Alive in a Dead World

“Mike! I’m about to slap the shit out of you, if you don’t start talking to me!” BT roared in my face.

I wasn’t quite ready to come back to this semblance of reality, but when BT says he’s going to slap the shit out of you, you tend to listen. “Don’t you dare!” I said, finally taking my eyes from Re-Pete. “I’m fine,” I was able to grunt out.

“I don’t know if it’s the moonlight or what, but you don’t look fine.”

I waved dismissively at his words. “Follow me,” I told him as I walked past him and back to an eager looking Re-Pete who now only had eyes for the bigger, beefier BT. “I knew you’d leave me at the first opportunity,” I told Re-Pete as I approached.

“Huh?” BT asked. “I’m right here, man. Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I was talking to Re-Pete,” I told BT.

“That’s hilarious,” BT said without a hint of humor.

“I’m serious, first he wanted to eat me and now he’d rather eat you, but to be fair, I’m sure once he was done with you, he’d want to eat me again. He’s non-discriminatory that way.”

“I knew it had to happen sooner or later,” BT stated flatly. “I mean it really was just a matter of time. The problem now is how do I tell Tracy?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“You going crazy, that’s what I’m talking about. I mean everyone knew you were already precariously perched on the ledge even before the zombies came. That you held out this long has amazed most of us.”

“You do know I’m standing right here, right?”

“Sure physically you are, but mentally you’re gone, man,” BT said. “I’ll miss you. I count you among one of my best friends.”

“BT, I’m not insane,” I said. He merely tapped the top of my head like I was six years old and I had said something cute.

“Come here, BT,” I told him, approaching closer to Re-Pete.

“Don’t you get too close to him. There are some medications that you can take that, aside from some excessive drooling, will almost make you normal. There’s no cure for zombie. Tracy will skin me alive if I bring back an insane zombie.”

“All this time, I thought zombies were already insane.”

“Come on, Mike, let’s get the rest and we’ll just head back to Maine. Maybe there’s still a part of you that can be salvaged. A small part, sure, but some is better than none.”

“BT, shut up and watch.”

I said aloud, “On your knees,” at the same time as I thought it. Pretty talented right?!

Re-Pete didn’t disappoint. He instantly once again fell to his knees. This time his already cracked patella completely shattered with a loud snapping noise.

BT had finally shut up and was looking back and forth from me to Re-Pete. “That’s not some sort of trick is it?”

“Yeah, I was using finger snacks as a training aid,” I said sarcastically.

“Coincidence then?” he asked, still not quite believing what he was witnessing.

“Get up,” I told and thought. Re-Pete stood with some difficulty and was favoring his left leg, but stood he did. “Turn around.” Re-Pete did; he was now facing away from us.

BT’s nose was almost pressed up against the fence. “You know, this is fucking amazing,” BT said, not turning back towards me. Now he turned. “How many do you think you could do this to?”

“No clue, I didn’t know I could do this until a few minutes ago.”

“Is it hard?”

“I have to concentrate but it’s no more difficult than listening to you talk.”

“Funny,” BT said turning back to Re-Pete. “Can you make him hurt himself?”

“I don’t think directly. I tried to make Re-Pete kill himself.”

“Repeat?”

“Re-Pete, P…E…T…E.” I said spelling the name. BT was looking at me funny. “He was following me around, I thought the name seemed fitting.”

BT looked at me like he wasn’t completely convinced I hadn’t stepped over the edge. “Then what about indirectly?”

“Well, I think he shattered his knee the way he’s been dropping to them, but I don’t know if he’s incapacitated.”

“Is there a certain distance you have to be from them?”

I shrugged, I had no clue. “He stopped listening to me when you pulled me away, but I don’t really know from what point he stopped or if it was because I lost concentration while you were jiggling me around like Jell-o.”

“Well, walk away; let’s see what happens.”

“I’d rather just put a bullet in its head; he’s really starting to reek.”

“We’ll get to that, but we have got to test the limitation of this. We might never get another opportunity like this.

“Yeah, that’d be a shame,” I told him, turning to walk away.

“You’re still concentrating, right?” BT asked to my retreating back.

“Yes I’m still concentrating, Mrs. Weinstedder.”

“What?”

“Nothing, just my old algebra teacher.”

“So somehow this whole scene reminded you of an old math teacher? Who did the wiring in your head? Because you should get your deposit back.”

“BT what…”

“Stop!” he yelled. “Re-Pete here looks like he’s about to break free.”

I turned to watch. Re-Pete was slightly swaying from side to side. I took one step backwards, the swaying increased.

“Go one more,” BT said, swinging his visage back to Re-Pete.

I did and Ree turned around to face us. I won’t say he had a look of confusion on his face, wondering what had happened, first because the light wasn’t good enough to see that minute of a facial detail from this distance; and secondly, I don’t think zombies have any facial expression beyond perpetual snarl.

“He looks angry,” BT said.

“Angrier than normal?” I asked BT as I came closer.

He shrugged his shoulders in answer. We were both up by the fence. Ree was trying unsuccessfully to get his hands through the chain link.

“He really does have a funk about him, doesn’t he?” BT asked. “Do you want to try and kill him?”

“I’m having some issues here, BT.”

“I’d like to say ‘So what else is new’ but that almost seems cliché now. That’s no human,” BT said pointing to Ree. “And it’s debatable if that thing is even technically alive, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. It is still trying to kill us.”

“I know all this. I really do, I just feel like a cat playing with a mouse. It seems much more humane to put a bullet in its head than mess with it for our amusement.”

“I don’t see anything funny here, Talbot, do you?” BT asked hotly.

Step back and then get on your knees, I commanded my puppet. He complied immediately.

BT turned to watch and see what Ree would end up doing.

Smash your head against the ground! I yelled in my head, showing the motion I wanted him to take.

Ree was mannequin-still; he did not move.

“What’s going on?” BT asked, switching his view back between Ree and me. I was almost swaying as much as Ree had been earlier.

“He won’t do it,” I said, blowing out a large exhalation of air.

“Are you trying hard enough?”

“BT, I just about gave myself an aneurysm. I don’t think I could concentrate any harder.”

“I bet you got a D in that algebra class,” BT said, placing a bullet in Re-Pete’s head as he struggled to get up, his damaged knee finally locking the joint in place. Ree fell over with a solid thud.

“I failed it.”

BT snorted. “How far you think you were, fifty, sixty feet?”

“Not much more than that.”

“Could you do that with multiple zombies?”

I could hear Gary yelling if everything was alright in the distance.

“We’re fine!” BT yelled, moving away from the spreading pool of blood by his feet.

“How far are we away from our locker?” I asked BT.

“A ways,” he answered.

“How did you find me?” I asked him suspiciously. “And better yet, why?”

“Mike,” BT started. “You’ve gone through a lot in the last few days.”

“Keeping tabs on me, man?” I asked, more than a little hurt.

BT didn’t dance around the bush. “Yeah, actually I am. Do you blame me?”

I was a second or two away from flashing into anger and then it dissipated like fog in a hot summer sun. “You know, fundamentally, I’m still the exact same person I was. You know that, right?” I asked him, seemingly for his approval.

“I hope so, Mike. Because I can’t imagine doing this shit with anyone but that crazy bastard.”

“What’s going on?” Gary asked, somewhat out of breath. He took in the whole scene quickly. One dead zombie, me with a slightly wilted look and BT very standoffish. “Everything cool?”

“I hope so, I really do,” BT said, walking back towards the locker.

“Mike?” Gary asked.

“BT isn’t all that enamored with my upgrades,” I said, walking over to the fence to see if I could figure out if Re-Pete had a thicker skull.

“Anything I should be concerned about?” Gary asked, coming up to my side.

“Not yet, brother.”

“How much time we got until Eliza comes?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Do you think we’ll need more weapons?”

“I’ve got a little surprise of my own set up. We should have plenty of guns for what I want to do.

“What about the zombie?”

“He’s dead now,” I said, walking back towards the shed. I could not see anything more in the dark.

Paul met me about halfway back. “Hey, buddy, do you need any help?” he asked still fumbling with his pants.

“It looks like you’re the one that needs a hand. Now, I’m not offering, I’m just saying.”

“Go figure, I find a camp potty, toilet paper, a small flashlight and some damn comic books. The night couldn’t be any quieter and I find the perfect spot to take care of some personal business.”

“Sorry, man, but you should know better by now,” I said. I felt for Paul I truly did. Women don’t really get it, but a man’s time on the throne is one of relaxation, a time when he can let go, both literally and figuratively. Not bathroom humor, just fact.

“I’m going to see if the office is open. Maybe there’s actually a door to the bathroom there.”

“Be careful, my friend.”

He waved a hand at me, I hoped it wasn’t the one he had been using for other needs earlier.

Mrs. Deneaux was sitting outside in a plastic lawn chair, smoking a cigarette, I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. The fluid motions she made when extracting the smoke from her lips and flicking the ash was a much-practiced maneuver. It was her own small dance of death.

Mrs. Deneaux magically produced a half-empty pack and one cigarette leapt out at me. I took it much like a drowning man would take a glass of water, or an apple from a serpent. You decide.

Gary had grabbed my shoulder and gave me a brotherly squeeze as he went back into the storage unit. Brian walked by, stopping only long enough to tell me he would take over the patrol. I thanked him as Deneaux lit my smoke.

“BT doesn’t trust you,” she said after a few peaceful moments. She wasn’t looking at me, but rather up at the sky and the blazing stars.

“And you?” I asked, taking a heavy intake of smoke, also marveling at the sight above us.

“All I know is that if you turn me into a vampire and I’m stuck in this old wrinkled body forever, I will make sure to never leave your side. I’m no longer a Miss Stewart.”

I started laughing. “I’ll keep that in mind; and who is Miss Stewart?”

“It’s of no concern now. So how are things, Michael?” she said. At some point, she had stopped looking at the stars and her eyes sparked brightly as they focused intently on me.

“That’s quite a gaze you’ve got going on there,” I said, trying to deflect some of that attention.

“It is not every day that someone has their soul stripped from their body. I have also given mine up, but I fear I will have to atone for it a lot sooner than you, I expect.”

My mouth opened to ask her what she had done, but she cut me off at the pass.

“It is not something I wish to discuss. Perhaps I will write it down in a journal. I see you scribbling in that thing all the time. I would love to know what you think of me.”

“No you wouldn’t,” I said.

Now it was her turn to laugh. “No, perhaps I wouldn’t. Do you lead us to salvation, Michael?” she asked in all seriousness. “Is that even possible?”

“To be honest, Mrs. Deneaux…”

“Vivian.”

“Vivian,” I said. Her name felt like I was swirling broken glass around in my mouth as I tried to say it. “I’m just trying to make it through tomorrow.”

Her gaze shifted back to the heavens. We actually enjoyed an easy silence for a few moments before she stood up. “I’m going to get a few more hours of sleep. I believe that we will make it through tomorrow,” she said, heading back into the shed.

And then what? I wanted to say, but I wished her a good night and I meant it. I stayed there, looking at the stars swirling overhead until the morning sun began to bathe my face in its presence.

“You out here all night?” BT asked, stretching his arms wide.

“I guess so. I think I might have discovered a new planet.”

“Okay, so it’s early and now I’m not truly sure if this is sarcasm or are you telling the truth?”

“He’s full of shit,” Gary said coming up from behind. “So what’s on the agenda today?”

“Is Brian back?” I asked, I hadn’t seen him since he had taken over patrol duty and how long ago was that? Four or five hours at least.

“He’s not in there. Probably couldn’t handle Mrs. Deneaux’s snoring,” Paul said.

“Vivian,” I corrected.

“Who the hell is Vivian?” Paul asked.

“That’s Deneaux.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Mrs. Deneaux’s first name is Vivian,” I clarified.

“Okay, but what’s that got to do with Brian?” Paul asked.

“Nothing.”

“Maybe we should worry less about Vivian and more about Brian,” BT said forcefully. “He could be hurt and you two are worried about someone’s first name.”

“Who’s hurt?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, coming up from behind BT.

“Nobody we hope,” I said “But Brian hasn’t come back from patrol.”

Mrs. Deneaux immediately went back into the shed and began to put on all her clothes as well as strapping on her pistol.

“Good idea,” Gary said. “No guarantee we’ll be coming back.”

Within five minutes, we had all our meager supplies and mini arsenal of weaponry ready to go.

“Okay, once around silently. Hopefully, he’s just holed up somewhere, getting some shuteye. If we don’t find him and the perimeter looks safe enough, we’ll call out for him. Sound good?” I asked.

I got terse nods in reply. We all knew this wasn’t good. Most folks don’t stray too far when a zombie apocalypse is going on and Brian knew enough to come back to the shed to get relief if he was tired. He wouldn’t just fail to let his guard down. We walked for a few minutes, but the only noise were the sounds of zippers striking rifles or an occasional boot scuff. Conversation was non-existent.

“Mike?” BT said, softly coming up to my side. I stopped. “Isn’t this where we met Re-Pete?”

I looked around. It was still a storage facility and everything looked pretty much the damn same, but I would bet money that this was the exact spot, with one notable exception. Ree was missing, not the blood spot he had left behind, but his body was most assuredly not present and accounted for.

“What’s the matter?” Paul asked, sensing the new tension.

“Our zombie buddy has gone missing,” I said as I scanned the lot.

“How is that possible?” Gary asked, walking over to the fence.

“Mike, he was dead,” BT said. “I saw the exit wound out the back of his skull.”

“Please don’t tell me that now they’re adapting so they don’t die from a head shot,” Paul sobbed. “Could they?”

“No, he was dead,” I said flatly.

“How can you be so sure?” Paul asked, working himself up into a fervor. “I mean, so far, they’ve become fast, they can hibernate when there isn’t enough food, and apparently, they can thicken their skulls to try to preserve themselves. Wouldn’t it make sense from a purely zombie evolutionary trait to alter the one and only way that you can die?”

“We’d be fucked,” I said. “But Ree was dead.”

“Who is fucking Ree, Mike? And how can you be so damn sure?!” Paul was yelling now.

“I named the zombie and I know he was dead because I lost contact with him.”

Paul was just looking at me with a shocked expression on his face, not grasping what I had just told him.

“It’s the zombie whisperer!” Mrs. Deneaux cackled, lighting a cigarette.

“It’s a pity those things haven’t given you throat cancer yet,” BT said.

She held up her middle finger like it was a makeup compact while with her other hand she would dab her extended middle finger on it and pretend to apply base to her face.

“That’s actually pretty funny,” Gary said.

“Wait! You can talk to zombies now?! When the hell were you going to let the rest of us know?” Paul said with spittle flying from his lips.

“Relax, Paul,” BT said, placing his arm across Paul’s chest. “He just found out last night.”

Paul might have calmed down, but it was marginal at best. His temper went from something like eating a habanero pepper to rubbing jalapenos in your eyes; neither one is a great suggestion.

“What did this zombie have to say?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, leaning up against the closest shed.

“It revolved mostly around him being hungry,” I said.

“That’s rich,” she laughed. “A hungry zombie! Who would have ever thought it?”

“What good does that do us?” Paul asked.

“That in itself, not much,” I said.

“But,” BT prompted when I hesitated with the rest of what we had discovered.

“But I can… with limitations now… I made Re-Pete do what I told him to.”

“Are you guys pulling my leg? Are there hidden cameras or some shit? Can you make them go away? Better yet, can you tell their hearts to stop beating? If they even still do?”

“Well, I could tell a few maybe to leave, but once they got thirty or forty yards away, they’d turn back around. And it seems that I can’t make them directly hurt themselves.”

“Almost like they have a failsafe switch?” Gary asked.

“I guess,” I told him.

“Could you lead them to a precipice and have them walk off?” Gary asked, thinking of differing scenarios that would lead to a mass demise in zombies.

“Kind of like a zombie Pied Piper,” Deneaux said.

Gary shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, pretty much like that.”

“Like lemmings?” BT asked. “That would be interesting.”

“Right now, you guys know as much as I do,” I told them.

Thankfully, Brian shifted the focus, being under Paul’s scrutinous eye was starting to grate on my nerves. “Hey guys,” a slightly disheveled Brian said, rounding a corner.

“We’ve been looking for you,” Gary said.

“Sorry, I know I was on patrol, but there was nothing happening and I felt compelled to keep looking for guns. It’s like a quest now.”

“Did you move the zombie?” I asked him.

“Why would I do that? I was busy looking in lockers. Did you say how much time we have until our dinner guests arrive?” he asked.

“We’ve got about four hours,” I told the group. The range of emotions went from “Holy Shit! I’m scared” to “About time” and whatever else can happen with five other people. I was more on the “Scared Shitless” side.

“Should we look for more guns?” Gary asked as we all looked down on our less-than-adequate-looking ensemble of weaponry.

My head was going up and down in the universal language of yes, but my vote was a no. “It’s too dangerous.”

“We have enough time. I can go through a few more lockers,” Brian said.

Yeah we could also play a rousing game of Monopoly for all the good that would do, I thought. I told him it sounded like a good idea though. I wanted to do what every soldier did before going into battle, eat. For some reason, the only thing that keeps you from the thought of dying or killing is eating. We had pulled out packets and packets of dried goods from the camping lockers. Beef jerky, here I come.

Paul and BT went with Brian. Mrs. Deneaux, Gary and I went through the dried packets, looking for the best stuff from which to make a decent lunch.

“Split pea and ham soup!” Mrs. Deneaux shouted triumphantly, holding the packet up to the sun like she had just reared the newborn king.

“You’re kidding, right?” I asked her. “I’d rather eat the packet it came in.”

“Who is insane enough to not like ham?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, looking sidelong at me.

Gary was pointing his index finger at me on the sly, thinking that I couldn’t see him.

“I can see you, brother,” I told him as he pulled his finger back quickly.

The weapons-of-mass-destruction-seeking team came back a couple of hours later with about as much luck finding anything as the US had been a few years previous.

“We got some swords,” Brian said, putting three sharp-edged blades on the ground.

“They any good?” I asked, picking one up. I’d seen some that would fall apart from the impact with a watermelon and others with a blade so dull they couldn’t cut a fart.

“They’re actually pretty good,” BT said. “I think they’re Japanese World War II officer swords.”

I hefted the blade. It definitely had a deadly enough feel to it. “I plan on being a little closer to the action. Do you mind if I borrow one of these?” I asked them.

“Me too,” Gary said, “Where he goes, I do too.”

BT just plain grabbed the third. “So what’s the plan?”

“You’d think you’d know better,” Gary said.

I laid the entire thing out in all its lack of glory. Without rocket launchers, a battalion of soldiers, and an air strike, this would be far from the killing blow I would have chosen. This was more of a gesture, a giving of the middle finger, if you will, in the face of overwhelming odds.

“This isn’t going to do much more than piss her off,” Brian said.

“Exactly,” I told him. “Pissed off opponents tend to make mistakes.”

Brian nodded his head in agreement. “Makes sense, in a suicidal kind of way.”

“Have you met Mike?” BT asked.

Gary nodded in commiseration. I punched him in the arm. “I’ll tell Dad when we get back,” he said, rubbing the tender spot.

I hope you will, I thought, because that would mean we made it there.

Chapter Seven – Mike Journal Entry 6

Eliza was late or early (and gone), or she had taken a different route or she had laid a trap for us, realizing what I was going to do. These three very different scenarios kept playing out in my head, each vying for its own time in the spotlight. I could deal with her being late or even the trap. Those two scenarios at least meant we were still in the game.

If she had passed while we were messing with Re-Pete, then every second we wasted here put my family in more danger. Another route could potentially be as bad, but as long as we were running parallel to her and not hours behind, I could deal with that also. That crawling sensation kept worming its way up my back that Re-Pete had been some sort of diversion and she was laughing as she barreled down the highway. The wondering was a nightmare. I was seconds away from pulling the whole plug when I noticed the slightest sway to a young sapling; it was not windy.

“Everybody down!” I yelled.

Ten seconds went by, twenty seconds, I think we were closing in on a minute and still nothing. I was beginning to feel a little foolish and now that nagging itching sensation was coming back. Screw it. I was ready to go. Gary reached out and put his hand on my shoulder when he sensed that I might be getting ready to move. How I let the sound of that caravan slip by my senses, I had no clue.

“Thanks,” I told Gary.

“You always were a little impulsive,” he told me.

BT was on my left side, looking intently at the rolling nightmare coming our way. His grip tightened on his rifle. Fat beads of sweat rolled off his forehead.

“You good, big man?” I asked him.

“Right as rain,” he answered without ever taking his eyes off the lead truck. “You think she’s in that first one?”

“Maybe before that invasion on Camp Custer when I almost killed her. She might be an arrogant bitch; but she’s also a self preservationist.”

“Too bad,” BT said.

The three of us were down in a culvert on the side of the road. It was almost steep enough that we were just about standing where we lay. Two tandem-trailer semis thundered past. Following them was what appeared to be an endless chain of troop transports and more tractor-trailers.

“Looks like Eliza’s playing for keeps,” Gary said, sticking his head over the embankment slightly.

“When has that ever NOT been the case?” BT asked.

I can’t say that I had ever seen BT quite as nervous as he was now and I was picking up on it, which in turn, made me more nervous. Gary seemed blissfully ignorant of it all.

“Sure would be nice to get a hold of one of those troop transports,” Gary said.

“I vote for just making it through the day,” I told him.

“I second that,” BT said, sticking his hand up slightly.

We could hear gunshots up ahead of us. Paul, Bryan and Mrs. Deneaux were holding up their end and we were getting close to seeing what we could do about holding our own.

It was long seconds before the entire rolling army knew that it was under attack, but the lead tandem-trailer truck lying on its side kind of put a damper on their forward progress. The screeching metal as the truck slid sideways down the highway grated on my fillings, the vibrations hurting my teeth. I was thankful I did not have a steel plate in my head; it would have probably scrambled my brains more than they already were. The large truck had finally come to a stop. Sporadic fire was being returned as some of Eliza’s human sympathizers started to realize they were being shot at and that the lead driver had not simply had an accident.

Eliza was close, I could sense the waves of cruelty emanating from her like ripples in a pond. I’m sure I could have followed the signal back to its source, but then she would have known I was here.

We could hear multiple truck doors opening and men scrambling to get into a defensive posture. Boot falls fell no more than five feet from where our heads were. A troop transport truck almost at the edge of my abilities was parked with the engine running; it was full of zombies.

“Anything?” BT asked, gripping his rifle so tightly, I thought he was going to fuse the metal with the wood.

Now it was my turn to sweat. “It’s full of zombies. They’re just sitting in there.”

“They’re very well behaved,” Gary said. Not sure why; it was most likely nerves.

“Mike, these guys are getting close. It’s only going to take one of them to look over and we’re screwed,” BT said.

“Cool, so I wasn’t already feeling enough pressure; that oughta help.” I told BT I was doing my best to not cause a self-induced brain bleeder.

A hastily thrown cigarette butt flew by the left side of Gary’s face. I thought he was going to start coughing from the smoke. Gary, in his entire life had never smoked, not one normal cigarette and not one of those funny, little left-handed ones that I had enjoyed so many of in my youth. Who am I kidding? I still enjoyed them from time to time in these latter years, especially at Widespread Panic shows.

Gary was turning blue in a desperate bid to keep himself from coughing. I grabbed the cigarette and chucked it further down the slope we were standing on.

“Talbot,” BT said, with no small measure of alarm.

We could hear men talking. The gunfire from our band had stopped. They had done their part and left before becoming outmanned and out gunned. Eliza’s men were about to fan out and find whoever had attacked.

I turned my thoughts back to the zombies, who were still waiting patiently in the truck. “Eliza’s got them under her control,” I told the group.

“We gotta go, Mike,” BT said, gripping my shoulder. “We might be able to make it to the tree line before they see us.

“Doubtful,” Gary said.

“Okay, she’s not communicating with them now, or she would have found me meddling about,” I said aloud, but mostly for myself.

“Mike, it’s now or never,” BT said, flipping his safety off, while Gary did the same.

“Okay, so she sent them an order and kind of tied it off. Does that make sense?” I was still only talking to myself. “It’s almost like a repeating message and she just has it on loop.”

“You should maybe pull the plug on that machine,” Gary said as he got himself into a proper shooting position.

“No power cord,” I said, intensifying my concentration. I’m still uncertain as to how this is done though. Can you really think harder? I find just thinking about thinking leads me astray. “More like a rope or a cord.” We were seconds away from capture and/or death or vice versa. My senses were so heightened, I could hear individual pebbles as they were crushed under the boot heels of the troops approaching. “I found the knot!” I said excitedly.

“Weeks! I heard something over by the side of the road!” one of the men said.

“Time to die,” BT said, though whether it was about the man that shouted or for us, he did not clarify.

I felt sort of sorry that the last thing that man saw on this planet was most likely the biggest man he had ever encountered, popping up from the side of the road with a rifle.

“Got it!” I shouted triumphantly just as BT’s rifle shuddered from the gas release of two bullets. Weeks’ friend caught the first round in the side of his neck; blood pumped out as the man tried in vain to staunch the flow.

A small piece of hell broke out that day as BT’s rifle kept jumping from the expended rounds. He was screaming a war cry. I watched in horror, almost matrix-like, as return fire began to pass him by, coming dangerously close. I was convinced I was going to watch my best friend die in slow motion. And then the real fun began. Shouts of alarm, pain and terror began to ring out all around us as “freed” zombies began to pour from the troop transport.

Speeders had come to our aid. As Eliza’s men had begun to coalesce on us, the speeders had attacked from behind. They were relentless as they chewed on anything within reach. Shots fired wildly as the men turned to face their new threat. BT was still screaming and firing. I had to get up from my hiding spot to drag him down. Okay, to be fair, nobody really drags BT anywhere. He sort of let me. Watching people, even the enemy, being eaten is not something to be witnessed.

“Don’t kill them all, BT, or the speeders will be looking for another food source, and I know I can beat you in a footrace,” I told him.

“That’s alright. I know I’m faster than your brother,” he said, smiling.

“That’s not cool, not cool at all,” Gary said. “Can we maybe go now?” he asked as the screams intensified.

We ran parallel to the road, making sure to stay deep in our culvert. Now that I had found Eliza’s string and knew exactly where it was, pulling it open was fairly easy. I was like a kid that had just discovered an unlocked candy store. Sounds incredible at first until you’re elbow-deep in salt water taffy and three pounds of licorice are already inside your stomach, oh! and don’t forget about the dozen or so sugar sticks you’ve already eaten. I was sort of drunk with the power of it, not yet realizing how much more danger I was putting us in. Apparently, Eliza wasn’t fond of the slower-ambling shufflers we’d all come to know and love. She was much more interested in the devastation that could be wrought from their faster, more mobile brethren.

Zombies were dropping out of trucks like blood from a pierced hemophiliac. (Think about that for a second.) Problem was, there were way more zombies than food. Some zombies had been shot or simply ran out of room on the roadway or were simply pushed out of the way began to find themselves in our culvert. Some were far beyond making a go at us, others were not.

“Company,” Gary said, looking over his shoulder. He had run up into my back and almost through it.

“You’d better pick up the pace,” I told BT, turning back to see what Gary was looking at.

“You sure I’m the slowest?” Gary asked, jockeying for position on my side.

“Gary, I’d trip you if you weren’t,” I told him.

He stopped to look at my expression. I’m not sure if he was happy with the answer he divined. He began to push ahead of BT.

“What the hell?” BT said loudly.

I started firing. I was well beyond the point of caring if we were discovered or not. Besides, Eliza’s men were doing all they could to merely survive right now. They were in full scale battle mode, whereas we were just a minor skirmish in comparison.

BT took an immediate left, heading straight for the tree line. The zombies had heard the cacophony and started to come into our ditch, further up, effectively cutting off our escape that way. A quick glance to the left had me wondering which avenue would be better, thorns the size of small rhino horns that glistened wetly, each looking big enough to bleed all of us dry or the zombies. Good thing BT was cutting the path first!

I was vaguely aware some of the trucks were starting up and pulling away. Some of Eliza’s henchmen would survive the day, but most, I felt, had met the end they so well deserved.

I almost fell over BT as he slid down like a baseball player going for a triple on a ball that was, at best, a double. Gary was way ahead of the curve on me on this one. He was on his hands and knees, crawling underneath the worst of the brambles. A zombie stepped on Gary’s ankle in an attempt to get at him, and if not for getting hung up in the stickers, it would have succeeded. The zombie kept trying to power its way through and was only rewarded with more piercings. I got down and began to scramble for all I was worth. The top of my hoodie got snagged on a branch and I was hung up like dirty laundry. A zombie grabbed onto the bottom part of my leg and was coming in for a bite when I screamed for him to STOP!

I turned to look at it and see if I had any effect on him. The intensity of my yell forced blood to pour from its nose. Its eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second and then it just stopped. It didn’t move. I would have liked to maybe kick it in the head four or five hundred times, but I wanted to get out of there quickly. More zombies were coming and I wasn’t sure if I could do the same to them. I snapped off the branch I was affixed to and went deeper into the tangle.

BT had pretty much uprooted the fauna as he went through. You could have driven a Geo Metro through the hole he left. The only problem with his passage was that it left an avenue for the zombies to follow. Once we all made it through the ten or so feet of thorns and into the woods proper, I stopped to get an idea of our pursuit. Zombies were haplessly stuck in the path that Gary and I had forged, but zombies were already halfway through BT’s gap.

“Should have been a little more careful about that,” BT said.

“You think?” I asked him.

Gary killed the first two zombies coming through, sealing the hole for the moment.

Zombies began to fan out. Some would be stuck hopefully forever; others were beginning to find inroads toward us.

“We’ve got to get going,” I said, pretty much needlessly.

“I thought Justin was the one with the flair for the obvious?” BT asked.

“He had to get it from somewhere,” Gary added.

I was going to tell them these rifles would be useless in the dense copse of trees, but refer back to the “obvious” banter. Zombies were already in the woods behind us, and were approaching as rapidly as the vegetation would allow.

“BT, go!” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Gary you get behind him. “I’ll try to make them stop.”

The gunfire from the roadway had become sporadic and then had abruptly ended. The food was doing what food was supposed to do, either getting eaten or fleeing. As the menu became slim pickings up top, more and more began to find their way down the embankment and joined in the pursuit of us.

I thought I might have possibly heard a woman scream. Eliza in frustration was my hope, but we were being hunted vigorously and we did not have time to gloat.

“Zombies in front,” BT said breathlessly. His trailblazing was beginning to take its toll. He turned left into somehow thicker foliage.

“This is horseshit,” I said as a third branch smacked off the side of my face. We would be leaving a blood trail Henry could follow. (I’m implying that bulldogs do not make good bloodhounds.)

Gary stopped for a second to take two well aimed shots at zombies that made an angle of approach which would have put them dangerously close to snagging BT.

BT pressed harder; he looked to be hung up. He quickly shucked off his jacket and kept pressing. He popped through a particularly dense bramble to emerge on the other side. But zombies had somehow beaten him to the punch. We were nearly encircled and barely had enough room to pivot around and find open firing lanes.

“Stop BT!” I yelled. “We make our stand here.”

“Not quite the Alamo,” he said with resignation, placing more rounds in his rifle.

“Any chance you can make them go away?” Gary asked, shoving rounds into his magazine.

“Yeah, one at a time and as soon as I move to the next one, the previous one will come back,” I told him.

“Not very effective,” he told me honestly and without malice; he was merely stating his feelings.

“Mike, now would be a most awesome time for one of your last ditch efforts,” BT said between expended rounds.

The noose was tightening quickly around our necks. The sun was nearly at high noon, the preacher had said his final words, the hangman’s hand was on the trip lever and the townsfolk were staring wide-eyed, fearful to blink, lest they miss something.

A zombie flew in from our right, a tree root making it fall at the last moment. It latched on with its teeth to BT’s pants, below his knee. The zombie’s hands scrambled to seek purchase. BT quickly turned the butt of the gun and slammed it into the side of the zombie’s face. The impact dislodged the majority of its teeth from its head. It’s nasal cavity had completely been pushed in from BT’s second head strike. It fell to the ground in a heap of crushed bone and leaking brain.

“That would have been a good one to tell go away,” Gary said to me.

“Thanks for that,” I muttered.

The trees and bushes, which moments earlier were preventing our escape, were now the only thing keeping the zombies from completely overwhelming our meager defense. As much of an impediment as they were to us, they were double that for the zombies, who were nearly oblivious to them as they tried to get at us. I watched as at least two zombies lost an eye when finger-thick branches pressed into their eye sockets. One had popped its left eye completely free from its orbital socket; the other had impaled the branch into her eye, yet neither one of them stopped trying to get to us.

Something niggled in my mind. I placed my hand on Gary’s back. “Stop shooting,” I told him barely above a whisper.

“BT, quiet!” I said a little louder.

A zombie launched at Gary, and as if a pit-bull on a short leash, it wrenched back in mid flight. “That you?” Gary asked, wide-eyed.

I shook my head in the negative, and placed my index finger to my lips.

One zombie, not more than a foot from BT’s face, took one long mournful look at the meal it was foregoing and headed back the way it had come.

“Eliza?” BT asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Tommy,” I said quietly.

“Tomas you mean?” Gary asked, correcting me.

I didn’t know the reason for the name change, if it meant anything at all. It, however, felt right calling the presence in my mind Tommy.

“That was pretty fortuitous,” BT said.

“Almost too much,” I said.

“You think he was helping us?” BT asked.

“It sure seems that way. Let’s get out of here before his big sister figures out what’s going on.”

“Back to the obvious, but I completely agree,” BT said.

It was another twenty minutes until we were finally able to push through the small woods and into the neighborhood beyond. I almost wanted to kiss the pavement when we got to it, but who knows what someone had on their tires when they drove over this spot. I shuddered thinking about my lips coming into contact with whatever it was. It could have been skunk road kill, for all I knew.

“Something wrong?” BT asked. “You’ve gone all pale. You’ve got that look like you just touched a shopping cart without a sani-wipe.”

“Damn BT! How long have you known me?”

“Long enough. Let’s get back to the rest.”

“I’m glad we’re out of the woods, so to speak,” Gary said, “but I hate feeling this exposed.”

Lower income housing dominated our left side; most looking vacated. Some looked like a war zone and others looked expectant, like they were waiting for a savior or a meal. Zombies would be trapped inside some of them, as would regular people, clutched in the vise-like grip of fear. People who would rather starve to death than brave anything on the outside. The meek would not inherit this world. They would die as they had lived, alone and in the shadows. We, the bold, would either die in a blaze of glory or triumph grandly over evil. Can you tell I was feeling slightly magnanimous over our victory? Already forgetting our near disastrous retreat. That’s how I survive. If I remembered every close call, I’d be huddled in a bomb shelter. Thank God for short term memory loss. See? All those years of smoking marijuana did have a higher purpose beyond getting high!

Zombies started coming out from backyards; it was one congealed mass of excrement and blood.

“All the noise must have disturbed a hive,” BT said. “We’ve got to get off the street.”

“See how easy it is to become Captain Obvious?” I told him. He didn’t see the humor, and to be honest, neither did I.

Options were limited. The majority were the deaders, but a fair portion were not. We would have a difficult time outrunning them. I had no desire to go into a house for fear of the inhabitants, whether dead, alive or a state in between.

“Which house looks the best?” BT asked, popping off a few rounds for good measure.

“Any of them have a moat?” I asked.

“Or a gun turret?” Gary asked.

“Right,” BT said. “What more was I really expecting?” he asked himself. He charged for the closest house.

I hoped the damn door was unlocked because if he had to cave it in to gain entry, that meant the zombies would be able to follow us. BT’s flight triggered something in the speeders. They veered off from the main group and began to angle towards him.

“Let’s go, Gary, or we’re going to be cut off!” I yelled to his back. Gary had already figured this problem out and passed me by before I could finish my sentence.

BT, with his rush of adrenaline, ripped the screen door clean off its hinges. I was too scared to even comment on him affecting the resale value. A bullet hole ripped through the front door, and had to have been an eighth of an inch from BT’s head, max. The splintering of wood forced BT to turn away. He looked back towards me, wondering where the shot had come from. I was frantically pointing to the next house. The shot had come from inside; someone did not desire to entertain guests.

BT had already jumped down off the steps when the next shot rang out. As the echo from the shot died down, all that was left was my heavy breathing and the combined heavy footfalls of BT, Gary, me and the zombies that pursued us. The next house had a security screen door, which was locked tight. I didn’t spare it a second thought as I jumped down the stairs, BT had passed me up and was heading for the next house in line. Gary was rapidly falling behind and in extreme danger of being overtaken. I was stuck, I didn’t have enough bullets or the right firing angle to do him much good. My heart lurched as Gary chanced a look over his shoulder and stumbled ever so slightly, giving the zombies more ground.

Gary had a three-foot lead on the closest zombie. BT got into the next house or I would have to go back and tell my father I had lost his son. “God, I could use a little help right now.”

The security screen of the house I had just tried swung open.” Get your ass in here!” A woman screamed at me.

BT was heading to the fifth house when he heard the woman. Gary was running towards me. I swung my head back and forth. Gary might just make it, but no way BT could get back though.

BT saw my dilemma. “Get your ass in there, Talbot! I’ll figure something out!” he shouted, still running.

“Listen!” the woman shouted at me. “I didn’t make it this long to die with my front door open. Either get your ass in here or get eaten on someone else’s lawn!”

I spared one more look at BT, who was on to the next house. “Godspeed, BT,” I said softly before running back up the stairs and inside. The woman didn’t spare me a second glance as she waited for Gary to get there. “He’s not going to make it,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Your friend is not going to make it,” she said, getting ready to pull the door shut.

“He’s my brother,” I told her, placing my rifle against the doorjamb to hold the rifle steady, and more importantly, to keep her from shutting the door too early. I had a shot, but it was a shitty one. There was about a three-inch window between Gary’s head and the closest zombie’s head. As long as Gary didn’t do any bobbing and weaving, I should be fine. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I applied slow, steady, even pressure to the trigger. The rifle went off before I was ready. I watched in alarm as a tuft of Gary’s hair blew back from the force of the bullet. His trailing zombie fell, taking with it some of the closer ones in pursuit.

Gary’s hands were still pumping as he fought for more speed. I saw the glistening of red welling up from the side of his head as he hit the bottom step. He jumped, launching past me and the stunned woman, collapsing on her living room floor. Blood pumped from the wound on his head. “I’ve been shot,” he said right before passing out.

The woman slammed the door shut, or at least, tried to as my rifle was still in the way. “How the hell have you made it this long?” she asked as she pulled my barrel in, quickly slamming the door and reengaging the lock.

“I get that a lot,” I told her as she moved me inside so she could shut the heavy steel front door. I admired her security. If I had half this set-up, I would still be in Colorado, riding the apocalypse out in relative style. That was a pipe dream, but a dream nonetheless.

“Josh! Get the first aid kit!” the lady yelled up the stairs.

A kid of about twelve or thirteen came running down, carrying an oversized white case with a large red cross on it.

I expected at any moment for her husband to come down the stairs also. When that didn’t happen immediately, I began to wonder if this lady and her son had opened up their door to strangers. I would remember to ask her later, after she finished making my brother stop bleeding on her carpet.

“There’s a lot of blood, Mom,” Josh told her. “He didn’t get bit, did he?” the boy asked in alarm.

“No, the one over there shot him,” the lady said as she cleaned the wound.

“Why mister? Why did you shoot him?” Josh asked me.

“He’s my brother,” I tried to say in explanation.

“If I had a brother, I wouldn’t shoot him,” Josh told me.

“Wait, no. I didn’t shoot him because he’s my brother. I was trying to save him.”

“By shooting him? Mom, didn’t Uncle Dave tell you not to open the door for the crazy people?” Josh admonished his mother.

The woman looked up at me. “Are you crazy?” she asked, still wiping blood and placing gauze in the wound to staunch the blood.

How did I answer that? More than a fair amount of people, especially recently, had called me crazy. I did the prudent thing, I stayed silent.

“Wonderful,” the woman said sarcastically, wrapping tape around Gary’s head. “Your brother will be fine unless of course you’re not quite through with him yet.”

“Why do I keep running across comedians?” I asked her.

“Come on, put your rifle down and help me get him onto the couch,” she told me.

“What about the zombies?” I asked her, not yet quite willing to yield my only means of defense.

“They can’t get in,” Josh told me. “The only way things can get in here is if we let them in,” he said pointedly looking straight at his mother.

“They needed help,” she told him quickly.

By the time we settled Gary down into the couch, he looked to be more comfortably asleep than anything else.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, sticking out her still bloody appendage. “My name is Mary, Mary Hilop.”

I looked in horror at the proffered hand. “Um, your hand is soaking with blood.”

She pulled it back slightly to look. “There’s like three dots and it’s your brother’s blood anyway.”

“I don’t know where he’s been,” I told her.

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” she said, heading into the kitchen and turning on the faucet.

“You’re not worried about contaminated water?” I asked her in all seriousness.

“It’s well water and are you going to make me regret my decision to let you in?”

“My name is Mike Talbot and that’s my brother, Gary,” I told her. “And why did you let us in? You don’t know what kind of people we are.”

She stood for a long time with her hands under the water. (And, I’ll happily admit, she was using liberal amounts of dish soap.) I think she was deciding what she did or did not want to tell me. She finally turned the faucet off and turned to face me. “This morning I was saying my prayers, like I do every day. You know knees on the bedroom floor, hands on top of the bed, and I was just getting up when I heard an answer back.” She looked me straight in the eye, wondering if I was going to think she was nuts.

I didn’t so much as flinch. That was far from the craziest thing that had happened to me, and I’m just talking about today.

When she realized I wasn’t going to try and have her committed, she continued. “The voice said I should help those as I would want them to help me. And when I saw you and the other two running from the zombies out there, I put Josh and myself in your places and thought what would I want someone to do, so I opened the door.”

“That was very brave of you,” I told her, meaning it.

“Did I do the right thing?” she asked me.

“Well, I think so. You saved my brother and my lives.”

“But were you worthy to be saved?” came her next question.

“My brother is,” I told her flatly. She left it at that, and I silently thanked her.

“What of the other man?” she asked.

“BT, his name is BT and he’s quite possibly the best friend I have ever had. We’ve traded saving each other’s lives so many times, I’m not even one hundred percent sure who is in the lead, although I suspect it is me. I have got to go and try and find him.”

“Not for a few days,” Mary said, turning back to the kitchen window. She stood on her tiptoes and pulled the shade to the side. “The zees will stay out here for a few days before they go to wherever they go or some other hapless idiot starts running down the street and then it starts all over again.”

I’m pretty sure she just called me a “hapless idiot.” I’ve been called worse, but it still stung.

“When they first came, they were out there for a couple of months.”

“You never had a breach?”

She turned back to me. “No my ex-husband ended up being a paranoid delusional. He spent more on the security of this house than the actual worth of this place.”

I’m a paranoid delusional, but my house fell in the first few days. What I wouldn’t have done to have talked to her ex beforehand. “Where is Mr. Hilop?”

That was a pretty personal question, and I was still some guy she had just let into her home. I thought she might lie and say sleeping upstairs, but she came out with the truth. “It ended up being his sickness that got the best of him. He was convinced that the zees would be able to get through the back basement window and he went to the hardware store to fix that problem and get some supplies for my son’s hobby, he’d do anything for him. That was three months ago. I’m figuring he’s not coming back, although Josh is still holding out hope.”

“Food isn’t an issue?” I asked.

“You heard the part where I said he was delusional?”

“Gotcha,” I told her. “So you said a couple of days?” I asked, coming up to look through the barred window.

“Yeah, they go somewhere and only come out when someone rings the dinner bell.”

“They go into a stasis,” I said as I quickly pulled the shade back into place. Three zombies were fighting over some sort of scraps and I had no desire to discern what it was. “They all pile up into this giant mass of decayed flesh and stink and sort of hibernate. Our best guess is that food is becoming scarce and this is a way for them to extend their lives, such as they are.”

“They’re cognizant?” Mary asked incredulously. “They have thought beyond hunger?”

“It’s some sort of parasite, so it has a survival instinct, but beyond that…” I shrugged my shoulders.

“How long have you been on the run?” Mary asked.

I got a faraway look in my eyes. “Since the beginning,” I told her.

I know she wanted to press me for more information. She and her son had ridden out the entire storm in the relative safety of this house. Luckily, Gary saved me.

“I can’t see!” he screamed from the living room.

Josh had pulled down all the blackout blinds when the zombies had returned. Besides a few strategically placed emergency candles, the house was as dark as the inside of a coffin.

“You’re fine, Gary,” I said. “Shit!” I yelled as I slammed my shin into a table leg.

“Mike? Mike? Is that you? It’s so cold and dark where I am. I can’t see you, brother. I’ve been shot in the head and I think it’s the end for me. Mom, is that you?”

“No, my name is Mary,” Mary said, getting to his side quicker than I could. Being familiar with the house, she was able to navigate through it more rapidly.

“Mary? Such a beautiful name. Are you my guiding angel?” Gary said dramatically, maybe a little too much.

Mary produced a small flashlight and checked Gary’s wound and his pupils, then turned to me. “Does he have a flare for the dramatic?”

“You tell me,” I replied.

“You know that your wound is not much more than a scratch, right?” she asked Gary.

“Are you sure? Because I see the light,” Gary said.

“It’s a Ray-O-Vac penlight,” Mary told him.

“Oh,” Gary said, sitting up. “Then I’m fine. Mike, you know I’m going to have to tell Dad that you shot me.”

“I figured as much. Good to see you vertical, my brother.”

“Are we in a safe house?” he asked.

I nodded my answer. For someone who a second ago couldn’t see anything, he did have a fast response.

“What about BT and the rest?” he asked, getting more comfortable.

“Josh, could you please get me some water and aspirins?” Mary asked her son.

Josh had been at the far end of the room, almost completely obscured in the shadows. I thought I may have detected the glint of a weapon. I couldn’t fault him that. In fact, it was quite the opposite, I thought it was admirable that he remained vigilant over us, protecting his mother and his homestead.

“I don’t know about any of them. BT was too far down the street to turn and make it back. And I haven’t heard anything from the rest.”

“The rest?” Mary asked as she gave the glass of water and tablets to Gary.

The ham made a great show of effort in reaching out to get the meds.

“We were with another three people besides the big man you saw.”

“What were you doing?” Mary asked, helping Gary more when she realized he was having a difficult time. He was completely soaking it up. Even Josh from across the room could tell he was over-exaggerating. The only one who was missing it was Mary.

“Payback,” I told her vaguely.

“Against who? The zombies? But you just said they don’t really have any feelings beyond survival,” Mary said as she checked Gary’s forehead for a temperature. “You feel a little warm.”

“Yes, I do,” Gary said as he slouched in his seat like that was now the most difficult thing in the world, sitting up straight.

“Oh, you poor baby,” I told Gary. “I hope you’re going to be alright.”

“He’s been shot in the head!” Mary shot back at me vehemently. “And you did it! Maybe you should be a little nicer to your brother!”

Gary was smiling over Mary’s shoulder at me; I could tell by the flash of his white teeth. “Yeah nicer,” Gary said weakly, slouching even further into the couch cushion.

“I’ve got to find BT,” I told Mary.

“Unless you’ve got a machinegun on you somewhere, you’re not going to get past the zees,” Josh said.

“Any chance you got one?” I asked.

“Even if I did, mister, I wouldn’t be giving it to you,” he told me.

“Fair enough. Do you have anything you could spare?” I asked.

Mary was shaking her head from side to side. “Greg took his rifle and a pistol with him when he went. The only reason he left behind the pistol Josh has is because he had no bullets for it.”

“Mom!” Josh said hotly. “Why would you tell them that?!” he said, storming out of the room.

“I don’t think he’s yet convinced about your intentions. You’ll have to forgive him. He has a lot of Greg in him.”

“That’s probably a good thing these days,” I told her.

“Didn’t help Greg out much,” she said.

“But you two are safe,” I told her. There was an awkward silence as Mary thought that through. Gary saved the day with a soft moan.

“Oh, you poor baby,” Mary said, stroking the side of his face.

“My ass,” I said.

“What was that?” Gary asked with strain in his voice.

“Mary, do you mind if I walk around the house, looking for a way around the zombies?”

”You won’t, but feel free.”

“Thank you,” I told her.

She had already forgotten I was still in the room as she turned back to Gary’s ministrations.

I did a complete circuit of the house. In typical zombie fashion, we were surrounded. It wasn’t thousands, maybe a hundred or so. My OCD half thought about counting, but the asses wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to get an accurate tally. One would go, two would come, a few would just run endless circles around the house until I started to recognize them and I had counted them more than once. With two full clips, I might be able to cut a path through, but then what? Most of these zombies were speeders and I was no track star.

I walked up the stairs to see how disappointed I could get with an aerial view. I had just pulled the shade to the side when Josh spoke.

“I’ve kept her safe all this time while we’ve been waiting for my dad to come home.”

I don’t know what stopped me… Divine intervention? A brain? My conscience? I don’t know, but I had just about turned and said “You know he’s not coming home, right?” If Tracy had been here, she would have smacked me just for thinking it; and somehow she would have been able to tell. I was stuck. I had been so intent on flat out telling him the truth, I couldn’t think of a viable alternative. I came out with the lame, “That’s nice.”

He gave me a look I’d become all too familiar with seeing.

“How long are you going to stay?” he asked. I’m not sure if it was because he wanted us gone, or it took the burden of protecting his mother off his shoulders.

“Just long enough until there’s a way through the zombies and I can get back to my friends.”

“What about your brother? He’s going to need time to heal.”

“Him? He’s faking.”

“I thought so. He’s not a very good actor.”

I laughed. “Your mom is buying it.”

He stopped to think about that for a minute. “That’s alright; it gives her a chance to stop worrying about me.”

“You’re a smart kid.” He was probably on to something. Mary, on some level, probably knew Gary was hamming it up, but it was a diversion from the nightmare outside.

“Yeah, I usually like to build radio-controlled cars, but guarding this house is a full time job,” he sighed heavily.

“Can I see them?” I asked. We’ve all established that I’m just a larger version of a kid so I wanted to see them; and the word “diversion” was now stuck in my head.

The kid’s room was crammed with at least a dozen different vehicles that I could see. There was a lunar module with six wheels, a tank, that fired projectiles, some racing cars and other sets that were in various states of repair or disrepair.

“I’m still working on this one,” Josh said, picking up what looked like a waste basket on wheels. “My dad went out to get me some parts for this. He had come over to work on it with me and then the zombies had come.”

“What’s it going to be?”

“A half scale R2D2.”

“No way? That’s awesome. You have some incredible stuff here.”

Josh sat down heavily on his bed. “I haven’t touched any of them since he left. He didn’t come back and he was out getting stuff for me.”

Man I hate the serious talks. I sat down next to him. “Listen Josh, I’m a father too.”

He looked up at me with “Really?” written all over his face.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kids, from giving up my life all the way to seeing a smile flash across their lips. You’re dad went out, trying to do just that. You can’t blame yourself for his actions, it was something he wanted to do.”

“Thanks mister, you seem like you’d make a good dad.”

“Thanks kid, now if you could just tell my wife that, I’d really appreciate it. Can you show me how a few of these work?”

Josh’s face lit up. He was back in his element, tinkering with the small machines. We spent a few hours going through his wheeled assembly. It was nice to forget for a while what lingered mere feet away outside.

Mary finally had to come up and get us for dinner. Her first two shouts had fallen on deaf ears as we recreated the chase scene from Mad Max.

Mary had made us a simple meal of beef stew and corn, but it was warm and we were safe. I said a silent prayer for my family and friends before I sat down. I noticed only two settings at the table. One for Josh and one for me. “I’m sorry we’re late. Did you guys already eat?” I asked from the kitchen.

“No,” Mary said. “Your brother is still in a lot of pain, so I set up a tray for him out here and then it didn’t seem quite right that he had to eat alone, so I’m staying with him.”

Josh rolled his eyes as he sat down. I snorted out a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Mary asked a little peevishly.

“Ah nothing,” I said, trying to stall for a more acceptable answer. “Josh had just told me a funny joke before we came downstairs.”

“Josh, it had better not be that one you heard at school!” Mary yelled from the living room.

Thanks, Josh mouthed.

“Better you than me,” I said quietly.

“What are you two whispering about in there?” Gary moaned. “The noise is hurting me.”

“You two stop it or I’ll make you eat upstairs!” Mary yelled.

Funny, Gary didn’t seem to complain about her volume and she was right next to him. And actually, going back upstairs sounded like fun. Josh’s myriad of radio-controlled vehicles was a good diversion from the cold hard truth. “Diversion.” There it was again. The word kept popping up in my head inadvertently; maybe I should actually pay it some heed. I was three spoonfuls into my stew when I looked over to the wastebasket. Gary’s blood-soaked shirt and a bunch of bandages dominated what I could see.

“Hey Josh, can your cars go faster than a person?”

“Yeah, why? You want to race? Because I will SO kick your ass.” He said the last word softly so his mom wouldn’t hear. But she was entirely too busy cooing over my malingering brother to know anything about what we were doing.

“What’s the range on the transmitter?” I asked him, an idea beginning to formulate in my head.

“If you’re talking inside, it would be the whole house.”

“What about outside?”

“A football field, I guess. I don’t usually let them get out of sight though.”

“Do you have one you wouldn’t mind not seeing again?”

“No,” he answered quickly and decisively. “Why?” he asked hesitantly.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, my gaze still focused on the trash.

“Oh kid, don’t listen to any of his plans,” Gary said. He was leaning up against the entrance to the kitchen, Mary was helping him stay propped up.

“I told him not to get up,” Mary said, exasperated. “But he just wouldn’t listen. He’s a stubborn one.”

I noticed that her eyes seemed to shine a bit as she talked. Looks like someone has a crush and someone else is eating it up in a big way. I was about to give him silent kudos until he spoke.

“I had Mary help me get up because when I heard how quiet you two were in here, I knew it meant you were thinking about something. You have to be careful, Josh, my brother’s ‘plans’ usually don’t work out so well.”

“Don’t you have an injury you can go ham up?” I asked him.

“You shot him in the head!” Mary exclaimed.

“It’s alright, Mary,” Gary said calmly. “Now do you see what I’ve had to put up with?”

“You poor baby. Here, let me help get you back to the couch, or would you be more comfortable in a bed? I’m sure Josh will give you his.”

“Mom!” Josh yelled.

“The couch is fine,” Gary moaned.

“Oh brother,” I said as both a euphemism and a commentary on his acting skills.

“But I’d love to hear Mike’s plan before I do,” Gary said, smiling to me when Mary turned to scowl at me for delaying his return to a horizontal position.

“Mom, Gary is smiling,” Josh said, pointing over his mom’s shoulder.

“It’s a grimace,” Gary said as Mary turned back to face him.

Mary turned back to hear me out and Gary took his index and middle finger and pointed at his eyes, then at Josh as if to tell him, I’ve got my eyes on you.

“Mom?!” Josh wailed.

“That’s enough, young man, I want to hear what Gary’s brother has to say.”

At least, I knew where I was on the pecking order. “I’ve got to find my friend,” I started. Mary was about to protest. “I know there’s no way out right now, but I can’t wait two or three days until they clear out. He might need our…”

“Gary’s not going anywhere in this condition!” Mary stated with a tone that said it was not open for discussion.

“Okay, my help.” I clarified, Mary nodded in ascension. “I would like Josh.” I knew I was treading on thin ice here. She would kick me out in a heartbeat if she thought I was putting her son even remotely in danger. I figured it best to continue my dialog and quickly. “With Josh’s permission, of course.” Mary’s stance was telling me that whatever hare-brained scheme I was coming up with, it wasn’t Josh’s decision to make. “No, nothing like that,” I said, putting my hands up. “I don’t need Josh.”

The kid instantly looked like he deflated.

Mary appeared a little heartbroken at the sight of her son.

“See? What did I tell you about his ‘plans?’” Gary said.

“Wait a second. I need Josh, but not in any way that exposes him to the zombies. I need his skills and a radio-controlled car, if he’ll do it.”

Go on, Mary motioned with her hand.

I laid the rest of it out there. Josh was immediately on board; he seemed actually pretty excited about it. Mary took a few minutes longer, trying to think of any way in which this exposed her son to anything close to danger, but she finally placed her stamp of approval on it.

“I’m going with you,” Gary said.

“In your condition?” I asked him. “I think not.”

Mary nodded with my words.

“You made your bed, brother, now you need to lie in it,” I said cryptically.

I pushed away from the table, placing my dishes in the sink. I thanked Mary for the meal. I would have normally waited for the morning to launch my ingenious idea, but the moon was nearly full and there were no clouds. It was a fairly bright night and I wanted to get BT back into the fold as soon as possible. The big guy was probably scared to death without me.

Gary found me about an hour later. I was in a small sitting room on the south side of the house. I was alternating between staring out the window at the zombies that periodically walked by, and stretching out my muscles for the endeavor they were about to undertake.

“You sure about this, brother?” he asked me.

“Of course not,” I told him.

“I’m serious,” he said.

“So am I,” I answered.

“What about back-up?” he asked.

“I appreciate it, Gary, I really do. Listen I’m no track star and that goes double for you. I won’t get to BT if I’m looking back for you.” Gary looked down. “And hey, if something happens to me, would this be the worst place in the world to wrap up the remainder of your days?”

“You’ve always been like a younger brother to me,” Gary said.

“Kiss my ass,” I told him.

“You be careful.”

“I will, I always am.”

Gary snorted. “Now I know you’re lying, because you’re insulting my intelligence.”

“Go find Mary; maybe she has some tea that can help you with that.”

Gary left and I was once again alone with my thoughts. I finished stretching quickly because no one should be exposed to my thoughts for too long.

I was as ready as I was ever going to be when I came out of that room. My head, however, was still clouded with doubt for what I was about to do. Why did everything always seem like a good idea right up until launch time? Then it seemed just about the craziest thing ever.

“Mom? Any words of wisdom?” I asked, looking to the heavens.

I could picture her saying, “What the hell are you thinking?” What response would I have to that? Thinking had never been my forte. There were a multitude of reasons why I did not build rockets when the world was slightly more normal.

“The car won’t flip?” I asked Josh.

He looked at me like I should leave that up to the pros.

“What are you eating?” I asked, looking at his sandwich. It smelled really good, but it looked like warmed-over vomit.

“A peanut butter and maple oatmeal sandwich,” he said between big bites. He was busy adjusting something on the chassis.

“Oatmeal?” I asked. Josh never looked up.

“He loves it,” Mary said, shrugging her shoulders.

“So this won’t flip?” I asked again, not wanting to look at his train wreck of a sandwich anymore.

Oatmeal leaked from the sides of the bread as he stared up at me. “Have you been listening to me at all?” he asked testily.

“His wife says that a lot,” Gary said from the couch.

I turned to flip him the finger, but Mary was boring holes in me, so I thought better of the gesture. It ended up being a half-hearted wave, which he returned eagerly.

“It can’t flip over because there is no top or bottom. I designed it that way so if it went over a bump and flipped over it would never get stuck.”

“That’s awesome,” I said, picking up his engineering marvel which was basically just four oversized tires attached to a chassis. “Have you ever gotten it stuck?” I asked, turning the machine over. He didn’t immediately answer, and I moved the machine so I could get a better look at the boy. “Josh?”

“Well not stuck, really,” he hemmed and hawed.

“Feel free to keep going,” I urged.

“Well, I’ve had some problems with this wheel,” he said, grabbing what was at this moment the front left, but at some point could be the front right, back left and/or back right. Yeah, it didn’t make much sense to me at the time either. In my world, front was front, rear was rear.

“Um, so what kind of problems?” My idea’s value was beginning to plummet.

“You really shouldn’t badger the kid,” Gary said.

“Badger the kid? Hey I know I get accused of not thinking before I speak all the time, but this isn’t our entry into the county fair where the worst that can happen is a last place finish.”

“Honey, what’s wrong with your car?” Mary asked him.

Josh took an extra squishy bite of his sandwich, and sticky oatmeal plopped to the floor. I would imagine this was a stalling technique. I’d employed that method many times myself with varying degrees of results. He gulped down his bite. “Sometimes this wheel gets stuck,” he said, looking up at my eyes and then his mother’s.

“How often does it get stuck?” I asked.

“More than it used to.”

Not much of an answer, I thought as I ran my hands through my hair in the traditional “I’m screwed” way.

“Mike, you can’t still be thinking of doing this?” Gary asked, rising up from the couch.

“I don’t have a good feeling about BT, Gary. I can’t explain it, but I really think he needs my help.”

Gary looked at me funny. “BT needs your help?” He finally came out, asking the obvious question. “Are you sure this isn’t just your over-active imagination or your senseless need to put yourself in danger or is it just a way to commit suicide by zombie?!” Gary said heatedly.

“Well, don’t hold back, brother! Tell me what you’re really thinking.”

“You’re upsetting him!” Mary came to Gary’s defense.

I didn’t see it that way, looked way more like he was doing the disturbing.

“Mike, ever since we left Maine, you have done everything in your power to put us in as much danger as possible. It seems like you go out of your way to find the worst situation, then you head right for it, like you just can’t wait to see a new and unusual way to die.”

“I don’t remember forcing you to leave Maine, Gary,” I said forcefully.

“Someone had to watch your back,” he said, advancing a step on me.

“You do realize, Gary, that we are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, right? And that we are no longer on the top of the food chain. Going out for smokes can now be a life or death situation.”

“You know I don’t smoke and neither do you, but you’d probably pick up the habit just to see if you could get them.”

Gary was pretty worked up. I hadn’t seen him this angry since they cancelled Battle of the Network Stars sometime back in the late seventies. “Gary, I’m not doing this out of some ill-conceived way to commit suicide. My family, my friends are in trouble, I could never, I would never leave them, or their fates up to the whim of a crazy bitch vampire.”

“No swearing in my house,” Mary said loudly. Then she stopped to look at me when she processed the rest of the sentence. “Crazy bitch vampire?”

“Mom, no swearing,” Josh echoed his mother in a much-practiced routine.

“Like Dracula vampires?” Mary asked hesitantly.

“Worse,” Gary said, still with heat in his voice.

“What? He’s not joking?” Mary asked as she sat down heavily, nearly missing the edge of the couch. Gary caught her under her armpit to keep her from hitting the ground.

“Her name’s Eliza and she’s got this thing for Mike,” Gary said as Mary settled deeper into the couch, trying to hide herself from the advancing shadows in her mind.

“And you came into my house!” Mary shouted, rising quickly from her perch. “How dare you!” she said, shaking with rage.

“You opened the door to us,” I told her.

“I wouldn’t have; had I known!” she shouted.

“I’m sorry. I really didn’t have the time to give you our bio when we were trying to save our lives,” I told her.

“Cool, you know a vampire?” Josh asked, surprised.

“It’s not nearly as cool as you might think,” I told him.

“Does she sparkle?” he asked.

“Why would she sparkle?” I asked Josh. I was clearly confused.

“You wouldn’t understand the reference,” Gary interjected, with no further explanation.

“Can we forget about all this sparkly shit!” Mary shouted.

“Mom!” Josh yelled.

“Sorry, Josh. Mommy’s a little stressed-out right now. Where is this vampire now?” Mary asked, swinging back and forth between Gary and myself, searching for a truthful answer.

“Well, I mean she could be anywhere by now,” Gary said.

“Where was she the last time you saw her?” Mary asked, trying to extract the information like a stubborn, impacted tooth.

“Well, what’s your definition of ‘saw’?” I asked her, trying to get the heat off Gary.

“I swear, I’ll throw you both out right now if I don’t get a straight answer!”

“What about my head wound?” Gary asked with alarm.

“Oh for Christ’s sakes! I’ve cut myself worse shaving my legs!” Mary shouted.

“Eww gross, Mom! Why would you shave your legs?” Josh asked, clearly turning the shade of green I had when I saw him eating his sandwich earlier.

“I’ll bet your legs don’t bleed as much as my head,” Gary said as he absently touched his wound.

“I’ll ask you one more time, Mike, and then you and your brother will be hitting the streets,” Mary said seriously. “Whether or not you ‘saw’ (in finger quotes) this Eliza, where was her last known spot?”

“I-95,” I told her.

“I-95 goes up the entire eastern coast. Could you please be a little more specific?” Mary said, heading towards the front door.

“Well, if you were to open that door you’re heading for and look across the street, past the small copse of woods, you would basically run into her last known whereabouts,” I told her.

I could tell that opening the door had suddenly lost some of its luster. Zombies were a nightmare, which many people had not been able to wrap their minds around and had paid the ultimate price for that disconnect. Vampires, well basically the same path, but you had to go a lot deeper into the woods, so to speak.

“Did Mike tell you he was a half-vamp?” Gary said, still fingering the bandages.

“What?” Mary said, almost falling over herself to get away from me.

“You’re not helping, Gary. How hard did that bullet hit?”

“Way cool!” Josh said, coming to get a better look at the circus attraction.

“Stay away from him!” Mary shouted, but I didn’t know if she was talking to him or me.

“Do you drink blood?” Josh asked excitedly. He may have heeded his mother’s words and stopped his advance, but his curiosity was unbridled.

“No, but I’ve got this thing for Pop-Tarts now,” I told him honestly.

“He has a psychic link to Eliza,” Gary added absently.

I thought Mary was going to faint. “Gary, feel free to shut the hell up whenever you want,” I told him.

“What? She has a right to know.”

“Does your friend out there turn into like Big Foot or something?” Josh asked. “I mean because I saw him running down the street and he was HUGE!” Josh said, spreading his hands as far apart as he could.

“No, but that would be cool,” I told Josh.

“Yeah, it really would be,” he agreed, nodding as he answered.

“Does she know you’re here?” Mary asked cautiously. She kept eyeing the door anxiously as if she expected her to bust through at any moment.

“No,” I answered.

“How can you be so sure?” Mary asked.

“Things would be way worse,” Gary said. “I really only have a scratch?” he asked her.

“Oh, honey,” Mary said reverting back to her caregiver status. “But it really is a nasty looking scratch.”

I don’t know if she was a trooper and had assimilated the information and was dealing with it or she just chose to push it down deeper into her psyche. Not my call, but whatever gets you through the day can’t be all bad.

“Can we still go on with the plan?” I asked Mary. She seemed to have lost herself in Gary’s wound. “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said to Josh.

“I would,” he agreed with me.

“You think it’s better to drag this behind rather than tie it to the top?” I asked Josh for maybe the third time.

“Even for an adult, you don’t listen well,” he admonished me. “I’ll tell you once again, this car has no top or bottom to tie anything onto. If it were to flip, it would get stuck on the clothes, like a turtle.”

“That makes sense,” I told him.

“That’s what you said the first two times I told you,” he said.

“Hey, cut me some slack, kid, I’m the one running with the zombies. I’m a little nervous.”

“I guess I would be too,” he answered, thinking about it.

“Gary, I know you’re head is probably still aching, and you might be woozy and everything, but do you think you could lay down some covering fire if I were to say, trip over something?”

Gary was fighting back a comment. I could see the machinations behind his eyes working frantically, but apparently higher reasoning or a higher purpose took over. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mike, but I’ll always have your back,” he said, getting up, even with Mary’s disapproving stare.

I nodded my thanks to him. I stuffed Gary’s bandages and bloody shirt into a laundry bag, secured the top and then tied a nylon rope from the neck of the bag to a strut on Josh’s car.

I opened a window and immediately regretted my decision. The smell that assailed us was hideous, the sour stench of death. Josh hurled his peanut butter and oatmeal sandwich. It looked pretty much the same coming up as it had going down. I would not be adding that to my list of foods to try.

“You going to be alright?” I asked him as I lowered the car by the laundry bag rope to the ground.

I could hear Gary gagging in the background; Josh started back up. “Great,” I muttered, “dueling gaggers.” My support system was not looking up to task.

Mary saved the day. “You two are going to ruin my carpet!” she yelled, getting up to clean Josh’s internal spillings.

A zombie startled the crap out of me as he smacked into the bars. It had come dangerously close to stepping on the car. More zombies were coming to investigate the din and they weren’t generally too concerned with foot placement.

“Josh, you have to get that car out of here, or they’re gonna bust it,” I said. That seemed to get him. The smell was one thing, but losing one of his remote-controlled cars was another.

The zombie was eyeing us hungrily (pun intended). It was tough to say if intelligence burned behind its opaque eyes, but this was no clodhopping brain chaser either. Josh gulped loudly as he looked straight at the zombie.

“Umm, I have to get closer to the window so I can see the car,” Josh told me as he turned his large remote on.

“Cover your ears,” I told him.

Mary was coming back from the kitchen with her cleaning supplies. “Don’t you dare!” she screamed just as the report from my rifle rang out.

“COOL!” Josh yelled, taking his hands away from around his ears.

The zombie had fallen mostly straight back, but its left arm was resting on top of the car.

“No shooting in the house!” Mary yelled.

“I’ll keep that in mind, the next time,” I told her honestly. Zombies were within a couple of feet of the window. “Josh, now or never, buddy.”

I’ll give him credit. He mustered up all his courage and stepped up to the window. And then nothing, I saw him moving buttons back and forth and side to side and we could hear the car trying to do something, but the zombie had it pinned.

“I think I can get it free,” Josh said excitedly, up until the point a zombie woman cracked it in half. Josh looked more crushed than the car that was now getting ground into the dirt.

I quickly undid the knot on the small laundry bag and shut the window, drawing the shades and pulling the curtains shut.

“Well, that didn’t work,” I said, going into the kitchen, I sat down heavily in a chair.

“Josh, honey, are you alright?” Mary said, putting her cleaning supplies down to grab her son in a bear hug.

Josh wept a little, but he tried his best to hide it from us all.

“It was a gift from his father,” Mary said over his head to me.

I can’t even begin to convey how big of an ass I felt at this point. If you’ve read all of my journals, you know I have a penchant for saying or doing the wrong thing at the ultimate wrong time, but this one? This one took the cake.

“What…what am I going to do if…if Da…Dad comes home with the parts for it now?” Josh sobbed into his mother’s arms.

“Josh, he’d understand. You were trying to do something good for someone else; you guys would rebuild it, that’s all, honey,” Mary said. She seemed to have correctly punched all the right buttons. Josh pulled back from her arms, wiping his tears away.

“I’ve got another car, Mr. Talbot, if you want to try again, that is,” he said to me.

“I would, Josh. My friend is out there and I’d like to find him.”

“I understand because if I knew where my dad was, I’d try to find him too,” Josh said, wiping his nose and extricating himself from Mary’s arms. “I’ll be right back,” he said, heading back upstairs.

Mary let out a half sob, half gasp. “I’m watching him grow up right before my eyes. Sometimes, he’ll always be my sweet six-year-old, and then sometimes like now, I can see the man that he is becoming.”

Gary finished cleaning up the carpet as Josh rummaged around in his room.

Josh came down the stairs with what looked like the monster truck version of a radio-controlled vehicle.

“Oh, honey are you sure?” Mary asked, placing her hand to her chest. “That was a Christmas present.”

“Mom, Hugo is the best chance Mr. Talbot has of getting to his friend.”

I gathered that Hugo was the name of the truck. “Josh, I don’t know how this is going to turn out.”

“He never does,” Gary added for good measure, coming back from the kitchen.

“I thought the peanut gallery was closed?” I said hotly.

“Boys,” Mary said, playing referee.

“It’s alright, Mr. Talbot. Maybe if you find your friend, then you could go and maybe find my dad.”

I looked over at Mary. I would be lying if I said anything but the truth of where I thought his father was.

“I know that look,” Josh said. “You don’t think my dad is alive. But he has to be! He wouldn’t have just left us, not now.”

“Josh, I will promise you this, if I can get to my friend and get back, I will go check out where you think your dad went.”

“Electronix Emporium,” Josh said quickly, now beaming. “No fooling? You’ll go check?”

“He’s a lot of things and many of them not good, Josh, but a liar isn’t one of them,” Gary said.

“Gotta love a good, back-handed compliment,” I told my brother.

He nodded his head in appreciation.

We moved to a different window on the same side of the house, one where we hoped there would be less zombies. We were right, but then we encountered our next situation - Hugo would not fit through the bars.

“It’s almost like it wasn’t meant to happen,” Gary said. “Like a sign, a bunch of signs.”

“Since when did you become a fortune teller?” I asked him sarcastically.

“Since my fortune got tied up in yours,” he answered quickly.

“As good a time as any, I suppose,” I told him.

“It’s only going to fit out the door,” Josh said, slamming the window down before we attracted any more visitors.

“I’d rather not open any doors,” Mary said.

“How were you planning on letting me out?” I asked.

“Hadn’t thought that far,” Mary said, as realization dawned on her that she really hadn’t gotten that far.

“See what happens when you’re around him for too long?” Gary asked sympathetically.

“Is that like his vampire psychic powers warping our mortal minds?” Josh asked expectantly.

“No, he’s always had this effect on people,” Gary said dryly.

Josh looked a little bummed that it wasn’t a supernatural cause that made those around me go crazy.

“Back door for the car, front door for me?” I asked the household.

“No,” Mary said without hesitation. “I will not have both of my doors opened simultaneously. You don’t even know if this will work. We put the car out, Josh sends it on its way and we see if they follow.”

I didn’t like the plan. At absolute best, the car had a hundred-yard range with Josh’s controller and then it would just stop. I needed a bunch of zombies to go and check this thing out and in a relatively small amount of time before the car hit its max threshold for signal-catching. I should have given the kid way more credit. He had a trick or two up his sleeve to give me the time I needed.

“How we looking?” I asked Gary and Josh, who were peeking out a window adjacent to the door.

“There’s a few milling around, but if you don’t stop to wash your hands or anything, you should be fine,” Gary said.

“You’re on fire tonight,” I told him.

He grinned back.

“You ready, Josh?” I asked.

He spun the wheels on the truck I was holding in response. The torque and the shock almost made me drop the thing. This time, I had secured the small bag of bait on the top of the car, careful to make sure that nothing hung down that could get hooked up in the wheels.

“This sucks,” I said right before pulling the door open. Zombie heads swiveled to the noise, food recognition dawning on their eyes as they began to forge ahead. I started to fumble with the security door, which was, I guess, out of my skill set because I couldn’t get the damn thing open. Mary rushed to my aid, undoing the lock and pushing the door open. I looked at her in gratitude.

“Put the damn car down!” she shouted at me, never taking her eyes off the advancing horde.

Josh already had the wheels turning as I placed it on the ground. The car shot from my hand as it made contact with the hard surface. A zombie slammed the door into my hand. I was sure I felt a couple of bones shatter as Mary wrenched me on my back, pulling me in. She quickly locked the screen door, and I scrambled out of the way as she hurriedly shut the front door.

My hand was already turning that bluish shade of pain and internal bleeding.

“You righty or lefty?” Mary asked, holding my hand.

“Righty,” I told her, “but I shoot leftie.”

Her face sank a little as she held my rapidly swelling left hand.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I have wonderful recuperative powers.”

She looked at me funny; I did not feel the need to elaborate.

“Mike, your hand is broken,” she said, pushing her finger into the bluest part as if to prove her point.

“Yup,” I winced.

“Hey, they’re following it!” Josh stated exuberantly.

I figured I only had seconds before the car had traveled its furthest radio-receiving distance and then they’d turn their attention back to me.

“Wish me luck,” I said as I once again opened the front door. Hand Slammer was gone this time and I had, at least, learned something from Mary as I got the security door opened much more easily. I looked immediately to my right, expecting to see Hugo rapidly approaching maximum distance. All I saw were zombies who were heading towards the side of the house. I ducked my head back in, Josh and Gary had shifted to another window. The kid was brilliant. Instead of just taking the car and heading for maximum distance, he was dodging and weaving it through the zombies, thereby giving me way more time to get the hell out of here.

“Go,” Mary said, her eyes wide with fear. Partly because I had the front door to her house open and partly because I wasn’t moving yet.

I jumped down the three steps and started running in the direction I had last seen BT heading. As soon as I hit my stride, I began to doubt the validity of my entire plan. I’m all for “alone time” and the need for it, but somehow during a zombie-pocalypse doesn’t seem like the right time. Should I shout? There weren’t tons of zombies out, but I also didn’t want to change that status. By my reckoning, one zombie is one too many.

I skipped Mary’s neighbor’s house, and as I approached the next, I began to wonder if BT had maybe traveled through a backyard or two and maybe got on to another street. I mean, what then? He knew where we were, but I had no clue where he was. Why don’t I think this shit out before I act?

I could hear Josh’s car off in the distance, but for some reason, that distance was getting closer.

Chapter Eight

“That’s awesome, Josh, they’re all following it,” Gary said excitedly.

Josh did not immediately answer, as sweat began to form on his head. “I’ve lost control!” he shouted. “I think the batteries in the remote are dead.”

“Shouldn’t the car just stop?” Mary asked.

“No,” Josh said in resignation. “I put the car on ‘auto’ so that it would keep running when it was out of range.”

“Well, that’s alright then, isn’t it, honey? We’ll get you another one,” Mary said, leaning up against the front door as if she thought it might open without her there to stop it.

“Which way did Mike go?” Gary asked, moving from the window on the side of the house to one of the side lights by the front door.

“Left,” Mary answered.

“Figured as much,” Gary said as his eyes tracked Hugo heading left.

“Shit,” Josh said.

Mary did not correct him, not this time. If ever there was a time and a place to use an expletive, this was it.

Hugo was heading down the street towards Mike like a heat-seeking missile.

Chapter Nine – Mike Journal Entry 7

“Shit,” I said, watching Hugo head my way. “I bet Gary’s working the damn thing.”

Hugo was cool; the two dozen speeders trying their best to catch him were not.

“Here we go again,” I said as I began to run. Couldn’t I get déjà vu, at like Oktoberfest, while I was sampling different beers? Because that would be so much cooler.

I started running down the sidewalk. Hugo was about dead center on the street. I don’t know about you, but I’d never had much luck with RC cars. Usually, I crashed them into something or they broke consistently, but not good old Hugo! Nope. He was running straight and true right down the bloody center (English slip) of the road. He was looking like he could do it all night long. What was even way better was that the damn street we were on did not have a curve in its foreseeable future. The one and only thing I had going for me at the moment was that the zombies were completely focused on the truck and its bloody contents (not an English slip, actual stuff it was hauling).

I had a few options. First, keep running in the same direction. Hugo would pass me up shortly and I would become victim to those old zombie posters. You know the ones, “I don’t have to be fastest, only faster than you!” Hugo would zip away and the zombies would turn to me for solace and food. I might be able to keep one or two at bay, but I did not understand my powers well enough or even know if it were possible to do much more than that.

Second, I could cut across a yard and start searching elsewhere, but here we come back to the needle-in-a-haystack analogy, although with the size of BT, it’s more like a cop’s nightstick than a needle, which in reality, shouldn’t be all that hard to find in one haystack. Or third, I could hide behind a bush against the house I was next to. I didn’t like the idea of not moving, especially if even one zombie was looking my way when it happened. But it might work, I’ll just let them run on by. I thought through all of these scenarios in a flash, and was already diving into a small mulberry bush as I was thinking it. Hugo was almost even with me by the time I was able to turn and feel that I was completely concealed from the road. The zombies were a good twenty yards trailing, but they didn’t look like they planned on stopping. My upper torso was completely under the bush, but the bottom-most branches were still a good six inches above my back, and my legs were uncovered. This, all of a sudden, felt like not such a great maneuver. If a zombie saw me and headed this way, it would be all I could do to extricate myself from my hidey-hole and get up to full speed.

“Dumb, dumb,” I said softly as the zombies approached. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of the crunching of plastic, and the high-pitched whining of spinning tires upturned. Are you shitting me? Hugo took this most inopportune of times to flip. I stuck my head out an inch, two at the max to see what happened. I was done in, by a fucking pothole! How damn ironic is that? The very job I had been doing before the zombies came and my equivalents down in North Carolina couldn’t do their part to make our streets a safer place to drive on.

The zombies pounced on the truck. The wheels stopped spinning as Hugo’s life came to an abrupt end. Gary’s shirt was shredded in the feeding frenzy, bandages and swabs flying like chaff in World War II. Zombies sprang up as they realized they had been duped. Well, maybe they didn’t figure that part out; they just knew they weren’t eating anything with substance and now they were on active search mode again. I pulled my head in slowly, not wanting to give my spot away. The moonlight felt like it was shining bright enough to rival a morning sun. Sure, no clouds when you want one, unlike that time back in 1978 when I was trying to watch the lunar eclipse. Oh yeah! They were all over the place then. Stayed up all effin’ night, didn’t see a damn thing except for clouds. I told God that he should probably stick to his day job and leave the ironic comedy to the professionals.

“Awesome,” I whispered, putting my head down for a second. Had to be at least thirty zombies just milling about, no more than thirty to forty feet from where I was. They didn’t go back to Mary’s house, which would have been a blessing. They just milled around, like stoners in their parents’ basement. They just didn’t know what to do with themselves. I’d been one of them, so I knew this could possibly go on all night. I guess zombies were a lot like stoners; neither did much in the way of action until food was involved. At least, I would be able to keep myself amused.

I would have to do something before daybreak. I was entirely too exposed like this. I decided I was not going to wait until the very end to do something. Normally, I’d wait until the sun was beginning to peek up over a nearby rooftop. I was sick of close calls when it was time to move. I slowly inched further back and closer to the foundation of the house I was hiding next to. The loud snap when my rifle sling caught a branch above my head, snapping the dry appendage in two, did not go unnoticed. I stopped moving completely. I mean, except of course, for my heart which was banging so hard it was popping my chest off the ground by a good six or eight inches. (Yes, yes, it’s my flair for the dramatic, I was scared. You have thirty or so zombies stop everything they’re doing and more or less look in your direction, and let me know how you hold up.)

I didn’t even want to breathe, but when your heart is slamming away and your adrenaline is juicing the works, it just isn’t possible. I let a small exhalation of air go. GOD, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I screamed in my head. The night was just cool enough that I could see my breath as it lazily swirled past my face. Might as well have been crashing cymbals together. A couple of zombies had honed in on the movement of coiled, cooled air, but as of yet, had not made any direct connection between it and a food source. But I had to imagine that they would come check it out. What the hell else were they going to do? I’m sure they weren’t worried about missing an ice cream social or something.

A few of the inquisitive zombies started to slowly make their way over towards my location. I was gradually inching my way back even further, so that I could stand and make a run for it. I was tempted to head back towards Mary’s, but I wasn’t sure if I’d make it, or more likely, if she’d even open the door. Oh, I’m sure she’d make a good show of it for Gary. But I could almost picture her fingers fumbling with the lock on the security door (yes, the same one she had already twice proved how adept she was with) as zombies began to chew on my flesh. And then she’d have this small, devious smile that would flash across her features right before she shut the front door.

I wasn’t even going to attempt that avenue. Mothers are entirely too protective of their offspring and now that she knew who and what I was? Yeah, better to not try that at all.

The problem at hand was that the three amigos kept advancing on my spot, not with any determined reason yet, but that was only a matter of time. I thought about sending them off one by one, but then I would definitely be giving my position away. If the rest of the troop joined in the fray, I would not be able to divert my attention to each of them in turn quickly enough to repel them.

“Piss, shit and vinegar,” I muttered. Pretty archaic curse words, but it seemed like the right thing to say. I must have been channeling an old man because I don’t remember ever using or hearing that particular combo of words in that fashion, ever. My feet were up against the house, I wasn’t going any further back, next thing for me was to rise and run.

“Did it crash?” I heard Josh’s voice from up the street.

“There’s a bunch of zombies in the road, but I don’t see your truck or Mike for that matter,” Gary answered.

Every last zombie turned to the voices, I was completely forgotten as the zombies went from ambling to full throttle in mere moments. It might not have been the cavalry to the rescue, but the outcome was just as effective.

“We should probably get back inside,” Gary told Josh.

My smart-ass comment would have been, “Do you think?” But right now, all I wanted to do was a small jig. I wanted to, but I wouldn’t. There was still a good chance that somebody alive and breathing would be in one of these houses and they would never be able to unsee that. I didn’t want to put anybody through any more stress than they had already been. There’s a few things in this life we should never be exposed to, one is my dancing; another would be anyone picking their nose and eating it; and third would be zombies. Anyone still alive who had already seen two of those, I would not heap anymore misery on.

The zombies were racing down the street, I could hear Mary urging the boys in and then the resounding thuds of both doors being shut. I once again felt alone and scared. Man, I just can’t seem to get my shit together. Two seconds ago, I was praying for this and now that I’ve got it, I don’t know what to do with it. Time to find my friend. I didn’t have a shred of proof, nor any type of psychic link to him, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that BT was in trouble. I stayed as close to the houses as I could. Hating every time I had to run across a side yard to get to the next dwelling. I was figuring I was in more danger of catching a round from a homeowner at this point, while I was in the open.

I had traveled another two houses when I started to see signs of a struggle. This was no CSI crime scene where I needed a magnifying glass and special chemicals. The headless zombie kind of gave it away, followed by a second and a third. I was passing the front of the house, and the zombie bodies were beginning to stack up. My heart or maybe my stomach or just plain both were struggling to find room in my throat. On the right side of the house, I could see a six-foot privacy fence. The gate was gone or buried under even more zombie bodies. It was impossible to not step on a zombie as I made my way through the constricted area. I now heard the distinctive sound of metal on metal. The repeated click was nerve-wracking. I pictured all sorts of travesties, but nothing could live up to the truth. I turned into the backyard, thankful that the space opened up and I could stop stepping on bodies. Twenty to thirty zombies lay strewn about, some with bullet holes, most with caved-in skulls, some with sliced off arms and decapitated heads.

The metallic sound got louder. I approached cautiously. The sound was coming from behind a large home-heating propane tank. I thought (hoped) it was merely the wind pushing something against the large drum, a great theory, mind you, if there had been any breeze at all. The air was as still as death. Great analogy, Talbot. I berated myself. I gave a wide berth to the tank as I approached, I saw large legs first, splayed out on the ground. I moved quickly around to see BT leaning up against the tank, his revolver planted firmly under his jaw, I didn’t move fast enough as the hammer came down on an expended round. He pulled the trigger again, the metallic click sending me flying to pull the gun from him.

BT barely registered my existence as I pulled the gun from his hand. He looked up at me with a tear-soaked face.

“I’ve been bit, Mike,” BT sobbed.

Chapter Ten - Paul, Brian and Deneaux

“Mrs. D, I really think you should take more cover,” Brian said as he hid behind some strategically placed road debris. The overpass they were on appeared to be the perfect place for their ambush. There was no access to the highway on this road and by the time anyone traversed the steep grade to get to them, they would be long gone. That was the theory anyway.

“Nonsense, I am no spring chicken. I’m not getting on the ground like a savage.”

Paul shrugged his shoulders at Brian, as if to say, I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about.

Mrs. Deneaux had searched four backyards before she found a lawn chair that she liked. Brian had carried the piece of furniture here for her. He would have left it behind if he hadn’t thought she was nearly his equivalent with the firearms. He thought Paul was a loyal and brave friend, but when it came to shooting, Paul was best left to the job of spotter.

Mrs. Deneaux, was sound asleep, head lolled to the side and half a burnt cigarette hanging out of her mouth when the earth begin to tremble.

“You feel that?” she asked, awakening with a start.

“No, what’s up?” Paul asked.

“Nothing. Must be gas,” she said, laughing.

“Wonderful,” Paul answered moving slightly away.

“No, I felt it too,” Brian said, looking up over their barricade.

“You must be ripping them,” Paul said to Mrs. Deneaux. “Whoa! I felt that,” Paul looked down the roadway. “You see anything?”

Brian placed his binoculars up to his eyes and held them steady. “Nothing yet,” he said calmly, but his true, rampaging emotions were threatening to rip through his imposed demeanor.

Mrs. Deneaux flipped her rifle’s safety off and rested the barrel on top of the guardrail. Her heart cracked off some rust as it beat a little quicker. She had led a decent life, not fulfilling and not overly happy, but it was her life and she was not in any rush to give it back to her maker. Besides that, she had some serious sins she still had to atone for. She wasn’t convinced there was an underworld, but who needed to believe in that when evil is present all around, every day. But she was not one to test her luck either. If there was a Hades, he would have to wait just like everyone else to get his due. She put her index finger in her mouth and stuck it in the air to find the prevailing breeze.

“Does that really work?” Paul asked.

“Watch and learn,” she said, placing her eye to the scope.

“Here they come,” Brian said, pointing down the roadway as he pulled his binoculars down.

“How can we be sure it’s them?” Paul asked.

“Well, first will be the smell, and then the underlying sense of evil that will pervade everything and then the old standby, your friend said they’d be coming this way and in this form,” Mrs. Deneaux said, never taking her gaze from her aperture.

“Okay, so there’s that,” Paul said.

“This a little much for you, bud?” Brian said, egging Paul on a bit.

“You do get that I was a manager at FedEx before this shit happened, right? I didn’t go off and play Army boy for a few years. I’ve played paint ball maybe three times my entire life and the only gun in my house belonged to my wife. So excuse me if I’m a little fucking nervous that we’re about to get into a fire fight with an enemy that probably outnumbers us a thousand to one,” Paul said heatedly.

“Quit your bitching,” Mrs. Deneaux said, looking up. “Most of them won’t even have a weapon,” she cackled, referring to the zombies that were being carried in the trucks.

Brian snorted. “Sorry, man,” he said when Paul directed a glare at him. “I was just trying to gauge your combat readiness.”

“He didn’t do so well,” Mrs. Deneaux said. “They’re in range,” she said steadying her eye back down on the scope. “You give the word, Brian, and the driver of the first truck is a dead man.”

Brian shivered at the iciness with which she delivered those words. Killing a man was not an easy task. She, however, sounded practiced at the event. “I want you to be able to tell if he’s a genteel before you shoot.”

Mrs. Deneaux laughed.

“I don’t get it,” Paul said.

The trucks rumbled closer.

“God, there’s so many of them,” Paul said.

The driver of the lead truck saw a glint of light from above. As he looked to see what was reflecting, he thought he saw a small wisp of smoke, followed immediately by a warm, stinging sensation in the center of his chest. His heart stopped beating from the ruptured aorta long before his brain caught up with the fact that he was dead. The truck jerked to the right and then immediately back to the left, the G-forces pulling the cab free from the trailer. The cab went off the embankment to the left, smashing into a tree with the tortured sound of twisting metal and breaking glass. The trailer’s front dropped onto the pavement. Sparks shot back forty feet as metal grated noisily on the roadway.

The trailer may have come to a peaceful stop had not the truck behind it plowed ferociously into its rear end. The troop transport’s rear tires came off the ground as it slammed into the tractor-trailer, spilling the undead contents all over the roadway. Zombies that weren’t immediately liquefied from the accident got up and looked around. The small group atop the overpass was left to wonder why the zombies didn’t do anything except stand in place, almost like they were awaiting direction. But those questions would have to wait to be answered as Eliza’s real men got out and began to search for the threat.

Mrs. Deneaux, smoothly pulled her bolt action back and then forward, placing another round in the chamber. The driver of the third truck had stopped in enough time to avoid the collision and had just stepped out of the cab when Mrs. Deneaux sheered his arm off above the elbow.

Paul, who now had the binoculars, told her that the driver was not dead.

“I did it on purpose, sweetie,” Mrs. Deneaux said, almost kindly. “I was hoping that maybe the sight of blood and someone screaming and running around like a headless chicken would get the zombies moving. Doesn’t seem to have worked,” she said, pulling the bolt back and pushing it forward again.

Brian once again got that chill up his spine. She’s either mad as a hatter, or insane. Neither is a very good prospect.

Brian started to shoot, not nearly with the precision or icy coolness with which Mrs. D dispatched of the enemy, but it was effective all the same.

“Might be time to get going,” Paul said as he saw troops rallying. “It looks like they know where we are and they’re getting ready to fight back.”

As if on cue, shots began to pepper their location.

“Good enough warning for me,” Brian said as he shifted to get his things together, ready to leave post haste. The round that hit him, smashed through his collarbone and exited his abdomen. He immediately rolled on to his back. “Fuck! I didn’t think it would hurt that bad!” he said as his breathing became rapid.

“What would?” Paul turned, beginning to rise with his rucksack. “Damn,” was all Paul managed to say as he looked down on Brian and a blossom of blood spread from Brian’s shoulder to his stomach.

“Bad?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, as she realized they weren’t leaving quite yet. She dropped her magazine and started to put more rounds in it. “I’ll keep shooting; you need to get pressure on his wound.”

Brian was breathing heavily, straining the air through clenched teeth. “It feels like someone has dragged a branding iron across my chest,” he hissed. “And I can’t move my left arm.”

Paul gingerly opened Brian’s light jacket and pulled his shirt up. The sharp intake of air was all the information that Brian needed.

“It’s bad?” Brian asked.

“Brian, everything’s bad to me. Remember me saying I was a manager at a FedEx? Worst thing I ever had to deal with were cardboard cuts,” Paul told him as he took an extra shirt from his backpack and placed it over Brian’s exit wound. “It looks like your collarbone is pretty busted up and the bullet grazed across your chest. That’s why it’s burning; and then it went in and out of your stomach.”

“Gained twenty-five pounds since I’ve been out of the Army. Most of it is gone now, but if I had stayed in shape, the bullet would have missed,” Brian said, still in pain, but realizing he might not quite be dead.

“That extra weight might have saved your life, at least the sexual part,” Paul told him.

“What are you talking about?” Brian asked as he repositioned himself.

“Look at the direction that bullet was heading,” Paul said as he got some bandages and tape.

Brian looked down to his left, past the busted collarbone, at the scrape that went to the right of his left nipple to where the bullet entered into his stomach and came out right below the navel. “Oh shit! That was close,” Brian said, placing his right hand on his still present male equipment.

“I’d take a scar on my mid section any day of the week,” Paul commented, doing his best to place a field dressing on the wound so they could get out of there.

Mrs. Deneaux was still rhythmically shooting, but their location was under heavy fire. Mrs. Deneaux’s lawn chair had already suffered two grievous wounds. The only thing saving her life was how thin she was.

“Well, that helps,” she said as she lifted her head from the scope.

The shooting had stopped on both sides, but the screaming intensified from the highway below.

“What’s going on?” Brian asked.

“I think Mr. Talbot has held up his end of the agreement,” Mrs. Deneaux said as she gleefully clapped her hands.

Paul got into a crouch to look over the guardrail.

“Oh, I think you could do the Samba and no one would take any notice of you,” Mrs. Deneaux said as she stood to get a better vantage point of the slaughter down below.

Paul was perfectly happy with his vantage point. “The zombies are attacking Eliza’s people,” Paul said, pumping his fist.

“I think now would be a good time to get gone,” Brian said, pulling his water bottle over.

“Let me get a sling on your arm first,” Mrs. Deneaux said, placing her rifle down and accessing Brian for the first time.

Brian was none too pleased with her scrutinous eye. He could tell she was sizing up his mobility, and if he were left wanting, she would not have any problem leaving him behind. She’s a dangerous one, he thought. But he said nothing as she did a reasonably good facsimile of a sling with an old t-shirt.

“Not bad,” Brian said as he stood up slowly. Blood rushed out of his head, sending him into a brief, but intense bout of vertigo.

“You alright?” Mrs. Deneaux asked and it almost sounded like she cared.

“Fine,” Brian answered as he steadied himself on the back of her lawn chair. He prayed that its compromised integrity would sustain his weight for just a little while longer. If he plunged to the ground now and passed out, he was certain he’d find himself alone on the bridge when he awoke. Blood slowly pushed its way back up and into his head, and the dizziness passed.

If Mrs. Deneaux hadn’t been so busy assessing Brian, she might not have missed a chance to end the entire conflict. Paul decided to seize the day as he grabbed Mrs. Deneaux’s rifle. He stood completely upright. A slight breeze was blowing left to right as he placed the crosshairs of the Winchester 30-30 on Eliza’s breast.

Brian and Mrs. Deneaux turned as Paul fired.

“I hit her!” Paul screamed.

“Who?” Brian asked, swallowing down some bile that had swirled up from his gut.

“Eliza! I hit Eliza!” Paul shouted, almost dropping the rifle off the railing.

Mrs. Deneaux grabbed it before he could. She started looking through the scope for any signs that the vamp was dead. “I don’t see anything. How far away was she?” she asked.

Paul started counting off trucks. “Nine or ten back,” he said proudly.

“That’s about a three-hundred-yard shot,” Brian said, finally able to move without the threat of falling.

“Did you compensate for bullet drop?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, moving the scope further out to look for Eliza.

“Bullet what?” Paul asked. His previous high beginning to sink.

“At that distance, the bullet could drop about ten inches roughly,” Brian said.

“If you were aiming for her skull, that could still have done her some damage. Might have hit her in the chest.”

Paul’s head sank.” I was aiming for her chest, figured I had a better chance of hitting that.”

“Gut shot the bitch,” Mrs. Deneaux laughed. “Bet that hurt.”

Brian thought her laugh sounded very much like what drowning babies crying would. “We should really get out of here now, I can’t imagine that anything good can happen from pissing Eliza off.”

***

Eliza had been so intent on finding out why her zombies had turned and what she needed to do to rein them back in, she had not been anticipating an outside threat.

“This is Talbot’s doing! I can smell the stench of him all over this!” Eliza spat.

“I think it would be best if we left him his small corner of the world, Eliza,” Tomas said, smiling as he walked with his sister.

“You did this!” she said vehemently, spinning on her heel to confront him. “Without your help, that animal, Durgan, would have killed him and we could be out exploring vast new ways to torment the world. I will not be bested by a mere man.”

“He is no longer merely a man, sister,” Tomas added.

“No, thanks to you.”

Tomas shrugged at the jibe. “He has struck you hard, Eliza. Most of your humans are either dead or have fled. I beg you one last time, leave him be.”

“Never!” she screamed as she stepped out from behind a truck and smack dab in front of a speeding bullet. Her mid section punched in from the projectile as her upper torso bent over. Tomas grabbed her before she could fall and pulled her back behind cover.

“It is not a fatal blow,” Tomas said, inspecting the wound.

The zombies around the siblings did not advance, but they had stopped what they were doing and were now watching them intently.

Eliza sat in her brother’s arms for a while longer. The searing pain was something she had not experienced since her human youth when a gang of Huns had trapped her in an old barn and beat and used her for three days before they tired of her. For the first time in half a millennia, Eliza doubted her intentions. “Why won’t he die, Tomas?” Eliza begged.

“It is for something you have forgotten about, Eliza: family, he fights for the lives of his family. He knows no stronger bond.”

“Then that is the bond we must break,” Eliza said as she stood up. The bullet had worked its way out of her skin and the wound was nearly healed.

“Did you hear nothing I said?” Tomas fairly cried.

“I heard everything you said. If we kill Talbot’s family, he will follow closely behind.”

“Not until he exacts his fair measure of revenge. He will not strike out if we do not corner him.”

“Maybe that would have been the truth at one time, brother. No, we must strike while he is at his weakest, while he still has family to use as leverage and while he is still learning the powers that you bestowed upon him. You sealed his fate when you bit him.”

There was nothing he could do to sway her from this course, and when the final showdown did come, whose side would he fall on? He still hadn’t made up his mind.

The cries of her humans had nearly died out. A few trucks could be heard pulling away and zombies were spread out everywhere, hunting for food, including the ones that had stopped for a moment, checking out Eliza, to see if she would be coming on the menu.

“We should leave here, Eliza, in case he has any other surprises in store for us.”

Eliza made sure this time to keep under cover and concealment behind the remaining trucks as she herded her zombies back in. And on that highway was where she would leave them, two thousand zombies, through the coming winters and summers. Those zombies would sway forever, as leaves fell, as rain poured, as sun soaked them, tied to Eliza’s last order to stand still.

“You’re just going to leave them here?” Eliza’s first-in-command asked, as he swung the command truck around.

“I fear that a couple of the zombies looked at her with a less than flattering stare,” Tomas told the man.

The man wouldn’t miss them. It was tough to feel sorry for the creatures that tore his wife apart in front of his very eyes as she fell from the ladder they were climbing to get up their apartment’s fire escape. He had thought about just letting go and joining her, but he wasn’t brave enough for that. Not brave enough to die and not brave enough to live. Eliza had come across him a week later, still huddled in the far corner of his apartment, covered in his own filth, too scared to even cross his own living room to get some water.

She had promised him a chance to strike back at those responsible for his wife’s death. Dean had never been a God-fearing man, but he knew the devil when he came across it, and the only thing missing on Eliza were the horns. It wasn’t that he believed her words, it was what he knew she would do to him if he didn’t join her. A coward is led. He felt this was his punishment for not dying with his wife. He had seen and done more acts of brutality, cruelty and evil in the last six months than any person should ever be exposed to, and all in the name of Eliza. He knew his wife was looking down on him, frowning, and that he would never see her again. There was no place in heaven for the likes of him, not anymore. Maybe at one time, he had the whole meek thing going for him, now he was certain he was damned. If he had not thought that, he would have killed himself months ago, but he was afraid of meeting whatever it was that had spawned Eliza. So, afraid of this eventual meeting, he had begged first Eliza and then Tomas to bite him. Eliza had laughed cruelly at him when his request came.

“You would give up your soul so willingly?” she asked, flashing her lengthened canines.

“More than anything, mistress,” he had groveled before her.

“You disgust me,” Eliza told him. “The only way I would bite your pathetic neck would be to drain you dry. To watch you shrivel like an exposed worm in the mid-July sun.”

“Please mistress! Have I not served you well?”

“Do not think I am fooled; you serve for preservation, not loyalty.”

Dean withdrew; was he that easy to read?

“I can see by your reaction that I know your heart,” she said. “Do you not wish to once again see this wife you were wailing about when I found you?”

Dean sniffed, wiping his nose clean, nodding his head vigorously.

“But you know now that there is no place for you in your God’s heaven, don’t you?”

Dean nodded again.

“You think I’m cruel?” Eliza said through thin lips. “How about your master that banishes his children from his garden because they merely thirsted for knowledge! Or floods an entire world because of acts from a few that he finds depraved. Or allows the undead to walk among his creations, devouring them because they went too far with the knowledge they had obtained? That sounds cruel to me!” she yelled. “How about letting a man’s wife be allowed into his heaven, but deny the husband entry!” she said as she picked Dean up by a finger placed under his jaw.

The pain was excruciating as his entire body’s weight was suspended by his jaw. Eliza’s finger had broken through skin and was threatening to come up underneath his tongue. He yearned for death at that moment, to be free from the pain she was inflicting on him. He cared not what happened to his eternal soul as she paraded him around like that for a few moments more. When she finally pulled her finger away, he crashed to the ground, staying there many moments longer, until Eliza beckoned him like nothing had happened at all.

“How far, mistress?” Dean asked as he drove away from the scene of carnage.

“Until I snap your neck or tell you to stop,” Eliza said, staring straight through the windshield.

And from the mood she was in, Dean fully expected the neck snapping to be the outcome.

***

Paul, Brian and Mrs. Deneaux worked themselves off the bridge long before Eliza had made her departure and were making as good a progress as they could. Brian was slowed considerably by his injury, but it wasn’t like Mrs. Deneaux was blazing any trails.

“Get in the woods,” Paul urged, “I hear someone coming.”

“Is it Mike?” Brian asked, hoping that was the case.

“Possible,” Paul stated as he ushered the small group along. “But there were also a bunch of people running for their lives from that raid.”

Mrs. Deneaux had just entered into the underbrush as three heavily armed men rounded a corner on the road up ahead. One of the men was holding his side like he had the mother of all stitches from running.

“Hold up,” one of the men said. “I thought I saw something.” He was pointing to where Paul and the others were now hiding.

All three had assault rifles. This will be a small scuffle, Paul thought as he tried to get his rifle ready with as minimal movement as possible.

“Whassa matter, Vinnie?” one man asked the cohort who was holding his side.

“I cut myself getting down off the truck,” Vinnie said.

The man who asked the question brought his rifle up to Vinnie’s head. “Lemme see the cut, Vin,” he asked.

“Come on, Lenny. I cut myself. Get that gun outta my face!” Vinnie yelled.

“What are you two hollering about?” the leader said, turning to face the other two men.

“Vinnie says he’s cut,” Lenny said.

The leader turned his gun on Vinnie. “You know the deal, Vinnie. Let’s see it.”

“It barely got me,” Vinnie cried, “it’s more like a nip.”

Vinnie collapsed to the ground as Lenny shot him through the back of the head.

The leader butt-stroked Lenny. “You fucking mook! You got blood and brains all over me!” he yelled at Lenny’s prone body.

Lenny’s face was swelling rapidly; broken blood vessels began to turn purple and blue. Lenny turned his gun on the leader. “You ever do that shit again, Sam, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“I hope you give me more warning than you did Vinnie,” Sam laughed as he reached a hand down to help Lenny up.

“I was really hoping they were going to shoot each other,” Brian whispered to Paul. Paul nodded in agreement.

“If nothing else, it looks like they forgot about us,” Paul answered.

Sam bent down and picked up the gun Vinnie would no longer be using. They walked past the hidden trio, more interested in what potentially lay behind, than to the sides.

“They’re heading towards our truck,” Brian said.

“Should I shoot them?” Mrs. Deneaux asked.

“No,” Brian said, “you won’t be fast enough with that bolt action and I can’t even hold my rifle.” He left unsaid Paul’s marksmanship skills or lack thereof.

“We’re screwed if they take our truck,” Paul said.

“Yeah, we’re also screwed if they shoot us,” Brian said.

“Maybe Mike is already back at the truck,” Paul said hopefully.

Brian was in the midst of standing when Mrs. Deneaux’s claw-like hand gripped his bad shoulder. He nearly swooned from the pain. But it had the desired effect as he fell hard to the ground. Brian was about to let loose a litany of choice swear words as a small tribe of seven speeders ran by.

“Fucking Grand Central Station,” Paul cursed, making sure the zombies were well past.

They could all hear the roar of an engine start up ahead.

“Well that settles that,” Brian said. “We need to get another ride.”

“This is all jacked now!” Paul said with some alarm. He was beginning to break down, Brian had seen it numerous times in combat. Some people just don’t deal well with accumulating stress.

“I sure could use a cigarette,” Mrs. Deneaux said.

“How is Mike going to find us?” Paul asked, his voice rising over the sound of the oncoming truck.

Shots began to ring out, a large thud was immediately followed by the screeching of tires and the sound of a large heavy object hitting an immoveable tree.

“Should we check on it?” Paul looked to Brian.

“Busted truck, seven zombies, two armed hostiles, don’t see the up side, Paul.”

“We can’t stay here,” Mrs. Deneaux said wisely. “That noise is going to bring more of one or the other or both. And as much as I enjoy both of your company, while we lay here in the grass, I would rather be sitting in a car with a warm cigarette in my hand.”

“I can’t believe they just took our ride,” Paul said angrily.

“I bet that’s not the worst thing they’ve done today,” Brian said, getting up gingerly, his shoulder aching. He could feel a flush coming on his cheeks and knew that he was going to need antibiotics soon to fight off any infection the bullet may have allowed to enter in to his body. The closest bottle was in the truck that now sounded like Sarajevo, and not the good Olympics one, but rather the war torn one of a few years later. He thought to possibly wait for the outcome of the battle and then finish off the survivors, no matter of what variety and grab what he needed. But more speeders ran by as the three refugees melted deeper in to the woods.

For an hour, they followed the road, but always remained hidden in the brush. The way was slow going, but the chance of being seen was minimal.

Brian finally brought them to a halt as exhaustion began to set in.

Brian was making a decent showing of going slowly to allow time for Mrs. Deneaux to keep up, but the evidence of Brian’s infection was on his face. His complexion had paled considerably and sweat dripped from his features, though the weather or the exertion didn’t merit it.

“You look worse than I feel,” Mrs. Deneaux said as she sat on a small stump.

“Holy shit,” Paul said, finally taking notice of his walking partner. “Let me see your wound.”