by Mark Tufo
“Bulkhead! There’s a bulkhead over here!” I screamed, making sure I would be heard. Funny thing about whatever this place was, the louder I spoke, the less they heard. Damn near gave myself an aneurysm before I figured that little tidbit out. “Bulkhead. There’s a bulkhead straight ahead.” This, not much above a whisper.
I noticed that Other Mike was now completely covered, and BT was nearly so.
“I can’t see anything…breathing is getting difficult.” Other Mike was laboring.
“We need to go back.” BT’s voice was rising in alarm. What would a good haunted house be, if not determined? The basement door slammed shut, cutting off what little light had been able to filter down.
I wasn’t sure if the bulkhead was a viable option for escape, but there were no windows, and scraping through rock had proved ineffective.
“The door out is straight ahead and slightly to the left when you get to the far wall.” I could see Other Mike and BT struggling to get through the murkiness, their hands outstretched, feeling for obstacles, eyes opened wide and unblinking in the hopes some errant ray of light would find its way to them. As for me, I was cloaked in that preternatural greenish-brown color that often happens in nightmarish dreams. While I most likely could not read a book by it, I could still see perfectly well. Shadow figures began to peel themselves from the darker recesses in the basement. One took note of me as it passed by, but I, for some reason, was untouchable to it in this realm. O.M. and BT seemed to be fair game though.
“Something’s coming,” I whispered, afraid if I said it any louder the thing would find a way to cross realms.
“Could you be a little more specific?” O.M. asked.
“You are not talking to the disembodied voice, are you? It could be a trick.” BT frowned at O.M. and shook his head.
“Got any better ideas? We’re already trapped; seems like no point in adding further insult.”
“Guess you don’t understand the minds of psychopaths then. They thrive on that shit,” BT answered.
“Been called a lot of things but not…wait, scratch that. I had an old girlfriend in high school call me that, but in fairness, she was REALLY pissed I had fooled around with her friend, and I don’t think she used it in the right context,” I said aloud.
“Cathy Gregory,” O.M. replied. “I could never get over the fact her nickname was Gregs; just felt weird to be kissing someone with a masculine name.”
“You let homophobia wreck a relationship?” BT asked.
“I was seventeen. Wasn’t like it was going to last, and I was a lot stupider back then.”
“Back then huh?”
“Guys…they’re moving slow but not that slow. Get your asses moving!” I whispered a shout. It worked.
“We listening to that voice?” BT asked.
“You’d better,” I told him.
Other Mike and BT had finally got to the last step and stepped onto the floor, both had their arms out, making sweeping gestures with them. “I don’t know how, BT, but that voice is mine.”
“Fucking great. World isn’t screwed up enough, now there are two of you.”
“Gonna have to trust me on this. The far side is twenty-five feet ahead; keep your arms to your sides and move quickly,” the me having the dream said. (This was confusing for me…can’t imagine what this is like for those reading my journal.)
The shadows were converging; I didn’t know what would happen if they touched O.M. or BT, but I got the feeling it wouldn’t be good.
“NOW!” O.M. jolted at my command, but did as I asked. “BT, keep your goddamned arms to your side!”
“I don’t like you, and I don’t like you,” BT referred to us both.
O.M. and BT had passed by three of the four specters, one so narrowly I saw BT shiver from the near contact. The fourth had parked itself directly in their path.
“Quick left for five feet!”
O.M. was slow to react; BT nearly took him out, but made sure to keep him on his feet as he grabbed his shoulders and heaved up.
“Turn right. Ten feet dead ahead.”
“Really?” BT asked, questioning my wording. “Now I know it’s you.”
“Steps,” I warned them a fraction of a second too late. O.M. went down hard; BT almost made sure O.M. never had any more kids or sex, as his foot came down dangerously close to the other’s crotch. Again, he picked him up by the shoulders and deposited him down. “Bulkhead.” Again I was too late in warning, but this time it was on O.M., I had told him there was a bulkhead; what did he think was going to happen? As he climbed the stairs, there was a resounding gong as his head smacked hard into the slanted metal doorway.
“Fuck! I think I got a stinger!” he shouted, his head bent at an angle that was hurting me just looking at it.
“Hey! Other pain in the ass! Where’s the handle?” BT demanded.
“Above your head to the right,” I told him. I could see him fumbling around for it, then I lost sight of them both as four spirits floated in and were now between me and them. One turned; an unnaturally long finger first pointed at me and then dragged across its neck. Didn’t need a demonology dictionary to decipher that. “Hurry up!”
“Like I’m taking my sweet ass time,” BT grunted. “Frozen.” I heard the tinkle of metal parts as they cascaded down from the door and onto the cement steps. Then I had to turn my head from the brilliant light that shone through. BT had pushed the doors open so hard, one had completely become unhinged and hung off to the side. He and Mike were through, and to what I hoped was safety. I was also going to vacate the premises, as my neck dragging buddy turned back to me. I also showed him a finger, different gesture, though, as I pulled myself free from whatever the hell that was I had been in.
I sat up. I was bathed in sweat. Tracy had just come out of the bathroom; she’d been getting ready for her day at school. “You all right?” she asked, concerned.
“Trip’s alive!” I let the rest of the dirty remembrance fall away from me. To her credit, she didn’t question me on how crazy that sounded or how I could possibly have known. “Now I just have to find him.”
Chapter 16
TALBOT-SODE TWO
I’m sure you’ve heard that there are no atheists in a foxhole. First off, it’s called a “fighting hole.” I once asked my DI where he wanted me to dig my foxhole; he smacked me so hard up the side of the head I remember seeing Tuesday. Then he calmly explained it’s a fighting hole. Lesson learned. I was in the mountains of Afghanistan a year or so after that instance; Sam Brannison and myself were assigned a forward outpost position. Not sure what he’d done to be on the shitty end of the stick; I had been caught trying to ferment mouthwash into something passable as alcohol. Didn’t work. Still got in trouble as if it had. Want to talk about the injustice of it all? The lieutenant that passed down the field judgment reeked of whiskey. Whatever. Now I knew where to liberate some stock when I got back to base.
So Brannison and I are tasked with digging a fighting hole. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the standard Marine Corps issue tri-fold shovel. It’s roughly the size of a toy you would buy for a child, and Afghanistan, well, it’s comprised mostly of cement. Natural cement, in the form of granite-like dirt and boulders the size of tires. On a good day, we’d be able to scrape a few inches of earth to hide in. The enemy was active in this area, and we weren’t feeling overly confident in our ability to make it through the night.
Typical talk of all fighting people everywhere revolves around food, home, and invariably, members of the opposite sex. We covered all those topics just as the sun went down over the horizon. Once the night settled in, the conversation became more somber. Not how I would normally while away an evening, but we moved on to religion. Yeah, I went to services on Sunday, but mostly because it got me out of the sand and into an air-conditioned tent. And in the off-chance there was a Maker, I wanted to make sure the lines of communication had been kept open. I had my doubts about the presence of an omnipot
ent, omnipresent deity, but again, what harm was there in playing all the odds? Brannison was Methodist, not that this made the slightest difference to me, just part of the narrative.
“I think guilt is the primary weapon favored by Catholicism,” I told him. “My mother got an advanced degree in its use.”
“Not too late…you could convert. As a Methodist, you would learn that we toss food around instead of shame.”
“I like your religion better; guilt weighs way more than food.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he responded as we toasted with our canteens, which, unfortunately, were filled with water and not sacramental wine.
Brannison and I were friends in the Corps; can’t say we would have been close outside the confines of battle. He was entirely too straight-laced. But he was a good guy and a great shot. Plus, right now he was watching my back; all of that equated to us being best buds. We made it through the night with only one report to make. Two weeks later, parts of Brannison were sent back to the states after an IED on the side of the road blew up the Hummer he was riding in. I think of him often and even went to a few Methodist services to see, and yeah, they like their food.
Chapter 17
Trip’s Lost Escape
“I don’t like it in here.” Stephanie was shaking.
“It’s all good, I have snacks,” Trip said as he pulled various half-eaten cellophane bags from his pockets. Stephanie winced at the excessive sound he was making.
Porkchop, Mark, and Sty looked longingly at the chip bags. Trip looked at the boys then slowly began to put them away.
“John,” Stephanie urged.
“Yeah?” He never took his eyes off the kids as he tucked all the snacks away.
She nodded her head to the boys.
Trip did the same thing. “What are we doing?” he asked her.
“I’m telling you to give the boys the chips without having to tell you to give them the chips.”
“How’s that working out for you?” he asked.
“Not so good.”
“Didn’t think it would,” he told her then turned away.
“John!”
“What?” He snapped his attention back to her.
“Give them the chips.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?” He pulled some bags out and handed them over.
She looked fairly exasperated.
“We should have stayed with Uncle Mike,” Mark said as he took a bag that Trip was reluctant to let go of.
“He thought we’d be safer here sweetheart,” Stephanie told him.
“Uh huh.”
For every snack bag Trip doled out, he grabbed something from the shelter’s ample food supply and replaced the emptiness. It was irrelevant what he grabbed; power bar, bag of beef stew, napkins, he didn’t care. Just as long as he had something in place. As if his pockets abhorred a vacuum.
“Shh…you hear that?” Porkchop asked.
“Can’t hear anything over your munching,” Sty ribbed him.
The bunker was a lot of things; airtight was not one of them. A malignant odor drifted in. It was so thick, Porkchop put his bag down, even went so far as to let it drop to the ground, but that had more to do with fright.
“You lost your mind?” Trip whispered as he bent down to pick it up. Trip threw his head back, as the first of the screeches ripped through his brains. When it stopped, Trip turned to the side. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were open wide in a wild, animalistic stare. Zach was screaming his lungs out; any chance they had of going undetected had long since slipped by.
A rhythmic thrumming began on the door. One of the zombies that had not yet climbed up the evolutionary ladder was using its skull to knock.
“What are we going to do?” Porkchop asked.
“We’re going to stay right here,” Stephanie said as calmly as she could manage. She was attempting to get Zach to stop crying; she’d been close to succeeding until another burst shot across their minds.
When it stopped, Trip had his head against the wall. Blood was flowing from his nose. “Going to rip our minds in half,” he breathed out with difficulty.
“Nonsense,” Stephanie said without conviction.
“Come out.”
Trip’s head first swiveled to the door, followed by the other inhabitants of the shelter. They had all heard it, and he didn’t know if he was sad or relieved.
“Do you think my uncle will come back?” Mark asked.
“Right now we are all we have,” Stephanie told him. Except for Zach, they were all armed, but what good was that? Trip preferred his slingshot, and she was reluctant to fire her revolver while holding the baby. That left three barely pubescent boys to do all the heavy lifting. She became irrationally angry at Mike for leaving them this vulnerable, even if he’d thought it was for the best, and so had she at the time, but things had changed, and so had her mind. It wasn’t fair to him, but this was their lives hanging in the balance; fair was out of the equation now.
Trip began to click his tongue. Stephanie looked over to him, his eyes were closed. He’d been skirting the edge of insanity for so long she figured the shrieker had finally finished off what traveling through realms and ingesting enough drugs to sedate a third world country had begun.
“Oh no, no, no, honey.” She reached up with her free hand to caress the side of his head.
“Echolocation,” he told her before resuming his clicks.
“What?”
“Shh…I’m figuring out where the asshole is at.”
Mark twirled his finger by the side of his head; Porkchop wasn’t so sure, though he wondered how the man was getting any return signals through the door.
“There’s ten of them; asshole is fifteen feet to the left.” Trip finally opened his eyes.
“No,” Stephanie told him. “You can’t possibly know that, and we’re not going out there.”
“Only ten?” Sty asked.
“No,” Stephanie admonished him.
“They’ll get more if we don’t,” Mark observed astutely.
“You’re not a dolphin!” she said to her husband.
“I watched Flipper when I was younger,” he offered as way of an explanation.
“We take them before they get a bulker,” Porkchop said.
“You too?” Stephanie seemed lost. “Is that what having testosterone is like? We have a baby here.”
“Lady, what do you think that shrieker is doing to his little baby mind?” Sty asked.
Trip was digging in his pockets for steel ball bearings. He grabbed the largest one splayed out in his hand; it was roughly the size of a super ball, but weighed significantly more.
“This’ll do, rabbit.” He held it up to the small flickering ceiling light, the batteries of which were starting to die. Stephanie could not help but think it was doing its utmost to mirror their own lives.
“Are you sure?” Stephanie asked Trip.
“About what?” His look of confusion only added to her fears. “Check your rounds and make sure your safeties are off, boys! The charge of the light brigade is about to begin.”
“Hold on.” Stephanie ripped part of her shirt off and wrapped it around Zach’s ears as many times as she could. “I love you, John, but I’m not relying on a slingshot to get us out of here.”
“Oh, it won’t, they will,” he whispered pointing to the boys.
Porkchop gulped heavily, a sour mash of taste rising from his stomach. He wished he’d not eaten any of the salty snacks he had received from Trip, as they were now blistering his throat with acid reflux.
“We’ve got this.” Sty was trying to psyche them all up; it wasn’t even working on himself.
“Steph, I need you to open the door then step back. Mark, Sty, there will be two very surprised zombies standing there; one is most likely going to fall right in.”
“The knocker,” Porkchop said.
Trip touched his knee like one might their nose in a rousing game of charades.
&nbs
p; “There will be no shooting until my blushing bride is completely out of the way, is that clear?” Trip made sure to look each boy in the eye. When he was satisfied with their non-verbal affirmation, he continued with his plan. “With those two down, I am going to put this giant metal ball straight into the eyeball of the shrieker; I plan to give him some karmic justice–firstly, and hopefully, not lastly.” He quickly produced a half-smoked joint and a match.
“Not this close to the baby or the boys,” Stephanie protested.
He eyed her, his left eyebrow arching high. “Fine, edibles it is,” he said as he swallowed it down.
“That’s just gross,” Sty said.
“Now we wait,” Trip replied.
“Wait for what?” Porkchop asked.
“Takes about twenty minutes for that to kick in. If I should fall, I’m not going down unstoned.”
“Unstoned? You mean straight?” Mark asked.
“Straight is for squares.” Trip drew a circle in the air. “Whoa, maybe that kicked in quicker than I thought, or maybe the quaaludes weren’t quite done.” Trip exhaled a big breath of air while also leaning back. “Let’s get this done.”
“Right now?” Sty asked.
“Trust me, this is the best time,” Stephanie said as she moved nearer to the door. “Boys?”
“Yup,” Mark said.
