by Mark Tufo
They walked in silence for a little while longer. Gary, for some reason, just couldn’t seem to let the quietness of the day hold. Maybe he also did not want to dwell on the fact that they were more likely heading out on a body recovery than a rescue.
“Sure aren’t many zombies for a zombie apocalypse,” he said, looking around.
“And that’s a problem for you?” Mike asked sarcastically.
“I’m just saying, that you’d think they’d be everywhere. And here we are, just strolling down the middle of the road, like we own the place.”
“I, for one, am not complaining, brother. I would much rather be strolling than running for my life. You should be thankful too, because we both know I can run laps around you.”
“Not if I tripped you.”
“Nice, you tell Tracy when you get back what happened.”
“Forget it, I’d rather get eaten.” He laughed for a sec.
They had been criss-crossing streets with no real objective. They were just looking for something, anything. Mike thought about calling out or maybe even shooting a round into the air and then he thought a little harder about sounding the dinner bell. Just because there were no zombies here right now, in no way meant that they weren’t around in big bunches.
“I don’t know about this, Gary.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know how long we should just keep walking around, aimlessly looking for him.”
“Aimlessly?” he asked questioningly. “You mean you’re not using your Spidey-sense or something?”
“Spidey-sense?”
“Yeah, don’t you have some special powers or something?”
“I wish, maybe we should just get some wheels.”
“The noise will attract them.”
“I know, but we’ll be able to cover more ground, and maybe Paul will hear us.”
“I thought you said...”
“I know what I said, I’m trying not to believe what my Spidey-sense is telling me.”
“Spidey-sense sucks.”
“I agree.”
“Whoa! What do we have here?” Gary said, his attention focused ahead of us.
A lone zombie was standing on a small stoop. It did not, at first, pay them any attention as its gaze was fixated on something small in the side light window to its left.
“That a cat?” Gary asked softly as they got closer. The zombie still not privy to their existence.
“Looks like a small dog. Nope, that’s a cat. I can tell by that funky tail-twitching thing they do.”
“Someone must be in there,” Gary said as we stopped about twenty-five feet from the house. “No way that cat could have survived so long without some help; and it looks pretty fat.”
Another cat came up next to the large gray cat; they both seemed to be staring at the men. But this wasn’t with imploring, “help us” eyes; this was more like something predatory. “Do they look like they want to eat us?” Mike asked Gary. Their zombie friend finally turned around. Mike would swear its eyes got big as it noticed them.
“I don’t know about them, but he sure looks hungry.”
“You want the honors?” Mike asked Gary, as the zombie headed towards their location.
“I’ll shoot it, but you have to go into the cat house first.” Gary blew a hole through the back of the zombie’s head before Mike could even utter his response. It wasn’t like they had a choice anyway. Zombies would come running. They, however, would not stay out long if they could not find anything worth their while.
The zombie was still twitching as Mike made his way up to the porch. A third cat joined the other two who disturbingly had not moved even after Gary took his shot.
“These cats are freaking me out.”
“Get in the house. I swear I hear running feet,” Gary said with a wide-eyed expression, doing a quick three sixty of their area.
Mike knocked quickly on the door. “Hi, we’re friendly and we’d like to come in. Please don’t shoot us.”
“That wasn’t very convincing.”
“I’m all ears if you have something better.” They heard no sound, but a fourth cat was now peering out the side light at them. Mike tried the door handle. “It’s unlocked.”
“Get in, we’ll try our luck in there,” Gary said, as he pretty much pushed Mike in. Six cats with tails flicking back and forth were looking up at them cautiously. Gary shut the door behind Mike, nearly stepping on a cat in his haste to peek outside the side light.
“Zombies! I knew I heard them coming. What is that smell?” Gary asked, finally turning around and taking in the view of forty or fifty cats that had now assembled in the room.
“Wow, this sucks,” Mike said. The cats weren’t advancing, but they also weren’t retreating. The ammonia smell of abundant cat urine was prevalent as were the feces that littered everything, but there was also something sinister, some underlying smell that he knew, but was unwilling to identify. Mike would have written down now that it was death, plain and simple, but at that time, his mind struggled to keep away from that realization. Add to the fact that Gary’s gagging wasn’t helping the situation at all.
Some cats were mostly fixated on Mike, but in Gary’s moment of weakness, he saw some of the pests moving in closer. They halted their advance as zombies began to slam into the framework of the house. Gary’s head shot up. “Is that blood?” he asked, pointing to the floor a few feet past some of the cats.
The garish, orange-flecked linoleum which Mike imagined led to the kitchen was dotted in reddish brown splotches.
“It looks like it. Is anyone home?” Mike called, hoping to reestablish some normalcy to the situation. The cats seemed to get a little hesitant at the sound of his voice, but they didn’t take off and retreat to a safe place. “Come on, man! We’re on the second rung of the food chain, Talbot,” Mike said, trying to steel himself for what needed to be done. “Third, if you include sharks.”
“Has Tracy been nominated for Sainthood yet?” Gary asked.
“Just watch my back.”
“From the zombies or the cats?” he asked.
“The cats, definitely the cats.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
They moved a foot forward, the cats yielded half that, seeming to grow bolder as they stepped deeper into the house.
“They’ve got in behind us, Mike. What the hell is going on?”
“I’d say that they’re pretty hungry.”
Mike’s trepidation increased as he got closer to the kitchen opening. The cats seemed very reluctant to yield the ground to their front. They were almost protective, like they had a prize they were unwillingly to share. A cat actually bit his boot as he crossed in, Mike gently kicked it away, not quite willing to add animal cruelty to his list of transgressions. He had never been a huge cat fan, but he’d never had reason to hate them until he walked into that kitchen.
“Oh God,” Mike said softly. Gary retched behind him.
A shredded human, bones glistening wetly with the remnants of bodily fluids and cat saliva stared back at them with an eyeless gaze. Its jaw bone was missing as was a portion of its lower leg. All that remained was a shock of hair on top and strips of blue denim. It was the white gold wedding band, lying a few feet from the body that brought Mike to the full realization of who lay before him.
Mike whirled, quicker than any of the cats could respond and lashed out with his heavy boot. The crack of ribs as he launched a cat into the far wall was only superseded by his satisfaction as he came down heavily on the spine of another. It wriggled its head uselessly from side to side, its legs now a useless jumble of spare parts.
The cats were mewling and scurrying about, some running, some defending.
“What is going on, Mike?” Gary asked. He was as scared as Mike had ever seen him.
“That’s Paul on the floor there and these fucking things did it!” Mike screamed as he lashed out at anything that was foolish enough to get within striking range. With
in five minutes, he had killed or wounded at least a dozen of them. The rest had seen the folly of trying to tackle two full grown, healthy, armed and defensive men. Mike had received more than a few razor-sharp claw slashes, but that had only added fuel to the fire that the cats had ignited.
He didn’t know if Gary had gone on the offensive at all, but he had protected his back as some of the cats tried to launch themselves at him from varying pieces of furniture. Mewls of pain and rage echoed from around the house. They’d be back, most likely waiting for the cover of darkness.
“Cowards!” Mike screamed. He was shaking with his emotions, that fluctuated wildly from pain to rage to mourning. Gary grabbed him in a big hug.
“It’ll be alright, brother,” he kept saying over and over.
But it wouldn’t be, now or ever. This was one more hard stop marker in life that Mike would never be able to step back over. There would be life with his best friend of almost thirty years and then there would be a much dimmer life with him after. Mike sobbed into his brother’s shoulder to the point where his head ached and a good dry cleaner would never be able to get the snot out of his jacket.
“We need to bury him,” Mike finally managed to get out.
“I feel the same way, but I don’t really want to stay here long enough for the zombies to leave so that we can do that. Maybe we can head out the backyard and come back.”
Gary’s idea was valid in almost every way, but Mike could not leave his friend here with the cats to pick through whatever remained of him.
“The backyard it is, but we’re burning this fucker down,” Mike said with rage-fueled words.
Mike scoured the house, looking for some sort of accelerant to make sure this house would burn hot enough to rival the depths of hell. The best he could do was a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol. The cats did not come out, but there was not a room in that house that they were not observed by multiple eyes. The only thing that was stopping them and barely, was the size discrepancy.
“Mike, you should come here,” Gary said from the other side of the house, back from the kitchen Mike was doing his best to avoid.
Mike braced myself and did his best to remember his friend as he had been in life, not the carcass that lay on the floor. Mike almost sobbed when he went in. Gary at some point had draped a blanket over Paul. There would never be any way Mike could thank him properly for that.
“What’s up, brother?”
He handed Mike Paul’s wedding band. “I think you should be the one to give this back to Erin.”
Mike would rather hammer nails through his toes than have to give her back her dead husband’s ring. She would never forgive him. He lost two friends today. Mike nodded as he took the ring from Gary’s palm.
“The stove is gas,” he said.
Mike was still staring at the ring now in his hand, Gary’s words merely a jumble of mish-mashed sounds.
“Did you hear me?”
Mike nodded only because he heard the uplifting sound of a question and it seemed appropriate. But he hadn’t, not in any cognitive way. Mike was shutting down, the accumulated stress of the entire ordeal was beginning to break him. He had always thought those people that claimed they had an emotional breakdown were weak-minded. That was until he began to suffer through his own, and then he pitied each one of them, because if they had been pushed that far to the brink, something had gone horribly wrong in their lives.
“Mike!” Gary said on the verge of a yell.
“I’m here, I’m here,” Mike said like a little kid lost in the woods.
“Where the hell else would you be?” Gary asked.
“Sorry, bro, this is just…”
“I know, Mike, I know. We’ve all lost ones we love, but there isn’t time, not yet. You’ll have to grieve later. Can you do that for me?”
Mike stared at him through watery eyes. “When did you become the leader type?”
“You like that?” he asked.
“Not bad and thank you,” Mike said. He wasn’t better, not by a long shot and maybe not ever, but he was functioning. Mike was still at the abyss; except now it was to his back. He was not sure if this new precarious position was the best place to be, but it gave him a chance to make this fucked-up world pay, starting with the damn cats.
“The stove is gas,” Gary repeated. “And I found matches.”
The cats were back at the kitchen entrance. Hunger is a powerful motivator, even more so than the need to breed. And how many species killed each other for the right to do that?
“Do you think they know something is up?” Gary asked as he pulled the stove out to get access to the gas line.
“I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve read that cats have an open gateway to the spirit world and I bet their ancestors are telling them that these shit birds are about to join them in the afterlife. I would imagine that news isn’t sitting too well with them.”
A large gray tom strode into the kitchen, emboldening the rest of his clowder. Dozens of cats were behind him and back out of eyesight, in the living room.
“How’s that going?” Mike asked Gary, never taking his gaze from the large gray, and the accumulating throng. He knew if he broke contact with him or them, they would attack. Mike knew they had size on the cats, but the combined weight of the small predators most likely outweighed them both.
“Got it!” Gary said with a grunt as he stood up with one end of the disconnected piping. The noxious gas fumes combined with the ammonia smell almost put Mike on his ass. Something about the hissing of the escaping gas or the smell triggered the cats into action. Mike noted that the gray had not moved as his minions streamed past.
“Gary, get out of there! We’ve got to go.” Mike hoped his voice wasn’t approaching falsetto, but he was scared. Gary never did call him on it, so either he had kept it together better than he thought or Gary was too scared to realize Mike’s man-code slip-up.
Gary scrambled over the top of the stove and moved to the backdoor before the cats could attempt to cut off their retreat.
“How many are there?” Gary said, fumbling with wooden matches.
“Enough,” Mike told him, and he believed it.
The gray began to shimmer in Mike’s line of sight as the room filled with dangerous amounts of liquid propane. His tail stilled, and like a military message, the cats as one unit, struck.
Gary had pulled the back door open and Mike was using his rifle as an ineffectual baseball bat. At least three cats had found purchase on Mike’s shins and dug in for the long haul. Their curved claws tore through his skin and the muscle that lay underneath. The pain was excruciating, Mike’s first instinct was to reach down and squish their necks, but he knew as soon as he bent down, they would attack his neck and face and then it would be game over. Mike gritted his teeth and kept swinging to dissuade anymore cats from weighing him down. Occasionally, he made contact, even Bucky Fucking Dent gets lucky sometimes (If you have an old sports book in your safe house look it up; if you’re a Red Sox or Yankees fan, you already know).
Mike heard the match as it struck against the box. He’d seen enough Hollywood movies to know a giant explosion was about to ensue. He could smell the sulfur as the match lit and then out of the corner of his eye, he caught a giant flare as Gary lit the rest of the matches in the small cardboard box.
Mike knew he was still alive because the cats on his legs were making him painfully aware of that fact. The fireball of matches passed dangerously close to his head as Gary gently tossed it deeper into the kitchen. Mike felt Gary’s hand close around his collar as Gary pushed the storm door open and pulled Mike out with him. They were still falling backwards as a flash of ignited gas blew past them. A wave of burnt fur and hair blew by Mike. The fur came from the cats inside, but the hair was his own. Glass shattered as the fire sought air in a need to increase its size. Two of the cats let go of Mike’s legs and were running around wildly in the yard, they were on fire. Mike hoped it took them a long time to die. The third cat was
trapped between his legs as he pressed them shut more tightly. The cat was ripping wildly at Mike to get away. He grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him up and away. The cat’s claws were lashing out. Mike held it up and punched it as hard as he could squarely in the face. He was confident he had crushed its skull with the blow. Mike dropped it to the ground. It had paid the ultimate price for its betrayal to humanity and now he was done with it.
“Where’s my rifle?” Mike asked.
Gary tackled Mike. “Roll, dumb-ass, roll!!” He was screaming. “You’re on fire!” He was pushing Mike around on the ground. Mike might have been thick, but he finally figured out what was going on, as the smell of burning hair and skin did not decrease, but rather increased.
Mike rolled around like his life depended on it, which it did. He was finally not actively burning, but smoke was pouring off him; he looked like he had busted a radiator hose.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Gary kept muttering, looking down at his brother.
“Pretty bad?” Mike asked. He was in a great deal of pain, but nothing that compared to the look of despair in his brother’s eyes. Odds were, Mike had third degree burns and had burned right through the nerve endings. “Help me up,” Mike said, extending a blackened hand.
Gary did not reach to grab it; he thought that maybe Mike’s skin would slough off if he did. The house roared behind them as the flames began to engulf the structure.
“Zombies are going to be coming, Gary. Help me up.”
“Umm,” he said and then he took off.
Mike passed in and out of consciousness for the next few moments as the pain began to catch up with him. Blasts of super heated air roiled over him as the house blazed. He thought he may have seen the large gray staring at him from the back door, but he couldn’t be sure. His corneas had been damaged and vision was becoming increasingly difficult. Burning tabbies streamed from some of the blown out windows just in time for the advancing zombies to hunt them down. Mike watched in horror as bulbous blisters began to form on his arms and hands. He may have cried out in pain, but the noise was lost in the destructive thunder of the flames.
