Those Left Behind

by Mark Tufo

  “I don’t know, but something’s not right. We’re definitely being followed. Someone, somewhere, is on to us. Haven’t been able to take a shit in a week without someone offering to hand me toilet paper.”

  “Dude you have seriously got to work on your analogies.” BT clapped me on the shoulder. We waited for Travis, Justin, and Gary to catch up and then we went back to the house.

  Chapter 16

  MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 12

  We waited two full days, no zombies and no Knox. Mad Jack had been keeping an eye on them but when we lost the feed, we lost them, and he’d not been able to pick them up again. My guess was they’d found a place to lay low, like we had. Ron’s house was still out of the question. We weren’t starving…yet, but we were hungry and everyone was starting to get a little irritable. We had a lot of mouths to feed and dammit if Deneaux hadn’t put her cancerous thoughts into my head. Of the twenty-eight of us, really only ten were combat ready and hardened. That made for a lot of people that needed assistance and resources. It wasn’t that I was ever going to leave them behind; I just didn’t even want the thought of liability to cross my mind. I was not Knox but there was certainly something to be said about leading a fighting force, makes you much more wieldy in a volatile situation. Anything we did had to be thought out with getting the slowest and the most infirm from point A to B as safely as possible.

  “Fuck you, Knox.” I was standing on the small porch looking out at nothing in particular.

  It was BT who heard me. He was looking out at the same expanse. “He’s not really there, is he? Because I can’t see him.”

  “I meant in general.”

  “Just throwing curses to the wind then?”

  “Yeah pretty much.”

  “We can’t stay here, Mike.”

  “Yeah I know.”

  “The kids are hungry, hell, I’m hungry.”

  “Have never quite felt as vulnerable as I do now. Cut off from supplies and transportation. We’re ripe for the picking. Those zombies head back, the vamps, shit even Knox. One Molotov cocktail and we’re done; we won’t be able to run from here. All of us, of this, can be undone with a gas filled coke bottle.”

  “Why the hell are you thinking like that? That’s pretty dark, even for you.”

  “It’s not bad enough out there, now we have to deal with a psychotic dictator wannabe who somehow has the ways and means to track us. I can’t figure out why he hasn’t already exacted justice.”

  “So you don’t think the meet up was a coincidence?”

  “Maine is small, brother, but it isn’t that small.”

  “Then why hasn’t he attacked here?”

  I’m guessing he doesn’t want everyone dead. He likes his games. So the bastard is out there, that I know and at some point, he’s going to make his move, our only play is to be gone.”

  “Wherever he is, we still need transportation.”

  “I know that, BT. So how do we go about it? Do we send out a large force to secure the rides and leave this place undefended or do we go out with a small force that can be easily picked off? Next time he corners us it won’t be so close to a rescue and my guess is he will have a response for that anyway.”

  “We all go.”

  “How big are your balls?” I asked him, I kept looking.

  “Mike, you’re making me uncomfortable, I mean at first I figured you were going figurative on me, now I’m wondering if you’re leaning to literal.”

  I shook my head. “No, wait, I definitely don’t mean literal. I don’t want to see your balls, which I’m sure are the size of grapefruits.”

  “Ponch, why are you talking about his balls?” Trip was leaning into my ear as if he were going to whisper but was talking at a completely conversational tone.

  “Figure of speech, Trip.” I leaned back from him.

  Trip turned to BT and was leaning over, staring directly at his crotch. “You’d think something that big would bulge out, you must have a great tailor.” Trip was reaching out like he wanted to physically inspect what we’d been talking about.

  “Get out of here.” BT pushed Trip away; if I hadn’t been on the other side to catch him, he would have gone flying off the porch.

  “They must be sensitive.” Trip said as an aside to me. “Anything that big would have to be. Do you think he’s embarrassed because he’s all balls and no bat?” He started reaching out again.

  “You have a death wish?” I asked him as I physically picked him up and out of the way of BT who looked on the verge of sending Trip into the stratosphere without the assistance of drugs. “Stephanie! You need to save your husband!”

  She came out onto the porch, she didn’t travel too far from him as I’m sure she was used to having to extract him from all manner of issue. She took a quick look at BT and that was all she needed.

  “Come on honey, let’s see if we can find you some food.”

  It took BT a few minutes to calm down. “Did you see that man? He was trying to touch my junk! Who does that?”

  “Trip, apparently.”

  “And you just stood there!”

  “What the hell did you want me to do? I don’t know what kind of deal you two have worked out.”

  “You’re an asshole, Mike.”

  “Hardly a newsworthy revelation.”

  “It could work, you know,” he said, coming back around to what we had been talking about.

  “Yeah it could, so could me becoming a pilot and jetting our asses out of here. There’s a possibility of success, just a way bigger potential for failure. We get caught out in the open like that and we’ll get slaughtered. We’ve got three infants and six kids for, fuck’s sake.”

  “We can’t stay here, you said it yourself. Those three infants and six kids need to eat. We all do. And I need to hear Trip shut the hell up about his Reuben sandwiches across the States tour.”

  Trip, of us all, was doing the worst without a constant supply of food. He would go on and on about the different things he’d eaten and where. And for a guy that barely remembered his own name he was very detailed in texture, taste, and presentation of his meals, the latest being the Reuben sandwiches he’d eaten. I had to admit I’d not known there could be so many variations in rye bread.

  “The truck. I say we go back for the truck.” BT continued.

  “Like we haven’t had enough bad experiences with dump trucks. Plus, you yourself said it didn’t work.”

  “I’m pretty convinced it’s the battery. We take the one from the tractor, switch it out, get everyone in, go a couple of towns over, away from this place and get some real rides.”

  “And if it’s not the battery?” I asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know man. What if we just wait here until we starve to death?”

  “Point taken. I’ll get MJ to do extra duty on the sat feed. We’ll head out in the morning; maybe get you a sandwich or two—you get so cranky when you haven’t had enough to eat.”

  I told everyone that night what we were up to, no one protested. There really weren’t a shitload of substitute ideas thrown around. I could see Deneaux biting her tongue, rare for her but appreciated. I slept that night, barely, not sure if I strung more than five minutes together at any one time.

  What I hadn’t taken into account the previous evening was whether to take the tractor or just the battery. Obviously, the tractor offered a measure of safety but at the expense of announcing to everyone in the surrounding area that we were on the move. In the end, we took it. I had MJ keep an eye on our perimeter and every time we went off grid, so to speak, we shut her down and took a break. It took way longer than it should have, but I was not going to lead us straight into a trap. It was possible Knox had the same technology and would set something up to hit us during our blind spots.

  Then came the fun of the pit, we couldn’t send everyone down because we’d basically be in a fishing barrel ripe for the shooting but there were some straggler zombies down there that needed to be dealt with. I
t was Deneaux that led the charge. I know, I know—it’s weird just to write that. She drove the tractor down, crushing everything in her path. BT and Gary followed her to clear away anything that could somehow survive, then most of the rest went after them. Justin, myself, Meredith, and Tiffany hung back as the perimeter guard. Twice I caught Mad Jack looking at his screen like he was a fourteen-year-old boy and he had somehow tapped into the Playboy channel. My heart would quicken and I would make everyone with me get low, convinced we were even now in the crosshairs of a sniper. Neither time amounted to anything though I was tempted to run down that hill and smack him in the head for scaring me.

  There were only five shots from inside the hole, Deneaux had been very thorough in her search and destroy mission. Even so, those five blasts echoed loudly out of there as if it were a megaphone. I winced with each and every one. I wondered if Knox had heard it, or possibly more zombies.

  “You alright, Mr. Talbot?” Tiffany asked.

  So unused to the moniker, I kept on pacing.

  “Dad, she’s talking to you.” Justin put an arm out to stop my earth stomping.

  “Huh?”

  “Tiffany asked if you were alright.”

  I looked up from the hole to her to see the concern on her face, she was trying to figure out what had me on edge. “Hey...sorry. And it’s just Mike. I get weirded out with Mr. Talbot, that’s always how the cops addressed me.”

  She smiled at that.

  “Oh, he’s serious.” Justin made sure to let her know.

  “You’ve completed your usefulness, why don’t you start filling this hole in,” I told him. “Changing a battery is a five-minute procedure I’m not sure why it’s taking so long, I don’t like being out here so long with our d…” I caught myself, not that Justin was going to let it go.

  “What dad? What don’t you like getting caught out with?”

  “He gets caught out with it a lot, apparently, he’s a big commando fan.” Meredith decided to voice up.

  “This is not a conversation we’re having. We’re surrounded by enemies on all sides and we’re discussing my undergarments.

  “Or lack thereof,” Meredith said as Justin and Tiffany busted out laughing.

  I made sure my pacing was a good twenty feet away while they yucked it up. Ten minutes later and they were still working on the damn battery.

  “Dad!” Justin called over.

  “No more jokes!” I told him.

  “No, look down.” He was pointing to Mad Jack who appeared to be yelling.

  I could hardly hear him. But I didn’t need it to be shouted, he was holding the screen up and on a slight breeze his words drifted up so silent as to be a whisper. “Zombies.”

  “To the mouth of the hole, move!” I told the kids.

  All was quiet as we sat on the lip of the access road down. It was pebbles that started rolling down the slopes of the hole that clued me into the number of zombies we were talking about.

  “Go now, all of you. Down.”

  “Dad?”

  “No questions, go.”

  They did, albeit Justin was a little reluctant. I stayed long enough to give them an adequate head start. We weren’t going to be able to hold them off; hell, I don’t think we’d even be able to delay them much. The only way we could give those down below any extra time would be if we allowed ourselves to be eaten. I wasn’t too keen on that option; I was going to keep spinning the wheel until something better came up. The kids were three-quarters down, I was about halfway when I saw BT, Deneaux, and a few others raise their rifles up. Not going to lie, I was happy they were pointing closer to the top. I turned, because let’s face it, that’s what you do when something is chasing you. This isn’t the NFL; I don’t have the option of looking at the big screen ahead of me. I stumbled for a couple of steps, but not before I caught enough glimpses of the horde coming our way. Soon enough, bullets started to fly; I was closing in on the kids who were spending way too much time constantly looking over their shoulders.

  “Keep running!” I urged.

  In between lulls of shooting I could hear Trip shouting. I won’t swear on it but I thought I heard him say they needed more time to fit in the flux capacitor. Gary was under the hood of the truck, he also kept looking up the hill to see what was going on and then I could see his arms furiously moving as he was cranking something down or trying to remove something, I was unsure of what his actions signified. It was bad enough that he was still under there. Changing a battery was a ten-minute job, and that’s on a bad day. There had to be something wrong. No pressure, but I figured he had about another four to get it done or else.

  Tracy, thankfully, was getting everyone into the rear of the dump truck which was no easy feat, given there was no ladder. BT had to leave his post and aid in the effort. He climbed onto the truck and was basically lifting people up by their outstretched arms and depositing them into the bed, handing one to another waiting inside. There was a sharp outcry of pain; Carol had slipped and struck the side of her head on the corner of the truck. She’d told BT in no uncertain terms that she could get up there by herself. The stubborn woman was going to get someone killed as three people rushed to help her back up. Blood streamed down her face, her eyes were threatening to roll back and her legs were wobbly.

  Gary’s look of panic became more expressive as I, and I guess the zombies, got closer. The kids had finally got down and Justin went over to help his grandmother. Even the unflappable Deneaux kept glancing up as she hurriedly loaded her rifle. Things turned even more askew in a matter of moments, as impatient zombies, unhappy with their place in the conga line decided to take the express route down. Some were spilling off the side of the narrow roadway but even more were taking what should have been suicidal plunges straight down from the rim. I’d mistakenly thought it was large rocks being knocked loose, then there was the resounding cracks of multiple bones snapping as they impacted the ground far below. The entire perimeter of the pit was encircled with zombies who couldn’t seem to control themselves enough to not go jumping in. Some were trying to navigate down the impossibly steep sides; they were in the minority. I’d finally made it to the bottom, myself; the zombies that had beat me down there were now crawling, mostly broken, over to the truck. I had a thirty-second head start on those behind.

  “Why aren’t you in the back?” I asked Porkchop as I was heading to the cab.

  He shrugged. It was too late; he was going to have to stay here.

  “Gary, get in the truck!” I shouted. Deneaux had got into the passenger seat and was firing, as were multiple guns from the back of the dump truck.

  “See if she’ll start!” He shouted without looking up.

  I didn’t hesitate and try to grab him; there wasn’t time. I ran around to the far side.

  “It’s diesel. Deneaux reminded me as I climbed into the seat. Like I’d not heard the words, I cranked the ignition without waiting.

  “Diesel, dumbass,” she said between shots.

  Not sure how many times I said I hated fucking diesel engines in the four seconds it took for the glow plugs to warm up. I started the engine. Gary was propelled off the front of the truck like I’d launched him with an electrical charge and, by the way he swore, that was probably exactly what happened. He stumbled back within inches of the outstretched hands of a zombie that was absolutely sure was finally going to get a happy meal. I’d gripped the door handle and was about to help him up when he righted himself and came running back. He closed the hood just as a roiling black cloud of smoke rose from the twin exhaust pillars.

  “Go, go, go!” he shouted as he climbed onto the hood. I had to wait the few seconds it took for him to go up and over the cab and into the back. I knew I was going to make the truck lurch and I’d shake him off like a bad dream if I didn’t. Deneaux had pulled in her rifle and rolled up her window as the fastest of the zombies reached the truck.

  “Feel free to drive at any time,” she said calmly.

  “You got it
, Miss Daisy.” The truck sputtered and spat, coughed a few times, hesitated and jumped into gear. As far as getting a machine rolling, it was about as ungainly as it gets but was still beautiful in its own right. The question now was: how was I possibly going to get out of here? The roadway was packed with commuters; I didn’t think I’d be able to force them off without putting us at even more risk.

  “I’m dying to see what you do here,” Deneaux said as she lit a cigarette. I snatched it from her hand before she could bring it to her mouth. I popped that thing in mine, took two quick drags, killed about half the thing and then handed it back.

  “Me too,” I said with an exhalation.

  “I’ve always liked you, Michael.”

  “Is this some sort of atonement before we die? Are you trying to make it right? Let’s not kid ourselves. Maybe there’s some mutual respect for each other’s skills, but you and I...we pretty much despise and hate each other. To say otherwise just cheapens our relationship.”

  “Have it your way. You planning on running straight into the zombies?” She was finishing her cigarette like she had all the time in the world.

  “No, I was planning on asking them to move to the side. Sure, I mean, I’ll say it as nicely as possible, but if that doesn’t work I’ll blow the horn.”

  “That many impacts will destroy the front end—including the radiator, and ultimately the engine will stall. By that point, Michael, not only would we be up shit creek without a paddle, we’ll be wading in it, possibly even treading in over our heads.”

  “Just the way I like it.”

  “Really, you? The one afraid of sharing another’s water bottle would relish the opportunity to swim in a river of feces?”

  I couldn’t even bluff that I was okay with that. “I’m listening,” I said to her. We’d taken out a few zombies as I approached the exit ramp way. I noticed damage already to the hood. Whatever she was getting at, she was right, the truck would not be able to handle that many strikes. But I was pretty sure we did not have the dump truck model with retractable wings. We weren’t going to fly out of here.