by McCloud, Wes
A half hour later, my attention is fully tuned into the gun that the deadeater had knocked over. I’m pulling and prying, but this thing weighs a ton. Maddie is there beside me, pushing and pitting what little weight she has against it, but it’s just useless. The backhoe is on its side as well, so it’s of no use to me. We stood there in this defeated state, both of us watching the rolling black cloud in the distance where the quarry pit fire still raged onwards. The only thing I can possibly hope to move the gun with is the Bronco. We both returned to the yard to fetch the truck and as I’m clamoring round the barn gathering up chains and rope I hear a sound that sends a wave of terror through me. Maddie is out there screeching something I can’t understand till I hit the open air.
“Cleaver! Cleaver!” She’s screaming out to me over the onslaught of dozens of barking dogs. Something is horribly amiss. I run out to meet her and all she can do is fearfully point towards the driveway…and I see her grievance. There he stands…the green we were pursuing not that long ago. He’s standing there in the road in this menacing motionless state, just glaring across the yard right at the lot of us. The dogs are all riled at this point. Most of them are barking, but then some of them start slinking off and running towards the pine trees in the backyard, disappearing amongst a retreating symphony of whines. That wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring. It’s like they knew. They knew the thing out there was a creature that was not going to fold beneath their bite. Before I know it, only about twenty dogs remain around us, vicious and growling, all except for June. She’s sitting at the forefront of them, motionless, much like the monster eyeing us down. She’s glaring in absolute silence towards the road almost like she’s waiting for the thing to make the first move so she can go for round two with its despicable kind. The very idea sets me on edge. I’d lost this dog once, and now I felt she was going to go right back out and die a second time. And then Jeff is beside me. I was proud he didn’t run off, but I too thought the same thing of him. I wanted badly to tell Maddie to round the lot of them up and get them into the house while I dealt with that fiend, but I knew it was just no longer an option. I was a fool. I shouldn’t have even let them back out of the house till I had the situation under control, but here we all were, in some intense standoff that is fogging up the lenses of my mask from nervous perspiration. Pretty soon, I see something move beside me. It’s Maddie raising up the handgun.
“No,” I said, putting my hand up and batting it down. There’s no way she’s going to hit anything at that range. She’s going to piss it off. I need more time to forge a plan that doesn’t exist. Maybe if the damn dogs would shut up for two seconds I could think of something…Why wasn’t it moving?
After a solid few minutes, I felt myself silently begging for it to twitch just a finger, but nothing. Were we just going to have to stare this thing down till one of us died? I pulled up my binoculars and focused right on its face and those eyeless sockets. There was just nothing in there. Just darkness. Surely it could see somehow? Finally, it starts moving. It’s doing this subtle head-jerking motion, almost as if its sniffing the air. It’s off-putting at best. But what’s far worse than that, is the flicker of movement I home in on beyond the beast. The corn begins to move and then a group of humanoid figures emerge from the stalks, and they’re not regular zombies. He brought friends. I was too damn late. In the few hours we’d lost track of this asshole, he managed to recruit at least twenty more first wave zombies that he turned to his side. I count the green pricks as they come lumbering up behind him and stop. It’s like they’re awaiting his orders and that’s what makes me even more fearful. It’s like these things are becoming more aware. They have tactful thought.
“Cleaver?” Maddie squeaks. I’m beginning to think that’s the only thing she can even say anymore. I know she wants to run, hell I want to run. I decide I’m not waiting on the greens to make the first move. I run to the truck and call for Maddie. She piles in, I can see the haloing white round her pupils through her mask as I start the engine and blast the gas, headed for the gun on the far field-line. My only hope is I can make it to that thing before they get to us. As I roll up and throw the truck into reverse, I look across the road once more. They’re still there, but they look agitated. They’re moving around, rocking where they stand, but I don’t give it much thought, I don’t have time. We both flee the vehicle and start haplessly tying off rope and cord to the gun and the truck. And then I hear it, yelping dogs, painful panging barks that sound of defeat and death. My heart jumps as I round the truck to look, but green zombies aren’t attacking my dogs…June is. My eyes widen at the sight of her as she runs around the yard tackling dogs and laying into them like she’s gone mad with rabies.
“What’s she doing?!” Maddie screams. At that time I only knew what I saw and the words came out,
“She’s one of them…” it was the only thing that made sense. She was bitten by the green and came back to life. Now she was doing their bidding in some diseased, hive mind mentality. It was too late for the dogs. I couldn’t run back and save them. I watched the fallen ones flaying around like fish in the grass and then I watched as June tackled Jeff. Memories of the day grandad brought him home went flashing trough my mind as I watched him helplessly try to fight her off. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind right then. It was like having your best friend ruthlessly attack and kill you for no reason. A storm of blind rage and unfathomable sadness tore me asunder. I felt betrayed. I felt stupid. June jumped off of him, and he just laid still. And then the charge came. From across the road this sickening screech deafens me and I watch as twenty green zombies come filing into my yard. Some of them are dropping to all fours, running across the ground like crazed primates.
“CLEAVER!” Maddie is tugging the ropes taught on the gun behind me. I snap out of the daze and bury the gas; I bury it too much. In my rearview, I see the gun flip upright and then topple over the other direction.
“Shit!” There was no time. I unsheathed Orion and just leapt from the truck. I had no idea what I was doing. I was running out there to die, but I just didn’t care. To my confusion, I watch as the fiends make their way straight towards the house, instead of towards Maddie and I. There are still plenty of dogs alive, so I don’t stammer in my run to save what’s left of them. I’m a fool. Maybe I was ready to die. At the forefront of this zombie charge I see June there, squaring up. I’m expecting her to fall in line with her zombie brethren, but instead, she tackles the first one and rips his throat right out. I slow my steps to a stop and my eyes behold the fallen zombie writhing and then exploding into a volcano of black blood that rains down over the yard like a summer storm. What the hell was happening? Then, one by one, a Lazarus effect takes hold and every dog that June had put down began to rise up amongst the horde of greens…and they attacked. It was an absolute massacre. I felt Maddie run up beside me and stop. She too watched with awe as every fallen dog reanimated and took a flesh-hold of each green that invaded our yard. They exploded and writhed under the bites of the dogs, just like the regular zombies had. Within minutes, the yard was nothing but a carpet of green and black body parts twitching in the late summer sun. June hadn’t betrayed us, she was simply recruiting an army of her own. It was right then and there I realized it…we were witnessing firsthand a war of microorganisms. These tiny things were yin and yang to one another and were now engaged in some state of evolutionary warfare. The plague virus had managed to create a new zombie and when that zombie bit an anti-viral dog, the organisms within it reacted in kind, turning the dog into a green killing machine. I was just picturing these two organisms in a petri dish, singing an Alvin and the Chipmunks toned micro-duet of “Anything You Can do I Can do Better.” They hated one another. Like a sibling rivalry hatred. My biggest fear now was the virus would finally figure out a way to mutate beyond the anti-virus, and we’d be absolutely finished. But today wasn’t that day.
I have to admit I approached all those dogs with caution. They were t
he same dogs I’d always known, but yet they weren’t. They were undeniably twice as strong and fast. My apprehension was quickly thrown to the wind when Jeff came running up to me with that same genuine dog smile he always donned. Only that smile was now stained in the blood of the dead. Or ultra dead. Or whatever they now were. I fell to my knees and hugged him tightly, thankful that he was once again with us. He covered me in his kisses and the world was right again, well, as right as it could be with a lawn covered in zombie body parts. June came up to me, I patted her head and shook my own in disbelief.
“Well…you are just full of surprises, aren’t you girl.” Off to my side, I see Maddie petting the dogs around her but she walks over to the torso of one of the greens. My attention centers in. The thing is still twitching, it’s mouth writhing round as if its trying to scream out…and it does. It caterwauls to the heavens in this shriek that sends me covering my ears and the dogs howling at the sky. And just like that, the rest of the intact zombie heads do the same.
“Shut them up!” I start screaming. Maddie and I are going around splitting skulls in two, until the last one is finally extinguished. There’s now this eerie hush that falls among our ringing ears. They hadn’t started doing that for no reason…that I was sure of. My eyes began searching the hills and horizon. I have a bad feeling. And then I hear it. The it of all the ITs. The trumpeting death-roar of the beast I thought I’d sent to the underworld beneath a towering inferno of burning crude oil. I look through Maddie’s mask at her wide, fearing eyes. Her breathing intensifies and June begins to growl. Soon, all the hair upon every dog’s back is raised up on end and the roaring comes once again. It’s there, through the sea of corn across the road. It heard the last cries of its offspring. It was coming for us…
Without even discussing it, Maddie and I are both running back towards the truck. I whip the vehicle round and she keeps the ropes tight for me as I once again begin to pull the gun up to a stand. Over the rev of the engine, I hear another roar so close it vibrates my mask and I look to the road and it’s there. The deadeater. Its twice as horrifying in the sun. You can see every intricate detail of it’s sickening body, down to the last piece of bone and sinew of the dead that tied it together. A large portion of it was covered in a black char from the fire it had escaped. Right then, the lurch of the Bronco signifies the guns repositioning. I watch in the rearview as Maddie pulls on the ropes, leveling it out. I leap from the truck and take a seat behind the weapon and order Maddie to take cover. I’m fearfully turning knobs and fiddling with levers, but nothing is happening. Ahead, all I can see is a small army of dogs running out to the road to meet this monstrosity as it charges head on into my property line. I’m in an absolute state of dread as my mind tells me I have about minus seven seconds and counting to fire or I’m going to be torn to shreds and sprinkled alongside the avenged dead peppering my lawn. I’m punching and kicking the weapon, screaming god only knows what. The whole time my eyes are bearing witness to my dogs leaping onto the beast only to ricochet off it like it’s made of solid steel. Three seconds left…two…and the metallic hum. I feel the pulse of the cannon as it shoots wave after wave of explosive rounds into the forwarding brute. My eyes squint in rage as I keep the trigger buried, screaming, watching this thing explode into pieces before me…but the beast still has the power to keep running through it all. Mists of blacks and reds, purples and blues, fly violently into the air amongst a rain of body parts…The monster is so close I can hear its death rattle as its legs buckle and it slides to a stop into the base of the gun. The whole weapon goes backwards with me on it for several yards until the forwarding momentum dies along with the creature who brought it. The gun winds down. And just like that, it was over. I can’t even get the confidence to breathe for what seems like a solid minute. My fingers are still glued to the gun. I’m in the same state of mind as I was when I’d gunned down Maddie’s daddies…just numb, not even sure if I’m still alive. The only thing that finally brings me out of it is seeing Maddie rise up from behind the Bronco and walk over to the fallen beast. She circles around it slowly with a shaky walk, inspecting it with a dozen dogs following beside her. I release my hold on the gun handles and watch as she takes out her sword and pokes the side of the monster.
“Don’t…” I speak up. I’m fairly sure it’s beyond dead, but I just want her away from it. She steps back and just keeps scanning the mangled body of the this thing. She then looks up to me and says,
“I think you killed it….” I couldn’t help but grin a bit.
We spent the next hours righting the backhoe and to my surprise, got it started. I toiled away, loading the remains of the greens into the bucket and hauling them over to the deadeater, piling them neatly along with what remained of the first wave zombies that still lay round the property. Soon, I had a massive pyramid of death and decay built in the field. Maddie helped me gather firewood and any accelerant we could find within a mile’s stretch. That night we had a good, old fashioned bonfire. One that I wasn’t about to roast hotdogs on. We sat there, side by side, in lawn chairs with the dogs surrounding us. Wearing our masks, watching the blaze as it reduced our enemies to ash. We tended to the fire into the night, taking turns throwing wood onto the pile to keep it going, as I finished up Empire and went straight into Return of the Jedi. Somewhere around 3 a.m., she fell asleep. I carried her to the house and put her to bed. I stood over her and watched her sleep for I don’t know how long. I smiled. She was a beautiful girl, but right then I looked at her with the eyes of a father. She’d been in my life for only this short breath of time, but she WAS my life now. It was so odd how quickly two people could bond when there was no one else around. I am quite certain you could kill off every human except two of the most polar opposite of people and then put them together and watch them become each other’s everything. When there was no one else left, petty arguments and grievances seemed lost in the sea of stupidity they arose from.
I returned to the fire and there I sat with my thoughts and the dogs. But mostly my thoughts. I wanted to celebrate, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I kept staring out through the darkness, wondering if we’d truly slayed all the existing greens or the group we’d killed were just a batch they’d sent in to test us. If the mutated virus was smart, it wouldn’t have sent in every piece of itself into a battle. The virus, in general, wasn’t stupid. No virus was. In a matter of no time, it had managed to detect June’s fleas and the threat they carried and create an anomaly that would produce a mutated strain of itself to skirt around the anti-virus. It was only a matter of time before another deadeater would rise up…maybe one already had. And to that end, I thought about the fact that I had about two dozen green infected dogs and the rest were first wave killers. Before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep amongst the thoughts of how I was going to get the rest of these dogs turned to green killers without having to put them in a small cage with June and induce a dog fight.
I wake the next morning to whining dogs and a violent tugging on my sleeve. A fistful of shotgun comes up and I find myself pointing the barrel of it right between Maddie’s terrified eyes. She has her hands to the heavens, hoping I’m awake enough to realize she isn’t one of the dead. I felt awful…Jesus, I could’ve killed her, and then where would I be, alone again, and hating myself worse than I hated the zombies. All of that took a fast backseat when I realized there are countless dead dogs spread across my yard. June and Jeff are walking around, sniffing at the bodies in the company of what I now notice is every last green-killing dog. The normal dogs are all dead. I start panicking, asking Maddie what happened as if she has the slightest damn clue. All this happened right under my nose as I slept. I drop to my knees, shaking some of the dogs closer to me. They have, in fact, passed on. They’re cold and stiff and there’s not a breath in them. I rise to my feet amongst some newfound dread and despair, just eyeing every one of them and seeing not only dead friends but potential zombie eradicators that are lost forever. We’re now far weaker in numb
er and that sets me on edge. If any greens are still out there, and they amass hundreds and come back, there’s no way twenty some dogs are going to stave them off this time.
“What do we do?” It seemed a simple question from Maddie’s mouth. But it just wasn’t. I wanted to start burying them, but I couldn’t. All I could seem to get my myself to do was walk off and sit on the front porch of the house, my brain drifting. I tried grasping at theories to explain away the phenomena. Maybe burning the bodies had released a toxin into the air that the first wave zombie-killing dogs breathed in? It was a last F-U from the green virus strain…Maybe not. Theory after theory keeps going across my brain, each one more inane than the last, as Maddie takes a seat beside me, watching out through the yard at both the fallen and the living watching over them. It was odd. The green-killing dogs wouldn’t leave the dead. They circled round, almost in a state of agitation…or perhaps it was impatience. I was missing something. Finally my troubled thoughts land on one last theory that makes the others go away. Maybe it’s crazy, but then again, I saw a dog rise from her grave less than twenty four hours ago. I pat Maddie’s leg,
“Let’s get some breakfast”. She gives me the most awkward glance as I leave her behind, but she doesn’t know what I know. Or at least I hope I know. We eat and we start going about the normal business of the day, sans feeding the dogs because they will not leave the fallen ones in the yard. I make it a point of not forcing the food on them. I try to get Maddie’s mind on other things like swordplay and board games as I wait out my theory. The situation just keeps getting all the more awkward. I know she’s wondering why we’re not burying the dead, but I keep skirting the subject.
