by Mark Tufo
Where next and then it struck like a bolt of lightning—nursing home! There was the Saint Vincent Home for the Aged on my way to work, I never gave it more than a passing glance but right now it sounded like a twenty-four hour Wendy’s. The food was way past prime but the fight would be long gone from those inhabitants. I began to whistle as I walked straight down the center line of the empty roadway. A zombie or two looked my way because of the unnatural noise I emitted but none investigated any further. I avoided any street where I could hear fighting, most times it involved voracious gun fire followed almost immediately by screaming. Fifty zombies would fall for every human eaten and still we would win, but then what? When man became extinct what became of us? I shuddered to think of our potential demise and pushed it from my mind as I concentrated on getting us intact to St. Vincent’s.
There were zombies already congregated around the nursing home, which meant food was still available, and none of them were being shot another plus.
‘Hugh, I’m going to find us a way in, can you tell the others to ‘fuck off’ again?’
The buzz started at the base of my skull, I ran around to the back of the nursing home a gated fence my only hindrance had stopped the others in their tracks.
‘Stop, Hugh!’ I begged, just able to shut the gate behind me before the blinding pain of Hugh’s communication threatened to overwhelm me.
I rested my head against the cool steel chain links as I waited for the tide of pain to peel back. It was slow like the outgoing tide and it was long moments before I could stand completely back up, I was going to have to be very careful before I told him to do that. I had been ready for this one and it had hurt twice as much, what could I expect the next time? Zombies bowed the fence in where they made contact but they were more likely to become pressed through like Play-doh through a mold than be able to follow me. A large black man dressed in a white orderly uniform came up behind me as I went to the back entrance.
‘Fuck off?’ Hugh was asking me if he should tell the other zombie to go screw.
‘No, no, no!’ I begged. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
I swept the big man’s legs out from under him, after he had fallen I got behind him and put my right arm around his throat, and then grabbed my right wrist with my left hand. The loud crack as I snapped his neck sent a crow flying from a nearby tree.
‘He won’t bother us anymore,’ I told Hugh.
As I got up and stepped away the orderly got to his feet.
“Wasn’t expecting that.”
The orderly’s head was bent all the way back so that he was staring at me upside down. He kept turning his body to follow his line of sight. I hadn’t killed him like I had intended but he was effectively out of commission. An ancient woman looked at me through the large French doors. How could she have possibly flown under Death’s radar for so long? I looked better than her. She had wrinkles as deep as fast water carved crevices, her face might look like a mini diorama of the Grand Canyon but her eyes, they were full of intelligence. No jelly-brain there as she watched me dispatch of the orderly. I wasn’t the cavalry that she might have been hoping for. She looked down to the lock to make sure it was engaged before she did the unthinkable, she flipped me off. I stopped to place my hands on my knees as I bent over laughing. There was a good chance I would save the old bird for last just for that. Who knows she might even die from natural causes before I got to her.
I stood up, the laughing felt great but now I was hungry. I walked a few steps around the yard until I found what I was looking for. I motioned for the old biddy to get out of the way as I hefted the rock in my hand, positioning it just right so that I could get maximum velocity before I hurled it at the mostly glass doorway. The lady glared at me but she moved all the same. The crash of glass was a satisfying feeling as large shards shattered to the ground.
“Have you no respect for your elders?” The old crow asked me as I broke through the door, sustaining a few more cuts along the way.
“Only in so far as I can eat one,” I told her. It really made no sense but my hunger was beginning to crowd out all higher thought.
There was a man nearly as ancient as the redwoods sitting in a chair, watching a static laced television. “TV dinner.” I moved on the unsuspecting victim, odds were he had no clue who he was much less that the world had been basically turned on its ear.
I was directly behind him just as the first impact hit. Old crow had followed me and had the strength to smack me with her cane, she truly was an impressive specimen. She looked five years dead, yet she defended the castle.
“Listen, granny.” I turned, doing my best evil stare to make her go shuffling into the night. “I have no issue with you, I plan on eating you eventually, but if you leave me the fuck alone I’ll make sure you’re last.”
“If I was your granny, I would have killed you in your cradle, you atrocity,” she shot back, right before she whacked me again.
She would have had a hard time killing a fly with the power behind her swat but she was pissing me off to no end. “Why don’t you leave me alone!” She swatted me again, her cane making contact with my exposed optic nerve. I stood to my full height and turned toward her. “That hurt, bitch.” I backhanded her across the room. Her dentures went flying and the snap of the impact let me know I had effectively disabled the broad, she lay there in a heap, her ancient hip most likely fractured. She never did cry out and she watched as I ate my TV dinner. And like most of those meals, it tasted like shit He was stringy, gamey and tasted like wet fungus, but none of that stopped me.
The old crow looked a little worse for wear; either the pain or watching her friend get eaten was having an effect. “I’ll be back,” I told her as I went down the hallway, looking for more food to round out my dinner.
“Meals on wheels!” I shouted, another old lady was crouched down in a wheel chair she was mumbling something incoherent as I grabbed the back of her chariot to spin her around. I wanted to get a good look at her before I ate.
“Howdy Doody!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together excitedly.
At first I thought she was greeting me and then I realized she had me confused with that Alfred E. Newman lookalike. I have no idea why that irked the hell out of me. I hated being a clown. I punched her so hard in the face her chair kept rolling until it banged off the far wall close to thirty feet away. She was most certainly dead. “Dumb ass,” I scolded myself. I had just wasted food and it was in diminishing supply.
I made short work of that hallway, a good portion of the residents had perished when the staff either took off to be with their own families or were turned like the orderly on the lawn. There were four old ladies and one man on his last legs, the oxygen tank sustaining him nearly dry. The hunger was abated for the moment but the meager meat these people provided would not stave it off for long. It prowled like a living animal in the periphery of my mind. I needed to distract myself from this constant in my life, I had at once simplified and complicated my life these last few days. The ever present pursuit of pussy had merely turned into a different addiction. I had no moral dilemma with the passing of others by my own hand so that I could live. The issue arose when my food fought back, how much nursing home food could I eat?
I strode back down the hallway, long wet glistening entrails dragging behind me, I had stepped in one of my victim’s innards and it had stuck to my shoe. I pulled what remained of my TV dinner out of his chair and sat down heavily. The chair creaked from my added bulk but held fast, I spun it so I was directly facing Old Crow. Her eyes were half closed and she was breathing quickly and shallowly.
“Must hurt,” I mimicked a tone of empathy.
Her eyes opened slowly. “I’ve had seven children, I’ve felt worse pain.”
“Seven kids and yet they all still deposited you in here to die. Kind of ungrateful, I’d say.”
She did not respond to my barb. “What are you? You can’t be one of those things. They don’t talk. Are you just a sic
k human who’s finally come into his true calling?”
‘What exactly am I?’ I thought. I had been human once, before Hugh came along, but then he had been running the show so all I could do was watch as he performed every imaginable perversion. But I had slowly taken the reins back and now I was running the machine, so what did that make me? I was infinitely more of a monster than Hugh. He was only doing what his instinct was telling him to do. I could have put a bullet in my head before he ever had the chance to stop me.
“Fuck you!” I screamed at Old Crow shooting out of my chair.
“Strike a nerve, did I?” she snorted softly.
I stormed down the corridor, looking for another wing I had yet to plunder. I ate the first thing I came across, it smelled like old cabbage and tasted worse. I was so upset I had completely ignored Hugh’s warnings that thing I had eaten was already dead.
‘Bad!’ Hugh lamented.
‘Who cares—food is food!’ I yelled back at him.
‘More me!’ Hugh shot back.
‘That makes no sense! I’m hungry!’ I told Hugh, then I stopped. I was the monster Old Crow had flat out said that I was. It wasn’t Hugh who had told me I was famished it was me. I was a self-aware zombie; didn’t that put me right up there with werewolves and vampires?
“Maybe even the boogeyman,” I said with no little amount of glee. I was becoming a legend—who wouldn’t be pleased with that?
I strode back down to where Old Crow lay. “I am a monster you hag, I am the monster!” I shouted proudly. “Never before and never again will there be anything as scary as me. When things go bump in the night children will pray to an empty God that it isn’t me!” Old Crow was looking at me with a slight upward pull on the left side of her face giving her the look that she was sneering at me. “I’ll rip your face off bitch!” I yelled running over to her. Her head bouncing off the ground as my heavy footfalls caused minor earthquakes on the floor. I started to laugh—it wasn’t a comforting ‘this is funny’ laugh it was a ‘trying to hold on to sanity and failing miserably’ laugh. Old Crow was dead and she looked like she had got the last laugh. I kicked her in the head, her body slid across the highly waxed floor to come to a rest against the far wall, the delicate bones in her decrepit face all shattered. I lost my balance as my plant foot slipped from under me, my ass struck first followed by the whiplash movement of my head as I struck the floor.
“Who the fuck waxes the floor in an old age home? Must be the hip replacement companies,” I mused as I sat up. Old Crow wasn’t looking at me anymore, although that would have been tough considering her face was now recessed into her brain cavity.
‘Trouble!’ Hugh shouted.
I scanned my immediate surroundings, and kept as silent as possible trying to ascertain what danger Hugh was seeing. I tried to ask him for clarification but in typically Hugh fashion he was ignoring me. “Fuck you too, Hugh, I don’t need you either!”
“I’m sick of eating this trash! I am Timothy and I will eat what I want!” I shouted as I pushed open the front doors to the home, zombies streamed past me to get into the place, still must have been some residents left. I pushed zombies out of my way much as I had done to defensive linemen on the football field. The mindless cretins never had the presence of mind to get out of my way; I sent at least three of them to whoever their maker may have been.
I had no sooner cleared the throng when I heard the hum of a car engine idling. I walked up the street a few feet as the zombies cleared from the roadway. It wasn’t difficult to ascertain where the noise was coming from as exhaust streamed from beneath a mostly closed garage door. There was a good chance whoever was trying to off themselves wasn’t making a very good go of it. With the garage door as open as it was, there was more than better odds they were still alive. Perfect, I’d always loved smoked meat!
As I approached the door I thought about using a catchy catchphrase, but ‘I’m back’ or ‘here’s Johnny’ seemed so cliché. Maybe something a little less well known like ‘Hey Georgie, want your boat?’ but that really didn’t make much sense. Something would come to me. I reached down to pull the door up but it held fast, the electric opener must have been engaged. I pulled harder, the door began to buckle under the stress.
“Cheap ass aluminum!” I roared as I stood tall, the handle had sheared off in my hand but there was at least a two foot gap between the driveway and the bottom of the door now. I was not at all happy about having to degrade myself by crawling for my food, but the old biddies had done little to quench my hunger. I needed a more substantial meal and who was I kidding, I was covered in the feces of multiple victims. Smoke poured through the opening, making it difficult to see. I bumped my head on the front end of a large SUV, the familiar blue and white layout of the Beemer logo stared back at me as I rose.
‘Nice car’ flashed across my head for a second but of more importance was the family of four and the dog still seated packaged neatly for safe transport.
‘How thoughtful,’ I thought as I removed the father’s seatbelt, no extraneous bruising. I unceremoniously dropped him to the ground, he stirred slightly. My spirits soared, he at least was alive, I turned the ignition to the off position to make sure none of my other food stocks expired.
In the passenger seat, the small brunette’s lids were semi-opened, the frosted glaze to her eyes gave me the impression she had moved on, at least until I saw her lips moving. She was in a full throated silent scream as I got to within a few inches from her face. Her hands came slightly off her lap in a useless defensive posture.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “This will only hurt a lot.”
“Babies… no… alone,” she said weakly through a tortured windpipe.
“What, you don’t want me to eat your babies?” I laughed. I turned to look in the back seat. A boy of about seven had long since made his final journey. I reached back and ripped him out of his seat by the neck. His mother was trying in desperation to resuscitate herself enough to help. “You talking about him?” I asked, shaking the boy violently in front of her face. She nodded in resignation.
“Well, you see this piece of shit is already dead,” I told her as I repeatedly slammed his head against the dashboard and the windshield, blood spread across the spidery veins his skull had caused in the glass. Mom had tears streaking down her face. “Sucks for him,” I told her as I threw him out the car to drop onto his father.
I turned back to see what other treasures I might find. The mom had finally garnered enough strength to place a hand on my arm. I pulled it up to my face and ripped three of her fingers off. I broke at least two of my teeth as I attempted to chew through her wedding ring.
“Bitch!” I yelled as I backhanded her so hard her head smacked against the dashboard to rebound back into the plush headrest, she was once again out cold. ‘Pity’ I thought it had been kind of fun having her watch, I had never much been into the whole voyeurism thing but it excited me in a way I had not been prepared for.
I watched mom for a few more seconds to see if she was playing possum. I turned in time to see Sparky the family Golden Retriever launch himself at my throat. Got pretty damn close too, if I had not got my right arm up in time he would have taken a significant chunk out of me. My arm burned where his canines had sunk into, fabric tore as he shook his head, trying to do as much damage possible. I slammed my arm down onto the console, but the dog would not let go. He must have some pit bull in him somewhere. I kept bringing my arm down with more and more force until I heard his lower jaw crack, his high pitched whine tore at my nerves. I grabbed him by the scruff and smashed him into the windshield much like I had the boy, their blood now intermingling as the mutt finally lay still in my hand. I threw him onto the meat pile.
“Any more surprises?” I intoned. And there was. “Danielle?” A sixteen or seventeen year old raven-haired beauty slept in the back seat. “But how could that be, that was at least twelve years ago.”
***
I had been a sophom
ore in high school and already considered a major player on the field and off when she had transferred from Pennsylvania. When she had walked into that Biology class that first day I knew I had to have her. I told my lab partner to take a hike before Mr. Cook could assign her to someone else.
“I’ve got a spot,” I told Cook, as I shoved my previous partner Peter Pender away hard enough that he fell to the floor. Cook was not amused but if he didn’t do what I asked he would have to deal with Coach Bartlett, and nobody wanted to be on the short end of that stick. Plus Cook loved football, so it wasn’t that big a sacrifice for him.
“There you go, Miss?”
“Danielle Hoegler,” the angel replied.
“There you go, Danielle. Tim will be your lab partner.”
She smiled shyly at me and came over to our station. I swept Pete’s things onto the floor to make room. I was so entranced by her I didn’t even hear the little nerd cursing at me as his books rained down upon him.
“Pete, shut the hell up,” one of his friends begged. “He’ll eat you if you keep talking.”
“Sorry,” Danielle told Pete as she stepped over his belongings.
And that was the beginning of our relationship. We went out for close to nine months, that’s about eternity for a high school kid. I was head over heels for her and we had not gotten past any heavy petting. It was Donna Sorji that had fucked everything up for me, she was the town pump and nine months of fondling Danielle and nothing else had my balls scrunched up into twisted blue melons. It was a Friday night. Danielle and her parents were going to see a movie, they had invited me but hanging out with my girl’s folks didn’t sound like a great time and besides, there was supposed to be a rager of a party. Danielle and I made plans to hook up the following night. The party was everything it had been cracked up to be. There was plenty of beer, the music was loud and I was kicking ass at quarters. For two straight hours I dominated the drinking game before my bladder finally rebelled, I stumbled away excusing myself as I bumped into someone sending them flying into the kitchen cabinets, I hoped they weren’t hurt but I didn’t stop to check; I was wasted and I needed sweet release.
