Dark Recollections

by Chris Philbrook

  Mr. Moore in the meantime had started to let slip a string of profanities that would make a drunken sailor blush. The Chief and Officer McGreevy went to his aid as Phil just tried to regain his hearing. He holstered his revolver and rubbed his temples in a vain attempt to repair his beaten eardrums.

  “Dad are you okay?” Chief Moore knelt beside his elderly father, checking his leg. McGreevy thumbed his walkie again and started to send out the call for additional medical personnel. No one was answering.

  “What the hell is happening?” Mr. Moore said through clenched teeth. He exhaled powerfully, frustrated and in pain.

  “I don’t know Dad, but we’re having more ambulances come, and they’ll take you to the hospital, we’ll get this sorted out.” The Chief was starting to panic, his voice was cracking.

  “Nope. Doesn’t work that does it son?” Mr. Moore shook his head, wincing in pain. “Those bites are all it takes. Look at what happened here, right here, right now. That boy was bitten and he now he’s bitten me and that that man there.” He poked a finger over at the slumped form of the dead paramedic. “He’ll be trying to eat you before we know it, and then I will too.”

  The Chief’s eyes were spilling tears down his cheeks, “That’s bullshit Dad, nonsense, help is coming.” He shook his head defiantly against his Dad.

  “Only help I’m getting now is a bullet to my temple. Who’s doing it for me?” Mr. Moore winced again in pain and made a conscious effort to make eye contact with the three other men remaining in the room. McGreevy shook his head in a clear no, stood up, and walked out of the room. He wanted no part of this.

  The Chief was sobbing now. He buried his face in his father’s chest and hugged him awkwardly. Looking over his son’s shoulder he locked gazes with Phil. Phil knew what had to happen. Mr. Moore nodded ever so slightly, and hugged his son back for the last time.

  After a moment or two, Mr. Moore said, “Alright, tell your Mother I love her, and you take care of her now. You get your ass home and take care of Stacey and your boy. To hell with the town now, you take care of them.” Mr. Moore’s voice cracked at the end. He saw the writing on the wall, felt his clock ticking down.

  All the Chief could choke out was a meek, “okay.” He stood up and walked out of the office, pausing only to put a hand reassuringly on Phil’s shoulder. They looked at each other briefly, then the Chief walked past him and out. Phil could hear him starting to sob again as he passed the counter and exited the shop.

  The two longtime friends just sat still where they were. Neither man looked at each other while they separately contemplated the situation. From the side of the office where the paramedic’s body was, came a scratching noise. Both men looked over in unison and saw that he was twitching.

  “Shit that’s fast.” Mr. Moore said in a disinterested monotone.

  “Ayut.” Phil muttered, eyes intently on the convulsing medic. After a few seconds the twitching stopped, and his eyes popped open, fixated on the fallen gun store owner. The undead medic began the slow crawl across the office to get at his prey. He was stopped short.

  Without missing a beat Phil drew his revolver again and put a .357 round straight into his ear. His head blew wide open and painted the side of the desk a thousand shades of red and pink. Chunks of brain slid slowly down, mixed in with streaks of blood and clear cranial fluid. Mr. Moore watched with no emotion, and nodded his approval.

  “Nice shot.”

  “Thanks Boss.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Yep. Anything you need me to do?”

  Mr. Moore squirreled his face up in thought. He thought long and hard about it, but eventually shook his head no.

  “Okay. I’m gonna grab some stuff here, and head back to Marcy, if that’s ok?” Phil hadn’t moved an inch since he shot the paramedic.

  “Phil buddy you are gonna blow my head off in a minute. You don’t have to ask me for any permission to do shit.” Mr. Moore smiled.

  “I know Boss. I guess I’ll see you soon.” Phil’s lip trembled as he steeled himself for what he was about to do.

  “Not too soon brother. You take care now.” Mr. Moore closed his eyes.

  Phil raised the revolver and aimed at his longtime friend. He kept it there for too long though, and had to lower it. Finally he choked down a sob, and raised it again.

  It was the loudest gunshot Phil had ever heard.

  *****

  After he gathered himself and stopped crying Phil went back out into the store. He grabbed two of the remaining pistols, several boxes of ammunition, and threw on a hunting vest. He peeked outside to find the ambulance still parked in the lot, but the Chief’s cruiser and McGreevy’s cruiser both long gone. For the first time all day the parking lot was essentially empty. Since the ambulance arrived, no customers had come, so the store was empty.

  Phil turned off the coffee pot, locked all the gun safes, then unlocked all the gun safes, and walked out. He decided that if anyone needed a gun now, it was better to leave the safes unlocked. Not like he needed any more weapons really. He still had a few more at the house if it came to it. Out of habit the aging gun store clerk almost set the alarm on the door, but caught himself. Not much sense in doing that either he thought.

  It had gotten pretty warm outside, and the sun was beating down pretty good on his walk home. He kept a good eye out as he walked the vacant sidewalk back. He didn’t want to get jumped by anyone, especially after surviving what just happened at Moore’s. His whole walk home he tried to think of ways to tell his wife that the nightmare was here already. He tried to think of a way to tell his wife how he’d just blown his best friend’s head clean off, and shot a paramedic too. He was never clever with words though, and by the time he got home he still didn’t have any idea what to say to her.

  As he walked up the steps to his front door he noticed a few dark brown splotches on the concrete. Blood. Phil’s back yelled out in protest as he bent down to touch it. Gooey. Almost dry.

  He started to worry. The old man with the perpetually disheveled hair let himself into the front door, and drew his handgun again. The door stopped short of opening fully though, and he stumbled a bit, bumping his head on the door. He took a step back and realized the door had hit a human foot.

  Laying in a heap in the hallway was the body of the female paramedic that David had bitten earlier. Her body here explained why the ambulance was still in the Moore’s parking lot. Heading off in a trail towards the kitchen was a series of blood splatters. Long streaks of blood were on the wall. Phil’s nose caught a whiff of an unfamiliar smell in his house: cigarettes. He holstered the revolver, and walked into the kitchen.

  Sitting in the same spot he had occupied for breakfast earlier that morning was Marcy. Her back was to him but he could see an ashtray on the table in front of her. Her left hand held a cigarette and she absently flicked the ash into the tray. She was fixated on the television set, which was blaring out the emergency warning. Phil’s mind couldn’t focus on that, he was too intently tracking the blood spatters that led straight to the floor beside his wife. His beloved Marcy.

  “Marcy baby, what’s happened?” Phil asked quietly.

  Immediately his wife leapt out of her seat, stomping the cigarette out in the tray, caught red handed. “Nuh.. nothing Phil, nothing at all.” When she turned Phil could see she had a large bandage on her other arm. It was dark red with blood seeping through it. A trickle was running down to the wrist as she faced him.

  Phil looked over his shoulder at the body of the paramedic, then back to his wife’s arm. He looked up at her eyes. The same eyes that could always say more than then a thousand words could. They said everything he needed to know.

  Phil closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and sat down in the chair that Marcy usually sat in at the table. He fished his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and fired one up with the lighter Marcy had on the table. He motioned for Marcy to join him. She giggled a little and sat down next to him. Phil picked th
e butt up she’d just put out in the tray and gave it back to her. She put it to her mouth and he lit it for her. She took a long drag.

  “Thought you quit these?” Phil asked with the cigarette in his mouth.

  “Seemed like a good time to start again.” She raised her arm and showed him the bloody wrapping on her forearm.

  Phil looked long and hard at it. He knew it was a bite. Her eyes were still talking to him.

  “Well. How was work?” She inhaled deeply, enjoying the sensation she’d deprived herself of years ago.

  “Busy.” Phil blew a smoke ring out, sending it across the room.

  “That’s good.” She exhaled her smoke out, and watched it drift up to the ceiling.

  Phil took the revolver out of the holster on his hip and clicked the cylinder out. Still had enough shots to do it. He clicked the cylinder shut and sat it down on the table next to the ashtray, right in between he and Marcy. She took another drag and looked at the silver gun on the table, with its long barrel, full of grace, strength, and violence.

  “Phil I love you.” She looked at him again with those eyes. Those bright hazel eyes. Phil noticed her brow was starting to bead with sweat.

  “Marcy I will always love you.” His voice broke and he sucked in a deep breath. Tears were streaming down both of their cheeks now. Phil hefted the revolver up and looked at it, contemplated it.

  He did it as fast as he could, before his brain could tell him not to do it. As it turned out, that was the loudest gunshot he’d ever heard.

  Phil sobbed at his kitchen table until he finished his cigarette. Once he put it out he got down on the linoleum floor next to his wife Marcy, and kissed what was left of her face. He cried a little more, and put the muzzle of the gun under his chin.

  Phil never heard how loud the gunshot was that took his own life.

  October 31st

  Happy Halloween Mr. Journal.

  It’s weird. I’m sitting here in the afternoon of October 31st, aka Halloween, and there isn’t a single iota of me that wishes things were normal today. Is it wrong of me to think that way? I guess the little kid inside me is kind of stoked that there isn’t anyone around to tell me what to do. I don’t have to go to work tonight, I don’t have any bills to pay anymore, and I can eat more or less whatever I want, whenever I want. Of course if I eat whatever I want, whenever I want, I will run out of food very quickly. It’s like a one person, adult Lord of the Flies here.

  That’s not entirely true. I love kids, and I love giving out candy on Halloween to see the kids in their cool costumes. I can remember this one kid a few years ago that came to our door dressed in a green dragon costume. He had this plastic cybernetic arm on one hand as well, and after he said “trick or treat” he presented his cybernetic arm to me proudly and belched out, “I AM A ROBOT DRAGON!”

  Priceless.

  That kid, I miss. I never saw him again to my knowledge, but I hope that kid is okay. For the sake of all future robot dragons.

  Tonight, I miss Cassie. She always liked dressing up on Slut-o-ween and I miss the trampy outfits. They led to good sex. I don’t think I miss the sex yet though. Just being with her. As long as I don’t reminisce I’m okay. When I start to think about things that we did together, or things that happened between the two of us, I get emotional. Gotta keep off that subject as much as I can to try and stay together.

  So it’s Halloween, and I sit here at the dorm kitchen table, gas generator humming in the basement, laptop plugged in, all alone save for Otis my cat, a world filled with flesh eating zombies, and starving survivors of the apocalypse. Granted, things could be better, but I’m not starving, I’m warm, and I’m holed up in a pretty safe place I think. Enhance the positives someone once told me.

  Daily update portion of the diary: Weather is cool, seasonably so, but not cold. It’s been damp and drizzly since my last entry. Incidentally, I have come to fucking HATE fog. I mentioned that I do two checks on the campus every day to check for stragglers or zombies. Fog makes that patrol amazingly difficult. Vision is almost totally hampered, and I can’t hear shit through the fog. It really scares me about snowstorms in winter later on. Anyone who’s been outside while it’s snowing knows the dead silence caused by the falling snow, and I can’t imagine it’ll make my life any fucking easier. Fuck mother nature, fuck her in her foggy, stupid ass.

  Luckily I haven’t encountered anything in the past few foggy days. Well to be more technically accurate, I haven’t noticed that I’ve encountered anything. For all I know I walked right by a horde of the undead bastards every time I stepped outside and just don’t know it. Whatever I guess. From the inside of Hall E here, everything is quiet, and I feel pretty safe tonight. Safe enough to eat one of my candy bars.

  Safe enough to write at length about my first night here on campus. I like to call that night “Night of the Living Dead Private School Students.” You’ll see why.

  So I arrived on campus to a disorganized mess. Amy, one of the admissions chicks, had filled me in on the day’s events on campus which were all bad. They had locked down classrooms, paranoid and or crazy parents, car accidents, one seizure, staff running away screaming, one diabetic reaction, a few assaults, etc etc. Not a safe place to be and it was where I had chosen to make my nest to ride this thing out. You could say with relative safety that I had some doubt at that moment. I mean, I could walk right then and there. Just fucking get back in my car, and go somewhere else. Kick in the door of some rural farmhouse and board that shit up. Aka Plan B, turtle it up somewhere else.

  But noooooo. I stick to my guns. I never walk away from a fight I think I can win. And strangely enough, I think I can win just about every fight. Cassie said my confidence bordered on arrogance. I think it turned her on.

  So after checking in with Amy and the eight paranoid parents trying to find their children, I decided to go find the crazy ass parent that was going to go “rescue” the kids from Mrs. Goodell’s classroom. I thanked Amy and tried to reassure the parents right before I told them to stay in the admissions house. I needed more firepower. I had grabbed the pistol and the .22, but this struck me a shotgun kind of situation. I went back to the car, switched the rifle for the gauge, and started to head south towards the main classroom building. Just as I headed that way, I heard the distinct sound of gunfire coming from inside the building. Not good right?

  I picked up some speed and got to the front of the building. All of our doors are either glass industrial doors, or steel fire doors. The school had the glass kind. I looked through, yanked the door open, and headed inside. The halls were lit by the emergency lights that are on at night normally. They’re on a timer and kick on automatically at 8pm. Two lights are in each major hallway, one at each end, flooding towards the center of the corridor. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the building, but they suitably keep it lit. That’s not a joke or a pun about the students or staff or anything, I’m actually talking about the lights there.

  So the school building is square and three floors. Classrooms were on each side of the central hallway with some offices in the front and back. The staircase was in the middle of the hall, on the left side. I remember feeling very out of place here. Normally I’m never in the main classroom building. I work (read: worked) in the residential program at night, so there’s no reason to be in that building. It was weird just being in there, let alone being in there specifically to find a gun-toting lunatic, and to liberate eight kids being held captive by a granola crunching English teacher. Weirdness abounds.

  I combat-cleared the lower floor in 4 minutes. I did it silently so as not to arouse any suspicion, or to let the dude upstairs know I was here. The bottom floor was all clear. You could tell from the clutter in the classrooms that it had been a bad day. The rooms smelled… sweaty. Plus the kid’s book bags were tossed about, and there were snack food wrappers all over the place. You could tell they had been holed up in the rooms for awhile earlier. Right as I was getting to the back office for the guidan
ce counselors, I heard some yelling coming from upstairs. It was distant, coming from the third floor.

  I couldn’t afford to move much faster though. My safety would be at risk. That’s a debate you have a lot in situations like that. You weigh your safety with the potential outcomes and at some point you realize that your safety is not worth any potential outcome. I was willing to go in the building to try and rescue the kids, but I wasn’t willing to die for them. Not today at least. I wanted to survive this.

  I remember tripping slightly going up the stairs. One of those times when your toe catches the lip of a stair. I didn’t fall, but I did put a hand down to catch myself. I made it to the 2nd floor after that with no problem. The second floor is largely wide open, save for the bookcases in the library. There are some floor to ceiling support posts, but otherwise, its bookcases and tables. I swept down the aisles in between the bookcases and quickly made sure the floor was clear of students, staff, and the undead.

  I made it back to the main staircase and took the steps up to the 3rd floor a little more carefully. I could hear a man yelling, but couldn’t make out exactly what was being said. I could also just barely hear someone else talking, but it was really muffled, like they were in a closet or something. I made my way to the top of the stairs and lay down on my belly. I slid my body up the last couple feet and poked my head into the hall at floor level. People generally don’t look for threats at floor level. It’s a pretty safe way to check out a situation around a corner. (Although I don’t know if this would work on the undead. Caveat emptor)

  Backlit by one of the emergency floodlights I could make out a guy, about six feet tall, holding a gun and looking into the small window of the classroom at the end of the hall. Classroom doors are sturdy fire class doors with the small rectangular window with the chicken wire glass in it. Strong doors for sure. He was banging on the door pretty solidly in between trying to look through the window. I took it in for a bit, then slowly got to my feet and came out into the hallway.