Triple Zombie

by Jason Beech

  ***

  IT WAS like playing hop-scotch trying to avoid dry blood patches scattering the sidewalk in town. They stomped past the pump where she used to fill her first car, and the cinema Kal took her on a first date – Gravity if she remembered right. Kal had puppy dog eyes which lit sharp and pulled her in. The first boy she’d ever allowed to touch her boobs. She sighed. Even he took that for a signal to go all the way. Why did every fumble have to turn into a downstairs rumble with each man she ever dated? Her mom always encouraged resistance. “Take your time,” she always said.

  They couldn’t avoid stepping on broken glass as they made their way across the main street. Molly Brannigan’s bakery stood empty, red stains on trays once full of cupcakes and pumpkin bread. A dead dog lay in the doorway of Ed Mason’s hardware store, its ribs exposed, no longer caging internal organs.

  “They’re slowing down,” she said.

  “They’re probably out of meat.”

  A mess of the undead stood outside the employment agency, looking at their own shoes, at each other’s shoes, like the homeless hanging out on pitiless Wall Street. Frank swung the rifle off his shoulder, ready.

  “Why don’t they eat each other?” Lizzy asked.

  Necks turned to observe their movement.

  “Not fresh enough, maybe. They used to be so fast. Gave me a heart attack every time …”

  “Now they just …”

  “Slouch. They’re dying.”

  An unconditioned smile pulled her face upward for the first time in ages. They had time on their side.

  “How long do you think they’ve got?” he asked.

  She put her arm through his rifle-free arm for a moment, then let go.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It’s for …” she breathed. “It’s for the future.”

  Frank showed enough restraint to keep his rifle pointed at the floor. They both made regular glances over their shoulders to make sure the zombies following them still had the pace of a ninety year old asthmatic, keeping their own pace swift and aggressive. They couldn’t ensure their thrusting body-language had psychological impact on the brain-dead, but they thought it worth a try.

  They slowed only when they reached the cul-de-sac at the town’s edge. Frank planted his feet, impassive, his hands wrapped around the rifle across his shoulders like a cross. She put him to the back of her mind as her hands swept across garden fences, each touch powering up a memory so strong she had to stop every so often to catch breath.

  What she had kept in her peripheral vision she now looked at straight. The gate lay broken on the tall-grass lawn. It would have shamed her father. The front door handle bent to the right, and dark marks streaked the bay window to her left. Otherwise, it looked pretty much as it did when she left it, with even the picture of the Cheshire Cat her girl had drawn still facing out from the glass panel window by the front door.

  “Give me a whistle when you need anything,” Frank called.

  The punctured silence made her jump, shooting unkind mutterings through her teeth. The door didn’t budge on her push. She pushed harder, but it stood like a grave stone, warning outsiders to respect what lied inside. She pulled the baseball bat from the deep side-pocket of the laptop bag and smashed the window panel below the Cheshire Cat. She reached inside and twisted the lock, hoping nothing would take a chunk from her hand.

  The door swung open without a sound. Her father always kept everything in order, except time for her. That was fine, he made it up with the second one. She enjoyed that, happy he’d learned his lessons. She took his care for her sister as acknowledgement that he had made mistakes. He couldn’t express it with words, but mom made up for it. Her best friend.

  Lizzy let the bat dangle by her side, swaying like when she played as a kid. She never hit anywhere near as many balls as she’d hit heads. She fancied she could hit a pitch out of the ballpark if she tried now.

  She padded through the kitchen, keeping her tears dammed as she passed her dad’s coffee mug and the Tom Clancy book her mom never got to finish. She couldn’t resist checking: page 180 of Dead or Alive. Lizzy preferred James Ellroy. Hardboiled and unnerving. She couldn’t read him now.

  Too dark.

  She kept her eyes to the wall at the top of the stairs as she climbed. To look down might mean she would lose her nerve to look back up. Her old bloody hand-print remained on her parents’ door like it wanted to push it open again to force her to see what she’d done all those years ago. She shifted to her sister’s door, turned the handle and pushed. She remembered locking it. She brushed her fingers along the ridge above the door, finding the key. She shook her head at even thinking to put it back up there in those circumstances. She rubbed the dust from her fingertips and inserted it, turning slowly. She edged the door open, entering with tiny steps. The room opened up to her left. Dulled pink and blue paint decorated her walls.

  Lizzy backed against the wall as much as it would let her, trying to catch her gasp with an open palm. Her sister’s thin skin held on, wrapped to her bones like cling-film. Her knees stood prominent from the rest of her legs, her arms skinnier than the legs on the bed her body leaned against.

  Her little beauty blurred through the tears filling her eyes. Weeping caused her vision to streak, to make everything move. The curtains seemed to wave, the light of the little Monster High lamp on the chest of drawers shimmered. Even her sister’s chest shifted up and down.

  “Tilly,” she sobbed, taking a knee, trying to squeeze her eyes dry with thumb and index finger.

  She wiped her face with a shirt sleeve, muttering that she shouldn’t have come home.

  “I didn’t need to see this. I didn’t need to see this. All these years easing my last image of you wasted. How do I erase this?”

  She looked up from the hardwood floor, following the Persian Rug’s Monster High design to her sister’s foot. It twitched. Every horror movie she’d ever watched told her to run from the house. Now. Tilly’s chest moved up and down and Lizzy could clearly hear her breath rasping, liquid in her lungs. Lizzy stood, creeped closer, her heels barely touching the floor. Tilly’s cloudy irises, barely distinct from the sclera, stared up at her.

  Lizzy stumbled back, fell on her backside, pushed back up again, stumbled into the wall. Tilly remained still, apart from the consistent rise and fall of her chest. She didn’t seem to have noticed her elder sister or the noise of her nails digging into the wall for some grip on reality.

  A gunshot snatched Lizzy’s attention.

  “Frank?” she called.

  Another gunshot. The afterburn smell had her reaching for the door handle. She pulled, raising the baseball bat for readiness. Frank turned the rifle to her, finger trigger-ready. She crouched low, hiding her face with her left forearm as if that would stop a bullet.

  “Lizzy,” he breathed.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she scowled.

  He ignored the comment, closing her parents’ door before she could see what he’d done. He brushed past her. Lizzy still crouched, pulling her hair. Trying to pull this reality out.

  She watched from the corner of her eye as Frank stood above Tilly. So vulnerable, so lost, and still breathing. How? Five years locked in this room, as far as she could tell. She’d had no food, human or not, and yet life had clung to her skinny frame.

  Lizzy flinched when Frank turned, not liking the set jaw, or the eyes which told her to firm herself for what must now take place.

  “No,” she said. She shook her head, realization breaking with sweat across her body, every goosebump popping and propelling her to stand, feet apart. She thrust forward, smashing into his hard gut, pulling back the bat. She raised her left hand when he held her bat-hand tight, nails ready to scratch out his eyes. The swing caught him above his right eyebrow, drawing blood, making him drop the rifle. The last-second pull of his neck avoided ruining his already bloodshot eyes into a pulpy mess. She shifted around him as the bat dropped to the floor, looking for
a weak spot that might down him, away from her Tilly.

  Her arms dropped, exhausted, unable to continue the fight. Her shoulders hunched, dragged down by heavy limbs, her neck unable to keep her head lifted. Her eyes had to roll up to look at him. Their maneuvering had him standing above Tilly again, one heavy-footed step from crushing the girl. Her chest heaved like Lizzy’s.

  “Leave the room,” he said.

  Emotion suppressed her “no” to a lip movement. She shook her head, breathed through her mouth, let the tears drip. What did showing such raw emotion matter compared to leaving her girl like this, alone, trapped in this room, for five years.

  Frank stared at Lizzy, not moving, not even to wipe the blood starting to trail down through his eyebrow, gathering in its follicles, pushing through to form a bell on his upper eyelid. Ready for a cliff-dive. She had to admit, despite her fury, that he had controlled himself. He could have snapped her with a well-aimed flick of a wrist. His body remained alert even as his expression softened.

  “You can’t leave her like this,” he said.

  She thought his voice croaked a little, a little rasp at the end of “this” bringing her back to reality. She heard her breathing heave louder, when her system ought to verge on recovery.

  “Tilly,” she gasped, looking down, realizing the sound’s source.

  Tilly’s irises had sharpened, colored. They saw. They anticipated. Lizzy lifted her look back to Frank, feeling energy rush back to every muscle. The blood she’d scratched from his brow elongated, ready to snap and fall. To a mouth waiting for sustenance.

  “Frank, wipe your head.”

  His forehead creased, surprised. His eyes crossed for a moment as he noticed the blood gathering as if for the first time. It was enough to disturb the blood’s balance. It fell from its precipice. Lizzy followed its fall, pulling away from them both in anticipation at the nuclear explosion.

  “Get away from her. Now.” She gestured a hand towards Tilly, imploring him to join her at the far end of the room.

  The drop had already hit Tilly’s upper lip. Enough had gathered for it to start rolling again on its new surface. It found the cracks in lips which had not felt liquid for years, filling a split which curved inside her mouth. There it gathered again, ready for its final fall, flat onto her tongue.

  Lizzy pulled at his arm. “We should never have come.”

  Frank relented to her urgency, walking backwards to keep his eye on the little girl. Lizzy winced at Frank’s grasp on her forearm, his squeeze reminding her that he had fear too, despite all his bravado. He had reason. Tilly’s sunken eyes followed their every move. Her palms turned from facing the ceiling to suckering the floor in preparation to push from her sitting position. Her right foot shuddered, like cable being pulled from set concrete, brushing against the rifle Lizzy and Frank now wanted back.

  “She’s not your sister anymore,” Frank implored.

  Lizzy bit her lower lip, squeezed her eyes, hardly able to breathe anymore as Frank backed into her against the wall. She remembered her last Christmas with the family, Tilly squealing at the Monster High toys, rug, lampshade and dolls house she had bought her. The years between them didn’t divide any feeling. She loved that girl from the moment she was born, and Tilly doted on her. Said she was her hero.

  The sob engulfing her twisted Frank’s neck back to her. “Leave the room, I’ll sort it out.”

  Whatever biological freakery had done this to Tilly had not strengthened her bones. As she attempted to push herself from the floor, something snapped. It looked like her upper arms had collapsed from their joints with the shoulders. Her arms looked like hockey sticks in a silk sack. She couldn’t maneuver. She just sat there, breathing heavy for more of Frank’s blood, a dry gag bouncing off the walls.

  “You leave the room.”

  “What?” Frank said.

  “Go,” she urged. “Let me deal with this.”

  His knotted brows told her he feared her as much as the little girl.

  “She’s your sister,” he hissed.

  “Not anymore.”

  She watched him leave, before edging towards the gun. Tilly - this thing - might have sat impotent, but caution had to prevail. The world needed repopulating. She was its Eve. She trembled that Frank was surely its Adam.

  “Tilly,” she said. “If you’re still in there, even just a teensy little bit, I…” She swallowed down a gathering choke, held it there, digested it, and fingertipped the rifle into a full grip. “I want you to remember that Christmas. I want you to concentrate hard. Make it your last memory, not this.”

  She raised the muzzle real slow, looking along it into Tilly’s deep-set eyes, trying hard not to get dragged into them for a hug goodbye.

  “I want you to remember us putting the lights up, you stroking my cheek, ha… consoling me for that crushed Christmas ball I made in kindergarten.” Lizzy wiped the back of her hand across her nose. “Stupid, right?”

  Tilly’s frame shook. Maybe her little beauty was trying to get out. Maybe she was in agony. Needed this to end. Right now.

  ***

  FRANK SHOT off the wall he’d leaned against after the rifle fire reverberated across the street. The world settled into a silence. Even the bushes rustled by a breeze moments before fell still. The sky’s blue deepened as the sun started to say goodbye to the day. A chill warned of fall and nights again spent in enclosed spaces or outside beside a beacon fire to keep warm.

  A scrape across tarmac snapped his attention away from Lizzy’s home. Between the brick ranch and the colonial with the upstairs shutter just hanging against gravity, came one… two… three…

  “Lizzy,” he called over his shoulder.

  Seven… eight…

  “Lizzy,” he called again, afraid to take his eyes off them in case they crept real close real quick if he stopped looking.

  Fifteen… sixteen…

  “Lizzy.”

  He didn’t like how his voice raised an octave. It lacked authority. Lizzy needed it. She was younger than him. He had taken it real slow until now. He couldn’t afford to do anything to scare her away… the last woman on Earth and all that. But once she relented, she was his. Her happiness would increase tenfold.

  He could see blood-drenched shirts, t-shirts, a dress, a woman whose lower jaw-bone jutted from a hole ripped from her flesh. Made his trigger-finger itchy. Made him want Lizzy to get out here with his rifle. Now.

  “We can leave out the back,” he heard Lizzy say.

  “Right,” he said. He came out of the staring stupor that threatened to make him dinner for these things. He backed through the gate, up the garden path, unable to stop watching them filing through the gate and tumbling over the fence. They saw nothing but the meat on his bones. The lack of an option to negotiate forced his pace to pick up, and he almost stumbled through the bush separating the house’s land from its neighbor.

  When he finally turned to see where Lizzy had gone, he could only fumble with his hands, nervous at her stance on a hillock, staring at the sun stretching out on the horizon, his rifle casually resting on her right shoulder. Looking like she meant to conquer the world.

  The only thought he could express, his brain scrambling for something, was “fuck.” He trudged forward, took the gun from her, and abused himself for failing to get as few words as the zombies could manage from his mouth.

  ***

  LIZZY FOUGHT against dwelling on what had just happened to her Tilly. She tried to focus on those good times and not spend a single tear about what could have been. She had to harness her little beauty for the future, for that’s where salvation laid. So this new morning she pored over Wikipedia, checking out New Mexico, seeing which cities to avoid, which might have a little culture to feed her mind. Talking to Frank might just sway her from life. He had nothing to add but his physical presence, like turning the TV on in the background for company on a lonesome night.

  She had pored over the webpage many times over the years, memori
zing most of it. She’d like to explore the Carlsbad Caverns, climb the Bandelier National Monument, soak in the Blue Hole, and ponder civilization’s rise and fall at the Aztec Ruins National Monument. She’d like to talk about it all as she saw them, but she knew she’d end up internalizing her thoughts. What if their children grew up like Frank? The thought shortened her breath.

  She couldn’t remember this part: “Rio Grande Gorge Bridge is nice to walk across when there’s nobody here. Not that it was always crammed with vehicles, but when you see it empty like this you can almost feel the natural world creep back into your veins.”

  What a weird conversational piece of description, she thought. Why have I never noticed that? Like it had only recently been added…

  She sprung to her feet at the unmistakable groan of the undead. She couldn’t see it below the lip of the hill, but it clanged metal with every step. Fine, she figured, the cow bell keeps me informed of your whereabouts.

  She saw the thing’s plastered hair wave a little stiffer than the gentle bending of the tall grass it rose above, slowly revealing the tortured face on the head it sat upon.

  “What the …?”

  Emerging ahead of the beast, which must have stood at least six and a half feet tall, Frank yanked the chain he led it by. Its shirt must have been white once, and that flapping, half-ripped collar probably secured a tie for some dumb office job. A fresh stain fronted its shirt, blood glistening in the low morning sun.

  “Frank… no.”

  “I’m alright,” he grinned, yanking the chain again.

  The beast grunted as its head jerked forward, eyeing Lizzy for its stomach. Frank wrapped the chain around the lone maple tree overlooking the town, securing it with a last pull, one foot pressed flat against its bark. He wiped his hands on his shorts and t-shirt, grinning at Lizzy as he headed back towards her.

  “What happened?” She clocked the flecks of red spattering Frank’s shirt, his increasingly blood-shot left eye, and the blood drying on the thing’s mouth.