Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel

by Jay Wilburn

  He sneered. “Officer Friendly, I presume. Oh, Lieutenant J. Berry, you were promoted. I hope it was worth it, you trigger-happy fascist.”

  Doc pocketed the badge and stood back up with the metal bar. He kicked the body at the vest and limped across the yard away from me. He started to look back. I ducked back behind the house. I looked down the trail back toward the park. I considered going back and leaving Doc to whatever this was. This felt like the moment where I raised my hand back on the roof during the funeral. This felt like a chance to not move forward into danger, if I just decided not to vote to go.

  I dared to look around the house again. He was gone. I walked out past the body and spotted him farther in the neighborhood.

  I thought this was him just walking away from us like he said he might do back when he and Chef were arguing on the roof. I was afraid, but I ran after him just the same.

  I caught up to him in the only yard with trees. The house had a high roof and wood siding, but it was a box like the others. The paint had peeled off the sides away from the boards and several holes.

  As I stepped up to one of the thick, tree trunks, I saw that there were police cars and a black truck surrounding the property. Doc was weaving through vehicles. The windows in the cars were cracked and holes were punched through the metal on the sides.

  He approached the house that was awash with bullet holes. I could tell by the missing sections that most of the shots had come from the inside out. I could tell by looking at the path in glass which direction a bullet had traveled too. It was one of those things kids learned in a world infested with zombies.

  Doc reached the front doorway and waited. The actual door was missing. He turned around again. I slid behind the tree. I didn’t watch, but I heard him step into house and across the floor boards.

  I waited for several minutes. I heard Doc’s pole at work again and heard him crying. It was a loose, braying sound and it carried through the open windows and doorway. I kept looking for walkers to be attracted to the noise. There were several minutes of long silence. I heard him creaking back outside again.

  In the yard, I lost him. I crouched and waited. I heard him in the bushes to my right with my back to the tree. He came out beyond the bushes and kept going.

  I didn’t know what I was doing there or what I was doing next.

  Doc was walking across the yards away from me without looking back. He was carrying a thick, file folder under his left arm and his bloody pole over his shoulder. That seemed like a lot of work for such a thing. A folder of papers seemed like a useless thing to fight zombies to acquire.

  It also struck me as odd that he didn’t have the roll of toilet paper with him. He had come out here on purpose. It seemed random to me. I felt the need to get back to the park before he saw I was gone, but I had already raised my hand to go forward.

  Before Doc was gone, I slid around the tree and walked through the cars to the dark doorway in the bullet riddled house. I stopped at the opening and stared into the darkness. There was insect noise behind me, but dead silence inside. I looked back at the empty cars standing guard behind me. The bulbs and plastic for the light bars were blown out facing the house.

  I didn’t remember ever seeing a living police officer, but these seemed to have lost this battle. From my perspective looking backward in time, the police seemed very ineffective and poorly deployed against the walking dead. I read about dinosaurs and I put police in the same category. People complained about police in stories and Doc had used the word as an insult toward Chef at the funeral.

  I turned back and creaked my way into the house. The furniture had the familiar look of cloth in a room with no doors or windows. Tables and cabinets were overturned and pushed toward the openings and then away from them again.

  There was a T.V. screen on the floor with three bullet holes in it. Television was another ancient wonder that was explained to me, but I couldn’t quite remember myself from before the zombies. We had watched movies once a week back at the Complex. Radio made sense to me and we had used walkie talkies, but the appeal of television escaped me.

  More vested bodies were cast aside on the floor. The skulls were nearly skinless revealing either rounded holes or crushed bone. One skeletal hand was still holding a corroded pistol. Another shotgun had decayed into three pieces next to another body leaning next to the front window.

  I stared at the spread of holes peppered into the wall around the empty window frame. Something seemed wrong about it. I looked out at the police cars that were focused in and the fire patterns of this skeletal officer’s shotgun blasts that seemed to be fired back out at the other police. Maybe the shotgun wasn’t his and was used against him, but the skull was ended by one bullet through the side judging from the holes. Maybe he got in and was turned around firing into the window at whoever they were attacking in here. Maybe there were teams of police like ancient armies that fought each other, but that seems like something people would have told me about in their stories. The bones of the officers had the familiar scratch marks over them that indicated teeth stripping away the flesh. Maybe they were all fighting zombies which could usually explain every death scene.

  I creaked deeper into the house. I had the good sense to leave, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the file folder and the missing toilet paper. These things made no sense to me. The bodies, the guns, the standoff, and the death were all part of my world. Doc coming here for a folder was alien to me.

  The kitchen deepened the mystery.

  The furniture had been moved out to the front room for the failed barriers either against the police or the zombies, one. That made sense. The kitchen counter had piles of brightly wrapped boxes. The paper was a little faded and tired, but the boxes and bows were still waiting for the guest of honor to tear into them. The remains of paper streamers and a shiny, silver sign hung weakly from the overhead light.

  I flipped the light switch and then dropped my head. I expected a voice of either Short Order or Doc to tease me. I looked back at the front door in fear. He wasn’t there.

  I walked up to read the sign. It was completely washed out to the shinny material underneath, but the faint outline of the letters remained. It said, Happy Birthday.

  I walked back out and looked at the light out the front door and the darkness down the hallway. I chose the darkness.

  My eyes adjusted again as I creaked slowly forward. I could see the body in the bathroom doorway. I could smell it. It still had decayed flesh holding on to the bones. Fresh, putrid gore was leaking out of a gash in the skull. I recognized the oblong wound in the skull as Doc’s work. She had just been brained before I walked into the house. It had been an adult, female zombie that was lying dispatched on her side leaking through the gap between the bathroom tile and the warped, plywood floor.

  Her hands and feet were bound by stretched lengths of duct tape. Broader strips wrapped the rest of the arms, legs, and body. Several bites were taken out of the exposed skin between tape rings. There was a broken piece of silver tape still attached to her green cheeks on both sides of her mouth, but chewed through roughly in the middle. With her mouth hanging open, I could see strings of glue stuck to the teeth and lips. Her eyes stared sleepy and half closed at my feet. A zombie in duct tape was new to me.

  I stepped over and went in deeper.

  There was a skeleton tied out flat on the bare mattress of a bed in another room by lengths of rope with feet together and bound to the foot board and hands bound together to the headboard above the skull. It still had dress pants, a shirt, and a tie hanging loose on the body.

  I walked up to it.

  The empty eye sockets seemed to be looking to me for help. The body had settled into a deep groove in the mattress with a wide, discolored stain around it. I felt the pockets, but there was nothing, but a set of keys. There was nothing on them to tell me who he was. I put the keys back into his pocket for no reason. There were apples on the tie.

  Something was clinched in
the back of the jaw. I peeled the bottom jaw open until it snapped loose. There was a metal clip. I pulled, but it wouldn’t come. There was still tissue decaying around it. I pulled it loose and found a rectangle of plastic attached to the clip. It was some sort of identification badge, but it was caked and unreadable. I dropped it down on the mattress beside the broken jaw.

  I walked into the next bedroom. There was no furniture, but there were more bodies. Some were in pieces, so it was hard to get a count. Some were skeletal and others were still preserved by the evil magic of zombification. There were five that had turned into zombies and had the same distinctive strikes to their freshly opened heads. They bled out black and grey brain matter. All of them were bound by the duct tape like the one from the bathroom. All but one of the zombies still had tape across their mouths and wrapped around their abused heads.

  Doc knew they were here and he came here for this purpose. I shivered as I stepped back into the hall.

  I looked in the partially open door to the last bedroom. I still didn’t know about the file folder. It took five creaking steps to reach it and the door ground on its hinges as I pushed it open.

  The bed was made and all the furniture was in place. It was as if this room was from another house in another world. The back window was broken and the glass was inside. The drapes were thread bare and molding, but there were no bodies or bullet holes. There was an open, cedar trunk at the end of the bed. I approached it slowly.

  Inside, several photo albums had been opened and pushed around so the lid wouldn’t close. I flipped through a couple pages. The plastic covers over the pictures were brittle. There were spaces for pictures that had been taken. I had gone through several pages before I realized I was looking for pictures of Doc. There were none. There were other men. There was a woman who could have been the one on the bathroom floor. There were several of a young, blond girl.

  I pulled one out and flipped it over. It said Jennifer Trasker, 7, second grade. I flipped another one that was penciled in the corner Jenny, 12, camp. Another was captioned on the back, mom and Jenny, 11, summer. Some had nothing written on the back. There were no Browns pictured or labeled.

  There were stacks of file folders on the other side of the trunk. I flipped through these quickly. None of the papers inside meant anything to me. They were forms and typed pages from another time that were good for burning now since the trunk had kept them dry. The covers were labeled in pencil in the same handwriting as on the pictures. They read various years that no one I knew used anymore. Most were labeled as tax records. The folders on top had Baker on them. The ones underneath with earlier years were marked as tax records for Trasker.

  There was a folder for vital records. Jennifer Trasker’s certificate of live birth long form was in there. So was her Social Security Administration membership card and number paper-clipped to the edge of the folder. Under Jennifer Lynn Trasker’s card was an older card for Theresa C. Lynnard. There were two blank forms for legal name changes. There was another one with Jennifer Lynn Trasker on one line and Jennifer Lynn Baker on another. There were also plane tickets in the name of John Baker. There was a license of marriage and other papers for Theresa and John Baker.

  A license of marriage struck me as odd. People were just married and had children in the Complex. Everyone knew who was married. I had trouble imagining a world with so many people that couples had to keep a paper reminding them to whom they were married.

  There was a folder of newspaper clippings near the very bottom. Most were death announcements for several Lynnards. They must have done funerals in writing in the past. Under the flat clippings was one for a Trasker. It was bigger and folded over several times. I opened it, but this one was a long story. The block title was Community Torn As Trasker Case Is Reopened.

  I read no more of it.

  “When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word,” filtered in through the hall.

  There was a creak at the boards at the front door on the other side of the house. I froze in place.

  “What a glory he sheds on our way,” the line finished in the living room.

  Three more creaks approached the hall.

  I stuffed the funeral papers back in the folder and slid them back under the stack. I couldn’t remember how the albums were arranged before I touched them. I still had one news clipping in my other hand. I stuffed it into my pocket and looked under the bed for a place to hide. Hiding under the bed had not worked well for me in the past. There was a crow’s body under there in the glass, but this was a desperate situation. The board creaked under me as I shifted.

  The singing stopped. I was caught. The steps moved more quickly now as I waited to be discovered. They were moving away. I heard paper tearing in the kitchen. The guest of honor had arrived and was opening his presents.

  “No, not this one,” he said. “Bitch better not have thrown out … What paper did I use? Jesus, a hundred years ago today … What do you think this one was, Officer Friendly? Happy Birthday, Jenny, hope you like crap.”

  Another box was unwrapped and then another. I tried to move at the height of noise as I slipped through to my hiding place.

  Doc shouted, “Bingo Bob!”

  My blood ran cold and I felt fear slice through my heart like a specialized, aluminum pole through skull bone. His pole hit a wall somewhere with a thump and I finished sliding through the gap into place.

  “If we do his good will,” Doc sang more lively now.

  The boards in the hallway creaked as he approached.

  “Pardon me, Terry,” he mumbled, “He abides with us still.”

  He passed the bedroom and went into the room with the stretched out skeleton. There was no noise for some time. The mattress creaked a couple times and then there was silence. The bed springs protested again and then silence.

  “How do you suppose this happened, John?” Doc asked himself, “Trust and obey. For there is no other way.”

  The boards creaked out in the hall and stopped again.

  Doc called out, “What the hell were you thinking, John? What would possess you not to tell me this was here? You had to know. I didn’t come back just to badger you some more, I promise. Did you cough it up before or after you finished dying? What possessed you?”

  He stepped into the bedroom with the trunk of albums and thumped the bloody end of his pole several times next to the trunk.

  He said, “Happy in Jesus.”

  He pushed the door open to the closet and waited. He walked across the room and pushed another door open that revealed a bathroom. I could see the back of his head in the mirror over the dresser. Doc turned and looked at me in the mirror. I felt like I was staring at a stranger. He kept looking as he reached in and pulled out a hand towel. He kept staring as he wiped off his weapon and dropped the towel in the floor. He still had the thick file folder stuck in his armpit held against his body with his elbow.

  He walked back across the room and looked under the bed at the body hidden there. He just stared for a moment.

  “You don’t belong here,” he said calmly.

  He swung the shaft under the bed and knocked the crisp body of the crow out into the broken glass on the floor beside the bed. A few feathers fell out as it went.

  “For there is no other way to be happy in Jesus,” Doc sang as he stood.

  He looked through the thin material of the drape. He reached the end of the aluminum across the room and pulled each one aside. They drifted back down as he let them slide off the pole.

  He set the pole and folder on the floor as he started pulling out the albums from the open trunk. I couldn’t see him clearly in the mirror from over the window sill outside. I could see the crow in the floor and the corner of his folder, but not where Doc was by the trunk. I heard the brittle plastic break as he started pulling out specific pictures one at a time placing them inside the cover of his mystery folder.

  I looked down and made sure I stepped on bare patches of dirt instead of grass or
leaves outside the open window just a few feet from Doc. I ventured one last look through the window from the back corner of the house. The view through the window in the mirror showed the opposite wall and an open door. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him moving the albums in the trunk.

  I turned just as the zombie lunged for me. His hands grabbed my sleeves as his open mouth closed in on my neck. We spun twice as the zombie’s feet came out from under him and we fell to the ground. We rolled once in the dirt and I ended up on top. The creature hissed dry air through its open and shredded vocal cords. Its jaw clicked as the teeth opened and closed. He was clawing at my stomach through my shirt leaving streaks of dirt and muck.

  I pushed his flailing arms down to his bare chest and folded them over a tattoo of a multicolored lizard. The rainbow lizard was wearing sunglasses as it looked up at me from the dead, wrinkled flesh showing every rib through the thin skin. I pinned the wrists and the body under my knees as I drew my knife again. The creature leaned up as far as the neck would bend and closed its teeth a couple inches away from my knee. He tried again and again.

  I paused as I looked up at the open window. Over the hissing coming from the useless throat I could still hear Doc thumping around in the trunk.

  He sang, “In the light of the day as we continue our way, may God’s love pour out as we say, Trust and Obey.”

  I was relieved as I drove the blade halfway into the center of the forehead underneath me. I twisted the knife from side to side as I felt the body become peaceful against my knees. I pulled twice before the weapon jerked free of the bone mired with decayed brain cells.

  I reached under quickly and caught the back of the mangy head before it banged against the ground. I gently placed the loose head against the dirt as Doc sang inside the bedroom window.

  “Stand with him now and let him carry your cares every day,” Doc advised.

  I wiped both sides of the blade on the colorful lizard, but it didn’t come clean. I sheathed it and stood back up. Taking the wrists, I pulled the body slowly across the ground only letting the legs slide against the dirt. I got around the side. I lowered the body letting the head settle first, then the back, and then the arms back across the chest. I looked at it for a moment and then moved one arm so it covered the head and the fresh knife wound.