A Plague Upon Your Family

by Mark Tufo

  “Are you fucking kidding me BT?”

  “Does now really seem like the time Talbot?”

  As I was pondering this new information, my AR dry fired. My Glock was up next, I had five hundred rounds but only five clips. Once those fifty clipped rounds were gone, it was over, unless of course I could call ‘time-out’ and the zombies would allow it. Then I’d be able to reload and have a fighting chance.

  The house behind us began to crumble; we had been able to push forward fifteen feet or so away, close enough to the flame that zombies couldn’t circle behind but not far enough to be safe from an imminent collapse and probable barbequing.

  “I sure wish they’d hurry,” BT said with no more expression than if he was waiting for a pizza.

  “I’m out!” Jen yelled on adrenaline fueled lungs.

  I was two clips down and now I would have to pick up the pace with Jen’s sector of containment now flooding through. Zombies were close enough that I could see individual gore stained teeth and black cracked fingernails clawing through the air attempting to seek purchase. Foul breathe escaped through decayed airways. Zombies lit by flame began to spill out of the house behind us, somehow still able to hone in on us. Three magazines down, and the Marines and Brendon were still fifty yards away.

  “So fucking close.” We might have all said it, I can’t credit it to any one of us.

  The trucks slowed minimally as the .50 cal shots had to be aimed more precisely lest they take us out too. The troop transport was in danger of high centering over the sheer number of zombies becoming so much road kill. The snail paced crawl may be saving the truck from getting stuck but at the cost of our lives. I saw exactly when the driver of the transport weighed those two factors on the scale and said ‘Fuck it.’ The bluster of the truck’s engine hitting full throttle cut through the dull roar of the burning cinder block behind us. Zombies flung in the air like a giant spoiled baby was done playing with his GI Joes and Barbie dolls and was throwing them around in the fits of a tantrum.

  The armor was beginning to fold in on itself under the pressure of so many collisions. As the lead vehicle pushed past, Brendon pulled up broadside just as I had expended the last bullet in my clip.

  “All aboard!” Brendon yelled in his best train conductor voice.

  Jen almost cleared the other side of the truck bed as BT hurled her up and in. BT’s leg might not be working well but his arms were fine as he followed her immediately up and in. BT’s ass had no sooner made contact with the bed and I was in his lap.

  “Didn’t know you cared,” BT said as he put me in a more respectable position.

  "Where's everyone else?" Brendan asked.

  "Safe." I shouted back.

  He smiled. "Okay then, please have your tickets ready to be punched!” Brendon yelled through the rear facing windows as he crushed down on the accelerator.

  Zombies pressed in from all sides. I grabbed a shovel and did my best to keep them at bay as the truck swayed violently from side to side. BT had found a tire iron and was making anything within striking distance rue the day it had gone over to the dark side. Jen had found an axe handle that looked like it had already been used for nefarious purposes as the end of it was deeply stained a suspicious brownish red color.

  Jen was swinging the handle violently. When she made contact, the vibrations shot up her arms.

  “Be careful!” I yelled to her.

  Whether she would have heeded me or not, the warning was a beat too late. The zombie she had been lining up to strike had fallen when Brendon ran over its leg. Jen pitched forward, precariously balanced between relative safety and death. Death won out. I watched the resignation in her face as she fell out of the truck bed.

  “JEN!” I screamed. I jumped to the other side of the truck bed. My hand brushed hers as she slid away from my touch. Her other hand shot out even as the first of the zombies sunk his teeth into her back. I was able to make a tenuous grasp on her hand, dragging her along behind the truck.

  “Don’t let me go Mike!” she screamed. “PLEASE!” she begged as another zombie took hold of her thigh, teeth first. He tore a ragged piece of flesh away from her as I continually pulled her behind the truck.

  She was dead. We both knew it. But I was not going to let go. The blood vessels in her eyes burst as a zombie ripped through her calf muscle, long strips of meat hanging between its greedy lips. I turned to gain as much momentum as I could before I began to pull her back into the truck.

  Her hand went slack. The weight I dragged increased as zombies jumped on her, feasting as we went. I let go of her hand and sat back up, the sharp pain in my shoulder a reminder of what had just happened. BT was looking at me in what I could only describe as shock. He moved faster than any man his size had a right too. He grabbed me and slammed me to the floor of the truck bed. I was beginning to feel light headed. He must have really knocked my head against the floor.

  “It wasn’t my fault, BT,” I said through fogged vision.

  “I know that you damned fool, you’ve been shot.”

  “Shot? Zombies don’t shoot guns. You’re crazy, man. It sure is getting dark quick.”

  “Not a gun, a crossbow.”

  A crossbow! A fucking crossbow? Who shoots somebody with a crossbow? What am I, an elk? What’s next? Someone gonna whip out a mace? Maybe a scimitar?

  My shoulder, for lack of a better term, unraveled. Muscle, tendon, sinew, whatever, just literally began to curl like wet parchment. My biceps bulged, rivaling the Hulk, as my ripped tendons rolled up into them. I noticed with a note of envy how large my muscles looked even as my vision began to blur. (Guys can be vain! Just because I was dying of blood loss and shock didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate how large my damaged muscles looked.) Searing pain immediately made me wish I would just pass out and die and be over with this. As bone separated from tissue, I’m pretty sure I involuntarily blackened my eye as my arm flung up. That was the least of my problems and I wouldn’t have even registered the fact had not my right eye dimmed and then blacked out before my left one.

  “Talbot!” Someone screamed. Sounded like someone I knew. Well, I must know them if they knew my name, right? Who gives a shit. “Talbot!” Again with the screaming but it sounded further away, even as I felt arms around me. From somewhere very distant I heard my wife. “Talbot don’t you di….”

  I accelerated along a black tube as light emanated from every direction. Its source I could not discern. My speed seemed to be accelerating, although I think it was all relative. It wasn’t me that seemed to be moving so much as the tunnel was streaming past. I wanted to reach out and touch the wall to see if that was the case but I was afraid of doing more damage to my injured wing. Aw what the hell, my arm was barely attached anyway, what more could I do. I moved my right arm around, unbelievably happy with how pain free the movement was. ‘Holy crap,’ I muttered. ‘He must have missed. Maybe it’s the wrong arm.’ Having been ambidextrous my entire life I often confused my left from my right. When I moved my left arm and again felt no pain the light of recognition dawned. ‘Holy Shit! I’m dead!’ That thought wasn’t nearly as dreadful as I would have imagined. Oh I was scared to a point, maybe more concerned. Alright I was a little freaked out. My thoughts obviously centering around what is at the end of this tunnel. Do I pull a Wile E. Coyote and smash face first into a faux hole in the wall? Do I come out to a huge drop and fall eternally? (Oh that would suck.) IS there a Heaven? Or worse, a Hell? My actions thus far in my life could probably gain my entry into either. Was my eternity going to come down to a rock, paper, scissor game between God and Satan? Wow, sacrilege on my final journey cannot be good in the ledger books. Maybe it would be possible to hang out in this tunnel a little longer and weigh my options. Wind buffeted me back as I tried in vain to approach the walls. The speed was picking up, I knew I was nearing my final destination, no stops, no layovers. I had a momentary pang for my wife and kids. I did feel remorse that I was dying but only because I wouldn’t be th
ere for them. I had ultimately accepted my fate, for what other choice was there? When I felt another presence nearby, it wasn’t nearly as comforting as I would have expected from the Almighty. There was a great sense of anger, of sadness, of a life truly unfulfilled. It took me long moments to pull these vaporous thoughts away from my own, the intermingling almost made me believe these errant thoughts were mine. Out of the corner of my awareness I caught movement as it at first trailed behind me by some lengths and then hastened to catch up and pass me by.

  “Brendon?” I shouted. So lost was he in his mortality he took no notice of me as he shot on by. I watched in the distance as a light infinitely brighter than what I was experiencing now blazed in acceptance, in love, in its warm embrace. These euphoric feelings washed over and around me. My pang of regret paled, faded and was washed away. Those feelings lasted long after the walls of my tunnel slowed and then began to shift direction, back into the blight, the pain, the hurt, the uncertainty, the love. “He’s back.” Someone familiar sobbed from a hundred million miles away.

  Epilogue

  Cops vs. Talbot

  TALBOTSODE #1

  So I started early dealing with the po-po. I was 16 years old when my high school thought it would be a good idea to deter drunk driving by placing a wrecked car on the front lawn of the school. For some reason that completely eluded me at that moment in life, I thought that was the most inconsiderate act possible. So of course that night my friends and I went and bashed in any and all remaining glass on that car. By the time the cops got there we were out of sight in the woods across the street. We watched them as they shone their lights across the wreckage of the wreck. We also saw them park inconspicuously across the street hoping that said vandals would return.

  You know I went back. It’s in my nature. This time it wasn’t with a tire iron. I had made a Molotov cocktail out of some gas and shampoo poured into a Coke bottle. My friends had told me 'I was crazy' and ‘You’re not going to do it.’ So, you know of course, all that really does is incite somebody above and beyond normal stupidity into super stupidity. I was a fast kid, I played half back for the freshman team. How fast was about to be tested.

  I went a little further in the woods, away from the cops, and emerged from a spot where they could not see my egress. As I walked back up the road towards the school I tried my best to act as innocent as possible. I knew they were watching me. I could feel it. They wanted me to do something wrong just as bad as I wanted to. My first step off the relative safety of the sidewalk and onto the lawn of the school had the police on high alert. My time was short. I pulled out my trusty Bic. The first flick of flame ignited the gas soaked rag immediately. I was momentarily stunned by the flash of fire. The cops however, were not. Their car popped into drive and the engine revved followed almost instantaneously by their headlights turning on. I was bathed in headlights. The iridescent blues and reds sent me hauling ass.

  I ran as close to the wreck as I dared. Reaching back for all I was worth I hurled the bottle at the car, hoping that I hadn’t missed and have it hit anticlimactically on a tire, or sail harmlessly overhead landing on the soft grass. Neither of those things happened as the bottle smashed throat first into the rear quarter panel. The ensuing fireball probably saved my ass as the cops sheared off from their intercept course.

  I’ll give them this though, they recovered quickly and were once again in hot pursuit. At one point the bumper of the cop car actually touched my ass. If I had stumbled there wouldn’t have been a thing in the world he could have done to avoid running me down, like some common criminal, which I guess I was now. When I got to the end of the school grounds I was met with an eight foot high chain link fence. Now remember, I was 16 and in great shape, one jump had me three quarters up and my body was half over the top when the cop car fishtailed to a stop directly underneath me.

  The cop actually had the nuts to yell at me to stop. I told him to fuck off as I retreated into the woods. I was semi-surprised he hadn’t shot me. The car was towed off the grounds the very next day.

  Talbot – 1, Cops - 0

  TALBOTSODE #2

  At the ripe old age of 17, having not learned a damn thing from the smashed up car in the previous story, I decided to leave a party I was at. Bad idea. I was closer to four sheets to the wind when I decided that I needed to go to my house and grab my marijuana paraphernalia. Must have been ten different bowls at that party to smoke out of, but NO, I had to have mine. So I got behind the wheel of my car and luckily, not one hundred yards from where I started, I smashed into a curb. It blew out my right front tire. I grabbed the keys out of the car, opened the trunk and then drunkenly scattered everything I had in my trunk on the ground around the car.

  I couldn’t find the jack to save my life. Although looking back, not finding the jack probably did save my life and someone else’s. I must have been making a hell of a racket because someone yelled out their window that I should just leave because they had called the cops. I might have mumbled something incoherently back to them, but in my addled brain all I could think was that I’d better change this tire quick before they got here.

  Now I don’t know if it was a slow night at the old Police station or I blacked out somewhere along the line, but the Boys were at the scene in what seemed like a heartbeat.

  “Son, you need to stop what you’re doing right now,” the cop said to my back. How I missed the glaring lights on the top of his car is not really all that much of a mystery.

  I stood up, smacking my head on the trunk lid as I did so. ‘Stuff’ was littered in a semi circle around my position, there was an empty cooler, a lawn chair, a blanket or two, a bunch of clothes, most were not mine (no clue), and the jack. I stared down at it like it had just materialized.

  “Son, why don’t you put that stuff back in the car,” the cop said to me. By now his partner had rolled up in another squad car.

  I’ve got to admit I was pretty impressed with myself that I hadn’t said anything stupid up to this point. I just kind of bent at the waist, wobbled a bit and put all the stuff back. ‘Stupid jack,’ I mumbled as if that were the root of all my ills.

  Another squad car rolled up. “Why don’t you come over here, son, so we can do a field sobriety check.”

  “Sounds good,” I answered him. At least those were the words I intended. I think ‘Smoods gound,’ came out.

  “Okay son, I want you to walk heel to toe for ten steps.” And then he proceeded to show me the technique to perform this magic routine. It’s kind of like when you go to a carnival and the carnie working the booth where you have to stand the Coke bottle up with the ring attached to a rope on the end of a stick demonstrates the proper techniques. He does it like five times in a row. So you figure when you hand him over your five bucks you’ve got this thing in the bag and your girlfriend is going to be so happy. Maybe just maybe, you’ll get second base under the shirt instead of over. What you don’t realize is that the ring on the end of your rope is slicked with Vaseline and you have absolutely no chance of ever winning that teddy bear or of feeling Suzy’s tits.

  So that was the same perspective I had when I went into the sobriety test. The moment I placed the heel of my left foot onto the toe of my right I lost all sense of equilibrium. The cop had to literally catch me as the ground rose up to meet me.

  “That’s far enough, son.” His statement was followed immediately by handcuffs.

  I was being fingerprinted when my mother came to the station to bail me out.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” were her first words to me.

  Mine to her: “Who are you?” I was that gone, that’s no exaggeration. I didn’t recognize my own mother. How far down the rabbit hole do you have to be for that to happen? I had dodged a bullet by having to take the keys out of the ignition to open the trunk. In a newer model of car, had I had a switch to open the trunk, my charge would have gone from public intoxication to DUI.

  Talbot – 1, Cops – 1

  TALBOT
SODE #3

  The next story isn’t earth shattering, more of another slice in the pie. I was somewhere in the 18 year old range and a gaggle of us had gone up to New Hampshire to go camping. It was one of those lost weekends you spend with friends, laughing, partying, having a great time, kids being kids. So now it’s Sunday afternoon and we’re heading back down I-95 to Massachusetts and of course we’re drinking. That’s what you do as stupid kids. At least this time I wasn’t driving or attempting to do so. The driver of the van I was in needed to stop and do what any beer drinker does, pee. So we pull into this rest stop for a break and someone pulls out a Frisbee. We spread out in the parking lot of this rest area and just start playing some catch. Nothing that so far was going to get me on the FBI’s most wanted list.

  So my buddy Kevin throws me this wicked long pass. I chase it down and snag it one handed. The other hand was wrapped firmly around a Budweiser. I turn back around smiling, only to witness the six people I was playing with whipping what I could only imagine were full bottles of beer into the woods. I was like ‘WTF’ is going on as I took a long pull from mine.

  “How old are you son?”

  I turned, bottle still to mouth; a cop in a cruiser was inches from me.

  “Twenty-one,” as I gulped down what I had just drank.

  “Got any ID to that effect?”

  Five minutes later I was handcuffed and in the cruiser. Minor in possession.

  Talbot – 1, Cops - 2

  TALBOTSODE #4

  Alright, so you are starting to get a recurring theme. Talbot plus alcohol, bad. It was freshman year at college. My buddy Paul and I were hanging out in the common grounds of our new school just partying it up with some other people. We were having a good time playing Frisbee. Holy shit, now that I’m writing this down, maybe it’s the Frisbee that attracts the trouble, food for thought.

  Eventually Campus 5-0 shows up. They’re about as intimidating as mall cops. They tell us we need to get rid of our beer. My friends all start pouring their beers on the ground, like we had done so many times before with local cops. But see, that’s not what I heard. I took the literal translation. I started pounding my beers down. I was two beers down and going for my third before the shocked cop could even begin to react. I just think he was so amazed that somebody wasn’t complying with him, but in my defense I feel that I was. He said, ‘Get rid of those beers.’ He never once said how and that’s what I told him.