Die Laughing (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  Die Laughing

  By

  Joseph Duncan

  Table of Contents

  1. Britney didn’t want to leave…

  2. Vincent Gorman woke…

  3. With the hysterics out of the way…

  4. “Ah, fuck, he’s already starting to stink!”

  5. He returned a few minutes later…

  6. “You guys want to make a run with me?”

  7. They figured out later…

  8. Brody finally managed…

  9. On their way back they saw Rudie.

  10. “I think she knew she was going to die…”

  11. So it was airborne…

  12. The day before he died…

  13. If anyone had told him…

  14. Watching Brody’s death throes…

  15. He came back much quicker…

  16. “Does it look bad?”

  17. The next morning…

  18. They drilled some holes…

  19. Just about sundown…

  20. That night, as they sat sober…

  21. Vince dreamed that night of angels…

  22. “I am one wild and crazy GHOUL!”

  23. If ever there was a bitch…

  About the Author

  Copyright 2013 by Joseph Duncan

  Originally published under the pen name Rod Redux.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living, dead or undead is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Cobra E-books

  Metropolis, IL

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  Britney didn’t want to leave. In fact, she was having a full-blown Brit Fit, which is how her husband had come to think of her little tantrums.

  Not that they were little.

  They were far from little.

  She screamed. She cried. She threw things. She behaved so disgracefully even the kids were embarrassed for her. But he couldn’t blame her. He was scared, too. He was putting their lives in danger—real mortal danger, the worst kind of danger they were ever likely to face—but it couldn’t be helped. They had to leave their home, and no amount of caterwauling was going to change that simple fact.

  They were out of water.

  When the unthinkable happened, when the zombie apocalypse went down, Maurice Perry, who was nothing if not a pragmatic man, fortified their suburban home. He did it quickly and he did it efficiently, and he didn’t waste any time worrying about what was and wasn’t possible. Britney was in heavy denial. Her brain refused to accept the fact that people were turning into zombies. But not Maurice, he calmly went about the house, tearing the furniture apart and nailing up the ground floor windows. After he had boarded over all the windows, he put away his tools and started filling all the tubs, sinks, basins, bowls and glasses with water. He did anything he could think of to lock down their home, help them weather the undead shitstorm bearing down on them like a hurricane from hell. His kids helped out, as much as they were able, but not Brit. Brit was too busy shaking her fists at the heavens and shouting “Why, Lord? WHHYYY?” But that was okay. She had never been any good in a crisis. He was used to it.

  “We can’t leave the house!” Brit squalled. “We’re safe here! It’s going to rain any day now, and then we’ll have fresh water to drink! You know what’s walking around out there! You know what they’ll do to us if they catch us! YOU’RE GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!”

  “We don’t know it’s going to rain,” Maurice said calmly to his wife, standing in the kitchen doorway with their kids huddled behind him. “There’s not a cloud in the sky. It might be weeks before it rains, and we drank the last of the water yesterday.”

  Annie and Bronson were staring at their mother, their eyes wide, their faces pinched and bloodless. They always got that look on their face whenever Britney was having one of her Brit Fits, like condemned men standing against a brick wall, waiting for the firing squad to start shooting—only with their mother, it was lamps and ashtrays that started flying, not bullets.

  If the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened, Maurice probably would have left her already. Hired a lawyer and took off with the kids. He was just about to pull that trigger. He couldn’t stand to see that look on their faces, the look of a child offering his hand to a dog he wasn’t sure would lick him or bite. He had been slowly coming to the decision to leave his wife for the last two years. He hated to do it. Didn’t believe in divorce. And when Britney was happy, she was just about the sweetest gal he’d ever met. But Happy had gone bye-bye about the same time people started eating each other’s brains, and it had been getting steadily smaller in the rear view mirror ever since.

  “If we drink our piss—“ Maurice began.

  “Ew!” Annie cried reflexively.

  Maurice smiled down at her grimly. “If we drink our pee-pee,” he went on, “we might be able to last five, maybe six days. I don’t know. Maybe not even that long. Probably not even that long. But make no mistake, Britney my dear, we might die if we leave our home and try to find a better place to live. If we stay here and pin our hopes on rain, we ARE going to die. And it’s not going to be very pleasant.”

  His wife stood in the center of the living room, fingers curling and uncurling restlessly. It looked like a tornado had swept through the room. The lamp lay smashed in the fireplace. The coffee table was turned on its back. She’d raked their wedding pictures off the wall. She’d even ripped her T Tahari blouse half off, the one that had cost over a hundred dollars on Amazon. One of her small, stretch-marked boobs was dangerously near to flopping out completely. Lovely thing for a twelve-year-old boy to see.

  “We have a tank full of gas in the SUV,” Maurice said. “We have a little bit of food left. I think, if we’re very careful, we can get out of town. Get out to the countryside where there are a lot less people-- less zombies-- to deal with. Maybe find a farm somewhere. Or a little cabin in the woods. Somewhere by a pond or a creek so we’ll have a permanent supply of fresh drinking water. Somewhere we can fish, grow our own food. I can hunt--”

  Britney scoffed at that.

  “I can hunt!” Maurice insisted.

  Maurice Perry, who was a software designer for a small company that produced mostly fart apps for mobile phones—and who was also an on-and-off again vegan—could certainly hunt if it meant feeding himself and his kids. Hell, he’d skullfuck Bambi to death if it meant his kids didn’t starve.

  “Could I have a pony?” asked little Annie, who was six and didn’t understand My Pretty Pony was over and done with forever. My Pretty Pony had gone to the glue factory, along with Barbie’s horse Tawny, and all of Melissa & George’s Pasture Pals. Such things had ended around the same time the U.S. military started gunning down its own citizens.

  Not to mention nuking major population centers.

  Maurice had been to New York City a few times. No big loss there. He just hoped the fallout didn’t blow their way. He didn’t have iodine pills, didn’t even know where he might find them, and if they did get a big dose of radiation, they were going to be spitting teeth and shitting blood long before they ever had to worry about starving, even if they did get away from the city.

  “Yes, we’ll get you a pony,” Maurice answered.

  Britney made a disgusted snorting sound at his lie, throwing her arms in the air, but Maurice would rather the girl daydream about the new real-life pony she was getting than worry about those icky monsters shambling around on the streets.

  “The only thing standing between us and survival is you, Britney. You and your fucking cowardice.”

  Maurice said it in the same rational, implacable tone of voice he had always used to tame his shrew. He knew it was probably about
the cruelest thing he’d ever said to the woman, but it had its intended effect. Britney’s head rocked back as if he’d slapped her. She blinked her eyes at him, then looked down at her children and collapsed. She fell to her knees in the middle of the living room floor, sobbing into her hands.

  Annie and Bronson rushed to console her. They knew from experience the Brit Fit was over.

  “All right,” she boo-hooed. “All right, we’ll go!”

  Maury looked down at her, finding it really hard to feel any sympathy for his wife. It was just so fucking hard to keep pulling when he was yoked with a partner who wouldn’t pull her own load.

  2

  Vincent Gorman woke to the sound of laughter.

  It wasn’t just your garden-variety laugh either. It wasn’t a dirty joke snicker or an oops-I-fell-down guffaw, or even a full-blown, thigh-slapping comedy club yuckfest. It was more of a hysterical, someone-just-jumped-out-from-behind-the-curtains-in-a-Halloween-mask-type laugh, and it made his head thump queasily.

  What had started as an end-of-the-world toast after supper last night had turned into an all night binge for the survivors of the Epsilon Omega fraternity house of Westland University (again) and Vince Gorman—G-Man to his frat brothers-- had another world class hangover.

  He heard footfalls thud up the staircase as the laugh, which sounded more like a scream than any kind of expression of amusement, just went on and on and on. Vince came fully awake, wondering just what the hell was going on across the hallway.

  Mary Caskill rolled over beside him, her hair a mass of auburn curls, and said in a dreamy voice, “Whasss goin’ on, Vinsss? Makem shuddup! My head hursss!” Mary, who was not really much of a drinker, had gotten pretty plastered herself last night. Which was amaze-balls for Vince. Mary got horny when she drank. Really horny.

  The covers pulled away from her chest when she rolled over, but he was in far too much pain to work up much interest in the view this morning. Didn’t matter how fetching her 36 D’s looked squished against his shoulder.

  “Whatever it is, it’s happening in Rudie’s room,” Vince said, and he forced himself to sit up. He groaned and clutched his head as the room did a slow pirouette.

  Rudolph Purdue was a sophomore like him. Unlike Vince, Rudolph (Rudie-Patootie to the frat brothers) was, with his kinky orange hair, four-point-oh GPA and roly-poly physique, a card-carrying nerd and perpetual victim of pranks both casual and cruel. They only let him join the fraternity because his father was, 1) rich, 2) an alumni, and 3) a rich alumni. Vince had sort of adopted Rudie the previous year because he reminded Vince of his little brother, another star-crossed nerd. He managed to protect Rudie from some of their fellow frat brothers’ constant abuse, but not all of it. Vince wasn’t influential enough to deflect all of it. Not as a sophomore. Hell, he had gotten hazed almost as bad as his luckless new charge.

  I better go see what they’re doing to him now, Vince thought, swinging his feet to the floor.

  He rose, found a pair of shorts and stepped into them, shoved his pee-boner to one side, and trotted across the corridor. Three of his frat brothers were standing in the middle of Rudie’s room, facing the open closet and laughing their asses off.

  “All right, what are you guys doing to him this time?” Vince asked, putting a half-amused, half-stern grin on his face. Sophomore or not, it seemed to work on his frat brothers about a quarter of the time. He figured it was his looks. Human beings instinctively defer to the most attractive members of their social group, and Vince was fucking gorgeous. He wasn’t vain. He just knew it.

  He was also a psychology major. Or had been until the Phage.

  All three of them glanced at him, their eyes wide, their mouths twisted so that they looked like masks of comedy. The maniacal laughter was coming from Brody Higgins, a junior majoring (as he constantly told everyone) in football and getting laid. The other two, Lance Breckinridge and Steve Dixon, weren’t laughing aloud, but they did seem amused, though it was a horrified sort of amusement, like seeing a priest shit his pants or catching a peek at your gray auntie’s cootchie.

  “It’s Rudie,” Lance said, pointing toward the closet. He snorted a laugh, tried to stifle it. “I never knew he was so hung!”

  Then all three of them were roaring with laughter. Steve fell back on Rudie’s neatly made bed, kicking his boots in the air like he was riding a bike. Lance stumbled against Brody, grabbing onto his shoulder to keep from falling. And Brody… he just kept laugh-screaming and laugh-screaming, his eyes watering, his jaw hanging down on his chest.

  Heart thudding slow and hard in his chest, Vince Gorman stepped in front of his frat brothers to get a look in Rudie’s closet.

  “Oh, no,” Vince said. All his blood seemed to have drained to his feet. “Oh, man, Rudie… why?”

  Rudolph Purdue hung in his closet, an electric extension cord stretched taut between the clothes bar and his neck. He was naked, his pubic hair just as orange and kinky as the hair on his head. He was quite dead, and looked like he had been for several hours. His face was swollen and purple, and his tongue had popped out of his mouth. For some horrifying reason, it reminded Vince of a woman’s labia, that little flap of tongue.

  Rudie had hung a sign around his neck. The sign was made of yarn and the flap of a cardboard box. Written on it in black Sharpie ink were three words.

  INFECTED

  DON’T TOUCH

  The only reason he could figure they were laughing was because Rudie was naked, he had a pale plump freckled body, and the hugest bush of pubic hair that Vince had ever seen. Not to mention a miniscule penis. The Irish curse had struck him hard. Like, aluminum baseball bat hard.

  At that very instant, as Vince was gaping at the dead boy in the closet, Mary Caskill shuffled into the room, wearing one of Vince’s tee-shirts. “What’s going on in here, you guys?” she whined, rubbing her eyes like a child. She saw Rudie hanging in the closet then and shrieked like a B horror movie scream queen.

  It didn’t make Vince’s head feel any better.

  3

  With the hysterics out of the way, they had to decide what to do with Rudie. No one really wanted to touch him, mostly because his sign said INFECTED DON’T TOUCH, and they didn’t want to get infected, but they couldn’t just let him hang there in the closet either. He might spring back to life at any moment, start trying to eat their brains. Even if he didn’t reanimate, he was going to start stinking pretty soon, so no matter how you looked at it, Rudie had to go.

  Mary was the one who suggested using the Platex rubber gloves. The gloves, she said, were under the kitchen sink. None of the boys knew that they were there, mainly because none of them had ever done the dishes at the fraternity, not unless it was some element of a humiliating ritual, like scrubbing the floors with a toothbrush while wearing women’s underclothes. They’d made Vince do that once, when he was still a probationer. They had a cleaning lady who came in for a couple hours every other day. An older Spanish lady named Carmen. She had tidied up the common areas and washed any dishes that might need to be done. She hadn’t come in since the outbreak really took off in Westland, though.

  “As slow as she moved,” Lance said, “she was probably one of the first ones to get eaten.” He did an impression of her, shuffling his feet like he had a stick up his butt. “No, zombies,” he said in a nasally Spanish accent. “You no eat Carmen.”

  The only one who didn’t laugh was Rudie.

  They all went downstairs to look for the gloves then, even though only one of them really needed to go. They went in a little clutch, the five of them. Nobody wanted to be alone, and they definitely didn’t want to be alone with Rudie. Not the way his filmy eyes stared out of the closet at you, kind of sad and confused, like he didn’t know quite how he had gotten into such a predicament. Not the way his tongue peeked out of his mouth like a bit of female genitalia.

  “I just don’t get it,” Mary said. “How could he have the Phage? He didn’t get bit, did he?”

&nbs
p; “Naw,” Steve said, “I don’t think he ever left the house. Not after that day with the van. He was too scared.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to get bit,” Brody said in his big dumb jock baritone. “Maybe you just get it like a, uh, cold or something. You know. Like, from the air?” He waggled his hands around vaguely. If ever there were a poster child for the pitfalls of fraternity life, Brody Higgins was that child. Three years of binge drinking had pickled a large percentage of his brain cells, and he hadn’t had a lot to boast of to start with. The only member of Epsilon Omega who could drink him under the table was a senior named Craig Kilborn, and he was dead. Not from alcohol poisoning, though. That’s how Vince had once been convinced Killer would go. No, Craig had gotten eaten by zombies during a philanthropy event called the Race For a Cure, along with several other members of E.O. and about half the crowd who had shown up to watch Westland University’s fraternity houses race trikes for cancer research.

  “If the Phage is airborne, then we’re all fucked,” Vince said. They all looked at him and he shrugged. “Sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Lance shouted.

  He screamed it so loud everyone jumped, and then they laughed, more to relieve their tension than because it had been funny. Lance Breckenridge, apocalyptic comedian. He had always been a bit of a scallywag, but he had really stepped it up after the world ended. Armageddon had brought out the funny man in him.

  They walked into the kitchen, which was dim with the electricity off and all the windows boarded over. The only light in the room was what leaked in through the finger-wide seams of their barricades. Not that anyone would want to see any better, nasty as the kitchen was. There were dirty dishes strewn everywhere, empty food containers, lumps of spilled food congealing on the counters and floor. The trashcan had overflown onto the kitchen floor, and the kitchen floor had overflown into the foyer, but it didn’t matter because the world was over and done with. It was a lightbulb that had blown. It was a used condom lying in a honky tonk parking lot. It was an empty beer keg. The world had taken that cynical saw to heart: life’s a bitch and then you die. Who cared about a few dirty dishes and empty milk cartons?