by Mark Tufo
My sister kissed my cheek before grabbing BT’s hand.
“Good job, man.” He smiled, then they left.
The entire courtroom was empty save me, Tracy and my kids.
“Geez dad…you can’t even get time off from work without causing a big scene,” Travis said.
“Even when he’s on vacation, there’s no telling what’ll happen.” Justin was referring to the great Canadian border debacle.
“I see where this is going. The colonel starts the pig pile and you all hop on.”
“I’ve got your back, dad,” Nicole said.
“Got one on my side!” I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here before someone else thinks of a reason I should be in court.”
Per Tracy’s demands, I did seek out help–not the traditional route, though. I instead sought out an Army Chaplain. His name was Mulcahey, of all things. The problem was, he was so young he didn’t know who I was talking about; hadn’t ever watched the show. Didn’t matter. The guy had seen enough to understand what I was going through. I saw him every day for those two weeks. The first couple of times, he had to pull words out of my mouth like a dentist might an impacted wisdom tooth. By the end, I think I was confessing transgressions I had done when I was six. I don’t know if laying yourself bare is the answer to everything; but I suppose it makes it easier to examine the broken bits and where to apply some duct tape. I felt better for it. My night terrors had become less frequent and they lost a bit of their intensity. All in the nick of time before we headed back out into the wild.
Epilogue
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 12
The Night of the Lord
* * *
We’d just come back from New York. Everything about that mission was still raw and now we were at it again.
* * *
“You look like shit, Lieutenant. You alright?” Colonel Bennington was sitting at the head of a large table; he stood as I came in. The table was packed with a cluster of shiny-lapeled officers.
“As all right as one can be after what we witnessed. Once I’m cleaned up, finished with my debriefing, I’m going home, then I think I’m going to drink an entire bottle of Jeff Daniels, and I hate the shit.”
“Jeff?”
“Sorry, sir, I get the two mixed up. Long story.”
“Have a seat. Tell us what happened.”
After spending the next two hours recounting the entire mission and answering dozens of questions, I was finally about to be dismissed. About halfway through my recounting, a corporal came running in and quickly handed a piece of paper to the colonel. It looked urgent, but right now all I wanted was to finish out the day and hope the next was better. The colonel looked at the paper then at me before scribbling some hasty notes and sending the corporal on his way.
I stood up. “Hope I passed,” I told the captain to my right, who had been taking copious notes. He looked up. I had expected some response, even if it was derision. That none of his facial features moved was somehow more disconcerting.
I was walking down the hallway of the command center after having finished my debriefing. My uniform was filthy, as was my rifle. I was shaking my head, attempting to get rid of the memories I had collected on the last mission. Life is strange; I realize by this point there shouldn’t be much that surprises me, but there always seems to be something unique and terrible around every corner. I just wanted to get home and wash the stink of the last few days off me.
“Lieutenant Talbot…” Colonel Bennington had come out of meeting room and had called to me as I was leaving.
“Sir,” I said, turning around.
“Listen, Lieutenant, I hate to interrupt your plans for what sounds like a stellar evening, but I’m going to need for your team to turn around quickly.”
“Sir? His family should be…”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“No disrespect, but he was my man.”
“None taken, Lieutenant, but you need to remember that all of you are my men.”
“Yes, sir. You heard my debriefing, sir, you know we’ve been run ragged. I wouldn’t doubt if all of my personnel were half in the bag or sleeping.”
“I need you to check something out. I’d get another team on it, but there are none here.”
My head sagged.
“I promise you, Lieutenant, it’s close. And when you get back, I’ll give your team a week’s R&R.”
“Unless, of course, something comes up.” It was past my lips before I could even think to contain it.
“I’m going to let that one pass on by, Lieutenant, due to the rough nature of your last outing.”
“I appreciate that, sir. We’ll be ready to go in forty-five; going to need to restock everything.”
“Already all set. There’s a fully loaded Hummer right outside.”
“Well, isn’t it my lucky day, sir.”
“Lucky I like you, Lieutenant.”
“My wife says I’ve got an endearing quality. What are we checking out?”
“Eatonville, couple of towns over. Some brainchild has lit up the night sky with those industrial searchlights the auto dealerships use.”
“Really? For what purpose?” I asked, the Colonel scowled. “Right…that’s why you’re sending us out there.”
“Lieutenant be careful. If someone is willing to let the whole world know they are there, it’s safe to say they are not too worried about anything.”
“Or they’re plain old crazy. Neither thing sounds good to me.”
The colonel smiled. “See you soon,” he said before heading back into the room.
I gave my rifle to the corporal who was sitting at the admittance desk. “Could you please get this to the armory?” I asked, placing the weapon on his desk. He looked down, horrified at the congealed blood that coated almost the entirety of it. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine,” I told him before leaving. I had no sooner walked out of the building when BT, who had been leaning against the Hummer, pushed off and yelled.
“What the fuck, Talbot? Who’d you piss off now? You realize we just got back, right? I bet you told the Colonel to go fuck himself with a frog or something like that. I was asleep! Some little pissant private came running in; I nearly choked him out. You know I hate when I get woken up.
“Did you get a shower?” I asked, stopping his diatribe.
“Yeah.” He looked perplexed.
“How about a meal?”
“Of course.”
“You get to see my sister?”
“Yeah, I did. What’s that got to do with anything?” He was building back to surly.
“Substitute my sister for my wife, and I didn’t get to do any of those things.”
BT finally took a moment to look at me; the dried blood of the one we’d lost still on the uniform I was wearing. “I’m sorry, man, I just figured you had done something to get us on a shit list.”
“Not a horrible or unjustified assumption, just not correct this time. There’s no one else available for the job. Plus, the old man promised us a week of R&R once this is done.”
“You realize that’s horse shit, right?”
“Of course I do. Duty calls. At least it’s close. Some idiot is playing with a huge flashlight over in Eatonville. Our job is to go check out why.”
“Maybe he has a death wish,” BT said as he got back into the Hummer. “Because I’m going to kill him.”
I poked my head in; Sergeant Winters was driving. He nodded to me; even in the bad lighting it would have been difficult to miss the hollowness of his eyes.
“You up for this, Winters?” I asked.
“Tried to sleep, sir. That didn’t go over so well.”
In the back seat were my brother and Tommy. Gary, aka Gambo, was fast asleep. Tommy looked pensively out the window.
“Where’s the rest?” I asked BT, as he was responsible for mustering the unit.
“The colonel only wanted one Hummer going in,” he replied. “Figured we’d let the corporals and
privates sit this one out.”
In five minutes we were outside the gate and back into the unknown. The night was cool, though the day had been unseasonably warm. I knew what that meant: fog, and lots of it. Winters was leaning forward as he attempted to peer through the thick pea-soup that was rapidly forming.
I turned on the small flashlight I had and pulled open a manila folder that contained our mission parameters. “Gary, I need for you to be awake.” I shook him.
“Come on, mom…no one wears rubbers anymore!” he shouted as he sat up. “Huh?” he asked, looking at our confused stares.
BT turned his considerable bulk around. “You had better clarify everything you just said.”
“What did I say?” Gary had no idea.
“Something about your mother and rubbers, and I need for you to tell me that is vastly different from the half-dozen things going through my head right now. Go on. I’m listening,” BT prodded.
“I don’t know…oh, wait, yeah I do. Fifth grade…it was raining like crazy and my mother didn’t want me to ruin my new shoes, made me wear rubbers. Instead of going to school, I hid under our back porch for the entire day.”
BT turned his attention to me. “Mike, can you translate from crazy Talbot speech to English for the rest of us?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that story.” I smiled. “Galoshes.” BT still had a confused look on his face. “Rain boots made from rubber. You put them over your shoes so you don’t get them wet.”
“What kind of white bread shit is that? You put shoes over your shoes? Do all white people do that or only the insane ones? Winters, tell me you weren’t in on this. Come on, man, I need someone on my side.”
“They were a big thing on the East Coast,” he said as a weak defense.
“You crazy fuckers should have been practicing more safe-sex instead of safe-walking. That way there would be less of you. People wearing condoms on their feet…were they called Toejans?” He laughed loudly at his joke.
“You done?” I asked him as I pointed out the front of the Hummer. Up ahead was a thick column of light piercing the fog-filled night sky.
“Shit,” he sighed. “Yeah.”
“We are only here to observe and call back in. Once that’s done, we turn around and go home. If it gets hot, our extraction point is the town hall, which is about a klick away from where the light is coming from.”
“Secondary extraction point?” BT asked.
“In this soup, my guess is there won’t be a first,” Winters said.
“There’s a church on the far side of town, Our Lady of Perpetually Burnt Food. Head there.”
“That a dig on my fiancee?” BT asked.
“Not at all. Not everything is about you,” I told him. Gary fist-bumped me.
“I hate fucking Talbots.”
“Mike, where’s the comma in that sentence?” Gary asked
“It’s best not to dwell on it,” I replied.
“What, no fist bumps for me?” BT asked.
“Guess we know who’s on point tonight,” I said. “Winters, I don’t want to get too close. I’d rather come in quiet. Let’s make sure the ZADAR, zombie radar, is up and running too. I hate being in the fog, and I don’t want anything sneaking up on us.”
We stopped as soon as we saw the sign saying: “Welcome to the Town of Eatonville.” The wooden sign was riddled with bullet holes and as Winters moved over to the shoulder, we drove over the skeletal remains of a half-dozen somethings. Most likely zombies, but I wasn’t about to check if their heads had been shot. Best not to think on such things; all dead beings were zombies, that thought helped me sleep at night.
“Alright, let’s set up a perimeter. Tommy, the ZAD is on you. Winters, could you help him, please?”
Winters nodded.
“All right Mr. T, Lieutenant, sir.”
“It’s fine, Tommy…the only one I want calling me Lieutenant is BT. He needs to know that the Marine Corps, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I should be his commander.”
BT was in front of the Hummer with his weapon, scanning the area. He scoffed. “They promoted me first, dumbass. I just wanted to be part of your unit.”
“He loves me; turned down a commission to be by my side,” I told Winters.
“I promised your sister I’d look out for you,” BT replied.
“Look out for me?”
“Remember, you’re her little brother. She’ll never stop thinking she needs to protect you. When in reality, we all need protecting from you. Crazy-ass,” he said under his breath. “Talbots all be crazy. Never heard of no brothers wearing shoes over their shoes…hell, I was lucky I even had shoes.”
“Yeah, because it was difficult to get them in canoe sizes,” I said.
“I wonder if I can tell the colonel I reconsidered,” BT said.
There was a loud series of beeps as Tommy fired up the ZAD.
“Sorry,” he said as he immediately lowered the volume. I moved quickly to Tommy’s side; the only reason the ZAD would give off beeps was if there was something beep-worthy, and unfortunately, we had a lot of beep-worthy entities. As far as military equipment used in the field goes, this stuff was pretty sophisticated. It had software that could render a three-dimensional image of our surroundings, including any beings within its range. Even had infrared capability which could penetrate buildings. The only downside was that the old school zombies who had first died and then were reanimated had a much lower body heat and hardly ever showed inside a building. So just because the ZAD showed a building as clear, we still had to take precautions. After all the shit we’d all been through, to be taken out by a first-generation zombie would be humiliating, to say the least.
It had pros and cons over the tech that Deneaux had brought us. We weren’t limited by night or bad weather, but everything was in hues of green, and buildings were outlined in green lines, giving it a feel of video games from the eighties. Other than that, it was invaluable.
“There is a crapload of zombies around.” BT was looking over my shoulder. “And bulkers.” He pointed at the screen.
“You do realize that with those sausage fingers, you could be pointing to anywhere on half the display,” I told him. “And it doesn’t help that your gloves are the same size as the mitt I used to play baseball with.”
“How do you think he stays so big, especially with our sister’s cooking?” Gary asked.
“That’s why he’s so surly; only so many Eggos you can eat before you start to snap,” I answered. “She burn those too, big guy?”
He looked angry, then relented. “If you put enough syrup on them they’re palatable.”
“Sorry, man,” I told him. “Starvation is a slow and painful death.”
“Can we maybe get through this so that I can find some real food? Looks like whoever set up the beacon got what they were looking for.” The light showed up as a bright column on our screen and there was a bunch of zombies congregating around it.
“Yeah, but for what purpose? Distraction, maybe?” Winters asked.
“That looks like a football field,” Gary said as we all looked at the screen. The fog was beginning to congeal; we couldn’t see much more than ten yards. The nearest zombie was over a hundred yards off and moving away from us and toward the light.
“Must be a high school. We should check the field out, then this building. It has a large open floor; I’m thinking the gym.”
“Yeah, and there’s something in there.” Tommy was looking intently at the screen. “Mr. T, there’s something weird here.”
“Listening,” I told him.
“Look closer at the occupants in the gym.”
There were two signals coming from the gym, and one of them was smaller like a shrieker. It wasn’t moving, but the other blip was. It was a dark blip, and something about it made all the hair on my neck stand up.
“Vampire.” I sucked the word through my teeth.
“Payne?” BT asked. We were instantly on high alert. Not t
hat we weren’t already ready, but the threat level had just been increased. “I know you know what I mean here, but I really fucking hate vampires.”
“Understood,” I told him.
When we had been shown the ZAD and had gone to a class on how it operated, Tommy and I had to always make sure we were on the “Good Guys” team. We wore a special pin that registered as a “friendly” on the ZAD so as to not show up as an anomaly on the special radar. We just glowed blue on the screen with our names and ranks displayed. That had been a stressful day; luckily, the captain teaching the course hadn’t noticed just how adamant Tommy and I had been to be the “hunters.” Once I had to switch with Gary; if the captain noticed, he said nothing.
“Shit. Now what? It looks like Payne is amassing an army,” Winters said after pacing a few steps.
“I feel pretty good about the five of us against damn near anything, but I’ve got a vibe we might be in over our head,” BT said. His words struck a chord; he was right. Something powerful was in that gym. I could feel the waves of energy vibrating through me.
“I take it we’re going in?” Winters resigned himself to a fact he already knew.
“Of course he is because…”
“Talbots be crazy,” Winters finished BT’s thoughts.
“You know you’re crazy when other people point it out.” BT clapped Winters on the back.
“Winters, could you radio back to command that we are about to make contact with an unknown entity, and to maybe warm up our ride?”
“On it, sir.” He moved closer to the Hummer and radioed in my message. BT and myself were going over the best approach to the building when Winters came back. “Birds are grounded.”
“Shit.” I looked up. “Listen, I realize I’m technically in command here by some strange twists of fate, but we’re more than just a military unit; we’re friends and family. And now that we’ve found out that help isn’t coming should we need it, I’d rather put this up for a vote instead of making an executive decision and just ordering us in, because, you all know I want to go in. It’s a character flaw of mine and I realize that, but I don’t want anyone getting hurt just because from time to time I like to do a ball check.”
