by Mark Clodi
"Zombies." Joe whispered.
The Doña caught his word and yelled it out to the men, then turned to Joe, "How do we drive them off?"
Joe laughed, it was always like this. The people had problems and the answers were always right there in front of them, but they required a leader to tell them to do what was needed. Oppressive governments didn't breed initiative into the populace. Shaking his head he said, "I don't know. Hit them in the head."
"Joe says to hit them in the head." yelled the Doña. The four men holding the line immediately did so; the zombies made absolutely no attempt to dodge or deflect the machetes and went down as one.
The women started screaming and the men continued their grisly work. The stream of customers lined up on the street outside, eager to get in for one more meal. Joe asked the Doña, "Where is your machete?" The woman turned and yelled for one of the girls she employed to get Joe her machete.
Taking the weapon in hand Joe stepped up to aid the other men in their work "We must push them back so we can close the gate!" Joe yelled. Like most businesses Doña Ria's had a security gate. This was also her home and she had not been thrifty when she had it put into place. Her living quarters were on the second floor, and she had a back yard that was surrounded with a nine foot tall cinder block wall that had shards of glass embedded in the top of it. Each home was a fortress for when the inevitable day came when one revolution or another would chance the power structure of the country. In the meantime, the hefty construction served to keep out petty burglars and thieves.
Grunting, the men proceeded to do as Joe had said, pressing forward over the fallen, instead of falling back as the bodies piled up. They reached the foyer easily enough, but from there they would not make headway against the bodies. There were just too many trying to press into the house now.
"We need a distraction. Severino you and I need to go out onto the street and lead them away from here."
"How?" asked the man, no doubt wondering how they could get out.
"We go out the back, over the back wall and around the corner and we throw rocks or make noise to get them away from here. When we lead them away, the others throw the bodies out and close the gate."
"Doña?" asked Severino looking towards the woman.
"Yes, do it. I have a ladder to get you over the wall in back. Relinda, get a blanket to cover the glass on the wall."
'So easily are the defenses breeched.' thought Joe a moment later as he and Severino clambered over the wall into the yard behind the restaurant. They dropped down into the grass and looked around for a way out. Unlike the Doña's house, this one had a gate that led directly to the street, a wide gate that a car could drive through, but no car was present. Approaching the gate they saw it was padlocked from the outside.
'Nothing is ever easy.' He thought scratching at his neck through the dishcloth. The top of the gate had sharpened metal spikes on it and Joe was eying them with some concern when Severino opened the unlocked back door and went inside the house. It turned out to be very easy to go through the house and get to the street beyond.
Together they ran around the block to get back to the front of the Doña's house and as one they killed two of the zombies at the tail end of the mob. It looked to Joe like there were several hundred zombies squished together in front of the house all pressing to get inside.
"What do we do now?" asked Severino, taking out another zombie with a casual swipe of his blade.
"We have to make noise, get them to follow us." Joe started yelling obscenities in English at the mob. Surprisingly, Severino joined him, mispronouncing most of the English words, but doing far better than Joe would have thought possible from him. 'And I thought you were a gentleman too. Aside from the whole pimping your daughter out thing.'
The zombies at the rear of the crowd turned towards them, but those near the front were not heading their way even after a few minutes yelling at the top of their voices.
"What do we do Joe?" asked Severino.
"Kill a few. Hope the others can hold the rest while we do our work." Joe hoped his words came across, his Spanish was decent, but sometimes he misused words and it led to misunderstandings.
Joe's neck was irritating him; it felt like when he had poison ivy after that hike up Mount Pakura. Severino noticed and asked, "You okay? Your neck doesn't look so good."
"It itches." Joe confirmed, "I should have put medicine on it."
"When we get back." Severino nodded.
"Yes."
Both men turned and struck the nearest zombies at the same time, dropping the first two of the wave that was following them with ease. The next group was a little more difficult to deal with because of the number. By the time the third wave got to them, they mutually decided to retreat half a block to stretch the group out more.
After moving quickly away, they turned to face their foes again, only to see that the group following them had swollen in size. Apparently their plan was working.
"We can't...there are too many!" Severino said.
"We need to lead them away. Let's go to the end here and then turn right, lead the zombies towards the highway. After that we will circle around and go back through the house and see how they are doing."
Severino nodded his agreement and the two spent the next forty five minutes leading the slow moving zombies back towards the other parts of town. As they went the crowd of zombies grew. Joe and Severino had to hack down zombies that appeared in front of them by the time they reached the highway.
"We have to run." Joe said, panting from the effort.
Severino still looked cool and collected, but he was used to working all day in the hot fields around the town. "I can run. Can you run?"
"Sure, for a little."
"Okay Joe. Let's go."
The two of them broke from the following mob and ran a block down the highway. The zombies followed them to the corner, but when they didn't see the two anymore they started milling around disoriented. Joe and Severino paused only once on their trip back to the house behind the Doña's; they stopped to warn off three farmers who were heading out to the fields with their lunch buckets and machetes. This took a few minutes of lively debate. Mostly Severino did the talking while Joe tried to catch his breath. Finally one farmer took off back to his house to check on his family and the other two agreed to make a short detour from their path to see what was happening at Doña Ria's before making up their minds.
The four men went back through the house behind the café and into the back yard where they saw the blanket was still tossed over the high wall. With some small effort they stacked up enough yard furniture to climb to the top of the wall and look over. Severino was at the top and called out, "Doña Ria? Doña Ria!"
A voice answered him quietly and Severino nodded and gestured for everyone to climb over the wall. Joe was the last one over and after he climbed down, Severino got back up on the ladder with a shovel and used the long handled to knock the table and boxes they had used to climb the wall back down.
"We should have barricaded that house. Just in case." He confided in Joe after climbing back to the ground.
Joe nodded, but didn't say anything. He was sitting on one of the rickety old chairs Doña Ria had in her small back yard.
"You feeling okay, Joe?" asked Severino.
"Not so good. I feel...." Joe leaned over and vomited into the grass.
Severino jumped backwards. Lily, one of the young women who worked with the Doña yelled out something too fast in Spanish for Joe to catch. A moment later Ria was there, with a hot towel, wiping off his face and making soothing noises.
"His neck is bothering him." Severino pointed to the dried blood and rash on Joe's neck.
"What happened?" the Doña asked.
"It was an old man in the park. I thought he was drunk and trying to kiss me." Joe inflected the Spanish to convey the humor, "But he tried to bite me. I ran back here after that."
"It looks like he did bite you." said Ria, spongi
ng off Joe's neck. Turning to Lily she said, "Fetch the medicine and some clean towels."
The girl fled and returned shortly with a tube of anti-bacterial cream and some clean, off-white, rags. Doña Ria saturated Joe's bite with the cream and bandaged him up as best she could. She ended the treatment by offering Joe the 'home remedy' of his choice, either pineapple flavored or straight grain. Joe smiled and accepted a shot of straight liquor. Both were horrible tasting 'guaro', Joe chose the straight stuff to try and win some machismo points with Severino, who was looking on with concern. The older man nodded and Joe felt a flush of justification.
Inside the café some sort of commotion broke out. The Doña went to see what it was and came back outside a moment later.
"What?" Joe asked.
She didn't answer him, but Severino went inside and had a heated discussion with someone in the kitchen.
"What happened after we left Doña?" Joe asked, hoping she would talk to him about something.
"They still tried to get in, but then you led them away and most of them left. The men, always trying to show off, they chased them out into the street and there was a great deal of killing. Then Jaime got pulled down. A bunch of them, the zombies, fell on him and bit him. He screamed and the other men fought the beasts off. That is what happened just now Joe. He died. And then he came back. As one of them."
Doña Ria looked at Joe, her eyes lingering on his wound. Joe gulped and placed his hand on his neck. He was about to respond when Severino came out of the kitchen.
"Joe." he said, "You have to go."
"What?"
"You were bit. Jaime was bit; he turned into one of them when he died."
"But I'm not dying!"
Severino looked at Joe, then at the men who had filed out of the kitchen into the backyard. "He's not dying yet."
"We can't keep him here. He'll turn into one of them." said one man.
Another chimed in, "Dump him over the back wall."
This seemed to be the consensus of the men. They wanted Joe segregated from them for their own protection. Severino tried, but not very hard, to go against the grain. In the end Joe found himself climbing down into the yard next door. After a moment Severino joined him.
"Come. We'll barricade the front doors and get you some food and drink for the day. If you last that long then I will talk to the others again and try to bring you back over the wall."
The two men worked moving the couch and other furniture in front of the wooden door to the house. The windows already boasted heavy wooden shutters, all of which were pulled tightly closed. After securing the place they moved into the kitchen and Severino found Joe some water, crackers, cans of sardines and two bottles of guaro, both pineapple flavored.
Joe wrinkled his nose, but moved the bottles out onto the back patio with him. Juan Carlos, one of the waitress's sons, was peering over the wall and waved as he saw the men. The boy shouted behind him, "They are still okay. They are coming onto the back porch."
Sitting down on the patio, Severino, filled the large tumbler with guaro and drank from it, then handed the cup to Joe, who also took a swig.
"How are you feeling Joe?"
"I don't feel so great. My neck itches, like a fire. Like when I had poison ivy on the mountain."
Severino nodded, he remembered when the young man had come down off of the mountain covered in blotchy rashes.
Music drifted over the wall as someone put a cd on.
Joe shook his head and smiled, "The world is ending and we are here drinking and listening to music."
Shrugging his thin shoulders Severino said, "It's not a bad life."
"No, it isn't."
"Joe. If you die, do you want me to tell your family anything?"
He hadn't thought of that, "Tell them I love them. I will find some paper and write a note, just in case. I'll leave it on the table here, okay?"
Severino gestured for the cup and he drank deeply from it again. Joe almost held it back, after all if he was contagious how did they know the cup wasn't full of whatever caused this? Then he realized the man was making a statement by drinking after him. Joe nodded his thanks and took the cup back.
"Joe. If you are really feeling bad and you know it, deep in your heart you will know it. Then drink more, so when the end comes it isn't as painful."
"Good advice my friend. I am sorry I didn't court your daughter."
"Bah, you Americans, too good for our women!"
"Bah! You Hondurans, wasting your children on good for nothing Americans."
Both men smiled. Severino rose and climbed back over the wall. When only his chest was visible he paused and said, "You have to take the tables down. Just in case."
"Okay." Joe said. He walked over and took down the tables and boxes that formed the ladder on his side of the wall.
"See you, Joe."
"See you, Severino."
Joe sat back down on the chair besides the table and reflected on this culture he was living in; he imagined it was exactly like America's culture had been fifty to sixty years before. Shaking his head he concentrated on his 'heart', like Severino had said. It felt bad. Like a laboring donkey in one of the poor farmers fields. Animals here weren't pets, they were animals. They worked. No one had time to do more than the minimum care to keep the beasts alive and when they wouldn't cooperate...Well Joe hadn't really seen any animals that didn't cooperate with their owners. A harsh word was usually enough to bring any wayward farm animal back into line, when that didn't work the usual method was to use whips, fists and kicks to get the beast to comply.
'Like the women, almost' Women had a certain power, though they did not put it to the test very often. It took a lot for them to band together and force changes. The best men just shook their heads and let the crazy mujeres do what they wanted. The worst...well there were always whips, fists and kicks.
Heart laboring, Joe knew he was infected. It was a slow realization, but by dinner time he was sure.
"Joe? Are you still...Joe?" called Juan Carlos over the wall.
Joe looked up wearily and nodded, "Yeah, I'm me. How are things over there?"
"Good. Are you hungry?"
'Good. The boy says. Zombies eating everyone, all of them locked up in a house with twenty people and things are 'good'. These people are sure down to earth.' Joe realized the boy was still waiting for an answer so he said, "I could eat. There isn't any food is there?" Long ago Joe had realized that the culture called for saying, 'there isn't any' instead of 'is there'. It was quirky, but he liked it.
"Yes, Doña Ria made you a dinner." Juan Carlos waved a rectangular black box at Joe from up on the wall. "I will lower it to you. It is good."
Joe got unsteadily to his feet. He was not drunk, he had only finished the single glass of guaro with Severino. His muscles ached like he had been running a marathon without any training. Slowly he limped over to the wall and held up his hands. Juan Carlos lowered the lunch bucket into his hands and Joe nodded in thanks.
"You don't want any water do you Joe? There isn't any there, is there?"
"No, no water. I have plenty to drink already." Joe's eyes wandered back to the bottle on the table outside the house, looking up he said, "Tell Doña Ria 'thank you' for me."
"I will. Goodbye, Joe."
"Goodbye, Juan Carlos."
Joe made his way back to the table, opened the lunch bucket and poured himself a full cup of the harsh liquor. He preceded his meal by drinking half of the cup. Dinner was good. It was simple fair, tortillas, beef, cabbage and carrots, with a sweet bit of cornbread for dessert. The Doña had also included a container of beans with a dollop of the Honduran sour cream that Joe loved.
'How did she know?' Joe couldn't recall every telling her how much he loved the local sour cream.
Joe saved the beans for last and finished off the cup when his meal was through. He placed all of the little bowls back into the lunch bucket and tidied up from his meal as best he could without going inside for a ra
g to wipe up the table.
Thinking about his aching body he poured another cup of liquor. He drank it down fast as his heart pounded in his chest. Soon he was crying, thinking about the unfairness of his situation. Where were his parents? His friends? Why did he have to die here? What did this mean.. Finally he reached the point where he could cry no more; it was full dark. The music from over the wall was still on, but turned way down. Lazily it drifted on the air to tantalize his ears. His eyes were drawn to the wall; someone was standing on the ladder looking over at him.
"Severino?" he called out softly. "You there?"
"I'm here Joe."
"What's the news?"
"Nothing good. How are you feeling?"
"I took your advice Severino, I am drunk."
"So you know?"
Joe nodded, perhaps a second too long, "Oh yes. I can feel it Severino. It is changing me. From the inside. I think the alcohol is helping me fight it. What is the news?"
"It is everywhere. We have the short wave and all the channels are bad. Except Castro, he says Cuba is free and warns that he will sink any boats and shoot down any planes that approach the island. He says it is a capitalistic plot to destroy communism."
Joe laughed. Before he had come to Honduras he hadn't thought about Cuba or its dynastic leadership, but in the region it was a big deal. The communist regime was given respect for having stood up to the largest military power for so long. Stamping out 'mini-revolution' cells inspired by Cuba's founders was a pastime for the local military.
"Well we all know how Cuba is."
Severino joined him in laughing and merely said, "Yes, we do."
"Is everyone else okay? Are there any...zombies out still?"
"We are okay. Crowded. There are a few zombies in the streets. We will clear them in the morning and then send out men to find the survivors and bring them here. We are going to clear this block. Then work block by block towards the fields."
