by Mark Tufo
“We could go with ‘your worst nightmare’ but that seems so cliché, don’t you think?”
“What have you done with our people?”
“Why don’t you come down here and find out?”
“Chris is dead,” someone else said, talking to the person that was asking me questions. She said it in a high-pitched, panic-laden voice. “He’s stripped clean,” she added. I could hear her stifling some gagging.
“Mister, I don’t know what your problem is, but there’s other issues going on here. There are zombies in the store. Why don’t you come out and we can work this out? We’ve got a few people back there with you that we’d really like to have back.”
“You mean we could really just talk?” I asked in my sincerest voice.
“That would be preferable.”
“Gosh, mister, after all I’ve done we could still talk?”
“Just give us our people back and you can walk out of this place,” he replied angrily.
“Why in the fuck would I do that? I’ve got everything in here I need.”
“Because I’ll put a bullet in your head if you don’t.”
“Oooh…I’m scared now. I guess I’ll just give myself up.”
A shot rang out, clipping the wall next to my head. I spun and saw the crazy bastard George, he was teetering on his meatless toes trying to get off another shot. His face twisted in agony. How in the hell he had seen enough of me to even get it off, I didn’t know. Duh, you’re framed in the doorway. Sometimes I was a meathead. I moved to the side, the wall at my back, and I came at George’s left side, he was looking around wildly trying to line up a shot.
I grabbed the outstretched pistol with my right hand and then stepped down hard on his exposed bones. He withered, letting go of the firearm without so much as a struggle. Multiple bones shattered as I ground them into the cement floor. He couldn’t even get air into his lungs to cry out. I turned the gun and blew his fucking skull out.
“Shoot at me, George? Fuck you.”
“What’s going on down there!” the man shouted.
“Domestic disturbance,” I replied. “George and I had a heated argument about how much I liked to eat. So I shot him.”
I could hear the man start running down the hallway.
“Better hold on there, Rambo. I’ve still got a couple of other delicate little flowers all bundled up and ready for processing.”
The footsteps stopped. “Let them go!” he shouted from a much closer vantage point.
“Doubtful.”
I could almost hear him weighing his options in his head. He could come in with guns blazing, but he had no idea where I was or where the two women were. Or head back to the mouth of the hallway, tail tucked between his legs. Not a great pose for a typical American alpha-male if – like I suspected – that was what he was.
“There’s no way out of there, you know. I’ll personally wait here until you have to come out.”
“I’ve got some time to kill. Bunch of meanings there.” I quipped.
“You can’t risk it,” the female voice said.
I don’t know if she was talking loud, or the acoustics were working out in my favor, but I could hear her almost as well as if I were part of the conversation. Then I had a palm-to-forehead moment; if my bionic buddy Hugh had enhanced my vision, I would imagine he had done the same for my hearing.
“My girlfriend is down there, Jan, I have to.”
“Vince you’re not going to do April any good if you get yourself shot.”
“This is bullshit.” He must have stomped his foot and walked a few feet away, as his voice softened and then came back strong. “You heard, Charlene, this guy is full on crazy. We have to stop him before he hurts them.”
“Vince, Chris is dead, apparently so is George, and Calum is in there as well, so we’ve got to assume he’s dead or near to it. You’re the last guy left and we can’t afford to lose you.”
“Well that’s some useful information,” I said softly.
“Shit,” he said. I think I could even hear him drag his hand through his hair. I would have to thank Hugh for this.
“Jan, you stay here, I’m going to talk to Charlene again and try to get the story straight on this nut job.”
“Vince, you can’t leave me alone here. Get Yorley to do it, she’s nuts.”
“Jan she’s on roof duty right now. I need her shooting skills up there. If the zombies get in, then we’re screwed on both ends. Don’t worry, he thinks I’m here. I’ll be right back.”
I licked my lips in preparation and hardly noticed I cut my tongue open as it grated against my teeth.
“Hurry,” Jan begged.
This was one time where I regretted my fashion choice. There was no way that I could go down the hallway silently, my clown pants made more noise when I walked than howler monkeys having sex. I waited until I could no longer hear Vince’s footfalls.
I stepped out of the break room. Go big or go home. “Hey, Jan, do you know how you steal a piano?” I asked as I walked down the hallway.
“St-stop…” she hesitated, “or I’ll sh-shoot.”
“That’s no way to answer a riddle. You steal a piano by pretending it’s yours. You do it out in the open during broad daylight. You gotta have nuts the size of bowling balls, but that’s how you do it.”
I didn’t figure the bitch would actually shoot, and I would have kept thinking that…right up until the left side of me spun from the impact. High-powered rifle shot from the feel of it. I was glad she hadn’t shot my arm, probably would have taken it clean off.
“Supposed to shoot moose with that thing, not people, asshole,” I told her as I kept advancing. “And to think I voted NRA congressmen into office, never thought it was going to bite me in the ass.”
“Stop.” I could hear the lever action of her rifle move, the clatter of the expended brass hitting the floor made me move quicker. She had a rifle and apparently wasn’t averse to using it.
I was moving faster down the hallway than a three hundred and fifty-pound fat fuck had any right to. Jan was sighting me in down the barrel of her rifle.
“Clarence? What is wrong with you?” she asked hesitantly. Pulling her sighting eye off of the aperture.
Well…she could die safe in the fact that she had made her last earthly mistake.
“Jan!” Vince screamed from off to my right.
The hero would be back here lickety-spit. I had to take care of business. I had meant to shoot her in the thigh or somewhere less deadly and then drag her injured-but-alive self back into my den of inequity, but Hero-boy was not going to allow that to happen.
“Sorry,” I told Jan, not because I had to shoot her, but rather because it meant wasting some intimate time together. My shot was fairly dead-on considering I was running at a 4.4 forty pace, at least that’s what it felt like. The side of her head plumed into a shower of deadly debris, chunks of dirty blonde hair fell softly to the ground. The bits of her brain that the bullet had seared with its passing would end up somewhere on the far side of the store.
“JAN!” Vince screamed.
Damn, Hero boy was fast himself. I stopped my bulk in a few steps, I knew what the pop in my right knee meant, I had just shredded my ACL and possibly my MCL, that much weight going that fast wasn’t meant to stop that quickly. Hugh was going to be a busy little boy. First things first. Shots flew down the hallway as Vince opened fire. I caught one in the shoulder just as I collapsed into the break room, my knee finally giving out.
“You fucker! I shot you! Are you dead?”
Upon reflection I wish I had just shut the hell up and let him come and investigate, but I was pissed. He had shot me and he had made me waste a meal. “Why don’t you come down here and find out,” I replied instead.
Half a magazine worth of bullets blazed, none close. I guessed he didn’t like my answer, or possibly more likely that I had responded at all.
I sat with my back against the wall. I was in a fair amou
nt of pain. I had at least two bullets in me, one possibly shot from a bazooka and I had torn my knee up. If I were in the NFL, I would have just been forcibly retired.
Hugh was barely a distant memory as I sat there. He was so hard at work I felt like I was home alone. I don’t know how long I sat there; I think I may have even dozed off. Hugh was flooding my system with dopamine to help me deal with the pain as he made his repairs. I was awoken by Vince as he spoke.
“Her name was January Wolff, she was twenty-six years old, married, divorced. She worked in an elementary school. She was up for a teacher of the year award before all this shit started. She made a hellish trip of survival just to get here. Where we actually have a chance of holding out until help comes…and then some piece of shit like you comes and blows her head off.”
“Is this psychological warfare or some shit?” I answered.
“No, I just thought you should know who you killed. How decent of a human being she was.”
“Listen, Vince, maybe you shouldn’t have left her in a position she was wholly unprepared to defend. If anything, it’s your fault she’s dead.”
“What do you want from us?” he asked wearily, I think I struck a raw nerve. He was probably already feeling guilty about it and I had exacerbated the wound by pouring raw sewerage on it.
“Nourishment,” was my one word reply.
“Just let me have my girlfriend and we’ll leave. The rest are yours.”
“Let me get this straight so that we’re completely clear. I unstrap one of these little honeys, hand her over to you and you and her just leave?”
“Exactly.”
“You’d leave the rest of these people to fend for themselves? Doesn’t sound very hero-ish of you.”
“She’s all I’ve got. I had to shoot my brother and my best friend. I have no idea about my parents. I don’t care about the others…just her.”
“See, I don’t believe you. I think I give her up and then you’re all happy and shit and then try to kill me again.”
“I swear to you, you hand her over and we’re like ghosts. I swear it on my soul.”
“Well that’s a whole other conversation…that would be assuming that I believed in all the mystical shit. Tell me something about this special little lady and then I’ll make my decision.”
He didn’t say anything for so long I thought the deal was off, not that it was really ever on, but he didn’t know that.
“I was an addict…” he started.
“Was? I’ve known enough pill poppers to realize there’s never ‘was’ in their vocabulary.”
“I haven’t had a fix in five months.”
“Five whole months you say? Wow, aren’t you just special. I bet you have it down to the hour the last time you swallowed.”
“Shot.”
“Heroin. Nice. I guess if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.”
“April saved me.”
“That would be one of the girls behind me?”
A hitch caught in his voice, even cracking it a bit when he spoke next. “April...April Springer was at my group therapy session. She became my sponsor.”
“Was it part of your court appointment? The sessions?”
“Intervention.”
“That must have been a blast.”
“Yeah, never had so much fun in my life,” he answered sarcastically. “My brother is screaming at me, calling me a junkie loser. My mother is wailing, and my sister was in the corner getting soused on bourbon.”
“What finally convinced you to go? Certainly not the theatrics from your family, I’m sure as an addict you’d been hearing everything they had to say for years. Am I right? And then talk about the irony, you claw and climb out of your own personal hell only to be thrust into this wide scale perdition, that’s fucking rich.”
He didn’t say anything again for a while. “I had sold everything I owned. I borrowed from everyone that would give me a dollar. I stole what I could get my hands on. It got to the point where they wouldn’t even allow me in their homes for the holidays.”
“Gotta have your fix, though, don’t you? So what? You blowing dudes at the bus depot?”
Another pause.
“Oh shit I nailed it. Did a little sword swallowing for smack, how quaint. Man, at that point you needed to shoot up just to forget you had a little spunk on your chin. That’s pretty pathetic, man.” I got up and crossed the room, as I stood over April’s cot. I asked her if she was hearing this. Her eyes were huge as she tried desperately to pull in enough light to be able to see me. To her I was as dark as a nightmare in a bad dream.
I dragged the cot towards the doorway.
“What’s going on in there?” Vince asked with alarm.
“I just wanted to make sure she heard how truly pathetic you are. Oh I’m sorry…were.”
“She knows.”
“Really? And she kept going out with you? What’s the matter with you?” I asked, whispering in her ear. She recoiled from the sound; or it could have been my horrid, meat-rotted breath. “Wait. She was an addict, too? Oh, this makes sense. She was probably busy jacking old farts off in the Walmart parking lot while you were busy with your own specialty.”
“Listen, I’m not proud of it, but April was able to look beyond my past. She could see the person I could be.”
“You do realize that two addicts together rarely work out. You weak bastards are usually so co-dependent that one needs to slip up so the other can feel worth in their life. Then, because you’re weak, one will drag the other down with them.”
“She saved me, man. Please let me save her. Those first few days I went without shooting up I thought I was going to go insane…she got me through it. I won’t make it without her. She’s all and everything that I’ve got. There’s got to be something inside of you, some little piece that’s human. Compassionate maybe.”
“Keep talking,” I told him, not because he was winning his argument, but rather to hide what I was doing. “Sorry, darling,” I said as I stroked her hair, “but I’ve wasted enough food already and there’s got to be starving zombies in Africa.”
She blew out a heavy gust of air through her nose as I lifted her shirt and started chewing through her stomach. I didn’t go at it with my normal gusto. I tried to eat like a gentleman, like my mother taught, mouth closed and twelve chews per bite to really taste and digest my food properly.
April’s breathing quickened and became heavier as I sliced through her midsection. Her blood was pooling on the cot and straining through to the floor as I ate her abdominal section. I almost gagged when I realized she had eaten an oatmeal bar or something equally as disgusting. The flesh of her stomach lining mixed with the half-chewed dried berries was not a great contrast in tastes. I reached in and ripped free a kidney to eat so I could wash the taste out of my mouth. Her body sagged as the last beats of her heart pushed life fluid through her system. I wondered for a moment if she was still having thoughts and what they might revolve around. My guess was she was wishing she had shot up one more time. Had she known her end was so near, she might as well have gone out with a high.
“Say something, man,” Vince shouted. “I’m talking my gums out over here and I’m not getting any response.
“Sorry…I drifted off for a moment,” I said, dragging my sleeve across my mouth. “Keep talking, I’m listening.”
He rambled on incessantly about what a perfect angel she was and how doves danced on her shoulders or some shit. I’d stopped caring about April the person the moment she became dinner. It might have been a half hour later and Vince was still droning on. April the saint had become April the carcass; what was left of her wouldn’t feed a family of mice. I did leave one special part intact.
I stood up from the cot. “I’ve made my decision.” I said as I tossed something down the hallway. It fell moistly against the floor. “Don’t let it be said I don’t have a heart.”
Vince’s screams were barely covered by the volley of
bullets he sent down the hallway.
“Oh wait,” I laughed from inside the break room. “I guess you have the heart now.”
The echoes from his shots finally died down, then the fun began as he started to smash things up and down the aisles. I could have attacked pretty much at any point, but this was so much more fun as he circled the drain into the depths of his own hell. What a pussy, brave enough to smash harmless bottles of mayonnaise but not enough to charge in here.
“Bet you could go for a little sugar smack now couldn’t you?” I shouted.
“I’ll rip your asshole through your throat, you fucking freak!” He was bellowing so loud I figured he had to be tearing his vocal chords.
There was more crashing and smashing, it was moving away from me. I could just make out a female voice trying to soothe him, talk him down from the precipice. It was one of the two women still left. Not the one who had skated out on me, and then it hit me. Those two were out in the store somewhere and there was no way my Charlene was guarding this exit way.
“I think I’m going to find my wayward little girl,” I told the store manager. He seemed to be lost in his own misery to care all that much.
I sauntered down to the end of the hallway, took a cursory look over to where things were still clattering to the floor, and then headed off to any location that a scared woman might try to hide. “Either towards the candy or the Kleenex, what do you think, Hugh?” He had just about completed his repairs and was coming up to poke his ugly head around.
“Eat now?”
“You’re worse than a tape worm. I’ll admit April was a little on the slender side, but come on, she wasn’t finger food either. And don’t you even think about an elimination. I’ve got some unfinished business to attend to first,” I said as I tried to quell down the gurgling in my stomach.
I moved away from the mouth of the hallway and the sounds of the retreating disturbance. I found what I was looking for two aisles over; a small mountain of wrappers were on the floor, Snickers, Reese’s Cups, Hershey bars, and at least a half dozen others. As I approached the discard pile, I was able to see a trail – some empty, some not – of candy leading away. It looked like a kid with eyes too big for his arms had come and grabbed all he or she could secret away.