Those Left Behind

by Mark Tufo

  The pain was intense and he didn’t think anything would make him forget about it, at least not until the zombies pulled the door back off him. Ron reached over with his good hand, desperately trying to keep them from opening it completely and pulling him free of the truck. Two of the fingernails on his right hand were ripped free as the door was finally yanked open. Realizing he was fighting a losing battle, Ron let the door go and put the truck in drive. Almost instantly he felt hands on him as the zombies grabbed at him. The tires squealed as he jumped on the gas pedal in his haste to get away. Behind him, the rag fuse ignited and a flame shot to the hole. Ron’s truck mowed zombies down like weeds as he tried to get away. A dead hand slid off Ron’s shoulder and gripped the steering wheel, veering the truck violently to the right where the gas station wall loomed large. The crash of the front end hitting the building was quickly and loudly outdone by the concussive boom of gas fumes being ignited from below. The ground rumbled and shook. The metal discs on the tanks blew fifty feet into the air. A superheated cloud of fire and debris spread out from the epicenter, consuming everything in its wake before rising up into a mushroom cloud.

  Chapter 10

  MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 7

  “Holy shit Ron, way to go,” I said as I watched the fireball rise up into the air. I knew it was a damn fine distraction and I could barely take my eyes from it. I would imagine the bastards that were about to be shot couldn’t either. The guard I was assigned was the farthest from the blaze. I got a good sense he wanted to travel across the roof to a better vantage point; he had completely turned away from me and was looking in that direction. Morally, I wasn’t sure if I should have felt bad or not for shooting the man in the back. Dead is dead, after all. I did not move, nor did the barrel of the rifle as I fired. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I had fired, as all else was drowned out by the echoing explosion and all the aftershocks, I suppose, as other combustibles were consumed.

  The man I was shooting at reached his hand up to his neck as if he were swatting away a particularly nasty deer fly before he fell forward. He was draped over the knee wall of his tower like a drunk over a park bench. I silently willed him to fall back as I handed the rifle to Tiffany, who was now running away from me. He didn’t fall over, but he also didn’t call out to his fellow guards. It was a victory. I moved quickly to my next shooting station.

  I waited for the rifle to shoot again. It was one of those things where part of me hoped that gun never came. People were such a rare commodity; killing them was not beneficial to us as a species. Maybe when we were grossly overpopulated war was a necessary evil. Nature’s way of population control. Simplistic maybe, but effective to a point. But now that we were clinging to existence, this was tantamount to walking into an endangered species zoo and opening up an all-you-can-eat exotic meats buffet. Who does that shit?

  It was Travis I saw sprinting through the woods towards me. I figured it was time to run—that something bad had happened.

  “Tiffany?” I asked as he handed the gun off. You’ll note: not then, nor ever did I ask about Deneaux. If she’d somehow found a Japanese restaurant still open and they served her an improperly prepared puffer fish and she died from poisoning...well, so much the better.

  “Twisted ankle,” he chuffed out as he blew hard a couple of times to catch his breath. My son was easily in the best shape of his life, even taking into account his football playing days. I’m sure he could run for miles without a problem, but those fucking sprints, they’re brutal. You ramp up the body to perform a task it can only do in short bursts. I don’t know if I’ve ever sprinted in my entire life where I haven’t wanted to puke immediately afterward. He looked like he was at that point.

  I brought my rifle up; my target was nowhere to be seen. I peered intently, now pissed off that I hadn’t kept my eye on him the entire time.

  “Left side, dad.” I saw the top of his head peak up. Travis was pointing.

  My target was aware he was marked. He was showing the bare minimum, looked like I was trying to shoot a damn yarmulke.

  “I’m good...I’m not that good.” He raised up maybe an inch more. I fired; my round careened off the steel he was encased in. I saw the barrel of his weapon come over the lip, he had an idea where we were and he was planning on returning fire.

  “Get to cover!” I grabbed Travis. The man on the roof had a much bigger and a much faster gun. Dirt, clods of grass, and rocks sprayed all around us as he absolutely salted the earth with lead. Tracer rounds lit up the night like angry fireflies. I don’t know if he had NVGs on but his rounds were getting dangerously close. We were trying to use a tree for cover that had taken that very year to go on a diet. I think he was shooting an AK-47, though it could have been an AR using .308 blackout rounds. Didn’t matter because either of which, I was thinking, could very easily go through the tree. I was about to tell Travis we needed to make a run for it when more rounds started firing off to our left. It was Deneaux and her pistol, she was a crack shot; a real Annie Oakley (not even incarnate...like, maybe Annie was really still alive and had just changed her name to stay out of the public eye). But there was no fucking way in hell she could make that shot.

  A magical elf riding a fucking unicorn would have to grab that round and guide it into that guard and even then it would be iffy. What was actually happening was so out of the realm of things I thought might happen that it almost hadn’t occurred to me. Okay, that’s a stretching of the truth. Ok, I lied. It didn’t occur to me at all. Travis had to tell me that Deneaux was pulling the gunfire away from us. Oh...and I’d be lying again if I said it didn’t cross my mind to let Deneaux hang out there on her own a little while longer. She was a perfect target standing there, gun raised at a forty-five-degree angle as she shot.

  Rounds were now impacting all around her; tracers lit up her smiling, smoking face. She was having a grand old time, like she was in glass slippers at the ball listening to Pachelbel Canon in D, back in the seventeen hundreds when she was a teenager. I followed my way back to the exit point for the rounds; the man was indeed completely standing, exposed, attempting to get a better angle on her as he did his best Stormtrooper impression. Most will get that reference, for those that don’t, I mean he was missing with spectacular consistency.

  There was a quick volley of errant shots as his rifle traveled upwards but it was over. I’d put at least two rounds into the side of his head.

  “Took you long enough, Michael!” she shouted as she came closer. I could see Tiffany hobbling up behind her. “I thought perhaps you might leave me out there.” When I didn’t reply she only smiled wider. “A little more of this and you’ll be just as dark as I am. The guards are neutralized. Phase two?”

  “A good a plan as any,” I told her. We’d raided the Home Depot just down the road, grabbed a thirty-two-foot ladder. I didn’t want to come up short like we had at WalMart, seemingly fifty years ago. It was strange to think about how much had happened on that night, on that very first night. The problem with a ladder that big is just how damned unwieldy it is. I knew we had to move quickly; there was no way that amount of gunfire went unnoticed. I did not want to be on a ladder when someone poked their head over. We slammed that thing into the wall. Santa would have been proud of how much clatter we made.

  “Watch your fingers,” I automatically told Trav as I grabbed the guide rope and quickly extended the rungs up.

  “Where’s Uncle Ron?” he asked, looking around.

  “Good question. Don’t have time to answer it right now, though.” I was five rungs up before the ladder stopped vibrating from the impact against the wall. My son was right behind me. I poked my head over the edge of the building quickly, convinced I was going to see ten heavily armed people looking around trying to figure out what was going on. It was empty, save the four corpses, and they didn’t seem to mind that we were up there. Tiffany was supposed to have joined us for this part of the assault but she was injured and I could ill afford to have to look out for her
. Trav and I raced across the roof to the access door that led down into the building. I had an irrational fear that it might be locked; I needn’t have worried. Once I opened the door I found my answer as to why our little firefight hadn’t been noticed.

  Sounded like a stadium down there—like the Super Bowl was being played and the score was tight. I knew in my gut it had something to do with BT, but I still had to be careful. I was in the enemy’s lair and I had my son with me. Every single person I encountered was a hostile; there could be no innocents. The stairwell was empty and mostly dark; I could see the door at the bottom—it had one of those small sidelights that let some light in.

  “Clear,” I whispered to Travis, though I could have yelled it and not been heard. We went down and I looked through the small window to the other side of a narrow corridor. I opened the door a crack and poked my head out; to the right was an immediate dead end. To my left, the corridor went down to the employee break room and then the bathrooms. Out beyond that was the main store where Thunderdome was going on.

  “Murph! That you?” someone called out from the break room. “You’re missing it, man, that guy was a fucking monster in the ring. Knox flipped and is about to execute him, you know, z style. You already done on duty?”

  I quietly handed my rifle to Travis and unsheathed my Ka-Bar as I crept along the hallway.

  “Yo Murph.” The man was coming out to meet his friend. When he saw me his eyes went big. He dropped his snacks as I plunged the knife in and up into his lungs. I covered his mouth with my other hand as I helped him to the ground. What I had not noticed at first was the woman sitting at one of the tables, reading a book, sitting back in her chair, her feet resting on the table. She looked over at me and then to the tabletop. I was dead to rights. Travis came in and told her not to move.

  “Make a sound and I will kill you,” he told her.

  She kept looking at that gun. “Don’t,” I warned her as I stood and moved closer. I’m sure the sight of me with warm blood dripping from my knife was very comforting for her. She leaned forward, pulled her feet off the table, and did what she felt she needed to. I absolutely could not blame her. It will be a long time before I forget the sound of that blade slicing the ligature in her neck as I slid it in. Maybe I should have tried to knock her out, but despite what you see in the movies, that’s much more difficult than flat out killing someone. Sometimes you can hit a person hard enough in the head you think you split their skull and they just shake it off. There is no second guessing when a cartoroid artery is severed.

  “Dammit.” Killing a man in the heat of combat or in self-defense sucks but it’s justifiable. Killing a zombie is a definite, no matter what my inclination. But killing a female reading a book? I think I’ve got to consider that murder any way you look at it. Travis was already looking the way we needed to go. Not sure if this phased him so he wanted to get out of there as fast as possible or if it mattered not at all and we just had more things to do than debate over whether killing her or not was reprehensible in the eyes of the Lord. I’m not going to lie, growing up Catholic can cause far too much baggage in the guilt department.

  There was no sense in sticking around here any longer; she wasn’t going to absolve me and if I didn’t save BT, then what in the fuck had I cut her throat for? Is it weird that I didn’t give two shits for the four men up top, but this one romance reading lass was going to haunt my dreams for years. Maybe I am a chauvinist...although this might be reverse chauvinism...but is that feminism? Can’t say I’m one of those either. Shit. I lightly tapped my head against the wall as I headed out of the break room, snapping my psyche back into place. The crowd, in the meantime, had gone exceedingly quiet. And then the cheers rose again. I heard what sounded like a cloth covered bell being rung every second or two or more.

  It was a hollow gonging that I’m sure I’d heard before, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Travis was at the end of the hallway now; he’d stopped and was poking his head around the corner to see what was happening.

  “What the fuck am I looking at right now?” he breathed. I’d caught up to him. We were staring at the side of an octagonal cage with a fenced tunnel that led into it. It was completely full of zombies and rising head and shoulders above the crowd was BT, inside that cage. He was smashing zombies with a baseball bat while the crowd went nuts. My first inclination was to just come out from around the corner and start spraying the audience with bullets, but I held back. “Got any ideas?” I figured I’d run something by my son first and see if he could talk me down off that particular ledge.

  There was a break in the action; I couldn’t see BT anymore. I was moving around trying to get a better angle.

  “He’s fine,” Travis said. “He’s bent over trying to catch his breath.”

  “We’re going to have to do something soon.”

  There was the sound of metal on metal once, then twice. BT screamed out, everyone went quiet—I’m talking crickets chirping quiet.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He’s broken a lock and is forcing the cage open. Go BT!” Trav said.

  I knew these assholes weren’t going to like that much. As soon as they were over the shock of what he’d done, someone was going to stop him before he had a chance to escape.

  “We have to cover him.” Now I did come out from the hallway. There was already a panicked expression sweeping across the faces in the crowd as people started to move away. Then I got it. BT wasn’t trying to escape; he was letting the zombies loose. Well, that should make for a fun mixer real fast.

  The spectators were between a rock and a hard place as I unleashed rounds. People were scrambling, falling over themselves in their haste to get away from the two dangers they were now faced with. Travis joined me and we just kept shooting. Fish in a barrel would have been harder to hit. Were they all bad? Of course not. Did I have the time to interview them and find out their individual true natures? Definitely not. That they were sitting there cheering while a man inside a metal cage fought for his life with a baseball bat against a horde of zombies was all the criminal intent I needed. Those that saw Travis and myself were attempting to veer off; those behind started to scream as they were dragged down and eaten.

  The zombies were loose. It was only a matter of time before our position was compromised. Ironically, right now the safest person in the building was BT.

  “We have to get to him!” I told Travis. That made as much sense as wearing a chum suit in a shark tank. We’d moved a couple of steps when I swore I caught a glimpse of the bastard that had put a bullet in my belly. He stood on the far side of the cage holding a large revolver out and it looked like it was aimed at BT—like he was going to make him pay for what he’d done, wrecking his little circus act.

  “Don’t think so asshole,” I said as I sent three rounds his way. None, unfortunately, hit, but he got the message that he wasn’t dealing with just the zombies. He looked around wildly for who had fired the shots. I hoped there was some fear and surprise when he finally settled on me. Tough to tell. Insanity burned so brightly in that one it had the tendency to overshadow all other emotions. He’d disappeared into the maelstrom before I could get another shot off. The arena had mostly cleared out of people by the time we got up to the cage; no one was even paying us any attention anyway as zombies were in hot pursuit of all living flesh. We were on the far side of the cage from where the zombies were exiting. I was happy to note we didn’t seem to be on their meal plan. I’m still not sure if the people inside even knew they were being attacked from the outside as well as in. BT was coated in gore head to toe. Carrie would have looked upon him with disgust.

  “Why the fuck are you naked?” was the first thing I could think to ask him when I got up there like I figured for some strange reason it had been his choice.

  “Took you long enough.”

  I was having a hard time getting past the fact that he was nude. “Did you do any umm…strange shows in Mexico?” I asked.

>   “Don’t make this weird, Talbot.”

  “Me make it weird? You’re the one playing Roman gladiator in the buff.”

  BT did the only smart move available to him; he spoke directly to Travis. “I’m going to wait until the zombies have all cleared through and out, and then I’m running back into the storeroom. Meet me there. Bring your dad with you...or not.”

  “Not cool,” I told BT as Travis led me away. We circled around the cage via the side that was fairly free of pandemonium. The Best Buy forces were now getting into defensive positions; they had obtained weapons and were firing. It wouldn’t be long before they had the situation under control. Once that happened, Knox would be out for blood. I was never a fan of shooting at locks; bullets always did funny things when they hit steel, but I didn’t have time to be cautious. Yup...I stopped when I thought that, too. It would be nice to remember a time when I had actually thought to be cautious. This would have been the perfect opportunity to give that a go. The careening bullet wasn’t the main problem; it was the zombies at the end of the parade that were. They were watching as I made a new exit, opening up a whole new buffet lane. They’d moved to the front, instantly.

  “Jumped the gun on that,” I said as I raised my rifle to my shoulder and fired. The tunnel was not emptying fast enough. Travis and I were doing our best to usher them along. There was a chance Knox could rally before we had a chance to make good our escape. “We need to go in the storeroom—shut the door behind us when the zees are gone.”

  Travis looked about as sure of that as I had felt when I said it. The back room was a dark void. If there were any malingering zombies who had been taking their time, we were about to shut ourselves in with them, in absolute darkness. Even I had the ability to recognize a bad idea; doesn’t mean I would not implement it, I’m just saying I could see it. I shot two more zombies as Travis shouldered past me and into the warehouse section. He clicked his flashlight on just as I stepped in behind him and pulled the door shut. From what we could illuminate by our flashlights it looked much like what you would expect a large room once inhabited by zombies might. And by that I mean it reeked. There was dried blood and fresh blood stains everywhere. It looked as if the zombies had been painting the floor in the crimson fluid.