Etna Station

by Mark Tufo

  “Mr. T?”

  “Sorry. How many do you think are up there?” I asked.

  “Hard to say, fewer than fifty though.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because any more than that wouldn’t fit.”

  “I appreciate the logical approach, but don’t like the answer it yielded.”

  “Me neither,” he replied. “You ready?” he asked.

  “No. BT, we’re going up.”

  “Hold up–I’ll grab my rifle,” he said.

  “No, you stay and watch our retreat. It’ll be too tight up there for three to fight effectively and move around. You’ll take up the whole hallway by your damn self–wedge us in too tight. Tommy and I will be stuck against the walls, trying to talk out the sides of our mouths.”

  “Shut up, Mike,” he said, coming over. “I’ll watch your backs. Don’t be heroes.”

  “Probably too late for that, at least in my case,” I told him.

  “At least you’ve held on to your humility. Be safe, man,” he said as Tommy took the lead. I was on the step behind him. Tommy was being extraordinarily careful, which translated to fear for me. In any kind of fight, armed or not, Tommy was a life-ending machine. That he was hesitant made things fairly scary. Okay, “fairly” wasn’t adequate. Really, my palms were sweating, my heart was trying to hammer its way out of my chest, and I could barely swallow because my mouth was so dry that I should have posted red warnings about the fire-danger level. We were as quiet as two people climbing stairs could be, which was still much too loud, at least, for someone expecting it. Our clothes rustled, our equipment shifted, and no matter where we stepped on a tread there was the groaning of the wood under pressure. Each creak made me wince.

  So sure, a slumbering homeowner in the dead of night most likely wouldn’t hear our approach, but the fucking zombies waiting in the wings sure would. On hindsight, maybe it would have been better to just rush up the stairs, maybe catch a couple by surprise, and not give the deep doubt that was forming in my gut a place to settle. I’d like to say that the zombies, fearing our imminent arrival, had jumped from the same window they entered. That wasn’t the case. When Tommy got to the top step he poked his head around the corner and he froze like we were playing a rousing game of freeze tag, and he wanted to win something fierce. Here was that urge to see again; wanting to know what had done that to him, I went around him to peek. The scene provoked one of those times when the mind races around, looking in all the dark corners of your logic, trying to make sense of the images being sent to your brain plate. The human mind can’t abide leaving unsolved a mystery or unclassified an anomaly, hence our insatiable lust for knowledge at the expense of all other things.

  There was a zombie in the middle of the hallway, in and of itself, not all that strange, considering the circumstances we found ourselves in, right? But that he was seated in a chair with his back to us, yeah, that was fucking weird. You want to know what it did though? Gawking at it cost us a few precious seconds as the three closed doors on that floor opened up and zombies flooded out. Tommy, in his haste to get his rifle up, about pushed me back into the wall. I’m not saying that he merely made me hit the wall, I’m saying I fucking almost became one with the drywall from the force. He was firing before I could recover. The house was small; therefore, the hallway was short. We’d already lost our position by the time they showed themselves.

  “Down, Mr. T, now!”

  I didn’t even get a shot off as I found myself launching down the stairs, careful to not knock myself out on the low overhang. Travis and BT were waiting off to the side as we made our hasty retreat. The zombies did not follow. This was one of those things where I was angry either way. If a few of them had come, we could have extinguished some of the bastards. That they didn’t, spoke volumes to their intelligence.

  “What’s going on?” BT asked, his rifle at the ready. He never took his eyes off the top of the stairs.

  “They were waiting for us; laid a trap,” I told him. “Shit, maybe you are Admiral Ackbar.”

  “I like reading suspense novels, Talbot. Not big on the whole zombie genre, though. I used to like reading about stuff I thought could actually happen in real life, made it scarier, you know what I mean?”

  I nodded and said, “yeah.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t read one or two of them. They were always mindless brain-eating machines; they didn’t lay traps, they didn’t climb ladders. It was always the buxom blonde tripping over her own feet that got everybody into trouble. What the fuck is going on here?”

  I couldn’t really think of anything to say. We all knew they were getting smarter, but our lives depended on the answers none of us had. “I wish I had a grenade,” was all I could think to tell him.

  “They know how to throw shit now, or have you forgotten already?”

  I’d forgotten already. Yeah, that would have sucked to have my thrown offering come back to greet me.

  “Flamethrower, then?”

  “Inside a stick-built house?”

  “Don’t be a dream-crusher, man,” I told him.

  “They’re going to wait for the dead of night and then they’re going to storm down those stairs,” BT said. He was right, though they might not attempt it tonight, maybe not even tomorrow night. For all I knew they were thinking to catch us truly off-guard. We’d be exhausted soon enough, waiting, anticipating. Whoever had guard duty might nod off and well, we knew where that was going.

  “Found this in the basement,” Tommy said. He had a coil of thick, yellow rope, a fistful of nails, and a hammer.

  “And?” I asked, wondering what he meant to do with it.

  “Just cover me,” he said, going halfway up the stairs. He started sinking nails halfway into studs then bending them upwards. He was on the fourth or fifth nail when a zombie quickly poked its head around the corner, I guess to see what was going on. I fired a shot, taking a chunk out of the wall but I don’t think I hit him, he’d moved entirely too fast. Tommy then started crisscrossing the rope around the nails until he had what looked like a spider web in the middle of the stairwell.

  “It won’t stop them but it will delay them,” he said as we both went back down.

  I couldn’t help but think it was also going to keep us from going up if we needed to, though right now, that was a closed avenue anyway. I was feeling way more trapped than I figured the zombies were; their enemies, or their food, was effectually surrounded. The backdoor groaned as the zombies launched another attack on it. Once they broke through, and they would, my guess was they would begin to pull our blockade out into the yard so we could not use it again.

  “What kind of shittery is this?” I asked. We were holed up with not much more than some old condiments to see us through. Not sure how far one could get on a shot of ketchup every day. Then to make matters even better, it was like the zombies, after hearing my question, decided to raise the stakes, add a little more shittery into the equation, I suppose. They started stomping on the upstairs floor. Started out soft enough, but as more and more of them joined in we watched the light fixtures sway, then plaster dust and dead bugs rained down on us. It was enough noise to keep Gary awake and to awaken a screaming, crying, Ryan, who was in some terrible pain. At first, we wondered if it was their version of a tribal dance, something to get them amped up for a battle, that they would be rushing down the stairs as fast as they could to overpower us. After ten minutes, that was beginning to seem unlikely; after a half an hour, we knew it for what it was. They were going to drive us into exhaustion.

  There was no reason not to think they couldn’t keep the stomping up for days. We wouldn’t be able to sleep, then all of a sudden, they would stop and we wouldn’t even be able to help ourselves as we just passed out. Yeah, we’d eventually wake up, but it would be to the screams of each other getting our faces torn off. After an hour of it I was ready to give going outside a shot. I’m not sure if I have ever related this story before in a previ
ous journal, but when I was still living in the townhouse at Little Turtle, we had a young neighbor for a while that was very much into club music. Which, for those of you that are unfamiliar with this genre, is basically just loud beats that can go on forever so you can enjoy your Ecstasy as you grind against your partner in a fit of psychedelic passion on the dance floor for hours on end. For some reason this assho…I mean, young kid, liked to turn this shit…I mean, music, on at around ten o’clock every night, you know, which is fine–he has a right to listen to whatever the fuck he wants to, even if it sucks. What’s not cool, though, is when you have five-foot tall speakers with bass cones the size of dinner plates pushing the low, thumping sound waves through everyone else’s house, causing dishes on the counter to vibrate and move from the shock waves.

  For two days straight, I bit my tongue and dealt with it in a stewing anger, especially since he had somewhat of the decency to shut it off at midnight, thinking that everybody else maybe went to bed at the same time he did. I did not. When the third night rolled around and he started it up again, I didn’t wait two minutes before I beat the shit out of his door trying to gain his attention. Had to wait for a lull in the action before he heard my assault, and like I said, club mixes go on for a good long while. He lowered it to about half, which meant my fillings didn’t move around in my head. The fourth night, I showed up on his doorstep with a rifle in my hands. I didn’t threaten him in any way. I just explained that lack of sleep tends to make me do irrational things and I left it at that. Never heard his shitty…I mean club music again. Where am I going with this? Oh yeah. A loud, rhythmic bass-pounding sound can quickly unravel the nerves, fray the edges, induce anger, and produce massive amounts of anxiety. I wondered if I could once again silence the offending party with a threat.

  Maybe I could. I grabbed Gary’s rifle and stomped into the kitchen, which was below the bedroom, where it seemed that most of the sound was coming from. I raised the rifle straight up. There was the fleeting hint of concern at just how smart of a move this was right before I pulled the trigger. I had to turn my head as plaster and wood bits sprinkled my head. I adjusted my aim and took two more shots.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Mike?” BT asked over the jarring noise I was making in concert to the zombies. Black goo began to leak from the holes. I’d hit a target, though it had not persuaded the Lords of the Dead Dance to stop.

  I took another two shots, heard a definite thump as a body dropped onto the floor. More brackish fluid leaked down the hole. I reloaded the rifle and took three more shots, primarily because it felt good. At least one more zombie fell to the ground, maybe not dead, but severely wounded, that was for sure.

  “I can do this all fucking night long!” I shouted up.

  Did they understand me? Maybe not the words, but the action and timing were crystal clear. It appeared that they did not wish to diminish their numbers too greatly before they launched their attack. With my threat verbalized and demonstrated, they ceased their psychological sound torture.

  “No way,” BT whispered after a minute of silence.

  “Fuck, I hope so,” I told him. “Not sure how much more of that I could have taken. Tommy, what’s the basement like?” I asked, but in a whisper. If the zombies could somehow understand me, there was no reason I could think of to let them in on our plans.

  “Two windows that maybe Nicole could fit out of. No outside doors, no crawl spaces or other hiding areas. The door leading down to the basement is a hollow core, and there is no effective way to barricade it because it opens outward into the kitchen, not towards the basement.”

  “A couple of months ago a door handle would have been beyond them,” I said. I pointed around at our group. “Sick, terrified, wounded, exhausted. Can’t attack, can’t leave, can’t stay, that about sum up our situation?” I asked everyone.

  We were at most forty-eight hours from big trouble. Already my stomach was collapsing in on itself, but the thirst; that was beginning to become a real problem. I could feel my throat getting dryer by the minute. Soon our brain function would diminish as we lacked the lubricant to keep it working efficiently. Dying of thirst held absolutely no appeal.

  “Dad.” Travis had come up to me, I was sitting back against a wall, catching a few uneasy minutes of sleep, or at least trying to–wasn’t going so good.

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying to put on as brave a face as I could as I sat up straighter. It was difficult to look past the black bags under his eyes and the sallow complexion he was getting from not being properly hydrated.

  “There’s a stack of pallets downstairs and some tools,” he said. I’m not sure if he was expecting me to put it all together; I didn’t. I could blame it on the lack of water, but he’d given me woefully little to go on.

  “I’m listening.” I sat up more as he did so. What he was proposing closed in on preposterous and I was in love with it. When I rolled it out to the rest of the group they looked much more skeptical than I had.

  “There’s a couple of things you’ve overlooked,” BT said. “First off, pallets are roughly forty pounds each, give or take. You’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred or five hundred pounds when this thing is done. Throw in Ryan, who will also need to be carried, and we’re close to six hundred pounds. That’s still doable, between Tommy and myself we could get that done, but we’d be completely useless for anything else.”

  “What about me?” I asked indignantly.

  “You mean why are you completely useless?”

  “No. I could help carry it.”

  “You’d be carrying Ryan or did you already forget?”

  “Oh, you bawbag!”

  “Bawbag?” BT asked.

  “Scottish swear word, I think.”

  “Really? Not enough English ones to go around? What’s it mean?” He asked.

  “Could mean trolley for all I know.”

  “Then we’re dealing with the width of the door,” Tommy went on staving off my tangent.

  That was a blow I’d never even considered.

  “We’d have three feet,” Tommy said. “It’s slim, but it could be done.”

  BT had weighed and voiced his objections and now they seemed overly optimistic. “Are you seriously thinking we can make it out of here in a long, thin, heavy wooden tank with the press of a thousand zombies on us?” he asked the boy. “Even at three pallets length, we’re talking twelve feet. That gives each of us about a foot; we’ll be half-stepping our way out of here, and it’s not like the zombies are just going to leave us be when we get out. We would be a shuffling crate of cookies.”

  I just looked at him, then I looked at him some more, then I kept looking.

  “What, man! You’re freaking me out. Of course I’m in. We haven’t done any crazy ass cracker shit in a while.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I told him as I moved in to clap his shoulder.

  “You touch me and I’ll break your gallbladder.”

  “That possible?” I asked Tommy.

  “You want to try and find out?” he asked me back.

  9

  Mike Journal Entry 9

  Not sure if the homeowner was a pallet hoarder, but we pulled up thirty-two pallets from the basement. Some of them were no good, either rotted out or the space between the wood was too wide, allowing the zombies easy access to the food inside. But when it was all done, we had a giant rectangular box with no bottom. It was four pallets long, by one and a half high and a little under three feet wide, so that we could squeeze out the door. We had cross beams inside to keep it from being crushed and handholds to heft the box that was just north of six hundred pounds, by our reckoning. This was going to be like sneaking out of camp under a canoe.

  “Looks like a giant fucking coffin,” BT said as he stepped away from it.

  “It could be,” I answered.

  “Oh, that’s so fucking helpful, makes me feel all gooey inside. Jerk.” He walked away.

  “That going
to be tall enough?” Meredith asked.

  “For us normal humans, it’ll be fine, that one over there is going to have a serious crick in his neck when we get out,” I said to her. The plan was to head out the next morning; we’d try to get a little sleep and go at first light. Not like the cover of night would have worked in our favor, anyway. Let’s face it, to humans, everything seems better in the light of day. How many nights have you personally lain awake and worried and fretted over something only to realize the next morning it wasn’t that big a deal? So, yeah, that was the plan. Seemed the zombies had something else in mind. They heard us working and maybe on some level they realized we were either getting ready to leave or were building a new house where they couldn’t come, and they didn’t like that. Or they, like us, were just plain hungry. It was Meredith’s turn to guard the stairs and she sounded the alarm when the first snarls of a caught-up zombie awoke her from a slumber. Got to admit, at that point, I was pretty happy about Tommy’s snare.

  She gave us a short, surprised, frightened, yelp followed by an extra loud gunshot. Anyone who had not been awakened by her exclaim certainly was after the report. The house was dark; not underground dark, but Meredith was only five feet away and I could just make her out.

  “Mer?” I called out after the echo stopped.

  “Fine Unc. Zombie in the trap.” She was standing now, rifle at the ready. I could hear his groans and the twisting of rope as he moved around, trying to push his way through. I put a bullet where I figured his head was. The brief illumination told me this was no rogue zombie heading down to the fridge to grab a snack while the others slept. They were coming and the rope looked stretched to its capability. Ultimately, it was the nails that betrayed us; I knew hemp wouldn’t let me down.

  “Travis, over here! BT, Tommy, start clearing the back door! Sis, start rounding everyone else up,” I shouted as I fired.