Zombie Fallout 2 (25 page)

“Dad?!” She fairly demanded. I thought she might even stomp her foot like she would when she was five and didn’t get her way.

A parent’s first instinct is to protect their children and that was my first inclination. I was going to blow off Nicole’s concerns and gloss it over with frivolities. She would have seen through it for sure but it would have got me out from under her questioning stare. I decided to temper the truth. This time she let me get away with it. “I just don’t have a good feeling about tomorrow, Coley.” I hugged her fiercely.

“It’ll be alright dad.” She said halfway between a statement and a question. I am supposed to be the rock with which my kids can crash their concerns against. But this rock was feeling a little spongy at the moment.

Brendon saved the day. “Hey Mike, we’re all set, I’m gonna turn in before the fireworks begin. You coming Coley?” He asked.
“Thanks Brendon.” My dual recognition of his work and pulling Nicole away, was not lost on him.

Nicole looked long and hard at me. Trying her best to ascertain the underlying truth beneath my veiled words before she turned and followed her betrothed. “Good night dad.” She called back. “I love you.”

I croaked out an ‘I love you too.’ Thankful for the darkness in the night that hid the waterworks. I had thought I had completely escaped with my manhood unscathed, I was wrong.

“Alright Talbot, out with it.” Tracy had come up behind me and had startled the hell out of me.

Nothing but the truth was going to appease her and my mind was entirely too befuddled to come up with anything even fairly convincing. “Tommy hugged me.” I told her, sounded kind of pathetic when I put it that way.

“Sorry for what? Talbot what aren’t you telling me? One of the most lovable kids in the world gives you a hug and then apologizes. I don’t see why that is making you walk around all long faced and telling everyone what a great job they’re doing and that you love them.” I watched as the light of recognition came on in Tracy’s awareness and then she did something I never figured, she laughed. “Oh that’s it! You think you’re going to die tomorrow! That’s hilarious!”

“But…but Tommy hugged me.”

Her laugh stopped mid-stream. Her index finger of doom, lashed out. “Listen Talbot!” I was. “You are not dying tomorrow or the next day for that matter or any time soon, I won’t allow it! You cannot leave me alone in this nightmare!” Her index finger turned into a loose fist as she hollowly punched me in the chest, her forgotten laugh approaching a sob. “I won’t allow it!” She screamed. I was too stunned to even reply. Work that was nearly completed started again as people scrambled to look busy before Tracy could turn her angst on them. She turned and headed back to the room. The zombies waited patiently below.

CHAPTER 19

The morning brought sunlight, and that was the end of the good news. Two hundred maybe two hundred and fifty zombies stirred below and more were coming. We could see them approaching across frozen fields, from the highway and from God (if he cared) knows where. Let’s see I could use, like a moth to a flame, or maybe a lawyer to a car accident or maybe just the truth, like a zombie to a brain buffet. We could hear some of the zombies that had broken through into the rooms below and the lobby.

A large sheet of glass shattered as Tommy came up to the railing. “That’s the Kit-Kat machine, Mr. T. Whew pretty glad I got them all out last night.” He was grinning as he hefted up a pillowcase stuffed to the brim with the bars.

Our encounter last night didn’t seem to be on his radar at all. Was he purposefully suppressing it or had I made too much out of it? Questions, questions and no fucking answers, isn’t that the way of the world?

BT opened fire. The bloodbath had begun. Travis had waited as long as he could. The Mossberg thundered through the air followed shortly thereafter by the high concussion rounds of Denmark’s AK-47. The smell of iron rich blood as it poured down storm drains nearly masked the stench of the dead. Body parts littered the ground, blown clean off under the strain of trying to capture a high-speed lead projectile. Rotten half-digested stomach contents spilled out of lacerated intestines. Zombies were becoming mired in the detritus of body parts. More than one zombie fell over entangled in it’s own bowels. The smell of shit, believe it or not, was entirely more welcome than the gangrenous odor of the dead. Denmark’s rapid rate of fire and seemingly endless supply of ammunition had nearly halved the opposing force. Jen and Brendon had by now joined in to the chorus of destruction. Heads blew out their contents. Bone and brain pattered down like the world’s most macabre hailstorm. The parking lot became bathed in hues of reds and browns. The light snow that fell did little to hide the destruction. It more than anything else, highlighted the contrast between its purity and the stained contents of the zombies.

My grief was heavy as I shouldered my weapon and did my part to eradicate the world of what evolution had now deemed the dominant species. Three magazines later of carefully aimed shots I called for a ceasefire. Three shouts later my command was heeded. Not much stood save a smallish, maybe ten year old boy. I turned my head away just as I saw a green laser dot clearly outlined on the boy’s throat. I didn’t know which hit the ground first, the boy’s body or his decapitated head. Both rang hollowly in my ears.

“We showed them!” Denmark barked. His jubilation joined by the others.

“Showed them what!’ I bellowed. “Do you think they give a shit? Do you think some other zombies are going to stumble across this and think ‘Hum, maybe we shouldn’t fuck with those humans, they’re bad ass. They don’t care. They’ll just keep coming, our former friends, our relatives, our post men.” I looked directly at Denmark, his gaze dropped. “They’re not going to build a memorial for their fallen comrades. They’re just going to keep coming until there’s nothing left.” Well I guess I had finished what I had started. I had completely wiped out any satisfaction we may have gained in our ‘victory’. What a fucken killjoy I turned out to be.

“How to mellow a high Talbot.” BT threw out there.

Not a sound was made, not even a stirring zombie. Nobody was sure in which direction I was going to go in from BT’s barb. “Oh you fuck.” And then I started laughing. Joined in by the rest. It seemed impossible that we would laugh amidst all the destruction below us but stress finds its own necessary release.

Straggler’s, to prove my earlier point, kept coming in only to be met with unmitigated leaden justice. A more pressing concern lodged into my head as I watched the newest interloper go down in a cacophony of bullets, actually a couple of concerns. Our minivans were completely encased in the shards of zombie remains. This wasn’t Alex’s truck, we would never be able to just drive over them or push them out of the way. The Terrible Teal machine would spin in place like a washing machine. Clearing out an exit for the cars wouldn’t take an abnormally long amount of time. Touching and dragging the bodies out of the way was not a palatable mission. Anything less than a Level 5 biohazard suit seemed to me to make the whole endeavor a nearly impossible assignment.

Secondly, and just as important, while we could clear a path and be on the road in the next half hour once our ammo and food were back in the cars, what kind of ungrateful bastard guests would we be if we had just made the world’s worst mess and then abruptly left. The zombies had come for the Talbot party, table of eight. To leave this horrendous display of death for Denmark was incomprehensible to me. Moving this many pieces of bodies to a safe enough distance whilst also keeping a vigilant eye out for others of their kind was going to take hours.

I vomited four times that morning. The first was as my first misplaced step off the ladder landed squarely on an eyeball. The resounding pop and ooze of viscous liquid from beneath my boot propelled anything worth digesting out of my mouth and onto the rungs of the ladder.

“Oh fucking Talbot!” BT lamented, as he was higher up the ladder and following me down.

“Sorry about that.” I wiped my mouth, my agitated stomach letting me know just how much it was displeased with this course of events.

In such a confined area with that many bodies it was absolutely impossible to not keep stepping on THINGS. Yeah, hold onto that thought. They are NOT fingers and forearms and skull plates. They are THINGS. Oh, who am I kidding! This looked like the world’s largest blender had been filled with humans and someone had held down the blend button for about a half second. So not nearly enough time to puree the contents but merely chop down the bigger pieces. You thought liver smelled bad when your mom cooked it? Try stepping on one fresh out of a corpse. Vomit number two did nothing to mask the putrification around me. BT wasn’t fairing much better than I was. If not for Jen’s lead and our need to competitively ‘keep up’ with her, it might have been a job that didn’t get done. No matter the guilt I felt for leaving Denmark in such a lurch. She set about the burden with a grim willpower.

Denmark and Travis stood watch over us as we dragged the human odds and ends out of the parking lot. If this were a real job that demanded compensation, I don’t think there would be a sum worthy. But survival has its own price, one that we couldn’t pay enough to satisfy. Occasionally a shot would ring out, hampering any more visitors from coming in for an afternoon meal. As we stacked the bodies behind the Dairy Queen like cordwood, we took the time to watch each other’s backs. We were not under the watchful eye of our lookouts from that vantage point. The distance, I hoped, would keep the majority of stench from wafting into the motel but more importantly was the old adage of out of sight out of mind. Although anything less than Noah’s Ark type floodwaters was not going to wash away gallons upon gallons of blood that had overrun everything.

My third mouth breaching came as I grabbed onto some kid’s jacket. He was wedged under the body of a female that suspiciously bore a family resemblance. The family that eats together, stays together you know. Whether in life, in walking death or in absolute death, there was something about killing a family that tore something free from within me. I wanted to be out of this split femur soup. I reached under and grabbed the thing from underneath the armpits. I pulled with more exertion than the task demanded. I was rewarded with a wet tearing sound as the boy’s top half came loose from the disengorged innards that spilled like night crawlers from a broken bait box. I fell over still holding tight to the top half of the boys remains. Luckily, my fall was broken by the ample carcass of Frita, the Ihop waitress. Her nameplate quickly lost under my voluminous cascade of bile. I stood up quickly, a dizzying spell nearly bringing me to my knees again. Flesh, saturated with bodily fluids, slapped against my blood soaked jeans. I dropped the boy to the ground. When I felt the worst of the attack had passed I reached down and grabbed the boy’s hand, not in a gesture of good will, it was what allowed me the greatest grip. I did not turn around as I dragged the boy to his final resting spot.

Jen had somewhere acquired a snow shovel and had cleaned up what had spilled out of the boy, my burden had been getting lighter as I walked but I would not turn to detect the reason why. One more violent stomach outburst like the previous one and I would have left my spleen on that parking lot pavement. For the next hour I went through my duties like an automaton, bend, lift, drag, bend, lift, drag. I had become more like our enemy than I would have ever thought possible. BT for all his bravado was two pukes ahead of me, fine by me he was welcome to that trophy. And winner of the 2010 Lord Upchucks Cup goes to Big Tiny! Huge applause! I grinned. Nuggets of some distant forgotten meal bracketed my goatee. Pain wrenched my gut. My knee was on the verge of collapse and my smile resembled something closer to a scowl. But still I soldiered on. Tracy, Nicole and Brendon had spent the better part of the morning getting our belongings back into the minivans. They had just about finished, when me, and the death detail were down to single figure leftovers to remove, when Denmark’s warning came.

“Michael you best come up here and take a look.”

I hobbled over to the ladder, the blood of a hundred bodies was solidifying on every article of clothing I was wearing. Between my knee and the inflexibility of the frozen blood my navigation of the ladder was haphazard at best. ‘If this is the way I die I am going to be seriously pissed off.’

"You say something?” Denmark asked as he reached out to help me up and over and then abruptly thought better of his gesture. He warred within himself, the disgust of possibly touching anything that was attached to me or the common courtesy of helping me up the ladder. Courtesy won out as he reached his hand out again.

“I’ve got it, don’t worry Denmark.” I wanted to laugh as I watched the relief on his countenance.

“Dad, hurry!” Travis yelled.