Etna Station

by Mark Tufo

  “Great. We can make sure we know when to flip him off,” I said, and you know what? Every fucking hour we knew that thing was overhead and I was available to, I did just that. And I would do so until I no longer could.

  The choppers made sure to steer clear of us, flying even farther away from us on their return journey. We could see them hovering where we figured the ring was and could just barely see something being dropped, at first, we couldn’t tell what. In another hour, we realized he was bombing the horde with Molotov cocktails, whipping them up into a burning frenzy. He was not going to leave anything to Providence; it made no sense. Why not kill the hostages? Why not kill me, after all his hunting and tormenting, when I was right there in his clutches. Unless you are insane yourself, it is impossible to understand the inner workings of a madman. So, maybe there was hope for me yet, because Knox had me completely befuddled.

  He’d left us alive, but we were defeated, and we’d yet to fire a shot. We went back to one of the safe houses, unsure as to what we should do next. We were surrounded by enemies with vastly superior numbers, both live and undead, and out of the reach of our loved ones. And to top it off, if we did somehow pull an orangutan out of our ass and make it, Knox was still watching, and he had visual and battle control of the sky. He could be upon us at any point that suited him. So much for living the dream of a zombie apocalypse in the comfort of my den, making love to my wife, eating fresh game, and catching up on all the reading I would ever want to do.

  I had my elbows on the kitchen table and had my palms pressed against my eyes as I held up my head, which was getting exceedingly heavy as I weighed the few options we still had left to us. Biddeford was upstairs keeping a lookout when he shouted he had spotted a fire. Sanders and BT joined me as I went up. Thick, black roiling smoke was billowing into the sky, three miles distant at the most.

  “Safe to say what Knox was dropping out of the helicopters.” It was BT that caught on first. “Hey, it could be worse,” he said when he saw my face.

  “Yeah? How’s that?” I asked.

  “He could have given us Deneaux back.”

  I let out a small laugh. He was right, it could always be worse.

  “You think she’ll ever get what she deserves?” he asked.

  “You can only die once, so I’m going to say no.” Then I thought about it; maybe she could get her just desserts.

  “There have been very few instances in life when I have even thought about hitting a woman and all of them revolved around self-defense, but I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I would gleefully haul off and punch her square in that cigarette clad mouth. Maybe she’d choke on all that tobacco, or better still, the lit cherry would burn all that dry, crinkly mess that she is inside.”

  They were staring at me open mouthed now, so I followed through. “Or, possibly, I would have enough of an upward angle to my punch that I shattered the cartilage in her nose and pierced her fucking brain, making her an instant vegetable so that I would be able to get in a few more savage licks before she collapsed to the ground and even then I might tie her corpse to a tree so I could use it as a punching bag for a few weeks, I mean, at least until the stink really started to settle in. Then at the very end, maybe fill her bloated carcass up with a few pounds of tannerite and blow what remained of her all over a cow pasture.”

  “I take it you’re angry with her,” Sanders said.

  “I feel like you’ve given this too much thought,” BT said.

  “Yeah? Look at me with a straight face and tell me you aren’t thinking the same thing now that I’ve spelled it out.”

  “No offense, man, but if I punched her, it would be a one-and-done. I’m thinking I’d rather twist her up like a pretzel. The satisfaction of hearing her bones snap would be beyond reproach.” He was wringing his hands as he said this. “But I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on her corpse.”

  “Alright, so we’ve decided we all want this old bat dead, but that isn’t our immediate problem,” Sanders said. “If everyone’s favorite psychopath did indeed set the zombies ablaze and they are now running around like flaming chickens without heads, this town could be swept up in a wildfire, and us with it.” We nodded, grudgingly. “Now, that being said, maybe they are dispersing. That merits us taking a look.”

  “You’re right about that, Sanders, taking a look is as good an idea as any, but things could spiral pretty fast; we’d need to move as a group,” I said.

  I could see the Marine in Sanders having a tough time with this new equation, and I got that. Things worked a whole lot easier with able-bodied men and women not only willing to fight but trained to do so very effectively and cohesively. We had a bunch of kids, assorted “others,” and Trip. If we left here to check then got overrun and had to make a mad dash to safety, who was here to defend the homestead, so to speak? Every time we split up our chances of getting everyone back together in one place got smaller. The other side of this coin was also a blast to think about. What if we had to move fast and we couldn’t?

  “Pogo sticks!” Trip shouted. “Man, we could just jump over their heads. Went to a dead show back in the seventies…this guy must have been eleven feet tall in front of me, or maybe it was a big hat, but I had a pogo stick and I just kept jumping up over him so I could see the show, that was until I realized he was behind me.” He started scratching his head.

  Stephanie grabbed his hand and pulled him away, I heard her saying something about coming with her so that the grown-ups could talk. I watched as Sanders wrestled with his thoughts; he dragged a hand across his face, something I had done a lot of since the z-poc, surprised I hadn’t worn my nose off this way.

  “Are there any other bunkers we could lie low in?” I asked. “Something fireproof?”

  “There are, but we usually only put enough supplies in them for a few days and for many fewer people. Not really prepared for anything of this magnitude. We get stuck in there for more than a couple of days, we would be in a world of hurt. Could be a last resort,” Sanders said.

  “Mr.T, what about putting all the kids in there?” Tommy asked.

  “We’d have to leave Stephanie with Trip to keep him from eating everything in the first hour.”

  “Five days max with rationed water–shitty living conditions; you’re talking about that many people basically living in a shoe box. Gonna have a hard time being able to lie down comfortably,” he said.

  “Beats being dead,” BT said, I nodded in agreement.

  “You are not going to believe this shit!” Biddeford said from atop a telephone pole. Sanders had explained that they had put footholds in a bunch of them so they could survey from a high point if necessary, this was one of those. Biddeford was there with a pair of binoculars seeing something he was having a hard time relating, judging by the shaking of his head.

  “You realize, Corporal, we can’t see what you can, right?” Sanders asked, looking up, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “Sorry, sir. The zombies–the burning zombies–they’re heading by droves into Miller’s pond.”

  “That solves one problem,” I said. And added a hundred more, I thought.

  We quickly made our way to a bunker house, which was more of a safe room…well, safe closet is a more apt description.

  “Gonna have to split them up, Talbot, you can’t put everyone in here,” Sanders told me as an aside. “There’s another, bigger bunker up ahead. It will fit the rest.”

  “How far?”

  “Little under a mile,” he replied.

  It didn’t sound far, but in hostile territory, it could take us an hour or more to safely traverse that span, and I didn’t trust Trip not to double that. Add to that Zach looked sick; he needed rest and whatever nutrition there was.

  “Trip, you cool with staying here?” I asked. “Keep an eye out on some of the kids.”

  “You’re a good dude, Ponch. You’re doing the best you can,” he said.

  “Umm, thanks, man,” I told him.

  �
��We’ll be alright,” Stephanie replied.

  I did not like the look in Trip’s eyes as we closed the door to the room. He looked very much like he knew something about this but had been doing his best to keep the truth even from himself. I had to let that nagging feeling go; it could just as well have been that he had some murderous gas built up in him and was fearful of what it would do to those poor souls locked up with him.

  We had most of those that needed safekeeping, safely placed. Now we just needed to get the rest to shelter. To get them there was myself, BT, Tiffany, Sanders, Winters, Biddeford, Gary, Travis, Tommy, Meredith, and my sister. Eleven skilled shooters against a hundred thousand zombies. It sounded fair. The idea was to stay off to the side of the fire, hoping for a clear avenue through. If we found a way out, we’d circle back around, once, hopefully, we had pulled enough zombies away or they’d lost interest in following. We’d gone a mile, no more, when we saw our first zombies. There were seven of them, and they were on patrol; couldn’t really call it anything else but that. They were actively looking for something or someone; their heads were on a constant swivel. We watched them pass on the street through knot holes in a privacy fence. I wasn’t thrilled that they appeared to be heading the same way we had come.

  When they stopped fifty feet past us, I was thinking that maybe they had caught wind of us. Then they showed just how serious they were when one of them did their version of flushing the prey out with that mind fucking screeching sound. I gritted my teeth in pain as I kept that particular one in my sights. Him, I wanted to kill personally. At that point, six would have been easy enough to deal with. But this was a patrol, the vanguard. The main force was still waiting to get in on the action. We did almost nothing as we waited for them to be out of range. Came across three similar patrols, though luckily none had a screecher with them. Whatever aberration those fuck-nuts must be, they were in short supply. We were being so cautious, I think Henry could have kept this pace up. By the time we got to the inner edges of the horde, night was fast approaching.

  We were creeping around houses like thieves looking for an easy target when the nightmare began. As if they were on cue, the zombies started moving as one cohesive unit. I’m sure if we had an aerial view, it would look something like those schools of fish or birds that all turn on a dime in unison; just change directions all at once and swoop in. I’d not known that people, I guess you could call them people, moving could be so loud; if we dared to talk we would have had to speak like we were in a concert pit to get a message across, even though the zombies were still quite a ways away. With that many pressing to maneuver down constricted avenues, they were going through fences, tearing down covered parking spots, beams on porches and decks…the press of them alone was shifting houses on their foundations and as far as I could tell there weren’t any bulkers, at least, not on the front lines. It was like a herd of buffalo that decided to shift from the plains straight through Dodge.

  “We’re in a little bit of a fuckery,” Sanders said.

  That was obvious enough; then it really dawned on me why we were in the fuckery. We had wandered directly into tornado alley, or for those of you unfamiliar with the term, straight into a mobile home community–a location where, seemingly, every natural disaster known to man ultimately befalls. Why is that? Does nature possess some vulnerability awareness? Does wind and water seek out places where it can cause the most catastrophic and graphic videos to be played out on the news? Maybe nature has a flair for the dramatic; it wants us all to know abundantly who is in fucking charge. No one can look away when that home goes twisting into the air or sliding down the side of a mountain or as it collapses under the weight of a four-foot snowfall. You should have to sign a disclosure when you buy one of those death traps, those hurricane flood beacons. Sign here that you realize at some point in your residence, your lovely double wide with the built-on porch will end up washing down the Mississippi, even if you live in Oregon. It’s just a foregone conclusion. I actually shook my head as Sanders ripped through the lock and started ushering us inside the doomed aluminum Twinkie.

  “This is about as good an idea as landing the Hindenburg on the Titanic,” I said as I walked up the flimsy, two-step steel stairway with the rickety railing. Sure, you’re not going to die if you fall a foot and a half, but it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the construction if the steps up swayed like a funhouse attraction. The thin aluminum walls of the single-wide did little to muffle the march of the damned. Then there was nothing. They’d once again acted in unison; they came to a full stop. I could not help thinking they were merely tightening the noose they had secured firmly around our necks.

  “Mike, do we make a run for it?” Gary asked.

  “Stuck now, brother. Good chance they’ll see us, and even if we make it away from this group, we’d have a decent chance of running into one of their patrols.”

  Gary pressed the kitchen wall and we all heard the small pop as it gave under the minimal pressure he had exerted.

  BT groaned. “Sort of wishing we were in a high rise right now.”

  Personally, that didn’t sound much better, especially if the zombies were inside the building. There were only so many ways out that didn’t include plummeting to your death. Fighting in a stairwell, while standard in survival tales, was not a fun proposition. Usually not factored in is the echoing percussion of shots fired, it was murder on the eardrums and thus the equilibrium, which, I learned, have some causal linkage to each other. Then there’s the ricochet; if you’re not shot directly or by accident or devoured by your enemies, you still emerge deaf and disoriented.

  “Why’d they stop?” Biddeford asked. It was a question we were all wondering. I had to remember he was a young kid and a Marine. He was used to his superiors telling him what was going on, so when Sanders did not respond, he turned to Winters, then, really, each of us in turn. But everyone either shook their heads or shrugged at him. How could any of us truly know what the hell zombies were thinking? It was definitely tactical, whatever it was. These weren’t just brainless brain-eaters, nope, not these fucks. Our particular kind were apparently well-versed in the Art of War. I jumped when I heard the splintering of wood. Now I think everyone did, but I had gone to the back bedroom to peek out a small window to make sure we didn’t have any company sneaking up on us while all else was quiet.

  “Ignorance is bliss,” they say, and I would have been much happier had I not witnessed two bulkers blowing completely through a storage shed. Books, dolls, old toys, brewing equipment, along with sheet metal, tools, and wood exploded up into the air as if a detonation had occurred. I’d not initially seen the two bodies; they’d been wrapped in blankets. Not sure if it had been a murderer hiding his victims or a couple of innocents that had found an easy way out, hidden among their treasures, not wanting to deal with the difficulties this world presented. Whatever they had once been, they were long dead and the ripeness must have attracted some attention. They may have been rotting, but that did not prevent the zombies from descending on them. I didn’t like watching people eating popcorn; there was no way I was hanging around to watch zombies rip through putrid people meat. I’d seen enough humans eaten that I would never need to refresh the visual. I could basically pull up the rolling reel in my head whenever I needed to lose a few hours of sleep.

  “Bulkers,” I said as I came back into the main living room.

  “They’ll cut right through this tin can,” BT said. I’m thinking he immediately regretted saying the words aloud.

  “You been hanging with Justin a little too much?” I asked him, quietly trying to lighten a pretty tense situation. (For those who may have stumbled on to my later journals, my son has a proclivity for stating the obvious and was very early on nicknamed Captain Obvious, which he thoroughly dislikes.)

  “Running sounds pretty good now,” Gary said, once again popping the kitchen wall as he stood away from it.

  “Stop that,” I told him after the third time.


  It wasn’t long afterward, I would imagine the time it took to eat a couple of corpses, for the zombies to start their march again. Was this their new tactic? Surround an entire community and flush out the prizes? Wring the final drops of humanity from the fabric of life? It was safe to assume that some people had just stayed put where they had lived. That they had eked out a quiet existence so far. The possibility that the zombies knew this and were capitalizing on it, well, that just sucked. How long would it be until they had sufficient numbers to encircle someplace the size of Boston or New York? There might still be thousands of people holed up in there. People were even more fucked, if that was possible. How could we possibly counteract what they were doing? Even if we somehow pulled off a heroic stand like the Spartans against the Persians, we’d never kill enough of them to make a difference. They wouldn’t lose the appetite to fight like the Persians had; they had nothing to lose, nothing to live for. They would just keep coming, keep eating, their resolve was insurmountable–basically because they didn’t have any. They did what they did because they just did it. Would the fucking aphids that invaded your garden give two shits if you killed a million of their brethren in an attempt to save your crop?

  Nope, not at all. They would keep coming, happily munching away at your corn, cabbage, and cucumbers. “More for us!” their tiny brains would say. Individuals don’t matter to them, only their continued survival as a group. The zombies had a sort of hive mentality, at least they were developing one. As of yet, I’m not even sure they understood the concept of “survival.” They were like a pillbug rolling down a mountain; it did what it did, then it stopped and unrolled to eat. Zombies were approaching and exhibiting higher brain functions, and maybe someday they would wrestle with existential questions. Right now, though, all that mattered was for us to not become mobile home soufflé.

  “I’m terrified.” I thought my sister was talking to me, but she was moving in closer to BT; this was seriously going to take some getting used to. The army was advancing and their stench with them. It was not easing my trepidation about the robustness of the house with so much of the stink pouring in.