Zombie Fallout 16

by Mark Tufo

  BT twisted to get a better grip, pulled again—still nothing. This time he braced his legs, threw his head back and pulled so hard he was concerned he might rip Talbot in two. He was getting a little woozy from the exertion and possibly the lack of good oxygen.

  “Mike, wake the fuck up!” BT smacked him upside the head, not happy with himself for how good it felt.

  “If you have a bus, can you get watermelons?” Mike asked, his eyes rolling around inside his skull.

  It was beginning to get dark as the car slipped deeper beneath the surface and the sunlight was having a difficult time penetrating the water. BT took in a large gulp of the stale air before plunging down to reach for the seat and Mike’s leg. When torquing on Mike didn’t work, he went deeper and grabbed the seat, his muscles taut, his back arched, and his head thrown back, teeth gritted. He pulled; the muscles on his arms rippled, his lungs burned and his back protested, but hope flared when he felt the seat bend upward a fraction of an inch. He came back up for another blast of air, alarmed when he saw that Mike’s mouth and nose were almost underwater. He took a look to the door, wondering if he had enough time to find one of the divers and get Mike out before he drowned. He saw a brilliant flash of light; he’d hoped it was the flashlight of one of the diver’s, but knew it was more likely the light at the end of the tunnel, signaling the conclusion to a life that would have ended much sooner if not for the man trapped next to him.

  His head ached from the poisonous air as he once again dipped down. Now or never, he thought, as he curled his fingers around the seat. His vision was beginning to fade as he strained. He was close to needing another breath of air when the seat again moved. BT knew if it wasn’t enough now, it was never going to be. He grabbed Mike under his shoulders and pulled up. He could hear the tearing of the uniform, and blood clouded the already murky water as Mike’s leg was torn open and his boot was ripped from his foot. BT managed to pull them both free from the wreckage before he passed out. This time, he knew exactly what the light was he was seeing. “God,” he mumbled, small air bubbles escaping from his mouth as his eyes glassed over.

  When BT awoke, he was convinced he’d not made the Gloried One’s cut. Every inch of his body was in agony: his lungs burned, his throat was raw, fires raged all around him, and the roar of screams so loud he knew he was among the damned.

  “Stay down, Top.” Stenzel had a hand on his chest. “Nice to have you back.” She smiled.

  “Mike?” The name ripped past the razor blades that lined his windpipe.

  “Getting stitches for his leg.”

  “Alive?” BT managed to cough out.

  “You saved him then the divers saved you both. I’ll explain in a minute; this is almost over.” Marines and SEALs had surrounded the area, luring Knox and his people into a trap. They’d used sidewinder missiles from the planes aboard the aircraft carrier and guided them in using laser range finders already in position. Once the bulk of Knox's force was in position, hell and all her fury had been ruthlessly released. The few that had escaped the initial barrage had fought doggedly, but had been outnumbered and had not the position to rally.

  “All clear! All clear!” Ceasefire!” Tommy had stood with a fist raised above his head. Dozens of soldiers emerged from behind trees and other hastily constructed cover.

  “Got one alive!” Sergeant Rose called out as she kept her rifle pointed at the figure upon the ground. “Injured—looks pretty bad.”

  Staff Sergeant Winters raced over, medical bag in hand. Tommy met him there.

  “It’s Knox,” Tommy said as they rolled the man over. Blood was pooling in his chest.

  “He’s got a sucking chest wound; we’ll need to get him onto the ship for better care.”

  “No,” Tommy told him.

  “What do you mean, no? We can save him.”

  “No. He has no place in this world. He lost that right.”

  “You can’t make that call.”

  “I can and I have. Step away, Sergeant.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Let nature take its course.”

  “A bullet to the chest is not natural. He’s suffering!”

  Knox was reaching for his sidearm.

  “Look. That’s the man you want to save. If he gets that gun free, he’ll shoot you then he’ll shoot me and anyone who comes to our aid.” Tommy, without hesitation, put two more in the man’s chest. Knox’s hand quickly fell to his side.

  38

  Mike’s Final Chapter Entry 21

  “Thank you,” I told BT as they were bringing us back to the boat.

  “Couldn’t stand the thought of eating your sister’s cooking without having someone to complain about it to.” We bumped fists.

  Tracy was standing inside the landing area. She looked exhausted and worried, and seeing the sad shape I was in was not alleviating that.

  “Looks like you forgot the eggs,” she said.

  It hurt to laugh; I did it anyway. She propped me up as we headed to our quarters.

  “Do you ever regret marrying me?” I asked.

  “Not today,” she answered, placing her head on my shoulder.

  Epilogue

  Five years later. We’d all taken it as far as was humanly possible to stay afloat, but our apocalypse wasn’t Water World, and even at the end of that movie, they went and found land. I was sick of the ocean. It was time to toss my sea legs away. The world had changed a lot in the last few years. Whatever humans remained were locked away tight, in holes so deep they were in danger of evolving into sightless creatures. Zombies had stripped the land of everything they could catch. What animals humans had pushed to the brink of extinction, zombies had made sure to finish the job. When human and animal populations had succumbed to the tenacious ferocity of the monsters, finally, they began to go into stasis in massive numbers. For a long while, the zombies had left scouts out in the off chance that some poor unsuspecting source of food strayed across the trap. Eventually, the dribs and drabs of meat stopped, and the scouts either joined the stasis or faded.

  That’s what we called it. It was sort of like stasis but different. Somehow when they stacked themselves up, they had a shared consciousness, a faint awareness. The lone zombies that went into a hibernation did not have this capability. You had to actively work at waking them up—not that we really wanted to, the first few were just test subjects. I’ve dealt with passed-out drunks that were easier to rouse and more consciously aware than those zombies. The only good thing about the faded zombies was they tended to prop themselves up like scarecrows, easily identifiable and easier to kill. The world, which had already become a very quiet place, became even more so. Gas-powered anything no longer worked. I’m sure the machines themselves were fine, it was the fuel. It had gummed up, becoming a sort of smelly black taffy. I’m not sure this can be considered a plus, might have been at one time. The lack of creatures, even insects—or at least the parasitic ones, suffered as well. Can’t feed your offspring if you don’t have blood. I wouldn’t be overly upset if mosquitoes went the way of the dodo, still, it was difficult to thank the zombies for eradicating them. Honeybees, without us fouling up the radiowave spectrum and polluting everything, rebounded nicely. I’d once read that they were the most important creature on the planet and that they could come back, given half a chance. It gave me hope that we had a future.

  “I’m never getting back on that thing. How does an aircraft carrier get so small?” We’d paddled our small zodiac boats to shore. We were north of Miami. We’d decided to stay away from the city, first, because population centers meant sleeping zombies and secondly, a couple years previous, a good-sized earthquake had struck the area—or at least the resultant tsunami. By the damage to the metropolis, I had to think some island nation had finally been taken out by plate tectonics, Japan, possibly, or Madagascar? I don’t know. Anything low lying had suffered severe damage and then, to add insult to injury, something had ruptured, gas line or storage tanks, causing a
fair portion of the city to burn. It didn’t look safe, no matter how badly we could use some supplies. And that was another thing. We were badly in need of fresh food. MRE’s were still edible, I mean, as far as that goes. But anything that could be bought at a grocery store, canned or packaged, was gone. We needed to farm, to grow our own food.

  “What are the odds we’ll be able to find cows?” I asked BT.

  “Potentially nothing left on the planet and, if we do find something, your first instinct is to eat it?” BT responded.

  “Bullshit, you wouldn’t eat a cheeseburger?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you’re giving me crap for saying it?”

  “Why change up the routine now? You say the crazy shit; I verbally berate you while silently agreeing. What now, Talbot?” We were both looking to the horizon.

  “I think I want to go home,” I told him.

  “And where is that exactly? Colorado?”

  My heart sent a hurting pang throughout my entire system as I thought of those times before all of this. The loss so deep, every one of us were entrenched in it. I missed when my kids were young, even missed my shitty nine to five and my expanding waistline. Life is loss; I’d known that before the zombies had come, but how high does the cost have to be? How much can you take and continue on? None of us still alive hadn’t been pushed to that brink. Maybe we weren’t hollowed out completely, but we all had unfillable holes. Often times this made it difficult to communicate with those closest to us. We were somehow becoming oppositely polarized magnets, and I didn’t have a clue how to fix that. The longer I went without an enemy to focus my rage, the worse it burned within me. I was becoming intolerable, and the worst part was I knew this and still, I was having a hard time doing anything about it.

  “I don’t think I can ever go back there; I don’t have it in me. For some reason, I think it has to be Maine.”

  “So you want to leave this temperate climate and head into that frozen, rocky wasteland? I mean, what better place to start a farm.”

  “You get it. And temperate? This is a fucking sauna. My ball sweat is producing sweat, and I’m not even moving.” Got a funny look from him, though he chose to not say anything. It wasn’t a completely crazy notion on my part, the leaving of Florida, I mean, I realize most of my notions tend toward the crazy side. We’d learned a few things about the zombies since the start. Cold didn’t kill them, no, we didn’t have that luxury, but given a choice, they were very much like retirees. They migrated away from cold areas in droves. It made sense that to avoid our greatest enemy, we should stay in colder climes. Farming in Maine was possible, but definitely not the easiest. If asked straight out, I don’t know if I could have answered the why of it. Ron’s house had been partially destroyed, and there lay so many people who were no longer with us. I felt an urge to do the things still left undone at his place, but maybe it was just to visit the ghosts.

  I didn’t make a unilateral decision; it was no longer necessary and I would never miss that responsibility. In extreme times where all we were trying to do was survive, it made abundant sense to have a hierarchy. I wasn’t above question; that should never be the case, but when snap judgments needed to be made, we could not spare the time to form a committee. When we did sit down to talk about it, the discussion itself didn’t take overly long, but lingering thoughts on it did. A few days, in fact. Some among the group wanted to settle where we were; I got that. After so many years of sailing the ocean, wanderlust had been burned out of a great number. When those of my closest inner circle decided that they were in on going back, the next problem became how. Couldn’t go to the nearest gas station and pick up a map or dial it into my Garmin, but vague recollections put the distance needed to travel north of a thousand miles. No planes, no cars, no horse-drawn buggies; didn’t even have a rickshaw, although, I didn’t think BT would carry us anyway. Lord knows I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him it was his new job.

  We stayed where we were for a week, maybe two. Time had lost its importance; I can’t even remember when I’d lost complete track of days of the week. Was it ever going to matter again that it was a Monday or a Saturday? Soon, the only importance would be seasons. A scouting mission found orchards. We ate more fresh fruit in that time frame than maybe my entire life and yeah, we’d all paid for it, to the point that fruit had lost its luster. Only so many times you can cop a wet squat and not get a little resentful. Luckily the one thing at the stores that was still readily available and hadn’t been completely ransacked was toilet paper. Go figure. Would have been weirder if it was all gone. It was with some reluctance that we eventually went back to the ship. But weighed with the epic journey of walking the entire way, we had no choice. We steamed up the coast. (Yes, I know the ship was nuclear powered, but it sounds much more romantic to say steamed.) So, we set sail, not stopping until we saw the jutted arm of Massachusetts signaling the destination of many vacationers and the wealthy East Coast blue bloods of New England: Cape Cod.

  It was summer, far too late to begin plantings of any kind. The mansions that dotted the ocean became our refuge. Want to know what doesn’t go bad in five years? Alcohol. Beer may flatten, but good old vodka was the cockroach of beverages. Not even sure how many times I drank away my demons, or at least covered their mouths so whatever they were spewing about became a meaningless chaotic babble. We rode out the winter in those homes, barely coming out to see the neighbors. When the first signs of spring emerged, I figured it was time to get to work, to focus on something besides the worms eating through my brain. I’d not been expecting BT to beat me so savagely. We emerged from our homes, much like bears leaving their caves, grizzly and unkempt, still drowsy and a bit cranky…or maybe that was just me.

  “Talbot, we need to talk.” The way he said it, so serious. We all know how well I deal with that.

  “I was figuring to get the break-up talk from Tracy, not you.” When he didn’t say anything smart back or even crack a smile, that was the first punch delivered.

  “I’ve been talking to Lyndsey, Jessie, and even BT junior.” He stopped there, a pregnant pause. I mean, they all lived in the same house; it made sense that they should talk to each other. Although now that I was thinking about it, that was something Tracy and I were doing less and less of, though not for lack of trying on her end. I could hope that time would begin to work out some of the kinks in my knotted mind, but if this small sample had shown me anything, it was that without some serious help, it was unlikely I was going to get better. Again, I wasn’t unique in this matter, every single one of us survivors were dealing with just that. I’d never really understood survivors’ guilt before now, but lately I was getting an advanced immersion course.

  “Seriously, man?” I had to prod him to keep going.

  “We’re planning to go to Amish country.”

  I didn’t get it, it hadn’t clicked yet. “There’s Amish country in Maine?”’

  “I don’t know, maybe, but I’m talking about Pennsylvania.”

  Maybe it was due to the copious amounts of booze drank, the brain cells drowned under the liquid poison. Maybe it was simply a reluctance to understand where this was headed. “But Maine isn’t Pennsylvania.”

  “I know. It’s something I have to do.”

  That was BT’s combination, a one-two punch followed by an uppercut. At some point, my legs had decided I’d been standing too long and I descended at a terminal velocity, right onto my ass. Without coming out and stating it, he’d spoke volumes. He was going to Pennsylvania and, for whatever reason or an overabundance of them, I was not invited.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow.” I had tears in my eyes as I looked up at the giant of a man, he leaned over, rubbed my shoulder. “I love you.” The words choked off as his throat closed. He turned and walked away. I don’t know if sobbing conveys what I was doing. I was stuck trying to catch my breath. I’d had plenty of relationships end during my life, which, at that point in time, I’d thought wa
s quite possibly the worst thing that could ever happen. This was different. This was my best friend, my brother, someone with whom I’d been through the most difficult times in my life. He could not be more a part of me if we tried. Then the realization of why he wanted to leave made sense. Whether fairly or not, I was a constant reminder of the hardships we’d been through. If perhaps we had known each other before the apocalypse, we could have focused on those events, but our times together were always punctuated by death, by killing, by battles both large and small. Who wants or can handle a lifetime of that?

  I walked the beach the entire day, not coming to grips with the news at all. I kept thinking it was some sort of mistake, or perhaps a bad joke, but nothing in his demeanor led me to believe that.

  I’m not saying this would have been better, I don’t mean it that way, but his death might have been easier to handle. There was no questioning of why it was happening, just that it had. Lord knows I’d had enough hopeless inevitability swirling around me; it was something I understood, something I knew how to deal with. To cope with…no, not cope, exactly. That makes it sound like I was dancing my way through the minefield in my mind. I went from incoherently crying to anger, anger that he would leave. That he would leave me.

  “What the fuck have I ever done except help you stay alive!” I raged at the ocean. It cared less than the driftwood I would sometimes toss. Three miles into my walk I came across a fader. I made sure he paid dearly for the pain I felt. When I was done, I walked into the ocean, boots and all, I was up to my neck when I took another step. It would have been so easy to just drift off, and I suppose I would have, if not for the distant bark of a dear old friend.