.
“Glad you could make it,” Alex said as he clasped my shoulder.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I replied.
Alex looked at me, trying to decide if I were serious or not. I let him keep wondering as I shouldered my rifle.
Four hours later, my shoulder throbbed, my back ached, my trigger finger was having muscles spasms, and still they plodded on. This wasn’t a battle in the traditional sense. We shot firearms, they caught lead. There was no battle cry, no call to arms, no rallying, no retreating, no strategy. Just onward, relentless, implacable, obdurate, pitiless forward momentum. Those that fell weren’t heroically pulled up and treated in the rear echelons. They didn’t cry out in vain. They didn’t scream for their mothers or a nonpartisan god, Buddha or Hare-fuckin’-Krishna. They fell like cordwood: hundreds upon hundreds of men, women, and children. I couldn’t convince myself—no matter how much I tried—to shoot a child. I knew instinctually that they weren’t human, and given the chance, they would eat me alive, but I could not bring myself to shoot anything under four feet tall. I made sure to always keep my aiming point higher than that. My nightmares were going to have nightmares already. I was not going to compound it further.
So far, the merciless gunfire had kept the zombies from reaching the walls, but that was going to change real soon. It had been a stalemate to this point, our lead for their bodies. It had been light out; we had been well rested and still stocked with plenty of ammunition. All the pros in our corner were as rapidly retreating as the sun over the Rockies. Every able-bodied person with a gun had been manning these walls, and we had done little more than delay the inevitable. With darkness came fatigue and hunger and hell, probably even shock and trauma. As people peeled away from their posts, the zombies gained precious inches.
I had finally been able to stretch out my trigger finger, although I was now suspecting it might always include a perceptible hook. Travis was leaning against the far side of the railing his head drooping ever so slightly and his eyes following suit. Brendon wasn’t faring much better. When I had first been exposed to combat in Afghanistan I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a week. The rampaging fear and adrenaline rush commingled into one hell of a toxic stimulant, but it came at an extreme price to your system. The crash was a near catatonic state. I could sleep for almost forty-eight hours straight after a firefight. I knew what was coming. The boys would have to learn the hard way.
“Brendon, take Travis and head back to the house,” I told him. He may have wanted to argue but he was already riding down the other side of the adrenalin slope. He clapped Travis on the shoulder and motioned towards the house. Travis looked back at me and I nodded my approval. “I’ll be there soon,” I assured him.
The fifteen or so people that had started the day on this platform were now whittled down to three. Myself, Alex and a third guy I didn’t rem
ember ever seeing before.
“Some day, huh?” Alex said as he slid down to sit next to me.
“I’ve had better,” I answered in a serious tone.
Again Alex just looked at me trying to ascertain my true meaning.
“I’m sorry,” I laughed. “It’s my New England sarcasm coming out in full force.” Folks that don’t come from that region have a difficult time truly understanding what is being said to them. Many will find it an abrasive form of communication. It is, without a doubt, an acquired mode of information dissemination.
Alex appreciated my honesty. “So how do you think it went?” he asked.
“About how I expected,” I told him. He kept looking for more so I elaborated. It was much easier talking now that most of the gunfire had fell off to some sporadic shots. “You can do the math as well as I can, Alex. This is a lesson in futility. We’ll be out of ammo in a few days…a week at most. Then, I don’t know, the food might hold out for a month and then what, we can’t go anywhere.”
“What about the truck? Couldn’t we fill it with as many people as possible and just run the smelly bastards over?” Alex asked with a glimmer of hope.
“You gonna pick who stays and who goes?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“We could do a lottery or something.”
“Yeah that’ll go over well. You better hope all the ammo is gone before you make that little proposition. Besides it won’t work.”
Alex looked to me to question the validity of my statement.
I obliged. “The truck will make it through the first few waves, and then the bodies will start to mount. You’ll end up high centering on them, and that’s if the radiator isn’t damaged from the excessive hits.”
He wasn’t done letting go of his idea. What was the harm, we only had time on our hands now. “What if we fixed it with a plow?” He was piquing my interest. “I could attach a grill that would protect the engine housing and we could put a skirt around the entire thing so no bodies would fit under it.”
The more he talked the more convinced I became that his idea had some merit. The problem was that we had close to three hundred residents here and this wasn’t going to be an alternative for about two hundred and fifty of them. But some was better than none. I started to head down the ladder.
“Where you going?” Alex asked.
“I’m going to talk to Jed and let him figure out how to choose who stays and who goes, and then I’m going home to get my finger massaged.”
Alex laughed, “Yeah, your finger,” he said with air quotes. “Is that more of your New England sarcasm?”
I don’t know if we were going to have enough time together for him to realize when I was kidding or not, but I honestly meant ‘my finger.’ Eh, let him think what he wants. Sex might not be the furthest thing from my mind, but I could almost guarantee it wasn’t even on Tracy’s radar screen.
Finding Jed was not all that difficult. He had pretty much set up residence in the clubhouse since the beginning. He was sipping some hot coffee over by the fireplace. He had the look of a man who wasn’t going to warm up anytime soon. He was a tough old bird, he probably only beat me here by a few minutes. He smiled a little when he saw me enter. He winced a bit as he raised his arm up to motion me over.
“Your shoulder hurting, too?” I asked him.
“Why the hell I thought buying a twelve gauge shotgun was a good idea I’ll never know. My arm’s stiffer than a sailor’s dick at a Village People reunion tour,” he guffawed.
“What is it with all the sexual references?” I asked. Jed ignored me.
“So what do you want, Talbot?” Jed asked.
“Am I that easy to read?” I asked, the surprise clear on my face.
“Just don’t ever cheat on your wife. She’d be able to tell before you got out of your car.”
“Yeah I don’t play cards either just for that reason.”
Jed arched an eyebrow at me, furiously rubbing his hands together for the meager generation of heat it created.
“Okay, Alex has an idea that I think might work.”
“So at this point is it ‘and’ or ‘but’?” he asked.
“Wow, it is a good thing I didn’t mess around with Allison,” I said with introspect. “But...”
“Wonderful, I was hoping for some ‘but’.”
“This isn’t another sexual reference is it?”
“Look at me, Talbot. When do you think is the last time I had sex, damn, even a hard on for that matter?”
There was another visual I was now going to be laden with until my dying days. “Thanks,” I muttered.
‘Go on’ he signaled with his hands, clearly getting a little irritated.
“But,” I said hastily, trying my best to erase an unabolishable image, “it’ll only work for about fifty or so people.”
What little light had been in Jed’s eyes quickly extinguished. I outlined Alex’ plan, and Jed nodded in agreement to most or offered some better alternatives.
“Women and children, right?” Jed asked, even if it was a statement.
“Without a doubt.”
“What about Tracy and Nicole?”
“Oh, I’ll want them to go, but they won’t.”
“Can’t you make them?” he asked seriously.
“That’s funny, Jed, how long were you married?”
He nodded in acceptance of my unwritten truth. Women ruled the roost. Men were merely figureheads. ‘Yes dear’ was the accepted vernacular in any successful union.
CHAPTER 21 - Next Day – 12/18
Journal Entry – 18
Different Day. Same Zombies. See how I substituted zombie for ‘shit,’? ‘Cause that’s what it smelled like, one giant pile of fresh maggoty dog shit. If this were summer, the sky would be thick with flies. It would be nearly impossible to breathe without swallowing some of the offending little beasts. Because of the fetor, intake of air was a nauseating task. Appetites had dropped off the charts. Last night, I had grossly underestimated how long our food supply would last. It might be indefinite. Nobody could work up any desire for food. Sometime during the night the zombies had made it all the way up to the gates of Babylon. Single digit amounts of feet kept us separated. Being this close and seeing the devastation the disease caused on these people was excruciating. Skin tone ranged from fax paper white to plum purple and everything between. There were your ashen grays and your burnt siennas. The thing that they had in common was that none of the pallors were healthy looking. Strips of torn skin hung like rags on more than most. Knees and hands were bloodied. Congealed gore splattered the masses like an all you can eat lobster fest gone bad.
For all the broken bones and shredded skin and clouded visages, there was no suffering. There was no self-pity or loathing or hate for that matter. There was only determination and hunger, wanton hunger. It was from this insanely close distance the morning’s firing squads commenced. The stench began to liquefy in the air as the bullets tore through the rotting corpses.
I know I have gone on and on about the stench of the zombies, but unless you have lived through it, you can’t truly assess how disruptive the smell was. Just think when you’ve watched a movie about some snowbound people in say, Antarctica. So you’re watching and these suffering fools teeth are chattering and they have frozen snot coming out of their noses and they can’t feel their fingers or their toes. I mean they are just miserable, and you the viewer are sitting there trying to experience what they are feeling and you’re like ‘boy that sure looks cold’ as you munch your buttered popcorn. That doesn’t really grasp the full effect for you. Until one day you get some tickets to a football game and it’s in Green Bay in December. You are outside for a maximum of three hours in the warmest gear created by mankind, and you are still freezing your ass off. It takes a thermal nuclear reaction to get the circulation back in your feet and hands and that is just a taste of what those poor souls lost in the Antarctica are going through. So now back to my problem.
If you, the reader, really, REALLY, want to know what was going on in Little Turtle, go feed your dog or your neighbor’s dog some chili, slathered in hot sauce and maybe throw in some chocolate cake. Okay wait for it, WAIT. Now about a half hour later, your dog’s innards are pretty much going to rupture, so make sure he’s outside. Now while this steaming pile of shit is still warm and fetid, place it in a plastic shopping bag—DON’T TIE IT UP! Now place the carrying handles one on each ear and inhale deeply. You must walk around with this bag draped across your face continually. Is this starting to punch through? Now, every time the dog crap begins to harden up and lose some of its edge, go grab yourself another refreshing pile of fresh dog offal. While you are breathing deeply of this savory concoction, try to eat some enchiladas or maybe some lasagna. Oh hell, just try to sleep with that thing affixed to your face. Yeah, not quite as much fun anymore. So that, my dear reader, is why I am going off the deep end to explain the stink. It’s all-pervading. There is no relief, no giant bottle of Febreze. There wasn’t even a prevailing wind that could help relieve us. We were surrounded by the never-ending miasma of decomposition.
By noon that day of death layered upon death, I noticed something strange. The zombies were getting taller. I jumped down from my tower and ran for the clubhouse. I voiced my concern to Jed after taking a few deep breathes which I instantly regretted. “Jed, you have to call a cease-fire!” I finally spit out.
“If it’s about the bullets, Talbot, I already feel your concern, but we’ve got at least a week’s worth,” Jed replied.
I was still breathing heavily from my run over. I had been reluctant to take deep breaths and it was only partly because I had let my cardio routine lapse in the last few months. So I rushed out my words without explanation. I pretty much got the response I deserved.
“The zombies are getting taller…” next breath I finished with “…Jed.”
“Booze is tougher to get than a fresh T-bone, so I know you haven’t been drinking. Some of that wacky tobaccy then?” Jed asked with a raised eyebrow.