Those Left Behind

by Mark Tufo

  Chapter 13

  MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 10

  I must have dozed at some point. When I woke, the bright shiny sun was streaming through one of the window slots.

  “Stopped a couple of hours ago,” my sister told me.

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “No. Went out and found more cigarettes, though.”

  My stomach turned a little thinking about doing one this early in the morning.

  “I hope you didn’t want any.”

  “I’ll be good until next month,” I told her truthfully. “You hear anything?”

  “Nope. The thunder and the explosions stopped before the rain did.”

  “Well, I guess we go find BT and get back to the rest of the clan.”

  Had to squint and shield my eyes as I exited the house, the sun was shining so brightly and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Hard to imagine that yesterday it had rained enough to fill storm drains. The roadway was completely dry; the fields off to our right still looked plenty water logged. As for the woods on our left, I had no desire to head back that way whatever their condition. While I was pondering which way to go, Lyndsey was already heading down the road.

  “You do know that’s the way the zombies went, right?” I asked when I caught up.

  “I plan on taking a sharp left as soon as the road allows.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s the best idea. I mean, staying in the open like this.”

  “Until I was sixteen years old and got my license you used to follow me around constantly. Without question, without my asking, even when I threatened to punch your lights out. And now, now you’re going to be a pain in the ass about it? How about we just do this for old times’ sake?”

  “Well, when you put it like that.”

  She smiled and hugged my waist. I knew why she didn’t want to go back in the woods. At some point, we would come to where Steve had fallen and she didn’t want to. What more, what better, reason do you need? We hadn’t gone more than a half a mile when we got our leftward traveling highway. I want to say it was Route 62 or something, but the sign was fairly shot up. There was only left or right as far as wheeled vehicles could go. The zombies were now traveling off-road to whatever the source of the noise had been. Didn’t bother me where their final destination was going to be as long as it wasn’t here.

  The longer we stayed on this road, the more my nerves began to fray. It was open on either side of us for a couple hundred yards; if a car came, we would never have enough time to get to safety. I’d brought up finding a safer route to travel and my sister unequivocally said “no” each and every time; said she wanted to feel the complete sun on her body, to feel it wash over her and soak through, much like the rain had. She mumbled that it would take weeks of being in full sun to wash off the stink of that rain. I had that feeling to a point, but it was gonna be a bitch laying out in the sun if we were getting eaten by zombies or shot up by assholes. Another hour or so passed, we hadn’t said much. I had my head on a swivel, constantly looking around for any signs of a threat. My sister was playing Sun God Rah every so often, by that I mean laying her head back and putting her arms out to her sides as if she could catch more of the beams that way.

  Shit, maybe she could; she seemed fairly content. I had my concerns about where her head was. This really wasn’t the time to pretend you were in Cancun on Spring Break. When I first saw the shimmering silhouettes in the roadway up ahead, I figured them for zombies—a couple of holdouts from the massive horde. Why wouldn’t I? Normal people did not just walk down the streets anymore, regardless of how nice it was outside. Lyndsey seemed only mildly interested in our approaching guests.

  “I never figured you for a worrier, Mike,” she said. She calmly pressed the magazine release to look at her loaded bullets and then slapped it back into place. “There’s only two.”

  “Only takes one,” I answered, though I was happy she was coming back to a better semblance of vitality. The zombies did not start running at the point where they should have been easily able to see us. They did something far worse. They held up guns. “Well damn, that’s something new.”

  “What?” Lyndsey asked.

  “Zombies with guns. Now, that’s bad news.”

  “Um, Mike, maybe they’re not zombies.”

  It took longer than I’m willing to admit to take off my zombie-colored glasses. I was just so expecting them to be zombies I almost couldn’t picture anything else. Two lone zombies were actually way better than two armed humans—leaps and bounds better. Meeting decent people this far into the thick of it was unlikely. Not as unlikely as, say, screwing a super model or winning the lottery, but the odds were clearly not in your favor. We all had our guns up in the ready position as we drew closer together. Was like the world’s slowest game of chicken as we all walked down the center line and directly at each other. The way we were going, I wouldn’t doubt if we collided and the entire troupe burst into flame from the contact.

  “You should maybe not smile like that.”

  “Like what?” I asked my sister.

  “You have this far off look and a lopsided grin that makes you look like you should be holding crayons instead of a rifle.”

  I was working hard on wiping the grin off my face. Weird how sometimes under really stressful situations that can be difficult. The more I concentrated on looking stern, the more I wanted to smile. Looking at the damn barrel of the .45 the man was holding should have been enough to fix that. Sun was glinting off the fat, chromed barrel. The man was tall, couple of inches over six feet, lanky...no, not that. Wiry. He had strength in that thinner frame. It was his eyes, those pale blue eyes, that caused me more concern as we got even closer. They were cold, calculating—I didn’t read negotiation in them. If he felt threatened, his first call of business was to shoot. I was thinking that the only reason he hadn’t was because of the reach of his weapon.

  The woman with him had a hunting rifle, a much better tool to reach out and touch someone. In terms of firepower, though, the advantage was ours.

  “That’s far enough,” I shouted at about two hundred feet. It was a damn near impossible shot with a pistol, whereas my sister and I could spray the entire area.

  “What are you doing on this road?” old blue eyes shouted, his pistol still up.

  “Wow, this one has balls,” I said softly to my sister. Louder, I said to him: “Road construction crew. We’re filling pot holes! What are you doing here?”

  He looked over to the woman he was with. I felt we were a handful of heartbeats from slugging this one out with bullets.

  “Following the herd,” he replied as he looked back to us.

  “Most people head the other way,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well, we have an interest in where they go.”

  “By all means then, don’t let us stop you.” I was motioning for him to get to the far side of the road so they could pass. “You might want to be careful. Whatever the z-pack was heading towards sounded a lot like artillery.”

  “Blanks,” the woman blurted out before the guy could stop her.

  “And you know that how?” I prodded.

  “None of your concern,” the man said.

  “We actually might have a vested interest in this.”

  “How so?” I noticed that the man tended to punctuate each word by moving his head forward and the barrel of his pistol, though completely menacing, was extended far from his body and pointing somewhat to the ground as if my boots were deeply offending him. Now, maybe you don’t know much about stand-off etiquette, but this is an unpredictable stance. My senses notched up and my grip tightened.

  “We came across that horde; got separated from our group,” I said.

  “We’re moving them away,” the woman answered.

  “Maggie,” the man said, getting her to stop her explanation.

  “Those zombies were pulled our way,” my sister said.

  “So all of those zombies herding, being drawn to the nois
e, that’s all your doing?” I asked. I think he saw how pissed off I was getting; he said nothing. “My sister lost her husband, we almost lost our lives. You owe us.”

  “Owe you?” The man cocked his head to the side.

  “You’re starting to look mighty hostile, friend,” I told him.

  “I’m not your friend.” He felt the need to state fact.

  Again with the head tilting and bobbing. I know I’m a suit or two short of a deck, but this guy was playing with blank cards. I got a sense he would do just about anything to make sure he and Maggie were safe. I got the motive, I did. I just thought he might easily go down darker paths to get his point across. Shoot first, tell his adversary to fuck off, later.

  “Put the gun down.” I put my rifle up to my shoulder, I had him center mass. He started looking over to his companion. “Stop!” I yelled in an authoritative voice. “I’ve seen that action a hundred times, trying to distract me by looking away and by the time you look back you plan on shooting. I’m telling you right now, friend, I will put a three round burst in your chest before you ever have the chance to pull that trigger. I can hit a man from five hundred yards with this weapon; I’m pretty sure you are significantly closer than that. You manage to hit me with that pistol from this distance and I would have to think that God has a personal vendetta against me and is using you as the instrument of my destruction. So what do you think, friend?”

  “It’s Rick...my name is Rick.”

  “Okay, Rick, put the damn gun down. We go about our merry little way and you go yours. I hope you catch up to the zombie horde and they just gobble up your sweet disposition.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “How about I just blow Maggie away? Will that change your mind?”

  “Mike?” my sister asked softly.

  “Relax,” I said to the side. “I’m not going to shoot her unless I have to.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel so much better.”

  “Keep your gun up on them. Just because we’re not too keen on shooting them doesn’t mean they don’t want to shoot us. The ones that have survived this long don’t take many chances.”

  “Apparently, they never met you,” she said.

  “Are you fucking channeling BT, right now?”

  “Right now, I’m more scared than I was at any point yesterday.”

  “We’ll get through this. Rick,” I yelled down the road. “I’m two pounds of pressure from laying Maggie all over the highway. Put the fucking guns down. Now.”

  He put his hands up then leaned over to place the weapon on the roadway. Maggie did the same.

  “Now take a couple of steps back,” I told him. He hesitated again. “Fuck, man, if I wanted you dead we wouldn’t even be talking right now.” As he backed up I moved forward, always keeping the barrel trained on him. He looked at his damned gun a dozen times, weighing his chances of picking it up and firing before I could. Seen too many movies, this one. “I’d like to say it’s nice to meet you, but you seem like a dick. Lyndsey, check his pack.” He had a small beige backpack on. My sister went behind him and rooted around in it.

  “Energy bars,” she said, holding them up triumphantly.

  “Grab his canteen.” I was five feet away with my barrel pointing at his heart. “We’re grabbing some water and a small meal, and yes, you do fucking owe us that. If not for your little zombie relocation plan, we wouldn’t have had to run all fucking night and then almost drown in a storm drain.”

  “And you owe me this,” my sister said as she pulled back and punched up, striking him in the chin. “Fuck! That hurt!” she said as she waved her hand around. “That’s for my husband.”

  His lip split as she twisted his head to the side. His gaze, when it came back to us, looked as cold as frozen steel. My sister wisely stepped back.

  “I’m going to walk backward until we get over that little rise, if at any time before I clear that hill you reach for your guns I’m going to consider that an act of aggression.”

  He put his hands down almost immediately as we left but he did not go for the gun. I do not think Lyndsey and I would have survived the encounter had we not had the advantage. I would wonder long and hard if the smarter thing to do would have been to shoot them on that road.

  Later we stopped and stood in that road for a bit. Wasn’t sure where the hell we were and wasn’t like I could pull up Google maps. There were times, long ago, when I had wanted to toss technology into a fast moving stream. This wasn’t one of them. We were miles from where we needed to be, that was all the information I had to go on. We needed to get out of this new development and back onto an established roadway so I could get my bearings. My sister looked exhausted, scared, and she was obviously suffering.

  “I’m not sure I believe he’s gone,” she said as I looked around.

  Did I go with the syrupy sweet, semi-nauseating platitudes like: “he’ll always live on in your heart?” or “as long as you remember him, he’ll always be with you.” Neither meant shit. They were words and they could only make you feel so much better. Anybody who’s ever lost someone knows there are no words that can take the place of someone’s smile, their warm touch; their eyes on yours. Those were statements that only comforted the speaker. They could not begin to unravel the tangle of devastated emotions and confusion that loss brings home. It hadn’t hit her completely yet, but in a few days, she was going to be in pretty bad shape when she realized he truly was gone, that he really wasn’t there. We’d be there for her, I’d be there for her, too, but in the only way one can be for someone that is suffering, for comfort. Unfortunately, there’s just no way to crawl into someone’s head and fix all that ails them. Modern science tried its best with a variety of pills, that’s for sure. And then there’s always the self-medicating route, which I traveled a fair way down when I thought I had real problems. What a fucking joke.

  I wonder how that old Mike would have dealt? Would he have risen to the challenge or drowned himself in a sea of pills and booze. Has my supposed intestinal fortitude always been there and the Marines just shined it up and polished it a bit, or did they have to build it from scratch on an assemblage of battered, scavenged parts? Maybe it wasn’t something I needed to worry about right now.

  “You ready to move on?” I asked my sister. Sure, it had two meanings. She picked up on it.

  “Yes and no,” was her response as we started to walk.

  “I’m sorry, sis. I truly am.”

  She reached out and grabbed my hand. “None of this is your fault, Mike and I’ll never for one moment think that.”

  She was letting me know that unlike Ron, she wouldn’t begin to harbor a bitterness toward me. I was grateful; I was. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t manufacture my own guilt, as usual. I’ll decide eventually that somewhere along the line I should have sent him back or that there was more that I could have done. Hell, maybe there was.

  “I’ll make sure Jess understands that, too.” She squeezed my hand and we continued to walk. “You remember when we were young and I smashed that frozen pita bread over your head?”

  “Not sure how I could forget.”

  “I’m glad I did that,” she smiled.

  “Here I thought I was going to get an apology thirty-something years in the making.”

  “No, I think it’s the first time I stopped thinking of you as my bratty little brother. That maybe you were a decent person all along.”

  “You got all that from smashing me in the head?”

  “Yeah, you know...you never called me on it. You never screamed at me or called me a name. That next week I snuck some of my friends into the house when mom and dad went out and we smoked cigarettes. Remember? You caught us, you and your friend...Eddie, right? That was his name?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought for sure you were going to tattle. I mean why wouldn’t you? I was an asshole to you and had done my best to even hurt you a little bit. I’d told my friends I was going to get grounded for a month. Then noth
ing. You didn’t ever bring it up with them or me. At first, I couldn’t figure out why. I thought maybe you were going to make me do your chores for a while as a way to keep your mouth shut. But nothing, Mike. It was then I think I figured there was something special about you.” She gave me a hug. “How come?”

  “How come I didn’t rat you out, you mean?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It was the brain damage from the pita bread. I’d forgotten about you, your friends, and the cigarettes the second I got my baseball glove from the garage and got out of that cloud filled space.”

  “Should have maybe hit you twice.”

  “I loved you back then, I love you now sis. I would never do anything deliberately to get you in trouble or harm you. You did a good enough job all on your own without me interfering. I didn’t have to say anything anyway because the way you behaved you were bound to get caught eventually. You got busted the next week making out with Davey, if I remember correctly.”

  “I remember Davey.”

  “Yeah, he had that gig as the Clearasil before-photo poster boy.”

  “Shut up.” She shoved me. “I’ve got something to tell you, Mike, and I hope you don’t think any less of me.”

  “Would be hard to think any less of you, sis.”

  I know she was thinking about other things and hadn’t been paying complete attention to what I had to say, probably was building the appropriate resolve to spill what she needed to say, so it took her more than a few seconds to realize that I’d just given her a little jab.

  “Too bad it wasn’t a roll of frozen dough. That would have done so much more damage. Are you going to listen or not?”

  “I’m sorry, go on.”

  “The day the zombies came I had been coming back from my lawyer’s office; I’d filed for divorce.”

  “Whoa, damn! I didn’t know.”

  “No one did—not even Steve.”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I loved Steve. He was a decent man, great father, and provider for our family. I just wasn’t in love with him.”