All the while… PONG. PONG. PONG.
“Shut up, Nana!” He hissed at her one morning as he tossed the dog’s shit across the driveway. “I can hear you, the neighbors can hear you, the students up at Auburn Lake can hear you. You’re going to get me killed,” he said to her. “You’re yapping like a hungry toddler.”
Tony felt bad for talking at his nana’s corpse like that, and he retreated behind the screen door and sat on the floor, crying. His mind ran to his mom, and how she’s beat the snot out of him for saying what he’d just said. He was out of line, and he was-
Right. He was right. Nana was yapping like a hungry toddler.
“You’re hungry. I haven’t given you anything to eat,” Tony muttered to the linoleum between his legs. “You must be starving. But what would you want? Zombies eat people, but I don’t have anyone to feed to you, not that I would even if I did.”
One of the birds tweeted in its cage, and Tony knew he had something he could offer Nana.
*****
Tony opened the shed the following morning after hearing his nana beat on the walls again. The parakeet (or was it a cockatiel?) he’d put inside the door blindly flew out and over his head, disappearing into the nearby trees. Nana had gone hungry.
Furious, Tony stomped into his grandparent’s ranch where he grabbed a second bird. He brought it out, clutched in his fist and when he got to the ajar door, he twisted its little neck until he felt stuff inside break. Tony tossed the bird’s twitching corpse into the shed where his nana was standing, and he shut the door and threw the clasp.
Nana’s ceaseless banging on the walls stopped for almost five minutes, but then resumed. The meal was insufficient. It made sense. She hadn’t eaten in a very long time.
“You need something bigger to eat tomorrow,” Tony said, and looked at one of her cats as it scratched the post his grandpa had made out of a 4x4 beam and some old rug in the living room. “Something with more meat on its bones.”
*****
With the rising sun, Tony threw his nana’s fluffy white Persian into the gap in the shed door. He heard the cat meow, then hiss. A terrible struggle ensued and the cat let free awful, terrible noises of feline aggression followed by complete silence.
Relieved, Tony went inside and ate 6 green beans from a can he’d opened several days earlier. He felt he earned the meal after making sure his nana was taken care of.
Before he finished the 6th green bean his nana was back to banging on the wall of the shed, and Tony sat in his grandpa’s recliner, and cried himself to sleep. He felt powerless. He felt weak. He felt sick.
He was bored and worse yet, he was unhappy.
Next morning, he’d kill the cat, and then throw it in. Nana might need the help, considering her advanced age.
*****
On his way out to the shed with the other, final cat he could find, Tony realized he’d made a terrible error in judgment. His realization came from kicking his nana’s top denture across the kitchen floor. It had lain there, abandoned, since their life or death struggle the morning of her death, and it occurred to him that without teeth, she certainly couldn’t eat meat on a plate, let alone meat that tried to escape from her.
“Let’s get that other denture out from under the stove, and get you to Nana,” Tony said to the final cat as he sat it down on the floor. “It won’t be long. And look at the bright side; we’re almost out of cat food anyway, and you love Nana. If you could tell me how you wanted to die, I bet it would be like this.”
Fifteen minutes and a denture soak and brush later Tony was at the shed, cat in the carrier Nana used for trips to the vet. He sat the cat down in the tall grass and laid her teeth and the special “denture insertion system” on top of the carrier and pulled the red door open.
Lashed to the bench at the back of the shed was Nana. Tony had gotten her out to the shed only suffering scrapes from her nails using a dish towel and a broom. The towel got tied around her face and the broom was duct taped to her waist. Tony got her out to the shed at arm’s length with the broom and when she was inside the red metal outbuilding he used a half dozen hooked bungee cords doubled up with more duct tape to affix her to the bench. She had some range of motion, but could never escape the shed unless she broke all 4 bonds then the thrown bolt across the doors.
At her feet were the dead birds, and the dead cat. They were uneaten and peaceful on the plywood floor. She pulled at the elastic restraints and tried desperately to reach him. He felt sick to his stomach. The scene was awful. Gut wrenching emotionally as well as physically. The smell and the lack of dignity for her and…
“Nana, I’ve got your teeth. I’m giving them back, but you can’t bite me with them, okay? I brought you Colby. He wants you to eat him. Told me himself. Now if you can just stand still for a minute, I’ll put your dentures back in, and then let Colby in.”
She clamped her gums down over and over, making a wet, heavy smacking sound. The force her jaws must’ve been generating could’ve rended flesh with ease, and that sent chills up and down Tony’s spine, right where he’d taken the cans to the back. It still hurt.
His “denture insertion device” was a Rube Goldberg if there ever was one, Tony’s grandpa would say. A rubber band ran around the top and bottom plate running from side to side so as not to impede the biting motion once installed. The banded dentures themselves were attached to the end of a reaching gripper arm that his nana used to grab things off of the top shelves in the kitchen. Simple stuff, really. Tony knew grandpa would’ve laughed, and been proud of his invention.
He picked up the clamp handle of the gripper and entered the stifling heat of the dark shed. No matter how cool the night became every morning the inside of the shed felt like a muggy August afternoon. It smelled of death around the clock as well.
He waited for his nana to open her mouth, and he darted the clamp into her face, and pushed the false teeth in. They jumbled about for a second, and then slid into the place they were designed for. The wet smacking disappeared and the noisy clacking of the plastic teeth took over.
“You look angry at me, Nana. Don’t be. I’m about to help you. Antonio has breakfast.”
Tony retrieved the carrier and the cat from the grass outside, and took the hissing animal out. Just as he was about to underhand it to the woman he loved dearly, deep pangs of regret and guilt struck him. The cat meowed, and he agreed.
Tony’s hand went around the cat’s throat and clamped down. Weak as he was he still had the strength to keep the cat from escaping, and he needn’t worry about being clawed; Colby had been declawed for years. The black and white animal thrashed and tried to hiss at him as he let it suffocate in his fist. It didn’t take long for the innocent creature to expire. Before it stopped twitching he threw the carcass at his nana’s feet and as soon as he saw her go for the unconscious pet, he backed out and shut the shed’s door.
He heard wet crunching noises, and then silence.
Nana didn’t bang on the wall of the shed for several days. He celebrated by eating six more green beans at dinnertime, and he didn’t cry at all. He kept thinking about how proud everyone would be of him.
- Part Nine -
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Nana remained sedate and fed for several rainy days, and a bored Tony used that time to test out how sharp grandpa’s knife really was. First he cut sheets of yellow lined legal paper he found in a drawer into a pile of shreds, then he moved on to an old towel. After that he considered cutting one of the dogs a little (Kojak, because the hairy bastard bit his ankle), but that seemed cruel and a waste of a meal for his nana.
So he cut his arm. One press and slow drag of the buck knife’s blade left a crease in his skin that went almost all the way through and drew a thick runner of blood. He had to do it all with his left hand because his right had swollen up as fat as an oven mitt and was spider webbed with red tracers along the skin. The red lines were moving up his forearm now too, and Tony was pretty sure that
meant it was a bad infection, but he kept taking a Tylenol every morning, and rubbed hydrocortisone cream on it at bedtime. He’d mend soon.
He knew it.
But the cutting continued. The first day it was two cuts on his right forearm and two on his right thigh. It felt so good. Powerful. The second day it was four more cuts on his arm and six more on his leg. Then he started to dig at the wound across his palm.
The tip of the blade opened up the barely healed scar and released an alarming flow of thick blood filled with white pus. The gooey discharge ran down his wrist and forearm until it plopped quarter-sized drops on the rug.
The dogs came over to sniff the potential treat, but backed away. Kojak whimpered.
“Shut up, Kojak. You’re the first to go when Nana’s hungry again. She’ll eat you up and stop that whining for good. You never whined around her before, and you won’t now. You should be grateful I still feed you after you bit me.”
Tony dug at the cut until all the pus ran out of it, and the fresh, bright pain cleared his head.
At sundown, Nana began banging on the side of the shed.
Tony looked down at Kojak and sighed with satisfaction.
*****
It took Tony the better part of 15 minutes to find a leash. Grandpa and Nana never used leashes for the dogs, as they believed in letting the dog choose to come home and listen, but he knew they had one. He found it in the pantry, hanging on a nail behind an old mop.
He resolved to mop after feeding Kojak to his nana.
He slipped on his favorite hoodie and slipped the leash over Kojak’s head like a choke collar. The dog resisted, but when Tony assured the old hairy beast that they were going to see Nana, its fear and revulsion of him turned into excitement.
He peered out through the door’s curtains, saw nothing in the driveway or street, and opened the door. He pushed the screen door open, and Kojak bolted.
“Dammit!” Tony belted out at the exuberant animal as it jumped off the steps and ran towards the back of the house.
The dog reached the end of the leash in a few short seconds, long before it slowed down or Tony could close the gap. His left hand (the good one) had the strap in it, and the leash connecting his hand to the dog went taut and almost yanked his arm out of the socket. The dog’s running power was enough to pull Tony straight off the top step and send him through the air and onto his stomach in the gravel drive.
His chest hit hard enough to lose all the air in his lungs and his face smacked down hard enough to split his chin, punch a tooth through his lower lip and cut his eyebrow. He tasted blood as his vision swam. His left hand went back and forth, tugged side to side by the dog that wanted to see its mom in the worst way.
“Fucking Kojak!” Tony yelped out far louder than he wanted to, but he was beyond thinking. All he had was anger.
Using his battered, bruised and infected body he grunted his way to standing and yanked hard enough on the leash to send Kojak tumbling back towards him. The choked dog whimpered and rolled onto its back, showing Tony its belly and gasping for air.
“You little bastard. Why did you do that? You know you have to wait for me to go. You’re not a puppy. Grandpa loved you and you’re acting like an asshole. What would he say to you right now?”
The dog didn’t say anything; it just rolled over onto its stomach and got to its feet. One step at a time it backed away from Tony.
“You should be scared of me. I’ve survived this thing. I’m a survivor. My mom and dad and little brother and Nana and Grandpa would be proud of me. And you know what? I was going to choke you out with this leash before I fed you to Nana, but now, screw you. You’re going in awake, little asshole.”
Something choked Tony from behind and slammed him backwards to the driveway. His skull crashed into the small, sharp stones and he felt a hundred pinpricks of pain where they had drawn blood. He blacked that thought out as he looked up at the rainy sky with eyes that swam with stars. His hoodie had been yanked up into his neck where it still threatened to strangle him and more pressing; a very dead man stood at the top of his head, and he looked down at him with an emotion that Tony couldn’t place.
The zombie went to the ground on Tony’s head with a crash, letting its own knees buckle to get down to him faster.
Tony was quick. He rolled to the side just as the zombie collapsed and he avoided being trapped by his head. He did feel as something thicker than the rain slapped against his ear and stick there, wet, cool, and gooey.
“Ahh, no! Fucking hoodie!” he screamed at the sweatshirt that betrayed him. He tucked and rolled away from the threat as fast as his tired body would allow, making his hood flop around his neck even worse. Two arm lengths away from the stranger trying to eat his face he spun to his stomach and tried to crawl hard away.
But the man had his sneaker by the heel.
Tony yanked the foot free, and lost the footwear in the process.
Then the man had his pant leg, then had his fingers inside the waistline where his cold, dead fingers pressed against the skin of Tony’s back, and Tony couldn’t shake him. The clothes he wore would be his undoing.
He mustered all of his meager strength and stuck his knee out to the side, rolling his body so the pocket his grandpa’s knife was in could be gotten to. The act of moving made the zombie’s frenetic clawing and grabbing abate for a second, and Tony avoided looking in the face of the thing. He could see dried red blood all over his face, and he didn’t want to see a wound, or evidence that he wasn’t this dead man’s first meal since death.
The knife popped out of the pocket and fell to the gravel near his hand.
“Dammit!” he yelled at the knife, the zombie, the dog that watched and the rainclouds that dripped down onto him.
The zombie didn’t respond; in fact, the thing made no noise other than the crunching of the stones in the driveway beneath the struggle. No breathing, no grunting, no moans of the undead, nothing other than the occasional clacking of its teeth as it snapped them shut just inches from the arm Tony had jammed into its neck.
As the weight of the struggling monster bent and buckled his arm Tony got the knife from the ground and fought to open it. He had to put his good hand very near the face of the thing he wouldn’t look at and he stared at the antler centerpiece of the knife to avoid the gaze of the man trying to eat him. His fingernail caught the groove in the side of the antique blade, and he pried the knife open and felt it lock in place.
He moved it into his hand fully, and jammed the blade upward into the snarling monster’s eye.
The zombie shuddered twice and a thick wad of viscous gray fluid fell from its ruptured eyeball straight into Tony’s open, angry mouth.
His empty stomach revolted, knotting up and forcing out a stream of bile. He turned his head sideways and threw it all up on the ground next to his ear. When the burning yellow acid ran out, he heaved and heaved, eyes fastened shut, pinned to the ground by the dead man atop him. He sobbed and cried and wailed and bit the knuckles on his swollen, infected hand to remain as quiet as he could.
When he regained his senses and strength, he pushed the zombie off him, and ripped the hoodie off. He pulled off his jeans and kicked the remaining shoe off into the backyard near the bulkhead door. Then he found Kojak. The sheepdog had walked over to the shed and curled up beneath the shallow overhang that protected those standing at its door from light rain. Kojak stood, and whimpered as he approached.
He cried when he hit the dog over the head with his fist until it went unconscious, and he cried as he shoved its heavy body through the door.
Ashamed, Tony walked in his underwear back to the house, and he curled up on his grandpa’s recliner, and sat alone, and afraid until he heard his nana banging on the side of the shed again.
- Part Ten -
Grandpa Might not be Proud
He couldn’t stand the whimpering. Night after night in the depths of his weird, fever dreams Tony could only hear Kojak’s whimpering as he walk
ed toward him in the rain.
The sound of the dog’s plaintive cry for another human’s help cooked Tony’s unwell soul as if he’d fallen straight to Hell. And now, in the wake of all he’d done in the name of the love he had for his nana, he was sure he was hell bound.
All of his nana’s animals were gone. The Guinea Pigs went into the shed, chirping and clicking gleefully as if he was about to give them a carrot. They never came out.
The dogs were gone, the cats were gone, and the birds were as well. He had fed all of his grandparent’s pets to his nana, and when that was done, he left the house and found other animals to give to her. There wasn’t much, but he wasn’t picky, either. He picked up a few animals that either starved or dehydrated and threw their carcasses into the metal structure she was banished to. He found a few skittish animals that braved loss of life or limb to come to the food bowl he left on the kitchen door’s steps.
They were strangled and thrown into the dark place for nana the moment they let their guard down. Those that fought back weren’t strangled; they were just thrown into the dark for the undead woman to feast on. Tony never went in. He didn’t need to see the final moment. The shame of it would be his final failure.
And Tony did all of this as naked as the day he was born. He didn’t trust his clothes anymore. His hoodie nearly choked him to death and offered the zombies a handle to grab onto and his shoes and pants did the same. Had he not worn the sweatshirt, he never would’ve been slammed to the ground, and had he not worn his sneakers or his pants he would’ve scampered away and to his feet where he would’ve killed the zombie with ease.
The Shed Page 5
