Trailer Park Zombies

by Jason H. Jones

  He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, gripping it tightly. “Why, Duke?”

  That surprised yet another laugh from me. “You really have to ask? Should we count the number of things we need to talk to the cops about? Um, one, we have my dead mother here. Two, we’ve got a slaughtered family down the way. Three, we’ve got a murderous zombie on the loose. Don’t you think any one of those things merits an intervention by the police?”

  “And what are you going to tell them? That you accidentally killed the guy who raped the girl you’re in love with and then he came back from the dead and trashed our car and then he murdered that girl and ate her family? Oh, and by the way, your mom just happens to be dead, too? The situation hasn’t changed, Duke. We still can’t call the cops.”

  I looked at him wearily, “Then what do you suggest, Barrett?

  Fannie Mae spoke up, “Why don’t we get in the car and take off? I know it’s covered in blood but we could still get out of here. Wait for everything to sort itself out.”

  Barrett got a sheepish look on his face. “We, uh, can’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “After I found your mom I decided I couldn’t deal and blood or no blood I was getting out of here. Sorry, Duke, I just couldn’t stay in here by myself. I thought it best if I just left.”

  “Best for you,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. But the car wouldn’t start. It doesn’t look like,” he paused, “Mason got into the engine compartment but it still wouldn’t start. I fiddled with it for a couple minutes but I got the willies and came back inside.” He hung his head, “I’m sorry for trying to abandon you guys, but I just couldn’t….” He trailed off.

  “Whatever, Barrett,” I said. I got up from the floor and peeked out the front window. “What time is it?”

  “Almost five,” said Fannie Mae from the floor. She was struggling to rise up, too. None of us wanted to be too close to the corpse of my mother.

  “The sun comes up at what, six?” I looked at the sky, looking for any kind of light in the east. A huge part of me welled up at the thought of seeing the sun. This night seemed to have lasted forever. The sky was still as dark as ever.

  “Something like that,” Fannie Mae said. “This time of year? Maybe 6:30. Ish.”

  I nodded. “If we’re going to try to wait it out here then we need to do something about the car. A busted up car covered in blood might be a pretty big hint to my neighbors that something’s going on.”

  Barrett came up behind me, looking out the window, too. “What about your mom? And Tamara and her family? And Mason Smith out there?”

  I looked at my mom. “We’ll leave her there. Get up in the morning and pretend we just found her. Or hope my dad comes home at some point and finds her. We’ll all be shocked and dismayed at what we find.”

  Fannie Mae spoke up, “What if she, you know, comes back?”

  Barrett shook his head. “If this was a movie she would have already. Plus she wasn’t killed by Mason so hopefully that means we’re okay.”

  I was still staring out the window. “Then what brought Mason back?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what, Duke. No clue whatsoever.”

  “And you’re sure that Tamara and her parents will come back? 100%?”

  He snorted. “No. How can I be sure of something like that? It’s like we’re in the middle of a horror movie right now. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in real life. I don’t know what brought him back. He may not even be a zombie. He may or may not be infectious. But I wouldn’t count on it being any other way. In the movies I’ve seen people usually come back within seconds of being killed by the zombie. How long were you in there after he’d killed them?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. But he was still in there so I can’t imagine it was too long. I think we interrupted his feeding.”

  “Say it was 10 minutes then. Or, hell, five. In the movies they would have come back by then. That’s why zombie movies are so apocalyptic. One bite and you’re infected and they’ve increased their numbers by one. Within hours you have an army. I’m not that good at numbers but just imagine if each zombie only bit one person an hour. The whole city would be wiped out within a day.”

  I smiled, “Granted, we have a small city.” It was a grim smile.

  “Yep.”

  Fannie Mae broke in. “So we may or may not be facing a zombie horde. Tamara and her parents may or may not be coming back – from the dead. We may or may not be fighting for our lives in a few hours. Oh, and we need to go out in the middle of the night to do something about our car that the dead guy attacked so that the neighbors don’t think we have anything to do with it.”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Groovy,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  Barrett looked at us with a tinge of wonder and a goofy grin on his face. “You guys are nuts.”

  We both ignored him. I still wasn’t looking at Fannie Mae as I scoured the night outside for any movement. My one hope was that whatever was going on with Mason was unique to him and wasn’t communicable to others. Or, hell, maybe he wasn’t dead after all and we’d just driven him nuts. Yeah, I’m sure that was it.

  The last thing any of us wanted was to back out into the darkness and deal with the car but we had a small window of time in which to do it. Even though it was Saturday and we were in a trailer park there would still be those random old birds that would get up at the crack of dawn and go for their walks or get up and about. I reminded them of that little fact and Fannie Mae was quick to point out that one of the intervening neighbors of ours – not the Marster’s – was well known for getting up super early. He’d woken up her mom many times on his early morning ramblings.

  That still left the question of what exactly we were going to do with the car.

  Barrett said, “I think my dad has a car cover in the trunk. We could go get that out of there and just cover the car up.”

  I looked at him with a critical eye. “You don’t think anyone would think it was weird that I’d have a car parked in front of my trailer with a car cover on it? I’m sure that first thing in the morning Donny over there,” I pointed across the way, “wouldn’t take but two seconds to peek under it. Him or one of his hoodlum friends.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  Fannie Mae broke in, “Even though the car can’t start, you can still push it, can’t you?”

  Barrett nodded, “Yeah. You just have to put it into neutral.”

  She had a little grin on her face. I asked her, “What’s on your mind, Fannie Mae?”

  She pointed at the rear of the trailer. “We could push it into the woods. There’s enough of a gap between the trees back there to get the car in. Then we could put Barrett’s cover on it and cover it with a little bit of brush.”

  I thought about it for a second and then nodded. “That’s not too bad. Probably the best plan we have. We shouldn’t need to go back much more than 20 or so feet to make it not visible. The trailers here on the back cover it well enough and no one really goes back there. It’d probably be good for a couple days at least.”

  Barrett pointed out the flaw in the plan. Of course. “That’s a pretty hefty haul there, cahuna. We’d have to back it up from the parking spot, steer it through the gap between the trailers, and then steer it over dirt and grass and get it back in there. I hate to break it to you, but neither of us is in that great of a shape.”

  “We’d better get started then,” I said.

  As we left the trailer I heard him mutter under his breath, “Not to mention the horde of zombies.”

  Worrywart.

  8.

  In the end we managed it – barely – before the sun rose in the sky. No hordes of zombies came crashing out of the trailers to attack us. No snoopy neighbors came out to see what was going on. No cops came by to see what us pesky kids were up to.

  Not that we didn’t worry about any or all of those things.

  Barrett got in t
he car, muttering all the while under his breath, and put it in neutral. He tried to show Fannie Mae how to steer the car but she just pushed him out of the way and called him an ass. It was a little bit of an experience pushing the car backwards while Fannie Mae tried to steer. But we managed not to hit anything.

  Once we had the car pulled out enough Barrett and I got behind it and started pushing it again. We were both out of breath already and we’d barely begun. We called instructions lowly to Fannie Mae through the torn soft-top as we steered it between the trailers. That wasn’t as difficult as we thought it’d be, but getting it onto the grass and pushing it into the tree line proved as hard as Barrett had predicted.

  One of us would stop every thirty seconds or so and shine the flashlight around us to ensure there was nothing sneaking up behind us. Or no thing as the case may be. That certainly didn’t help with our time.

  Eventually we made it though. Covered the car and went back near the trailer to see if it could be seen. It couldn’t, but then it was still the dead of night with just a hint of sun peeking through the sky. We’d done as best we could though and decided that was just the way it was going to have to be. Hopefully it was out of the way enough that’d we be okay.

  Barrett said it was all a waste of time anyway. Kept mentioning the zombie hordes.

  Again with the worrywart.

  Fannie Mae finally smacked him upside the head and told him to shut up about that crap. Said we had enough to worry about without borrowing trouble. She was right, of course.

  We made it back into the trailer just fine and closed the door again. I scooted the couch down just a little bit so that it blocked the door, hoping that if Mason did try to come in that he’d have the decency to knock first. I shone the flashlight on mom and then realized there was enough light coming in the windows now that I could see well enough without it and shut it off.

  She still looked dead.

  Fannie Mae and Barrett collapsed in the kitchen. Barrett was sucking down water like crazy. He was in worse shape than I was and pushing the car almost gave him a coronary. Not to mention that he was still worrying about what his dad would say about the state of the car. And the zombie hordes.

  I wanted to take a rest, too. My bones ached for it, honestly. But I wanted to check out my leg and make sure that nothing had snuck into the trailer in our absence. I resisted the impulse to tell the others, “I’ll be back” before I left the room, but it was close. Sometimes humor always finds a way.

  It didn’t take long to make sure the rest of the trailer was empty. I hadn’t been too worried, but I still felt a sense of relief after searching under all the beds and in the closets. I ended up in the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. My face was caked with dirt and the startled whiteness of my eyes stood out in stark relief from the rest of my face.

  I braced myself and slowly undid my pants, wincing as I pulled them down my leg. I tried not to look at my thigh as I took them off the rest of the way. Once they were off I sat down on the edge of the tub and finally looked down at it. My thigh was swollen to about twice its normal size. Amazingly colorful black and purple bruises emanated from a central goose egg that stood up about a half inch from the rest of the flesh. My guess was that all the pain I’d been feeling was emanating more from the knot than anything else. I touched it and very quickly ascertained that I was right.

  Yep, that bitch hurt.

  I turned the tap on the tub to see if we had any hot water, but of course we didn’t. No power equals no hot water and out here on the fringe of Litchville, in the backwoods of Kentucky, home of hillbillies and hicks, we’d likely be without power for days. We weren’t important enough to get power that fast.

  A quick debate inside my head satisfied the matter of whether or not it’d be a good idea to take a cold bath. It’d definitely shake the weariness from my bones and I knew I needed the cold to try and take down the swelling in my leg. The only pants I had that would go back over that thigh the way it was were sweats and I didn’t want to wear those.

  I filled the tub with cold water and when it was about halfway full I stepped in it, wincing at the bitter coldness as it hit my feet. I slowly lowered myself into it, wincing again as each new part of my body met the coldness. My thigh felt immeasurably better the second it was submerged in the water. I decided I’d sit in there for about 20 minutes and let it soak and wash the grime off and then get out.

  I’m pretty sure I fell to sleep the second my head hit the back of the tub.

  It was dark, everywhere. A bitter wind ravaged my face and I turned around and around, in circles, trying to find a way to shelter myself from it. But it came at me from all directions. I put my arm up to shield my face but even then it felt like it was coming through my sleeves. I was in the middle of a forest. There were trees everywhere, reaching up to the sky with their dark branches. I leaned on one to catch my breath and try to find a way out of the wind, but even that did no good.

  I touched the tree but my hand came away covered in redness. The tree was bleeding. Even as I touched it I could feel the brittleness of the bark and the skin of the tree shattered in my hands, sloughing away like the boiled skin of a pig. More blood ran down from the tree and covered my hands. I pulled away from the tree in disgust, wiping my hands on my coat, trying to clean myself, but my hands were stained with it. No matter what I did it wasn’t coming off.

  Both my hands were stained with the blood of the tree.

  A full moon hung in the sky. It appeared to cover at least a third of the night sky and almost seemed like I could just reach up and touch it, but I didn’t want to. Something about it frightened me. It seemed to be mocking me.

  Ignoring the cold and the blood on my hands I began to walk. I picked a direction at random. I had no idea where I was or where I was going but walking seemed like an excellent idea. I needed to get out of this place. I know they say that when you’re lost in the woods you should just hunker down and wait for someone to find you but in that place I was afraid of what might find me. There was something wrong about that place.

  I don’t know how long it took me to notice but by the time it finally registered I realized I’d been hearing it for quite some time. There were steps in the forest matching mine. Creak for creak and stomp for stomp. I only noticed it because every so often I’d put my foot down and hear a twig break; only I hadn’t stepped on one.

  I stopped, surveying the forest, but could see nothing. The moon still hung fat in the sky and its light shone everywhere but it didn’t seem to actually illuminate anything. I stayed unmoving for what seemed like forever and still there was nothing. It was only when I’d finally decided to start moving again that I heard the snarl behind me. I whirled around with a cry but there was nothing there. Thank God. Then I heard the snarl again. Behind me, of course. Rancid breath blew softly past my ear.

  I whirled again and standing behind me less than a foot away was Mason Smith. He was covered in boils and sores and rotting flesh. Even as I watched a hunk of skin fell off his face onto the ground with a sickening plop. He grinned at me and the muscles in his cheeks gleamed wetly as he silently reached for me again. The skin had pulled away completely from his fingers leaving the bones exposed. The bone shone in the moonlight as the naked claws reached for me.

  I cried out and fell to the ground. He stared at me, arm still reaching out for where I’d been standing. Something crawled over me and I looked down at my body, crying out in disgust as I saw the maggots streaming from the ground to crawl on my flesh. I slapped them off in panic and scrambled to my feet again, running back in the direction I’d come from.

  I ran, breathing heavily. The air seemed so thick and I was so tired. I couldn’t hear him behind me anymore but I knew he was still there. Watching and waiting. Smelling the blood that coated my hands.

  Wait! What’s what? I could see a campfire in the distance. Not too far ahead, actually. Thank God. Maybe I’d get out of here yet. I ran even harder, feeling my chest
burn with the exertion. My throat was sore and dry and every inch of my body was pounding. I needed to stop and rest but I knew there was no rest for such as me.

  I stumbled into the clearing and saw my friends by the campfire. They were sitting with their backs to me but I could see their shoulders and head moving as if they were talking to each other. I would recognize them anywhere: Fannie Mae with her braids and her father’s coat and Barrett towering over her. I breathed a sigh of relief and ran past them, stopping a couple feet from the flames. The warmth felt so good on my face and hands. I was chilled to the bone and beyond and it felt like I’d never get warm again.

  Fannie Mae grabbed my hand and squeezed gently. Barrett put his hand on my shoulder. It felt so good to be with my friends again. I basked in the warmth of the fire as I leaned back into their cool embrace. I turned my head to thank Fannie Mae and apologize for ever being mean to her and that’s when I finally saw her face.