The Z Club

by Bouchard, J. W.

  “Not us,” Derek said. “Our brains.”

  “Derek, just stop talking.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Start boarding the place up,” Kevin said.

  Chapter 10

  If there was one thing Fred’s father had taught him, it was how to make money while maintaining a sedentary life style. In almost all respects, Fred Jr. was the spitting image of his late father; all the way down to the beard and the beer gut.

  And Fred hadn’t really had to work for it, either. Fred Sr. had been best known for his infectious foghorn of a laugh and for growing a successful business despite what could be classified as a lackadaisical attitude. When he had suddenly slipped off the proverbial mortal coil four years ago, Fred Jr. had been an aimless man-boy residing in his parent’s basement, having never moved on after graduating high school. His daily routine had consisted of video games, movies, food, and jerking off (though not necessarily in that order).

  Perhaps Fred had known, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, that this would be how his life ended up. He had spent every summer since he was nine helping his father make house calls, and although he had never really enjoyed that line of work, no one could argue over the fact that he was good at it. Maybe it was destiny; maybe it was bad luck. Either way, the expectation that he would one day take over the family business had always been there. Fred had been determined to fight his fate, even if it meant doing nothing was the only alternative.

  It was on his mother’s insistence that he had reluctantly taken up the helm. “Do it for your father,” she had said. “You’re the only one that can carry on his legacy.”

  She almost made it sound romantic; as though he had been born into the world solely for that purpose. After the funeral, she had laid on the guilt extra thick. And when that hadn’t worked, she had threatened to throw him out of the house. “You wanna sit on your ass and be a slob all day, well then you can damn well do it someplace else.”

  Esther Klemt considered it motivation by ultimatum. She had died of a stroke two years later, having lived long enough to see Fred Jr. become a carbon copy of his father; long enough to see him make something of himself by playing around in other peoples’ shit.

  No one had ever accused Fred of being particularly lucky, but he had inherited a livelihood, and when his mother passed away, he had inherited the same house he had grown up in. Some might say he inherited his entire adulthood, but those that did never put it quite so delicately. The words ‘freeloadin’ sonofabitch’ had been uttered more than once behind Fred’s back.

  He followed his normal routine that Saturday morning. He slept in, and around ten-thirty he opened his eyes and rubbed one out under the sheets as he imagined the cute blonde cougar from the day before. It took longer than usual because her huge black husband kept crowding the memory. Breakfast consisted of beer and cold pizza. He gazed at a framed picture of his mother and father on their wedding day that hung on the imitation wood paneling in the living room. For two years he had tried to exorcise the feeling of emptiness from the house, but the house had remained steadfast in its duty as a harbinger of loneliness. Fred, although not especially superstitious, believed that the house simply refused to move on; it was his parent’s house, and in a way, it always would be.

  After that, he put on his navy coveralls and headed out for his twelve o’clock appointment.

  Fred took his time driving across town. The job was over on Stilson Avenue, which was on the west side of Trudy, a few blocks from the hospital. It was only a seven minute jaunt across town, but it took fifteen because he had to wait for a train.

  Quiet for a Saturday, he thought as he pulled up in front of a ranch-style home with a cobblestone path leading to the front porch. Before exiting the truck, he flipped open his appointment book and glanced down to the twelve o’clock slot. All he had written was: Clogged sink. Sexy voice.

  After yesterday’s events, Fred told himself to be cautious. Look for a ring. He hadn’t remembered to do that when the cougar had answered the door. That lack of foresight had led to an embarrassing situation. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Like it matters, he thought. Never leads to anything except food for the mental spank bank.

  He rooted around in the back of his truck, bringing out his tool belt, a fifty foot extension cord, and selected a handheld auger with drill attachment. More often than not, standing water in the sink meant the clog was nearby. Running the snake down the pipe under the sink usually did the job; no need to break out the big guns.

  When Fred reached the top of the steps, he found the front door slightly ajar. He knocked anyway. No one answered. He waited. Finally, he pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside. The house was meticulously kept, which Fred took to mean the woman who lived there probably worked at home. He had seen the inside of a lot of houses, and he had gotten good at determining what kind of work the people who resided in them did for a living. The woman who lived in this house, for instance, probably either worked remotely, or was a stay-at-home mom, and if that was the case, he guessed she didn’t have more than one kid otherwise there was no way she could have managed to keep it as clean as it was.

  The only thing out of place was a set of muddy tracks in the white carpet. There was a continuous trail of footprints running from where the carpet started in the living room and leading up the stairs. He called out again. “Anybody home?” No reply, but he thought he heard movement from above.

  If Trudy had been a big city, he would have turned around and left. But it was a small town, and since people mostly trusted each other, he wiped his boots on the mat and headed into the kitchen.

  The sink was half-full with cloudy water. Whoever lived there had done a lot of the work, because the cabinet doors under the sink were open and all of the cleaning supplies had been cleared out and arranged on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, leaving Fred an uncluttered work area.

  There was a shallow bucket on the floor. Fred got down on his knees and positioned the bucket under the pipe. He used a wrench to unscrew the fitting. The water in the sink drained into the bucket. Fred unraveled the extension cord and plugged it into an outlet on the wall next to the window. He plugged his drill into the other end and tightened his auger onto the drill. He pulled the drill’s trigger and the thick cable shot out of the auger several inches like a snake flicking out its tongue. He fed the cable into the open pipe, running it in by hand until he encountered resistance. He ran the drill, feeding the cable, finally managing to break through the obstruction.

  He fitted the pipe back together and turned on the tap, letting the water run for a minute to make sure it didn’t back up. All in all, it was an easy five minutes of work.

  Before grabbing his tools, he wrote out an invoice by hand and left it on the kitchen counter where whoever lived there was sure to find it.

  Fred was getting ready to unplug the extension cord when he heard the creak of someone coming down the stairs. “Got her all fixed up for ya,” he said.

  He turned around just in time to see the man coming at him. The charging man was slow and stiff-legged, but Fred didn’t have time to react. The man tackled him to the ground, jaws snapping open and closed like a rabid dog, spittle flying from his mouth. Cleaning supplies flew everywhere as Fred crashed to the floor, the wind knocked out of him. He kicked out with his legs, catching the man in the side of the head with his boot. The man was momentarily dazed. Fred used the opportunity to slide back and get to his feet. The man hissed at him. “Brainsss!”

  “No fucking way!” Fred said.

  The man raised himself up. Fred noticed that the man’s t-shirt was torn and bloody. There was a large chunk of flesh missing from his right forearm and two of his fingers were also missing.

  The man shambled over to the counter and snatched a carving knife from the rack.

  “Look, if this is about your wife…nothing happened. I swear. All I did was talk to her on the phone, man.”

  The
man lunged forward, slicing outward with the knife. Fred jumped back, tripped over his tool belt, and landed on his ass.

  “Brainsss!”

  “What the fuck are you?” Fred scooted backward until his back hit the wall. A wood cutout that spelled Home Is Where the Heart Is fell off the wall and clattered to the floor. Fred picked it up, bringing it up just in time to block another downward swing of the carving knife. He kicked out again. The man’s knee buckled and he collapsed. The carving knife came down with enough force that the tip of the blade sank an inch into the floor.

  Fred saw the drill, the auger still attached, a few feet away. He leaned over, grabbed it, and brought it up. The man slithered toward him, grabbing Fred’s boot. Fred took hold of the cable at the end of the auger, stuffed it into the man’s mouth, and pulled the drill’s trigger. “Suck on this!” he shouted as the cable snaked its way down the man’s throat. Fred tried to keep it steady, despite the blood that flew from the man’s mouth. The man made gargling noises in his throat; his body spasmed as the cable shredded his insides.

  Fred let go of the trigger. The man – monster was more like it, Fred thought – remained still. Fred’s heart was racing and there was a sharp pain in his chest. For a moment, he was certain he was having a heart attack; that it would explode any second now and he would die on the kitchen floor next to the monster he had slain.

  Suddenly, the man raised his head, the cable protruding from his mouth. He started to crawl forward. Fred’s eyes widened, and for a second he forgot all about the pain in his chest. He leaned forward, grabbed the handle of the carving knife which was still embedded upright in the floor, and jabbed the blade into the top of the man’s head. More blood spurted from monster man’s mouth, and then he lowered his head. Fred waited. This time the man didn’t get up.

  Fred stayed on the floor, working to catch his breath. He waited for his heart to decide what it wanted to do. After a couple of minutes, the pain in his chest subsided. The house call from hell, he thought as he picked himself up. He needed a beer.

  Chapter 11

  Ryan was thrown backward. He struck the wall and fell onto a gurney before finally hitting the floor. Branagan, the majority of his face missing, towered over him. His shiny star-shaped badge was no longer pinned to his shirt, but was instead sticking out of the side of his cheek, planted deeply enough that two of the star’s spokes were trapped entirely beneath flesh. The Sheriff hauled Ryan up by his hair and said, “I’m gonna enjoy eatin’ your brains, boy. Real slow.”

  Ryan felt himself sailing through the air again, this time colliding with a metal cart. The cart toppled over, spilling surgical tools across the floor. Instinctively, Ryan’s hand went for his firearm, but brushed the worn leather of his empty holster. He could see his Glock in the corner, ten feet behind Branagan. Sheriff Branagan advanced, smiling down at him, his face looking like something that should have been on display at the Body World Exhibit. The Sheriff sniffed the air. “Goddamn, your brain smells gooood.”

  When Ryan had arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes earlier, it had looked like a scene out of a disaster movie. An ambulance, lights still flashing, had crashed through the hospital’s front doors. Ryan had had to climb over the vehicle’s hood to gain access to the hospital. Inside, bodies were strewn everywhere, many of them mutilated beyond recognition. And whatever had caused the massacre hadn’t discriminated; patients, nurses, and doctors littered the floor.

  But that wasn’t the half of it, and Ryan had known then that there would never be a way to unsee any of it. Jesus, he had thought, am I really seeing this?

  Not everyone was dead, but it had taken Ryan’s mind a long time to decipher what that meant, because the people that were alive weren’t normal by any stretch of the imagination. He had seen a woman with gray hair and wearing a nurse’s uniform bent over an obese man, one of his nipples clamped between her teeth, tugging on it until she bit down and snapped it off; he had seen a little boy, no more than nine or ten, his head bald (probably from chemo, Ryan had thought absently), burrowing his face into Dr. Kirkman’s open chest cavity. The boy made slurping sounds like a cat lapping milk out of a bowl. Ryan had gagged, one hand cupped over his mouth, while drawing his gun with the other. “Stop!” he had shouted at the boy, and when the boy had slowly turned his head, Ryan had seen Kirkman’s liver hanging from the boy’s mouth like a giant pink slug. Ryan had squeezed the Glock’s trigger and blown the boy’s brains out.

  Right away, he had thought: zombies, and his mind had immediately rejected that explanation. But as he had made his way down the long hallway, peering into room after room, the fluorescents lining the ceiling overhead flickering off and on, his brain had gradually accepted the truth.

  By the time he turned left at the hallway’s first intersection, he had emptied his Glock’s magazine. He ejected the spent magazine and loaded a full one from his duty belt. He had made a beeline for one of the hospital’s emergency exits when Sheriff Branagan’s voice had echoed down the hall. “Where do ya think you’re goin’, deputy?” And then Branagan had plowed into him, coming down on him with 260 lbs. of rotting flesh. The Glock had flown out of Ryan’s hand and skittered across the floor out of reach.

  Now here he was, Branagan standing over him, the only obstacle between Ryan and the exit.

  Ryan groped for the tools that had spilled from the cart. As Branagan’s hand swooped down and gripped him around the throat, Ryan picked up a scalpel and rammed it into the Sheriff’s stomach. Hot black ooze gushed onto Ryan’s hand. He drew the blade across the length of Branagan’s stomach. The Sheriff’s intestines came spilling out, flopping to the floor like a coiled snake.

  Branagan doubled over. A guttural sound boomed from his mouth, which, at first, Ryan mistook for a bellow of pain.

  The motherfucker is laughing, Ryan thought. His guts are on the floor and he’s laughing!

  Ryan seized his chance, crawling past Branagan toward the Glock. Branagan turned, striding toward him, his intestines untangling and catching the corner of the overturned metal cart.

  “No use fightin’ it,” Branagan said, talking over the noise of the cart as it bounced and clattered behind him. “You just need to learn to go with the flow, deputy.”

  Ryan tensed himself, diving forward, his hand finding the butt of the Glock. He rolled over onto his back, brought the Glock up, and fired. The shot pierced Branagan’s left eye and exploded out the back of his skull. The Sheriff went to his knees and fell forward, doing a faceplant onto the floor.

  Ryan crawled over to Branagan’s body and pulled the badge from the Sheriff’s cheek. He wiped it on his jacket. “Consider this an early retirement,” he said and headed for the exit doors.

  Becky had been on the phone with her mother for fifteen minutes when the line went dead.

  She had spent all morning cleaning her apartment, absently thinking up excuses to call Ryan as she vacuumed the carpets, dusted the shelves, Swiffered the kitchen floor, and finished a week’s worth of laundry. And in between all that, she had found time to watch the episode of The Office she had DVR’d the night before.

  Her parents were still in Florida, where her father owned a timeshare at a condo close to the beach. She had called at one o’clock her time, which meant it was two o’clock in Miami. She had told her mother that she was just checking in (it had been a week after all), but she had really called to talk about Ryan. So she had waited, listening to Marilyn Russell talk about the beach, the scalding sun, and her now considerable knowledge of the pros and cons of various brands of suntan oil. After a five minute rant, her mother had finally asked, “How are things with you?”

  Becky had done her best not to sound like a teenage girl gushing over her first crush, but hadn’t done a very good job of masking her excitement. It didn’t help that her mother kept interrupting her. There had been a time not that long ago when her mother would have begged to know what was going on in Becky’s life. Ever since Becky had graduated from ISU, her m
other had become less intrigued with what Becky was doing and more concerned with living her own life. It was as if her mother had been hiding the fifteen year old version of herself somewhere and had finally let that younger, more carefree girl out after years of being chained in the basement. Becky wasn’t certain she cared for this new side of her mother. In fact, during the last two years, Becky thought her mother had become downright selfish. When she had confronted Marilyn Russell with this, Becky’s mother had simply said, “Honey, listen, maybe after you have kids of your own and become a parent, you’ll understand. Believe me, I’ve earned this.”

  Becky had been able to hear her father asking questions in the background. She could even picture him standing there, overweight, wearing only swim trunks and his gold watch as he sipped a mojito.

  “Your father wants to know what this boy does for a living,” her mother had asked.

  “He’s a cop,” Becky had said and waited for a reply. She heard her mother whispering to her father. “He’s really nice,” she added.

  That was when they got disconnected.

  He’s really nice? she thought. Well, it was the truth wasn’t it? It occurred to her then that this was what Ryan had been talking about: that he wouldn’t measure up. Becky had to admit that perhaps (if it was her parents doing the judging) he had been right.

  Becky picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone and got nothing but dead air. She checked her cell phone. Full signal, she thought. Must be something wrong with the landlines.

  An explosion outside startled her. She went into the kitchen and looked out the window to the street below. An SUV had jumped the curb onto the sidewalk and grazed a telephone pole. It had tipped over and come to a rest on its side. Becky saw people coming down the street toward the vehicle. At first, she thought they were coming to the driver’s aid, but then something struck her as unusual: they were walking.