Trailer Park Zombies

by Jason H. Jones

I could have picked the gun up from the couch and rushed out madly, Indiana Jones-style. I could have fired on foot-zombie and maybe hit his head without taking out anyone else. Doubtful, but it was possible. Or I could have charged in and shot Donny Marsters as he scrambled forward to eat the leg of the man who’d come to his aid. And maybe me shooting a shotgun into that group of men wouldn’t have harmed any of them. Maybe I could have done it without harming anyone else.

  Or maybe, since I’d never actually shot anyone before, I’d have only managed to kill one of the other men in the group and they would have promptly attacked me. Or maybe none of my shots would have gone true and I’d have faced the pack of zombies that stood out there now, eating the ruined shell that had once been Mr. Marsters.

  Then maybe that pack would have come after me and I’d now be one of them, shambling around looking for a nice little snack.

  That was the most likely thing to happen.

  That’s not to say I logically thought this through when this all happened. The truth is that I did reach for the shotgun with every intention of trying to target shoot but that’s when Fannie Mae grabbed me and gripped me tightly and wouldn’t let me go. She kept sobbing and whispering no at me and telling me I wasn’t going out there, that it was already too late and that there was nothing I could do about it and that she wouldn’t let me.

  And it honestly took longer to tell it than it did for it to happen. The whole experience from the time we’d seen the zombie chewing on the foot to the time the street had emptied out and there were now four zombies wandering around was maybe three or four minutes. The bastards were quick when they wanted to be.

  Plus that was about the time that a dreadful screeching and grinding sound began to permeate through the trailer. It started slowly and was little more than a whisper. It was like the sound I’d heard on my first watch in the hour before dawn. Like something was being dragged slowly along the exterior of the trailer. Then it was joined by another one on the back side of the trailer. We couldn’t see anything out of any of the windows.

  Boom… drag… boom. It was coming from all sides now. Someone or some thing was beating slowly and methodically against the back wall of the trailer. We only had one window on that side and whatever was going on was in a blind spot. Barrett and I left Fannie Mae to stand guard by the front window – with the shotgun – while we ran back there. We couldn’t see anything.

  The back door began to shake and I could see that the hammering was popping in dents along the edges of it. I whispered to Barrett. “Go in my mom’s room. I think she has some laundry line – some rope – in her closet. Hurry!”

  He stood there staring back and forth between me and the door. The look in his eyes was one of a frightened rabbit. I was afraid that Barrett had almost reached his limit, but this day was far, far, from over.

  I slapped him hard across the face. As hard of a shot as I could give him.

  His head whipped to the side with a grunt and a red imprint of my hand stood out on his cheek. He looked at me, extremely pissed off, blood trickling down his nose. He stepped forward threateningly, then shook his head to clear it.

  “Sorry, cahuna. I’ll go get it.”

  I braced myself by the door, waiting for the zombies to find their way in. Judging by the sound of it they’d all migrated to the rear door now, apparently sensing the weakness in our tin box. Every so often one of them would get a good blow in and I could hear the metal of the exterior crimping and popping back out like the side of an aluminum can. A trailer isn’t exactly made to withstand nuclear attacks or zombie hordes. Hell, it’s barely made to withstand a rain storm.

  Barrett finally came running back from my parent’s room brandishing the clothesline. He was quicker than I thought he’d be. Maybe a good slap upside the head was all he needed. I winced at the sight of my red handprint on his cheek.

  “Sorry, dude,” I said, pointing to it as he handed the line to me.

  He shrugged, embarrassed more than anything else. “That’s okay. I needed it, cahuna.” He gestured toward the line in my hand. “What are we going to do with that?”

  I looked at the door and then at the line. “This door opens out, so we can’t really brace it like we need to and did with the front door. All I can think of is to tie this to the doorknob and then tie it to something in my bedroom,” which lay across from the backdoor, “and hope for the best.”

  He eyed the flimsy backdoor and then the rope and looked at me. Gave me the raised eyebrow. I gave it back to him. For a moment a ghost of a grin crossed both of our faces. Then he said, “I guess it’s the best we can do for now, huh?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I think the windows are high enough that unless they figure out how to piggyback or build a pyramid that we’re okay there. We just need to brace the doors.”

  He looked at the windows down the hall and shuddered, “Don’t give them any ideas, cahuna.”

  We made short work of tying the clothesline to the doorknob and bracing it in my room. I had no doubt the zombies could still break it in and get inside but it should at least give us a little bit of time. After a quick debate we dragged the kitchen table down the hallway and jammed it against the door as well. The legs made a pretty good brace for wedging it against the other side of the wall. It would be a bitch to go down to my parent’s room if we needed to but we decided that was a small price to pay.

  We went back down to the living room and watched Fannie Mae looking out the window. I don’t know about Barrett, but even though my mom was most definitely dead I was still very spooked by her corpse sitting on the couch in the room with us. Barrett watched me eying it and then suggested that we take her back down to her room and close the door.

  I liked the idea, but not the execution. I didn’t like touching her when she was alive, let alone now.

  Finally I sighed and nodded and went back to her room to grab the blanket off her bed. I had to scootch between the legs of the table to do it and get perilously close to the backdoor, but I managed. I could hear the fingernails scratching against the tin on the other side and for a moment when I passed it I stopped and listened. The whisper of sound it made almost sounded like a voice talking to me. I could hear the silent screams from my dreams and for a moment I was thrown back to the fireside and the cradle of the tree limbs and could see my friends as zombies standing before me. I closed my eyes to clear my head and hummed under my breath to try to drown out the sounds.

  It worked – barely – and I did the same as I made the trek back through to the living room.

  The scrabbling of their claws was somehow worse than seeing them eat everyone in the road. It jarred relentlessly in the brain and bounced around enough to make you think you’d go off gibbering in madness.

  I came back with the blanket and Barrett and I stared at each other. We both looked sick at the thought. Neither one of us liked my mother and you’d be hard pressed to name a time when either one of us had last touched her and the thought of touching her dead body – even through the feeble protection of the blanket – made both our skins crawl. But it was better than sitting there with a dead body sharing the room with us while a bunch of other dead bodies scrambled to get inside and eat our brains.

  Something about it just gave me the willies. I’m sure you can understand. And if you can’t, give it a shot yourself and see how you feel about it.

  I reached out and gingerly pried the empty bottle from between her legs and set it to the side. I nodded at Barrett and he took a corner of the blanket and we both reached forward to wrap it around her. My hand brushed her cheek as I did so and a shudder went crashing through me like a wave. Every fiber of my being was on alert and that touch sent everything into a tailspin. I breathed deeply to try to calm myself, which was a mistake all on its own. The familiar smell of my mother – B.O. mixed with multiple layers of booze and cigarettes – filled my nostrils along with the new scent of decay.

  It wasn’t pleasant.

  So I held my breath
as we gingerly lifted her and wrapped her. On the count of three and with a “heave-ho” we lifted her in her arms cradling her body between us. She was frozen with rigor mortis into a sitting position so were basically carrying her sitting up. I had an arm cradling the backs of her knees and another on her back. Barrett’s…

  “Man, you owe me for this,” he said. “I’ve got my hand on your mother’s ass. Not once in the years I’ve known you has this ever occurred to me as something I wanted to do.”

  “Them’s the breaks,” I said, mentally congratulating myself on maneuvering my hands into the right spot first.

  He nodded toward the window. “Why don’t we just throw her outside and let the zombies take care of her? Then it’s off of us and we can just say the zombies got her.”

  I nodded to mom’s shroud. “What would happen if the virus or whatever revived her? Even with her being dead so long? I’m happy that she’s dead and about the last thing I want is for her to come back. The only way I’d want that to happen is so that she could eat dad. I really don’t want to have to re-kill my mom, Barrett. I might have hated the bitch, but I don’t want her blood on my hands.”

  He stared at me silently, then nodded.

  I muttered to myself, “I have everyone else’s blood on my hands. I don’t really want hers, too.”

  We carried her slowly through the hallway and then cursed each other when we hit the table. This was something we should have thought of before we put the table in. Neither one of us felt like wrestling with the table again so I finally left mom in Barrett’s arms as I threaded myself back through the chair legs, humming silently. When I was all the way through I reached back for her and Barrett and I somehow manhandled her through the bottleneck. It was short order from that point on to get mom into her bedroom.

  We made it back into the kitchen and both vigorously washed our hands. I swore I could still smell her stink on my hands but after a couple washes decided it was only in my head. I went back to Fannie Mae and looked out the window over her shoulder. She leaned back into me, shivering, and I sighed and wrapped my arms around her. She wiggled in my embrace, making herself comfortable. In the process she made me a little uncomfortable, but I tried to ignore it and will it away. (What can I say? I was a 16 year old boy with raging hormones: and I was a virgin to boot!)

  Barrett came into the room and prudently decided not to comment on our arrangement after a dark look from me. It was amazing what pettiness we could get away with in the midst of all this madness.

  I looked out the window again. The road was deserted. No zombies. No people. No bodies. Well, there were scraps of bodies, but they don’t count. Especially since they were, thankfully, not moving. “Anything else happening, Fannie Mae?”

  She shook her head. “No. Donny got Mrs. Smith right after you guys went back to take care of the backdoor. She was trying to hide behind a car. He just went straight for her and tore her apart. About halfway through munching on her he just stopped and stood up and started to wander off and she got up and followed him. The rest of them wandered off, too, like they’d lost all interest in the people.”

  “Which way did they go?” I asked.

  “This way,” she replied. “They headed toward this trailer and went around the back.”

  “Barrett?”

  He didn’t even have to ask what I was asking of him. He just nodded. “I’m on it.” He went to the back side of the trailer and peeked one of the windows we had over there. “I can’t see anything, cahuna. It’s a weird angle to see anything right behind us, but I don’t see anything back to the tree line.”

  I pointed to the other window, the last one before the hallway. “What about that one?”

  He went to that window and pulled the curtain back, peaking out. “I think I can see –.”

  A hand slammed against the window. Bloody and covered with all kinds of filth it rattled against the window panes. The fingers squeezed and closed trying to get through to Barrett but the window held. The hand slid down the glass, making a squeaking sound. Later in life I could never clean my car windows and not see the zombie’s hand against the glass. It came out from underneath the window again and slammed back into the glass. Moments later it was joined by another hand. This one obviously belonged to either a shorter zombie, a zombie with a shorter arm, or a zombie with no legs, as it could only reach the edge of the glass, but you could see the fingertips tapping playfully on the glass.

  Fannie Mae shuddered even more in my grasp. She turned to me and buried her face in my shirt. “How much longer do we have to put up with this, Dukey? I don’t know how much more I can stand.”

  “I don’t know, Fannie Mae. I don’t know. Maybe the cavalry will come charging in soon and help us.”

  “You don’t really think that, though, do you?” She whispered that into my chest.

  I didn’t bother to answer her, but we all knew what the answer to that question was.

  We sat there in silence for God knows how long and eventually the hands stopped scratching at the windows and the zombies stopped trying to get in. We hoped. Occasionally I thought I could hear a whispering echoing through the trailer and a small scraping on the outside, but I’m sure that was all in my imagination.

  Yeah, right.

  13.

  This time I knew from the beginning that it was a dream – I think. It started with the same imagery we’d just seen: Donny, the foot-zombie, and the quick zombie horde forming outside the window. The big difference was that no one ran. They all just stood there when the zombies attacked so the zombies just went from person to person and a quick chomp later and we had a new zombie. It only took minutes to transform the 50 or so people watching into zombies.

  Then as one they turned to face our trailer.

  They silently came forward in zombie formation to line up outside my trailer. Wordlessly and without so much as the whisper of leaves to mar their presence. Once they were all in formation the foot-zombie stepped forward away from the rest of them to close the distance to my trailer. He passed out of view when he went up on the porch and we heard his soft treading on the stairs. Then a soft tap tap tap on the door.

  The bastard was knocking. It was civilized, even.

  When we didn’t answer he did the same three tap on the door again. This went on for several minutes with him knocking every ten seconds or so until I finally went to open the door. Fannie Mae and Barrett tried to stop me, but I just shrugged them off. Didn’t they realize that I had to answer the door?

  I opened the door and foot-zombie and I stared at each other across the three-inch gap of the threshold. Silently (of course, since zombies can’t speak), he extended his only arm and offered the foot to me. Confused, I took it. The foot was squishy in my hands and was heavier than I would have expected. He turned around to leave and then stopped again, staring down at the waiting horde. Then he turned back to face me and held his hand back out, questing for the foot.

  I looked down at the foot in my hand, taking my eyes off the zombie. It was mine. Why did he want it back?

  When I looked up again his face was only inches from mine. I gave the foot back to him. He looked down at it in his hands and then looked at me again. He opened his hand and let the foot drop to the floor with a thud. Then he reached for me, mouth open wide. I closed my eyes, waiting to be eaten.

  That’s when I woke up with a start. Dammit.

  I looked around the darkening living room. Barrett was asleep in one of the kitchen chairs, head down, chin resting on his chest. I would guess he was going to be majorly uncomfortable when he woke up. Fannie Mae was sprawled out next to me on the couch. Her head was resting on my thigh. I was lucky my waking up hadn’t jerked her awake, too.

  I had no idea why we were all asleep. Last I remembered we were sitting around listening to the zombies and wondering how long it was going to take before we were all dead. Or not-dead. You know.

  That was when somebody rapped on the door with a tap tap tap.

>   I shot to my feet like a bat out of hell. Fannie Mae rolled to the floor with a grunt and Barrett fell out of the chair.

  “Johnson’s,” somebody whispered. “Mryna? Bobby? Duke? Anyone in there.” Off to the side, “I told you no one was here.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I was too surprised, awe-struck, flabbergasted, pick your adjective. I finally found my voice, “Wait!”

  I moved the couch out of the way of the door and opened it a crack to see who was there. In the fading sunlight I could see that it was Mr. Thompson. He lived a few trailers down from Fannie Mae and wasn’t really a very nice guy.

  “Oh, thank God,” I heard someone else whisper. I peeked out the door and saw that it was Herbert Jennings. He was another neighbor and a pal of my dad’s. I was actually surprised that he wasn’t wherever my dad was.

  Thompson shone a flashlight in my face, blinding me. “You okay in there, Duke? Anyone else in there with you?”