Trailer Park Zombies
Page 21
They pulled his truly dead body back into the kitchen slowly, other hands reaching out of the gloom to pull him in.
Washington looked at me, his face covered in a thin sheen of sweat. His shaking hand came up and wiped at his forehead, but it didn’t seem to help with the wetness. “What do we do now, Duke? Shoot ourselves? Get it all over with?” A giggle escaped his lips.
I looked at him in disgust. “The basement, Wash. We go out through the door in the basement.”
One of his men got the door open and Wash sent several of them down to make sure the room was clear. Not that we had much choice at that point. The zombies were now at both ends of the hallway and approaching us slowly, with their bloody, dripping arms reaching for us.
The men he’d sent down yelled the all-clear and Wash signaled the rest of us to go down, closing the door behind us. Mere seconds after the door was shut the zombies began pounding on it. We tramped down the stairs and I looked around at Wash’s men. There were about six of them spread throughout the basement, all scared shitless and as liable to shoot their own feet as they were any zombies. The bodies of the men and zombies killed earlier were stacked in one corner like cordwood, but I made my eyes slip past them. I didn’t want to see that.
If I looked at them for too long or thought too hard about it I might start to lay blame. And the man responsible for that blame was standing right next to me.
Wash looked at me, “The door won’t hold long, Duke. We need to get going. Do you have a plan for how we’re going to get out of here safely?”
I went over to the bottom of the steps to the walkout and cocked my head to the side, listening intently. I didn’t hear anything, not that that meant much. The dead were silent after all. I went back to Wash, Fannie Mae trailing silently behind me. “I don’t think there are any zombies up there right now. I’m sure they’re milling about outside trying to get in upstairs. We have a few minutes before they realize there’s another way to get in and try for that door. Like I told you earlier, it won’t take much for them to burst that door in.”
I looked at Wash and his men, weighing the pros and cons of my plan. “We need to just unlock that door and burst out as fast as we can, running like bats out of hell to get as far away from here as fast as we can. That may give us some extra time.”
One of his men turned to Wash. “Are you nuts? Taking this kid’s advice? He’s going to get us all killed.”
Wash stepped forward until there were only inches separating them, trying to pull himself together. “This kid,” he pointed in my direction, “has killed more zombies tonight than anyone standing here. Myself included. If he’s got a plan I say we use it. What other choice do we have?”
His man backed down, muttering to himself. “I don’t have to like it.”
“I don’t give two shits if you like it!” Washington roared. He whirled in a circle and locked eyes on every one of his men. “We are surrounded on all sides by enemies. The dead are literally hammering at the door to get down here. That flimsy thing won’t last long and I’m guessing they’ll just fall down the steps. We’ve only got minutes, people. We don’t have time to debate this.”
He looked at me again, his left eye twitching spasmodically. I could see the sweat just running down his face. “So the plan is to unlock the door and run out there?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“What then?”
“Once we get out there we need to see which way the zombies are heaviest and go the other way. Hope they don’t see us and we can buy a little bit of time.”
The burly man who’d questioned Wash turned to me and said, “Then what? Where are we going to go that would be safer than this place?”
“I’m open to suggestions. Anyone know of a good place we can hole up?”
He waved his hands in disgust.
Wash said, “Why can’t we just hoof it into town? We’ve got enough guns here that we might be able to protect ourselves.”
I shook my head. “That might work, but there’s no guarantee how infested the woods are and if town is even a safe bet.”
Wash said, “No hope, of course. Then you’re saying we have nowhere to go?”
I shook my head again and lied, “No, I’m not saying that. We need to hole up somewhere – maybe a trailer – and hope that the cavalry comes sometime in the morning.”
Who knows how long we would have debated where to go or what to do. Probably until Hell froze over, but that was when the decision was taken from us. The door at the top of the basement stairs burst with a resounding crack. Fortunately the zombies were in such a frenzied hurry to get down to us that they clustered around the doorway and wedged themselves in. Not one of them had enough leverage to push through the throng. But that wouldn’t last long.
“We’re out of time, Wash!” I yelled. “Let’s go.”
We all ran to the bottom of the walkout. I looked at Wash, “Where’s the key?”
He looked at me and then went, “Oh, shit,” and started rifling through his pockets. He finally pulled out a huge key ring. One of those you always see janitors have in the movies and think how funny it is and wonder how they can ever find anything in that mess. I didn’t wonder. I knew there was no way he’d find it in time.
“Ah, screw it.” I finally said, and then bounded up the bottom two stairs of the walkout. I braced the gun on my shoulder and aimed it at the padlock straight on and turned my head, hoping that I wouldn’t get shrapnel or wood in my face. Saying a brief prayer to whatever god was listening, I pulled the trigger. The blast of the gun was tremendous in the enclosed space and all I could hear was a ringing in my ears as I chambered another round and ran up the rest of the stairs, putting my shoulder into it and heaving the doors with all my might.
They flew open, bouncing noisily against the ground as I ran out of the walkout. I did a quick 360. There were no zombies in sight, thankfully.
“All clear,” I hissed back down the stairs.
Fannie Mae came scrambling up behind me, followed by the other seven men. They spread out in a fan, checking every corner. When they were all out I turned around and looked back down into the basement. As I watched I saw a zombie skidding to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He looked like he’d surfed to the bottom. He had no legs, his torso ending in a bloody, white stump that twitched madly. It was his spine. I saw his head swivel around the basement and then come to rest on my face. He began to pull himself forward with his hands.
“Shit,” I muttered. I gripped one side of the double doors and swung it shut. Wash saw what I was doing and went and did the other. It wouldn’t hold the zombies off for long but it might confuse them for a couple extra minutes and that was really all we could ask for.
“What now?” The burly man said.
“How about we go that direction?” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from the house.
So we were off. I managed to keep me and Fannie Mae in the middle of the pack while we went off in a fast walk. You don’t want to run too fast when you’re in the middle of a zombie attack. I could just see us running like crazy and turning a corner and running smack dab into the middle of a horde. Although I was hoping against hope that we’d left most of the horde behind us. Fannie Mae only had the pistol she’d grabbed earlier and I don’t think either one of us really knew how to check it to see how many rounds were left in it. It was for last resort only and I didn’t want the others to know that she had it. She must have sensed the direction of my thoughts as she’d not once brought it to anyone’s attention.
For all we knew it only had one round left in it anyway.
We made quicker time than our little rescue party had earlier going to the car park. No rain and less caution help’s a ton. We got there in no more than a couple minutes. We stopped in front of the line of cars to rest and talk and I felt a wave of sorrow pass over me as I saw Tamara’s body. Fannie Mae looked to see where I was looking and she sighed, too, and squeezed my hand. Even though my heart was now full of
ideas of me and Fannie Mae together there was still a place in it for Tamara and I wished yet again that none of this had happened. You could blame me or her or Mason Smith all you wanted, but the truth was that I was the only one still alive to shoulder the blame.
Mason was still out there somewhere but he was beyond blame now.
For a moment I flashed onto an image of Mason out there, marshalling his troops. Somehow commanding them to come attack the House or to sweep the trailers for survivors. I had no doubt there were still people huddled underneath beds and in closets. I didn’t think that Mason had any more intelligence or personality than any of the other zombies but a piece of me had a glimmer that maybe, just maybe, there was a little more to him than the others. He’d been the first.
That was the first time I had the idea that maybe if I could find and take out Mason that all of this would stop. It worked for vampires, in some movies, so why wouldn’t it work for zombies? It worked in Lost Boys, right?
Regardless, after a quick glance at Tamara’s body lying there in the dirt I turned to Washington. “What’s the plan, Wash?”
“I thought you had the plan, Duke?”
“We’re at the limits of my plan, Wash. There are nine of us. There’s nowhere to go that would hold the nine of us safely. The House was the only place that could do that. I think we need to split up.”
He looked at me incredulously. “Split up? That’s insanity, Duke. Our best defense is to stick together.” His lips continued moving after he was done speaking. My flesh crawled. He wasn’t going to make it too much longer.
The burly man laughed humorlessly.
I looked at him sourly. And then looked round at Wash and his men. “The only thing we can all do together is die together. This big of a group will attract the zombies.” I shook my head. “I don’t know if they’re attracted to the noise we make or if they can somehow sense our,” I waved my hands, trying to find the right word, “life force. Our essence. Whatever. But I think a huge group of us together is like giving them a big all you can eat buffet. They can’t stay away from it. I think if him,” I pointed at the burly guy, “and a couple of the others want to try for town they should. Maybe they can get there and send help. Then I think the rest of us should hunker down and wait til daylight. We’ll be better able to fight in the light of day.”
Wash looked hurt. “Duke? Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Deadly serious.”
“Fine,” the burly man said. He turned to the others. “Clark? Walter? Remy? You guys with me?”
They nodded at him. He turned to look back at me and Wash, pity on his face. “We’ll send someone back for you, if you’re still alive.”
They took off at a slow run, checking all the corners and making sure they weren’t running directly into a pack of zombies. It didn’t take more than 10 seconds for them to pass from sight. Wash stood there with his mouth open, staring off at them and alternating between looks at them and at me. You could see the surprise and confusion on his face. Somewhere in the middle back there – maybe the moment we’d left the House – he’d lost the semblance of leadership.
He finally turned to look at me fully. “There’s five of us left now, Duke. What’s the plan? Hunker down and wait to die?”
I shook my head. “No. The first part is right. We’ll hunker down. But I have no plans to die.”
I looked at the two other unknowns. Both of their faces were etched with worry. “What are your names, guys?”
The first one, shockingly tall and built like a beanpole, mousy-brown hair and a patchy beard on his face, said, “Call me Shaggy.”
“Shaggy? Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding solemnly. “It’s been my nickname since I was 14.” He grinned a mouth mostly empty of teeth at me. “It’s grown on me.”
A ghost of a grin of my own crossed my face and I looked at the other one. He was short, maybe 5’ 5”. A little thick through the middle, but his arms were as big around as car tires. He was covered in dark patches of hair and his dark eyes barely showed through his untrimmed beard. He said, “My name’s Kevin.”
“No big nickname?”
He shook his wild hair. “Nope. Nothing anyone’s ever lived to repeat.”
“All right, then.” I looked back over at Wash. “Any good ideas where the five of us can hole up?”
He shook his head disgustedly. “Any trailer’s as good as any other. Just a bunch of crappy tin cans.” He walked a few feet away from us, put his gun in the crook of his arm and the next thing I knew he unzipped his pants and started pissing. Shaking his head and muttering to himself as he whizzed on the ground.
I looked at the others, but they both shook their heads at me at shrugged. Great. I had to be the brains of the operation again. I sighed and looked at Fannie Mae. She shrugged at me, too. Still keeping my eyes locked on hers I said, “Maybe we can do my trailer then. It’s fairly secure and it’s at the edge of the Acres.”
Fannie Mae shook her head at me quickly, trying to tell me something with her eyes. Oh, yeah. Mom.
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I said again, thoughtfully. “Fannie Mae only lives a couple trailers down from mine. Do you think that would work?” I asked her.
She nodded and said quietly, “Yeah, I think so. I locked it up when I came over earlier. It should be okay.”
I looked at the others: Wash, Shaggy, and Kevin. “Does that work for you guys?”
Shaggy just shrugged his shoulders and smiled toothlessly. Kevin didn’t bother to make a response. Wash zipped up and came back over and looked at me steadily. “If you think we’ll be safe there, Duke. I trust you.” I felt a niggling of doubt in the back of my head at the lies I’d said and the plan that was formulating inside of me. But I ignored it. What further choice did we have?
“I think we’ll be as safe there as anywhere, Wash.”
He nodded at me.
We finally got moving again. Staying in that one spot for so long had been giving me the willies so bad that I think my nuts had crawled back inside of my body. Seriously. It was uncomfortable to walk. Every hair on my body stood up in constant anticipation of being attacked. I had no idea how long the human body could stay at this heightened level of awareness and adrenaline but I figured I’d be crashing at some point and I’d much rather crash between four walls than out here in the middle of God and everything. Not that I thought God was present this night.
He’d left the work tonight to darker things.
There were only the five of us now and even though I trusted my life more with Fannie Mae than I did any of the others, she still didn’t have a visible weapon and of all of us she’d had the least use of it. I still wanted her to maintain it for later as a just in case kind of weapon. Honestly most of the reason I wanted her to keep it was for the time when I finally took a bite or a hit and needed to be taken out. I knew that no matter what there was between us she’d be capable of doing the job. I hoped.
We made Fannie Mae stay in the middle. I took point even though Washington wanted the job. I made him take rear, Shaggy took the left and Kevin took the right. We did our best to make sure we were protected on all sides, although we only had three flashlights between us. We made our way slowly in the direction of mine and Fannie Mae’s trailers. We had to go back in the direction of the House but we swung a very wide arc around it. There was still the occasional tinkle of broken glass and screams as someone was found by the zombies.
Wash winced at every single scream that came out of there. He took each one as a personal failure. I didn’t blame him; I felt the same amount of responsibility, too. I just tried not to show it. After one particularly loud, drawn-out scream I muttered to him, “We should have set the place on fire when we left.”
He stopped in his tracks and whirled to face me. “Really, Duke? That would have been your solution? Set the rest of the survivors on fire in hope that it would have killed the zombies? How heartless are you?”
I’d begun yelling toward the end, but I couldn’t help myself. “And to know that you would be responsible for anyone that you eat after that? Which one of those people dying right now wouldn’t have rather died by a shot in the head or the welcome embrace of the flames had they known what their options were?”
Silence greeted me when I stopped my tirade. Fannie Mae was gripping my arm tightly. “Duke,” she whispered, “maybe you can tone it down a notch, okay? We don’t want to alert the zombies to us.”