by Mark Tufo
I took out my last change of clothes and dressed. I checked my not-Yorley’s wardrobe. It wasn’t going to work. Scarlett was petite, this woman looked like she shopped at the Short and Stout store for her clothing.
“Gonna have to learn to eat like we have table manners, Manny.” I giggled as we headed for the front door. I’d gone nearly a block when I realized I had to turn around. I’d fucking forgotten my Yorley tracking list. I hadn’t been gone more than twenty minutes and it looked like the fly population of Venezuela had descended upon that house. If they swirled into an entity, they would have dwarfed me. I grabbed my old dress and pulled out the gore-soaked page.
“Shit.” I went down to the kitchen and laid it flat so I could clean it off. I did the best I could, then I tore the cabinets apart until I found what I was looking for, a baggie to keep it dry the next time this happened. Although I was really hoping the next time would be the last, and then I could toss this list. Then what? What would I do then? Would my life just be the purposeless pursuit of food forever and ever? Fuck it, I could live with that. I’d switched food for pussy, big deal. I was heading for the front door when I figured I’d finally gone over that edge the shrink my mother sent me to used to talk about. There was the very familiar tinkle of a sound from my youth.
“An ice cream truck?” I fully expected, as I stepped outside, that there would be indeed be a truck, but it would be a white ambulance and two very large men all dressed in white; one carrying a straightjacket would be coming up the pathway telling me how everything was going to be okay. Oh there was a truck, but whereas it should have been the white of an ambulance or perhaps the white of that deranged ice cream truck, this one was black, the black of police, maybe special ops.
“What the fuck are they doing?” I was standing on the small porch, watching as the truck rolled on by, that incessant little jingle ringing like a kid’s Pavlov’s dog experiment. Instead of screaming, spoiled, little brats following though, there were zombies, dozens of them, maybe as many as a hundred, trailing behind. Some with a shuffling gait struggling to keep up, others easily keeping stride, occasionally smacking the side of the truck in an effort to get inside. I honestly couldn’t help myself, I felt compelled to follow. I don’t know why, curiosity maybe. I pushed past the slower ones and got into about the middle of the pack with the fast ones. I was following because I wanted to know what was happening. Manny, I don’t think he could have turned away if he tried, and Scarlett was on board, if only to see if these strangers could somehow help her and the predicament she found herself in.
Chapter 8
We’d been following for what? A few minutes, an hour tops. Maybe a fucking day. I don’t know, I’d sort of been lulled into a fugue state. Our number had swelled to well over a thousand. I couldn’t see out over the ocean of bodies. We were no longer in a suburban neighborhood. Trees and tract housing had given way to concrete and old abandoned factories. The truck raced ahead, I found myself being dragged along in a desperate need to keep up. This was the first inkling I got that perhaps this was not a place I wanted to be. I’d been forced to the outer edges of the running zombies. The street was constricted by the huge buildings, and now I noticed that heavy fencing lined both sides of the street, making an escape to the side an impossibility. We were being herded; I don’t know what for, but it couldn’t be for anything good. We’d willingly walked into a trap. I elbowed myself completely out and to the side of the zombies that were still streaming past. I was just about to reach out and grab the chain link, confident that I could climb it and escape, when I was gripped with the fear that it would be electric.
I grabbed a little kid zombie, couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine. Must have been pretty skinny when he was a live, not much more than skin and bones these days. The apocalypse had not been good to him. I tossed him into the fence, and when he didn’t explode like an over-ripened melon striking the ground from a three story fall, I figured it was safe for me to climb over and get the hell out of there. I’d no sooner placed my hand on it when I heard someone talking through a loud speaker.
“Warning, warning. The front gates will be shutting in ten seconds, the back in a minute.” There was an automated countdown, then a loud siren blare. This was followed by the chatter of machinegun fire. “Rear gate obstructed!” came over the speaker, and again the alarm rang out, followed by extended machinegun fire from more than one location. Zombies were being slaughtered; this angered me a lot more than it had a right to. Manny was indifferent and Scarlett was thrilled. Zombies started to mill about once the music had stopped, and they could not see or smell their prey and went into a waiting mode. I’d stick out like a sore thumb right now if I started climbing. I looked around and up into the buildings. What had looked like broken out windows were actually a camouflaging ploy. I could now see lights shining down and people looking out from a bunch of different locations.
“I could potentially say I was a human.”
“Yeah, that’ll work, dumb ass. A lone human among a thousand zombies, yet none have eaten you yet.” Scarlett let me know what she thought of my idea in no uncertain terms.
“I haven’t heard you come up with any better ideas.”
“What the hell makes you think I’m going to help you at all? I should have just shut my mouth there and had you walk up to one of the men and try your little ‘oh poor me’ routine. Then maybe you could show them your little dried up pecker for good measure. I’m sure that would get you in good and tight with them. You would have been right in the inner circle!” She started laughing.
“Shit, what am I going to do?” I wasn’t really looking for some outside input.
“We eat now.” Manny threw himself on top of the whole heap fest.
“Oh God, I hope they just kill us,” Scarlett intoned.
I kept looking around. “Naw, there’s something else going on. This was too elaborate of a trap; they could have mowed us down at any point. Why go through all the effort?” I could sense Scarlett taking more of an interest. She could say whatever the fuck she wanted to, but she wanted to die about as much as I did, which was not at all.
“Those are labs.” She was looking at what I was. Men and women in white coats were looking down at us. None seemed overly concerned, which meant this wasn’t their first rodeo. “What could they possibly be testing that they would need so many?”
“Are you really this dumb?” Scarlett asked.
I didn’t say anything. She was a woman; she’d fill in the blanks soon enough. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. It was in her nature.
“They must be finding more effective ways to kill zombies. A gas maybe.”
“We need to get out of here.” I was not a fan of our present locale.
“Wait until the night. They’ll see you trying to escape and just put a bullet in my head.”
“Now we’re on the same side?” I sneered.
“When you die, it’s going to be by my hand. That’s all I have to look forward to now. So yeah, in this matter, we’re on the same side.”
I laughed then, because it seemed so remote a possibility, I should have maybe paid it more heed. Nothing happened the remainder of that day. We’d occasionally catch glimpses of people looking down at us. Never once saw a soldier or anyone carrying a gun for that matter. Might have had to do with the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere near either end where we had heard the firing earlier, it seemed a safer bet to avoid those places.
“Soon.” I had my hand on the fence. Darkness was beginning to descend along with the sun. In less than five minutes, I would be over and running for safety, far away from whatever was going on here. Lights clicked on, made it so much brighter than noon time, I thought we were in danger of getting a sun burn.
“Son of a bitch,” Scarlett and I said at nearly the same time.
“We need to eat!” Manny was getting perturbed.
“You see any food, you gluttonous fuck?”
Manny started r
eaching for the controls. “Wait … wait … wait. I’ll get us out of here, put some food in your sieve of a stomach.”
“Now, we eat now.”
“Now or never, I suppose.” I started climbing, and then I was up and over the top of the ten-foot-high, reinforced fence. No alarms, no cries from surprised men, nothing. I was going to get us out of this. Just as I jumped down, the cold barrel of a weapon was pressed to my forehead.
“Well hello there, darling,” was said in a southern drawl just as the trigger was pulled and I fell to the ground. Dead, I was fucking dead again….
Chapter 9
But I wasn’t quite dead, I was something else. Drugged perhaps, but like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was wrapped in a fog so thick it had substance to it. I couldn’t feel my extremities, as bad of shape I was in, Manny had been completely thrown for a loop, I almost got the feeling he’d been tossed completely aside. Had we been cured? And then what? I would need to take care of Scarlett, who seemed about as lost as I was. Then I’d be stuck in a weak-ass female body, which was simply unacceptable. The alternative was to find a huge zombie, have him bite me, and then go through the training process again. I could do it; I was three for three, and there was no reason to think I couldn’t go four for four.
“Even the best miss sometimes.” It was Scarlett.
“Not me. I’m immortal!”
“Yeah, it looks it.” Our eyes were open about the width of a dime, we were on a rolling table, gurney I guess, we watched lights go by overhead. In all those spy movies, they count the lights so that they know how long the hallway is when they escape; I got to one and forgot what numbers meant.
“Well, hello there.” A face looked down on us. “Interesting, you really shouldn’t be awake,” the man that had shot us said. “Not that you can understand me, but it’s rude to not have introductions. My name is Chance Butrell, and once upon a time I was a taxidermist. Not much call for those anymore. Lucked out and hooked up with ZETI—I know, cool name, right? Means zombie eradication team incorporated.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I screamed at him. It came out as a drug-induced groan.
“You’re a lucky one, Michelle. You don’t mind if I call you Michelle, do you? You look like a girl I knew once upon a time. Her hair was brunette, though, and she didn’t have a sewn on penis. Thank God for that; that would have been awkward the first time we got naked. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my time. Folks brought all sorts of weird animals to be stuffed. Once did this huge crocodile-looking thing, but that’s a story for another day I suppose. I think some nasty people got a hold of you and were having some fun. I gotta tell you though, some folks’ version of a good time varies greatly from mine. I’d rather drink a cold beer and do some fishing. That’s fun to me.”
“He sure does like to hear the sound of his own voice. I’m going to chew his fucking lips off!”
“Going to be a bit difficult considering we’re completely strapped down.” Scarlett informed me.
“How do you know that?” I asked her. Huge mistake.
She paused for a second thinking through the implications. “How do you not?”
I wanted to backtrack, but she was already leaping to the foreground when she realized that she had just wrested the power from the trio. “Help!” she begged.
I thought my heart was going to seize. Then I started to laugh. Whatever the drug was we were on, it had relaxed every muscle including the diaphragm in her voice box, so everything sounded like a moan. “You sound like someone’s giving it to you nice and hard.”
“Please, I’m in here!”
“Oh that’s right, baby, keep going. I’m right there with you! I bet your husband never did that for you. Did you go into the bathroom and use a hairbrush on yourself after he rolled off of you and fell asleep?”
“You are the most vile, disgusting thing I have ever come into contact with, and that you inhabit the same space as me is a violation of everything I am!”
I had to keep her off balance because of the way Manny and I were. If she knew what to do, she could crush us. “Did he know the kids weren’t his?”
“Fuck you!”
“Oh shit, I was just fucking around, but it’s true! That’s hilarious, my prudish little Scarlett out there fucking around! Were you a street walker? I bet you blew guys for a box of doughnuts.”
“They were his in every way that mattered!”
“What was the matter? Could he not get it up? Limp dicky thing going on? Was it too small for penetration? I bet that was it. Tough to get pregnant from a toothpick. If I didn’t know better, I would have bet Yorley knocked you up. That bitch has enough testosterone running through her to do it. Wouldn’t have to do much more than rub up against her. Your poor husband must have looked at those kids every day with disappointment, knowing that he wasn’t man enough to do what needed to be done and that you were just a slut.”
“I’ll kill you!” She was coming, and I was actually in danger. It was only Chance that saved me. Not the verb but rather the noun, the taxidermist shot us again with whatever he’d used previously.
“You really shouldn’t be thrashing around so much. This should help you sleep.”
I watched Scarlett stumble and fall just as I went down myself. Time was indeterminate. We’d been out for five minutes or five days—didn’t matter much. When we awoke, all of us this time, we were in a cage with four other zombies. We stood. I’m not really sure who did the motions. I didn’t think I was capable. We were in a small room with other cages, some holding animals but mostly it was zombies like us. There was a large window on the other side that showed a good sized lab where the doctors or scientists were working on something. I couldn’t tell what it was from this angle.
“I was wondering when you were going to wake up. Was sort of afraid I might have overdone it. Hope you don’t mind your hospital gown; it gives the scientists easier access.”
It was Chance; he was sitting in a chair off to our right.
“Gotta admit, I’m more than slightly fascinated with you. Besides the fact that you look strikingly like someone I used to know. I mean, that could never work out. I’m a human and, well, not to be blunt, but you’re a human eater. Be kind of like a lamb and a tiger—maybe we’d get along for a while, but then you’d get hungry and eat me. It would end badly. Nope, that’s not it. There’s something different, something more. I don’t know what the hell it is. We know the zombies are getting smarter, and I’ll tell you, that in itself is terrifying, but you went up that fence in record time, and that makeup, that makes you look like an oh so scary clown.” He gripped the sides of his face in mock terror, his mouth open. “That’s fresh, like yesterday fresh, but you look like you’ve been through the ringer a little bit. They drew some of your blood. We can tell how long you’ve been a zombie, and from the looks of you I’d say a week or so. So what’s that say about your little get up?”
I gripped the sides of the bars. He was tantalizingly close. He took a half step back.
“You’re sly, little one. You’re trying to gauge if I’m in range. I wasn’t, and I’m even less so now. I really don’t like the fact that you are making me nervous. More so than usual.” He sat back down. “Now, I don’t really think there are people crazy enough out there that would have done these things to you—the whole penis thing and clown makeup—but what are the other options? That you did it yourself? That seems leaps and bounds above what your brethren are capable of. Then I look into your eyes and I see that spark of intelligence. That’s not the normal opaque look of one blindly on a quest for food; that’s the predatory gaze of one figuring out how to best get his food. Her food, I mean, though I’m not sure you differentiate sexes. You procreate from a bite.”
“This little fucker talks too much.”
“I need to eat.”
“Oh great, this day is just getting better. What do you suggest we do, Manny? We’re trapped in a cage with four other zombies.”
�
�Help!” Scarlett screamed out of the blue.
“It is getting entirely too crowded in here.” I spun on Scarlett. “You had your chance, and you blew it. Now shut up while I try and figure out how to get us out of here.”
“I saved your life,” Chance said. “I know that means nothing to you. But most of those zombies outside will be dead within the next couple of days. We’re finding new ways to kill mass amounts of your kind. There might actually be a way to win this war; we could have our planet back. Wouldn’t that be incredible?”
The idiot was actually smiling. That would be the worst thing ever. What the fuck was I going to do after all my people pillaging? Serve burgers to all the fuckers I’d wanted to eat previously? That would be an awkward encounter, I would imagine. “Hey listen, I know I wanted to eat your fucking kidneys, but do you want fries with that shake?”
“Some of the science people are actually working on a cure. They think that there is a chance some humanity has remained behind during the infection. Personally, I think there’s a possibility of that too, but what the hell do I know? I used to stuff animals for a living.”
I turned and sat down while the other zombies crowded into my spot trying to get at Chance.
