by Mark Tufo
He did not reply as he began to step around varying obstacles. Most were chunks of heavy cement that had fallen from the roof. Some was heavy steel furniture that had not yet succumbed to the elements as it was still fairly protected.
The prison felt like a tomb. It was quiet; the only sounds our footfalls as they reverberated and echoed off the walls of the large antechamber we were in. Had to be the receiving area where new inmates were given their first glimpse into the hell they were about to descend into. Ahead of us, about twenty feet up on the wall, was a door and a small ledge where I’m sure the warden must have come out to “greet” his new charges by explaining to them that they now belonged to him. And as long as they respected the rules of the institution they would get along fine, but make no mistake—if you cross him, he would make you wish your whore of a momma had never got drunk that night and opened her legs. That might be a little embellishment on my part, but I’d watched enough prison movies in my day to know that prison wardens were all from the south and they had a warped sense of justice.
“Mathieu, there is nothing to be gained from this place.” He was listening to me less than my kids used to, which was hard to do.
The deeper we got into the fortress-like structure, the less damage had been wrought. What I am sure was lead paint hung in sheets, thickly peeling from walls and ceilings. We had just passed under a sign that somehow looked as if it could have been hung yesterday that read, “Cell Block D.” We’d no sooner passed over the threshold when the smell assailed me. It was an all too familiar stench. I could see Mathieu’s face wrinkle up, as he must have also gotten a heavy dose of the reek.
“What is that?”
“Zombies or a secret cache of Tommy’s liver and Mongolian beef Pop-Tarts. Either way, I don’t want to be here.”
“Zombies? As in the monster that took down your civilization?”
“One in the same.” Sort of amazing that something so brainless could take down those of us who considered ourselves so smart. “Come on, let’s go.”
“You’re not curious at all?”
“I’m not man, not at all. I’ve seen enough of them for a lifetime and mine could extend for quite a bit more. You get grounded a lot for not listening to your mom?” I asked as I followed him.
There was another corridor, and although its sign didn’t look quite as good, I could still make out a “C” on it. We were moving into a new block. The smell had intensified and had almost become something physical; something you could reach out and potentially feel with your fingertips it was that pervasive.
“It really is excruciating.” Mathieu had turned to me. His eyes and nose were running, clear fluids leaking from them like he was in the midst of the world’s worst allergic reaction.
“You cannot think this is a good idea, can you?”
He just kept going forward like he was a wind-up toy and could not deviate from the path he’d originally been set upon. I had my head down, stuffing my mouth and nose into my clothing as best I could. I nearly walked into Mathieu, who had finally stopped moving. He was in front of a steel barred door looking into Cellblock C’s common area. It was a pretty big room with benches and chairs, but that wasn’t what had stopped Mathieu in his tracks. It was the mounded high bodies of zombies.
“Oh no, not again.”
“Are...are they dead?”
There were piles and piles of zombies coated in a thick, gelatinous mass of some sort, like a protective cocoon. It was somewhat opaque and had to be close to a couple of inches thick. This, I surmised, from the rays of light that had found their way in through cracks in the ceiling and walls and struck the heap at various points.
“Mike?”
“We should get out of here. This can’t be happening.”
“What is it?”
“Those are zombies, somehow in stasis. How, though? How is that even possible?”
“Not all that hard to believe, cicadas stay underground for seventeen years.” Mathieu seemed entirely too fascinated and definitely not afraid enough.
“These aren’t cicadas. They’re not going to eat a couple of trees and then die, they’re going to lay waste to whatever food source, including us, they can get ahold of. This is bad, this is real bad.”
I was backing up. It was like I was seven and had seen the boogieman emerge from my closet, all wax-dripping face, knives for fingers and cherry-red eyes rimmed in black. And after years of therapy and counseling, I’d finally been convinced he was a hallucination or a product of a fantasy fueled imagination to only one day much later have him emerge from my closet again. That same sick twisted, “here I am, here I’ve always been” smile on his face.
“Mike, the pile is moving.”
“Of course it is. Run, Mathieu, fucking run!” I’d like to say I waited to see if he did the same. My system had just immediately gone into panic mode. I could think of nothing more than to get my feet moving and keep them moving. I was halfway across Cellblock D when I heard his footfalls just entering into the chamber. At least I figured it to be him. I suppose it could be zombies. I turned over my shoulder to see it was he and no one else. I slowed and then stopped to let him catch up. We were at the entrance to Cellblock D when he came up beside me.
“You don’t run from Lycan, yet you take off from something that looks like giant heaps of rotten food. You are a strange man, Michael Talbot.”
“I’ve got more history with those piles of rotten beings. I haven’t been around Lycan long enough to realize I should be terrified of them as well.”
“I do not think one needs an acclimation period to be frightened of them.”
“Probably right. Let’s get out of here. Being this close to a zombie stasis horde is wreaking havoc on my fight-or-flight system.”
“Your what?”
Any response I was going to make to his question was cut short when we heard the echoing sound of steel slamming against concrete.
“We should go check it out.”
“Damn shame you’ve never seen a horror movie or you’d know just how bad of an idea that is. I’ll give you the quick answer as we head for the exit. That was zombies busting through the door, and you want to know why? Because they’ve now caught the scent of food.”
“They’re dead, they can’t possibly move.”
“You keep telling yourself that. I’m sure the metal door picked this most coincidental of times to fall to the floor.”
“You might be right.”
We were jogging at a decent clip, constantly keeping a watch out behind us. As of yet, we had not spotted any followers. We’d gotten back to where Mathieu had originally spied the prison when we stopped to turn back around. I pulled him behind a tree. If he wanted to look that was fine, I just wanted to make sure nothing could see him if it came to that.
We’d been there long enough to catch our breaths and even laugh a nervous laughter that I may have imagined the whole pursuit thing. I was beyond relieved. I sort of felt like the time I was sixteen and the guy I had punched in the eye for catcalling my girlfriend decided not to press charges. I was already on probation, and you only get so many second chances. That was of course until I realized that he didn’t want me to go to jail that night because he wanted to track me down with his friends and do some payback in spades. Thankfully, I’d already dropped off my girlfriend when he finally caught up to me.
I’d love to say I went all Chuck Norris on Mr. Douchehammer and his cronies (his name was actually Dutchheimer, pretty fortuitous as far as I was concerned) and gave them a good old-fashioned beat down. That would be a lie. I got three decent punches in, two to the original idiot before the four of them over-powered me. Sure, it was an unfair fight, and I got my ass handed to me, but at least nobody got real stupid and pulled a knife or gun out. I’d healed just fine; and, oh, the payback I got from my girl for defending her honor made the whole thing sort of worth it.
This conflict came full circle a month later when the Walpole Rebels played the N
atick Redmen in a football game. I was the tailback and Mr. Douchehammer was free safety. I don’t think he recognized me at first, at least until I made myself known. I had nothing to do with the play except protect the quarterback (who was Paul by the way). I told him who the safety was on the opposing team and we came up with a plan. I left the backfield on the snap and Paul just heaved that ball up.
Douchehammer couldn’t believe his luck; the ball was heading right for him, although so was I. He’d no sooner fumbled around, catching that ball than I’d put the crown of my helmet into his chest. (That was still legal back then.) Air was expelled from his lungs like it couldn’t wait to get out of there. Funny thing was that he coughed the ball up and right into my hands. Personal vendetta or not, I was heading for the end zone. It happened so quickly and with such precision it almost looked like a drawn up play. Douchehammer was still on the ground desperately trying to suck in oxygen when I spiked the ball. Both teams had taken a knee, something that is always done when a player is injured on the field. He was all right after a few minutes, but he was out of the game—in his head—for the rest of that half, shying away from every play that came anywhere near him. We were heading into halftime when I pulled my helmet off as I walked up to him.
“Remember me?” I was smiling.
He had a confused look, like, “yeah, I remember you, you’re the one that tried to cave my chest in” and then as it came back to him, I could see it in his eyes. I tapped him on the chest and smiled. Anyone looking on would think I was congratulating him on a good game or for being able to shake off the hit, or maybe that I was even apologizing for trying to plant him into the ground.
“I’m going to fuck you up in the second half.” I was still smiling as I trotted off the field. He had stopped walking. Gotta admit, I was pretty surprised when the second half started and he was on the sidelines in street clothes. I made Paul keep doing running plays to their side of the field so I could call him a “pussy” at every opportunity. We won the game 38 - 7 and more importantly, I’d made a new friend! Listen, we’ve been through this; I was not, and still may not be, what many consider to be a nice person. If you mess with me or mine, and an opportunity presents itself for payback, I will gladly comply with the serendipity of the event.
My relief was short lived, as was my memory. Zombies began to shamble out of the entranceway. They looked just like you would expect something would look like after being in hibernation for decades, if not a century and a half. I had to pull Mathieu all the way behind the tree as he started moving, to get a better look, I guess.
“They’re more distasteful up close.”
“Those things destroyed your world?”
I poked my head around and could see his point. The things in front of the prison were slow looking and emaciated to the point where Sally Struthers might come back from the grave to film a pleading commercial looking for donations to aid in the plight of zombie starvation.
“Those might be a poor representation of what they were like.” I had turned around so my back was against the trunk of the tree. I had an unnatural level of fear coursing through me. I wanted to get out of there and hopefully let my horrible short term memory kick in and allow me to forget that I’d ever seen them.
“Uh-oh.”
I didn’t even have time to ask him what he was referring to before he answered. He was reaching for my shoulder as he started to take off.
“One of them saw me.”
“Yeah, I figured that.” We were twenty feet from the tree and moving fast.
“How long will they chase us?” We’d gone maybe a quarter mile and Mathieu had stopped to suck in some much needed air.
“Forever, Mathieu. They will never stop until they have eaten you or you kill them.”
“I take back my questioning statement.”
“A lot of people took back how they felt about zombies. Including myself.”
“What?”
“Before the zombies came, they were wildly popular in movies, television, and books. Groups were formed hoping that zombies would finally come and wipe the dregs of society from the earth. But zombies don’t discriminate, they wiped just about everything from the earth.”
“People wanted zombies to come? They wished for a being that ate other beings?”
“It was a fantasy, I suppose. I don’t think if people knew the true horror they were asking for they would have felt the same way about the whole thing. Getting stranded on a deserted island sounds like fun too until you realize that coconuts don’t taste so good, monitor lizards can kill you, and there’s no alcoholic beverages with the funny little umbrellas.”
We could hear the approach of zombies—and a lot of them too, if the snapping of twigs and branches underfoot was any indication. Our hunting/foraging trip was cut short as we ran for hours, taking small breaks so that we could get some air. When we did stop, I would rub my leg, which had started to hurt again from the strain of the day. I felt sure we had put a fair amount of distance between ourselves and the zombies, but I could not get it out of my head that we had somehow made the world a much more dangerous place. I should have done more to persuade Mathieu not to go into that prison, especially once we caught wind of the zombies.
As if he had been reading my very thoughts, Mathieu spoke. “I’m sorry, Mike, I was just…I don’t know. Intrigued sounds like the wrong word to use if I just released another plague upon us.”
“If not us, someone would have done it eventually. At least this way, we know they are still out there.”
“How are we going to sleep tonight knowing that they are out there?”
“In shifts.”
We walked much deeper into the day than we normally did. It was not something spoken between us, just some unspoken desire to make sure that we would have enough time to settle down for the night and be able to get a modicum of rest. We didn’t. I told Mathieu I would take the first shift. It wasn’t that I wasn’t tired as well, but seeing zombies had brought back a whole flood of memories. Some were very much wanted; others resurfacing like bloated bags of rotten trash bursting at the seams of their confinements to spill their contaminants all over my mind. Love or hate being a vampire, there were other curses that went along with it as well. There was not a memory that I had at any point in my life that I could not access like one used to a file on their computer.
I could, once again, watch the birth of each child. I could look at my soon-to-be wife as she strode down the aisle. I could lie in the same bed on a lazy, rainy Sunday with Tracy as we laughed, ate, and made love the entire day. I could also watch as I pulled the trigger to put my niece out of her zombified nightmare. I was there as I laid everyone I knew to rest. I was there for every winter as I watched the snow fall. It was difficult and time consuming, avoiding my catalogued thoughts. That became impossible with the sight of the zombies. Well, more like with the smell. That unmistakable odor of death triggered my trip down memory lane. I guess that makes sense. I once remember reading a study that said our recollection of thoughts is more closely tied to smell than sight. If I spent a couple of seconds looking, I could have actually found the article I’d read.
Maybe that’s why I missed it when that wave of smell hit me, because I was already thinking about zombies. That shouldn’t have been an excuse. The zombie seemed as surprised as I was when it came running into our small makeshift campsite. It looked at me sitting by a small fire and then to Mathieu. He was closer, simple as that. Two feet made a world of difference when you hadn’t eaten in a century, maybe more. I was still having a hard time believing anything could be alive that long without some sort of sustenance. But that assumption was wrong. This thing had been devouring itself, slowly for sure, but it had been working through its own stores of fat and muscle. What was the shelf life on a zombie in stasis? In reality it couldn’t have been much longer than what was already happening. The thing before me gave scarecrows a bad name.
The thing was over six feet tall, and I’
d bet it weighed eighty or ninety pounds, including what was left of its tattered clothes. It’s possible Mathieu and I had released the second coming, but my bet is that they would have come awake towards the end anyway. Better to die trying than to pass quietly into the night. How many zombies were left? Were they even now all awakening and starting to scour the landside in a large convergence? How many villagers would fall victim? There were no books or movies that talked about the iconic monster. People would think the zombies were sick and would most likely try to help.
The dawn of a new civilization was about to run headlong into the midnight of an old one. These people were wholly unprepared. If Azile would have listened to me, I would have whisked her away to some small island off the coast of Maine while zombie, Lycan, werewolf, and man fought it out for ultimate domination on a planet gone to shit. These thoughts blistered across my mind, as I was already in motion. I was diving over the fire to cut off the apparition that traveled in the guise of a zombie. My head struck his shoulder just as his mouth was about to come down on the slumbering Mathieu’s face.
Having your cheek ripped away was not how I would want to be awakened. Mathieu’s eyelids did not so much as flutter as I cruised over his body with not much more than an inch to spare. I knocked the zombie away, now we were locked in combat as he tried to wrap his spidery, slender arms around me in a desperate bid to pull me close to his mouth. Death has a unique pungent smell, but this was something different. It had an acidic addition to it as well. Somehow, this zombie had made the smell of death more deadly.
The zombie had considerable strength, they all did. When a body is not encumbered by thoughts, it is much stronger for it, but this one…if I attached a string to his toe, I may have been able to give him flight. He was no match for me. It was just the awkward way in which we had become entangled that had made it initially difficult to kill.
I was finally able to get up on top of it and pin its arms under my knees, as it did its best to spin its neck from side to side to bite at the flesh of my legs. He wasn’t having much luck. In this position I was able to see just how much the effects of starvation had taken their toll. The skin on his face was nearly translucent, so taut it had been pulled across the jagged outlines of his skull. The eyes had sunk even deeper into the cavern of its mind, making it appear as if only black sockets were staring back at me. My initial thought was to shove my thumbs into his eyes until I pressed them all the way into his brain. That was until I saw the rock to my right that was used to ring the fire. Seemed a cleaner method. Couldn’t have been any more wrong if I tried. How I thought smashing its skull in with a fifteen-pound stone wasn’t going to get matter all over the place is beyond me.
