Trailer Park Zombies

by Jason H. Jones

  Wash’s finger pulled back slowly on the trigger. His gun was still pointed at Fannie Mae. I stepped in the path of his gun and pulled my trigger. He shot in our direction at the same time. Fannie Mae cried out behind me and pushed me, but I held my ground. I felt his bullet graze my arm, furrowing a path through the meat of my bicep. I cried out and fell to my knees.

  My shot had gone completely wide of Wash. He grinned at me when I looked at him, his eye twitching madly. I was holding my bleeding arm and Fannie Mae was standing over me protectively. I tried to push her out of the way but she wouldn’t budge.

  Shaggy’s voice broke the moment. “What are you doing, Washington? We’re surrounded by zombies and this is what you want to do? Kill each other?”

  Washington turned to him. “Cork it, Shaggy. We’ll take care of the zombies after we take care of him. We’ll leave him wounded here for the zombies so they can have their little midnight snack. That’ll keep ‘em off us.”

  Shaggy shook his head. “I don’t think so, Wash. I didn’t sign up for this crap. If you want to kill a teenager then you can do it without my help.”

  He turned to go and Wash swung his gun to point at his back. I cried out a warning and tried to bring my shotgun to bear, but my arm was too weak. Wash grinned humorlessly at me and pulled the trigger. Shaggy stumbled and stopped, turning back to face us. His hand was holding his chest and blood was bubbling out of his mouth. I could see the question on his face. I could have answered it for him if I had any mind to. There was no reason. Wash had just gone insane. Snapped from the strain.

  He tried to bring his gun up but Wash shot him again, twice. The second shot took off the top of his head.

  Wash turned back to me. “See. That’s how you do it. Take off their head so they can’t get back up.” He took a step toward me. I’m guessing it was so he could get a better shot at my head.

  That’s when a zombie rushed out of the darkness and bit him in the neck. He screamed and brought his gun around, spasmodically pulling the trigger. I guess he hadn’t counted his shots. His clip was empty. The zombie came around to his front and started tearing the flesh from his face. From behind me Fannie Mae said, “Oh my God.”

  I saw it the same second that she did. The zombie was Barrett. He was horribly disfigured and barely recognizable as himself. Almost every bit of flesh was missing from his body. Internal parts and pieces were oozing from what looked like several hundred bites. Most of his face was missing, the flesh ripped into pieces. He smiled a deaths-head grin in my direction as he ripped Wash to shreds. I don’t know how I recognized him, but I just did. Some tilt to the head or set of the shoulders. Something. But it was definitely him.

  I didn’t even feel Fannie Mae pulling at my armpits, trying to force me to my feet. One part of me knew that she was crying above me. I could hear the sobs coming from her as she tried to get me up. I instinctively helped her, digging my heels into the dirt and pushing up. My shotgun still lay cradled in my hand as I held it uselessly. I couldn’t shoot him. Not Barrett. Not my friend. Logically I knew there was no way it was really him. There was no part of him left.

  Still, emotionally I thought that he’d just saved me from Wash. Wash had been about to shoot me in the head and Barrett intervened, eating him in my defense. I couldn’t repay that by killing him. Maybe another minute, another hour, another day away, I could. But not here. Not now.

  Barrett stood motionless staring at me and Fannie Mae. I could see other zombies streaming out of the darkness behind him. They were moving slowly, inexorably, toward us. It’d be mere moments before they came upon us. Barrett’s mouth opened and the skin and gristle drizzled slowly from his mouth. He locked eyes on me and tilted his head to the side. I swear I could see his eyebrow cocking on his head. He took a step toward us, arms rising slowly in our direction. That zombie need to eat and eat and eat coming over him.

  The world began to rush back in at me. The pain in my arm and the moans of Kevin on the ground, trying to get to his feet himself, but failing because he kept trying to use his broken hand. Fannie Mae’s hands yanked again at my armpits, bringing cries of my pain from my lips as she pulled the hurt muscle in my arm. Sound finally came back and I could hear her screaming at me to get up. I realized she’d been screaming the whole time.

  I finally gained my feet, wobbly and at risk of falling for a moment.

  “Come on. Come on. Come on.” Fannie Mae screamed from behind me. Neither one of us wanted to face Barrett.

  I whispered an apology to Barrett as Fannie Mae and I turned to make our escape. He’d have wanted us to shoot him and take him out of this Hell but at the moment I just didn’t have it in me. We made it maybe three steps before Mason Smith stepped out of nowhere at us. His head was still cocked at that weird angle from his broken neck. Other than that he looked in perfect condition, if you ignored his pale skin and deep, sunken eyes. His face and hands were covered in blood and gore and it looked like he was wearing a red mask on the lower half of his face.

  Neither one of us had time to react before he stepped forward and grabbed Fannie Mae’s arm. I cried out in warning as he almost delicately bit into her forearm. She screamed in pain and fear as the blood started spurting down. I swear Mason grinned at us. He let go of her arm and slid back into the darkness, disappearing from sight. I swore and looked back behind us. The other zombies had swarmed out and were now chowing down on Kevin and Wash. Barrett stood there shuffling ever so slowly forward, staring at me and Fannie Mae.

  A few of the zombies were inching in our direction but that was when I took charge and started pulling Fannie Mae away from the horde. She was screaming inconsolably and staring at her arm in horror. I tried not to look at or think of it as we ran away. Stumbled away might be the right phrase. My arm throbbed in pain and my brain throbbed in terror, the pain in my leg was but a distant memory. All I could see was that bite on her arm.

  The zombies could have probably overtaken us at any moment but for some reason they didn’t. We could hear the screams of the others behind us as we ran away. It only took us a few minutes to reach Fannie Mae’s trailer. She dug her keys out of her pocket with a wince and opened the door, shoving me inside.

  I don’t know which of us was in more pain, but we managed to barricade the doors and windows as best we could and then I finally collapsed on the couch. Fannie Mae disappeared into the bathroom and I heard her rattling around for a minute before she came back out. She had a pill bottle in one hand and a first aid kit in the other. She put those down next to me and then went into the kitchen and got us some water.

  She came down and sat in front of me on the floor, running a shaky hand through her hair. Her face was waxen and pale, her eyes sunken deep into her forehead. The bite on her arm was even whiter than her face, the jagged edges bleeding slowly as we sat there. She caught me looking at it.

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “What?” I said wearily. I was so, so tired.

  “The bite,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s throbbing a little but there’s surprisingly little pain.”

  I nodded silently at her. I could feel the horror scrabbling at the corners of my mind, trying to gain a foothold. It felt like it was going to be here very shortly.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “Huh?” I said numbly. Was this what shock felt like? I could feel myself growing cold. I didn’t have her luxury; my arm was hurting like crazy. It was the worst pain I’d ever had in my life. Except for the pain in my heart I was feeling right now.

  “I have to look at your gunshot,” she said, opening the first aid kit. “We have to clean the wound.”

  I stared at her stupidly as she opened the top of the pill bottle and dry-swallowed a half dozen pills. “What are those?” I asked.

  “They’re antibiotics. I think.” Her mouth quavered. She was trying her best to hold it back for me, but I could tell that she wouldn’t make it too much longer. “It’s all I can think of. Maybe it will stave off t
he infection. I hope.”

  “It will,” I said, trying to put an inflection of hope in my dead voice. “It has to.”

  She smiled wanly at me and said softly, “Take off your shirt.”

  I gave her a confused look and she laughed at me, “I need to check your arm, silly.”

  “Oh,” I said sheepishly.

  I did my best to get out of the shirt but she ended up having to help me in the end. The wound on my arm was burning and every movement seemed to stretch the skin in all kinds of fun and interesting ways. I was sweating by the time we had it all the way off. She winced when she saw the open wound and I couldn’t help but look at it myself. It looked ugly. The bullet had passed right through, but on the way it had sheared off a section of skin with it. If I managed to survive I’d have a real wicked scar.

  Blood seeped slowly out of the hole and I could see light passing through my arm. I tried to hold it up by my face to get a closer look but that just made me hiss in pain and drop it back down. Beads of sweat popped up on my face. Fannie Mae pulled some things out of the first aid kit and set them neatly in a row next to her. Her face scrunched in concentration and her tongue popped out between her lips. If the situation wasn’t so abysmally awful I would have kissed her. She looked so cute.

  She held up a roll of gauze and unscrewed the cap on a brown bottle. It looked like peroxide. She put the gauze over the hole and upended the bottle over it, soaking it into the gauze. When she was done she held the bottle out to me. “This is peroxide. This is gonna hurt, Dukey.”

  I nodded at her. “Just get it over with.”

  She grabbed my hand firmly with her free one and then placed the wet gauze on my arm. My mouth opened wide and I could feel the tendons in my neck stretching taut as I tried to hold in my scream. No need to let the zombies know where we were. I could feel the skin on my body go through various degrees of hot and cold and honestly came about an inch shy of taking a crap in my pants. The pain was that intense. After some interminable time that felt like a million years but was probably no more than 30 seconds the pain finally began to ebb. I breathed in deeply, trying to will the pain away from me and telling myself that I could feel nothing.

  That must have been what Fannie Mae was waiting for because she finally took the gauze away from my arm. The wetness of it had mixed with my blood and it looked pink in the dim light. I tried to smile at her. “Thanks, Fannie Mae.”

  She shook her head at me. “Don’t thank me yet. I still have to do the other side.”

  I felt my stomach do flip-flops and my mouth dried up. “Okay, then.”

  She sighed and repeated the whole process with a new piece of gauze. If anything this time it hurt worse. It was like I could feel every drop of the peroxide interacting with my nerves and each pop and sizzle they made sent a current of pain into my brain. I might have let out a couple little drops of pee. Just a couple, mind you.

  She finally peeled the gauze away, but the pain never really subsided. It felt like I was going to be sick. I could feel the bile rising in my throat but I managed to keep it down. Barely. But I could taste every scrap of food I’d had in the last couple days and when I burped the taste of it all came back. It didn’t taste very good.

  Fannie Mae squeezed a tube of antiseptic all over the holes and then finally wrapped my arm in gauze and taped it over. When we were done she handed my shirt back to me silently.

  “Thanks, Fannie Mae. Let’s do your bite now.”

  She laughed bitterly. It hurt my heart to hear that sound come out of her mouth. “There’s no point in doing mine, Dukey. You know that.”

  “Hey,” I said, grabbing her arm and making her look me in the eyes. “Don’t talk like that. There’s still a chance. We, we can, um, clean it up. You took the antibiotic and if we clean the wound we can clear the infection.”

  “Dukey,” she said solemnly, “don’t be stupid. You and I both know that the only way we could have cleared me of this would have been to cut my arm off the second I got bitten. That would have maybe been enough to stop this, but it’s way too late now. I can,” she paused, “almost feel the virus coursing through my body. It’s filling up my blood and everywhere it goes my body is going numb.”

  She stopped and wiggled her fingers at me. “I can’t feel my hands anymore, Dukey. It’s like they’re someone else’s hands and I’m just controlling them like a puppet master. I can already not feel my thighs and if I got up to walk right now I think I’d be stumbling around here like a zombie already.”

  I could feel the tears coursing down my cheeks. I didn’t even know I was crying until they fell silently into my lap. The pain in my arm paled in comparison to the pain I was feeling in my heart right now. It was like nothing else existed but me and her. I didn’t give a crap about the zombies outside the door anymore.

  “Kiss me, Duke,” she said, closing the distance between us to a few inches. “Kiss me some more before my lips go numb and I can no longer feel you. I want to feel you, Duke. I want to feel everything,” she whispered.

  So that’s what we proceeded to do. I sat on the edge of the couch and she kneeled before me, our faces at the same level. I put my arms around her waist, wincing with the pain of it, and she put her arms around my neck. I drew her in and we kissed like there was no tomorrow. I guess there really wasn’t.

  Her lips were soft and dry, the skin brittle to the touch. Her tongue danced in my mouth and intertwined with mine. We didn’t do anything else but that. We kissed and held each other and it wasn’t enough. Dammit, it wasn’t enough. I can still feel her lips on mine and her forehead on mine and her arms holding my neck tightly. It was never enough.

  Finally she pulled back from me. I could see the fear in her eyes. “My lips are numb. I can’t feel you anymore, Dukey.”

  I tried to pull her back into my embrace so that I could hold her tightly but she fought me off saying no over and over again. When she finally escaped my hands she scooted across the floor until she was against the far wall. I slid off the edge of the couch until I was sitting on the floor, too. There was maybe six feet between us.

  “Dukey, you have to stay away from me. We don’t know,” she shook her head, “how long until I turn. I can’t stand the thought that I’d hurt you.”

  I said nothing, just sitting there on the floor opposite her. Every fiber of my being yearned to touch her and be with her. I could feel the gulf opening in my chest and felt like my heart was being ripped in two.

  She pulled her gun out of the waistband of her pants where it’d been hidden all night. She held it limply in one hand and used the other to trace circles in the iron. She tore her eyes away from mine and just stared at the gun.

  I stared at her in horror, comprehension beginning to blossom in my brain.

  Still not looking at me she said simply, “I love you, Dukey. You know that, right?”

  I nodded, my mouth dry. She couldn’t hear a nod. I cleared my throat and whispered, “Yes, Fannie Mae, I know that. I love you, too. I’m sorry I wasted all this time with you right next to me. We could have had so much.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes blazing. “Don’t you say that, Duke! Don’t you even think it! We had this weekend and even with all the pain and the horrors and everything else we’ve experienced, that can be enough. We packed years worth of love into the past 24 hours. And that has to be enough. I knew what it felt like to finally have you return my love and for us to be what we were meant to be.”

  “Fannie Mae, I’m sorry -.”

  She cut me off. “Never say that! Never! Never apologize or feel sorry for what happened here. We had enough love to last a lifetime. I want you to live, Duke. Survive this somehow and get away from the Acres and forget all this and just live. Can you promise me that?”

  I nodded, but that wasn’t enough for her. “Promise me, Duke!”

  I whispered through dry, cracked lips. “I promise, Fannie Mae.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling. “I can live with that.” />
  Then she raised the gun to her chin, tears streaming down her face, smiling at me gently, and pulled the trigger.

  22.

  An empty, hollow click echoed through the small living room.

  “Oh, fuck!” She cried out as she lobbed through the gun through the room. It hit the wall next to me with a thud and bounced on the floor. She burst into tears, putting her head in her hands. Her shoulders shook uncontrollably as she sobbed. I got to my knees and started to scoot in her direction.

  “Stop!” She looked at me fiercely. “Do not come any closer, Dukey. I can feel the change coursing through me. I can feel myself dying, for God’s sake. Don’t come closer, please. I’m begging you. I don’t want to eat you.”

  I froze, torn between her orders and my own feelings. Finally I settled back against the couch. Waves of sorrow poured through me and I wanted to scream and cry and run over to her and hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right and save her and live happily ever after with her.