by Bryan Smith
Oscar frowned. “Why me?”
Kyle hooked a thumb in the direction of the recently revived woman, who was just now woozily getting to her feet. “Because I’m gonna have to lift her up and have you pull her up onto the roof. I’ll be the one doing the heavy lifting. I just need your help getting her up there for me. Can you do that?”
Oscar shrugged. “Sure. Of course. Who is she, by the way?”
“Wife number six. Carla, I think her name is.”
“You think?”
Kyle laughed. “Yeah, man, I’m pretty sure. All right, let’s make this shit happen.”
After shrugging again, Oscar climbed up on the fridge and stood there precariously a moment while getting his balance, holding his arms out to either side to help keep him from falling over. As soon as he felt he was steady enough, he reached up and gripped the edge of the opening. Grunting with the effort, he began to haul himself up. Kyle helped by gripping him hard by the ankles and giving him an upward shove. In another moment, he was through the opening and on the roof. His heart was hammering in his chest as he took a look around and saw the massed hordes of the dead. They were everywhere he looked, with nary a living person left anywhere. Strangely, many were now much less frantic than earlier. They were shuffling and shambling about, swaying on their feet and sometimes falling awkwardly over. Whatever strange energy was animating them had its limits, apparently.
Kyle was yelling at him from inside the trailer.
Snapping out of his momentary trance, Oscar knelt at the edge of the open skylight and took hold of Kyle’s wife under her arms as she was lifted through the opening. Once he had a secure hold on her, he scooted carefully backward, moving slowly in fear of knocking into something that’d put him off-balance. He didn’t want to fuck up and go rolling over the side of the trailer with deliverance from this nightmare so close at hand. In another couple moments, however, he had her safely out on the roof. Before he could even finish heaving a sigh of relief, Kyle had hauled himself up through the opening, joining them.
The three of them spent the next few minutes sitting there and observing the shambling sea of dead things. The woman whose name was maybe Carla rested her head against her famous husband’s shoulder. At the same time, she reached for Oscar, putting a hand on his crotch. He gasped softly in surprise and moved her hand away. She immediately put it in the same spot again.
And squeezed.
Oscar again moved her hand and scooted out of range.
Kyle laughed. “That’s Kari for you. Oh, wait. That’s her name. Kari, not Carla.” He laughed again. “Anyway, she’ll fuck anything at any time under any circumstances. You gotta love her for that.”
Oscar frowned, glancing at him. “You do?”
Kyle shrugged. “Yeah. Whatever, man. Someday she’ll be an ex, too, just like the rest of ’em, with yet another tell-all book to peddle. So what does it really matter?”
Despite everything, Oscar was able to laugh at this. “Wow. You’re such a romantic.”
“Don’t I know it. Fuck. Wish I’d brought along a couple more of those beers.”
With that sentiment, Oscar could wholeheartedly agree.
It wasn’t much longer before they began to hear the rotors of the approaching copter. As soon as the craft appeared as a speck on the distant horizon, the three of them got to their feet. Oscar’s excitement soared as it rapidly drew closer. Not so long ago, he’d firmly believed all hope was lost. He’d never see any of his colleagues, friends, or family again. And now here he was, mere minutes from being transported away from this catastrophe.
“Hey, Oscar?”
Oscar glanced over at Kyle while still keeping a hand to his brow to reduce the glare of the bright morning sun. “Yeah?”
Kyle smiled. “You remember that bad review you gave our comeback album a few years ago?”
Oscar glanced at him again, confusion pulling at his features. “Um, yeah. I wouldn’t call it bad. It was more mixed than anything. Um . . . why bring that up now?”
By now the copter was close enough they had to shout at each other to be heard over the buzzing rotors. In another couple moments, it would be directly overhead.
Kyle leaned close and shouted his parting words, “Because fuck you, that’s why!”
Oscar tried flinching away when he realized what was about to happen, but by then it was too late. The singer had a solid grip on his arm and was spinning about, preparing to launch him over the side of the trailer. He tried planting his feet to halt the momentum, but it was no good. The old singer was just too strong. He went over the side of the trailer and for an all-too-brief moment was airborne above the seething zombie masses. In that last moment before his inevitable earthward descent, he imagined being magically gifted with the ability of flight. He imagined flying away into a golden sunset, safe from any threat of harm and forever far away from anything like the horrors he’d witnessed over the last couple hours or so.
Then he fell and hit the ground.
The last thing he saw as the dead fell upon him and began tearing and ripping at his flesh was the copter flying away—and Kyle Bile leaning out the side of the craft and waggling an extended middle finger.
NINE
THE TOP OF THE HIPPIE kid’s head blew apart as Darlene unloaded both barrels on him, spraying blood and brains everywhere. With the booming report of the weapon still ringing in her ears, she gave the chair a kick and sent his corpse tumbling to the floor. The others were still cringing at the blast of the shotgun as she hurriedly retrieved Purvis’s rifle from where he’d dropped it on the cot. She needed to act fast and didn’t have time to reload the antique shotgun. Once she had hold of the rifle, she drew a bead on Purvis and shot him in the side of the head.
Jasper squawked in surprise and was slow to react as she worked the bolt lever to chamber another round and shifted her aim in his direction. He was blinking slowly and his mouth was hanging open as he watched Purvis drop and begin to bleed out on the floor. Then he looked at Darlene with a squinting expression of confusion, as if completely unable to comprehend the sight of his sister aiming a weapon at him.
Darlene had learned long ago to be ruthless and unforgiving in situations like this. You didn’t want to hesitate or have second thoughts, because the person on the other side of the equation wasn’t about to forget you’d just pointed a gun at them, especially if that person was someone who’d loved or trusted you.
She squeezed the trigger and a nickel-sized hole appeared dead-center in Jasper’s forehead. Blood and brains jumped from the bigger hole at the back of his head, depositing her brother’s essence on the already heavily blood-spattered floor. He toppled over, sprawling across the dead hippie’s corpse with the hem of the frilly blue dress riding up over his flabby thighs.
Eunice watched her warily for a moment before saying, “You done now?”
Darlene hocked up a loogie and spat it on her brother’s face. “Reckon I am. At least until it’s time to start shooting zombies.”
Eunice shook her head. “Zombies. Goddamn. That’s really what those fuckers are, huh?”
Darlene grunted. “Looks that way.”
She lowered the rifle and approached Eunice, pulling her into a tight embrace and then kissing her hungrily for a moment. The other woman’s arms went around her waist and settled on her ass, clutching at it tightly while Darlene probed her mouth with her tongue. She slid a hand between her naked lover’s legs and inserted a finger in her vagina.
Eunice gasped. “Oh, god . . .”
Darlene smiled and broke the clinch, pulling gently away from her. “Ain’t got time for that. We’ve gotta get ourselves out of this clusterfuck first.”
Eunice took a pointed look around at all the bloody carnage. Her expression conveyed a level of surprise that fell short of actual shock. She’d witnessed her share of bloodletting and abominable acts over the last few years, probably dozens of them since that summer day when Darlene and her brothers had snatched her from
the festival grounds. Back then she’d been an ardent LGBTQ activist who at times found herself associating with elements of hippie culture. She liked the music, and tagging along with friends for a weekend of partying and positive vibes sounded like a great time. Now she barely resembled the person she’d been in those days, having been transformed by a period of relentlessly brutal slavery. She was constantly threatened with death or worse if she ever failed to do as she was told. This meant she sometimes had to maim and kill other people not much different from the person she’d been. In time, she even became a semi-willing participant in the vile deeds perpetrated by the unhinged siblings, acquiring a taste for it that would’ve appalled her former self. Murders galore and epic torture and rape sessions that sometimes went on for days before the victims finally expired. Experiencing anything akin to genuine shock was a rare thing these days. It almost never happened anymore.
But this . . . this came close.
She shook her head and looked at Darlene. “Mind explaining why you did this at this particular point in time?”
Darlene shrugged. “This is what we were always gonna do someday. We talked about it, remember?”
Eunice wasn’t sure what Darlene was talking about at first, but then a dim memory of a night the two of them spent in a sleeping bag outdoors came back to her. This was several months back, at least. The memory returned in wispy, hard-to-grasp fragments. Not surprising, given how drunk they’d been that night. Other substances had been involved, too, of course. It was just the two of them, holding each other in the clearing and staring up at the stars. The brothers had been off somewhere else, probably prowling the countryside in their pickup truck looking for victims. Darlene told her she wished it could always be this way. Just the two of them. She vowed to make it happen someday.
Well, “someday” was today, apparently.
The youngest of the murderous siblings had always displayed reckless and impulsive tendencies. Eunice long ago lost count of the number of batshit crazy things Darlene had done over the last three to four years. The girl never went into explicit detail about it, but she occasionally dropped hints about a background of abuse at the hands of her siblings and deceased parents that went back to early childhood. Even knowing this, the abrupt gunning down of her brothers was about the last thing Eunice had been expecting.
Processing it mentally required a few moments.
Darlene smirked. “Yeah, guess you were pretty fucked up that night and maybe don’t remember it so well. Let this be a lesson. I mean what the fuck I say, by god.”
The comment elicited a small smile from Eunice. “Yeah, I guess you fucking do.” She sighed. “Well, what now?”
Darlene’s smirk became a smile. “I’ll show you what now. Hold this.”
She handed Eunice the rifle, grabbed hold of an edge of the rickety old table, and pulled it clear of the threadbare rug beneath it, dislodging many of the empty bottles and cans crowding its surface and causing them to clatter to the floor. Next she pulled away the rug and tossed it aside, revealing the hidden trap door beneath.
Eunice had been under the impression the siblings no longer had much in the way of things they kept from her, but it appeared she’d been wrong about that. She guessed there was a cellar under that door. She’d never had a clue it was there. How they’d kept its existence from her all this time was a mystery, seeing how she’d been in the company of one or more of them at all times, but she guessed they had their ways. You didn’t survive in the serial-killing game as long as they did without having a gift for trickery.
Darlene plucked the rusted iron ring opener out of the recessed plate at the edge of the door and hauled the door up, the old hinges creaking loudly. Once she had the door fully upright, she stood at the edge of the opening and glanced at Eunice. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
She began to slowly and carefully descend the steps into the dark cellar. As soon as she’d disappeared into the darkness, Eunice did an impulsive thing of her own. She hurriedly circled around to the other side of the trap door and kicked at it from behind. It maddeningly stayed where it was despite how hard she’d kicked it with her bare foot. She immediately tried again, but the result was the same. The door wouldn’t budge. Instead of kicking it again, she grabbed hold of the top edge of the door and began rocking it back and forth in a desperate effort to disengage the mechanism holding it up.
“What the hell’s going on up there?” Darlene yelled at her from the cellar.
Her heart hammering, Eunice abruptly ceased her effort to lower the door and trap Darlene in the cellar. The last thing she wanted was Darlene coming back up those steps in time to see what she was trying to do, because she definitely feared her more than the encroaching horde of dead things.
“Nothing,” she called back, raising her voice enough to be heard from up here. “Just those things making a racket.”
“Well, hold tight,” came Darlene’s reply. “I’m about to come up there with something that’ll take care of those fuckers once and for goddamn all.”
Eunice sighed heavily. “Okay.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d picked this moment of impending doom to finally rebel against her sole surviving captor. In all her time with Darlene and her brothers, she hadn’t attempted anything of the sort. Not even once. Her absolute terror of them and the potential of their sadistic wrath kept her from even considering it. Until this morning. Then suddenly the opportunity to imprison the last of them was right in front of her and she simply couldn’t resist.
It just happened. And now it was over and done.
A failed gesture of resistance.
And now she was once again resigned to spending what little remained of her life under Darlene’s thumb. She’d been coerced into becoming the girl’s lover through a process of years of brutalization and terror tactics, but the truth was Eunice hated her every bit as much as her far stupider brothers. Maybe more so, because of the false emotional intimacy she’d been forced to feign throughout their time together. The moments of pleasure she’d derived from the things they’d done together had only been possible via an exhausting process of psychological compartmentalization. Essentially, there were two versions of her living inside her head at the same time. Sometimes the lines between her two selves blurred to the point of indistinguishability, but other times the delineation abruptly became clear again. The latter was happening right now.
Feeling tired and suddenly unwilling to devote much more mental energy to worrying about the threat lurking outside the cabin, she leaned against the upright door, bracing her arms over the top edge and closing her eyes as she began to weep. She cried not for the grisly fate she was undoubtedly about to meet, but belatedly for the loss of the person she’d once been.
In the next moment, however, two things happened almost simultaneously. The pounding hand of one of the dead things broke through a window pane at the front of the cabin. And Eunice heard a click from somewhere near the base of the trap door’s opposite side. She gasped and jerked away from it as it fell away from her, slamming back into place with a loud thud. Darlene immediately called out to her again, but the sound was fainter now, her words unintelligible.
Eunice knew she had to act fast, without taking the time to think about what she was doing. She flipped the table over, sending more bottles and cans scattering across the floor as she dragged it back into place over the trap door, only now the table’s surface was braced against the door. Whether the table was heavy enough to prevent Darlene from pushing the door up and open again, she did not know. She was considering what else she might pile atop it to make it heavier when she heard a series of loud, rapid pops from somewhere beneath her. Then she saw the holes appearing in the floor and realized Darlene was firing some kind of automatic weapon up through the roof of the cellar in hopes of hitting her. She’d finally realized what Eunice was really up to and now she was trying to kill her.
In the same moment she realized this, she heard another clatte
r of breaking glass from the front of the cabin and one of the zombies finally came tumbling through the shattered window. It got awkwardly to its feet and began to stagger slowly in her direction. The thing’s flesh was a dark shade of purple. It looked rotten. In life, the reanimated dead thing had been a tall and skinny hippie kid, with long, blood-flecked hair hanging in his face. He wore bell-bottom jeans and a torn and bloodied Widespread Panic shirt. The hair and attire made him look a lot like the other hippie kid Darlene had murdered just minutes ago.
Another zombie spilled through the broken window.
And then another.
Soon enough, they’d overwhelm her.
She had to try to get out of here. Going out the front door was impossible. She’d never be able to push her way through the mass of them crowding the porch. The only other option was the back door. Maybe there were more of them back there, maybe a lot of them, but she had to try. She was turning in that direction when she felt a bullet penetrate the bottom of her right foot, causing her to cry out and pitch backward. More bullets punched through her flesh in multiple places as she crashed to the floor. The popping sounds from the cellar continued. Still more bullets ripped through her torso and continued their upward trajectory, making holes in the ceiling.
The shuffling, groaning zombies were closer now. She hoped consciousness would fade and disappear before they reached her.
That did not happen.
She was still cognizant a few moments longer as they tore into her with their hands and ripped into her flesh with their teeth. She screamed one last time, but did not struggle, having no strength left for that. The last thing she saw was a rotting corpse face lowering itself to her, filling the entirety of her field of vision in the instant before the thing tore loose a scrap of her cheek and gobbled it down.