Those Left Behind

by Mark Tufo

  “Yeah, ‘cause that sounds good to me too, asshole. It’s an English cookie, you uncouth slob.”

  “You keep telling yourself that. I’d rather stay hungry.”

  “Your loss,” he said as he took a bite and almost as if by magic, Trip showed.

  “I smell Tam-Tams,” he said as he sidled up to BT, who was doing his best to move away.

  “If I give them to you will you go away?” BT asked, holding the package out.

  Trip snagged the package and disappeared as quickly as he’d come.

  “I really wanted those,” BT said, saddened.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Paul and I tripped?”

  “Was there ever a time when you didn’t party?”

  “When I was young? No man. I don’t know why I hit it so hard. Maybe a part of me knew how fucked up my adult life was going to be and I’d better do all the crazy living early.”

  “You don’t call this crazy?”

  “Yeah, but that was crazy-good, this is crazy-sucks.”

  “I’ll have to give you that,” he said.

  “You want to hear the story or not? I’m trying to distract you from losing your diarrhea enabling crackers.”

  “They are not diarrhea enabling…oh, forget it. Just tell me your story.”

  “I don’t remember dates well—I lost swaths of time back then. Have you ever partied so hard on a Friday that you didn’t wake up until Sunday?”

  “Mike, I’m pretty sure you had a problem.”

  “Damn right I did. You have no idea how pissed off I would get when I woke up only to realize I’d blown completely through a weekend night. When you’re in high school that’s a pretty big deal.”

  “Not necessarily what I was referring to. What did your parents think?”

  “Not around much by then...probably why I did it. No chance of getting caught.”

  “Ever hear of self-restraint?”

  “Sure. I didn’t eat your shit cookies, did I? And I’m hungry, too.”

  “How am I going to forget about the damn cookies if you keep bringing them up?” BT asked.

  “Fine. So it's fall in New England, maybe a week before Halloween. Air has that clean, crisp feel to it. The leaves have all changed; they haven’t fallen yet, but they’re dry and when the wind blows they rustle around...sounds a little like cookie wrappers.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Sorry. So anyway, by this time Paul’s family had moved. He’s like, a half hour away in a town called Stoneham.”

  “Fitting.”

  I stopped swinging my feet. “Yeah, kind of is...never thought about it. So it’s the weekend, and I had gone up to his mom’s house. He’d picked up some acid—or maybe it was mescaline, we did a lot of the microdot back then. Ever done it?”

  “Do I look stupid?”

  “Right, I’m not touching that one. So we pop the dot—takes about twenty minutes from ignition to lift off, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I get it.”

  “So we’re at his mom’s house and I’m not sure where she’s at. It sometimes amazes me to think about how wrapped up in our own lives we are during our teenage years that we have damn near no concern for others.”

  “Not every teenager is like that.”

  “Really? I’m honestly hoping you’re wrong, because back then I couldn’t have given less of a shit for the welfare and well-being of others. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “I’ll return the favor and defer from answering,” he said.

  “This next part man—I honestly still don’t know if I hallucinated it or it actually happened. But Paul’s mother was taking care of her own mother who was suffering from the early effects of dementia, or possibly Alzheimer's. Anyway, the buzz starts. A pressure forms around your eyes; vision begins to elongate and redefine objects with sharper definition and brighter colors. Your brain reroutes your thought patterns into new and interesting avenues. You should maybe have tried it. It’s never too late, you know; you’d probably be less mean.”

  “I like me; I don’t need drugs to realize that.”

  “I’m talking about for everyone else, man.”

  “Just finish your damn story.”

  “I just fucking started it,” I told him.

  “Then get on with it. I swear you only tell me this shit when there is absolutely nowhere else I can be.”

  “Duh. So like I said, it’s fall. It gets dark fairly early, so we were gearing up to head out—denim jackets packed with weed and beer.”

  “Acid wasn’t enough?”

  “You grow up under a rock BT? No, it’s not enough. Sometimes you need a little weed to smooth out a particular high spot and you drink the beer to keep an even keel and stay hydrated.”

  “Seems like a lot of maintenance for a high. Maybe you should have thought about staying sober.”

  “You are wrecking my story talking like my damn parole officer. You have no idea the incredible adventures we used to go on, and sometimes we never had to leave the basement. A ‘journey to the center of your mind’ type of thing. Pretty fucking liberating. You know, I kind of feel sorry for you now.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t end up like Trip.”

  “Maybe...but right now Trip’s eating a box of English cookies, enjoying watching an unlit candle burn while I’m sitting here with a true cynic, deathly afraid for the lives of my entire family,” I said as I reached up and grabbed his shoulder to know I meant him included.

  “Yeah, I get it. Keep going, maybe we can both forget about what’s outside for a few minutes.”

  “Right. So we’re just about ready to go and Paul gets the idea to bring some snacks with us in case we get hungry.”

  “I get the reason why you might want to bring snacks.”

  “I’m being thorough. If you’re going to give me shit about everything I did on a trip we’re going to have some problems.” BT just nodded so I kept going. “So Paul has these doors leading into the kitchen that have those two-way hinges so you can open them either way.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fine...you know what two-way hinges are. Anyway, he freezes in the doorway half in, half out from the kitchen and he’s like, ‘Yo, Talbot. You have to come over here.’ So I open the door a little wider and his grandmother is at the fridge. No biggie, right? Normal stuff. Until I look at what she’s doing. She had a squeeze bottle of mustard and was squeezing it so mustard was squirting up and out like a tiny condiment geyser. And then she was lapping it up in mid-stream like a cat might. She’s getting mustard all over the floor, the fridge, and her night shirt. Paul and I are transfixed. What are we supposed to do? We both backed out of there like we had stumbled into our parents’ room while they were fooling around.”

  “Have you ever?”

  “Oh fuck no.” I almost gagged. “I would have needed a lot more drugs to burn that out of my head. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s what happened with you, isn’t it? Is that what went wrong?”

  “Shut the hell up, man. So I take it you left his grandmother in that state?”

  “Dude, what part of two stoned-off-their-gourd teenagers seems capable of dealing with a senior citizen in the throes of a psychotic snap?”

  “Yeah, she was probably better off on her own.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. So we head out of the house without the snacks.”

  “Oh, the horror,” Trip interjected, he’d showed back up.

  “Trip gets it,” I said.

  BT merely grunted and would not budge an inch when Trip tried to squeeze in between the two of us. Eventually, he sat on the floor right in front of us. Almost immediately, he peeled off his sneakers and socks and started digging dirt and debris from underneath his toenails.

  “I think I’d rather see the mustard fountain again. Okay, so Paul and I head out. The wind is blowing hard and the trees are rubbing against each other, sounds like old bones scraping at their coffin lids. It was pretty fucking creepy. We walk down
the street maybe a half mile or so and we’re in the center of Stoneham. Not really much there, a few small shops, all of it closed up at this particular time of night. Even the one store we were hoping was open, was closed. It was called Treasures and Trash. For most of the year it had small, handmade local crafts—candles, bath shit, that kind of thing. But come Halloween they had costumes and this huge display of masks that took up an entire wall.”

  “People use masks all the time to hide their identity.” Trip pulled his big toe out of his mouth long enough to say.

  “Please tell me you’re not biting your toenails?” BT asked.

  I just kept going on with my story, the alternative was to be completely grossed out by Trip’s grooming habits. “We stared through that window for at least an hour. They had Jimmy Carter, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Freddie Krueger, Jason Voorhees, it was unreal. I swore they were moving. It’s a pretty surreal experience to be in that condition while also looking at an entire wall of faces—of real and fictional characters. When they started to meld into each other we both kind of figured it might be best to move on. It was a weird night for sure. Stoneham isn’t the center of the universe by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s also not a secluded little villa either. That night there was no one out, no one driving by, everyone was buttoned up like there was a storm coming.”

  “Dad,” Justin said from the kitchen. “I think the storm is here.”

  “You didn’t hear that whole part about me tripping did you?” I asked as I got off the table and joined him.

  “Naw...not a word. Who cleaned up the mustard?”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” Trip had stood and hopped into the kitchen with us; he was holding his left leg up and dipping his head down trying to get at the hangnail he was causing.

  “That’s it? That’s the story?” BT asked in a huff. “You have this whole build up and then you stare at masks?”

  “Of course that isn’t it! There was all sorts of mayhem and super juicy parts! But I think maybe we should deal with this first.”

  “What if you die, though? How am I going to find out what happened?”

  “I told Tracy the edited version once. You should be able to tell where I toned down the story a bit and you can fill in your own thoughts. If you really stretch the limits of your imagination you might just start to hit on some of the things we did that night.”

  “You suck, Talbot. Make me listen to your lame ass stoner story and then don’t even have the good graces to give me a satisfactory conclusion.”

  “One of the most intense nights of my entire life.”

  “I reiterate my last point,” BT said quietly as he looked out the window with me.

  A couple dozen zombies were shambling into the yard through the thick, overgrown brush that surrounded the place.

  “Everyone upstairs.” I was walking around, tapping them on the shoulder and pointing to the ladder. “Shut off your lights and go—quickly and quietly.”

  “We can take them,” BT said, following me around.

  “Probably, but this is just a hunting party. We kill them, the main force comes. They don’t discover anything here, and maybe they leave.”

  “Look at you going all thinky-think.”

  “Thinky-think?” I questioned him.

  “This is your fault. Listening to your stories about getting fucked up is screwing with my mind...like a contact-high.”

  “Sure, whatever you say. Justin, when you get upstairs have your mother put the babies and the kids in the pinger room.”

  “Okay,” he said as he climbed.

  The zombies had a new weapon—echo locators, or the terrifying tweeters—whatever you want to call them. It was all anyone could do to keep from pissing their pants when those zombies broadcast their signal. It was brutal when you knew what it was. For babies and kids, it was beyond their ability to not react. We figured the pingers would come and had set up the only defense we had, a room where the crying of babies might not be heard. Off the master bedroom was a large walk-in closet. We had hung sheets all around it and used every mattress and chair cushion in hopes of creating a natural sound barrier. The signal would still get to the babies, but the idea was they would not be able to send a response the zombies could detect.

  Carol, Tracy, Nicole, all the kids, both babies, Justin, and eventually Trip all made it into the closet. I’d no sooner heard the mattress slide in place over the door when I almost screwed everything up by screaming out. The ping had rocketed inside my brain cavity, threatening to drop me to my knees or put me on my ass. There was more than one of them out there—it was a continual barrage for maybe seventeen days...or the longest minute of my entire life. I had to wonder if this assault was causing micro-hemorrhages in my brain. Like it was getting stabbed repeatedly with those little plastic cocktail garnish swords. Got to figure that would be a pretty bad way of going out. When I looked around, there were more faces with gritted teeth than I had ever encountered at one time. Looked like a constipation festival in full swing.

  “What the fuck is that smirk for?” BT managed to push through clenched teeth.

  “I was thinking that everyone looks like they’ve been eating blocks of cheese for a week and is now paying the price. Too bad Trip ate all your cookies.”

  I think BT wanted to punch me; then as he looked around at everyone, his arm relaxed, as did the clenching of his mouth. Eventually, his mouth upturned in a smile.

  “See?” I asked.

  “Fucking Talbot. The only guy I will ever know who, while we’re being actively hunted by ravenous monsters, can still make me laugh about it.”

  The babies were crying, that was for sure, but it seemed sufficiently muted that the sound should have no way of reaching the zombies and the babies certainly weren’t going to be startled to run like jackrabbits. After that horrifying brain quivering minute, the pinging stopped. It was like having the sun break through after a tornado had just destroyed the entire town. Hopes rose with its ending and just as quickly were swept away like the smoky mirage that hope was. First one window broke downstairs, then another. There was a distant tinkle of glass; I had to think the basement windows were being broken out as well.

  “Why?” Tiffany asked.

  I was with her on this question; we’d given them no reason to think anybody was here, and still they looked. We could clearly hear them; it was a vocalization of groans and growls. There was enough pitch and inflection that it was a logical step to believe they were communicating. Mad Jack had been sitting at a table, I think trying to figure a way to get juice to the satellite device. When the zombies began to break through, he had a change of heart about where he wanted to be. That was all well and fine until he knocked the corner of the table and sent one of the knick knacks rolling off the side. Fate couldn’t have made the previous owner of this domicile a cubist, nope, this person seemed very much into spherical objects. It was dark, but not dark enough. I watched in agonizingly slow-motion as the baseball-sized piece of crystal rolled to the edge of the table where it would drop to a sudden, spectacular end. The moment it struck the floor, we would be exposed. I was on the move; wasn’t going to matter, I was sure to be woefully short of the mark.

  It approached the edge of the desk and hadn’t thought twice about letting gravity be its dictator. Two inches...just close enough to make it a game, but one with a fixed outcome—like, yeah, I’d rallied late in the fourth quarter during garbage time, but corporate bets had been laid against me. The ball dropped. I dove. One inch—one inch from the floor a wizened, skin-cracked hand shot out in front of my nose; bony fingers cupped the ball before it could strike. A fucking miracle play. I looked up the arm and right into the face of Deneaux who was smiling at me like she’d laid a flush over my full house. I think I finally got what people mean by “my blood ran cold.”

  “Shh…” she said as she raised a finger to her mouth.

  I felt like a child that had been given a reprieve from the monster in t
he closet as it had returned from its rampage of slaughtering and sating its bloodlust with the neighborhood kids. I pulled up short, was lucky I didn’t rupture an Achilles' tendon and maybe an ACL and MCL for good measure. There were monsters outside, that was for certain, but they were also inside, as well. After my heart stopped threatening to break through my rib cage I thought about smacking MJ up the side of the head for putting me through that. He was still holding his clenched fists up high and his face was pinched, as he waited for the resultant crash of the globe. When it didn’t happen, he comically opened one eye to look around and see if he could figure out what saved him and maybe take a peek to see if anyone had laid witness to what he’d done.

  Deneaux took care of lightly smacking MJ in the head before thrusting the ball into his hand.

  “Dumbass,” she’d whispered into his ear loud enough for me to hear.

  He looked as mortified, as you’d expect. Once our little round of excitement was over we hunkered down for the real terrifying part. We waited as the zombies began their assault on the house in earnest. They were banging against the outside walls, the doors, and smashing every last panel of glass. Nobody dared move or say anything, though we were all wondering why they were doing this. As far as any of us knew, zombies weren’t known for their sense of smell. They worked primarily on eyesight and none of us were in view. Tommy shrugged when I looked over to him.

  The babies had stopped crying, but I could hear Angel whimper a couple of times as the glass broke. There were some thuds, and I had a hard time figuring out what was going on until Travis came over.

  “I think they’re in the basement.”

  That sent chills up my spine. That added a new wrinkle as they were going to be trapped there. There was a possibility the zombies would stop attacking what we hoped they would come to believe was an empty house, but now we had at least two, maybe more, trapped zombies in the basement and they could communicate telepathically. Not far, was the general consensus, but we also weren’t sure. Killing them before they could get a distress signal out was going to be tricky. One problem at a time, though. We weren’t anywhere near crossing that bridge just yet. The noise around the house began to ease, subside, then it just about stopped. I thought I was going to be able to catch a breath, then I heard what could only be described as a bull elephant in full-on attack mode coming through the brush.