A Good Distance From Dying

by David Carroll

  “Charlie, we have one more body.”

  Following Sass eyes to the third body I found myself in awe of this person, whoever he was. The last zombie had been rammed through the glass door of the cooler. This trauma hadn’t killed him though. He was still trying to escape. The shelves had been blasted inward as the corpse had entered the cooler door in a way that only the unluckiest of movie villains would ever have a chance of experiencing. This had led to the shelves getting caught between two pallets of something that was sitting inside the cooler. The metal sections of the shelves were being flexed as the zombie attempted to stand up and free himself. Once the zombie had put enough torque on the shelves they would spring back to where they had been wedged. This springing motion would pull the zombie back into the door where he would be stuck for eternity and made the metal shelves go from being very bent to very flat. This flattening of the shelves made the loud bang.

  All of this happened as I was watching the corpse try to free itself from the cooler door.

  “Well Sass, we have our answer. Skippy here is causing the banging noise. Now can we get your gloves and get out of here please?”

  Sass was finally happy to go back to the bridge. He began to look down the hardware supplies aisle for the much desired gloves. I decided that I really needed to go to the bathroom. I had not yet been today, and suddenly I felt the pressure of the two liters of Pepsi I had drank the night before. I wandered over to the bathroom and opened the door.

  Now, it needs to be said, there is a moment in every person’s life when the little voice in your head knows that he just dropped the ball. It has to concede that you are totally screwed and it’s completely his fault. This moment never leads to anything good as I was soon to find out. Not once did I think to myself, “You may want to be careful. There may be something nasty in the bathroom.” Nor did I think, “Be careful, you are still not out of the woods yet.”

  Nope, none of these thoughts crossed my mind. You can imagine the shock I felt when I opened the bathroom door and found myself looking at the biggest man I had ever seen in my life. He was standing on just the other side of the door. He wasn’t beating on the wall or making any sound at all. He was just standing there quietly waiting for his next meal to open the door and blunder into him. Like a zombie Venus Flytrap, he began to unfold himself as he reached for me.

  C H A P T E R T E N

  I used to watch a show on TV called the “World’s Strongest Man Competition.” It used to air on ESPN all the time. The competitors were always from places like Sweden of Finland or some area of Russia where they could either go outside and freeze to death or stay home and lift weights. There would usually be an American or two in there trying to win, but they never went far.

  The guys on this show were huge. I’m serious. They would carry cars and pull trains around on chains. It was crazy what they made them do to prove how strong they were.

  The zombie in the bathroom looked like he had been training to do this show before he was attacked. I swear I don’t think he could have simply walked out of the bathroom door because his shoulders were just too broad. His body was nothing but a big muscle with eyebrows. I immediately knew this was our zombie slayer. I had pictured him killing the three zombies in the store and escaping. Now I knew the truth, he had killed them but had been ripped open in the process. I now knew who the big pool of blood up front had come from. I could see that at least one of them had tore into his side. His white shirt was blood red down his right side. I could imagine him shutting himself in the bathroom knowing what was coming next, hoping that he would simply stay in the room forever. It was a good plan until I arrived.

  I never quit looking directly into those dead eyes as I spoke, “Sass. Don’t freak, but get out of here. Now.”

  I heard Sass say something but I couldn’t tell you what it was since I was so focused on watching this big beef eater directly in front of me. When I had first spoke, it was like he had been snapped out of a trance. His eyes darted around for a moment then they rested onto me. I smiled at the big zombie and slammed the door shut in his face. Turning and heading towards the door I saw Sass still standing there, holding the door open.

  “Run! Get to the bridge and up on the cars!”

  I grabbed a can of soup off the shelf as I ran past. I had a plan in my head, with just a little bit of luck I was sure that it would work. I attempted to kick the Pepsi case out of the doorway as I ran from the store but only succeeded in almost breaking my foot and falling face first into the gravel parking lot of the market.

  As I was clearing the building I heard the wooden bathroom door being blasted off its hinges and crashing into the floor behind me. I clenched my teeth and kept running.

  Now, I am aware that things look pretty bad for me at this particular junction. How am I going to take down Charles Atlas of the zombie world with nothing but a can of tomato soup? Trust me, I had a plan. The only problem was, for the plan to work my conclusions about how zombies behaved had to be perfect. To understand the plan we need to take a few minutes and talk about the much overlooked gem of a movie simply called “Tremors”.

  Tremors came out in the late nineties and if you haven’t seen it yet the shame you should be feeling at this moment should be immeasurable. It is one of my favorite movies of all time. Everything about this movie is done to perfection. The writing, the cinematography, the acting, the special effects, even the name of the town itself is Perfection. As well, the monsters are the perfect mix of cheesy and real at the same time. There was no doubt that it would instantly become a cult classic.

  The thing I loved about this movie was how the writer had the characters react to the circumstances that they found themselves in. Wasting time speculating on where these monsters came from, or even what they should name it, instead of getting out of town was so realistic to me. We, and by we I mean humanity as a whole, are complete idiots when it comes to assessing mortal risk and taking action to prolong our lives as much as we can.

  The movie is about a group of underground worm-like monsters that begin eating all the residents of Perfection, a small town hidden away in the mountains. Once the two heroes finally realize what is going on, it all goes to hell quick. There are so many great quotes from that movie that if I decided to start writing them down it would eat up several pages of paper so I think I’m just stick to my favorite.

  Val, played by Kevin Bacon, looks over to his best friend as he realizes that they are now trapped between the monsters and the mountains and it’s going to fall on them to save everyone in town. He gives his friend a little sigh and says in an almost disgusted tone, “We decided to leave town just one damn day too late.” To me that line is perfect. They didn’t ask for this. They didn’t want this. Who wants to be in charge of saving everyone they know? Who wants to feel responsible for their friends and family getting killed? How many people in our own world felt that way today? How many are still feeling that way? I don’t care how strong willed you think you are that’s a level of stress that can, and will, take you down.

  The premise of that movie has so much in common with the situation we now find ourselves in. We are being assaulted by monsters we don’t understand. We are caught with nowhere to run and like the citizens of Perfection, we absolutely need to get off the ground or we risk being devoured. There was one other similarity that my current situation had in common with this movie. And that was the inspiration of my plan to take care of the Charles Atlas zombie.

  The can of soup is what we would call my “attention getter”. When I was taking speech class I learned that you always need a good line or a sweet prop to get your audience’s attention. I thought that once muscles got outside he may see something that he thought looked tastier than me and that couldn’t happen. He had to stay on target and that target had to be me if this was going to work.

  I ran about halfway to where the land dropped away to make room for the river that stretched out below us. Once I was at what I considered to be
a safe distance I spun around and looked back towards the store. The glass door was still resting against the pack of soft drinks. There was no movement inside or outside the store other than Sass starting to climb back up on the cars. I had just enough time to wonder if Atlas had even seen us flee the building when the big dead body builder crashed through the door. He stopped moving once outside. I imagined he was completely blind at this point. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if his eyes would still dilate to help him see in light and dark. Another voice in my head said to quit thinking about stuff like that and concentrate on getting the job done.

  After a moment of just standing still, the zombie began to look around slowly. He looked right past me and focused in on Sass who was busy climbing up onto my girlfriend’s car. Atlas began to run towards Sass and I knew that a large muscular monkey wrench was being lobbed at my plan. I ran towards the zombie and hurled the can of soup at his head.

  There is a reason I never played quarterback for my high school football team. It wasn’t because our team was that good, or even a little bit good. The reason was that my aim is so-so at best. Taking this into consideration my can of soup that was aimed at the zombie’s head fell short of its mark. The can crashed into Atlas's shoulder where his collar bone would be. The impact rocked the big dead guy and brought his attention back around to me. I waved at the pissed off corpse and began to run towards the edge of the cliff at top speed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the sudden soup attack combined with my accelerated movement away from him had successfully drawn the attention of my new dead friend.

  You have to understand, I had one fact in my mind that was fuelling this entire conflict. I remembered the doomed couple at the airport. There had been two fast movers in the crowd of zombies that were chasing them. The woman went to climb the fence. The man turned to fight. He had sidestepped the first zombie and cracked his weapon into the skull of the second. The first zombie didn’t stop. He ran full speed into the fence knocking the woman back down to the ground. However, he had not shifted his focus from the man to the woman. He hadn’t changed targets after the man had gotten out of the way. Had the fence not been there the zombie would have probably run until he hit the cars down on the road below.

  To me this said that they could run, but they had no clue how to stop. This understanding led me to think about Tremors. At the end of the movie when Kevin Bacon is trying to kill Stumpy, the last killer worm, he uses the fact that they are near a cliff to his advantage. He figured out how to make the monster fling itself off the cliff to its demise. Here in lay my plan for dealing with the Charles Atlas zombie.

  Sass must have seen that I was playing tag with the big dead bruiser and yelled out in his confusion, “What the hell are you doing?!”

  I couldn’t help myself. I was caught up in the whole Tremors moment so I yelled out Kevin Bacon’s line as I ran for the cliff, “I’ve got a God damned plan!”

  Kevin may have said it first, but I assure you, I said it better.

  Reaching the edge of the cliff, I spun around to see Atlas bearing down on me. I waited until I knew there was no way he could change his path before I flung myself out of the way. I hit the ground and watched as the muscle bound locomotive kept trucking right by me and over the edge of the cliff. Jumping up I looked over the edge to see that the zombie was still going through the motions of running as he fell towards the water below. Still caught up in the Tremors moment I yelled at him, “Can you fly you big zombie bastard?! Can you fly?!”

  I believe the answer to be no, he couldn’t fly. I say this because I watched his body bounce off a large boulder at the bottom of the cliff and rebound into the water below. Charles Atlas may have survived his Humpty Dumpty fall, but if he did, he was somebody else’s problem now. I sat back down on the ground and heard Sass laughing as he walked up behind me. “You and that damn movie.”

  “It’s one of the all time greats man, I’ve told you.”

  “Yes, you have. Here, I grabbed you a pair of gloves. You don’t want to cut yourself on any of this shrapnel we’re going to be climbing over.”

  He laid the gloves down on my lap. I looked at them for a minute then stood up and looked at Sass. I would like to say that I was mature and appreciative of his gesture. However, I smacked him on the arm as hard as I could with the gloves he had just given me. To his credit he laughed and said, “What? You don’t like the color?”

  I followed Sass back to the bridge and we began to retrace the steps we had taken before the big bang had drawn us off the bridge. I waved to my girlfriend as we passed her on our way to the SUV. Once there, Sass climbed up on top of the vehicle with the agility of Cat Woman in full heist mode.

  Using the undercarriage, I clambered up to stand beside Sass on the side of the wounded gas guzzler. When I reached what was now the top of this beast of automotive brilliance I saw Sass standing right at the edge of the driver’s side door looking down into the interior. The door had somehow been knocked open during the wreck and now it stood straight up, pointing skyward. Sass looked back at me and made the sign that meant “be quiet”. Walking up to stand beside him I could see that there was a man sitting at the bottom of the interior. He was sitting on what would be the passenger side window looking down into his lap. His lap and everything under him was covered in what looked to be drying puke and blood. I gave Sass a look and he gave one back.

  “You think he’s alive?” Sass asked.

  I had no clue. I didn’t think he posed much of a threat if he was a zombie. I really couldn’t see him climbing up and out the door.

  I leaned over the open doorway and spoke a little louder than I would have liked.

  “Hey buddy. You okay down there?”

  There was no reaction. The guy just continued to stare at the floor. Somewhere in my mind a voice was saying, “You really need to leave”, but I ignored it. There was something about this whole situation that took control of me. It felt like that scene in a horror movie where the people find the killer lurking in their midst but are powerless to flee. Yes, I know that thought by itself should have sent me moving the other way, but it was one of those things where curiosity turns into such a powerful need to know that you lose rational thought.

  After maybe fifteen or twenty seconds of just sitting there, the man twitched then slowly began to raise his head towards us. Did it take that long for him to register that somebody was talking to him? Had he been so far into his own head that it took a few seconds to realize that maybe it really wasn’t hopeless?

  An idea seemed to stick into my mind. What if we had just witnessed the change from living to dead first hand. What if we were watching the birth of a zombie? If that was the case then I was encouraged by the process. What we had seen would mean that there was an intermediary period between human and zombie. During this period of time the person would be, for all intents and purposes, dead. It would be to our benefit if this was the case because we would have that small window to put them down. Thinking back to Becca at the airport fence I remembered that when she had died she didn’t immediately changed either. She was neither alive or a zombie when my hammer had been brought down onto her head.

  The man looked up. He looked mad. He looked hungry.

  “Who are you buddy? Give me a name?”

  The man didn’t answer. He continued to stand bringing him closer to me with each second we spent watching him.

  “Give me your name.” I said.

  Half of my brain was screaming to me, “He’s not going to answer your questions. He’s dead.” The other half was still so caught up in the moment that I couldn’t move. The man was now standing up inside the SUV. You could now see that he was dead. It looked like he had been hurt before he had ever made it into his car. There was blood and puke down the front of his shirt and pants. As I looked into what would have been the driver’s side floor board I could see that there was blood there as well. As I drew my conclusions, out of the corner of my eye I could see Sass l
ean over, grab the door and slam it shut on our new playmate.

  This development sent the dead guy over the edge. He began to thrash around in the SUV punching, kicking and screaming in an attempt to get to us. Sass bent down lower to the window and watched the man for a moment.

  “Damn. That’s impressive.”

  “What?”

  “Listen. He’s going crazy in there; do you hear anything? I remember the commercials for this one. They said that the cab was soundproofed to give you the quietest ride on the road. We’re just a couple of feet from him and I can’t hear anything. It really is impressive.”

  “We could congratulate the designer, but he’s probably dead now.”

  Sass stood up and gave me a strange look. “Wouldn’t it be weird if the guy who designed it was this guy, forever trapped in his greatest creation.”

  “I have to admit Sass, I didn’t know you had that kind of potential for irony. I’m impressed.”

  “I am so happy that you’re happy.” His voice had that irritated edge to it, but I knew he was smiling as he said it.

  The next vehicle we had to climb over was an old VW hippy van. Somehow this old van had become airborne during the chaos of the bridge wreck. The van, after its brief moment of aviation, reluctantly admitted that it was never intended to be used in that manner and quickly fell back to earth. To make matters worse, when the van fell from the sky there happened to be a Honda directly beneath it. This proved fatal to the Honda which was now nothing more than a pillow for the van to lie on.

  We both stood at the edge of the SUV looking at the bottom of the hippy van trying to figure out how we were going to climb up and over to the other side. All the rounded parts of this van made it hell to get a hold good enough to haul yourself up. I asked Sass if he would carry me, but he just muttered something about us not being married yet as he hauled himself onto the current pile of metal that stood in front of us.

  I’m not much of a climber. I’ve watched people climb the rock wall at the mall and thought it looked fun, but never pursued it. There were so many video games I needed to play. I didn’t have time to do something real. I would like to say that I grabbed the bottom of that van and flung myself on top of it like Action Jackson. I would like to, but I can’t. I made it to the top more like Tommy Boy, but in the end it was worth it. For my efforts, I was rewarded with a priceless view. The entirety of the bridge wreckage lay out before us. I could see that everything had been moving at a speed that wouldn’t even qualify as reckless. To quote the truckers from all those seventies movies, “They had the hammer down.” Directly after this thought came memories of the Smokey and the Bandit movie and I had that damned “East bound and down” song going through my head for hours.