Trailer Park Zombies Page 18

  Washington held a shaking hand over his eyes and finally found his voice. “Yeah, we killed some. About 30 or so I think. Isn’t that right, guys?”

  Felix just nodded. “Yeah. Can I borrow your flask, Wilkinson?”

  Wilkinson wordlessly handed it over. Felix tipped it over his mouth and we all heard him down the nearly full flask. He closed his eyes when he was down and leaned back and sighed.

  Rodriguez was gripping his chest where Tamara had pushed him. He grimaced with pain every time he pressed. I’m guessing he was going to have a nasty bruise and wouldn’t have been surprised to hear he had a cracked rib or two.

  “Was that all of them? Do you think you killed them all?” Wilkinson asked.

  I flashed on Mason Smith and Barrett and some of the others I’d seen get taken today. I shook my head. “No. There’s definitely more out there.”

  Fannie Mae looked up at me. “Did you get Barrett?”

  I shook my head at her. “No, but I did put Tamara out of her misery.”

  Concern crossed her face and she gripped me even more tightly. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Not really. But I’ll wait til this is all over to break down.”

  I struggled to my feet and Fannie Mae helped me stand there. I was very wobbly and all I wanted was rest. I towered over Washington and the others. “You need any more help right now, Wash?”

  He shook his head at me wordlessly, not able to meet my gaze. His whole body was shaking along with his hand.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going to go take a little nap. Let me know if you need anything.”

  With that I turned around and Fannie Mae helped me to our little spot on the wall. The crowd in the main room silently watched us. They’d all heard the shots and they all wanted details but the dark look on my face was enough for them to decide not to bother asking me. Fannie Mae helped me to a sitting position on the wall. It felt like all my muscles were tightening up and screaming at me. I really did need some rest. But before that…

  “Fannie Mae,” I whispered.

  “Yes, Dukey?” She put her face next to mine.

  I felt my mostly empty pockets. I’d used nearly every shell I’d had on me. “Fill me back up with shells. Every pocket. As many as you can stuff in there.”

  She nodded and broke them out of the bag. I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of her stuffing my pockets, something nibbling at the back of my head. It seemed like I’d seen something or knew something that was important but I was way too tired to try and remember it.

  So I slept.

  Noise was the first thing I remembered. It was definitely what woke me up. The huddled masses were talking real loud and making a ruckus. I sat up from where I’d been laying and as I did something fell off my throat. I picked it up and saw it was a wet rag. Fannie Mae must have put it on my throat to help with the swelling.

  She was standing about five feet away and staring at the group of people making the noise. It was about 20 of them so maybe a third of the refugees were up and about. The rest were still huddling in their corners with the blankets over their heads. I could make a joke about ostriches and sticking their heads in the ground, but I won’t. Or I guess I just did. I was a little pissy for having been woken up. It felt like I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. My clothes were still wet from the rain.

  Fannie Mae turned back to me. She looked worried. When she saw I was awake she smiled and came back for me. She sat down next to me and squeezed my hand.

  “What’s going on?” I rasped.

  “They found out about the rescue mission and the shootout. They want to know if the men who went outside know who was killed. They’re pretty upset. A lot of them don’t think we’re actually dealing with zombies.”

  I sat up straighter. “So they think we were just killing people willy-nilly?”

  She sighed. “I don’t really know what they think. Some are complaining that we don’t know what’s going on, that it could be some kind of disease or infection and that they can be cured. They think you just murdered all their friends and family.”

  I struggled to my feet. Fannie Mae helped me but she looked concerned. “What are you doing, Dukey?”

  I just shook my head at her. “Help me over there.”

  As we walked over to where the crowd was gathered around Washington, pushing our way through them, I felt my strength returning to me. It was just bone-weariness more than anything else. All I wanted to do was rest. I looked at the clock. Yeah, I hadn’t been asleep more than thirty minutes. Awesome.

  We finished our way to Washington and he glanced at me, a look of consternation crossing his face. He was in the middle of saying a bunch of platitudes and trying to talk the crowd down. Screw that. They should have let me sleep.

  I put my hand on his arm and felt the minute shivers in his body. He shook me off and sighed, “Yeah, Duke? What is it? Kinda busy here.”

  I ignored him, too. There was a chair nearby so I dragged it over and stood on it, putting me above the rest of the crowd. I tried to speak over them but my throat was still too raspy for me to really get the volume I needed.

  Suddenly I heard, “Everybody! Shut the fuck up!”

  I looked down at Fannie Mae and grinned. She grinned back. She did have a set of lungs on her.

  The crowd quieted down almost immediately. They stared at me expectantly. There were equal measures of hostility, outrage, concern and worry on their faces. They all looked like they could have used about 12 hours of sleep. I knew I could.

  I nodded at them. “How you all doing? I’m Duke Johnson in case any of you don’t know. I turned 16 yesterday. Can I hear a happy birthday?”

  You could have heard a cricket chirp. Some people just can’t appreciate humor.

  “All right, then. Guess not. Let me tell you what I know. Earlier today most of us saw Donny Marsters get attacked and eaten by a person holding a partially eaten foot. Donny died. I saw it from my windows not thirty feet away. Then you know what happened? He got up.”

  I heard someone murmur something in the crowd. I couldn’t tell who, but I swiveled my head in that general direction. I began to feel stirrings of my own anger. “How do I know? ‘Cause I saw it. There’s no mistaking when someone’s dead from having been eaten. You can just kinda tell. This isn’t a movie where there’s gonna be a happy ending. The dead are rising, folks. If you get bitten or killed by these things then you will get back up. And when you get up you will be hungry for flesh. Those things out there are zombies and they’re eating people. If you doubt that then why are you here?”

  No one would meet my gaze. I don’t know why their doubt made me so angry, but it did. I could feel my rage as an almost palpable thing. “Not an hour or so ago me, Wash, Felix, Rodriguez and Stubby all went out to save some kid that was trapped by the zombies in a car. Stubby didn’t make it back. Do you know what happened to him? Do you?” I was shouting. “He got attacked. A zombie shoved her arm down his throat and pulled all of his insides to the outside. I saw his lung in her hand. I saw her eat his tongue. And then do you know what happened after that? He got back up and came for us. Do you really think that’s something that could happen under normal conditions?”

  I could feel my eyes blazing as I look down at the crowd. My throat was on fire yet somehow I’d found my voice.

  “Couldn’t it be some kind of disease?” Some small voice queried from the crowd.

  “Sure,” I said sarcastically. “It is a disease. It infects dead tissue and makes it living again. But don’t be mistaken. They’re not alive anymore. There’s no cure for death, people. The only cure for death is what’s outside these walls. And it wants to eat all of you.”

  Washington helped me off the chair as I got down, muttering to myself. Damn fool bastards. I looked at Wash and saw the haunted look in his eyes. Saw the tremors and his clenched jaw, the sweat running down his shaved head. Then I said, “We’re all going to die.” That was when all hell broke loose, of course.


  I don’t suppose you recall way earlier, less than 24 hours ago, when Barrett told me and Fannie Mae the rules of zombies movies? Well I did. That was when we’d all stripped for each other and I’d noticed Fannie Mae as a woman for the first time. A young woman, granted, but still. The whole point of our little striptease was Barrett’s assertion that in the zombie movies when you get a whole bunch of people together, survivors like us, that invariably there will be someone who’s hiding a bite from the zombies or someone with a scratch who doesn’t know it. He’d made us strip because he said that the zombie infection is insidious and it burrows down into the body and that if you’re not critically injured that it will works its way on you and then boom, you’re a zombie.

  I’d forgotten to share that information with Washington. Don’t really know why. Guess it hadn’t come up and I’d forgotten been too tired from trying to survive to mention it. You’d be surprised at what slips your mind when you’re jumping from one hell to another.

  Know where I’m going yet?

  Rodriguez had been jumped by Tamara. Remember what I said? That she dug her hands into his shirt and just shoved him out of the way? One fingernail, one lone fingernail, had cut Rodriguez in the chest. Just the tiniest little scratch. How long does it take the infection to take hold throughout the body from a tiny scratch? Apparently about 45 minutes or so.

  When we’d all gotten back from our failed rescue mission Rodriguez had snatched Wilkinson’s bottle of booze and thrown himself down into a corner to get as drunk as he possibly could in as short of a time as he possibly could. He’d been haunted by the visions of what we’d all seen and done outside. He was a sharpshooter, having taken his gun to the range every weekend to target shoot, but it was a different matter entirely to shoot people in the head. Logically he knew that those people would have happily eaten him and that he’d done the right thing, but that doesn’t change what you feel when you line up the sights on a fellow person. He saw them coming for him and saw himself shooting head after head over and over again.

  Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. Children. All coming straight for him and us and wanting to feed. He’d shot them all. With no thought and no pity in his brain, he’d shot them all.

  I think that more than anything else was what he wanted to drown out: how he’d felt nothing as he pulled the trigger. It was all about survival instincts and his brain had shut down to the trauma. But it woke up when it was all over and he knew that no matter what excuse you used that all of that was on his head.

  So he drowned it all out. Or tried to. The booze was like fire going down his throat but it wasn’t affecting him. He wasn’t getting a buzz and he wasn’t passing out. As he sat there in his corner all he could feel was a wind rushing through his mind and his brain and body were in a vise of pain. His chest itched and he didn’t know why and didn’t really care why.

  Rodriguez was alone in the world. No family to tie him down. Very few friends. He rented his trailer month to month and at any given time he might be inclined to just move on. He didn’t believe in roots and had a past he was running away from and all he cared about was being able to move. There were demons chasing him and every time they got close he’d run as fast as he could.

  He hadn’t run fast enough this time.

  The scratch on his chest was the tiniest thing. The smallest little pinprick you could ever see. Imagine taking your sharp, jagged fingernail and just pressing it into your skin. That’s it. Not even a drag across the flesh to mar the skin. Just a little blip on the radar. But it was enough. The bacteria or virus or whatever the hell it was that travelled from zombie to zombie found purchase there and began to replicate through his body. It began to permeate the flesh and the organs and eventually found his brain.

  His alcohol-infused brain.

  He was sitting there while I was railing against the crowd and trying to convince them of the existence of zombies. Scratching at his chest absently like he was a dog infested with fleas. He finally got up and stumbled to the bathroom to see what was going on. Looked in the mirror as he felt blackness creep into his brain and saw shadows moving at the edge of his vision. Clumsy fingers that had lost all feeling slowly undid his buttons and when he couldn’t manage to do that he just ripped it off in a fury, buttons flying everywhere.

  Numb horror filled his brain as he saw the black, weeping flesh above his heart. Saw the red lines of infection spread from the wound like a spider web and travel around his body. Suddenly noticed the paleness of his flesh and felt the rot creeping into his brain. Opened his mouth to cry out in rage, but before the cry could escape his lips, in the time from one blink of the eye to the next, he was suddenly not alive.

  Dead but not dead. Alive but not alive.

  And with a terrible hunger.

  He stood there staring at himself in the mirror for a few minutes. If the eyes are the window to the soul what does a zombie see when it looks in the mirror? Does it recognize that it’s looking at itself? I have no clue. But I do know that he was just standing there gazing at his own reflection and probably would have stood there for God knows how long except that someone opened the door to the bathroom without knocking.

  Brenda Barker had been listening to me yelling at the crowd but she’d been on her way to the bathroom when I started and suddenly couldn’t hold the gallon of water she’d drunk since being locked up in the House anymore. When she was nervous she was always thirsty and then always had to go pee. She’d held out for as long as she could but finally decided she didn’t need to hear what I said anymore. She believed in the zombies. She’d seen the zombie attack at the BBQ and seen how quickly the infection spread. She was terrified of them all and had given herself nightmare after nightmare when she was younger by watching the original Night of the Living Dead at the drive-in. Her mother had forbidden her to go to the movie anyway and she’d paid for it with nightmares. Her mother said that’s what she deserved.

  But she didn’t deserve this.

  She opened the door and saw Rodriguez standing at the mirror with his back to her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  He turned slowly to her and that’s when Brenda’s bladder let go with a rush. The hot urine flowed down her legs like a river and she didn’t even notice it. She screamed and turned to run back out the door, which was what caused us all to turn and look down the hallway. I had a birds-eye view of her making it about two feet from the door before a hand reached out and grabbed her hair, which was swinging wildly behind her. Her eyes bulged and she screamed again as she skidded back across the floor, her hands grabbing at her hair.

  The entire group watched as he chomped her on the neck, her blood spraying wildly through the air. Someone stepped in from behind him and he dropped her to the floor to attack them. It was Wilkinson. He fell back screaming to the floor with zombie-Rodriguez riding him all the way down. Rodriguez was moving faster than any of the zombies we’d seen so far. My only guess was that he was at least partly still alive, that the blood was still pumping warmly, but slowly, through his veins.

  The crowd was now screaming behind me and bulging to get away from the slaughter. Brenda Barker rose slowly, steadily to her feet. Her face was pointed down at the floor and the mess of bloody hair covered it like some grotesque veil. Suddenly her hands shot out in front of her, fingers curling in a restless search for flesh.

  I turned to Fannie Mae. “My shotgun? Where is it?”

  She pointed wordlessly back to our little nest along the wall. Shit. I started hobbling back that direction, fighting the crowd and pushing people away with a snarl. They were sheep for the slaughter. Not more than 30 seconds had passed since Brenda’s first scream.

  I heard Wash shouting behind me at the men with guns to gather round, to shoot, shoot, dammit. Finally gunshots began thundering through the air. I turned to look, hoping against hope that their shots were flying true. I saw Brenda Barker’s body shuddering and fluttering in the air with the shots pumme
ling her body. Not one hit her head. She took two shuffling steps forward against the tidal wave of shots and grabbed the nearest person, ripping their throat out with her teeth. She dropped the body and it quickly rose to its hands and knees. Someone thought they’d be smart and went forward to kick the new zombie back to the ground and found their foot being grabbed out of mid-air. I could see him wobbling for balance and that’s when Brenda reached out and touched him. He fell to the floor with a cry.

  Both Brenda and the other zombie set-to with a will.

  I muttered curses under my breath, feeling sweat break out on my skin and all the hairs on the back of my neck rising to attention. Between my throat and my sheer exhaustion I was hobbling like an old man for the corner and the safety of my shotgun. Fannie Mae ran ahead to grab it and turned around. I was maybe six feet away when she reached it and whirled to face me. Everything slowed down. With all the screams and the gunfire in this enclosed place my hearing was almost gone. What there was left could only hear the horror happening around me.