Alive in a Dead World

by Mark Tufo

  “Don’t kill them all, BT, or the speeders will be looking for another food source, and I know I can beat you in a footrace,” I told him.

  “That’s alright. I know I’m faster than your brother,” he said, smiling.

  “That’s not cool, not cool at all,” Gary said. “Can we maybe go now?” he asked as the screams intensified.

  We ran parallel to the road, making sure to stay deep in our culvert. Now that I had found Eliza’s string and knew exactly where it was, pulling it open was fairly easy. I was like a kid that had just discovered an unlocked candy store. Sounds incredible at first until you’re elbow-deep in salt water taffy and three pounds of licorice are already inside your stomach, oh! and don’t forget about the dozen or so sugar sticks you’ve already eaten. I was sort of drunk with the power of it, not yet realizing how much more danger I was putting us in. Apparently, Eliza wasn’t fond of the slower-ambling shufflers we’d all come to know and love. She was much more interested in the devastation that could be wrought from their faster, more mobile brethren.

  Zombies were dropping out of trucks like blood from a pierced hemophiliac. (Think about that for a second.) Problem was, there were way more zombies than food. Some zombies had been shot or simply ran out of room on the roadway or were simply pushed out of the way began to find themselves in our culvert. Some were far beyond making a go at us, others were not.

  “Company,” Gary said, looking over his shoulder. He had run up into my back and almost through it.

  “You’d better pick up the pace,” I told BT, turning back to see what Gary was looking at.

  “You sure I’m the slowest?” Gary asked, jockeying for position on my side.

  “Gary, I’d trip you if you weren’t,” I told him.

  He stopped to look at my expression. I’m not sure if he was happy with the answer he divined. He began to push ahead of BT.

  “What the hell?” BT said loudly.

  I started firing. I was well beyond the point of caring if we were discovered or not. Besides, Eliza’s men were doing all they could to merely survive right now. They were in full scale battle mode, whereas we were just a minor skirmish in comparison.

  BT took an immediate left, heading straight for the tree line. The zombies had heard the cacophony and started to come into our ditch, further up, effectively cutting off our escape that way. A quick glance to the left had me wondering which avenue would be better, thorns the size of small rhino horns that glistened wetly, each looking big enough to bleed all of us dry or the zombies. Good thing BT was cutting the path first!

  I was vaguely aware some of the trucks were starting up and pulling away. Some of Eliza’s henchmen would survive the day, but most, I felt, had met the end they so well deserved.

  I almost fell over BT as he slid down like a baseball player going for a triple on a ball that was, at best, a double. Gary was way ahead of the curve on me on this one. He was on his hands and knees, crawling underneath the worst of the brambles. A zombie stepped on Gary’s ankle in an attempt to get at him, and if not for getting hung up in the stickers, it would have succeeded. The zombie kept trying to power its way through and was only rewarded with more piercings. I got down and began to scramble for all I was worth. The top of my hoodie got snagged on a branch and I was hung up like dirty laundry. A zombie grabbed onto the bottom part of my leg and was coming in for a bite when I screamed for him to STOP!

  I turned to look at it and see if I had any effect on him. The intensity of my yell forced blood to pour from its nose. Its eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second and then it just stopped. It didn’t move. I would have liked to maybe kick it in the head four or five hundred times, but I wanted to get out of there quickly. More zombies were coming and I wasn’t sure if I could do the same to them. I snapped off the branch I was affixed to and went deeper into the tangle.

  BT had pretty much uprooted the fauna as he went through. You could have driven a Geo Metro through the hole he left. The only problem with his passage was that it left an avenue for the zombies to follow. Once we all made it through the ten or so feet of thorns and into the woods proper, I stopped to get an idea of our pursuit. Zombies were haplessly stuck in the path that Gary and I had forged, but zombies were already halfway through BT’s gap.

  “Should have been a little more careful about that,” BT said.

  “You think?” I asked him.

  Gary killed the first two zombies coming through, sealing the hole for the moment.

  Zombies began to fan out. Some would be stuck hopefully forever; others were beginning to find inroads toward us.

  “We’ve got to get going,” I said, pretty much needlessly.

  “I thought Justin was the one with the flair for the obvious?” BT asked.

  “He had to get it from somewhere,” Gary added.

  I was going to tell them these rifles would be useless in the dense copse of trees, but refer back to the “obvious” banter. Zombies were already in the woods behind us, and were approaching as rapidly as the vegetation would allow.

  “BT, go!” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Gary you get behind him. “I’ll try to make them stop.”

  The gunfire from the roadway had become sporadic and then had abruptly ended. The food was doing what food was supposed to do, either getting eaten or fleeing. As the menu became slim pickings up top, more and more began to find their way down the embankment and joined in the pursuit of us.

  I thought I might have possibly heard a woman scream. Eliza in frustration was my hope, but we were being hunted vigorously and we did not have time to gloat.

  “Zombies in front,” BT said breathlessly. His trailblazing was beginning to take its toll. He turned left into somehow thicker foliage.

  “This is horseshit,” I said as a third branch smacked off the side of my face. We would be leaving a blood trail Henry could follow. (I’m implying that bulldogs do not make good bloodhounds.)

  Gary stopped for a second to take two well aimed shots at zombies that made an angle of approach which would have put them dangerously close to snagging BT.

  BT pressed harder; he looked to be hung up. He quickly shucked off his jacket and kept pressing. He popped through a particularly dense bramble to emerge on the other side. But zombies had somehow beaten him to the punch. We were nearly encircled and barely had enough room to pivot around and find open firing lanes.

  “Stop BT!” I yelled. “We make our stand here.”

  “Not quite the Alamo,” he said with resignation, placing more rounds in his rifle.

  “Any chance you can make them go away?” Gary asked, shoving rounds into his magazine.

  “Yeah, one at a time and as soon as I move to the next one, the previous one will come back,” I told him.

  “Not very effective,” he told me honestly and without malice; he was merely stating his feelings.

  “Mike, now would be a most awesome time for one of your last ditch efforts,” BT said between expended rounds.

  The noose was tightening quickly around our necks. The sun was nearly at high noon, the preacher had said his final words, the hangman’s hand was on the trip lever and the townsfolk were staring wide-eyed, fearful to blink, lest they miss something.

  A zombie flew in from our right, a tree root making it fall at the last moment. It latched on with its teeth to BT’s pants, below his knee. The zombie’s hands scrambled to seek purchase. BT quickly turned the butt of the gun and slammed it into the side of the zombie’s face. The impact dislodged the majority of its teeth from its head. It’s nasal cavity had completely been pushed in from BT’s second head strike. It fell to the ground in a heap of crushed bone and leaking brain.

  “That would have been a good one to tell go away,” Gary said to me.

  “Thanks for that,” I muttered.

  The trees and bushes, which moments earlier were preventing our escape, were now the only thing keeping the zombies from completely overwhelming our meager defense. As much of a
n impediment as they were to us, they were double that for the zombies, who were nearly oblivious to them as they tried to get at us. I watched as at least two zombies lost an eye when finger-thick branches pressed into their eye sockets. One had popped its left eye completely free from its orbital socket; the other had impaled the branch into her eye, yet neither one of them stopped trying to get to us.

  Something niggled in my mind. I placed my hand on Gary’s back. “Stop shooting,” I told him barely above a whisper.

  “BT, quiet!” I said a little louder.

  A zombie launched at Gary, and as if a pit-bull on a short leash, it wrenched back in mid flight. “That you?” Gary asked, wide-eyed.

  I shook my head in the negative, and placed my index finger to my lips.

  One zombie, not more than a foot from BT’s face, took one long mournful look at the meal it was foregoing and headed back the way it had come.

  “Eliza?” BT asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “Tommy,” I said quietly.

  “Tomas you mean?” Gary asked, correcting me.

  I didn’t know the reason for the name change, if it meant anything at all. It, however, felt right calling the presence in my mind Tommy.

  “That was pretty fortuitous,” BT said.

  “Almost too much,” I said.

  “You think he was helping us?” BT asked.

  “It sure seems that way. Let’s get out of here before his big sister figures out what’s going on.”

  “Back to the obvious, but I completely agree,” BT said.

  It was another twenty minutes until we were finally able to push through the small woods and into the neighborhood beyond. I almost wanted to kiss the pavement when we got to it, but who knows what someone had on their tires when they drove over this spot. I shuddered thinking about my lips coming into contact with whatever it was. It could have been skunk road kill, for all I knew.

  “Something wrong?” BT asked. “You’ve gone all pale. You’ve got that look like you just touched a shopping cart without a sani-wipe.”

  “Damn BT! How long have you known me?”

  “Long enough. Let’s get back to the rest.”

  “I’m glad we’re out of the woods, so to speak,” Gary said, “but I hate feeling this exposed.”

  Lower income housing dominated our left side; most looking vacated. Some looked like a war zone and others looked expectant, like they were waiting for a savior or a meal. Zombies would be trapped inside some of them, as would regular people, clutched in the vise-like grip of fear. People who would rather starve to death than brave anything on the outside. The meek would not inherit this world. They would die as they had lived, alone and in the shadows. We, the bold, would either die in a blaze of glory or triumph grandly over evil. Can you tell I was feeling slightly magnanimous over our victory? Already forgetting our near disastrous retreat. That’s how I survive. If I remembered every close call, I’d be huddled in a bomb shelter. Thank God for short term memory loss. See? All those years of smoking marijuana did have a higher purpose beyond getting high!

  Zombies started coming out from backyards; it was one congealed mass of excrement and blood.

  “All the noise must have disturbed a hive,” BT said. “We’ve got to get off the street.”

  “See how easy it is to become Captain Obvious?” I told him. He didn’t see the humor, and to be honest, neither did I.

  Options were limited. The majority were the deaders, but a fair portion were not. We would have a difficult time outrunning them. I had no desire to go into a house for fear of the inhabitants, whether dead, alive or a state in between.

  “Which house looks the best?” BT asked, popping off a few rounds for good measure.

  “Any of them have a moat?” I asked.

  “Or a gun turret?” Gary asked.

  “Right,” BT said. “What more was I really expecting?” he asked himself. He charged for the closest house.

  I hoped the damn door was unlocked because if he had to cave it in to gain entry, that meant the zombies would be able to follow us. BT’s flight triggered something in the speeders. They veered off from the main group and began to angle towards him.

  “Let’s go, Gary, or we’re going to be cut off!” I yelled to his back. Gary had already figured this problem out and passed me by before I could finish my sentence.

  BT, with his rush of adrenaline, ripped the screen door clean off its hinges. I was too scared to even comment on him affecting the resale value. A bullet hole ripped through the front door, and had to have been an eighth of an inch from BT’s head, max. The splintering of wood forced BT to turn away. He looked back towards me, wondering where the shot had come from. I was frantically pointing to the next house. The shot had come from inside; someone did not desire to entertain guests.

  BT had already jumped down off the steps when the next shot rang out. As the echo from the shot died down, all that was left was my heavy breathing and the combined heavy footfalls of BT, Gary, me and the zombies that pursued us. The next house had a security screen door, which was locked tight. I didn’t spare it a second thought as I jumped down the stairs, BT had passed me up and was heading for the next house in line. Gary was rapidly falling behind and in extreme danger of being overtaken. I was stuck, I didn’t have enough bullets or the right firing angle to do him much good. My heart lurched as Gary chanced a look over his shoulder and stumbled ever so slightly, giving the zombies more ground.

  Gary had a three-foot lead on the closest zombie. BT got into the next house or I would have to go back and tell my father I had lost his son. “God, I could use a little help right now.”

  The security screen of the house I had just tried swung open.” Get your ass in here!” A woman screamed at me.

  BT was heading to the fifth house when he heard the woman. Gary was running towards me. I swung my head back and forth. Gary might just make it, but no way BT could get back though.

  BT saw my dilemma. “Get your ass in there, Talbot! I’ll figure something out!” he shouted, still running.

  “Listen!” the woman shouted at me. “I didn’t make it this long to die with my front door open. Either get your ass in here or get eaten on someone else’s lawn!”

  I spared one more look at BT, who was on to the next house. “Godspeed, BT,” I said softly before running back up the stairs and inside. The woman didn’t spare me a second glance as she waited for Gary to get there. “He’s not going to make it,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Your friend is not going to make it,” she said, getting ready to pull the door shut.

  “He’s my brother,” I told her, placing my rifle against the doorjamb to hold the rifle steady, and more importantly, to keep her from shutting the door too early. I had a shot, but it was a shitty one. There was about a three-inch window between Gary’s head and the closest zombie’s head. As long as Gary didn’t do any bobbing and weaving, I should be fine. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I applied slow, steady, even pressure to the trigger. The rifle went off before I was ready. I watched in alarm as a tuft of Gary’s hair blew back from the force of the bullet. His trailing zombie fell, taking with it some of the closer ones in pursuit.

  Gary’s hands were still pumping as he fought for more speed. I saw the glistening of red welling up from the side of his head as he hit the bottom step. He jumped, launching past me and the stunned woman, collapsing on her living room floor. Blood pumped from the wound on his head. “I’ve been shot,” he said right before passing out.

  The woman slammed the door shut, or at least, tried to as my rifle was still in the way. “How the hell have you made it this long?” she asked as she pulled my barrel in, quickly slamming the door and reengaging the lock.

  “I get that a lot,” I told her as she moved me inside so she could shut the heavy steel front door. I admired her security. If I had half this set-up, I would still be in Colorado, riding the apocalypse out in relative style. That was a pipe dream, but a d
ream nonetheless.

  “Josh! Get the first aid kit!” the lady yelled up the stairs.

  A kid of about twelve or thirteen came running down, carrying an oversized white case with a large red cross on it.

  I expected at any moment for her husband to come down the stairs also. When that didn’t happen immediately, I began to wonder if this lady and her son had opened up their door to strangers. I would remember to ask her later, after she finished making my brother stop bleeding on her carpet.

  “There’s a lot of blood, Mom,” Josh told her. “He didn’t get bit, did he?” the boy asked in alarm.

  “No, the one over there shot him,” the lady said as she cleaned the wound.

  “Why mister? Why did you shoot him?” Josh asked me.

  “He’s my brother,” I tried to say in explanation.

  “If I had a brother, I wouldn’t shoot him,” Josh told me.

  “Wait, no. I didn’t shoot him because he’s my brother. I was trying to save him.”

  “By shooting him? Mom, didn’t Uncle Dave tell you not to open the door for the crazy people?” Josh admonished his mother.

  The woman looked up at me. “Are you crazy?” she asked, still wiping blood and placing gauze in the wound to staunch the blood.

  How did I answer that? More than a fair amount of people, especially recently, had called me crazy. I did the prudent thing, I stayed silent.

  “Wonderful,” the woman said sarcastically, wrapping tape around Gary’s head. “Your brother will be fine unless of course you’re not quite through with him yet.”

  “Why do I keep running across comedians?” I asked her.

  “Come on, put your rifle down and help me get him onto the couch,” she told me.

  “What about the zombies?” I asked her, not yet quite willing to yield my only means of defense.