by Mark Tufo
“Now you know.”
“Well I feel better,” I told him.
“I thought you would.”
“Oh one more thing, BT,” I said as I was going over to check the boys’ positions.
“Yeah?” His face serious now.
“You were attracted to me.” I didn’t stick around long enough to see his response. A tossed book clipped my heel; that would have to suffice.
“No firing until we’re sure,” I told Justin.
“Do we let them in?” he asked.
“I can’t imagine they’ll want in. First off, they’d have to get through our perimeter security.” Justin was looking at me strangely. “The zombies.”
“Oh.”
“And for what purpose? To check out some books? The risk is most definitely not worth the reward. It’s just some folks foraging,” I said hopefully.
For a few seconds, my bleaker imagination ran wild and I had visions of Eliza arisen from the dead to finish what she had started. I was fairly certain that wasn’t the case, though. I’d convinced Tommy that the best send-off for his sister was cremation by funeral pyre. Trust me when I say that I made sure that fire burned hot enough to return her to her most basic of vestiges. What was left wouldn’t have filled a pepper shaker. I checked that as well.
Engine noise began to echo off the small buildings that lined the road leading towards us. And then they were upon us. Two pick-up trucks sat side by side, their headlights illuminating the swirling mass of death and decay.
“It’s Uncle Ronny!” Justin cried.
“Some things never change,” Travis said to me, referring to his brother’s flair for the obvious.
“And sometimes I like it like that,” I told him. “Okay, everyone, he may pull that Gatlin gun out, so get ready to duck.” I wasn’t going to though. I loved that thing, and I wanted to watch it spit fire! “Alright…get ready,” I said when we heard a door open.
Zombies were beginning to move rapidly towards the two trucks. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand the delay in sending a savage lead curtain downrange.
“Any day!” I shouted.
“Oh! Hey, Mike!” Gary yelled, looking up in approximately my direction. The night was fairly well lit with a healthy half-moon rising, but it would have been difficult to see me recessed in a window even if it was full. He was lit up pretty good, though.
“Gary, you know there are zombies coming your way, right?” I asked, truly concerned.
He appeared to be muscling into some sort of backpack. I could hear other voices down there. I couldn’t make out the dialog, though.
Gary hefted the package onto his back like a rucksack and then secured a strap across his midsection. Although, where a rucksack was made of a canvas-like material and soft, this looked solid. Roughly the size of a spare tire if you were to stick a spare tire in a box for shipping. Suffice it to say, it was big.
Gary took two steps towards the library then quickly went back to the truck to grab his rifle. I smacked my forehead with my palm. Zombie apocalypse and he leaves his rifle behind. Now my heart was hammering. Gary was holding his rifle to his chest.
“Covering fire!” I shouted. “And be fucking careful!”
We opened with a hail of lead. Zombies collapsed to the ground as we shattered skull plates, scattering brains all over the front walkway. Yup, then I got a sick memory of an old commercial ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ If I hadn’t been so worried for my brother, I would have gladly enjoyed the dark humor.
“Gary, fucking shoot!” I yelled, watching in seemingly terrified slow motion as the zombies raced towards him. We couldn’t shoot the closest ones. With our angle, any bullet would come dangerously near to him.
When I thought all was lost, the zombies just…stopped. Gary had a nearly perfect bubble of protection around him. It was terrifying to watch. I now knew what the box housed on Gary’s back was, but to realize that your brother’s life rested solely on the soldering skills of a man who had named himself Mad-Jack…that was fucking scary.
“Cease fire!” I shouted, although that already seemed to be the case once everyone saw what I was looking at.
“Is he singing?” BT asked. “He is. What is that shit…REO Speedwagon? Why are you crackers always bat-shit crazy? You’d never see a black man tip-toeing through the zombies singing crappy 80’s music.”
“Hey, I like REO Speedwagon,” I told him.
“I’m sure you do.” He said it as an insult. I’m positive of it.
“And I’m not a cracker,” I said weakly.
“Uh-huh,” was his response. “Cracker ass cracker.”
“What the hell is he wearing?” Tracy asked, coming up beside me.
“Looks like a jumpsuit. Where the hell did he get a jumpsuit, and why?”
Well, I got the answer to the second part of my question soon enough as Gary moved into the stream of light radiating out from the front of the truck. It was difficult to see at first, and to be honest, it took my mind a few seconds to piece it all together. Over the left side of his chest was a stitched tag like the military would use; the name ‘Talbot’ clearly marked in white thread. It stood out against the gray possibly brown material of the jumpsuit. It was the patch on his right arm that gave me the most difficult time trying to discern. When it did, I nearly fell on my ass laughing so hard.
“What is it?” Tracy asked, wondering how I could find any humor in the situation we found ourselves in.
“Gary…” I started trying to get my laughing under control. “He’s…got…a zombie buster’s patch on!” And then I was howling all over again.
“I told you crackers were crazy!” BT shouted.
Even Tommy, who was almost always dour-faced lately, was smiling.
“Nice outfit, Uncle Gary!” Travis shouted.
“Thanks,” Gary replied, beaming.
“Any chance that’s an old Halloween costume?” Tracy asked me.
“Doubtful,” I told her.
“You know you really should have given me full disclosure about your family before I married you,” she said.
“We would have never been hitched if that was a prerequisite.”
“I should have put it in a pre-nup,” she said with all seriousness, never taking her eyes off of Gary.
“How’s it working?” Mad-Jack asked. He had his window rolled down a quarter of the way.
Gary gave him the thumbs-up. To my way of thinking, if he wasn’t getting eaten, then it was working.
“Mike, what did you do to my truck?” Ron asked with chagrin from the driver’s seat of the first truck.
“That not obvious to him?” BT asked me.
“I know, right?” The destroyed remains of ‘said’ truck were pinned on the handrail, leading up the main steps into the library. And anybody including a casual observer would note that the thing was destroyed.
I led off with “Ummm,” and then right into a smart-ass comment, “first prize at the demolition derby was a bucket of fried chicken…seemed like a fair trade.”
“You suck, Mike,” Ron intoned.
“I would have done it for that,” BT replied.
“Yup...definitely a pre-nup. Next time, I suppose.” Tracy shook her head.
“Next time?” But she was already heading away.
“Were there biscuits?” BT asked.
“What?” I didn’t even know what he was referring to.
“The prize, Mike, the damn prize! Did it come with biscuits and gravy?” BT asked, clearly agitated.
I was shaking my head. “There was no…” BT’s face began to contort to one of anger. “Err…I was saying there was no mashed potatoes, but tons of biscuits and gravy.” He relaxed at that point, a smile creeping across his face, his eyes half-closed as he remembered some past meal. “And I’m the crazy one,” I said, making sure that he couldn’t hear me.
“Uncle Gary, you’re going to have to go to your left. There’s a fire escape and the doorway is
on the second floor,” Justin yelled to him.
Gary looked up. I could see the pained expression on his face.
“How heavy is that thing?” I asked him.
“I had to use two car batteries,” Mad Jack replied. “And the case is three-quarter-inch plywood which Gary made me paint black. Although the weight added from the paint would be negligible. The components are heavy-duty because I wanted to make sure they would hold up in a battle scenario, then there’s the—”
“Mad-Jack! Just pounds, man, that’s all I need,” I said to him.
“Well, I usually use the metric system like all scientists, but I’m sure you wouldn’t understand kilograms.”
“I’m going to kill him,” I said under my breath.
“Okay, let me do the conversion…carry the five…add in the remainder…divide by pi.” There was a pause. “Roughly a hundred thirty pounds and six ounces. Give or take an ounce or two.”
“Shit, we didn’t carry that much in the Marines,” I said to anyone close. “You going to be alright, brother?”
His thumbs-up was much less enthusiastic, and his smile looked more like he had to take a shit and there wasn’t a toilet for a mile. Oh don’t go turning your nose up, we’ve all been there.
“Everyone grab your gear. BT, can you take over for Gary when he gets here?” I was referring to carrying the zombie repellant. I was going to be busy hefting my own cumbersome bundle. Henry did not like the indignity of being carried. He was fine with riding or being pulled along in a wagon, but carrying was somehow beyond his station.
BT nodded, slowly returning from the world of saliva-worthy meals.
“What’s the plan, Mike?” Tracy asked nervously.
“You must be nervous if you even asked,” I told her. “Here it is in a nutshell. Make sure you’re always within reach of BT.”
“Sounds easy enough,” she said.
“One would think that.” Although I knew from multiple personal experiences that any battle plan unraveled at first contact with the enemy.
We could hear Gary’s labored breathing and heavy footfalls coming up the stairs. When he was about halfway up, I realized we were going to have a problem. The zombies already on the staircase, although being repelled by the machine, had nowhere to go. They were pressing up closer to the library wall. They didn’t have the wherewithal to jump over the side; most likely it was a failsafe in them…or just stupidity.
“Gary, hold up!” I shouted, hoping he could hear me through his groans of protestations. His rendition of Queen’s We are the Champions was suffering greatly from his distressed intakes of air. “And keep your head down!”
BT pressed his face up against the small window that overlooked the fire exit. “It’s never easy.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I asked him.
“Sick bastard. How is it that you make Deneaux look like a viable traveling companion?”
“That hurts, man.”
The difficulty was going to be compounded because the door opened outward and a good ten or twelve zombies were huddled up against it. The person or persons pushing the door open was going to be exposed to the zombies while those behind him would be shooting. It was not an enviable position.
“Maybe we should have Gary go back down the stairs to ease the pressure,” Tracy suggested.
“Good idea. I hope he can make it back up, though,” I told her. I empathized with my brother. That thing was like strapping a human on your back, and not a little baby one.
I was about to tell him when his singing (dare I call it that) cut short and he shouted out, “MJ, this thing is blinking.”
“What color? Because if it’s a green, that’s alright, just the box doing a self-diagnostic. Now if it’s yellow that’s still okay, it means the box has detected a problem, but it’s fairly certain it can self-correct.”
“Fairly fucking certain,” I mumbled. “I’m going to kill him.”
“But if it’s red—” he was continuing.
“It’s red!” Gary replied.
“Um…erm…I would suggest running,” Mad-Jack shouted to him.
BT and I were already heading for the door. Our combined momentum drove some of the zombies clear off the small landing where I hoped they dashed their skulls against any hard object below. I had slammed into the door, shoulder first, thinking I wasn’t going to get much movement, but when the freight train that is BT also crashed into it, the thing opened easily enough. I found myself falling, the steel grate of the landing rushing up to meet me. Just where I wanted to be—by the feet of zombies. That’s sarcasm, although in hindsight, it beat the hell out of being by their mouths.
BT was screaming a war cry. I’d like to think my scream sounded fierce as well, but mine was more fear driven. I could hear rounds being fired above me. I was on eye level with a zombie that was in serious need of an anti-fungal medication. Mini brown cauliflower pustules were erupting from its toenails, and trust me when I tell you, I was fixated on that. I was deathly afraid it was going to shuffle those growths right up to my nose. If they touched me, odds were I’d go into shock. I felt hands wrap around my lower legs, and I kicked out thinking it was zombies.
“Talbot, if you kick me, you’ll be sleeping alone for years,” Tracy told me. She and Travis yanked me back into the sanctuary of the library.
BT had a good four or five zombies pinned behind the door and the railing. Justin and Tommy were clearing the few remaining ones away from him. MJ’s machine had done more than just repel, now the zombies fixated their attention on it. They were in such a rush to get away from it that they weren’t even bothering with the food literally a mouth’s span away. Gary had just made the landing as Tommy put a knife I didn’t know he was carrying straight through the eye socket of the last remaining zombie. Shooting anything alive is nightmare worthy, but there’s something about a knife that just ratchets up that gross factor. It’s a much more personal way to dispose of a life (such as a zombie’s is). The knife easily slid into the soft tissue of the eyeball, cracking through the delicate orbital bones, and then finally coming to a rest in its brain. The zombie stilled as its headquarters were breeched. Tommy had a fierce grimace on his face as he pulled the knife free and kicked the zombie over the rail.
The zombie sailed a good fifteen feet in the air—sometimes I forgot just how strong Tommy was—before the thing’s forward progress was stopped by a strategically placed elm. If not for the tree, the zombie may have broken some flight records for his kind. Even Gary’s panting couldn’t drown out the sickening sounds of shattering bones.
“You alright?” BT asked Gary, not stopping for a response as he physically picked him up and into the library. Travis grabbed the handle to the door and pulled it shut before a new wave of zombies heading up the stairs could get in.
“Well that sucked,” I said as I watched zombies smack into the now closed entryway.
I didn’t watch long enough to see if history would repeat itself. (The whole glass licking thing.) Tracy had grabbed a chair and dragged it over to Gary who looked like he was on the verge of collapsing. BT and I helped him out of MJ’s contraption. I think the hundred and thirty pound estimate was a little light. Even with BT’s strength and my enhancements, we struggled. I’d swear I saw the floor sag when we put it down.
“How the hell did you carry that thing?” BT asked Gary, looking at him with newfound amazement.
“Nice outfit,” I told him.
He was too tired to grin.
There was a light on top of the unit that was now shining a steady red, but was dimming rapidly as I watched it.
I went back to the window that overlooked our ‘saviors’ and spoke into the radio we had salvaged from our now defunct ride. “The light was a steady red and then went out. How do we fix it?”
“Oh dear,” I heard MJ say.
“Oh dear? Any chance you could be more specific?” I asked.
“Batteries are dead.”
“Dead? It was
barely on for five minutes,” I told him.
“Forty-five.”
“MJ, unless we were in some sort of time warp, that thing wasn’t on for more than five minutes. Six, tops,” I told him.
“I performed tests,” he said. I could see his head sag from my vantage point.
I’m not the quickest thinking man on the planet, although considering there were way less men, I was probably gaining on that ladder. Sorry, errant thought. Then realization hit. “Really, MJ, you didn’t think to change the batteries after your tests?”
“It never occurred to me,” he said reluctantly.
“You have got to be shitting me.” I moved away from the window.
“What’s up?” BT asked, he kept muscling the heavy box up and looking over at Gary like he couldn’t figure out how he had done it.
“Well you’re now doing curls with the world’s largest and most likely heaviest paperweight.”
“It’s broken?” he asked.
“Dead batteries.” I would have kicked the thing, but I liked the configuration of my foot bones just the way they were.
“I carried that thing for nothing?” Gary moaned.
“Not for nothing, brother. You got to show off your new outfit.” He smiled at that and immediately fell asleep, his legs twitching spasmodically from the stress they had been under.
“Mike,” BT said, lifting the box again. “This thing is closer to two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“I wonder. Let’s see if we can get this thing open.”
Chapter 7 – Stephanie and Trip
“Stephanie, we can’t afford any dead weight,” Curtez Riggs, the self-appointed leader of the group, said. “We’re barely holding on here and he doesn’t contribute at all.”
Curtez didn’t relish his role, but with his stint in the Army, he felt he was the best qualified to keep his work mates alive when they had become trapped in the hotel offices. It was his fast thinking that had kept the majority of them safe even when their supervisor had rushed headlong into the zombies in a panic to get back to his home.
Curtez had kept them alive and they had gone out on multiple successful foraging raids to get weapons and supplies. They’d made due in an increasingly hostile world. Everyone had a part to do in that success…save one.