by James Barton
“Hey now, I don’t want any trouble,” the man called out after flicking on a light taped to the end of his shotgun. “My group is starvin’ and I need to take half of yer supplies. If you just show yourself now we can work this out peacefully.”
I thought to myself, bullshit. I’ve watched this scene in too many movies to fall for that. With Harvey being on the other side of the trailer, I kept thinking I had a 50% chance that this wouldn’t be my fight. The man waved his flashlight beam towards me and I ducked behind the door frame. The light started moving closer and I could practically feel his boot steps through the faded carpet. Well Harvey, this looks like my fight.
Focus, Jim, focus. The light wavered between the bedroom and the rest of the kitchen. I could hear the loud almost sticky peeling sound of his footsteps on the fake tile as he entered the kitchen. I tried to play out each scenario in my mind. I was mentally preparing for a fight I was afraid I would lose. For some reason, my brain just kept reminding me the half useless fact; machetes are not for stabbing. I wasn’t sure how that helped me, but my mind kept repeating it like a mantra.
I ran the scenario of tackling him blade first as he approached, but again the mantra repeated in my head. I needed enough distance to swing the machete in a way that he couldn’t respond by filling me full of buckshot. I began to play out a second scenario and then I heard the cupboard opening. I was two feet from the home invader, separated by a peach colored panel of drywall. Sweat began to pool in my hands. Was this my only chance? Where do I aim my strike and what do I do next? I was almost breathless and my mind went blank. At that moment, remembering my own name would have been a struggle.
The flashlight beam filled the kitchen with a motionless light. The fact that it was taped to his weapon led me to hope it was propped up against the wall. I was filled with a rush of sickening adrenaline. This was my moment. I came around the door frame and there he was, filling a backpack with our food. I raised my shaking arm and stared at him trying to prepare a blow that would split his camouflaged hat in two.
Suddenly the truck bellowed a deep horn blast and the light flashed. Harvey was a couple steps past our broken door and froze in an almost cartoonish tip-toe stance. He had a dumbfounded look as he was highlighted in the dark room. The man in our cabinet turned away from the food, grabbed his weapon and started to bring it to his shoulder. Harvey suddenly hurled himself to the floor in a desperate attempt to avoid being shot.
The man still hadn’t noticed me steps away from him. Even though I was shaking, I barred my teeth and summoned all my courage to bring the unstained blade down as hard as I could. I struck him from the side. It sunk cleanly into his left shoulder. The strike caused him to fire a shot before dropping his gun clacking to the floor. He let out a furious howl that sent a chill down my spine. A sound that told me, you are killing a person. His legs collapsed from under him and he fell with his back slumped against the cupboard. Even in the darkness I could make out those eyes; they called out to me in pain. My hand was still clasped around the machete, shaking more than ever.
Quickly the look in his eyes transformed from a plea to a threat. He reached for his gun, which now lit the wall behind me. My emotions were running rampant, taking me from anger to pity. As he reached for the weapon, everything became clear. I was going to live tonight, and he was going to die. My mouth curled into a snarl and I felt something new. I felt powerful, something I had rarely felt, except in my video games or fantasies.
I ratcheted the machete sideways with both hands and rotated the blade deeper into his wound. He shook from the pain and uttered some high pitched whimpers. His fingers extended and then he balled a fist, shaking uncontrollably from the pain. I yanked the blade out of his shoulder and raised it over my head. I brought it down, attempting to put it through his head. At the last second he defensively raised his arm and I ended up sinking the metal into his wrist. There was a loud snapping sound that promised me he wouldn’t be signing his name ever again.
Harvey crawled around the counter and saw what was going on; he ran in and scooped up the gun. He pointed it at the man and hesitated. This villain was in bad shape.
“You are so dead,” the man muttered.
“Let’s see how much you mean to them,” Harvey said as he walked over to the window, and fired two rounds at the truck. He immediately ducked down to avoid any retaliation. There was a flurry of shots sent back our way, but at a speed that sounded like a single shooter. The driver must have been the only other person. There was a delay, a hesitation from the truck driver. He wasn’t driving away, but he wasn’t in the truck any longer. Harvey had moved to the living room window and looked out. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “He must like you.”
He took aim and fired one more time. This time I could see the driver flail from the hit. He cussed and ran back to the truck. The injured man inside then heard the most dreaded sound ever. The truck tires screeched in the mud for a second before getting traction and speeding down the road. The lights from the truck were gone and now the silence had returned. Harvey pointed the flashlight (with a rather sizeable gun attached to it) at the man on the floor and I could hear him quietly sobbing. He held his limp, nearly severed hand in his lap. He was bleeding badly and I could tell he wouldn’t last much longer without help.
“Go ahead, just do it,” he cried out with his voice breaking like a pubescent teenager.
“Well, Jim, I’d hate to waste another shell. With our door missing we might need all the ammo we can get. You want to take care of him?”
I stood up and walked over to the table in the dark, Harvey still trained on the man’s chest. I picked up the black and white notebook and tapped my pen against it. “Kill him? Not yet, he is going to help us fill a couple pages in our book.”
Chapter 3: Open Doors
Things had gotten worse in the days that most people spent holed up in their homes. The number of zombies had increased and while their numbers were not overwhelming they were relentless. They were durable as hell and you’d be fooling yourself if you thought shooting the brain of a staggering assailant was easy. Some people had devised traps or methods that seemed incredibly effective against zombies, but the dead weren’t the only hungry ones out there. The combination of starving people and zombies made for a mix that spelled disaster all around the country.
Most people, when faced with the knowledge they were bit, would hide it. Don’t get all high and mighty, claiming you would be truthful. Even without real knowledge of how it happened, people had seen the movies and thought they knew what was going on. Honestly revealing a bite would result in your immediate death. You can’t blame someone for hiding it; we were hardwired for self-preservation. We would hold onto life as long as we could, trading the lives of our friends and comrades for an extra thirty minutes of air.
“Dude that is twisted,” Harvey said with concern in his voice.
“Just patch him up so he can hold on a bit longer. We aren’t going to get another chance to learn this without him,” I responded coldly.
“Why do I have to patch him up?”
“You took that class last year, plus I have to barricade the doorway,” I said pointing at the gaping hole in the wall.
The injured man had slipped out of consciousness and there was a steady trickle of blood still running down his limp fingers onto the plastic flooring.
“I only took it to get closer to Carrie. Fine, I’ll do what I can,” Harvey complained. Harvey went in the other room to gather some medical supplies and returned to begin his work. I used the oversized bookcase to block the doorway, which now had been desecrated by their intrusion. I put the two halves of the door in the living room. I wasn’t sure if I could find a use for it, but these days, trash pickup was running a little late. The bulky plasterboard bookshelf protruded into the narrow hallway. This was actually a benefit to us, because if anyone from the outside tried to push it over it would get wedged by the hallway. It actually looked like it might hold,
although I would have still preferred a door.
I told myself that I wasn’t a monster and this man wasn’t a poor orphan, he was a killer. This was only logical and he would have shot us dead anyway. Like most people, I had my day dreams of getting revenge on people that had wronged me, but this was different. What he was doing was cold, impersonal ransacking and murder. We had questions about the zombies and he could give us the answers, in a roundabout way. It is funny how quickly our minds changed when times became desperate.
Harvey had argued with me, but his argument felt mandatory. There was a group of people on the news a year ago that had their yacht capsize. They had gone missing for weeks and when they were found four of them had survived by eating their friend. I’m sure when it was suggested that they eat a recently deceased or dying member, that everyone thought, “Yes, I would like to live,” but had to get past their morals. There had to be an argument, you had to put up a fight or it just felt, wrong. Harvey and I got along so well because we had a lot of similar views. When we didn’t share the same perspective we were adult enough to accept the other’s opinions for what they were.
There was a surprised gurgling scream that came from the kitchen before being promptly muffled. I jogged over to see the man’s legs convulsing in pain. There was a thin green package lying on the floor with spilled powder. The man’s wrist was bubbling. “What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Speed Clot; I got it from the Army surplus store while you were at work.”
“Is it legal?”
“Everything is legal now. Plus, you’d be surprised what you could get when you say price is no issue. Except guns … apparently,” Harvey said.
“What is it doing to him?”
“Chemically searing his wounds shut. It keeps soldiers from bleeding out before they can make it to the surgeons. He isn’t going to bleed to death now, but without antibiotics or whatever they use, he might just die from an infection.”
“Fuck you,” the man muttered still making a sneering expression from the pain.
I looked over at the broken man, “We won’t need him that long.”
So we planned it out, the immoral lessons we would extract from our unwilling teacher. There is only so much we can learn from the death of one person. These lessons also required zombies; which worried me.
“What caused infection? How long once infected does it take before you turn? What kills them and how do they hunt us? Those were the most pressing questions we needed answered,” I said while writing in the notebook. Harvey nodded his head while tying the man up with phone cable.
“They will come back for me,” the man muttered.
Now I may have skipped some parts of the story. John, or whatever the hell his name was, had been talking non-stop since he recovered from his amateur surgery. Pleading at first, telling us that he only needed the food and that he had never shot anyone. When that didn’t seem to get him anywhere, he started threatening and making demands. His stories kept changing, but he kept coming back to the one where they had taken up residence in the Allmart. They had at least a hundred men and were going to take this attack personally. He painted a picture of a tough group of people that pretty much took what they wanted. People that tried to steal from them, even their own members that took too many rations were tortured and killed.
I had struggled with a few shreds of remorse for what we were about to put him through, but thankfully he had cured me of that. Not only did he seem more evil than us, he just simply wouldn’t shut up.
“When they get here, they aren’t going to kill you. Oh, no, they are going to chain you up to the back of the truck and drag you all the way home until bloody chains are all that is left of you,” he said before spitting on the floor. Harvey and I looked at each other one last time. Screw it; I don’t even feel bad about this anymore.
There he was, beaten and bloody, tied to a folding chair. The sun was just peeking over the horizon and provided enough light to drag him into the dewy grass. One of the things we needed to learn was if the undead were attracted to noise, particularly voices or just any loud sound. We hadn’t figured out how to test smell, but to test sight we decided to throw a blanket over him. It sounded stupid, but what if a sheet made you invisible to their dull senses? We had seen so many movies that it was hard not to assume we already knew it all.
So there he was, in the yard with a thin white sheet covering him, rocking back and forth cussing up a storm. I was surprised that the gunshots and commotion from last night didn’t attract any visitors, but we had only seen one zombie so far. We were also concerned that the neighbors might try to save him. No heroes showed up during last night’s shootout, so it seemed they were content to mind their own business.
So we left him in the yard, swaying back and forth like a foul-mouthed ghost. A few minutes in, John managed to knock himself to the ground. We went out to him, not to sit him back up, he could lie in the grass for all I cared; we just had to fix the sheet. After that we found ourselves sitting at the window just waiting for something to happen. We took shifts staring at the white mass on the ground. Periodically the white lump would cuss at us or try to make a bargain. I never responded. I couldn’t remember all the stages of dealing with death, but our friend had covered them all at least twice. “We got four shells total now,” Harvey said, breaking the silence. “It’s more than we had before. I’m afraid we may have to leave soon.” “Why?” he asked. I simply gave him a look.
“Oh, you think his friends might come back for us,” he said.
“This is the last place I want to be if more of those guys come stomping by. They don’t seem to care about this guy, but they might come back for revenge.”
Harvey just frowned, still not looking away from the man. “Where the hell would we go?” “I haven’t figured out that part yet.” And so we waited … and waited. Four hours went by and nothing had happened. I cracked the window an inch and called out to see if John was okay. He responded with his usual “Fuck you.” He was fine, but as I was about to call Harvey over to switch shifts, I saw it. Auto-Fixit was in the park across the road. He was staggering his way towards us. I cracked the window and called out to John, “Keep quiet, one is coming this way.”
He retorted with a colorful response and then grew very quiet. Auto-Fixit was taking his sweet time, but he was clearly centered up on our house. He wasn’t moving with outstretched arms or swatting at the air like he had when he was closing in on the girl’s corpse. This time he just moved in a straight and direct path, shambling to the side only slightly to go around a park bench.
“He is coming right at us, I mean him,” Harvey said.
“Yeah, seems that way. Which way is the wind blowing?” I asked. We both looked for anything moving and there didn’t seem to be any wind at all. I got out the black and white book and jotted down a small note. Barely any wind, zombie 100 paces away seemed to catch scent.
The next few moments took forever as we watched the zombie cross the street (without looking both ways mind you) and stumble into our yard. He had moved directly to us without any hesitation, but once he stepped into the yard he lost track. He wandered very close to John and then would stumble past him by only a few steps. He seemed to have a basic understanding that his prey was close, but pinpointing his exact location was a challenge. I jabbed Harvey to go and he snapped out of his trance and sped to the back door. He unlatched the back door and stepped out onto the small wooden set of stairs. He began banging a cooking pot with a metal spoon. The sound even startled me and I knew it was coming. I watched closely as the zombie looked in the direction of the sound. His head moved somewhat quickly as it scanned around, surveying the yard. It started to move along the exterior wall of the house, honing in on that sound.
The white lump in the grass began to shout. My mouth dropped as he started yelling.
“Stop that banging! You’re not scaring me. You just wait until they fill you full of holes tonight!”
Auto Fixit
jerked in that direction and the banging pot was suddenly very uninteresting. It moaned and started moving at a more rapid pace, swatting and chewing at the air. Harvey had stopped banging the pot soon after and I could hear the latches being locked. He sat next to me and looked out the window. He turned to me with wide eyes. I looked back even more surprised. He had his machete gripped tightly in his right hand and the shotgun at his side.
Auto Fixit made audible gasps for air and short grunts as it seemed to move right for him. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, please save me! Don’t let it eat me,” John screamed out, followed by quiet whimpering. Fixit was almost on top of him and the sheet disguise was clearly not helping any longer.
I leapt up from the couch and slid the bookcase down the hall to make an opening. Harvey nodded and ran out into the yard. I grabbed the shotgun and propped it in the window sill and trained it on Auto-Fixit. He had thrown himself on top of the sheet and was coming up with bloody mouthfuls of cloth. Harvey bounded down the steps, making an excessive amount of noise and Fixit became locked into his meal, unable to break his focus. Harvey rushed to the side of the zombie and he still paid no attention. Harvey looked at me and cringed before shouting “Hey!”
There was still no response. Harvey delivered a heavy blow to Fixit. It lodged into the back of his neck and he slumped over the sheet. At this point John was screaming hysterically. Harvey yanked out the blade and took a step back. Fixit was still biting at the air, but his body lay motionless. Harvey looked up at me again and then struck the zombie cleanly in the back of his head. There was a crunching sound as the blade cut through his skull. The auto-mechanic seemed to finally be at rest. I went outside with Harvey, the shotgun trembling in my hands. He shoved Fixit off the sheet and the zombie rolled onto his back in the grass. His embroidered name tag read “Stephen.” I shivered, as it reminded me that he used to be a person with a crappy job, just like the rest of us.