The arms of both twins were covered in bite marks that were too small to be human. Thanks to Mr. Raymond’s info, it painted a picture, giving me a clue as to what happened to them. The kids had probably been infected first. By what? More cats maybe, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Their parents had been next, most likely crying out such idiotic platitudes as “It’s your mommy. Don’t you recognize me?” even as their former kids were busy taking bite-sized chunks out of them.
They say love is a many splendored thing, but during a deadly outbreak of virulent plague, all it did was make you a fucking imbecile. Can’t say it surprised me, though.
What did was the speed at which Abel charged forward. It wasn’t quite an outright run like in more recent zombie movies—a sad attempt to ratchet up the danger by making the undead seem like the progeny of Usain Bolt. It was more a shambling lope, kinda what you’d expect from something whose legs still worked but whose brain was too liquefied to know how to properly use them.
Either way, it got the job done, and Abel closed the distance between us with surprising speed. Sadly for him, this was one pitch I was ready for. I swung SPAZ just as he stepped into range.
Homerun, fucker! Maybe I should have named my bat Cain instead.
One of the nails sunk deep into the side of Abel’s head, and it was instant lights out. He went down in a heap, and I yanked SPAZ free. Sadly, his brother was almost as fast. He was on me like white on rice before I could pull back for another swing. All I saw were teeth coming at my face and then clink. The idiot’s chompers clacked onto the faceplate of my helmet and slid off.
My turn.
I reared back and head-butted Abraham, feeding him a mouthful of carbon fiber and hard plastic. That sent him staggering back enough to let me stab out with SPAZ’s business end. The bayonet went into his mouth and punctured his palate. I felt the blade scrape against the back of his skull, but I already knew I’d won. Abraham twitched once and then dropped like a bad habit.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I proclaim you emancipated...from life.”
Hmm, maybe I’d forgo the historical one-liners next time. I kinda sucked at it. It didn’t really matter much anyway so long as they were all dead.
All?
Oh crap! Quick as I was to celebrate taking out the Curtis twins, I spun even faster. As expected, both Mom and Dad were making a fucking mess of things. Mr. Curtis had Mom pinned to the ground. She’d managed to get the shovel between them, so he was biting the handle, but it was a losing battle if ever I saw one. As for Dad, he’d gotten the better of Mrs. Curtis, but couldn’t seem to understand why she was still crawling toward him. The freaking idiot had nailed every part of her except where it counted.
I made a mental note to kill them in their sleep if they didn’t improve quickly, then leapt back into the fray. First up was Mom since she looked about three seconds away from becoming an appetizer. I stepped in, raised SPAZ high, and brought it down with a solid clonk, splitting Mr. Curtis’s head and raining gore down upon my mother. Served her right. Maybe a shower of hot brains would wake her the fuck up.
“Yo, Dad!” If I had to save him, too, I was gonna be in one hell of an ornery mood come dinner time. When he looked up at me, I raised a finger and slowly pointed it to my noggin.
“Oh yeah, forgot about that,” he called back. “Um, does it have to be in the head? That seems so...mean.”
Yeah, smothering him in his sleep was still on the table.
Mrs. Curtis was a mess. Broken arms, legs, and a crushed torso. But she was a mess that was still trying to bite things. That meant she was dangerous. “Do it.”
“But...”
“Do it!” I repeated.
Dad looked like he wanted to puke, but then he finally nodded. He lifted the mallet, closed his eyes...and then gouged a chunk out of the pavement as he completely missed her head.
“Now do it again, idiot.”
This time he didn’t miss, popping her skull like an overripe grape. Hopefully the street cleaners had gotten the memo about the world ending, because if not, they weren’t going to have a fun time scraping up all her pieces.
“Good,” I said, throwing the old dog a bone. “Next time do better.”
5
UNSAFE HOUSE
Dad wanted to turn back for Darlene, but he needn’t have bothered. She was already skipping down the road toward us, an oblivious smile plastered on her face and what looked to be the same pile of mistreated dolls in her hands.
She stopped to look down at Mrs. Curtis’s remains. “Eww. That’s gross.”
“You’re gross,” I replied. “Did you get your stupid doll? Because, you know, we were so worried about her.”
The sarcasm flew so far over my sister’s head that she’d have needed a plane ticket to catch it. “No, silly.”
“No?!”
“Carlene was being naughty. So I told her to sit in the corner.”
I had to be adopted because there was no way I could be related to such a flipping idiot.
Pity that Dad’s stupidity was on full display to distract me from knocking her teeth out with the butt of my shotgun.
“Should we...I dunno...bury these guys?”
That was going to be difficult since we’d brought a shovel and not a squeegee. “There isn’t time to bury every hungry corpse we come across. Leave them for the buzzards.”
“But shouldn’t we at least say a few words before we go?” Mom asked, her hair and shirt still covered in bits of Mr. Curtis. “It seems disrespectful to leave them like this. We did kind of kill them.”
We? As if. “I wouldn’t bother. Besides, we didn’t kill them. They were already dead when we found them.”
“But they were still...”
“Walking? Yeah. That’s how this zombie thing works. But trust me. The shambling dead don’t need eulogies. What they need is to be put down, permanently. If you really want to say some words, forget about them and ask God to make sure we survive the next attack, because believe me, there will be another. This is only the beginning.”
“I’m going to try 9-1-1 again,” Dad said, pulling out his cell phone.
I opened my mouth to say something, but held my tongue. I understood how it was. The world was dying, and the vast majority of the people still littering its surface were in the denial phase. It seemed I alone had skipped ahead to acceptance. There was my sister, too, but so far as I was aware, there was no step in the five stages of grief to account for dipshits. That was fine. I accepted her death for her. Hell, I was kinda looking forward to it.
I patiently picked bits of brain from SPAZ while I waited for Dad to acknowledge that the busy signal he kept getting was indicative of how truly fucked things were. If the cops and EMTs had half a brain, they were going to cover their own asses rather than deal with bodies who refused to stay dead. Any who hadn’t gotten the memo were probably already in the process of being digested.
But not me. The undead could eat my dick, figuratively anyway.
“Any luck, honey?” Mom’s tone was disturbingly calm, the same she used to tell us when dinner was ready. She was probably going into shock. Sucked for her, but she needed to hold her shit together until we got where we were going. Because if she fell behind, she was on her own. There were no time outs in the apocalypse.
“Line’s still busy. Maybe they’re understaffed today.”
“Maybe,” I offered. “But hey, tomorrow might be better. I’m sure someone will think, ‘The world is overrun by feral corpses hungering for my flesh, but I don’t want my minimum wage paycheck docked.’”
“Your sarcasm isn’t appreciated, young man,” Dad replied, trying to use his parental voice to intimidate me.
Good luck with that. “And you being a dumb fuck isn’t appreciated either. Now let’s go before I ditch you all like a bunch of bad pennies.”
Dad sputtered for a couple of seconds, still unaccustomed to the new food chain I’d established. I half-expected him to try telling
me to go to my room. If so, my response was going to be one warning shot before I blew his fucking kneecaps off. But, fortunately for him, he decided that whining was more to his advantage, like a Chihuahua hoping that humping a Rottweiler’s leg might actually convince it he’s in charge. “Y-you still haven’t told us where we’re going.”
“Follow and find out.”
“Are we going to the playground?” Darlene asked.
“No,” I replied through gritted teeth.
“The toy store?”
“No.”
“What about Marjorie’s house?”
“Your friends are all dead.”
“So, no tea party today?”
Armageddon was less than half a day old, and already I had to wonder how Rainbow Not-So-Brite here was still drawing breath.
“NO!” I screamed at her, breaking my own rule about being silent. It was worth it, or would have been had she cowered as I’d hoped.
“Mommy says that only rude people yell.”
“Then listen up, cupcake, because I am the rudest motherfucker you are ever gonna meet.”
Her response was to blink stupidly for several seconds, then ask, “So where are we going?”
I spun on my heel and started walking. It was either that or see how many kicks it took to get to the center of her Tootsie Pop head.
“You didn’t tell me where...”
“To the scrapyard!” I snapped.
“Why? What’s there?”
“Otis. He’s a friend, or at least he better hope he is.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Otis owned the junkyard at the far end of town. When he wasn’t crushing cars or dumpster diving for scrap metal, he could often be found deep within his own personal haven of trash, working on his little hobby.
See, I knew Otis’s secret. At the playground, his name had often been mentioned as a boogeyman of sorts. He wasn’t very talkative and mostly kept to himself, oh, and he lived in a fucking dump, too, hence becoming prime material for the local kids to gossip about.
I didn’t pay it much mind. The typical spew that came gushing from the mouths of my classmates was so much bullshit you’d have thought they spent their nights grazing. Most of it was the same garbage you’d hear anywhere: kids trying to scare the crap out of their more gullible brethren. They said things like Otis had a collection of human skin, that he liked to jerk off outside kids’ windows at night, that he was responsible for just about every crime in our boring town whether it was a dead raccoon in the road—that he’d obviously fucked to death—or whatever teen had run away from home—and also been fucked to death.
But there was one rumor that caught my ear last year, one different from the rest. It made me curious enough to start snooping around the junkyard in my spare time until I was bold enough to strike up a conversation of sorts with Otis.
He didn’t particularly like kids hanging around, but I was persistent, and eventually he grew used to my presence. Though he heavily hinted at what I wanted to know, he was always very coy about it...at least until the day I finally won him over. All it took was a half-full bottle of cheap vodka that I’d found in the trash and suddenly I was his best friend.
You see, Otis’s real secret wasn’t that he was killing kids or whacking off outside people’s houses. No. Otis was a prepper. The reason he kept to himself was because the guy bought into conspiracy theories more easily than dollar store wine. He’d been working for years to convert a section of his junkyard into his own personal oasis for the end times.
In some ways, it was brilliant. He had access to all the scrap metal and tools he needed. A junkyard wasn’t exactly a place where many people would snoop around and spy on him, present company not included. And, unlike the crazies building cabins and bomb shelters out in the middle of fucking nowhere, he was close enough to town to enjoy such amenities as supermarkets and laundromats until such time as the world went to hell.
He was right to prepare, just wrong about the cause. See, Otis was all about worrying that it would be Muslims, liberals, or whatever other buzz group was in the headlines that week. He was far too ready to believe stupid shit like government death troops, trained to go door-to-door selling wholesale murder. That was his mistake. He thought people would be the cause. But people can think, and usually there’s just enough folks around with common sense to keep us from completely spiraling into madness.
But monsters, that’s a different story. The undead don’t think. They just eat. And if they can’t eat you, they’ll chase you down until you’re too tired to do anything but let them eat you.
The only way to fight them is to accept that fact. Find a safe place to eat and sleep, then spend the rest of the time hunting the fuckers down and splitting their heads open.
Otis had, over the years, built a bunker both in and below the junkyard. He’d dug a well for fresh water, had enough canned food stored to last for years, and had acquired a good-sized stockpile of weapons—some bought and some fashioned from the trash around him. Hell, I wasn’t too ashamed to admit that his collection of cobbled bludgeoning tools had inspired SPAZ.
In short, the man was ready for the end of the world. The only thing he hadn’t prepared for was having company to share it with.
And he was going to get company, whether he liked it or not.
6
TAKING OUT THE TRASH
We ran into a couple more zombies as we crossed town, annoying but in few enough numbers that we were able to take them out fairly quickly.
Though I couldn’t be sure, and I wasn’t quite stupid enough to go check for myself, I had an inkling that the local police were responsible for our relatively easy trek. No, they didn’t mount an effective defense or anything useful like that. Let’s be realistic. When push came to shove and the dead rose from their graves, the cops were probably going to be just as fucked as everyone else...maybe more so because the masses would flock to them hoping they had a clue.
It was the sirens that did it. I wasn’t sure if it was purposeful or just some stupid accident, maybe an electrical malfunction at the worst possible moment in all of history, but whatever the case, as we neared the halfway point to Otis’s Trash Emporium, we heard them blaring off in the distance. And if we heard them, that meant the dead did, too.
“That’s it. Ring the dinner bell like good little piggies,” I said to myself as we took advantage of the lull.
My sister, wrongly thinking herself clever, added, “This little piggy went to market...”
“Yeah,” I snapped. “And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way to the fucking grave because it was too stupid to shut up.”
Normally I would’ve been told to be nice to my sister, but by then, my parents seemed to be thoroughly cowed. Maybe they were finally starting to realize there was a new pecking order and they weren’t at the top of it.
Good. Perhaps there was some hope for them after all.
Unfortunately, nearing the gates of the junkyard, I began to doubt if others had as much hope.
A lone figure could be seen shuffling about just inside the gates.
“Are you sure about this, Jacob?” Dad asked as we approached.
“Just follow my lead. And the name is Jimmy.” Sadly, my gruff exterior belied the fact that I was starting to feel uneasy.
The closer we got, the more certain I was that we were spying Otis’s form lurching around aimlessly. Sure, it was possible he was just piss drunk, but somehow I didn’t think so. And, if he was, it would almost certainly make me think twice about letting him share his bunker with us. He might have labored for years to build it, but a new landlord was moving in this day. We already had one albatross around our necks in the form of my sister. That was more than enough useless skin weighing us down like an anchor.
The gates were closed, which was probably fortunate. The second he noticed us, Otis ran face first into the metal bars, rebounded once, then stepped up to them and reached through trying to grab us. One thing about z
ombies, they weren’t that bright.
A small part of me was saddened to see him already dead. It wasn’t because of any fondness I had for him, mind you. The fucker was actually kind of creepy. I’d already decided way in advance that he wouldn’t be in charge of the laundry in our new living arrangements because I had a feeling it would be all of five minutes before his face was buried in our soiled underwear. What bugged me was knowing he usually kept his shit locked up tight. Now we’d have no choice but to break in. Things would have been so much easier had the paranoid bastard managed to live more than an hour into the apocalypse he’d worked so hard to prepare for.
I guess in some way that was kind of ironic, but it mostly just ticked me off.
“Why is the big man such a funny color?” Darlene asked, displaying intelligence that spoke ill of a future devoid of sugar daddies.
“He’s practicing to become a clown,” I replied, debating the best way past him. Through some minor miracle of luck I saw that the gates weren’t padlocked—a small win for our side—so it would be a simpler matter to open them than I first assumed, but it would offer an unnecessary risk if we did it without taking him out first. But how to do that without getting grabbed or making any noise?
Fuck it. I pulled the shotgun off my shoulder and pushed the barrel through the bars, where Otis promptly tried to bite it. Like I said, zombies were dumbasses.
“He’s not a very funny clown,” Darlene sagely observed.
“That’s because you haven’t heard the punchline yet.”
I braced myself and pulled the trigger.
The shotgun still kicked like a mule, but this time, I was ready for it. Can’t say the same for Otis’s head, though. All that was left of his noggin was a fine red mist that painted the ground behind him in a ten-foot arc.
Too bad the chances of nothing having heard that blast were slim.
We needed to search his body, but first we had to get inside and find a way to lock up behind us. Fortunately, the junkyard had a solid gate and thick walls surrounding it, walls bolstered by stacks of crushed cars.
The Legend of Jimmy Headshot (Shingles Book 6) Page 3
