Trailer Park Zombies

by Jason H. Jones

  I forced myself to control my breathing, pushing the air out of my lungs. I rose shakily to my feet, leaning heavily on the lawn chair. Barrett was still on the ground looking like he was in the middle of a massive coronary.

  Fannie Mae stood there about 10 feet in front of us, in the middle of the road. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a little tank top. She had a hoodie on, but it wasn’t zipped up, and a pair of flip-flops. Her hair hung in wet strings down her back. She had a shit-eating grin on her face. I’m guessing it was because she’d scared the living crap out of us.

  “Dammit, Fannie Mae,” Barrett wheezed. “Was that really necessary?”

  “What?” She smiled sweetly. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Why are you so jumpy?”

  She looked at me, a twinkle in her eye. I could tell through her white tank top that she wasn’t wearing a bra and it was either a little cold or that she was glad to see me. I rolled my eyes.

  “Because of that,” I said. I flashed the light on Barrett’s car.

  “Oh my God!” She ran over to me and put her hand on my arm, gripping me hard. “What happened to the car?”

  “We don’t know. I woke up during the thunder and looked out the window and saw it. We came out to get a better look.”

  She took a step toward it, letting go of my arm. I sighed and grabbed her hand to keep her from going closer. “Is that blood on it? Oh my God,” she gasped.

  “Yeah, that’s blood,” Barrett said. He’d finally regained his feet.

  I flashed the light on the jacket where it lay on the ground. I squeezed Fannie Mae’s hand. “Look.”

  She let out a little scream and buried her head in my chest. “What… what is that? Where’d it come from?”

  I pulled her off me. “That’s Mason Smith’s letterman’s jacket. He was wearing it tonight. We found it in the car.”

  She looked back at the car, gripping my hand so hard it hurt. “Is, is he in there?”

  “No. Just the jacket was. In the backseat.”

  “He was dead, Dukey.”

  Barrett came over to us. “Yeah, we’ve been over that part already.”

  She stepped away from me, still holding my hand. Tried to look at the car and then finally sighed and let me my hand go. She had more courage than Barrett and I combined as she just walked up to the car and inspected both the front and back seat. She didn’t say anything as she looked over the car completely. Barrett and I let her have at it. She was smarter than the both of us combined and we all knew it.

  She finally came back over to us and looked at me with a critical eye. “Are you guys screwing with me?”

  “No,” I said, taking her seriously.

  She pointed, “That’s Mason’s jacket?”

  “Yes.”

  She pointed behind her, “You found the car this way? Broken into? Blood smeared everywhere? And the jacket was in the back seat?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Fannie Mae bit her lower lip in concentration. “Then what the hell happened?”

  Barrett broke in, “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. I told you.”

  She completely ignored him. “Is someone playing a prank on us, Dukey?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “It’s pretty elaborate if they are. They stripped the jacket off his body, got a bunch of blood from somewhere, smeared it everywhere, and then broke into Barrett’s car and smeared it some more. It doesn’t make sense as a joke. Or a prank.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. And I know he was dead. I could tell. Should we go back and see if the body is still there?”

  I looked around the Acres, noting the quietness of the night. Not even the usual troublemakers were up and about. The power was still out and I could taste the rain we’d missed on the air. We weren’t done with that storm yet if my nose had anything to say about it. A cool breeze rustled the air and swayed the swing in my neighbor’s yard. The sky was heavy with the mostly full moon that still struggled to free itself from the clouds. It was more than a mile walk each way to the graveyard but I knew they’d do it if I asked them to. Even under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t want to do it, but at three in the morning on a crazy night like this?

  “No way,” I said. “It’s too far and it doesn’t add up. Regardless of if he’s still there or not, someone is still screwing with us here. We should stay together here and wait things out.”

  Barrett was looking at Fannie Mae with a new look in his eye. It wasn’t often that he had a flash of intuition but I could tell by his face that he’d just thought of something. Fannie Mae could tell, too.

  “What, Barrett? Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Why are you here, Fannie Mae?” He pointed at her trailer where it stood several down from mine. “You should be in bed, just like us. Why are you out and about?”

  She flicked her wet hair at him, “I couldn’t sleep, dumbass. After what happened tonight and with my mom out of town I couldn’t sleep in that tin can by myself. I made sure that Tamara got home okay and then I went home, too. I tried to sleep, couldn’t, then finally took a shower. I was getting ready to fix myself something to eat when the power went out. I looked out the window and saw a flashlight over here so thought I’d check it out.” She waved at the carnage, “Like I could even do something like this.

  “Dumb ass.”

  Barrett had the sense to look ashamed, but I had to admit it was a good thought. I was so used to Fannie Mae always being around that it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder what she was doing out here. But wait.

  “Tamara,” I said. Both of them looked at me with dumb expressions on their faces. “If someone is screwing with us they’re probably screwing with her, too. We should go make sure she’s okay.”

  “It’s after three in the morning, Duke,” said Barrett. “You want to just go knocking on her door and make sure she’s okay? Her parents would kill us.”

  I shone the flashlight full on his face. “You’re just afraid, Barrett. Look at what they did to your dad’s car. Look at this bloody jacket here on the ground. Do you think they’ll stop there? Mason raped her and beat the crap out of her. Judging by your car it looks like someone is pretty well pissed at us. The only one of us who’s alone is Tamara. We have to at least warn her that something is going on.”

  “Fine, then” He ran over to the car, took a deep breath, and pulled his cell phone from the dash. “Why don’t you just call her then? Then we don’t need to tramp over half this trailer park in the dead of night by the light of the moon so that we can knock on her door and have her dad yell at us and wake everyone in the world up.”

  I looked at him, dumbfounded. I’d never had one so it still never occurred to me to use a cell phone. “Oh, yeah.” I took the phone from him. “What’s her number?”

  “How would I know?” He slammed his hands in his pockets, turning his back on us.

  “Fannie Mae, do you know her number?”

  She grabbed the phone out of my hand and started punching numbers into it. Barrett still had his back to us but Fannie Mae and I stared at each while she held the phone to her ear. The rings from the phone were loud in the silence of the night. We could all hear it go to voicemail. She sighed and dialed it again. Did it three more times until finally handing the phone back to Barrett and stating the obvious, “No answer.”

  I looked at Barrett. “Satisfied? Can we go now?”

  “What time is it?”

  I shone the flashlight at my watch. “Half-past three.”

  “What time’s sunrise?”

  “How the heck should I know? I didn’t bother checking my almanac today.”

  “How about we wait til sunrise? It can’t be more than a couple hours away. Please?” He looked sincerely, severely scared. I didn’t blame him, but still. The situation was what it was and we had to deal with it.

  “You can stay here if you want,” I said, gesturing to my trailer. “Just go in there and lock the door and let u
s in when we come back. I don’t want to wake up my mom.”

  He looked at the trailer and back at me and Fannie Mae. I could see him trying to will himself to come with us, but something in him was just broken. He had no backbone and never had. When we were kids he was always the one who wouldn’t jump into the swimming hole. Always the one who wouldn’t steal the cigarettes from old man Brody’s store. Always the one you couldn’t get to do anything bad or against the rules. He was deathly afraid of getting into trouble or getting hurt (although it still never stopped him from being a wiseass or giving me trouble). I’d seen him give bullies all the money in his wallet before with them barely asking. He was a coward and that was just the way that was, too.

  I could see the knowledge enter his eyes as he looked back at me and Fannie Mae. He wasn’t a coward by choice, but the choices he’d made turned him into one. Fannie Mae looked away with a snort of disgust.

  He looked at me and I looked at him. “Just be ready for us when we come back,” I said. He nodded and went silently inside.

  “Ready?”

  Fannie Mae gave me a nervous but resolute smile. “I was born ready.”

  6.

  The shadow moved through the darkness with ease. It saw things in a different way now than It had before. It didn’t know this, of course, as it was nothing but a shadow. A shadow without forethought or memory or a mind at all. All it knew was hunger and it could smell its food on the air. A smorgasbord of food to fill its empty belly. Only a basic drive pushed it forward. All else had been crushed from its mind. It didn’t know why it did the things it did, why it had gained such savage pleasure from destroying the car. It didn’t even know what a car was. Fleeting impulses drove it past other food that could fill its belly but somewhere inside it the shadow knew that other food awaited it. Better food.

  “You ready?” I’d asked her. We stumbled through the dark like we’d never walked outside before. Scraping our shoes on the gravel and making enough noise to wake up everyone in the Acres. It didn’t help that the ache in my leg hadn’t abated at all. Fortunately it hadn’t started hurting any worse. Fannie Mae saw me wincing and kept trying to help but I just waved her off. If she tried to “help” me walk it’d take us twice as long to get there. Tamara lived a couple gravel streets over and several trailers down so the easiest way to get there was to cut through people’s lots.

  You ever walked through someone’s yard? Stepped on the various and sundry crap they have in there? Dog toys, swings, tires, planters. Multiply that by about a hundred and you might get an idea of what people in trailer parks leave in their yard. Tiny grills that are about six inches off the ground, rusted out gardening tools, random pieces of barbed or chicken wire, old washing machines. You get the idea. Now try walking through that while you’re limping and carrying a flashlight. In the middle of the night. With the power out.

  See how good you do.

  Going through the Acres in the dead of night was a little frightening. It felt like Fannie Mae and I were in some sort of post-apocalyptic world and that we were the only survivors, struggling to make our way. The silence and the darkness made it the spookiest thing imaginable. I couldn’t even conceive of how bad it would have been a couple hundred years ago when there was no electricity and people had to actually survive this way. Give me my MTV any day.

  Of course, the car and the jacket weighing heavily on our minds didn’t help the spookiness level at all.

  Fannie Mae stayed fairly closely to me as I limped through the yards. I half-expected to see at least someone out and about, but we didn’t see a soul. I guess I’d never been up this late and moving through the Acres. No one was out this late. Except us poor saps.

  We finally made it over to Tamara’s street and Fannie Mae whispered to me, “Which one is it? I can’t tell in the dark.”

  I counted the number of trailers from the road silently in my head and then pointed the flashlight at the right one. “It’s that one,” I said.

  She smirked at me. “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. How many times do you think I’ve managed to casually walk by it?”

  We slowed as we neared the trailer; both feeling like something was off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until Fannie Mae whispered, “Duke, the door. Is there something wrong with the door?”

  I flashed the light on the door and immediately saw what she’d seen: the door stood ajar several inches. Fannie Mae gripped my arm tightly and dug in with her fingernails. A flare of pain went through me but I ignored it. Why would Tamara’s door be open?

  “Did you close it when you left earlier?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Tamara’s parents were asleep – I could hear her dad snoring – and she wouldn’t let me come inside. She said she was fine. She was gonna stuff the clothes in the back of her closet until she could burn them and was going to take a very hot shower and scrub the hell out of herself. She said you didn’t deserve to get into trouble because of her so she was going to do her best to get rid of all the evidence. She even tried to laugh it off a little bit and said that she was glad she’d finally got rid of her pesky virginity.”

  I looked at her in horror. I couldn’t believe that Tamara could laugh it all off like that.

  Fannie Mae saw the look in my eyes. She shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, she was still torn up about it. I could see that she was about to cry but just holding it back. What else could she do, Dukey?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Anyway, when I left she gave me a hug and closed the door behind me. I could hear her turn the lock. She’s still got my dad’s coat, actually.”

  “And now it’s open,” I said, staring sadly at the door.

  “But her parents were home. Like I said, I heard her dad snoring. If something had happened wouldn’t all the neighbors be outside? Someone would have called the cops.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe. Depends on if anything did happen, how loud it was. The trailers on both sides of hers have been empty for a while. It would have to be fairly loud for it to reach further than that.” The lots in the Acres were actually a fairly good size, for a trailer park. Not as big as the size of a normal yard, but this was backwoods Kentucky we were talking about. There was lots of space to move around in.

  I stopped moving and sighed, still shining the flashlight on the door. Fannie Mae didn’t even slow down. I grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”

  She looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face, then gestured at the trailer, “I’m going to check on Tamara.”

  “We have to… we have to… check the place out or something. I think.”

  She gently took my hand off her arm and squeezed it tightly in her own. “Checking it out won’t tell us anything, Dukey. Just like checking out the car didn’t really tell you anything. We have to go in and see if everyone’s okay or if there’s anything we can do to help.”

  I flashed my light around the trailer. There was only one car parked in front of it. “Maybe,” I said, “they’re not home. Maybe they drove off and accidently left the door open. Simple explanation.”

  She shook her head. “There’s the same number of cars there now that there were when I left a couple hours ago. They didn’t go anywhere, Duke. They’re still here.”

  I sighed and said, “Okay, but I’m going first. I am the man, after all.”

  She snorted. “Whatever.”

  We snuck up the walkway as best we could. Fannie Mae was a much better sneaker than I was. As we got to the steps leading up to the door I shone the light on it again. “Crap.”

  “What now?” She whispered.

  “Um, there’s a bloody handprint on the door.” I focused the light on it. It was in stark relief on the middle of the door. Right next to it was a big dent covered in blood.

  “Crap,” she said.

  “Exactly. It’s not too late to go back, Fannie Mae. We’ve got options. Call the cops or whatever.”

  “Screw tha
t, Dukey. She’s a friend.”

  I didn’t say another word as I nudged the door open with the flashlight. If something vile had gone on in there the last thing I wanted was my fingerprints everywhere. As I’ve mentioned, I’d seen enough detective shows to know that they’d find me in a heartbeat. Plus I was majorly weirded out by the idea of touching the door covered in blood like that. For some reason it seemed different than touching the car. More intimate.

  The inside of the trailer was blanketed in darkness. Of course. What light there was inside was shining through the windows from the moon, so it was just ambient spooky light. My flashlight lit the place up good, in pretty little cones of light. As flashlights do. You ever watch a horror movie where the hero has the flashlight out and pointed at a benign wall and he’s shining it around with nary a thought and thinking everything was all right with the world and you, the viewer, can see the monster just out of reach of the light by about two inches? And you’re screaming at the screen for them to run, run, run?