by Mark Tufo
On a whim she checked the store for makeup but found none. She went back into the bathroom and finished, scrubbing her face with most of a bar of soap. For the first time in too long she stared at herself in the dirty mirror and cringed. Her cheekbones were sunken, her eyes puffy and red. Her once-lustrous hair hung in knots, her lips chapped and her chin bruised.
Darlene had never been a skinny woman – she preferred thinking of herself as curvy – but now she was downright anorexic. She guessed that she was hovering at around one hundred and five pounds, a far cry from the healthy one-fifty she normally carried. Her body was sore, black and blue covering her legs and arms, and she could spend a week counting all of the cuts across her body.
She stopped looking at herself in the mirror while she gathered her clothes and began the task of washing them under the hot water from the tap. The dirt and grime filled the sink and she noticed for the first time all of the holes and rips in her jeans and T-shirt. She’d need to find new clothing before she had to make her way naked in this dead world.
Sometimes you forget about the things you no longer have, she thought as she eyed a stack of toilet paper rolls. She was going to enjoy her time here, at least until the food ran out. Then it was back into the wild and fending for the next meal.
Later, after a dinner of cold chicken noodle soup and three bottles of water, she took both bodies outside. She didn’t have the strength to bury them but figured that tomorrow she would have to. They yielded little in the way of supplies: the keys to the store, house keys she assumed were from the house up the road, a pack of gum, two pocketknives, and a dead cell phone. The small-caliber gun was empty; he’d used his last shot. She left the gun on the ground where he’d dropped it.
Darlene tossed the cell phone around in her hand and laughed. It was funny what people still clung to, even when they were of no practical use. She reached into her pocket and fingered her keychain. Her house key, her car key and the key to her dad’s house were there, all useless. Yet she had them with her at all times.
She peeked outside again but there was nothing hanging around the fence. She knew they were out there. They were always out there. The glow from the coolers was enough light to see by, so she didn’t have to stumble around in the dark.
Behind the counter were two pillows and three blankets, which Darlene hadn’t used in months. Darlene curled up on the floor, wrapping herself in one of the blankets and stuffing both pillows under her head. It wasn’t the greatest of comforts but it beat sleeping in trees, under porches and in cold abandoned buildings. Her body, newly cleaned after weeks of dipping into dirty rain water or rivers and oceans, felt relaxed. Her mind was racing and she hoped that she could sleep. How ironic would that be, if I finally get a decent spot to sleep on, and I can’t?
She woke with a start and fought back an imaginary attacker. It was just one of the blankets that had wrapped around her legs. Her Desert Eagle, never far from her grasp, was put down on the ground next to her. While the floor had been better than being outside, her back hurt and she had a pounding headache.
By playing with the coffee machines she figured out a safe way to make two packs of the noodles and a pot of coffee for breakfast. After eating she cleaned up the store, getting everything of value together on the counter and separating the items into plastic shopping bags. In the cooler she found four cardboard boxes that could hold two dozen bottles of water each, but she had no idea how to then transport them.
Three hours later she had run out of work to do and knew that she had been stalling. She didn’t want to go outside and dig two graves for the men. A part of her didn’t even care about doing it, but she felt compelled. They had been alive, after all, and it would be proper to bury them and say something.
Back outside the sun was fierce, with no clouds in the Florida sky. The two bodies were right where she’d left them. She wasn’t surprised, but then again not much could surprise her at this point. If they had been dancing or missing when she’d come outside it wouldn’t have shocked her. In fact, it now disappointed her that she’d have to bury them. She needed a shovel, which she didn’t have.
The house up the road was quiet. She wondered if they had a shed out back, and if she could keep enough distance from the house in the event that the undead inside could escape. There were no zombies outside the fence in the immediate area. Darlene decided to chance it. The sandy road leading to the house offered nothing save a few old footprints.
By the time she reached the bridge she was drenched in sweat. “I need another bath,” she whispered. From here the grounds were overgrown with weeds poking through the sand. The dirt road was dusty and rutted from long-ago traffic. The front yard had, at one time, been landscaped. A section of stone wall ran the length of the driveway to the left, now showing wear in a spot and leaning back. A line of short bushes had been planted on the right, now all stunted and dead.
The house loomed before her in the midday heat like a creature ready to pounce. The windows had been boarded hastily from outside, the front door jammed with two rocking chairs and nailed shut.
Darlene was holding her breath as she put a hesitant foot on the first step. “Go around to the back,” she whispered. She didn’t need to be going onto the porch; she already knew what awaited her inside. She felt like the stupid chick in every horror movie that ignores the scary noises downstairs and goes into the basement, clad in her underwear, and then is amazed when an axe is sticking out of her head.
She put her full weight down on her foot. Not a sound. The wooden steps were solid. Gingerly she made it up the remaining four steps and stood at the front door with her Desert Eagle in hand. She didn’t have eight bullets left – three in the Desert Eagle, three in the Sig Sauer 226 - or even know if he had been telling the truth about the number inside. Maybe it was one and he wanted to scare her away. Maybe there weren’t any dead inside and the house was filled with food and drink, piles of clothing and form-fitting bras and panties with the tags still attached.
The next step forward and the boards creaked.
Darlene fell back when the banging inside started, right in front of her. It sounded like a hundred undead were inside, slamming against the wall. The windows and door shook with the impact.
Scared and ashamed at how easily she’d been rattled, Darlene ran from the porch and around to the back, in search of a shed and a shovel.
Five
As she finished burying the two men night was falling. The sounds of the trapped had brought more undead to investigate. Darlene counted almost thirty of them on the other side of the fence groaning and reaching for her. She ignored them as best she could.
At first she was going to simply walk up to them and begin smacking them with the shovel, but she knew it would be futile. The fence would keep her from doing permanent damage. In a strange way she was enjoying the company after being alone for so long. Even if her company wanted to rip off her head and fuck her headless corpse.
Back inside she drank more water and made a can of sirloin burger soup. As a kid she’d hated eating soup, but her father insisted on making it a meal at least once per week. She remembered dreading it when her parents came home from food shopping and her father stacked another three cans on the topmost shelf for later in the week.
Exhausted, Darlene checked the locks on the doors, stared into the darkness outside for lights, listened for noises, and then finally turned in for the night.
The next morning she rose, cleaned up, ate more noodle soup, and was mildly disappointed to see that the undead had moved on during the night. She wished she had binoculars so that she could climb onto the roof and see for miles.
With nothing else to do today, she ignored the still, hot air of the room and decided to clean. The undead already knew she was here so she decided to prop open the front door and the side garage door to get a nice cross-breeze flowing. Darlene supposed she could raise the large garage doors but then it might attract too much attention. The zombies weren’t the only thing
she had to fear; out here there was probably more than one Lazy Eye and a noise that loud would give her away.
Besides, the air felt nice when she opened the doors. She found some over-priced toothbrushes on a shelf peg and decided to give this place a thorough cleaning. A bottle of cheap bleach and some spray bottles of cleaning supplies were in the small stockroom. The mop and mop bucket were both broken and looked like they hadn’t been used a long time before the end of the world. It was just as well. For the first time in months Darlene had a task besides finding food, shelter, and trying not to get killed. She dropped to her hands and knees in front of the counter and began to wash the floor, one inch at a time.
The blankets and pillows smelled funky, so they were hand-washed in the sink before she took them outside and draped them over the gas pumps to dry in the ocean breeze.
A lone zombie crested the dunes over the broken bridge, moving away from her. She wondered if they ever stopped, ever grew tired or ever had a real destination in mind when noises didn’t compel them to move in a certain direction. Once again she longed for days that were long gone. In movies she used to watch with her father when she was a kid the zombies would come at night, dark and dreary, gray and overcast, with rain and lightning strikes silhouetting the background.
Darlene’s reality was even more disturbing: blue, clear skies, the smell of the beach, the sound of the pounding surf, and the undead. She couldn’t remember the last time it had rained since she’d been this far south. She wasn’t complaining after the long, cold winter in Baltimore, but still… a little rainfall would be nice, something to break up the sun and the heat.
Once again, before going back inside to continue her cleaning project, she stepped around the side of the station and looked at the house.
It was quiet, as she knew it would be. She almost wished they’d found a way out, one at a time, so she could finish them off and grab the treasure inside. She felt like Laura Croft or Indiana Jones, only they weren’t too scared to kick down the door and start shooting and killing with a trusted machete. Instead, she decided to go inside and keep scrubbing with a damn toothbrush.
At first the noise was so unexpected and so far away that she ignored it and went back inside. It seemed like a distant memory. Every now and then, especially after a fitful night of nightmares, she would sometimes wake and hear a voice or a radio playing or traffic in the distance. Fully awake she would cease to hear anything but the wind or the undead.
As it got closer she stopped and stared at the ceiling. “What the Hell?” she whispered. Back outside she stared at the sky.
She heard a plane.
“Where are you?” Darlene spun in a circle, looking and looking. There was no cloud cover. It grew louder, the sound of the engine. It might be a Cessna, something small. It wasn’t a commercial airliner. Did it matter at this point, anyway?
Darlene couldn’t remember the last time a plane, helicopter or air balloon had been spotted in the sky. She shielded her eyes from the glare and wished there was a sunglass rack inside. It made her laugh to think of her standing out here with a pair of huge white tourist sunglasses on and one of those huge weaved hats on her head.
She was positively giggling by the time the plane, indeed a Cessna, shot overhead from the west, glided straight out to sea and then shot up the coast to the north.
Immediately a score of zombies appeared and began to follow the smoke trail in the sky.
Darlene ran inside, locked up, grabbed two bags of groceries, and decided to follow.
Six
She lost sight and sound of the plane by the time she hopped the fence. Getting back across the water was easier because it was low tide, but she still watched for submerged undead. Back across she moved as fast as she could on A1A. A mob of zombies were ahead of her, following the plane. She knew from experience that they would give up once it was completely gone. She didn’t want to be around when that happened. A single zombie or even two or three wasn’t a problem in wide open spaces, but twenty or thirty could easily surround you or trip you up.
After half a mile the undead began veering off into random directions. Most of them moved toward the east and the beach. Three stayed course on the road. Trying to be as quiet as possible while still moving, Darlene quickened her pace and was soon past them. One of them grunted but when she saw that none were before her she began to jog.
Bad move.
The noise of her bags jangling brought two undead from out of nowhere, directly in her path. She shouldered through them, getting slashed with rotting fingernails as she moved. Now she was running. Two abandoned cars were in the road and she stayed as far away as possible. It was a good thing because a zombie, legless, was behind the lead car. She could hear its jaws snap as she ran past.
Up ahead, about a quarter mile, a solitary zombie was heading north. Darlene slowed her pace and watched it. She was breathing heavily from her short run and was frustrated to be so out of shape. “You’re fucking twenty-eight, not eighty-eight,” she whispered.
The zombie suddenly fell forward and was gone.
Darlene stopped and looked around. Only open road and sand greeted her. She walked quickly to the spot where the zombie had been and saw a crater in the road. Ten feet below the zombie struggled to move, run through on a bevy of sharp wooden spikes in the hole. He wasn’t alone. Three more had been caught as well, their bodies falling to pieces on the spikes. Darlene looked around again. The trap was man-made, running across the road. To either side large wooden stakes had been driven into the dunes at angles meant to impale.
On the other side of the pit she noticed several tripwires. The dunes to the west were covered in short pieces of sharpened metal. She’d have to proceed with caution. The paranoid feeling of being watched came over her and she ducked down instinctively and moved toward the beach, careful to watch what she was stepping on.
The waves were strong today, slapping against a horrific sight: a whale, half submerged in the surf, was being eviscerated by a group of zombies. Darlene nearly puked when she saw one of them trying to ejaculate on the dead, bloated creature as other zombies pulled off chunks of flesh. The scene was surreal; gulls fought with the zombies for pieces. She wasn’t surprised when one of the gulls got too close and his head was promptly bitten off.
Sticking to the dunes, Darlene tried to ignore the scene and not fall apart. She’d seen some disgusting things in the last few months, things that might have made the old her go mad. Now she tried to chalk it up to just another nauseating sight in the long line of many. There were plenty more in her future, she guessed.
She supposed that the secret was to keep moving and not think too long on any one thing. When this first started she tried to think of pleasant thoughts like vacations on the Maine coast as a child or going to see the Red Sox with her family or playing in the park at the end of her street. Nightmares about zombies coming out of the surf, Fenway Park overrun by the undead and other children dismembered on the slide and the swings at the park forced her to look ahead. Always look ahead.
She circumvented the road pit about two hundred feet north before trying to get on stable ground once again. The road was devoid of footprints and traps. Up ahead a charred school bus was on its side, blocking the path. To either side the sand had built up, creating an effective barrier. Darlene doubted that it was natural.
There was no movement from inside or around the bus but she proceeded with caution. If there was going to be an ambush – from undead or living – this would be perfect. She had the machete and the Desert Eagle at the ready as she took tentative steps forward, eyes darting all around her.
To the right, closest to the beach, was a path through the dune. She could either try to climb the bus or follow the trail and go around it via the beach.
Ignoring a nagging feeling in her head, Darlene moved quickly, leading with the machete. The dune sloped up and it was a hard climb. When she reached the top, she slid down, then ran onto the beach and stopped. A
crude wooden fence had been built on the sand to the north, braced with debris and car parts, creating an effective barrier for the thirty or forty zombies that were trying to move past it.
“What the Hell?” Darlene managed before the group turned as one and began moving toward her. She knew that climbing the loose sand behind her would only get her caught so she decided to make her stand. If today was the day to die, so be it.
Instead of standing back and letting them come to her she took the battle to them, slicing at the closest with the machete and connecting with its arm. The limb was tossed through the air. Moving to her left, she chopped at another. Her goal was to get to the fence and try to climb over before she was grabbed and killed.
A zombie to her right suddenly staggered, its head shattered. A thick arrow protruded from it. She caught a glimpse before it fell and was swallowed up by the moving horde.
She glanced to the north, in the direction she assumed the arrow had come from, just as another was shot from above on the dune. It ripped into the face of a zombie. Darlene thanked whoever was helping her out and slashed and jabbed with the machete, dropping two more as she got closer to the fence.
She was a whirlwind of motion, clearing a path before her. Arrows filled the air around her. A zombie stood between her and the fence. As she swung to decapitate it she felt a stinging in her left arm.
Looking down, she saw the blood and the arrow, which had neatly pierced her forearm and lodged the tip into her side. She made a frantic swing of the machete at the nearest undead but her vision clouded.
She fell to one knee, still trying to defend herself, as the darkness overtook her.
Seven
Darkness.
Not gloomy like the middle of the night, sleeping under a cloudy sky with the undead all around you. This was black, stifling, closing in on her. Darlene tried to scream but her throat was too tight, her body unable to move. The night had weight and it was pressing against her, holding her under like an ocean.
