by Mark Tufo
I sucked in my breath as I watched Mr. Hernandez do his best to control the rage that was threatening to boil over.
Jed didn’t like Mrs. Deneaux any more than anyone else at the meeting. He was probably wondering if she had become this ‘difficult’ before or after her husband left her. Tension mounted, the pressure was palpable. That was of course until the nightmare began again. Where someone had dug out an old WWII siren, I don’t know, all I know is when the siren went off I got to taste my scone a second time, and believe me it wasn’t better this go around. Most everyone got up, unsure of what we should do next. Eyes invariably shifted to Jed.
“Just hold off until the siren stops and then we should hear some directions,” he stated.
Just how many air raid sirens had this man lived through? The siren cut off as if it was placed under water. Then we heard, faintly at first and then with more vigor as the message passed on from sentry to sentry, “Zombies at the gate, zombies at the gate!”
“You idiots,” Jed mumbled. “Which gate?”
As if in answer to his question, “Northwest and northeast gate, all hands!!”
Gerry, Mrs. Deneaux and a few of the older folks didn’t move. Hell, I thought darkly, most of them already look like the walking dead, without the walking part. I wanted to pull Jed aside and tell him that we had already been infiltrated, but I somehow didn’t think he’d find the humor in it.
I grabbed Jed’s arm. “Do you want me to go get the boys?” It would delay my arrival by ten minutes but I’d be bringing more firepower with me.
“How many rounds you have for that fancy gun of yours?” he asked, looking down at my M-16.
“Four full clips, so a hundred and twenty rounds,” I said as I began to shuffle my feet. Adrenaline had started to surge, I needed to direct this energy and quickly.
“Ants in your pants Talbot?” Jed mused. (When was the last time I’d heard that? When I was ten?) “Go to the gate and see how bad the threat is, they’ll either come running when they hear the shots or I’ll have a runner sent.”
I was halfway out the door, when I turned. “Thanks Jed,” I told him.
“For what?” came his grizzled reply.
“For a chance,” I finished before dashing out the door.
I ran as fast as I could to the northern end of the complex. I knew this wasn’t the proper approach. My slamming heart was going to make it difficult to steady my gun. There was no need for the rush. There were no more than twenty of them and half of them had been cut down before I got there. I saved my rounds. Well at least the question of what to do with refugees was answered. The zombies had been chasing a small family, a mother, father and two kids that didn’t look much past two years old. As we let them past the barriers, relief was imprinted on the father’s face. Fear and worry had corroded the mother’s features. At one time she had been a very attractive lady, but the events of the past night had gnarled everything about her. I felt sorry for her and would have liked to have comforted her, but I was having a difficult time stretching the boundaries of my altruism; I only wanted to get home to my own family. I wasn’t sure how much time I had left with my family and I didn’t want to squander one precious moment.
CHAPTER 8
Journal Entry - 8
The next few days went by without too many problems. Our numbers swelled by a whopping twenty-one souls. We had hastily erected a six-foot high cinder block wall with mortar over the northeast gate. Some had argued to do the same on the other fenced gate but Jed had argued back, and rightfully so, if we needed to leave in a hurry, we would need a way to get out. Personally, I didn’t think it was going to matter by that point, but I didn’t want to argue about it. We strengthened the northwest gate by placing two minivans against it. They were parallel to the gate and parked rear hatch to rear hatch. They were close enough to the fence to scratch the paint but the previous owners weren’t around to complain.
The bus gate was the most difficult of all to bulwark. Obviously we wanted to make it impregnable to the zombies but also mobile enough so that we could leave in an instant. It was our first new resident that came up with the idea. Alex Carbonara, a medium sized man in his thirties, had been a carpenter in his previous life and was used to finding ways to work around problems. We had mostly left him off the revolving guard duty because his wife had yet to snap out of her catatonic state. There was no way he could safely leave his children at his new home with a non-responsive spouse. So it was in this free time that he had first pondered and then drew the design for his ‘movable wall.’ It was a six, six and a half foot high by twenty-foot long wall built on wheels and placed on a track. It was ingenious. He placed studs every ten inches as opposed to the standard eighteen for added strength. Covered with drywall and with small wheels attached to the bottom, with some muscle power the gate could be retracted to either let someone in or out as the case might be.
We were as fearful of ‘gangs’ or desperate mobs as we were of the zombies. Normal humans would have an easy time breaching any of our defenses, so as much as we wanted to cut down on the number of sentries, we just didn’t dare. Every hundred yards or so we had either a tall stepladder or a small sliding ladder set up against the wall. These were manned 24/7. I spent nearly six hours a day on guard duty. I didn’t mind so much at the gates. The camaraderie heralded me back to my days in the Marines Corps. The time on the ladders, however, was excruciating. When I got off the ladder at the end of my shift, my feet and legs throbbed in pain for almost as long as I had been on it. When the opportunity to go on a supply run came, I jumped at it. A chance meeting with zombies seemed much better than the known pain of ‘the ladders’ (modern societies’ newest form of torture). Thank God for Alex, he had already come up with a design for small gun towers to take the place of ‘the ladders.’
The raid was set up specifically to search for food and batteries and that type of stuff, but when Alex came to us with his list of building materials, we promised to make sure to leave room in the van. Who knew what invaluable contraption he was going to come up with next?
Six of us went out in that van. Between all the guns and ammo we carried I didn’t know how we were going to fit any food in here. Me, Justin, Travis, Brendon, Alex (he left his kids with Jed and his wife) and a slightly built man that barely looked like he could hold up his rifle; Spindler was his name. He said he had been a principal once upon a time in a town called Walpole or something like that. I didn’t like him much but as long as he helped and didn’t become a liability he was fine with me. Tracy and Nicole were not thrilled that we were heading out, but I assured them everything would be fine. We hadn’t seen more than a dozen or so zombies in the last two days.
“Mike you’ve seen the news,” Tracy pleaded.
And I had, that was all that was on. There were two television stations left and it was ‘All News, All the Time.’ It was horrendous. There was nothing else to report on except for zombies. Even the commentators seemed bored with the subject.
‘Another mass killing in Ohio.’ Yawn, big stretch, the newscaster would state. ‘Film at eleven.’ Stretch. Obviously the yawn and the stretch are figurative, but that was the implied tone. What wasn’t implied, however, was that no matter how seemingly easy we had it at the moment, the worst of it wasn’t over. The zombies were still out there and wherever they went havoc, death and destruction followed.
“Trace,” I consoled. “Lowe’s and Safeway are less than a half mile from here, we’ll be loaded up and back within the hour.” It ended up being a lot longer than an hour and incredibly more dangerous than I had said or figured. And like every Star Trek away team, we ended up losing a crew member.
We left by the minivan exit. It was on the side closest to our destination. Across from the gate on the other side of the road was a Jehovah’s Witness freedom hall. I was wondering how many of the devout followers that went to this church were lucky enough to get one of the coveted 144,000 spots in the Promised Land this last week. Whe
n I reigned in my cynicism, I noticed someone standing at the far edge of the church parking lot. My heart beat a little faster. Why was somebody just standing there? Something didn’t seem right. I told Alex, who was driving, to go into the church lot. He was not happy about any detours, he was thinking that Jed was most likely as good a baby-sitter as his near comatose wife. But when I pointed out what I was looking at he readily agreed. We were within twenty-five yards and still she didn’t run away or amble towards us. We could tell it was a woman from the slight build and long hair, but beyond that we had no clue.
“Alex, get about twenty feet away and let’s see what’s going on,” I said.
“This doesn’t feel right, Mike,” Alex said, echoing what we were all thinking.
As we got closer I could tell that in life, this woman had been downright beautiful. Even in death there was a certain majesty to her. Her long raven black hair hid the majority of sores on her face, but her uncovered arms showed the ravages of the disease she was carrying. I could see her arms rippling even though ‘it’ didn’t move a muscle.
Justin had lined up his shot. “Dad do you want me to kill it?” he asked.
I knew deep down in my subconscious she was dangerous, as any beautiful woman was, and she felt worse, much worse. But I couldn’t find it in my humanity to kill if we weren’t in danger. She made no threatening move whatsoever, her eyes watching us warily, and that shook me because I knew there was more than some rudimentary intelligence going on. We sat there and just stared.
“Dad?” Justin asked again. He wanted this standoff done.
“Put the gun down. Alex, get us the fuck out of here,” I said, never tearing my eyes from her.
I heard Spindler gasp, so I know he saw what I did. The zombie woman nodded once, as in ‘thank you’ for not killing her. I shuddered, but nobody else in the van was the wiser. Looking back just a few short weeks later, I wish I had let Justin shoot her.
When I got my composure back, I was able to rationalize the nod as stress induced or just perception problems. I knew better though, I’d wished Spindler hadn’t seen it too. It would have made it a lot easier to brush this away if there hadn’t been a corroborating witness.
“Alex, drive behind the Lowe’s store,” I said with a quaver in my voice. Luckily everyone else was too busy scanning the area to notice the octave change.
“Mike, you heard Jed, we need to get food first and then worry about the wood for the turrets,” Alex bemoaned.
“Yeah, Jed would say that, the old geezer hasn’t done one shift on those god-awful things. I can barely sleep because of the pain in my legs.”
Alex opened his mouth to say something but I cut him off. “Come on Alex, I know what I’m doing, how much food do you think we’re going to fit in here anyway? Go to the back of the store, I can almost guarantee they’ll have a big rig there, we’ll fill it with all the supplies and food we’d need for a year.”
“Mike, I don’t know how to drive a rig,” Alex pleaded.
“No sweat,” I said as I put on my best bull-shitting smile. “I drove one back in my Marine Corps days.”
He eyed me a little dubiously, if he had stared at me a little longer I would have cracked and just forgotten the whole damn plan.
My whole half-hour of driving a big rig had started as a dare from a fellow Marine friend of mine. We had been drinking all night at the base watering hole and had just started walking home to the barracks. We had passed the armory and a giant camouflaged truck sat in the parking lot.
“Betcha can’t drive us home in that,” my drinking buddy Chuck Blaylock dared.
“Can so,” I blustered as I began to squeeze my way through the locked gate.
“What the fuck are ya doing?” Chuck asked, almost as if he had already forgotten what he had dared me about.
He had; unfortunately, my short-term memory wasn’t as bad. I got up into the cab and turned over the ignition, which allowed the glow plugs to warm up. There was no need for keys, like all military vehicles there was no such thing as keys. It would do no good if in the heat of battle the driver was killed or blown apart and the keys disappeared with him. You get my point, right? So within half a minute of getting through the gate the truck roared to life. I lurched the truck forward.
“Crap, there’s a bunch of gears,” I mumbled. I was paying more attention to the shift box than I was the gate. I barely looked up as I crashed through it. The truck stalled, Chuck hopped into the cab from the passenger side.
“’Bout time,” he said, and then he started snoring softly.
The barracks was only two streets over but I was so inebriated I had lost all sense of direction. When the eight trailing military police hummers had pulled us over, I was ten miles from home, had destroyed three cars and one guard shack. All in all, not a great ending to a great night. At my court-martial, the officer in charge of the proceedings, Colonel Laret, went easy on me. First off because the truck I was driving hadn’t blown half the state away. Unbeknownst to us the truck was packed with C-4 explosive. I could have served life in prison at Leavenworth for that alone. When it was all said and done, I had lost two stripes (demoted from sergeant to lance corporal), three months' pay and one year of confinement to the barracks. Chuck lost a stripe just for getting in the cab. They also sent him to another duty station, Okinawa, Japan, so we couldn’t be together to cause any more havoc. I was going to miss Chuck to no end, but this beat a life sentence at Leavenworth, and because of the hard labor, a life sentence at Leavenworth equated to seven years. So long story short, technically I had driven a big rig even if I had no recollection of it.
As it was, there were three trucks parked at Lowe’s. Two were still mostly full, and the third looked as if it had just finished off-loading. That was going to be the one we wanted. We fanned out on the loading bay, thankful that this one was lit up like a spring day. The light was welcome, the sights however weren’t. There had been a brief but intense fight here. Some zombies had re-died and so had a bunch of truckers and dock crew. They had fought with tire-irons, chains and even a floor tile stripper. Gore littered the floor. The only thing alive in here was the incessant buzzing of the flies. Curiously the flies, which I thought of as one of the nastiest creatures on the planet next to cockroaches, wanted nothing to do with the zombies. They covered the remains of the humans, but not a one alit on any of the zombies. Even flying cockroaches knew better. I was thankful that it was early December and not a hot sweltering day in August; the smell was already fetid. I couldn’t begin to imagine what the smell would be like heated up to 98 degrees. I would have liked to have pulled the bodies out of the bay and onto the parking lot, but I didn’t see the point. There were bound to be a lot more bodies in the store itself, and stopping to dispose of all of them would just be eating into precious time. I left Spindler to guard our rear echelon while the rest of us went forward to check out the store. When I swung open the large swinging doors I soon discovered the inside was much more malodorous than the airy bay. I motioned for the small party to retreat. Confusion and fear crossed their features. I calmed my tumbling stomach by pulling in great breaths of the air I had previously thought was fetid.
“We’re going to need Vick’s or something like that to put under our noses,” I said, when I felt like I could finally speak without bits of discharge intermingling with my words.
We hunted for a couple of minutes, never finding the coveted Vick’s. Travis discovered some cologne in one of the metal desks that lined every bay. We made some makeshift bandannas and soaked them in the cologne. So we went back to the swinging doors looking like the best smelling bandits this side of the Mississippi. The redolence of Eau de Death will haunt my olfactory nerves for the rest of my days. The one good thing about the swinging doors, besides being able to prop them open and get air, was that it had allowed the zombies to escape. In the long run that may have been bad, but for right now it was a welcome blessing. We did, however, do a thorough search of the entire store
before we began our supply run, just in case there were undead lurkers still roaming about.
I had the unenviable task of finding the keys to the big rig. My biggest fear was that the drivers were all zombified and had just walked off, keys and all. The dockworkers were all dressed the same, blue jeans, light colored shirts and blue smocks. All I needed to do was find some fat men with jackets on. It’s stereotypical but I was in a hurry. After a few minutes of looking I was rewarded, or more likely punished. I had found my quarry. There were two men on the loading bay that fit the description. I was looking for the one that was a little less decomposed than the other. I flipped the first guy over. The left side of his face had been removed. Jagged strips of flesh were all that remained. His left eye had been chewed in half, like a bad Entenmann’s chocolate. Something had bitten into it and decided they didn’t like the flavor and had left it for someone else. My stomach wasn’t going to be right for a week after this.
‘Stop looking at his face!’ I silently screamed at myself. This was much worse than the impersonality of passing an accident on the side of the road. This was High Def death brought to you in 1080dpi. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Does that mean I’m in trouble when I refer to myself in the third person, isn’t that some form of psychosis? I think I was trying to stall with myself. I’m a borderline germaphobe. I didn’t want to have to touch what was left of this person. There’s no telling what diseases he was carrying. If I had been someone else I would have punched them and told them to get moving. This internal dialogue was not getting my family or me out of danger any quicker. That thought got me moving, but when I plunged my hand into his pocket I was compensated with the liquefication of Jared’s (I had to name him something, it somehow seemed easier than fat dead guy) fat tissue. I pulled my hand out only to find it attached to a two-foot long sinewy snot-like substance.