Zombie Fallout 8: An Old Beginning (32 page)

“Great. I’ll take his spot.” BT hopped into the passenger seat.

“That’s fine. I wasn’t going to sit there,” Justin said sarcastically. “I’ll get in with the stoner.”

“Great, then there isn’t a problem,” BT said as he pulled the door shut. He turned to Tracy. “I don’t think I could listen to that perpetual
pot-head spew one more thing about how he visited Gandhi or some shit.”

Dennis moved to the rear of the car, having the entire third row for himself. Tracy hoped he stopped crying soon. It was withering away her resolve to stay strong until such point that she could collapse in on herself, much like the Demense building had.

“I don’t think so,” Stephanie told Trip who was sitting behind the steering wheel of the other SUV. “The last time you drove, you thought it was a rocket ship.”

“It wasn’t?” Trip asked as Stephanie gripped his shoulder and gently pulled him out. “Get in the backseat,” she told him as she helped him
back in.

“Wonderful,” Justin said as Trip sat.

“You live here?” Trip asked him.

“Wonderful,” Justin repeated.

Gary hopped into the passenger seat. This was the second time he was going home without Mike, and he felt the loss more acutely this time than he had the first. For a few moments he wished he’d died in those first days of the zombie outbreak.
It would have been over a long time ago, and I wouldn’t have had to go through any of this
, he thought in a dour mood. The joy and the victories were too insignificant and placed too far away to outweigh the overwhelming losses and defeats that kept piling up at a rapid pace.

Tracy pulled out of the parking lot, hoping to put as many miles between her and Mike’s final resting spot before the day was through.

Chapter
Nineteen – Mike Journal Entry 9

My head was ringing and my stomach felt like I’d been rabbit punched by the Hulk. Somehow it was comforting to see that Tommy was suffering as well. This is such a strange reaction in humans. Why is sharing misery such a common event? You would think people would try and pull themselves up instead of drag each other down. It really was only a matter of time until man took himself out of the picture.
If
man were to make it out of
this
disaster, which I wasn’t holding onto much hope, it would be a century and a half at the minimum before we came off the edge of extinction. By then, who knows? Wolves would probably be running the show.

I couldn’t tell if I was in the midst of a severe case of vertigo. Either the building was shifting, or we were actually moving. Tommy was yelling something, but I might as well have been in Tibet behind one of those huge gongs while the monks were performing their rendition of
Moby Dick
by Led Zeppelin. For those of you who may not know, this is a drum solo. It was possible I was as deaf as a politician to the outcries of his constituents. Tommy was pulling his seat belt out, that made no sense to my brain, which had been acting like a ping-pong ball inside my skull.

“Seat belt!” I know I shouted it, because my throat hurt after I said it even though I didn’t hear it.

Explosions were going on to the rear of us, the truck lurching forward as the concussions slammed into the back of it. I was just picking my blood-dripping head off of the dashboard when I saw something run past that was huge and on fire. The ape had escaped. If I had the presence of mind and a rifle, I would have shot it. But what were the odds we would ever cross paths again? Yeah, I already knew the answer to that question before I asked it. I could only hope it would be on my terms, not his. And yes, I knew the answer to that statement as well.

Tommy saw it, too, and we moved in its direction, maybe to run it down or maybe just because it was heading out. Most likely, this was the way it came into the facility; and therefore, in theory, it would know the way out.

The ground under us trembled violently.
This
was how I imagined the world was going to end, being split apart by major earthquakes or a meteor strike, not a microscopic virus. Even with the seat belt on, I was in danger of giving myself whiplash and a concussion. The ground movement was so violent that it was impossible to see clearly as the earth was jumping by feet. It was impossible to focus.

I don’t know how Tommy was able to drive. His whole body was leaning on the steering wheel, I guess in an attempt to keep the truck from veering. The ground leapt up one more time, higher than all the other times combined. The truck went with it and, for heart-lurching moments, we were in flight before the truck collided back down with the pavement. I stupidly looked into the side view mirror. Ever watch any movie or documentary about volcanoes? You know that pyroclastic cloud that just swoops down the side of the mountain and destroys everything in its path? Yeah, well, that’s what it looked like, and it was rapidly gaining on us.

“Faster, Tommy!” I may have audibly heard my words this time. I’d either found a new level of volume, or I’d regained a little of the hearing that I’d lost.

Porkchop was seated between us, alternating looking from my mirror to Tommy’s. “Yeah, faster!”

Tommy glanced in his mirror as well, his eyes growing large. He might have been scared, but we weren’t moving any faster. I looked to his foot; it was already planted on the floor of the truck.

“Shit.” I rolled up my window. Most likely this was going to be as effective as hiding behind lawn furniture when someone shot a bazooka at you, but this was all about perceived safety right now.

I could not keep my eyes off of the mirror as the gray cloud rushed to greet us. The force was enough to lift the rear of the truck off of the ground. Tommy was struggling to keep the wheels straight, and us, from being broadsided much like the ship in
The Poseidon Adventure
. (Cheesy 70’s movie where the ship
Poseidon
turns sideways to a tidal wave and is turned over upside-down.) My daughter Nicole loved that movie, made me watch it a dozen times, which was about eleven-and-a-half times more than I wanted to.

There were a couple of times when the back of the truck was desperately trying to come even with the front, and it was only Tommy’s yanking and cranking on the wheel that kept this from happening. I don’t know how he knew which way to turn. We were completely encased within the debris cloud. I expected a wall at any moment to jump out at us so we could
brutally crash into it.

The cabin was beginning to fill with the foul air. It was a caustic toxic mix of plastics and zombies that threatened to choke the lives out of us. I was trying my best to take short, measured breaths; I wasn’t having any luck. It was like I’d just run the fifty-meter dash and was trying to regulate my breathing. When the inside of the cab became as dense with ash as the outside, I figured this was it. Porkchop’s eyes had closed. I was afraid he had passed out and was moving steadily toward death. Then, like we were being birthed from the pits of hell, we emerged into beautiful, blissful sunshine. Tommy and I both rolled down our windows as he drove a few
hundred more yards before finally stopping. I jumped down and hauled Porkchop out with me. While I was busy coughing up my lungs, Porkchop sat up from where I deposited him. 

He stood and patted my back as I tried to get all of the poisons out of me. “Mr. Talbot, you should have really held your breath like I did. I used to win all the time against my friends when we would bet who could go underwater and stay there the longest. I even beat Bobbie Gibbons, who I saw go up for a gulp of air and come back underwater and tried to make it look like he didn’t, but I had water goggles on and could see him do it clearer than I can see you. Although he tried to deny it, said I was jealous that he could hold his breath longer, which was funny, because I still beat him, so that really didn’t make much sense. You okay? Every time you cough it looks like you’re smoking. Can your lungs be on fire?” He was bending over trying to peer down my throat. “I don’t see any flames, I think you’re alright.”

I wanted to thank him for his expert advice. “Go help Tommy,” I hacked out. From the sounds of it, Tommy didn’t sound much better than I did.

If I thought my throat was raw before, it was absolutely
skinned now. It felt like I’d swallowed shaved glass. So even when Porkchop handed me a water bottle that had clearly been drank from, I didn’t refuse. At that exact moment, germs could kiss my ass.

We all sat there a few minutes longer, looking to the place we had escaped. More than a city block was laid to waste and now sunken in. It would be hours before the dust settled and the fires went out. I had no desire to be there for it. We’d emerged victorious, but we’d suffered a loss with Doc gone. I was under the assumption my family was safe, though; and we’d saved Porkchop, so I was actually feeling pretty good. That was tempered slightly knowing Deneaux and the damned ape were still out there, and like steel to a magnet, they’d both find their way to me. It was a foregone conclusion.

We were still hacking up lungs as we, once again, entered the truck and departed.

Tommy recovered faster than I did, but by degrees I was feeling better. Some of it was putting distance between our former captors and us, but a big chunk was that I was racing to meet back up with my family.

“I don’t know if I thanked you, Tommy,” I said, turning to him. He didn’t say anything. “You risked everything and I appreciate that.”

“We’re family, Mr. T. What choice did I have?”

It left him a lot of choices, but I didn’t bring them up. “Just, thank you,” I said, reaching over Porkchop and tenderly touching Tommy’s knee. The gesture, which was meant as one of affection, seemed to cause him pain and discomfort.

He looked over at me.

“What, kid? What do you have to tell me? It’s written all over your face, I just don’t read vampire so good.” My heart started thumping in my chest. Did he know something about my family that he hadn’t told me? Were they in danger or worse? If he didn’t fucking spit it out soon, I would beat it out of him. Okay, that’s hypothetical…or is it rhetorical? Because he could kick my ass.

“There’s more coming.”

“Huh?” I was expecting something along the lines of Tracy has been kidnapped by a rogue band of Jehovah’s Witnesses, not some vague threat. “Zombies? Are you talking about zombies? There will always be more of them coming.”

He shook his head.

“That ape? There’ll be more of them apes coming?” That was indeed terrifying, and sort of funny in a shtick 60s movie kind of way. I could see the marquee now:
Planet of the Zombie Apes.

“Rednecks?” He shook his head. “Militant ants hell-bent on the destruction of the planet? What, Tommy? Because I can keep guessing all day long.”

“My kind. They’re coming.”

I shit you not, my response was,
“Walmart greeters are coming? What are they going to do? Sticker us to death.”

On some level, I knew exactly what he meant; I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Not yet anyway. We’d just barely escaped with our lives, defeated a shadow government group that wanted to rule what was left of the world, and witnessed the destruction of a fair part of the zombie population in this part of it. My family was supposedly safe and heading home, as were we. This was a time and a cause for celebration, not for gearing up for another conflict.

“Are they just going to have the smiley face stickers, or will they have superheroes, too?
Porkchop asked.

“Eliza and you weren’t the only ones?” My head sagged.

“No.” His head sagged to match mine.

I probably shouldn’t have said her name aloud, because suddenly Porkchop looked like he might be…no, scratch that, he was going to be sick.

“Pull over, Tommy!” I was barely able to open the door and get Porkchop out before he started heaving.

I’d finally caught a break when his first projectile of bile shot over my left shoulder as I was helping him out. As his feet touched down, I stepped to the side. That seemed to be the worst of it as he hunched over like he saw a particularly shiny rock.

“You okay, kid?” Sometimes I could be an insensitive shit.

He’d lost his mom and dad on the first night. Then lost most of his second family to the very vampire I had just mentioned, and now Doc, his surrogate father, was gone as well. The kid probably thought he was driftwood with nowhere to place his roots.

“Sorry.” He didn’t look up but stayed fixated on that mythical, shiny rock.

“I’m the one that should apologize.” I was rubbing his back. “You know you’re part of my family now, right? I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about, Mr. Talbot.” He stood up. I steadied him as he looked a little unsure on his feet. “It’s everyone around me. Everyone I care for ends up dying.” His pleading eyes were looking at mine.

“I’ll make sure we’re alright, Porkchop.” I tried to be as sincere as possible.

I truly meant the words, but it was an impossibility to guarantee such a thing. Even if the world was normal, and I had moved them all into the woods, hundreds of miles from people, one of them could get Lyme Disease from a tick and die. There is no such thing as safety, only the obscure illusion of it. Sure, you can take steps to be safer, like maybe don’t take up chainsaw juggling, but that’s about it. I think in the movie
Jurassic Park
one of the characters was quoted as saying, “Life will find a way.” The converse is also true. Death will find a way, and if it’s looking for you, there is no place to hide.

“I think I’m okay now.” He looked better; however, I don’t think he believed a word I said.

He walked toward the side of the road. I was going to ask him where he was going. Should have known the kid was smarter than me. He wanted Tommy and me to finish what we were talking about before he came back in the truck.

“Is he alright?” Tommy asked as I hopped back up into the cab.

“Better than me, I would imagine. Let’s not make this like pulling teeth. Tell me what is going on.”

Tommy looked like a whipped dog. “When someone as powerful as Eliza is killed, it can be felt. You felt it.”

“How could I forget?” When Tracy was finally able to shove a knife into her withered heart I felt that she’d done the same to me, the pain was that acute. For a while I doubted I would be able to go on, and if I did, it would only be a fragmented part of me…like a hollowed out egg…brittle and easily broken on the outside, empty on the inside.

“Others felt it, too. I had hoped that maybe they would disregard it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“Is your vamp-dar going off?”

“My what, Mr. T?”

“Your vampire radar?”

Tommy looked at me like most do when I open my mouth—confused and maybe somewhat disappointed. It was
alright. I’m used to it.

“I guess…sort of.
Nothing quite as detailed as radar, more like feelings. Her passing was noted, and I’m fairly certain someone will come to check it out.”