Dext of the Dead (Book 3): We Are The Entombed

by Kuhn, Steve

  Food for thought.

  Entry 88

  I was awakened this morning by daylight streaming in through the cracked door of the trailer and greeted by JC. It was chilly! He had spent the night in the sleeper of the truck, keeping watch on Fool. Though, I think we’re all pretty much in agreement that if Kylee and Fool were gonna turn, it would have already happened.

  The others were still sleeping, and I was thankful for that. We had a minor issue with Lilly as darkness fell last night that could have turned disastrous in a hurry. Dana had been giving us the lay of the land, so to speak, telling us where various landmarks were and telling us where the next community was in an effort to pin down where Lilly’s parents might have gone for help. I didn’t know shit about kids, so when Lilly starting bawling in the trailer for no apparent reason, Dana had to come in and calm her down.

  Dana informed us, “She’s just scared. She’s been in her house for longer than I can remember, and this is the first night she has to sleep somewhere new. And she has to do it with a bunch of strangers. Of course she’s upset!”

  Okay. I guess that made sense. That little “bunch of strangers” bit pissed me right off, though.

  Luckily, I wasn’t the only one that felt the sting of that comment, because JC snapped at her, “I’m sorry. What was your name again? Dana? Well, Dana, you’re welcome to march your little ass right outta here anytime you want. I’m sure it’s nice and quiet back in that big, empty house—except for the moaning of the dead, of course.”

  She scowled at him miserably and huffed under her breath, “Asshole…”

  Still slightly upset and looking adorably pitiful, Lilly announced to no one in particular, “I miss Mommy.”

  That was when Cutty broke up the party by kneeling beside her and telling her, “We gon’ find ’em, baby girl. We jus’ gotta get some sleep fo’ we set out. Think we could have us a slumba party in this here traila?”

  Even kneeling, Cutty was taller than Lilly, and she looked up at him to say, “You mean a sleepover! Yaaay! A sleepover!”

  Ten minutes later, Cutty was braiding her hair as they sat quietly in the light of our shitty, car-battery lamps. I swear, Junior would have had a field day with Cutty for this one. I can hear him now. “Now, don’t you go puttin’ corn rows in that little girl’s hair, ya hear?”

  Heh. Junior.

  But imagine if that hadn’t gone over quite so well. We really need to get this kid as far away from us as possible. If she goes into another one of those screaming fits when there’s more stinks around, we’re dead meat.

  So, Dana had a hunch that Lilly’s parents had set out for another richy-ass neighborhood about a mile over. It was a good thing she was with us, too, because we never would have seen the place, even if we were looking for it. The houses were tightly surrounded by thick woods, and it appeared that, due to its orientation, the sun shone on the front lawns the better part of everyday. The trees hadn’t been pruned, and the lawns were as unkempt as in Lilly’s neighborhood, but the grass here was nearly as tall as me. This whole area was clearly built by the same company, as evidenced by the cookie-cutter house design and the similar cul-de-sac layout.

  It appeared quiet and desolate.

  We bailed out of the vehicles, minus Kylee and Lilly, at the entrance to the community and stood as a group, surveying the situation.

  Fool said, “Looks like a jungle with a street in the middle, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Murphy opened up the trailer containing Kylee and Lilly and motioned for Fart to jump up and get inside. She followed his order and, with a three-step, jogging start, leapt right into that bitch like she owned it. “Stay, girl,” he said coolly.

  He then asked JC, “Mind stayin’ here with them just in case?”

  JC frowned at the idea, but answered with, “I guess so, but I’d be better acting as cover if you guys have trouble.”

  Rebecca volunteered, saying, “I’ll stay with them.”

  There were no objections until Dana suggested, “Why don’t we all go? There’s a turnaround at the bottom. We can just drive in and check it out first.”

  Minutes later, we were fucked. And when I say ‘fucked,’ I don’t mean ‘we ran into a problem.’

  JC drove the jeep in front of D-Prime with Murphy and Fool riding shotgun, leaving me in the cab of the truck with Cutty and Rebecca. We opted to lock Dana in the trailer with Lilly, Fart, and Kylee just to keep them all out of harm’s way… or so we thought.

  We passed by the houses as we approached the turnaround, but the grass lawns had our vision pretty obscured. Some of the homes were boarded up, and those that weren’t had their windows broken on the ground floors and the doors wide open. I couldn’t really tell if it was the result of looters or the dead.

  JC spun the jeep around easily at the bottom of the street, but as Cutty approached the turn, he spouted, “Aw shit, Dext! I cain’t make this turn, man! Ain’t enough room in dis bitch.”

  Couldn’t really blame Dana, though. There was really no way for her to know that the truck wouldn’t be able to make the turn.

  JC pulled up beside us and looked up at Cutty through the window. Cutty made a swirling motion with his hand while shaking his head ‘no’ and then pointed his thumb back to indicate we were gonna have to back all the way out of the neighborhood.

  He threw D-Prime in reverse, and it happened. The backup alarm began spouting beep, beep, beep, beep! Can you believe that shit? A fucking ‘safety feature’ was about to get us killed.

  The grasses parted as the dead spilled into the street from every direction. They poured from the open doors of the houses in little packs of six or eight, and they emerged from the wooded areas behind the huge houses. The alarm just continued to scream beep, beep, beep, beep!

  Rebecca shouted, “Turn it off, Uncle Curtis. Turn it off!”

  But Cutty panicked a little bit and told us, “I cain’t! We gotta get outta here!”

  JC and the others in the jeep stepped out smooth as motherfuckers and just started popping heads like it was business as usual. They waved us backwards in an effort to tell Cutty to get the fuck outta there.

  Cutty was flustered, though. He turned to me and said, “Dext, I cain’t do this, man. It would take me ten minutes or more to get dis thing outta here on my best day… without dese geeks e’rywhere!”

  They just kept coming. The others would be overwhelmed in minutes if we didn’t make a move quickly. I could hear Fart barking loudly through the walls of the trailer. I told them both, “We gotta get out. We hop out and get Murphy to back it out. It’s either that, or we leave the truck. Come back later, and hope the armor holds up.”

  Rebecca looked me straight in the face as the dead shuffled closer with every passing moment and said, “Fuck that. Get out.”

  Cutty didn’t even have time to correct her language.

  We bailed out, screaming to Murphy to get in and start backing it up. He moved quickly for his age. I’ll give him that. With the reverse alarm still screaming and JC popping off shots with Fool, he spun the wheel a bit and began to slowly back out. The truck bucked and hopped when the biters finally made it to the trailer as Murphy unceremoniously began running them over—slowly.

  Heads popped and squirted juice and funk all over the street, while in other cases the huge tires split some in half. I could hear the squeaking of the suspension mixed with wet plops and cracking bones—fuckin’ gross—but I had other shit to deal with.

  Let’s not forget, I was bare as a stripper’s titties, standing in the middle of the street with the rest of the crew, taking potshots at the horde. Fool called out over the gunfire, “Just get in the fawckin’ jeep! Murph’s got this covered!”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth when a geek fell clumsily into JC in an effort to bite his shoulder. JC was in the middle of a trigger pull, and as he spun around from the impact, the bullets ran a line right down the side if the trailer with a sickening bap, bap, bap, bap. My stomach d
ropped as I heard the screams from within.

  Lilly’s shriek will haunt me forever.

  It was useless to stand there and try to hold them off. Fool was right. I kicked the biter off of JC before it could get at him and helped him to his feet as Cutty put a machete across the back of its neck, spraying Rebecca with coal-black blood. We just piled in the jeep and hauled ass past Murphy in the truck and out of the community.

  JC was a wreck. He was shaking and kept saying, “Oh Jesus, oh God. I killed the kid… I killed the kid. Oh Jesus, man!”

  Fool told him to chill the fuck out until we could regroup, because we didn’t know anything about inside the trailer right then. I was personally worried about everyone. Fart, Kylee, Dana… Any one of them could be dead or injured. My mind raced. What if one of them was killed and turns and takes out the others? Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is bad—real bad.

  We sped a little further down the road as Murphy emerged behind us in the lumbering truck. After we had some distance between us and the neighborhood, we pulled over and bailed out, expecting the worst.

  Murphy hopped out of the cab as all of us ran past him to open the trailer. When Cutty whipped open the doors, we squinted to see into the slightly darker interior. They were fine—all fine, shaken and scared shitless, huddled in the corner, with Kylee sitting numbly. Dana held Lilly with her hands over her little ears. Fart stood guard, ready to pounce and kill anything that came near them.

  With all of them crying fearful tears, Dana shakily asked, “Is it over?”

  Cutty nodded. “Yeah. It’s ova now.”

  Dana released Lilly’s ears, but the little girl clung to her still. She stood up and carried Lilly to us, passing her to Cutty. He held her for a minute, and she buried her face into his shoulder and sobbed, “I wanna go home. I want Mommy and Daddy.”

  Cutty just wrapped her up as safely as he could while Fart and Dana hopped down onto the street. They moved away and left me alone for a moment, so I sat on the back of the trailer with my feet dangling off the edge, trying to catch my breath. Looking out from the back of the trailer, all I saw was road—miles and miles of road.

  Smack!

  My teeth clicked. My teeth clicked?

  My fucking teeth clicked!

  I spun around to see Kylee standing over me in the trailer with her hand on her hip and her lips pursed.

  “I ain’t dead yet, asshole,” she quipped smartly.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the best sight I’d seen in weeks. I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at her, and she stared right back at me with her good eye—except this time, she was attentive and sharp.

  “Well? You gonna say somethin’ or what?” she asked me.

  I blurted out, “Hope you enjoyed your fucking break. You all right?”

  She smirked at me as if to say she was feeling much better and said, “Where’s my gun?”

  I pointed around the side to the others as she hopped down from the trailer. She turned to face me and put her hand on my leg. She started to say something, but I didn’t need to hear it. Just to see her with us again was all I needed. I waved her off politely.

  “Save it.”

  She nodded and went to see the others.

  I’m not sure what to tell Lilly. We can’t keep looking like this, but what if they did make it back? If her parents came back successfully to find their little girl missing, not knowing if she was dead or with some psycho-raider-Haven-asshole-rapist shithead… That’s their baby! But if they are dead, we’d be saving her life.

  I need Cutty to keep his faith, because I refuse to believe there is a God who would leave us with a decision like this.

  Entry 89

  We heard a shot this afternoon off in the distance, back towards where we picked up Lilly and Dana. I can’t tell you how stoked we were about that. In an instant, we had hope again.

  The discussion was going to hell quickly anyway, and we were divided into two completely different schools of thought. On one side: Kylee, Fool, and Cutty argued for sticking around and looking a bit longer for Lilly’s parents. On the other: JC, Murphy, Rebecca, and myself argued for just gettin’ the hell outta dodge because Lilly’s parents were likely dead. Needless to say, we did our best to keep it quiet with regards to Dana and Lilly.

  We failed.

  Dana came storming from the trailer to where we were huddled up on the roadside and said, “She can hear you, ya know? There’s holes all over the trailer, and she is listening to you people talk about her parents being dead!”

  Cutty tried to calm her down, saying, “Eeeeasy, now. We ain’t mean no disrespect, but we gotta think this through.”

  Rebecca added, “Right. And, regardless of how old she is, she has no choice but to learn about what death is right now. Have you looked around lately, Dana?”

  Dana seethed and snapped at us, “That’s not for you to teach her, and surely not like this. You are being completely insensitive! She is only five years old! I don’t care what you think she needs to know. It’s not. Your. Place.”

  Murphy spat on the ground, disgusted. “She’s right, ya know.”

  He nodded at Dana and continued. “Girl that age don’t need to hear shit like this, even if it is a hot mess everywhere around her. Accept our apology for that, Dana.”

  Dana replied to all of us, “Screw your apology. You need to apologize to her. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  She stormed off angrily into the trailer to tend to Lilly again.

  Kylee asked us all, “Are we really willing to kidnap this child? Whatever we do from here on out depends on the answer to that question. If those people go back to that house and she’s gone, that’s what we are—kidnappers, plain and simple.”

  JC answered, “I am. If we keep searching around blindly for two people we don’t even know, in an area we don’t even know, for a little girl we don’t even know… we’re going to be dead. I’d rather be a kidnapper than a dead guy.”

  I told them I didn’t want to search anymore. After the shit back there in that death trap of a neighborhood, I was over it. I suggested we go back to the house where we found them and leave a note. I mean, if they did come back alive, they would at least know that their little girl was safe and that we weren’t bad people. We could even tell them about Kilo and where we were headed. Maybe they could catch up with us, and we could reunite them.

  The others halfheartedly agreed. I could tell they weren’t happy about giving up, but I felt like they understood. The note idea was the lesser of two evils. We’d let Dana explain it to Lilly.

  That was right about when we heard the shot. A single shot from somewhere towards Lilly’s place echoed through the sky and left us all looking at one another like, “Did you hear that shit?”

  We mounted up as fast as we could and pushed the engines hard as we raced the mile or so back to Lilly’s place. We left D-Prime at the entrance again, and I jumped in the jeep with Kylee, Fool, and JC. The others stayed back.

  No sooner had we entered the house, we were met with the foul stench of the dead. I pointed to the three bodies that rotted in the family room, figuring they were the source, but we kept our guard up as we climbed the steps. As we reached the top, we were confronted by not only the smell of rot, but also of gunpowder, strong and pungent.

  Kylee pointed her pistol down the hallway to cover the parent’s bedroom as Fool and I made entry on Lilly’s room.

  Boom!

  I heard the hiss of the round as it whizzed past my head and lodged into the doorframe beside me, spraying the back of my neck with shards of splintered wood. While I was flinching and recovering from the shock, Fool took two quick shots.

  Kylee rushed into the room from the hallway to lend a hand, asking, “What the hell’s going on?”

  Fool stood over the bodies of two biters, a male and a female. The female was in worse shape with hand-sized holes in her midsection where the dead had no doubt torn at her guts, gorging themselves until she turned.
The male, bitten on his throat, arm, and face, still clutched a revolver in his right hand. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that it was this walking corpse squeezing his trigger reflexively. We hadn’t heard any survivors.

  Ironically enough, Lilly’s parents did make it home after all.

  Kylee told us, “We should have Dana identify them.”

  Fool nodded and ran out to fetch her as Kylee began pulling some of the splinters from my neck.

  “You’re fine, but I want you to get Murphy to patch this up when we’re through here,” she told me.

  I reached up to stop her from picking at me because it hurt a bit and pulled her hand away. I’m pretty sure I held onto it for a little too long, and she nervously snatched it back as Fool re-entered with Dana.

  Dana clasped her hands over her own mouth to stifle a scream and clenched her eyes shut at the sight of them. She shook her head ‘yes,’ and Kylee walked her back to the truck to calm her down.

  Now the real challenge—explain this shit to a kid.

  As Fool and I left the room, I grabbed a little, stuffed dinosaur that was on Lilly’s bed. I told Fool to gather some other things for her to play with, but to make sure there wasn’t blood on any of it. He grabbed some crayons, a book or two, and an assortment of Barbies. It was the only way I could think of to ease the blow for the kid. Besides, the trailer bores the hell outta me, and I’m a grownup… sort of.

  *

  Kids never cease to amaze me. I had expected more tears or a tantrum of some sort. We all were trying to find supportive ways to tell her about her parents, and Dana was still a train wreck, so it was up to us to make sense of it for Lilly. Before approaching Lilly, we filled the others in.

  As I stammered and floundered around, Cutty stepped in and knelt beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder and told her, “’Memba when I said we was gon’ find yo’ mom and dad, Lilly?”

  She nodded, clutching the dinosaur I had passed off to her. Her little, freckled face was somber as she listened to Cutty.

  Cutty continued, “Well, we found ’em, baby girl. We found ’em but, see, they wasn’t the same as before.”