Those Lazy Sundays: A Novel of the Undead

by Thomas North

  “Holy fucking shit!” Jack’s voice boomed from around the corner. His four friends stopped in their tracks.

  They looked at each other worriedly, and then hurried back around the side of the store. Andy and Jack were both slowly sidestepping away from the embankment towards the parking lot. Joining them, the rest of the group looked into the field.

  The man and woman were now close enough that their faces were clear – or what was left of them. The woman’s curly brown hair was matted with a dark, sticky maroon. A gash split across her face from the corner of her forehead down to her chin, revealing her cheekbone and jaw. Her mouth hung open, revealing an empty cavity save for a few broken teeth. The man was in better shape, sporting just a basketball-sized red splotch stretching across his white shirt, like a tie dye gone horribly wrong.

  “I think I’m done here,” Jack said, almost whispering. “Whatever they’re on, I don’t want any.”

  “Yeah…” Sarah agreed, backing away.

  There was no argument from anyone this time. Even Andy was uncharacteristically silent. He simply nodded, and turned around. The six of them rushed back to the van, hurriedly got in, and locked the doors. In the rearview mirror, Andy watched one hand, and then a second, grasp at the cement of the parking lot from below, searching for a handhold. He put the van into drive and gunned it out of the parking lot, pulling onto the road without looking.

  “Think we ought to call the police or something?” Kyle asked after a few moments of silence.

  “About what?” Andy asked sharply. “A bunch of crunchy hippies fucked up on drugs? They’d have to lock up half the state.”

  “I dunno man, that one chick looked like she was hurt pretty badly,” said Jack. “And they weren't dressed like hippies. I don’t know what is going on there, but they could be hurt, or they could be dangerous, or…”

  “It couldn’t hurt just to call,” Sarah agreed. “Just let them know…”

  “Yeah, guys, we can’t just do nothing,” Mary said.

  “So call then,” Andy replied dryly.

  He checked his mirror and pulled the van onto the road again.

  Sarah dialed 9-11 and held the phone up to her ear. She was greeted with a busy tone.

  She took the phone from her ear and looked at it, surprised. She dialed again.

  Busy.

  She tossed her phone on the dash and looked back at her friends.

  “I keep getting a busy signal,” she told them, confused. “Someone else want to try? There might be something wrong with my connection or something.”

  Mary reached into the back of the van and picked up Kyle’s gray backpack. She took his phone from the side pocket and handed it to him.

  “Can you try calling?” she asked.

  Kyle dialed the number on his phone and waited.

  After a few seconds, he returned the phone to his backpack.

  “Same thing,” he said.

  “There’s gotta be some kind of serious accident nearby,” Jack opined. His voice sounded unsure. “They must be getting a lot of calls.”

  Sarah looked over her shoulder at him and nodded slowly and deliberately, a non-verbal signal meaning “I get what you’re saying, but I know that you know that you know that you’re full of shit.”

  “Try again in a few minutes,” Andy told them. “Whatever they’re dealing with is probably more important than a bunch of drug addicts.”

  “You really think that’s what they were?” Mary asked softly. “Their faces were so…”

  “I read this story about this guy who was high on LSD and chewed his own tongue off,” Andy replied. “People can do some pretty fucked up stuff when they’re high.”

  “Okay,” said Mary, looking unconvinced.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. Sarah tried dialing the police one more time, to no avail, this time not even getting a signal.

  “We’ll be driving through Allentown soon,” Andy said. “I’m sure they at least have a local cop. We can stop and rep… SHIT!”

  He slammed on the brakes, snapping everyone forward even as the seatbelts locked them in place. The brake pedal vibrated under Andy’s foot as the anti-lock system activated.

  A dull thump came from the front of the vehicle, and the van bounced up and down.

  Andy guided the vehicle to the side of the road and turned on the hazard lights. The cab of the van was a symphony of gasping, heavy breathing and pounding chests as they all took stock of their own body parts. Kate was shaking visibly, and Kyle was clutching the “Oh Shit” handle (so-named since grabbing it usually led the passenger to yell “Oh Shit!” and potentially act on the phrase as well) so tightly that the veins on the top of his hand were visible and his knuckles were bright white. He leaned against the window, looking like he had just had a heart attack.

  Without looking back, Andy unbuckled his seatbelt, threw open the door and jumped out of the van.

  “Hey!” Sarah yelled, managing to get out a single word before he slammed the door shut. She unbuckled her seatbelt and chased after him.

  The rest of them remained in their seats. Jack turned around and looked out the rear window.

  A person lay on the ground several feet behind the vehicle.

  “Jesus, we hit someone,” Jack gasped, looking out the back of the van. Kyle and Mary turned around and looked through the rear window, stunned.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Mary squeaked, holding her hands over her face. “God, we just ran over somebody.”

  Kate stared at Jack, not wanting to look at what she assumed would be a dead body.

  Jack slid the door open and got out. Sarah and Andy were standing over the figure – a chubby man dressed in a pair of jeans and a tan polo shirt, lying on his stomach. Jack’s stomach churned at the sight of the man. He could see that the man was moving, though the way he was moving gave Jack a bad feeling. The man looked twitchy, stiff, almost like he was having muscle spasms. He felt a shade of a relief, however, knowing that the victim was at least alive.

  “Jeez Andy, what the hall happened?” Jack asked, exasperated.

  “Fucking guy was just standing in the middle of the goddamn road!” Andy replied, his cheeks red. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “I didn’t have a friggin’ chance to even stop. He was just standing there, right when we came around the curve!”

  Sarah kneeled down and placed her hand on the man’s shoulder. In a flash, the man turned his neck and snapped. Sarah screamed and jumped back, falling onto the road, landing on her right hand. The man on the ground continued snapping his jaw like a rabid animal.

  Jack stared wide-eyed at him, the queasiness in his stomach growing into a full blown face-in-the-toilet nausea. Both of the man’s legs were obviously broken. His left leg was bent at the knee ninety degrees in the wrong direction, and his right leg was snapped at the ankle, a dark blood stain on his pants cuff. His left arm was under his body and looked mangled beyond repair. The sandy hair just above the right ear was bloody, and there was a small bit of gooey substance poking through a crack in the man’s head. It reminded Jack of the stress ball he had on the desk in his dorm room, next to his computer. It had a tear in the cover, so when he squeezed it, the gel oozed out through the rip. Along with the biting, the man was now grabbing at the pavement with his one good hand, as if he were trying to pull himself forward.

  Jack took a few steps to the side, bent over, and threw up on the dirt by the side of the road.

  Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he glanced back at his two friends, embarrassed, but they weren’t paying him any attention. Andy was holding Sarah’s wrist and looking at it closely, a clear look of worry on his face.

  “Christ, did he bite her?” Jack asked, re-joining them.

  Her shirt had a small tear, revealing a small amount of blood dribbling from a scrape just below her hand.

  “Motherfucker,” Andy swore. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?”


  Jack glanced at the man on the ground again. He was still fixated on Sarah and Andy, still snapping his jaw, writhing, drooling, and trying to drag himself across the pavement. He also made an occasional primitive growl or grunt that sounded far more animal than human.

  “I just scraped my hand on the pavement when I fell,” Sarah said, glancing warily at the man on the ground. “He didn’t actually bite me. I’m fine. This guy needs help, not me.”

  Andy looked at her wrist again. She covered the wound with the sleeve of her shirt and looked up at him. “Andy, I’m fine. I just need a Band-Aid. It’s just a scrape.”

  “This guy’s seriously busted up,” Jack said, deliberately keeping his eyes off the man. He’d looked at him twice now, and that was enough. He didn’t think he had anything left in his stomach to regurgitate. “When we hit him we must have messed up his brain or something. We need to get this guy to a hospital.”

  “No shit,” Andy replied. “First he was standing in the middle of the goddamn road, and now he just tried to take a bite out of my girlfriend. Of course he’s fucked up.”

  “Something is not right,” Sarah said, backing away from the man. “Shouldn’t he be dead? I mean, look at him.”

  “God damn it,” Andy muttered, ignoring her statement. “Sarah do you have your phone?”

  “It’s in the van,” she said.

  Sarah waved at the vehicle and made a gesture like she was talking on the phone.

  Mary leaned out the open door and yelled, “I just tried. I’m still not getting anything! I don't have any signal!”

  Sarah, Andy and Jack all glanced at each other.

  “I’ll keep trying though!”

  “Shit!” Andy yelled. “We can’t just leave this guy here.”

  “There’s no way we’re trying to get him into the van!” Sarah replied.

  Jack shook his head.

  “Even if he hadn’t just tried to take a bite out of your hand, you’re not supposed to move accident victims. Especially people with…” he paused and nearly glanced at the mangled body again before catching himself. “Serious injuries.”

  “One of us could always take the van into the nearest town, and the rest of us could stay here,” he suggested.

  Andy nodded. “We’re only a few miles away from Allentown. It wouldn’t take long to get there and back. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes max.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sarah said. “What if those guys from the store come?”

  “They won’t,”Jack replied. “We’re a good five miles away from that store. Even if they followed the road, at the rate they were moving, it’d probably take them all day to get this far.”

  “I know. I still just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “We don’t have much of a choice,” Jack said. “Andy’s right. We can’t leave this guy here. At least one of us will have to go track someone down.”

  “Well, we should at least let Mary, Kate and Kyle know what’s going on,” Sarah said, pointing at the van.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed. “Tell you guys what. I’ll stay here. You guys go let them know what’s going on. They can hang out here with me if they want. I’m good either way.”

  The truth was, he didn’t have any desire to stand by the side of the road with the apparently cannibalistic accident victim, and definitely not by himself, but he was embarrassed. He’d lost his cool – and his lunch – in front of his friends. Though neither of them had said anything (and, he knew, they probably didn’t care), he wasn’t letting himself off the hook.

  “Sounds great,” Andy agreed. “We’ll see you in a few.” Sarah shot him a worried glance, and then she and Andy walked back to the van, leaving Jack alone by the side of the road.

  Seeing them walk away, the chubby man renewed his attempt to pull himself along after them. His jaw wasn’t snapping anymore, but his mouth was open and saliva pooled around his tongue and dripped out the sides of his mouth.

  Jack looked up and saw Kate getting out of the van. Andy leaned his head out the window and yelled. “You good man?” Jack waved and gave a thumbs up.

  Kate stopped a couple of feet away from Jack and grimaced, looking down at the man on the street.

  “Oh… oh my god…” Kate whispered, bringing her hand to her mouth, and looking away.

  “Sarah said he tried to bite her?”

  “Yeah,” Jack replied. “Just started snapping like a rabid dog. Damnedest thing. Looks like his skull is fractured. Must have done something to his cognitive abilities or something.”

  Jack was definitely the intellectual of the group, or at least usually managed to make himself sound like he was. He didn’t know anything more about human brain than any of them, but he always managed to throw around big words and impress people. His friends found it annoying, though they begrudgingly admitted that he was pretty smart.

  “It’s amazing he’s still conscious,” he added.

  They both turned their heads at the sound of the van starting. Mary and Kyle waved at them through the rear window. They waved back, and the dark green van pulled into the road and drove off. They watched it without saying anything, until it disappeared around the next bend in the road.

  3

  THE BALL BOUNCED off the receiver’s hands and tumbled along the ground, where another hulking player dove on it, before a piercing whistle ended the play.

  “The ruling on the field is an incomplete pass,” the referee announced, as the players huddled.

  “Jesus Christ, catch the goddamn ball!”

  Brent Williamson enjoyed watching football, or so he told himself. The Patriots had been pretty damn good the past decade. Three Super Bowl wins in five trips, one agonizingly close play away from a perfect season, all under the command of one of the greatest coach-quarterback combos in history (the greatest, as far as most New Englanders were concerned). But that didn’t stop him from swearing at the TV with every dropped pass, and curse the team as the biggest bunch of bums to get a ride to Foxboro with every loss ˗ the hallmarks of the proverbial fickle fan.

  He took a gulp from his Michelob bottle and waited while the Patriots’ training crew tended to an injured player, the television station finally deciding to cut to a commercial when it became apparent it might be a while.

  Brent got up from the couch and walked across his small, one-bedroom apartment and into the kitchen, where he grabbed a can of roasted peanuts from the counter. He had just sat down again when a “Breaking News” banner flashed across the screen, which then cut to Bob Bartolo, the local news anchor, sitting behind his usual desk. WPUR, the local NBC affiliate, had a pretty loose definition of “Breaking News,” and tended to break into television programs whenever there was even a hint of anything interesting happening nearby. Usually it involved some kind of minor local scandal, a car accident, or something having to do with the weather.

  “Coming up on Action News after the Patriots game,” Bob Bartolo began in his almost comically deep voice. “Over one hundred people were sickened this afternoon at the Allentown Summer Cookout. The annual event, planned yearly on the first Sunday of fall, usually involves various lawn games and sports competitions, and heavy servings of summer favorites like grilled hotdogs, hamburgers, and potato salad. But something this afternoon sent dozens of people home with flu-like symptoms, cutting the celebration short and prompting questions about the tradition of serving all homemade food at the event. Also coming up, Ben and Jerry's announces a new flavor dedicated to a famous comedian! Who is it, and what is in their latest concoction? Tune in after the game to find out!"

  Brent took another sip of beer and snickered. So the cookout in Allentown went to shit. That would mean his brother was probably about to have a whole bunch of bullshit to deal with. State health officials. Reporters. It would probably only be a couple of days worth. It wasn't like a few people getting sick ˗ or even a few hundred people getting sick ˗ was that big of a deal in the long run. But it was a Sunday,
in Vermont, a slow news day if there ever was one. They'd probably milk this for a couple of days, then it would go away.

  The whole thing probably shouldn't have anything to do with Mike, given that he was the town cop and public health issues usually didn't have anything to do with police, but as Brent had told him that last time they had spoken (which was quite a while ago), his brother had long ago gone from being the town's cop, to the town's bitch, dealing with all kinds of shit that the town council and mayor should have dealt with. Instead, they got paid to sit on their asses while Mike got paid next to nothing to do their jobs for them.

  That had been Brent's take, anyway. A take Mike hadn't appreciated, as illustrated by the right hook he had unleashed across the side of Brent's face. That had hurt, and left a nice shiner for a week or so. But it wasn't the first time Brent had been slugged. It wasn't the first time he'd been slugged by his brother. Plus, they had been having a fight about another issue ˗ Jenna ˗ before they'd moved on to getting at each other's throats about that topic.

  Brent cursed again at another dropped pass, a moment that thankfully took his mind off of his brother, a topic which he hadn't had any desire to revisit anyway. It's not like Brent was perfect. Sure, he was doing okay. After doing his two tours in Iraq, taking one bullet and having one more close call, he'd decided that he probably shouldn't press his luck any more. So he'd come back home and used all the money he'd saved up during his time overseas to start a construction company.

  It had been pretty good timing, actually. The construction market wasn't great, but most of his local competitors had been decimated by the recession and housing crash, and being a start-up had actually helped: his company was lean, not burdened by old debts and large staff. And the labor pool was, well, plentiful. He hadn't gotten rich by any means ˗ at least, not yet ˗ but he was doing pretty well. He was doing well enough that he had been able to afford a pretty nice BMW, a car that stuck out like a sore thumb in most parts of Vermont. But that was fine by him. Unlike Mike, he wasn't out there to please everyone and get fucked over in the process.