“And they will” I said, “…but I don’t wanna rush balls out into this shit and get our asses shot full of holes, okay? We gotta be real careful here. These aren’t no fucking zombies we can just walk up to and kill, you know?”
“Yeah, okay, so what’s the plan?”
“Well… I don’t know…” I stopped to think for a couple minutes while the assholes kept a steady rate of fire at Ethel’s from behind the same vehicles Frank and I had taken cover behind earlier in the day. Someone was returning fire from the house, ‘cause one of the shooters yelped in pain as they were shot - if it was either a direct hit or by a ricochet, I didn’t know, but I hoped it was a fatal hit.
“Okay, here we go… I’m gonna sneak across the street here and get right behind ‘em, using those bushes and parked cars as cover.” I said, gesturing to the bushes that bordered the front yards on the opposite side of the street, and the cars parked there, as well. “When I get there, I’m gonna start shooting at them, getting their attention off the house. When they turn around and focus on me, I want you to come in from the side here guns blazing and take out the ones left standing. It only looked like five guys or so, so it shouldn’t be too hard. Sound okay to you?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “I guess it’ll work. Let’s get to it, then, I’m getting antsy here…”
“Okay. Here I go… Watch my back, dude.”
At that, I took off at a crouching jog to the opposite side of the street, and using the cover, made my way over so that I was right behind them - the only thing separating us was the expanse of the street and a newish Dodge Charger, whose engine compartment and front wheels I was hiding behind. I thought of saying something clever that you would hear in a big action movie to get their attention - like… well… fuck, I don’t know, I’m not good at that shit - but instead just took aim at the back of the head of the bandit that had the best weapon, an AR like mine, and pulled the trigger, splattering his brains all over the hood of the Monte Carlo.
I was able to kill two more before they even realized what was going down and turned to fire back at me. That left five more to take out. Unfortunately for them dumb-asses, they had nowhere to run for cover, and were trapped out there in the open, in a giant fuckin’ meat-grinder - as I was shooting at them and ducking behind my cover, Frank rushed out from behind the Tempo, firing and killing three more as he came, and whoever was doing the shooting from inside Ethel’s (probably her) took out the last two as they tried to scramble towards another car further down the street for cover.
After Frank and I made sure the bandits (that’s what they looked like, at least) were dead - by shooting them in their heads - we made our way to Ethel’s front porch, where Ethel had just stepped out onto. In her front yard, right up to her porch, the bodies of six more men lay all sprawled about, all shot to death.
“I am sure glad to see you boys!” she said with a big smile on her face. “It was getting pretty hairy here, if you know what I mean. I was getting a little worried, wasn’t too sure if we were gonna make it through this alive.”
“Well, I am glad we showed up when we did!” I said to her. “Man! What the fu… sorry…what happened here? What was going on?”
“Well, tell you what, boys, let’s go inside here before we attract any more unwanted attention - alive or dead - and I’ll tell you all about it. I’ve had just about enough of this shooting shit for one day, and just want to put my feet up and relax.”
“Hey, what do you mean ‘we’?” Frank asked as Ethel was turning around - something I had caught and was wondering about myself.
“Now what the fuck did I say, young man? In the house…” she said, smiling, as she stepped inside, “goddamn kids nowadays, always in a hurry for answers. Hope you got some of that beer left.”
“You got lucky, there’s only one left,” Frank said, “and it’s yours.”
38
Ethel barricaded the door back up once Frank and I entered, and walked over to a nice old, comfy-looking recliner and took a seat. After we got our packs off - sans the final beer, which Frank gave to Ethel - and our rifles propped up, we went to take a seat on her couch.
“Before you boys sit down and ruin my upholstery,” Ethel said as Frank and I were about to sit down on the couch. “I want you both to go upstairs and clean yourselves up, you look like hell. Get yourselves a shower and a change of clothes if you got ‘em. Then come back down and I’ll tell you boys everything I can.”
I showered up and changed first - I put my nasty clothes in a trash bag Ethel had given me - went downstairs and waited for Frank to get back down, and made small talk with Ethel. Once he was all spruced up and sitting on the couch with his own trash bag of clothes, Ethel filled us in on the situation.
She said that forty-five minutes before we came upon the bandits firing at her house, she was woken up from her afternoon nap by a girl screaming and hollering and hammering on her front door. She said that instead of rushing over and yanking the door wide open - “Because you never know who you’re gonna let into your house nowadays, do you” - she went into the kitchen to get Ole’ Henry, since it was in there from our earlier visit. She said the firing started while she was still in the kitchen, and that the bandits didn’t even know she was in the house, at that point.
“I could have just ignored the poor girl, and let those bastards do what they wanted with her - which was very, very bad - but that’s not the kind of person I am. So I rushed to the door as bullets ripped through the walls and into my house, opened it and pulled her inside. As soon as they saw me, they started shooting at me - and that really pissed me off. So I started shooting back. Just because I’m an old lady doesn’t mean I’m going to let some young bucks get the better of me. Fuck that.” Ethel stopped for a minute and took a couple long pulls from the Busch Frank had given her, savoring it.
“The girl wasn’t alone, though,” she continued, “she had three friends with her - who she later told me were her brother and her cousins - which was who the bastards were shooting at, originally. I watched them get cut down right in front of me. Horrible mess. It’s a pity they didn’t make it… now the girls whole family is gone. After that, I was able to keep them from getting too close to the house by taking pot-shots at them from the windows. I’d shoot at them for a few minutes from the windows down here, then I’d run upstairs and do the same - I figured it would make them think that there were more people in here than just little old me, and be less inclined to try anything. Worked better than I thought it would, at least for a while. They finally realized that it was just me in here, but then you boys showed up and saved the day.”
“Yeah, and I’m glad we did, too!” said Frank. “We really didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but we figured that if the guys were shooting at your house, they had to be bad guys. So we took ‘em out!”
“Damn straight we did,” I replied. “So, where’s this mystery girl, Ethel? And what’s her story?”
“She’s upstairs in the spare bedroom resting for a while,” said Ethel. “And she has a name - it’s Beth. Her story… well, that’s not mine to tell, and I really didn’t have the time to get too much outta her anyway, you know, with all those guys shooting my house to shit. She’s had a rough day, so keep your asses down here and out of her hair. She’ll come down when she’s ready, and you can ask her all the questions you want then.”
“Well… what if we gotta use the bathroom or something?” Frank asked. “You want us to go outside?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, you little punk,” Ethel snapped back, “you go upstairs, of course. Just don’t go snooping around up there. Take care of your business and get the fuck back down here. No dilly-dallying, you here?”
“Okay, okay… I was just messing around, Ethel!”
“I know, so was I. How can I be mad at you boys? C’mon, let’s go to the kitchen, see what I can fix up for you two. I bet you’re pretty hungry - I know I am.”
So to the kitchen we went. Ethel star
ted cooking us all up a fat meatloaf with all the fixin’s - green beans, mashed potatoes, corn, and some sweet rolls - and made a tall pitcher of sweet iced tea. While she was cooking, the three of us gabbed about nonsense, talking about everything but what was going on outside the walls of her house - the weather, some t.v. show that was on before the dead started walking around, the possibilities of the Bears season (she was a die-hard Bears fan) - and finished off the pitcher of tea. Just as Ethel was taking the meatloaf out of the oven, the girl from upstairs, Beth, walked into the kitchen.
This chick was fuckin’ hot - she was around 5’4”, thin but not too thin, with dark brown hair and blue eyes, a pale complexion with freckles, and a sweet, athletic little bod - the kind of girl that, before all this shit started going on, would’ve completely ignored guys like Frank and me if we saw her in a bar or something. But since the population outside had taken a huge shift, with most people walking around dead eating the few still alive, our odds weren’t looking all that bad.
She walked in and sat with us at the table, and Ethel poured her a glass of tea (from a freshly made pitcher) and told her her timing was perfect, ‘cause the grub was just done. As we were eating, the girl - who introduced herself as Beth Reynolds - told us about how she came to be involved in the predicament Frank and I had stumbled into.
She said that earlier in the week, herself and the now deceased family members sprawled about on the lawn, began to be hunted by the guys we had killed, how they had saw her on one of her small groups foraging runs - as they were hiding in a car dealerships office with nine other people, and was just passing through when all this shit started - and how they wanted to kidnap her and the two other women there so they could use them as “fuck-toys”, as one of her pursuers so eloquently put it. Beth said that her group was forced to move about very late at night, and that somehow, the bandits always showed up at their new destination.
“It was horrible… the things they said to us,” Beth said, with her head hanging low, “as we hid behind whatever we could get up as a barricade. They’d just sit on the opposite side and taunt and taunt and taunt us, until, after it got dark, they’d go off somewhere safer and get drunk, and eventually pass out. That’s when would move out, to somewhere else a little further away. We thought of leaving this town, but we really didn’t have anywhere else to go, and we were afraid to be out in the open for too long with all the zombies.”
At that she stopped to eat up Ethel’s scrumdilliumptious grubbage and drink a couple glasses of tea, then after she was sated (she must’ve been hongry), got back to it. “We were on the run since last night when we came to this street. We saw people looking out their windows at us, but no one would help us, no one would let us in. I started pounding on doors and yelling for help, but it was useless. One guy said ‘shut the fuck up, there are zombies out there!’ - like I didn’t know! What a dick. …I’m just glad that there are some good people left in this world (she said as she looked at Ethel), or I’d be out there on the grass, too.”
She then went on to tell us who she was with when they came to Ethel’s (something we already knew, but since it was her story, we acted like we didn’t), and how, just four days ago, her group had eleven people in it. She told us that the bandits took out a couple people a day with random, lucky shots, and how numerous zombie attacks took out the rest of her group until it was just her and her family left. And then it was just her.
This new world of ours must change people to the core - as Beth told us her story she never once broke down, only teared up a little, and the only time she looked even remotely uncomfortable was when she was talking about the implied rape the bandits had planned for her.
I consider myself to be a good judge of character and all, and I was figuring that before all this went down, she was just a sweet little innocent thing, a good girl (or maybe a bad, bad girl, who knows?) who never caused any trouble and always did the right thing. Nowadays, though, you gotta be hard to survive (sometimes I take that too literally) - and she had that survivors look in her eyes.
We sat there at the gabbing table for another hour or so, finished off the food, and had a little q&a, the four of us telling each other about who we were and what we did before - and I was right about Beth, she didn’t even drink, what a bummer. Beth’s mood started to get better as the conversation went on, ‘cause me and Frank kept it anything but serious - after only five minutes she couldn’t help but smile at our retardation - and a good time was had by all. But, alas, we had to get a move on, as the light outside was fading, and we were expected back at Gus’s before nightfall.
So after we said our goodbye’s and promised to check up on them as often as we could - Beth opted to stay with Ethel, much to our disappointment - we stepped back into the world and headed off to finish our little outing, as pointless as it was. Well, not entirely, since we did save Ethel and got a new friend out of it - but it just wasn’t what we had planned on happening. In life what does go as planned, though, really? Seriously, I wanna know, ‘cause nothing I plan ever works out and I’m really getting tired of this shit.
39
Unfortunately for us, Midtown Road was thick with the undead. They must’ve been attracted by gun battle we had with the bandits earlier on and were milling about in their mindless, yet cunning, fashion. Lucky for us, though, none of them saw us as we stepped off the porch and into the front yard, where we ran through and hid behind the blood and brain covered Monte Carlo.
“Man, that chick was smokin’, dude,” Frank whispered as we were looking for a safe exit point. “I couldn’t help it, but I got a fuckin’ semi when I was looking at her!”
“Yeah, no shit, dude, I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” I whispered back. “I felt like such a douche-bag, eye-fuckin’ her like I was, but I just couldn’t help it. You see them shorts she had on? My god!”
“Hah! What shorts, you mean those teeny-tiny things she had painted on her?”
“Exactamundo, mi amigo. And that tight-ass little tee-shirt? Goddamn! She gots it goin’ on fo sho! Too bad she didn’t wanna come with us. At least one of us could’ve hooked up with her, you know? Maybe…?”
“Shit, we could’ve tag-teamed her ass! Off the top rope…”
“Ha-hah! Yeah! Coulda been a good time. Well, there’s always tomorrow. …I’m not gonna put the moves on her, though, you can if ya want, man. She’s all yours.”
“What?… What do you mean?…”
“Eh, you know, I been thinking… well, fuck it, I’ll tell ya when we’re safe at Gus’s house behind closed doors, okay? It’s something you all gotta hear, anyways. For now, let’s concentrate on getting there.”
“Okay… you got me curious now, fucker, so don’t fucking forget.”
“Trust me, I won’t. But it’s back to business for now, man - no Beth-talk, no Dave’s inner thought shit - we need to get the fuck outta here, got me?”
“Yeah, I got ya.”
There was no fuckin’ way we were gonna go east or west on Midtown with the street being packed shoulder-to-shoulder with zombies in some places, and to head north was out of the question, since that was where the mini-horde of zombies that came upon us after Frank wrecked Joey’s car was at - and that group was most likely a whole lot bigger, as these things tended to group up for some reason, like they still retained some sense of community or something - so the only option was to head south, through uncharted territory.
“South it is…” I mumbled to myself.
“What did you say?” Frank whispered, barely louder than my mumble, as there were a few zombies bumping into the cars’ opposite side. They still hadn’t seen us, but our luck was running out, I could feel it.
“Sorry, I was thinking out loud,” I barely whispered back. “We gotta go south, man, through those yards across the street here, that’s the only way. I’m pretty sure there’s a couple streets down there we could take that go in the general direction of Gus’s.”
“Okay, sounds good. You
ready?”
“As ready as I’m ever gonna be, dude. You?”
“I suppose so… Okay, then, here we go. Cool if I take point again, I kinda like it, you know…”
“Hey, no prob, man, lead the way.”
We both popped our heads up so we could see over the Monte, and seeing that the way across the street was as clear as it was gonna get, Frank crouch-walked to the edge of the cars’ hood, took off at a crouching sprint across the street, and dove through the bushes that I had used for cover on my way to the point where I had shot the bandit in his head. I followed in right behind him, the bushes barely having time to close behind him before I busted through.
The yard we burst into was thankfully devoid of the dead, and we quickly ran through the yard and got beside the house, hugging it close as we made our way to its back yard - with Frank facing the front, and me with my back to him, as I wanted to make 100% motherfuckin’ sure none of that street horde tried to creep up on us. At the houses edge, Frank stopped and reached back and touched my hip to get my attention (we were running silent due to the large number of zombies in our vicinity), and once I turned to see what he wanted, he made the eyes front hand signal, directing my gaze to where he wanted it.
There in the center of the backyard were two zombies - old people, that were most likely attacked and killed early in the morning, as the old woman zombie was wearing a nightgown and the old man zombie was wearing flannel pajamas, the both of them covered in old, crusty dried blood - who were standing motionless, facing the fence that separated the yard we were in from the backyard of the house that was on the street we were making our way towards.
I made a chopping gesture signaling that I wanted to go to our machetes for the two of them, and we both slung our weapons, got our blades from their sheaths, and pulled our side-arms - just in case they turned while we were making our way towards them, or we were attacked from elsewhere during the head-choppins’.
A.K.A. No Time for a Love Story (Book 1): Just Another Day Page 14
