Chaos Theory

by Rich Restucci

  I used more control when I took out the others who were coming for me. One headed for Ship, but he was the one with no legs, and I was out of ammo. I picked up another of the same type of gun, but this one had a cool scope on it instead of that handle thing on the top. I peered through the scope and a little red dot was in the middle. I put the red dot on Quarterlegs’ head and ended his misery before he could snack on Ship.

  The big guy’s pulse was strong when I checked, so I gathered all the weapons and ammo from the twice dead hillbillies and stacked them near us, then built a fire. It was easy, as the A frame was now fully ablaze and I was able to get some burning stuff and drag it to where we were. I had also been able to slide Ship’s massive frame across the snow, although it was difficult, and we were now outside his locked shed. This was no ordinary shed or lock either. The shed was steel and the lock was a combination lock built into the door.

  I washed out Ship’s wound with snow. So happens it was just a graze, but he’s huge, and it was a scalp wound so it bled a lot. He woke briefly and was able to stand. He input the code into the door and fell through. I pulled his legs in, turned on the light and shut the door. There were a bunch of guns and backpacks and survival stuff in this particular shed. It also held another stove with some small pieces of wood and stacks of white bags of anthracite, which I thought could only be coal on a pallet in the corner. It sure burned well.

  He came to again some hours later, after I had bandaged his noggin with some stuff I found in the shed. I got him on a cot, and passing him the two items I went back into a burning tree house for, I asked him what went boom. He used the items to write one word: Claymores, and he promptly passed out again, pen in hand.

  Oh, and the chipmunk? Poor guy had had the misfortune of running out underneath my bicycle tires when I was about eight. I cried for a week.

  Retreat

  I kept an eye on my new friend for some time. I also tied his foot to the cot with a length of heavy duty orange extension cord just in case. His bandage soaked through in an hour or so and he stirred when I changed it. I took a look around the shed, which was about a hundred degrees in a half hour after I got the coal burning. I had used a piece of Ship’s house to help get it started.

  The shed had everything a budding survivalist would need: workbench, computer station, rack of rifles, gas masks, canned and packaged food and drink, and a bookshelf of “How To” books. The weapons from the dead rednecks were arrayed on the workbench for us to fight over when my pal woke up. Three M16s, two black shotguns, and a black rifle with a huge scope. There were also nine pistols of different types and a bunch of knives and machetes. I didn’t want to take the dead guys’ clothing as it was covered in gore, but I did search through their crap, finding lots of ammunition, watches, walkie-talkie looking radios, and other sundries. I had appropriated a small black automatic pistol with two clips (I would later learn from Ship that they are called magazines, and the pistol was a Glock 23) and a chrome .357 magnum with two speed loaders. The Glock was in a shoulder holster and the .357 was on my right hip. Now I was a badass. I just needed to learn to hit something with my freakin’ bullets.

  I also got a chance to read what Ship had written in his notebook when he found out about my immunity. There were many questions. The easy questions were things like when/where was I bitten and did I get sick. The difficult questions were longer, but they all asked me if I had taken any combination of odd drugs, a lot of antibiotics, or if I had taken part in any medical studies. Ship had no idea that two weeks ago, I was in a six-by-eight concrete box with bars for a door.

  The big guy woke up while I was cooking rice and beans on the stove and reading Sign Language Made Simple, a book I had borrowed from his shelf. He sat up and looked quizzically at the cord around his ankle and then at me. I just shrugged, and he smiled and nodded. I made the sign for head and he made a sign back. I searched the book for what he had done with his hand, but I couldn’t find it, and I told him so. He leaned over to remove my clever orange restraint, then thought better of it and sat up straight. I brought him the notebook and pen, and he shockingly wrote just one word: Hurts.

  I told him it wasn’t bad, just a graze, and he wrote that it felt like somebody hit him with a sledge hammer.

  So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I called him a baby, and untied the cord.

  He asked me about the tree house, and I told him that it had kept us warm for a while, and in fact some of it was burning merrily in the stove right now, but I hadn’t been outside since the redneck zombie slaughter. He stood, and once again I marveled at his gigantic frame. He moved to the work bench and flipped on the computer monitor. I was amazed there was still power, but his solar panels and mini wind farm must still have been doing the trick. When the monitor came to life, it was divided into quarters, each portion showing a different area outside the shed. Captain Survival had struck again, with little surveillance monitors strategically hidden throughout his small plot of land. This guy had been prepared.

  One of the monitors showed the smoldering ruin of his house, and he nodded in acceptance. He took the loss way better than I had, and I had only been there overnight. Immediately, he pulled out a black military-looking backpack and began shoving choice items in it. The pack was huge, and I was thankful that he would be the one humping it should we have to leave. When he finished packing it, he passed it to me with one hand. I accepted it with one hand and it crashed to the floor. It had to weigh eighty pounds. He pointed to a shelf and I placed this pack next to another pack that had already been prepared.

  Ship took stock of the weapons and gear I had procured from the bad guys, and he turned at me and winked, holding up one of the walkie talkies. He switched it on, something I had not even thought to do, and we were subjected to redneck radio. The news was on, and it wasn’t good.

  “…elve hours. Repeat, Jed still ain’t checked in, and it’s goin’ on twelve hours.” A woman’s voice.

  “Him and his crew o’ idjits is prolly chow by now, but I’ll take my guys and run a sweep of the area up north o’ Wilson’s Farm.” This guy had his mouth full of something while he was talking. It was kind of gross, and difficult to decipher, but the woman who had originally spoken seemed to have no trouble with it.

  “Roger that. I’ll let Hugh know, but I can tell you he’s gonna want you to check in every fifteen minutes now that Jed ain’t been heard from.”

  The guy with the other guys didn’t like that too much. He didn’t want to keep talking into the radio because it gave away their position, and he didn’t know who else might be listening. The woman said she didn’t make the rules and the guy had some choice words for her.

  I had been staring down at the work bench listening, and when I looked up Ship was holding the notebook toward me. We leave in twenty minutes.

  I was going to ask him if he was, in fact, nuts, because of his head wound, the heavy packs, the cold, and the zombies, but he beat me to the punch. He flipped the page, and I continued reading.

  We’re directly north of Wilson’s farm. They’ll see the smoke and come right here, where they’ll find their dead friends. It won’t take long for them to see the shed, then they’ll kill us. I don’t have the tools to take them all.

  Shit.

  He grabbed two of the radios with earbuds and we each tested one. I spoke to him and he gave a thumbs up. He used the squelch button, which, previous to that moment I could never figure out what that was for, and I heard him fine.

  We gathered some more gear and it was time to go. I kept the weapons I had taken as spoils of war, and asked Ship if he would pass me one of the M16s from the bench before we left. He held up four fingers, and I told him there were only three M16s. He shook his head no, and wrote a single letter and number in the notebook: M4. Then he pointed to my gun. I got it and asked him what the difference between an M4 and an M16 was. 12 was all he wrote, and I swear I never got that until right now.

  He left the door unloc
ked, but he also left some nasty surprises for the hillbillies. The explosive kind. I asked him what if a kid found his way in here before the rednecks, and Ship wrote that blowing up was better than being eaten or subjected to whatever the bad guys would do. I had to agree.

  We exited the shed and moved to another. I helped him clear some snow from in front of the other shed’s door and inside was a two-seater snowmobile. Later, Ship would tell me that he had a horse, but it had been at the vet when the plague cropped up. He had been on his way back from the vet’s when he stumbled upon me and my dead pals chasing me. I guess the horse had been a meal for a bunch of those things, including the undead vet.

  After we had maneuvered the snowmobile out of the shed, Ship set another trap. He started the machine and I almost shit myself it was so loud. We both mounted it, and without a backward glance, we split that scene.

  We travelled west for a long time. I don’t know how long but it had gotten dark, my face was frozen, and we were flying across the snow when I saw something weird in front of me. The snow was lit up in spots for just a moment at a time. I squinted, but kept seeing it. Realizing that the spots were moving with us, I couldn’t comprehend what it could be. It made no sense until I looked back over my shoulder. Three lights were screaming through the frigid darkness behind us. Snowmobiles most likely and they were about a half a mile back.

  I leaned forward and yelled to Ship that we had grown a triplet of tails, and he stiffened. You know, his body, I was hugging him. In the most manly and extremely hetero way possible, I was holding on to him as we zipped over the frozen ground.

  The big guy altered our course and he headed north. The lights behind must have been following us (shocker) because they did the same and bore down on us.

  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’ve just killed a bunch of inbred bumpkins that were intent on stealing your stuff and then murdering you to death during a zombie apocalypse in a frozen setting. Let that sink in. Now imagine the buddies of said bumpkins are aware of the purge and you see lights behind you in the dark as you flee. What would you think? I’ll tell you. You would think that the bad guys were on their way to finish the job their friends had started. Nevertheless, you still hold on to a ridiculous pipe dream that the lights behind you belong to a gaggle of bikini clad supermodel nymphomaniacs carrying beer and Buffalo wings in the saddlebags of their snowmobiles.

  Well that’s just fucking dumb.

  Damned if I wasn’t thinking about beer and wings when the first bullet hit me. It actually hit the metal stock of the rifle that was slung across my back. I wasn’t sure it was gunfire, as we were travelling at high speed away from the shots and I couldn’t hear shit over the engine we were straddled over, but it hurt, and I didn’t think it was a bee sting. It came to me quickly what was happening, when I heard auto weapons fire. Of the fifty or so bullets that these dickweeds had fired at us, one had actually struck us, but they didn’t know that.

  We flew (we actually flew) over an embankment, and suddenly we were on a snow-covered road. The only reason I knew this was a road was because I saw a frost-blasted SPEED LIMT 35 sign. Screaming down the road, someone stumbled into our way, and Ship skirted around him. He was quite dead, and followed us with arms outstretched in that classic zombie pose. I saw a house go by on the left, and then another, and then a bunch of them on both sides, with parked and abandoned vehicles in the street, and I realized we were in a small town.

  The noise from the flying engine we were on was exceptionally loud in the relative quiet of the dead place. It didn’t take long for dead people to show up looking for a late dinner, and soon they started coming out of the woodwork. Zipping down the frozen streets of this shit stain little burg was one of the most terrifying things I had ever taken part in, as the dead people seemed to materialize out of the darkness in ever increasing numbers, reaching for us with infected claws. One of the things actually managed to latch on to the right handlebar, and we jerked violently to the right. Ship grabbed the thing’s hand and lifted it away from us as if it were a child’s appendage. I swear I saw a couple of its frozen fingers break off. He just let it go and it fell behind us, but the damage was done.

  We sideswiped a Toyota Camry, which was ridiculous in its own right. I mean what self- respecting hillbilly would own a non-truck, let alone a foreign non-truck? Regardless, our right tread was damaged in the collision and started to make that noise. You know that noise, the one that every vehicle you’ve ever owned makes at some point. The one that screams This isn’t right, and you get all nervous about a five-hundred-dollar mechanic bill for a water pump or brake rotors.

  Our trusty steed was faltering. We made it another eighth of a mile before the tread broke off and almost took Ship’s leg with it. We spun chaotically out of control and wound nose first into the brick façade of a barbershop. Now, I’m no insurance adjustor, but I could tell you that this extremely expensive snow toy was all kinds of totaled, and there was no protection check inbound. Remember a couple of paragraphs ago when I told you that I was scared when riding through the streets? Yeah, well that was paltry compared to when I heard that first throaty, gargling moan from someplace very close.

  We grabbed our stuff and Ship used his size twenties to persuade the barber shop door open. The shop was blissfully devoid of all things alive or dead except us, which was good because the damn pack (an ALICE pack for you enthusiasts) weighed in at ten million pounds and I was already tired after six feet. Ship wrenched the barber’s table off the wall and braced it against the door just as the first slap of a dead hand smacked against it. I looked at the shop front and the zombies that were showing up looked right back at me through an entire wall of plate glass.

  This simply would not do, and I turned to tell the big guy, but he was already moving toward the back of the shop. The front window imploded and I jumped a little. The zombies hadn’t even started pounding yet and I was confused, until the mirrors on the far wall exploded and I heard gunfire.

  Damned if I didn’t hear woo hoos and yee hahs again.

  I hightailed it through the shop following Ship, who threw the lock on the back door, and we stepped out into a long, skinny alley.

  OK, so I’ve told you about how scared I’ve been a couple of times already, with the cannibal heifers, and the Superfly runner, and evil rednecks, and zombies and more zombies, and moaning and crashing snowmobiles into walls, and most importantly, being bitten. Well, when we opened that back door and I stepped out into that alley, and we saw how many dead people were there milling about, I was even more scared. They all turned like a flock of birds, and every single dead eye in the bunch focused on me. I don’t even know if they saw Ship, even though he’s almost seven feet tall and four bills. I’m telling you, every one of those predators saw me as the sick gazelle, and every one of them wanted to eat me. They leaned left and right to look around my colossal friend. When the closest one turned and took a step, and it crunched in the frost, that sound is what scared me the most. Not holy crap I just got a two thousand dollar tax bill scared; not my God, where’s my kid in the department store scared; this was pants-shitting, total panic, fuck all, my agonizing death is most ricky-tick imminent terrified.

  Now multiply that sound times one hundred as the fifty dead bastards in that back alley streamed toward us en-mass.

  Domestic Troubles

  I heard the tell-tale crunching of shoes on glass in the dark barbershop behind us, but as there was no place else to go, I ran back inside with Ship hot on my heels. He slammed the door extra hard, so it was extra loud. I couldn’t see any dead yet, as they hadn’t made it to the small corridor from the main room to the back room. I raised my rifle to deal with the first of the mini-horde that would be approaching from the shop, but I heard a door open behind me and the strong fingers of death on my shoulder.

  It was Ship, he had found another door with a set of stairs going up. He dragged me through the door and I shut it quickly. It was a flimsy interior d
oor that a cat could scratch through given the time. A cheap knock off of a Home Depot fifty dollar special. Some draped Charmin would have slowed our antagonists better, and I could have used some right then anyway if you catch my meaning. Pounding had already begun on the back door, and it was only a matter of time before every pus sack in the area found our little sanctuary.

  I thundered up the stairs after Ship, who hadn’t made a sound, to another door, this one open and beckoned us into its shadowy maw. Ship stopped dead…poor choice of words…at the top landing, and let me tell you, in a three-foot-wide stairwell, there was no getting past this man. An octagonal window let moonlight in to illuminate my friend’s enormous frame. He cocked his head almost imperceptibly, then pulled his machete. I thought my machete was all tough and mean looking, but his looked like the wing from a Boeing as he cleaved the air in front of him. Turns out it wasn’t air, but a dead woman looking for an evening nibble. She dropped like a hot rock, her head split in two down to her trachea, and Ship yanked his weapon out of her noggin.

  What seemed like a steel cage melee was going on below us; I can only imagine that the inside horde had missed our side door as I initially had and opened the back door to confront the pounding of the outsiders. I had a brief moment of levity when I considered that the two groups could pound on either side of the door for eternity with only bloody stumps remaining before they realized they were hunting spoiled game.