by R. J. Spears
I looked back to Kara and Naveen and motioned for them to bunch up to me as we moved further into the scrum of rusted out mobile homes, abandoned and dead as our world. We arranged ourselves with me in the lead, Naveen in the middle so that we could protect her, and Kara as the caboose. With the helicopter on its way past us, I could hear a little better, but it was still a challenge. The sound resonated off the metal of the mobile homes, giving it a murky quality.
We made slow progress because the homes were so tightly packed that sometimes we had to turn sideways. The one good thing about the situation was that it would be hard for someone above to see us.
I learned a valuable lesson that day. When it comes to facing down zombies, you have to know that they don’t always come at you dead on. (No pun intended.) These things will come at you any way they can. I’ve seen ones with broken or missing legs just keep on trucking as they came after a meal, albeit, crawling. Where, we live humans, would be crying our eyes out in pain, crawling along on open stumps, the zombies didn’t give two shits. Nothing kept them from eating fresh food.
And that’s where I got into trouble. I had been watching face forward for zombies to come shambling our way and also looking up for death from above in the form of the helicopter. Little did I know I was about to be taken down by none other than a crawler.
This was no ordinary zombie. In his past life, he had been a weightlifter or something. Granted, he had only two gory stumps for legs, but he made good time on his powerful, tree trunk-sized arms. Plus he had low clearance.
We had reached an intersection when Kara said, “One just filled in behind us.”
I didn’t have to turn around. I heard the moans and guttural sounds coming up from behind me. Just as I started to turn, a vice locked onto my ankle and wrenched it sideways.
The funny thing about your leg is that it likes to stay in its original form and if twisted, the sum of its parts like to follow. My body whipped around like a marionette being slung around by an angry child, and then the vice pushed down on my leg, and my body followed because my leg didn’t want to break. They’re funny that way.
On the way down, my baseball bat flew free from my hand and clattered off the metal hide of one of the mobile homes.
That’s when I got to meet the Terminator. No, not the robot. The zombie. I only gave it that name because it had a passing resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, it was more the fact that he was as big and broad through the chest and arms like Arnie used to be. Then again, maybe Arnie had survived and was still out there knocking down zombies like he did villains in the movies. There’s always hope.
Any-hoo, the Terminator had a hold my left calf and was eyeing it like a turkey leg. That meant only one thing and that he was about to take a bite out of it. I watched his jaws unclench and open wide as he lowered his head toward my leg. Instinctively, I drew back my right leg and gave him a face-full of the bottom of my boot. It was like kicking a tree trunk, and I felt a jarring and painful reverberation pulse up my leg. But it did work. At least temporarily.
That’s when I heard Kara tell Naveen to stay back. In my momentary reprieve from being eaten, I glanced up and saw Kara moving in on a small, lanky zombie coming up the gap toward her. Naveen jittered back and forth, not sure what to do, looking like she was about to go airborne without the aid of wings or propulsion. She did hold the hammer we gave her in her hand, but it was shaking so badly that I was sure she would drop it at any moment.
The Terminator, barely stunned from my kick, recommenced his desire to have ‘leg of Joel.’ This was something I fervently did not desire. I slammed my boot against its face again, and this time, the impact made it release and slide off me. I tried to roll away, but ended up trapped against a tire of one of the mobile homes.
The Terminator used the time I tried to roll away as a chance to climb up onto my lower torso. It lowered its hands on me again, and I felt his fingers dig into my thighs like blunt daggers.
At that point, I would have shot the damn thing even though I knew the noise could draw the helicopter in, but the Terminator effectively blocked my access to my hip holster with its massive body. I took the quickest of peeks over my head and saw my baseball bat lying tantalizingly close, but also miles away, just out of the reach of my fingertips.
I felt the pressure fall on my waist and heard a clacking noise that sounded like porcelain on metal. I looked down in time to see the Terminator biting repeatedly down onto my metal belt buckle. He bit down so hard that two of his teeth broke down to stumps and I felt the little pieces bounce off my legs. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks for big metal belt buckles because if I had been wearing anything smaller, the zombie would have been munching down on my guts.
Without a ready weapon, my only recourse was to buck my body off the ground in hopes to dislodge the Terminator. I bucked hard, but the damn thing held fast to my belt buckle. My second buck was much more successful, but in retrospect, I might have been better leaving him there because he would have a time eating through metal. As it stood right then, he had a direct pathway to my soft belly meat. A delicacy, I’m sure, in zombie foodie circles, but I wanted my abdomen to stay intact.
He started to descend for the kill, broken teeth and all, but I reached down and grabbed his armpits and yanked him upward towards my shoulders where I planned to press him off me. Then I would make a jump for my bat.
Let me tell you; there is a big difference between plans and execution.
Once again, the thing’s bulk got in my way. Where I had hoped to push him off of me, he reached out, grabbed my shoulders, and used his powerful arms to pull himself down towards my neck. My juicy and delicious neck.
I pushed back against him with all my might, but he had gravity, his incredible strength, and appetite driving him down towards me, using a death grip on my waist as an anchor. I could see into his dead gray eyes and watched his expectant mouth opening and closing as he came closer and closer to me. The muscles in my arms started to shake from the strain as his mouth inched closer and closer to my neck.
Images shot into my mind, rapid fire. My mom and dad on the day I graduated from high school. My boyhood dog, Herbie. Kara’s face after our first kiss. It was my final slideshow, and it was all too brief. I didn’t want a slideshow as my last memories. I wanted a 70 millimeter, Cinemascope, epic extravaganza and the story had to be longer than twenty-three years. Hell, it would need to be a trilogy or an ongoing series like James Bond. Joel Hendricks, licensed to kill zombies.
The zombie and his appetite had different plans though. His mouth was only a few short inches from my throat when all of a sudden, its head jerked forward, and its chin smacked against its ample chest. A moment later, I felt its body go slack as it fell against me.
At first, I wasn’t sure what had happened, but my arm muscles were done. They up and quit, left the job, left the building, and went on vacation to Mexico.
The weight of the dead thing collapsed onto me, and I half expected it to start ripping into me, but it didn’t move at all. I pushed its head out of my way and saw the ugly end of a claw hammer sticking out of the back of its skull, wobbling back and forth. Over the hammer, I saw Naveen, holding her hands to her mouth in horror, her eyes wider than I had ever seen them.
“Naveen, you saved me,” I said, but she didn’t move. I bucked my hips again and, this time, the Terminator rolled off of me, feeling like a side of beef sliding away.
“You did the right thing,” I said in a quiet and calming tone, as I sat up and reached out my arms for her.
Her face broke and she fell into my arms, her body shaking with sobs. I hugged her tight.
She said, “Oh, daddy.” And that’s when my heart broke. I wasn’t her real dad. He had been killed months ago, and I had never met him. She had ventured into my life, as brave a person as I had ever met, having to leave him to die and then survive on her own.
Now, she had blood on her hands, and I hated this world. This new undead wor
ld where children have to kill things with their bare hands.
I knew she would never be innocent again. This world would never let her be that way. I guess I had always hoped that she could somehow be removed from having to take on the real dirty work of killing these undead things. That she could retain some of her childhood innocence while she was a child. This world, in its cruel and cold way, taught me, as it always did, that it didn’t give a shit about what I wanted.
I heard something moving our way and looked around Naveen to see Kara cautiously moved towards us. She had her metal pole in her hand. I saw blood and dark colored goo dripping off its end. Her face looked as frightened as I had ever seen her.
“We’re okay,” I said quietly as I patted Naveen’s back. “We’re okay. Naveen saved me by taking out the zombie.”
Kara’s face relaxed some, but I could see the same heartbreak in her eyes that I felt.
But then the world, being the cruel son of a bitch that it was, decided that there was no time for emotional healing or a release from the horrors it dispatched on a daily basis.
The sound of the helicopter came back and it was zooming our way at an alarming speed and with a great sense of urgency. Again.
Chapter 25
Down on the Farm
In a case of delayed reaction, the shakes hit him hard when he got back to the farm. Old man Schultzy had been careful on his way back to the farm after making his way back to the truck, hidden under a thick canopy of pine trees. He was about to start it up when he heard the helicopters take off. That sent a little chill up his spine. If they sent choppers to find him, then he knew he was in serious trouble, but he waited and listened carefully.
The helicopter’s beating rotors increased in volume for several seconds sounding loud and angry, but then the noise receded, obviously letting him know that they were headed off in a different direction. Still, just to be safe, he waited for another thirty minutes, listening as hard as a seventy-eight-year-old could. The helicopters didn’t return.
He fired up the old pick-up truck and pushed it down the old logging road, taking it slow, and easy. No use rushing it and breaking an axle. The farm was still two miles and a long walk for his old legs and he already felt nearly spent after the little war he had started.
He eased the truck out of the woods, across a wide field, and up a rolling hill to the farm.
The old women, two sisters older than he was, were waiting on the porch, arms crossed, giving him the hairy eyeball as he cruised past the house to the old barn where he parked the truck. Madison Bloom, the young girl Joel’s group had left behind, was with them, watching him warily. He ignored them as best he could, but there was no avoiding them. As soon as he left the barn, they were giving him what-for in a long and nearly endless scolding about him leaving them like he had. Plus they had questions. Lots of questions.
He answered a few of them and told them he had to take a nap. He was tired, and it had been a long night. They didn’t like having their questions and concerns dismissed, but he was in charge of his own destiny and the captain of his own ship. Still, it took slamming his bedroom door to finally ward them off.
It was when he laid his head on the pillow that the shakes started, images of what he had done flashing in his mind. The zombie’s head exploding over Aaron. The soldiers looking in his direction. Him firing on them. Them firing back. His escape into the hidey hole. The nervous wait as the soldiers stood just feet away. It all had a cumulative effect.
Just like after the battles in Korea after fighting off wave after wave of Chinese soldiers threatening to overrun them, the fear crept in. He and his fellow soldiers had fought them off. While in the heat of battle, he was steady, but in the aftermath, his hands shook. He tried to hide it from his fellow soldiers, but he wasn’t the only one.
Questions also haunted him. What if the soldiers back at the Manor decided to track him down? There was little chance that he could fight them off and the old sisters wouldn’t pick up a gun to save their own lives. He didn’t doubt that a gunshot nearby them might give them a collective heart attack.
Then there was Madison. She was just a kid. But not totally. Only a few could stay young and innocent in this ugly new world, and she had seen some of the worst it had to offer. Behind her eyes, he saw something, though. Some of what he saw in the eyes of the guys that fought and survived alongside him in Korea. She didn’t seem to be the type that backed down easily.
But what was he thinking? He was an elderly man who had the shakes after a small skirmish. Going back to the Manor would be suicide. Taking a young kid would be beyond reckless. There was no way he could consider either action. Time to put that as far away from his mind as Korea was.
His hands calmed down, and he wanted to go to sleep -- to escape the fear that ate at him. It took twenty minutes for his thoughts to settle down and he drifted off to a restless sleep, filled with crazy dreams and dangerous images.
Chapter 26
Death from Above and Below
The helicopter was coming and it was coming fast. I pulled Naveen to the ground and started rolling to my right, hoping we could make it under the mobile home and out of view before the helicopter flew over. I also hoped that Kara took my cue.
My last hope was that the whole underside of the mobile home wasn’t teeming with zombies. Or spiders. God, how I hate spiders.
God smiled at me at that moment as the underside of the home was zombie and spider free. He smiled on me again as I heard Kara grunt and felt her snuggle up next to me. In almost any other situation, I would have been wholly happy about our little snuggle-fest, but there was a death dealing helicopter flying overhead and a small herd of zombies roaming through the maze of mobile homes looking for their next meal with us at the top of the menu.
What the underside lacked in zombies, it made up for in cobwebs and pieces of the weather soaked flooring of the trailer above us hanging down like Spanish moss in clumps and strings. There were was little doubt there was a vast armada of spiders up there, just not visible, but when weighing their threat against zombies and attack helicopters, I decided to ignore them.
The other compounding element of our predicament was that I had no idea where the other half of our party was. Jason and Brother Ed disappeared in our mad rush to get out of sight from the first sortie of helicopters and we hadn’t seen them since. With the deaders wandering the maze of homes, there was no shouting out for them.
Again, it was first things first. And that first thing was the helicopter.
The roaring beat of its blades rushed towards us and when it swooshed by overhead, I could practically feel the reverberation in my chest and head. As it turned out, part of that feeling came from the fact that Naveen was trembling against my chest.
“Joel, what are you going to do?” Kara asked as the helicopter circled the area. I couldn’t see, but could hear it.
Kara’s question was a good one and a query I wished I had an answer for.
“We need to find Jason and Brother Ed,” I replied.
“How are we going to do that?”
Another good question.
“We need to check how far we can see across the bottoms of these mobile homes,” I said as I rolled Naveen off my chest and craned my neck to see off our right. “You check in that direction.”
In places, I had an unobstructed view across the bottoms of several homes, but in other places, the flooring had completely collapsed onto the ground. What I was able to see was shadowy sets of legs moving among the homes.
“How can we tell who is a zombie and might be Jason or Brother Ed?” Kara asked.
She was just full of questions.
“Well, the deaders will most likely be shambling and our guys won’t be,” I said.
“That’s hard to tell,” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
The helicopter seemed to have stopped it’s circling pattern and moved to a hover and that hovering was getting closer to us. The force of it
s rotors kicked up debris off the ground and sent it banging off the sides of the mobiles homes. Dirt blew into our faces, prickling them.
“What if it just opens up its guns on the homes?” Kara asked.
“We have no control over that, so we have to let that go,” I said. I hope that made sense to her.
“Joel, I’m scared,” Naveen said.
“Me, too,” I replied, “but we’re going to get out of here. It’s going to be okay.”
Now, I had no idea how that was going to happen.
Something bumped into the side of the home we were under with a flat thud and the whole structure shifted slightly. I jerked my head to the right and saw a pair of legs that looked like those of a baby elephant press against the outer wall. Those legs were gray with large splotches of black along with old wounds on them, dark colored goo oozing from the edges.
I’m not sure what this deader was up to, but he was a big one, probably as wide as he was tall from the look of his legs. My only consolation was that he was probably too big to slide under the home to get at us. That consolation ended when two sets of normal legs appeared besides those large legs. I had no idea if they knew we were hiding underneath the home, but if they did mosey down to our level and started crawling after us, then we would be in trouble. The space underneath was too cramped to be able to put up a decent fight with our hand-to-hand weapons. Shooting them would be like sounding the dinner bell for the other undead in the area, but if it came to that, and I thought it might, then we’d face it down.
Throughout all the racket from the helicopter and the pitter patter of the feet of our zombie friends, I thought heard a whispering noise and when I looked back to my left, I saw Kara with her eyes closed. Her lips were moving slightly and I couldn’t read them, but I knew she was saying a prayer.
