'Til Death Do Us Part

by Mark Tufo

  At times I felt that the ground I was on was sloped upward but the horizon never changed, odds were my dominant leg was pulling me just enough off course to lead me around in huge circles, learned this in the Marine Corps but without a compass or a point of reference there was no way for me to make any corrections, and I had a sneaking suspicion that even if I had a compass there would be no magnetic North anyway. No it would be much better to believe that I was still somehow on Earth.

  If rocks were a life form I would have been inundated, with teeming abundant, prosperous life! But the world I was in was sterile, no sun, no water how could anything survive here. Then had I not stumbled over it I would have completely passed it by. As far as plants go, this would have been the one that the greenhouse threw out after the planting season was over. It would have been at the bottom of the large dumpster in the back of the building covered by the dried manure and broken bags of decorative rock. Right then that little runt of a twisted stick popping up from the soil was singularly the most beautiful thing I think I had ever seen.

  I cried as I dropped to my knees to get a better look. No I didn’t cry out, like ‘Aha!’ I actually cried. You know, the kind where moisture actually flows from the eyes…yeah that kind. A starving horse would have passed this thing over, yet, at this moment I would have staked my entire life on it. This represented a chance; if this was alive, there was more…that was for sure. Life is adaptable. Like a typical selfish human my first thought was to pull it up and take it with me, if I could have punched myself with enough force to make it worthwhile I would have.

  It took me long moments before I could leave my new best friend behind. We had shared so much. I told him about my plight and he listened patiently. I knew it was a ‘he’ because he didn’t interrupt me once. (I’m dead meat if Tracy sees this—WAY worth it though). I kept moving on, this was a barely habitable place. Although I wasn’t sure if I was still trapped in my mind, or Eliza’s for that matter (though I didn’t know who she was at the time). It was another forty-seven days (or an hour) before I ran across the next plant, it was most assuredly a brother to the one I had met earlier, it was slightly more full-bodied, but it wasn’t going to win any competitions at the Rose Off. I stopped briefly to acknowledge its existence and kept going.

  Then I saw something in the far distance scurrying off. ‘Scurrying off’ was just fine with me, that meant it wasn’t coming my way, the best defense I would be able to muster would revolve around some rock throwing and in my High School hey days I hadn’t been able to get a ball much over 65 miles per hour and I know my shoulder hadn’t aged very well. Best I’d be able to do would be a nice bruising before whatever wanted to eat me slammed into my body with teeth a gnashing.

  But whatever was going on, I was coming out of the abyss of sterility. The outer fringes of hardy life for sure, but who knows what I would begin to encounter as I kept moving steadily forward, but what were my options? Stay and languish waiting for death, but I wasn’t sure if I could really die here. I’d been walking for hours and I wasn’t tired, thirsty or hungry, I just was.

  I was self-aware enough to realize that this woman (who I will now call Eliza going forward) hadn’t physically teleported me to anywhere, but mentally I was on a trip for the ages. And not like any trip I had ever taken in my experimental drug days of college (shit forget Tracy finding this, I’m glad, in one sense, that my dad will never see this, he knew I wasn’t the greatest student in school but he most likely didn’t know why, even at this juncture in life I had no desire to spill the beans on what I used to do).

  Mentally I was out to lunch. Was my body still in the ground across from Little Turtle or had Eliza hefted me over her shoulder and was even now bringing me back to her lair for whatever insidious reason she might have? I had no idea. More than likely, I was propped up in the corner of my home drooling excessively after finally having traveled into the deep end of psychosis. How long would Tracy change my diapers before she just put me out of all of our miseries?

  I walked on because sitting and reflecting on what was or could be or may be, really just isn’t my way. If you’ve read any of my journals I’m sure you’ve come to the realization that I act first and then have to figure out a way to get out of my newest predicament. Someday I’ll learn not to do that, but my guess is that it will be my last (day).

  The pea green color may have been steadily brightening it was difficult to say, if it was happening at all, it was in degrees so slow as to not be registerable. But I just got the feeling that was what was happening. Still didn’t know if it even meant anything, although I would take any sort of light no matter the color over the pitch blackness I had been immersed in earlier. I would have feared any sort of movement in that environment. Looking back on all this now, I’ve got to wonder if Tommy’s hand played in any of this. I can’t imagine that Eliza would have given me any sort of handhold from which to pull myself out of the quagmire she had plunged me into.

  The illumination had Tommy written all over it. In the short time that I got to know the boy he had stamped himself indelibly onto my life and the lives of all of those around me. It would have been just like him to risk everything to help a man he barely knew at the time. Although he was much more aware of the bigger picture than I was. I was under the very misguided thought process that I was only dealing with a zombie apocalypse, why and how could I have known any differently. Well like Alex’s meemaw used to say, “When it rains, you get wet.” No wiser words could have been uttered.

  I miss Alex. My gut says he’s dead, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to confirm that until I meet him once again topside if the big man deems me worthy. Wow, I’m pretty easily distracted these days. I think a lot has to do with the injuries I’ve sustained. I think for necessity sake I will try harder to stay on task if only to finish this infernal story. Although it’s hard not to miss the ones that have fallen along the way, it’s when I write that the pain becomes acute, focused like the tip of a particularly sharp knife blade, it finds ways to cut and slice, deeply. Sorry. Where was I? Right, I didn’t know it then, but it had to be Tommy’s influence in this alien scape.

  Fuck! (I yelled it, then wrote it, that was cathartic.) The puke green light was getting brighter. I think I’ve established that. I was coming across increasing vegetation, nothing that could really even sustain a lone locust but there was a comfort of shared life here. I hadn’t seen anything scurry off since that first time and was now beginning to wonder if I had even seen it or whether it was just my mind trying to establish some sort of normalcy to this void although a Wendy’s or Subway would have been preferable (but not McDonald’s, never them again.)

  Still I wandered, much like Moses. (My blasphemy alone in these journals is probably enough to keep me exiled from THE epitome of gated communities.) My guess was I was meant to ‘wait’ in this place while my real self wasted away, would I know when that end came. Would I cease to exist here or would that mean I was now forever bound here. Did the zombie girl have that kind of sway? Could she parlay my soul? I wasn’t much of a people person, but who the hell was I going to issue snide and sarcastic comments to if I was alone. I could always berate myself, it wouldn’t be the first time, but that would get old quick.

  I kept walking for what else was there, and then, in the hazy distance, there was an irregularity. At first I could not discern it and then it began to dawn on me that I was seeing objects not of nature. Man made? Could it be? My heart leapt, that of course was until I began to think of where I may or may not be, would I want to come across anything made by the sentient beings of this place, because that would mean the sentient beings were around also. Maybe that would be preferable, one quick death instead of this long drawn out crap.

  Typical Talbot, jump headlong into the teeth of the tiger instead of gently skirting around. I guess I just work better with the gun pointing at my head rather than having to think my way out. Well when you have as little going on in your head as I do you c
ould see why I tend to go with my strengths! As the day wore on I began to see wisps of smoke coming up from a variety of homes, I guess huts might be a more apt word. Well shit, if I want to get honest, more like earthen mounds with a thatch roof.

  “Hello,” I said, I wanted to yell it, but I still felt like a stranger in a strange land and until I knew the customs I wanted to be as discreet as possible. I began to peer inside of a hut when the flap of deer hide used as a door began to rustle. I stepped back as a heavyset man. No…that was the wrong terminology, he wasn’t fat, he was thick as if he were hewn from one solid block of wood. There wasn’t a curve on the man, he was all hard angles. I had height on him and that was it, his arms looked as thick as my legs. He walked right past me and I couldn’t have been more than six inches from him. I wanted to shout at him to look at me, but the square set of his jaw outlined in a scowl made me think twice.

  I could hear guttural talking inside, it sounded Germanic but the brutish words issuing softly made even the harsh modern day German language seem French. The only reason I dared peek in was the voices sounded young, I might be able to take the off spring of the thick man that had just passed me by. You’ll notice I said ‘maybe’. “Hello?” I asked as I walked in. I had a girlfriend back in college that was taking German as a second language. She used to speak it all the time around me. You’d think I would have at least retained the word ‘hello’ in German. Nope not me I was too busy staring at her tits, sue me. I’m sorry if what every male on the planet does offends you.

  Listen, the planet right now is in the midst of a near extinction event, I can help with the repopulating of our home. It’s VERY, VERY simple, because if you’re a woman and a guy is next to you, he wants to have sex—except for the obvious exceptions, related, dead, or zombie. Other than that, if he’s had a good sandwich today, humping is the only other thing on his mind. I mean now that sports have literally been wiped off the table, what else is there really?

  I think I’m avoiding this next part; I’ve been sucker punched in the gut with less wind knocked out of me. The inside of the hut had a stone fireplace off to the side, a small table was in the center and a pile of filthy animal skins was in the far corner where I imagine the family, I use that word loosely, slept. A girl with long raven hair was leaning over a table, tears fell heavily from her face, her torn and worn skirt was draped around her shoulders, her skinny legs caked in dirt were shaking violently, an even younger boy was facing away from the scene he kept repeatedly banging his head against a stout branch, the sobbing and the hollow knocking were the only sounds in the small enclosure.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. My heart was thumping wildly in my throat. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The girl had been raped and the young boy, I figured to be her brother, had not dealt with the violence very well. What kind of monster does this? I put my hands up in as non-threatening a posture as possible and approached. I had made up my mind, I was going to kill that man or die trying.

  “Miss,” I said trying to sound as comforting as possible. Her tears and mutterings kept up, the boy was now rocking back and forth crying heavily himself, he was saying something, but even in a foreign language I could tell it was gibberish by its tone and cadence. The girl had still not acknowledged my presence as I approached. She looked up wildly when she heard a noise behind me.

  Zombie girl? Was the first thought that came through my head, she was a dead ringer for the thing that had kissed me albeit an earlier version, this girl couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, it was tough to tell with the amount of malnourishment she seemed to be sustaining. I stepped back as her intense, frightened gaze bore holes through me, then I realized she couldn’t see me at all. She was reacting to the thick man who had come back from whatever errand asshole rapists do.

  He yelled at the girl and she immediately stood up and placed her dress back into place. She stood there with her head down, looking completely beaten as the man kept berating her. This wasn’t just some stranger. The longer I stayed and witnessed the interaction, such as it was, the more I came to the realization that this thing that called himself a man was the father of the two children in the hut. He yelled until they began to do menial work around the house. The boy was fixing holes in the walls where light was spilling through and the girl took the pile of skins and brought them outside. She placed them on the branch of a small tree and began to beat the bugs and dirt out of them with a stick. Oh how I wished she would use that on the man.

  I was a ghost here. I had no more influence than a flying piece of dust. No that wasn’t true, dust could carry germs. Germs could be inhaled and the host could become infected and die. I shuddered at the thought (airborne germs I mean) not me being a ghost part. I watched as something in that girl was dying, she had lost whatever semblance of innocence she had possessed, it was early in her development but I thought I could see the foreshadowing of what she was to become. Abuse takes so much that is good from our children and replaces it with so much that is dark. Her scales had not yet been tipped but the process had begun.

  Her brother came out and lay by her feet. He was still crying. The girl alternated between beating the skins and rubbing his head.

  They began to utter that guttural language that I could not discern so I filled in what I thought they were saying merely by their tone and posture.

  Tomas looked up at his sister, his tear-soaked face lined with muddy runnels. “Are you okay, Lizzie?”

  A quick narrowing of the eyes, then a softening when she realized who she was talking to. She got down on her haunches and stroked his face. “Tomas, I have to leave this place.”

  Then and there I realized that Eliza had sacrificed all that she was and could have become to shield her brother from the man that they called ‘father’. “He’ll stop, Lizzie! Please don’t leave,” he begged, clutching onto her.

  “Oh, Tomas,” she cried. “He’ll never stop.” And in that she was right. But I think Eliza feared what would become of her brother if he was left behind to face the wrath of that sick bastard.

  That was Eliza. She had been a small girl in a brutal world and she should have died after a pitiful existence. The dialog between the two siblings had no sooner finished when I felt a loud whooshing noise pass around my head, much like if you were crazy enough to stick your head out of a car moving at a hundred miles per hour down the Autobahn. I was at what looked like an alleyway abutting up to a small market; although I had not moved my feet so much as an inch. As I began to orientate myself, I noticed an older Eliza being dragged along by her father. He had one large meaty hand wrapped completely around her forearm and was pulling her towards the back of the alleyway.

  My heart began to sink and gorge began to rise, if that was even possible in the embodiment that I was adorning. Eliza’s head was whipping back and forth violently as she fought desperately to be released from her father’s clutches. He turned and open palmed her so hard against the side of the face that she staggered. I impotently stepped forward. If I could have willed his death I would have done so. She recovered quickly and the look she directed at him more than adequately reflected the vampire she would become. I think even her father caught a glint of it for he pulled harder and faster to get her to her final destination and away from him.

  A hook nosed man waited fervently in the corner, he may or may not have been rubbing his hands together, I honestly can’t remember, I was so sickened from the events taking place I couldn’t think clearly.

  Asshole, I mean Eliza’s father, pulled the girl flush with himself and then thrust her towards the other man. Eliza looked back defiantly at her father with eyes almost as black as coal. Hooknose pulled some coins out of his pocket and put them in the outstretched hand of Eliza’s father. He eyed them greedily, then quickly put them in his own pocket. Eliza spit in her father’s face and let loose with a litany I can only imagine was some of the most colorful commentary known up to that period in time.

  Her fath
er reared back and looked about to let loose with another vicious blow when Hooknose interceded. He waggled his finger and seemed to be saying that she was his property now and that the father no longer had claim. Eliza’s father seemed happy to be rid of the girl, he ‘pahed’ as he turned and left, still looking at the money he clutched in his hand, never once turning to look at his daughter.

  Hooknose was leering. It was not difficult to imagine what he was thinking. Eliza had a hint of fear in her, but she tried her best not to show it, weakness was not a virtue in this world. The scene again whooshed away, but was repeated often throughout the years. Eliza grew older, but there never seemed to be a shortage of lecherous men around. With each transfer of her body, I watched more of her soul become exposed and stripped bare. She looked beaten, worn down, possibly even disease-ravaged. Who knew what she could be carrying from her exposure to the worst of what the world had to offer.

  I ‘whooshed’ again, this time into a market and at first I was unsure as to what I was hearing, then it dawned on me. I was hearing English. A cockney version for sure but it was English, I could understand at least a good two thirds of it through the thick accent. I won’t even pretend to think that I could ‘translate’ the rest. I watched as Eliza was coming directly towards me, she looked both fiercely proud and sufficiently beat down it was a strange dichotomy. She looked much like the woman I would come to know as my mortal enemy Eliza, I’ll be honest I was scared shitless to be this close to her even if she couldn’t see me, even if this was only an echo of the past, didn’t matter. Here was the woman that had the ways and means and, more importantly, the drive to kill all of those I loved.