Zombie Fallout 2 (39 page)

I turned from her terrified face to the yard beyond. I wished I had shoved a bayonet into my eyes instead of looking out there. BT added his own pool to the up chuck muck.

“I can’t Talbot! I can’t deal with this!” She screamed.

Children from the earliest stages of walking to somewhere around ten years of age began to spill out into the front ranks of the invading horde. Jen’s gun clattered to the deck as she turned around. Placing both hands over her eyes, trying in vain to suppress the image, forever burned in her retinas. They were five feet thick before they stopped coming. Some were in pajamas. Some just in diapers and nothing else. Some completely naked and still others that looked as if they had changed into zombies mid snow ball fight.

So many of them! My heart was crushing in on itself. Breathing was becoming more difficult than it was worth. My instinct was to go out and comfort each and every one of them. Their flat black eyes belied no need for alleviation of their hurts. Never again would any of them need a boo-boo healing kiss on a scraped knee. Never again would they need a kind word after tough loss in pee-wee baseball. Never again would they need an ice cream cone after Susie called them a doo-doo head. I dropped onto my knees from the pressure of the heartache. I just wanted to roll over and watch the stars travel on by in my last moments on earth. Of all things, Durgan saved me.

Not so much him, as his personality, but it was a fine line anyway. And definitely not anything he did on purpose. But the cocksucker took my misery and despair and magically transformed it into rage. Pure unadulterated rage.

“What are you going to do Talbot?” He asked as he grabbed at Jen to bring her into the house. He winced as he bent over to grab the discarded weapon.

“I’d like to tell you that I was going to do what I should have done a long time ago and go and kill that bastard. But that’s going to have to wait. No I’m just going to watch your backs while you go in and then we’ll just have to start phase two of our plan, I mean idea, a little earlier than expected, is all.”

“We’ll meet again Durgan!” I shouted out into the night. He responded before I had a chance to close the door.

“There’s no room for me where you’re going Talbot.” And he laughed some more.

Was he that far gone that he didn’t even realize what he’d just said? Are there many people that think going to hell is the epitome of a successful life? I wanted to open the door and get some clarification but that didn’t seem like a great idea. Insanity by definition is not rational and besides there was no sense in refreshing the image of hundreds upon hundreds of hungry zombie children in my head.

BT and Jen were huddled by the fire in the living room. Jen was shivering uncontrollably.

“BT get her down into the basement, I’ll take care of what needs to be done up here.” He nodded at me and scooped her limp but not lifeless body into his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face into his broad chest. The added weight was causing him some serious pain in his injured leg but besides a small grimace he never voiced concern one over it. The house was bathed in darkness. The small candles and fire in the living room could only chase so many shadows away. The diffused moonlight that filtered through the storm shutters did more to stimulate this affect than diffuse it.

It was in this setting that I splashed gasoline across every treasured belonging that Carol and her family had ever owned. The propellant washed over and around picture frames, bleeding pictures into first something that resembled something from the twisted mind of Salvador Dali and finally into unendurable blotches of bled color. Like so many other things in this life that were now irretrievable. I had covered the house in nearly five gallons of the volatile fluid, upstairs and down. There was more than triple that amount laid out in various containers located strategically throughout the house. This house was going to burn like the fires of hell. My only concern was the hope that it took some of Eliza’s earth-wandering despots with it.

Jen’s fits of shivering had nearly stilled by the time I got down there, but she had not let go of BT’s neck as he sat in an old chair that had been relegated to the basement before it was to become a permanent fixture at a land fill.

“She going to be alright, when the time comes?” I asked BT.

“I’ll carry her if I have to.” BT said.

Jen didn’t move from her spot. Her words were muffled. Her message was not. “I’ll be fine, when the time comes but for now I’m staying where I’m at.” That didn’t seem to bother BT in the least. He was getting as much out of her as she was from him.

The smell of gasoline had begun to settle into the basement, it did wonders to mask the stench of death. Not sure if this was an angle Glade would want to use – NEW Gas scented plug-ins for all your zombie stench needs. Is grandma’s rotting corpse beginning to embarrass you? Do guests avoid coming to your house because of the decomposing children? Whisk away those horrible odors with our new GAS plug-ins, now available in Diesel and Oil fragrances! – Yeah you’re probably right, not much of a market for that.

We didn’t have long to wait as the first thump of a thwarted zombie hit the front door. The sound was not as loud as it should have been in the quiet house. Mostly because the zombie that walked into the frame of the door was probably only a girl of seven. An involuntary tremor of revulsion coursed through me. It was an instinctual response. I could no more control it than the weather. The thumping began to pick-up frequency and intensity as if who ever had been holding the invisible leashes had let go.

I did it, I don’t know why but I did it. “No, what?” That set her off. She went on and on about being in the midst of some sort of apocalypse or such. I kind of lost the train of her rant.

“Stop it you two, just stop it!” Jen looked up from BT’s chest, her face looked like she had gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. And not the soft, brain addled Mike Tyson but the lean mean ear biting machine.

The house was shaking on its foundation as the zombies closed in from all sides. I didn’t even want to think about the children that were pressed up against the walls. An explosion of glass tinkled to the ground in first one and then two and then a dozen different locations. This was followed almost immediately by the crashing open of what sounded like the backdoor, at least by the location of the many footfalls now above our heads. The front door lasted the longest but ultimately could not withstand the assault. Zombies had breached our meager defenses. The floorboards above us creaked and protested against the strain of so much weight.

Zombies rushed in to fill every void within the house looking for tasty treats. Furniture splintered and knick-knacks were ground to dust under so many feet. I waited as long as I could, allowing as many as the enemy as I could into the house. It wouldn’t be a fraction of the number it needed to be but my options were rapidly becoming diminished. Someone had smelled our hiding spot and zombies began to bump up against the cellar door. It was reinforced with two by fours that I had nailed across it but they wouldn’t hold forever. Although I was more concerned at this point with the ceiling over our heads giving out first. There was a noticeable bow to it.

“You two ready?” I asked as I stood up, grabbing the road flare from the cabinet next to me.

Jen extracted herself from BT and did her best to gingerly help BT to stand. I noticed as he shifted his weight around, he was being especially careful not to put any weight on his injured leg. He half hopped over to where I was and leaned against the cabinet. Jen had walked over to the bottom of the staircase, nervously looking up at the basement door as if expecting it to open.

BT leaned in to make sure Jen couldn’t hear but unless she had a bionic ear, that wasn’t going to be a problem. The general melee free-for-all up stairs made the simple act of thinking a difficult proposition.

He looked incredulously at me. “What do you mean, Mike? You gonna carry me? Maybe buck ten Jen over there could heft me on her shoulders.”

Jen looked over. “What’s going on?” She asked as she crossed her arms over her chest and rubbed her arms, possibly to wipe the chill of death from herself.

“Oh well he got all indignant. And then he was berating me about being able to carry his extra large ass, and that maybe you’d be able to.”

“Mike, I’m right here!” BT shouted.

“So you told him that there was no way in hell that we were leaving him behind?” She asked.

“Well we hadn’t got that far, but those would have been my next words. And then he would have replied with something heroic like ‘You guys could save yourselves. If you try to help me then we’ll all die.’ And I would have came back with something equally heroic like ‘Either we all get out of here alive or none of us do.'”

“I get it guys.” BT said. “We knew this was a one way trip anyway.”

Jen gripped herself tighter. “Wow just got a chill. Someone must have just walked over my grave.”

I laughed my ass off. We all did. “That’s hilarious because well, because…” And I pointed to the ceiling with the shuffling of hundreds of feet was going on.

“You must be psychic.” BT added. And we started laughing all over again, like the crazed doomed souls that we were.

Jen's tears of joy, slowly but inevitably turned to real tears. BT went over to comfort her.

“Now seems as good a time as any.” I lit the flare and walked over to the far corner of the basement where I had previously drilled a silver dollar sized hole through the kitchen floor and into the basement. I had drilled the hole through a cabinet in the kitchen thus avoiding any chance the hole would be plugged by someone standing on it or by knocking over the large container of gas that was next to it. I looked at the flare for a few seconds more, letting the brilliant fire burn its final images into my memories.

This fire represented the end of so many things, and hopefully the beginning of a new safer life for my family. “I wish you were here to enjoy this with me Eliza,” I muttered as I thrust the flare up and through the hole. The flame flashed brilliantly as it came in contact with the gaseous vapors. I crinkled my nose as the smell of burnt arm hair wafted up. If I found this smell offensive, it was a vale of roses on a warm spring day after a brief rain shower compared to what assaulted my olfactory senses next. The smell of zombies can be topped by only one other smell, that of burning zombies. Roasting on an open pit was preferable to the cloying stink of melting decayed flesh that ran rampant through the farmhouse.

There were no screams of mercy coming from upstairs. No shrieks of terror or pain only the mindless hunt for food. There was no mass exodus from the premises. We knew this by the unrelenting assailment on the basement door. Would the door give before the floor? Or would we succumb to smoke inhalation, death by breathing in the dead. Oh just fucking gross.

“You guys ready?” I asked again.

“Let’s give this a shot.” BT said making sure his rifle was fully loaded.

Jen didn’t say anything but thankfully she picked up her HK, popped in a new magazine and nodded to me. We three stood for a moment side by side looking at the door that led to the bulkhead. Long moments passed. Realizing your death is imminent is one thing. Rushing headlong into it is completely another matter. The basement door cracked or it may have been a floor joist.

“Well that’s decided.” I said as I opened the basement door that led to freedom, in theory anyway.

The heavy aluminum bulkhead doors were heavily dented from the sheer number of zombies standing on them trying to get into the house.

“I guess the fire didn’t scare them away so much.” BT noted.