Tim2

by Mark Tufo

  “Timothy!” I yelled back.

  “Yeah I give a shit, Tim-Tim.”

  “I’m going to eat you from the inside out.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first that promised me that. All talk and no action, the men I’ve dated. Come out where I can see you so we can talk about it.”

  “I’d love to, I really would, but I have this crazy fear of getting shot. Call me nuts,” I told her.

  I could just make her out talking to someone. It was impossible to tell if it was over a radio or she was saying something to someone next to her. Either way, I had to leave where I was. I was not in a strategic position at the moment.

  “You going somewhere?” she asked as I was slowly sliding away.

  She was guessing. She had to be, she didn’t have the angle on me to see what I was doing – or she had someone on the ground watching me. But that made no sense; they’d be shooting, not reporting back. I kept quiet, not giving her a chance to isolate my voice. I had moved a good twenty feet from my previous position. I was showered in a bottle of hot sauce. The red liquid stung my eyes as it dripped onto my head.

  “What the fuck!” I yelled, when the sauce hit the hole in my side. That wasn’t a lucky shot it couldn’t have been could it? I was wiping the fluid away from the wound as best I could.

  “Oooh do you want me to kiss it and make it better?” She cooed. “You’re an ugly bastard aren’t you?”

  I was wracking my brain trying to figure out if the government had finally come up with a working version of x-ray goggles. How else could she see me? I leaned back my head, resting on a bag of flour when I finally figured it out. The back wall of the store had an angled mirror that went the entire distance across, giving anyone in the office a perfect view of the entire store.

  My tormentor waved vigorously at me when she realized I was watching, and then she slipped me the finger before retreating back into the shadows of the office. That was an easy enough fix. I held up my gun and blasted pane after pane of mirrors.

  “That’s a shit load of bad luck, Tim-Tim,” the woman cried out when the echoes of shattering glass faded into obscurity.

  “That’s the thing, bitch, I have plenty of time,” I told her right before I went on the move again. This time she was blind to my actions – unless of course she did have those x-ray goggles. Prudence would dictate I should take my mostly intact ass out of the store, but I didn’t know the bitch, and I’d be damned if she dictated anything to me. I knew I was going to be in trouble at the end of either aisle. I would be exposed as I made my way to the next. I went back the way I had come, thinking she would be expecting me to leave the way I was headed.

  I took a quick breath, pushed off from the kneeling position I was in and into the aisle closer to the front. Her shot caught me in my left ankle, nearly severing my foot from my leg as it shattered the joint. The only reason I wasn’t dead was she had guessed I would be retreating and not advancing. Otherwise that shot would have caught me in the back of the head.

  “Won’t make that mistake again, Tim-Tim,” she said as she let the piece of brass tinkle to the ground. “I’ll save the one that ends your worthless existence.”

  Nothing happened for a while, I didn’t move, she didn’t talk.

  “Hugh, need some help,” I said in my inside voice.

  “Stop getting damaged,” he answered.

  “I didn’t say I needed worthless advice. Not like I’m doing this shit on purpose.”

  “Too bad,” Hugh replied.

  At first I thought he was getting sarcastic with that ‘too bad’, and I was going to give him an earful for it…then I came to the realization that sarcasm was not one of Hugh’s traits. Straight forward, directness was his calling card. He was telling me the damage to my ankle was beyond his expertise.

  “I wonder if I can get inside of She-Commando, might be fun to inhabit the lesser sex for a little while. She doesn’t have a dick, but that’s about the same condition I’m in now,” I laughed.

  “Something funny, asshole? I know I hit you…that’s twice. I kind of wish you’d just die and get it over with.”

  I made sure to take any signs of distress out of my tone. “Are Sweet Charlene’s words ringing a little truer?”

  “A thinking zombie? Hardly, you crazed fucker. I’m thinking body armor and crude dental work combined with psychosis and a dash of severe physical trauma to the brain or maybe just plain evil. Did your mommy not hug you enough as a child?”

  “Hugh, what can you do for my ankle?”

  “My ankle,” he replied.

  Great – getting attacked on all fronts. “Your ankle. What can you do for your ankle? Dick.”

  “Fuse,” he gave a one-word answer, showing how my foot (screw him) would be flat and not bend anymore, I was going to have a pronounced limp even for a zombie. “Hold,” he said again in his typical monotone fashion. He wanted me to hold the parts together while he welded them with human glue I guess.

  I involuntarily gasped as Hugh went about his handiwork. It hurt significantly more than I was prepared for and my rebellious little cohabitator saw fit to not suppress my pain centers. It flared and radiated out from the wound, up my leg, through my chest, and pounded on the side of my head.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Hugh? I get the feeling you’re being a little less than gentle here.”

  “You say something?” the woman asked from the office.

  “I was wondering if the grapes were on sale, because they look a little soft.”

  “Bring them up here and we’ll take a look.”

  I honed in on ‘we’. Was that telling? Or was she talking about me and her ‘we’?

  Don’t you worry, darling, I thought, that’s where I’m headed.

  “So what were you before the zombies came, one of those whacked out survivalists?” I asked through gritted teeth, waiting for my ankle and leg to be in some sort of usable function.

  “Yoga instructor,” she answered.

  “This doesn’t seem very Zen-like.”

  “Oh, you’d be amazed the chi I receive when a bullet busts through a skull.”

  Great, another psycho off her meds. Hugh wasn’t kidding, I tried to move my foot around; it was virtually nailed in place. I wanted to get up and test it out, see how fast I could move on it, but I was pretty sure Rambette wasn’t going to give me the opportunity no matter how long I waved a white flag for a cease fire.

  “Listen, Tim-Tim, I know you’re thinking you can make it up here. You can’t. I think maybe it’s time you cut your losses and ride off into the sunset.”

  “You’d let me walk? After what I’ve done to your group?”

  “What’s done is done, I can’t bring them back. I can keep myself in one piece, though, and it is survival of the fittest now.”

  “I could just stand up and walk out of here? You really think I’d believe that? I’ve never even used such an open lie on the women I bedded, and they were way stupider than I was.”

  “They must have been if they went home with you. Did you pull this Dahmer shit with them, too?”

  “Hey, I was an asshole as a human, don’t get me wrong, but I never directly killed anybody. Couple of in-directs sure but not directly. I do what I do now because I have to.”

  “Right,” she started sarcastically, “because you’re a zombie. I almost forgot. Man, how did that slip my mind?”

  “You think I get pleasure from eating people?” I asked her. The crazy thing was, I did. I loved their screams of terror and the begging for mercy it added to the entire ambience of the event. Dinner and a show, what more could I ask for?

  “My guess would be yes, because apparently you do it. Just stand up and let’s end this, you deserve whatever fate you have coming. Vengeful gods get pissed off when they are made to wait.”

  “Hugh, I’m going to need some help. Going to need to get some zombies here as a distraction.”

  “No,” came his terse reply.

  “Ar
e you fucking kidding me? We’re in a pretty bad jam right now.” If Rambette somehow convinced the two with her to come out and flank me, she had me dead to rights. I was pinned from above with no way to go.

  “Hughs, die around you.” He even added the imagery of white crosses in a field, which I thought was so fucking cute.

  “Zombies dying are for our benefit, dipshit. We – meaning me and you – survive.”

  He was wracking Clarence’s thoughts for the appropriate wording and pictures, but it basically came down to ‘the Collective is more important that the individual’.

  “Hugh, come on, man. You’re kidding right? Hughs are altruistic? I don’t believe that shit.”

  It took him even longer for the next gem. “Zombies don’t kill zombies.”

  “This is rich. Maybe not, you mindless fuck, but I’ve also never seen one step in front of another to save their diseased hide either. You are not human! You do not have human thoughts and emotions. You are an opportunistic parasite that has taken over, that’s it. That’s all!” I shouted the last part.

  “Sounds like you’re cracking up a little bit down there. Is it hard keeping all those alternate personalities in check?” Rambette asked.

  She almost had me…I almost stood up to give her a good what for. She would have replied with a leaden response.

  “Hugh, are you really not going to do this?” I asked. He turned his figurative back on me. “I’ll leave if you tell me your name.”

  “Why?” she asked suspiciously.

  “What are you afraid of, identity theft? I just want to know who’s bested me.”

  “Looking at you, I’d say life bested you a long time ago, you just haven’t figured it out yet. But if it sends you on your merry little way, my name is Yorley.”

  “What the hell is that, Swedish?”

  “Ignorant and ugly, you must have been a heartthrob. Yorley Garcia, and I’m Cuban.”

  “Ah that explains the fire.” And like that, the idea exploded in my head. I couldn’t get up there, but I could make them come down. Yorley’s origins had given me inspiration. Now I just had to see if there was anything flammable in the aisle I found myself firmly rooted in.

  The luck of the Irish was sort of on my side; I found myself one removed from that mystery aisle where they kind of stick the seasonal items along with the clearance items and the hard to sell. The bitch of it was, that was the aisle I had just left. Would she be expecting a retreat or an advance from me? If she somehow shot my other ankle, I’d look more like Mary Shelley’s creation than George Romero’s, at least in locomotion. Although, if given time to dwell on it, there were a fair amount of similarities. Maybe Yorley could be my bride. I looked up at the aisle marker signs, so close yet so far. Too bad the damned hot sauce that had dripped on me didn’t live up to its advertising and ‘burn with intense heat.’

  I didn’t think she’d be fooled by a distraction, but I had to try. I moved as far to the end of the aisle as I could, grabbed a bottle of pickles, and launched them to the other end. I waited until I heard it crash against the floor before I made my move. I had no idea how severely hampered my injury had made me. My ankle had as much flexibility as a two-by-four, it was with my right leg that I had to do most of my propulsion. I kept my head down, realizing I could take a bullet to just about any part of my body, although the question was would Hugh help? Maybe I moved faster than I thought or maybe the pickles had confused her, whatever the case she had not fired.

  “Where you going, fat boy?” she asked.

  I ignored her as I sat, my back up against the side she had no trajectory on.

  “Just trying to honor my end of the agreement,” I told her as I scoped my aisle out. To my right on the other side were some old bags of briquettes. Directly above them were the cans of lighter fluid.

  Off to my left were cute stuffed animals all resplendent in pink ribbons and bows, a cheery smile plastered across their faces. They would never again be used as a syrupy afterthought for young love. ‘I really love you, here’s a stupid stuffed animal that proves it, now get on your knees and show me how much you care for me.’ I smiled. I had gone from a pessimistic outlook to completely optimistic. I could only hope Yorley tasted as spicy as she sounded.

  Getting the stuffed animal would be easy enough since it was on my side of the aisle, the lighter fluid would require my being exposed, but unless she had a large streak of luck running, this should go fairly well.

  “You’re going the wrong way then.”

  I slid down and grabbed a pink teddy bear holding a heart that said ‘Would you be mine?’ seemed apt. I moved down until I was across from the barbecue section.

  “Lot of movement down there, Tim-Tim. That makes me nervous.”

  “Just trying to get comfortable, Yorley. Ever try to sit on concrete? The cold seeps into your ass and up your spine.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  She had just finished talking when I got into a kneeling position, I launched towards the other side of the aisle. Mostly crash-landing as I slammed into the unyielding steel shelving. I think I snapped my anklebone which was actually a blessing in disguise as it yielded some movement in the joint. The pain was minimal as I think Hugh’s handiwork had severed the nerve endings. A bullet crashed into a cooler not more than six inches from my head. I reached up and pulled at least five or six of the lighter fluid bottles down. They crashed down next to me as I fell awkwardly. I pulled one to me and scooted back. The next round sparked off the floor where my leg had been only a millisecond before. By now, Yorley had a clue of what I was up to.

  “Don’t even think it, Tim-Tim,” she yelled down. “The first time you poke your head up I’ll blow it off.”

  “Hasn’t that been the plan all along, Yorley? If you’re going to make a powerful threat, it has to be something new, something in addition to what is already out on the table.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for future reference.”

  I could hear murmured talking in the office. I didn’t catch much, but the one sentence I did hear was enough to let me know the gist of it.

  It was a male’s voice, so it had to be the store manager, Calum. “I’m not going down there, he has a gun.” The voice was laden with enough fear to make me sufficiently happy with how terrified I had him. I didn’t catch another, so it was safe to say that the woman – whose skull I had cracked – was not quite battle-ready, and in all likelihood would never be again once this fight was over.

  Would what I was planning on doing be sufficient impetus to bring Yorley down? Odds were yes. I needed to move quickly before that happened, I wanted her to come down on my terms, hopefully smoke-blind and choking. I soaked the bear in lighter fluid and tossed the squishy little bastard in the air. It wasn’t heavy enough; I needed it to crash through the window and spread its warmth and my joy all over that office. I was convinced my best heave would fall well short of its mark.

  Luck was still somewhat on my side as the tape was in the same aisle, but again, it was on the opposite side. Every time I moved, my parachute pants made enough noise to disturb Repugnant up in her Ivory Tower. “Nothing to it but to do it.”

  I scooted halfway down the aisle, rolls of black electrical and silver duct tape were tantalizingly close. I could almost feel the crosshairs of her rifle as I once again jumped up and over. My arm bent at an awkward angle as a bullet smashed through my upper arm, cracking it in two.

  “FUCK!” I screamed, shuddering in pain and shock from the force of the injury. “Hugh, help!” I didn’t care who heard. Although that plea for help most likely saved my life. Yorley had to be thinking that I was out of commission and that now would have been a perfect time to finish me off. But if there was a ‘Hugh’ in the mix she would need to be wary of him as well. I was cursing and whimpering as Hugh took his sweet time coming to my aid.

  “Did that hurt?” she asked.

  I ignored her. If I spoke, there would be no way I could possibly hide
the torture I was feeling. That was one more reason she would deign not to come down and investigate. She was still operating under the false impression I was human and the grievous wound she had just inflicted should be more than enough to finish me off in this abysmal lack of a health care system we now found ourselves in.

  Hugh did quiet down the pain receptors this time; a flood of dopamine coursed through my system. I sighed in the relief of it and slouched back.

  “STILL,” Hugh admonished me.

  I grunted as Hugh started sliding chunks of bone back into place. It seemed like hours of agonizing bone knitting as I sat there.

  “You broke my arm, Yorley. This is really going to set our friendship back a little bit.”

  “Oh, you’re still awake. Thought I’d lost you for a minute. If you do by any chance pass out, please rest assured that I am going to cut your throat as soon as you do.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I winced. I watched as the skin under my arm rippled, partly from the amassing of Hugh-ites but mostly from the large chunk of damaged bone being positioned back into its rightful spot. “Where’d you learn to shoot?”

  “Why are you still alive? I’ve seen blood sprays from you twice. Maybe neither was a kill shot, but you should be curled up in a ball whimpering for your bitch of a mother.”

  “Hey there’s no need to go there, I haven’t been dragging your family into our discussion.”

  “How very rude of me, I tend to get a little personal when those around me are eaten by a sicko.”

  I put my head back as Hugh kept at it; Yorley spoke after a few minutes. Why? I don’t know, it’s just something chicks feel the need to do…you know, talk incessantly. Maybe they think words will keep them sane while they drive the rest of us fucking nuts. Makes perfect sense to me.

  “My father was a rebel against Castro. He taught our whole village how to shoot.”

  “He mustn’t have been too good of a rebel, last I heard Castro was still around. If he had done his job better I would have been able to get a decent cigar.”

  More silence.

  “Ooh, sore spot?” I asked. “Whole village wiped out maybe? Were you interred? Maybe raped a few dozen times? Lord knows you have the ass for it.”