by Ron Tufo
Mark knew he’d lost all his points on the Dad-O-Meter again. Given that he was a teenage boy, this was pretty much a weekly occurrence for him, so he was fairly used to it by now. Didn’t make him feel any better as I got out of the truck and gently scooped up the remains of my heated power mirrors with side blinkers in my hands and looked at him with beady laser eyes, a neat trick I had learned from his aunt Tracy.
We got both trucks facing in the right direction and headed for Searsport again. I swear if I saw another fogbank I was just going to start shooting into it.
Steve, Gary and my father pulled onto Mayweather’s property. It was filthy hoarder garbage dump all the way up his access road. The man was a pig. No other way to describe his land or his living habits. Gary got out first and made his way unseen around the back of the house. Steve drove up where a curve in the road would keep the truck hidden. My father instructed him to take cover down low in the cab and then he flipped back the protective tarp on the 50 cal. He cocked the slide and fired a burst over the house. Without any appreciable delay, a shot answered us from the house.
My father’s next words were all Marine. “Hey pussball, I am glad that I have your attention. Here is the way this is going to work. Send your wife and kids out the back door now. Don’t even dream of joining her; it's now a covered exit. Gary, if you please, demonstrate your coverage.” A warning shot came from behind the house as requested. “You will not make it past your backdoor if you try to leave with them. Also, Scooter Ferris is dead. We have brought him back so you can bury him. We will leave him in your front yard with all the other garbage.”
Heard from inside the house was Mayweather’s wife: “You told me no one was hurt you lying sack of shit! Scooter is dead and you were not going to tell me about it. How the hell am I supposed to explain to my sister that her husband is dead? ‘By the way, Sarah, Scooter went out with my no good prick of a man, now he’s dead. Sorry.’ You fucking asshole! I am leaving this house for good, and right now.”
Tony could hear the backdoor slam once and then another shot came from the front. This one didn’t miss. It was only a small bore rifle and the slug had caught him high up on his arm. The sting wasn’t all that bad. My father thought that was just dandy. Gave him all the reason in the world to use his own type of Marine-based karma. It was a very classic and yet basic model: “You mess with a Marine and he will fuck you up.”
He stitched that house like it was a new pair of jeans ready for hemming. Began on the left, walked across at window level and back again a little lower until the belt was gone. He had his next box right beside him and had it loaded and the breach ready when he calmly yelled out, “Hey Mayweather, if you want one last shot, you should take it now while I am reloading.” A barrel did indeed poke out and a single shot was blindly fired.
My dad was thinking: I guess this guy is really as stupid as Wink told me. Since my father was already reloaded, he gave Mayweather no time to move. Beyond a shadow of any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, he emphatically destroyed that corner of the house. An ant could not have lived through the barrage.
He told Steve to pull the truck up and drag the body out of the bed. “Drop it wherever it falls. There is not going to be anyone here to bury it anyway.”
Gary yelled from the backyard, “Safe to come out yet? Fuckin’ bullets were coming out the back of the house near the end of your last burst.” When he saw the destruction the 50 cal had achieved on the front of the house, he turned to his father. “You know, dad, we really have to do something about that nasty streak of yours.” It always bewilders me that Gary has lived this long; what does not astonish me is that my dad is a complete badass.
They got back to the compound at the same moment we were pulling in. We all looked at each other for a moment before speaking. I was wondering why they had taken the UAZ out of the garage, and they were wondering why we had another woman in the backseat that was not Melanie.
The usual round of hugs ensued and it was generally agreed that the stories of the past few days were best told all at once and with everyone present. Squeak did make a short introduction of Manuia to everyone. Dad was just completely overwhelmed by her gentle demeanor and Polynesian beauty. “Squirt, how can such a wonderful young woman be related to you?” Even though Manuia could not understand every word, she knew by inflection what he had said and blushed accordingly.
She was enamored with my dad already. He has that effect. Get shot, shoot a bad guy and then go impress the girls with his charm. Crap, why couldn’t he have passed that piece of genetic material along to his eldest son!
Ida’s Revenge
Don’t underestimate the power of an enemy, no matter how great or small, to rise against you on another day. - Attila the Hun
Once back in the house, my father dropped into his easy chair. Lyn gave him a hug and he gave Lyn a wince. She was just about to ask why when her hand came away sticky. She looked up at him, then down at her hand and then at the floor which she was quickly approaching as she fainted. Dad caught just enough of her to prevent her from mooshing her very pretty face.
He dropped back into his chair as the pain and blood loss finally caught up to him. The shot had hit his upper arm, almost at the shoulder, and luckily had made a nice little exit wound. That was really good news because it meant that the slug had not only found a way in but had also found a way out. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a few wads of gauze later and the wound was clean enough to bandage. As I finished wrapping him, he thanked me for my ministrations but made it clear that I was not half as cute as the last nurse who had done some work on him. I countered with, “That’s okay; the last guy I worked on got to keep some of his arm, so you should have a pretty good chance, too.” He gave me a worried look, immediately followed by a smirk.
Some heavy painkillers and a cold beer put him down for the count right on his easy chair in the far corner of the living room. Hopefully, he would be out until late tomorrow morning and have had a good chance to rejuvenate some lost blood. Wink offered to take him to Doc’s when he was ready. He had already promised Doc he would pick up the wounded man from Mayweather’s failed fuel heist and take him off his hands anyway.
I had deliberately left any talk about Andrew’s parents out of the roundtable report to the family other than to say we had been to the house and they were not inside. I, for the life of me, could not see adding to my daughter’s angst by telling her what had really happened to Ed and Maggie.
Since my dad was out for the night and Gary had spent his time behind the house covering the exit, telling the Mayweather story fell to Steve. He was in his glory, relating word for word the way Tony had taken down Mayweather and his house. All he could think of while all this was happening was that he would not want to ever piss off my father. In Steve’s words: “It was never a fight between Mayweather and Tony. It was only a fight between your dad’s split Boston or Marine personalities to see which one was going to have the pleasure of taking that guy out. It was like the man was the leader of a Viking ship, standing at its prow.” It seemed that in my absence, dad had written another chapter to be added to the Talbot Family Guidebook of Deadly Confrontations.
I was too distressed to say out it loud, especially to Nancy, that we had not looked for Melanie yet as I related the Longwalker episode. The more I told of it, the stranger it became, even to me. As far as Nancy and the family were concerned, I was hallucinating.
As she so blatantly put it into context, “You went to find our daughter, you did not even look for her. You turned around and came home because you thought you saw an old Indian, hidden in a fog bank, who might have told you to come back to Maine. Does that about cover it?” Without waiting for an answer, she pushed her chair back hard and stormed out of my father’s house.
Her words echoed behind her and it even sounded lame to me. Yes, the thought did occur that maybe I was overcome by anxiety and fatigue and, okay, maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. But I knew I hadn’t. Everyo
ne around the table picked that moment to stare out the window or count the dimples in the ceiling. I had shot Andrew. I had been there to finish killing his mother. I had held Ed as he died. I had not found my eldest daughter, but had returned home with another refugee. Meredith and Squeak were doing their best to lend me some nonverbal support, but I could tell their hearts were not in it. I felt like jack shit. What had seemed so right at the time now seemed so pathetically wrong.
Thank goodness Wink moved on to another matter with his information about Ida’s zombie attack at Doc’s. He fell into full command mode as he speculated on when, not if, we should expect an invasion of our own. As a neighbor of the Littlehill’s, he knew an awful lot about them from way back in his own childhood. As he put it, ”They were wicked nasty even back then. Doc is right, too. Ida made Abner look like Santa Claus. She is one malicious shrew of a woman. I would have told you not to cross her, but that ship had already sailed. Since she has called you out, Ron, you can bet your bottom dollar she will be coming here sometime soon with all her new friends.”
Joy and rapture. This just kept getting better every day.
Lyn and Manuia were now the only ladies left at the house. Steve offered to go and scrounge together some snacks, but Lyn told him to stay and listen to what was going on, that she would do that chore. Manuia was quick to catch on and used a bit of broken English to let my sister know that she could help. Lyn smiled and they both headed for the kitchen.
The discussion of how to best prepare for Ida continued for awhile until Lyn came carrying in a bowl of, well, a bowl of something. Manuia went right over to Squeak and whispered in his ear, “O ia o se taulaitu. Loe?” Squeak, who had just taken a swig from his beer, choked and sprayed it all over the nearest wall. I guess you could safely say he had everybody’s attention.
Gary giggled. “Good god, man! What did your sister say to you?”
Squeak had the good sense to look as small and as sheepish as he could. “She asked me if I knew that Lyn was a witch!” The laughter was just plain boisterous. Even dad shifted out of his drug induced stupor for a moment.
Gary exclaimed, “Well, that explains so much!” Steve had the great presence of mind to keep his mouth shut. I was glad, because there was only so much room on my couch and it was spoken for tonight, I was sure.
I tried to pay Lyn a compliment to her efforts, I really did. “I do like the crunchy parts,” was tartly rewarded with, “That’s the cheese dip, you jerk.” Will I never to learn to just Shut. The. Fuck. Up!
Watches were foregone for the night. No one had anything left in the tank. It was agreed that everybody get some sleep now and the night watch would begin at midnight. Even the tactical minded Gary had to admit, no one was going to be able to stay awake for very long, and it would be better to have fresher eyes at the windows after a few hours of rest. Both Gabby and Boo were given porch duty, so there would be some warning system in place. As of yet, we had not discovered an effective ZomAlert system other than dog noses and eyeballs, although Gary’s String of Bells through the woods idea held some promise. And if anyone got close enough to our attack dogs, such as they were, the resulting cacophony would wake the dead, so to speak.
As expected, a pillow and blanket were waiting for me on the couch and I spent another night in front of the fire. Probably should just move my dresser into the living room and make it permanent. Anyway, it was way colder in the bedroom than the temperature outside. Even with the shredded nerve endings from all the extreme happenings of the past few days, my exhaustion was overwhelming. Sleep came quickly and deep. So did the dreams.
I was out walking the edge, taking the late afternoon security stroll. I could almost, but not quite, make out the reason for the activity in the hollow of the forest at our far northern point. We had no defenses here, so the only way to confirm anything was eyes-on.
Sure enough, there were a few lonely, and it looked like, confused, zombies drifting around in a bunch, not really going anywhere. Almost like they were waiting for a signal to move on. I was peeking from behind a big sycamore and felt comfortable that I was downwind. We still hadn’t figured out exactly what zombies reacted to, or if there was more than one way to get their unwanted attention. I moved a little to see some more.
Snap! went the twig underfoot. Snap! went the zombie heads, all looking in my direction. Snap! went my mouth! You stupid, stupid idiot, Talbot! You just had to go and test out another theory, didn’t you, bonehead.
Well, at the very least we now know a snapping sound makes a great zombie alarm. My newfound playmates started to close on my hiding place. Time to go, bucko. Fuck.
Oh yeah, this is a dream. And it is about to become a nightmare.
Funny how you can have those thoughts in the middle of it. So of course, I became an uncoordinated lump of can’t run to save my life–literally–who also seems to be shlepping through knee deep mud. The zombies, unsurprisingly, are moving with no problems at all and are getting closer to the main course by the second. Fucked again.
I am finally able to scramble up the culvert and back on to the road. I can move a little better but not a whole lot and already fatigued beyond hope that I am going to make it back home to warn everyone. I turn my head to see if I just might be far enough ahead of them to have a chance and they are following me in my worst car from my early thirties, a Ford Tempo, and the driver is wearing a goddamn fedora! Aw c’mon man! Magically, I am suddenly crawling up the driveway, still being chased of course, by Zombiana Jones and the Tempo of Doom. I get to my gun post at the front of the house, grab my loaded rifle and start shooting zombies, who, by the way, are no longer in my car, but do seem to have once again magically multiplied.
I shoot and I shoot some more. I see Ida peek out from behind her bodyguard cover and laugh at me. I blink, and when I look up again, I see that it is not Ida but my daughter Melanie. “Daddy, I am waiting. Are you coming to save me daddy? Daddy, I don’t think I can wait much longer. When are you coming, daddy?” I blink again–it is actually Ida and she has gone from laughing to cackling. I shoot and I shoot and I shoot.
All of the zombies look like Melanie. As soon as I shoot one, they go the ground, slough off their diseased skin and ratty clothes and stand up again to keep coming toward me. Closer and yet closer they get; I know I should be out of bullets but my unhinged mind says to me, “You can’t be out of bullets, dummy–you aren’t out of zombies yet.” I am trying to yell for help but I can’t breathe and shoot at the same time.
All the Melanie Zoms are crying now.”I can’t wait any longer, Daddy. Where are you? Why haven’t you come to save me?
And I start to cry too. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I tried! I’ll come again. I will. I promise. Just hang on, honey and I will be there for you!” I go to my knees sobbing and the Melanie zombies finally close on me. There is no biting, no ripping, just a complete smothering. There is no more sun. No more air. No more life. And I am okay with that, because I have failed to save my child.
I awoke from the nightmare on the floor near the fire with the quilt completely cutting off any air flow around my head. As I comically unwound from my patchwork sarcophagus, I could see the light of the living room. I found myself staring into my wife’s beautiful blue eyes. She, however, was not looking at me with anything resembling wifely affection, and was calmly drinking her coffee.
“Uh, hi, honey. How long have been there?”
“Long enough to make a cup of coffee and to watch your nightmare. You really do get into those things, don’t you.”
“Well, it is kind of real at the time, you know. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Actually, I was enjoying watching you torment yourself. It was good for my soul to know you felt the way you did about turning your back on Melanie.”
“Christ, Nancy! I did not turn my back on our daughter! I felt I had to come back here because of what I saw. Believe me, I agonized over whether it was the right thing to do and I am leaving aga
in just as soon as I can.”
On cue, Gabby started whimpering and then hound-dog howling out on the front porch. I stood up, tripped over the damn quilt, and stumbled to the door. No sooner did I have it open then I saw Wink approaching from his house and Gary coming up from the other side. In the false dawn light, they both saw me and they both yelled a word I was really beginning to hate: “Zombies!” Then they turned and hastily headed back to their own defenses.
Gabby, having discharged her responsibilities, was now under the porch and not coming out until this was over. Smart dog.
Nancy woke the kids, who took only moments to get ready, and we all took up our spots. We could already hear zombie noise coming from both the front and sides of the house. My home was certainly not going to be sitting this one out while others were involved in the fight.
“Talbot…Talbot! I know you can hear me. We are coming for you, little man. Let’s see if you can shoot me like you did my husband!”
I had just been called out by a short, half alive, rotten scuzbag, quasi-female, knuckle dragging, bitch faced, creature double feature. I think that about covers it. My testosterone levels were shooting into the stratosphere. Nancy, who had certainly known me long enough to know that I was brief moments away from storming outside to get my best shot, stepped in front of me and halted the rhino charge.
“You idiot! You do know she is taunting you, trying to draw you outside where the zombies can rip you up. If you go out there, even if you shoot that little witch dead, you are probably not getting back in alive. If you die, who is going to find Melanie then? We are already shorthanded. We would never be able to send anyone on a search mission. Think about that while you cool off because you are not getting past me anyway!”
Why do people use logic on me when they know I can’t handle the extra thinking? I am busy in here working with what passes for intelligence, ramping up all my manly hormones to mount a noble sortie into the jaws of death. Why the hell would I want to hear any logic?
