by Brent Abell
Joe and Bobby were shocked. Both stood with their mouths agape and watched their leader fall, unconscious, to the hardwood floor. His head bounced off the planks and his eyes went blank.
“Now, I can let you go or we can take this to its logical end,” George told Joe and Bobby.
“Fuck you, you old fuck,” Joe hollered and dove at George.
Joe slammed into George and they fell back over Raul’s prone body. Slamming to the floor, the breath left George’s body and he gasped trying to get his breath back. Joe took advantage and began to give George a series of quick jabs to the side and kidneys. George coughed and tried to roll out from under Joe’s rank smelling body. He stank of sweat and self-loathing. It assaulted George’s nostrils and he found it worse than the constant barrage of punches to his side.
Harry watched Joe throw George to the floor and begin to pound away at his sides. Bobby looked at him, but didn’t make a move at him. He found it curious and pushed past him. Bobby didn’t try to stop him and backed away to clear the path to his cohorts.
“You mother fucker!” Joe seethed and rained down the punches.
George finally freed his hand from under him and pushed his palm into Joe’s chin. His head pushed to the left and his eyes grew wilder and more maddened with each passing moment. It reminded George of how a feral dog looks when threatened. He pulled his hand back and smacked Joe in the ear. A pop sounded from the blow and Joe stopped punching him. He felt Joe’s body fall to the side and he saw Harry standing above him with the bat. When Joe had pounced on George, he’d tossed it to the side.
Harry pulled the bat back and swung. The aluminum cracked the man’s skull and he dropped to the floor. Blood flowed from the back of his head and pooled on the floor. George looked over and saw it leak onto the Oriental rug he had picked out with Sally a year after they had moved into the house. She’d be upset it was getting stained, but none of that mattered any longer. He figured it’d take him a while to get used to the idea that nothing would upset her again.
“Thanks, Harry,” George said.
“Don’t mention it. I’ve never hit anyone before, much less clocked somebody upside the head with a baseball bat,” Harry quipped.
George turned to Bobby. “I figured you for the smart one in the group. Was I right?”
“I did what I had to survive, even if it meant teaming up with those two,” Bobby said.
“You can always come with us,” George offered.
“I went with them because I knew one person couldn’t make it alone. They were assholes, but they kept me alive.”
“Are we going to leave them like this?” Harry asked.
George looked around for a moment. “No, I have an idea.”
“You still going burning down the house,” Harry questioned.
“No, I’m going to tie them to the table and leave them for the dead if they come through here,” George answered.
Harry looked surprised. “You’d leave Sally down there like that?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. She doesn’t care and, if I set fire to the house, I might burn the whole state into ash,” George said.
“Point taken,” Harry said.
“What about me,” Bobby asked.
“You can come with us or you can go out on your own,” George answered.
Bobby sat down next to his partner’s bodies and thought it over. “I’m going to head south.”
“I heard the zombies are all moving that way,” Harry said.
“My uncle had a boat in the Keys and I think, if I can get to Key West, I can get out to the ocean and take my chances on an island somewhere,” Bobby said.
Bobby’s answer surprised George. “What if the infection is worldwide? What if nowhere is safe?”
“Well, I’ll die in paradise.”
“Give me your knife,” George offered his hand out to Bobby.
Bobby placed the handle in George’s hand and wondered what he planned on doing. He watched George stare at the blade for a second before he buried it in Raul’s ear. Raul’s body jerked and fell still. Before anyone could react; he yanked the blade free and did the same to Joe. The dining room remained silent. George wiped the blade on his cargo shorts and offered it back to Bobby.
“Leave now and pray to God we never see you again,” George hissed.
Bobby took the knife and slid it back into his belt. Without another word, he nodded to George and Harry and walked out of the house. He knew he’d never be able to travel with them after all that had transpired. Hell, he knew for a fact he could never travel with someone who had gotten the jump on him. Still, the George guy recognized the trio for what they were and had given him the chance to live and fight another day. He respected them for that and, in his mind, he wished them well on their journey. Maybe one day, they’d make it down to the Keys and they could sail the ocean for a bit and share stories of how they had survived the zombie apocalypse.
Maybe.
***
George waited by the door. He placed his hand on the splintered frame and leaned on the wood. The melee had left him winded and tired. Part of him wanted Bobby to turn back around to join them, but part of him also wanted to kill him for what they had done.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Harry asked.
George turned his head from the outside, as he watched Bobby leave the yard and continue on south down the street.”No, I think he knows.”
“Knows what?”
“That to stay is to court his death.”
Harry didn’t answer. Instead, he carried on with getting the pack back on and his bat ready to go. George finally returned to the dining room and gathered up the pack and items he’d dropped in the attack. He hadn’t wanted to kill the two, but they had left him no choice. If he let them live and they escaped, they’d look for them and it might not end in such a manner. If they died, it’d be two more zombies in the wild to kill.
“We still leaving now or do you want to wait and rest?”
George’s shoulders sagged and he sighed heavily. “This house is as dead as Sally now. I have nothing left to do here except to listen to the ghosts in the halls and the memories haunting me. Let’s go.”
The two walked out on the porch and down the white concrete steps to the walkway. George took the lead and left the yard. He closed the white wooden gate and took one last look at the house he had built and took it all in. He could already hear the phantoms of the past and turned away.
“Time to head north,” George said and walked off into the dead world.
2
The sun began to set in the west and the mosquitoes were feasting on George’s legs. He seriously was rethinking the choice of cargo shorts. Every few seconds, he’d swat at his calves and would pull his hand back to look at the bloody smear of a dead mosquito. Harry wore a faded pair of jeans with big holes in the knees, but he still had them attacking his arms. George wanted to laugh each time Harry would switch hands holding the bat to swat at the monsters trying to drink his blood.
“When do you want to stop for the night?” Harry asked and smacked his wrist to kill a mosquito. “I think we need to find some Off or something too, these things are eating me alive.”
“I know the feeling. We can hole up in a house up the street for the night, but we need to find something faster than our feet if we want to get to St. Augustine any time soon. I don’t want to walk my old ass that far.”
Harry snickered and stopped walking. After the fight at George’s house, they had hiked a mile or so east. The neighborhoods gave them plenty of options for places to stop for the night, but they knew each house could also be a death trap, full of guys like Raul or masses of the undead hanging around looking for a meal. Still, Harry knew he was lucky he had broken into George’s house and George hadn’t shot him. The fact he was still alive surprised him on a daily basis and he hoped he wouldn’t let George down. He’d only known him for a few hours and already looked up to him as a father figure. His own
father wouldn’t have risked his life to save him but George had so he really didn’t want to disappoint him.
“I’m ready to stop. See that house over there,” Harry said, pointing to a large three-story house a block up, “I think it’ll be perfect.”
“Three-stories? I like it. We can defend the stairs on the third floor easier. One point of entry should make the night less stressful. After that bullshit with those three, I could use a little quiet,” George said.
The two men hiked up the street and to the house. The streets were littered with dead cars and months of trash blowing around. George was surprised by the lack of damage to the houses. Before all forms of communications had stopped, they had reported about the unrest, rioting, and looting in the bigger cities. The reports were full of the usual doom-and-gloom, but, apparently, it hadn’t gotten as bad close to his home. He figured Orlando would’ve been looted pretty badly. He hoped St. Augustine would be fine since the military and FEMA had set up camps there.
He hoped Trent was in one, and everything was going to be okay.
The house had a beach motif and, as they climbed the front steps, Harry reached up to play with the shells hanging from the porch. Starfish dotted the home’s façade and three white beach loungers rested on the porch. A small table sat between them and a broken pitcher, from some long-ago summer day, covered the wood plank porch in glass. Stains from the tea or whatever the people had sat out on the porch and drank darkened the white paint.
The door sat ajar and Harry pushed it open with the bat. It creaked from months in the humidity and the hinges having begun to rust. The noise hurt Harry’s ears. George tapped Harry on the shoulders and motioned for him to step aside. George raised his gun and entered.
***
Inside, the house smelled like mildew and rot. The living room walls were painted a bright yellow, but George could tell they were also dirty and dingy. The chairs and tables were flipped over and the television screen had been broken out. He listened carefully and didn’t hear any noises in the house.
“Harry, go and check the back of the house. I’ll finish up here and head to the second floor. If you see anything, yell and I’ll come running.”
“Be careful, George.”
“You too.”
George watched Harry disappear around the corner to the dining area and the kitchen. He made his way through the overturned furniture to slowly ascend the stairs. The wall going up was full of pictures depicting a happy family. A handsome man holding his beautiful wife while their three kids held tight to their legs greeted him and he felt a pang of sadness. Other pictures showed a happy family at play on the beach or at Milton Mouse World. He wondered how many times they’d been to the park and if they had known the last time would be their last. How many times had the same scenario played out in every home? One day you’re a happy family without a clue someone would be trying to eat your face off the next.
He allowed himself a second to think about Trent and Sally. It had killed him to lose Sally, and he prayed for Trent to be okay. At first, he was pissed Harry had broken into his house, but now the guy was growing on him. George wasn’t sure how much of Trent he projected on Harry, but it made him feel useful to travel with him.
The second floor landing looked untouched. George found it hard to believe looters or squatters would stay confined to the first floor. It made him suspicious.
“I’m a paranoid old fool,” George whispered, and looked at the four doors on the floor.
Two were open and two remained shut. He wondered which one was the bathroom; one of them had to be one. The other three he pegged as bedrooms or maybe one was an office. He approached the first door, and slowly turned the knob. The latch disengaged with a click, and he pushed it open.
A pink canopied bed welcomed him and he found the entire room was painted and decorated in pink. Little dolls and toy ponies sat on the dresser. A shelf, in the far corner by the window, housed a large collection of trophies and ribbons. A few of the trophies were topped with horses so he assumed she rode for a hobby. He scanned the rest of the room and didn’t find anything out of place or any evidence of life; only of a life passed on.
Moving on, he found an office (the man was an architect), the two boys’ room, and a small bathroom decorated in the same ocean and beach motif the porch and first floor shared. George found it curious none of the second floor rooms showed any signs of looting or that anything bad had happened in the house. The situation made him cautious, but also curious.
George returned to the stairs and began to climb to the top floor. From the outside, the third floor seemed smaller and when he got up to the top, he could see why. George found the master suite taking up the entirety of the level. The decorating was a bit more on the normal side and moved away from the beach theme.
“Why would you want a beach for your house when you live in Florida?” he muttered and began to look about.
The blankets on the bed were wadded in a pile at the foot of the bed and the pillows were all stacked on one side. A broken lamp was the only thing on the nightstand. The window was half open and the light evening breeze made the sheer burgundy curtains bellow into the room. Nothing smelled bad or off, but something didn’t feel right in George’s gut.
On the right were two doors he figured were the closets and the singular door on the left was the master bath. He looked back and forth from one to the other and wondered which one he should check out first. The idea of leaving his back exposed worried him.
“It loves me, it loves me not,” he said as he pointed to each side. “And you are not it.”
His finger ended up pointing at the single door.
“Shit,” he muttered. He hated checking it first, but he chose it fair and square.
When he took a few steps toward the door, he caught the hint of decay. The door was shut, so he turned the knob. When he slowly pushed open the door, the stench grew and he winced. Holding his breath, he pushed it open fully and saw the wife.
She wasn’t the radiant woman from the pictures any longer. Her dull blonde hair hung from her peeling scalp in clumps. Her eyes had the same glaze he’d seen in the others and her torn bottom lip hung down in the corners of her mouth. It gave her an unholy looking grin and she snapped her jaws at him.
The noose around her neck kept her from getting close. Each time she tried to grab George, the thin white rope jerked her back like a dog on a leash.
She tried to pull herself free from where she had looped the rope over the top of the shower curtain rod. Her legs couldn’t stand and she kicked trying to get to her feet. On the slick marble tile, she kept losing her footing and sliding back down the door. The rope cut deep in her throat and a black liquid began to spill down her white nightgown.
George reached for her and she snapped at his outstretched hand. He pulled his hand back and looked around for something to release her soul with. He didn’t want to waste a bullet because he didn’t know how hard it would be to find more this far into the apocalypse.
On the sink sat a curling iron and a brush. Two toothbrushes were in a holder on the right and soap dispenser flanked the faucet on the other side. Getting to them, however, meant passing really, really close to the undead woman trying to snack on him in the process. George backed out into the bedroom and snatched a sheet from the bed. Quickly, he wrapped it around his arm and re-entered the bathroom.
The woman growled and tried to get to her feet again. George held his arm out and she latched on to it. He had a thick enough cover her teeth couldn’t get to his arm, but he was nervous. If he messed up, he’d be dead. When his arm was in reach of the sink, he stretched out and his finger tips danced across the curling iron. The woman shifted and the rope cut further into her neck. She moved closer to him and her jaws released his arm. Before George could grab the curling iron, the rope over the door broke. Her body fell on the ground and George scrambled to the tub.
He looked at the back of the closet door and saw the fraye
d rope had been tied to the knob. Her small frame and lithe body allowed her the ability to hang. Any bigger person would’ve brought the rope down when they had first attempted to commit suicide.
The woman crawled in his direction and he leaned out for the sink and grabbed the curling iron before she could reach the tub. She hissed and grunted climbing to her feet and her hands clutched the shower curtain. When she pulled up on it, George wrapped her up in it and jumped from the tub. They crashed to the tile floor and she writhed wildly in the shower curtain. George struggled with her as he raised the curling iron high above his head and brought it down into her skull. The first shot didn’t penetrate her head and he brought it down again and again and again. The light blue curtain darkened around her head and her body stopped fighting him. George breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed.
He hoped the closets were less exciting.
***
Harry sat down at the kitchen island and looked around. The refrigerator door was open and the food had either long been taken or had rotted. The white interior was mostly full of odd black shapes and he could tell where food had liquefied and leaked out. Luckily, the smell had faded and he could breathe easily in the kitchen. Upon inspection, it appeared the kitchen had been ransacked and the cabinets were all still open and empty of any usable supplies. The pantry was devoid of any canned goods and the butcher block on the counter next to the stove was missing all the nice big knives.
Harry wondered if this was one of the houses Raul and his stooges had ransacked. Of course, it could’ve been anybody, and he didn’t know how far from the neighborhood the threesome had ventured. He had never gotten out his far and figured it was like this everywhere. They would need more food eventually, and he wondered if they’d find any before they reached St. Augustine.
Harry had never tried military food, but he hoped he liked it. His stomach rumbled and he wanted to tear into one of the ones sitting in his backpack, but he’d wait until he and George had settled in for the night.
