Trailer Park Zombies Page 22

  I shook my head, trying to clear the rage that had filled it. I was more angry at myself than Wash or anyone else right now. I lowered my head and put my hand up, rubbing my temples. God, I was so very, very tired. I just wanted all this to be over.

  A roar of engines suddenly broke the silence. My head shot up so fast that I felt something twinge in my neck. A surge of something that could only be hope passed through me. I looked at Wash.

  He shook his head at me. “I think the others just took off on their motorcycles. Both Walter and Clark have Harley’s. They must be trying to back road it or something.”

  I grimaced. “Damn those guys. They’re going to pull the zombies away from the House. They’ll come back out here looking for us. We need to get going.”

  That’s when Kevin screamed. He had a surprisingly girly scream for such a big guy. We all flashed our lights on him and it wasn’t immediately evident why he was screaming. He wasn’t being attacked. Hell. Oh fuck. He was pointing to the side that Shaggy was covering. The side that the House was on.

  We all turned in horror movie slow motion to look and see what it was. An uncountable zombie horde was slowly making their way toward us. I say uncountable because I really have no clue how many there were in the group. They were packed in tightly together like sardines and it made totaling their numbers next to impossible. Regardless, they were all headed ever so slowly in our direction.

  Oh, crap.

  “Let’s go, people!” I shouted hoarsely.

  I turned back the direction we’d been heading and Fannie Mae and I took several running steps forward before I looked back to see that Wash and the others hadn’t moved. I skidded to a stop. “What the hell are you guys doing? Let’s go!”

  Wash looked at me, a weird look on his face. Eyes gleaming in the darkness and hands shaking, he said, “Won’t they just follow us, Duke? Shouldn’t we just make a stand now?”

  I ran back to him furiously. What an idiot. I told him, “Are you an idiot?” I looked at them all. “Are you all idiots? You know they will find us eventually. We need to get to the trailer and make our stand there. Board it up as best we can so we have a little bit of something protecting us and then we can fight back. We can wait for daylight and fight them then.”

  Wash shook his head at me. “If you and Fannie Mae want to try to get to safety, you can. The rest of us will stay here and protect your trailer.” He turned to look at the zombies and then looked back at me. “As long as we can, anyway.”

  I looked at Shaggy. At Kevin. “You guys aren’t falling for this heroic bullshit, are you? If you decide to make a stand here you might as well just shoot yourselves in the head and give me your weapons so that I can try to keep me and Fannie Mae alive.”

  They just stared at me. Shaggy looked serene. Ready to accept his fate. Kevin had that wild look in his eyes like he still couldn’t believe what was going on. I didn’t think there was any way he wanted to stay here and sacrifice himself for two snot-nosed teenagers. Wash had a resolute look on his face. His hands had finally stopped shaking and the sweat was no longer dripping down his face. He’d decided this was the place he was going down, for whatever reason.

  I took another couple steps toward him and put my hand on his shoulder. I whispered to him. “Wash, you don’t need to do this. You have nothing to prove to me or anyone else here. There’s no point in committing suicide like this.”

  He shrugged off my hand. “We never should have left those people to die.” His eyes looked haunted and the lid was still twitching madly. “Who knows how many we could have saved if we hadn’t run off like cowards?”

  “You couldn’t have saved any of them,” I said. “There were too many zombies and the place was overrun. You would have accomplished nothing by staying. Nothing but get us all killed.”

  He pushed me away and I lost my balance, landing on my ass. “You don’t know that, Duke. You act like you think you know everything, but you can’t know shit about what’s going on. How can you know anything more than any of us guys here? Just because you’ve managed to kill more zombies than us? You think that makes you some kind of hero? Huh?” He sneered at me. “All that does is make you a bigger murderer than the rest of us. More able and willing to kill your fellow man. I never should have listened to you.” He giggled silently and I think I was the only one who saw the madness in his eyes.

  I drew slowly to my feet, with Fannie Mae’s help. My eyes were locked on Wash’s, “If you hadn’t listened to me than you and your people would have died hours ago. You wouldn’t have made it this long.”

  He laughed long and hard, humorlessly. Then he waved his arms in the air, doing a grand sweep of the trailer park. “And what’s that gained us, Duke? An hour reprieve? Maybe two? Eww, thanks for drawing out my death even longer and making me realize that all those people in there died because of me. Thanks for all of that.”

  I looked away in disgust and held my hand to Fannie Mae. “You ready, sweetie? I think it’s time for us to go. We’re not wanted here.”

  She nodded at me and took my hand.

  Suddenly I felt another hand on my shoulder. It was Kevin. The hand felt like a rock crashing down on my shoulder. It stopped me in my place. I turned to face him and he only released the pressure enough to let me turn around. There was no mercy in his eyes. He said over his shoulder, “Wash. Why should we let these two go? I think they should fight along with us. If Duke here is such an awesome zombie killer maybe he can help us kill all these zombies.”

  Wash shook his head, eye twitching, and then a slow smile came over his face. He nodded. “You’ve got a point, Kevin.” He looked at me. “You’re going to stay here and fight with us, Duke. We need your gun.”

  I shook free of Kevin’s hand. It hurt like a bitch but I finally managed. I could tell there’d be a bruise there in the morning, if we ever reached the morning. I said to Wash, “I don’t think so. There’s no way I’m sacrificing Fannie Mae and myself for your little death wish. You can forget it.”

  Wash shook his head at me. “No, I think you’re going to help us.” He suddenly pointed his gun at Fannie Mae. “If you don’t I’ll kill her right now. Or shoot her in the leg and leave her here for the zombies. I’m sure they’d love the tasty little snack.”

  I stepped forward, lifting my shotgun. Kevin put his hand on the barrel. I ignored it as I eyed Wash. “I don’t think so, Wash. You’d have to kill me first.”

  He laughed. “And why wouldn’t I do that? This is the end of the world, Duke. Killing one more person can’t make that much of a difference. I’d just be saving us from another potential zombie.”

  I looked Kevin in the eye, then Wash, and finally Shaggy. All I could see in Kevin and Wash’s face was insanity. They truly were no longer home. They’d decided for some reason that they now had to die and nothing was going to stop them from it. This was insane. Not 30 minutes ago they’d been all about survival and getting out of here and now all they wanted was to die. What the hell was wrong with people?

  Shaggy was the only one who didn’t have the insane look in his eyes. He looked uncertain. He actually backed away a couple steps from the rest of us. I think I was the only one who noticed. This was going to go very, very badly.

  20.

  When the dust settled and the sun rose, everything was fine with the world. Help came in the form of about a million Army guys and they took out all the zombies. They figured out that it was some weird kind of virus that had mutated in the graveyard and somehow animated dead flesh. They couldn’t really explain why the reanimated people hungered for flesh but decided it was ultimately unimportant. The virus was contained so that’s all they really cared about. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my head that maybe they kept a couple of the zombies alive in a lab somewhere to “study” them and the virus, but Fannie Mae kept telling me not to worry about it, that it wasn’t our problem.

  She also told me that the virus would have caught anyone in the graveyard, so ultimately
none of it was my fault. I still woke with nightmares occasionally and when I did she would hold me and stroke my hair and tell me it was all right, that it wasn’t my fault. She would soothe me back to sleep and if I woke up again that night she’d still be holding me and rocking me and I could sleep well knowing that she was still there.

  More people survived the zombie outbreak than we would have thought in the dead of that night. At least a hundred people were huddled in their trailers, hiding under beds and the back of closets. We had Walter and the others to thank for our survival. They’d managed to get to town on their motorcycles and somehow got the police to believe them. Don’t even ask me how they managed that. The police somehow convinced the Army to come out and take over the town. They killed a couple hundred zombies, although they didn’t classify them as that, of course. To the Army they were classified as the “infected” and they would never say anything different. The town was cordoned off and quarantined and it took them weeks to ensure that they’d completely cleared it of the “infected”. They interviewed me and Fannie Mae and the rest of the survivors relentlessly and were finally convinced of our stories, drilling into us the imperative of never letting anyone know what had happened.

  Fannie Mae and I were relocated by the government to a suburb of Denver, Colorado. We were given new names and new identities but when we were alone we would talk about what happened and I would still call her by her real name. I knew how important her name was to her. We refused to be separated by the government so they put us up in the same town, in the same school district. We had different foster parents (that would have been too weird otherwise), but we still talked together and ate together and hung out together.

  Our love grew exponentially as we got older. It became a deep, abiding love. I could never explain it to anyone, let alone myself. Part of it was just the many things we’d gone through with each other and part of it was just the fact that she was an amazing, awesome woman and she accepted me completely.

  The two year age difference between us made it a little weird for a year or so, until she reached 16. Some of the teachers tried to keep us apart, but our foster parents never tried. They could see how we felt for each other and could tell that it wasn’t a childish love. They never knew the things we’d gone through or the horrors we’d seen, but they could tell that something drew us together. And knew even better that nothing could tear us apart.

  I graduated high school with honors. The government fixed my transcripts so that my first couple years of high school didn’t matter anymore, but I managed to do the last couple all on my own. It’s amazing how much it helps to have a nice, stabilized environment at home with supporting parents. I got accepted to a bunch of really nice schools but they were all too far away and I couldn’t leave Fannie Mae. She told me not to worry about her, but I just couldn’t leave her like that. So I went to DU – University of Denver – and eventually graduated with a degree in IT.

  Fannie Mae blossomed well under the attention of her foster parents. They bought her nice clothes and pampered her and treated her like the little girl they’d never had. She ate it up but never got spoiled and never took them for granted. She flourished and did even better than me in school. She went to DU, too, and graduated with a degree in social work. All she wanted to do was help people so she got a job helping developmentally disabled people. I was so proud of her.

  We got married when I was 25 and she was 23. Everyone wanted us to wait until we both graduated, so we did. We got married less than a week after she got her degree. It was a huge wedding, with all of our foster families and the many friends we’d made over the years. There were over 300 people at the wedding. We burned a candle at the ceremony for all of our friends who’d gone before us. I knew that no one there knew what we were talking about, but we said our little piece and a prayer for the fallen and both had tears streaming down our cheeks when we did it.

  I think our foster parents were the only ones who’d had an inkling of the truth. They knew that the government was the ones who’d dropped us on their doorsteps. They’d never asked us for details, but they’d all heard the screams and the moans of our night terrors. I think I’d had nightmares for the first year or so that I lived with them. It haunted me more than Fannie Mae. Barrett weighed heavily on my mind. He was always there for me and there were times I could swear I could see him out of the corner of my eye.

  Fannie Mae’s foster mom died when I was 30 and she was 28. It was shortly after the birth of our first child, Barry. She’d held out for as long as she could. She had stomach cancer and it was particularly vicious. The doctors gave her only a few months to live right when Fannie Mae announced her pregnancy. She vowed to see her first grandchild and she did, dying the day after Barry was born. Fannie Mae took it hard. The birth had been long and painful and she was still recuperating in the hospital when her mom died. She turned to me with tears in her eyes and whispered that she wished her mom could come back. I shook my head vehemently at her and told her to never wish for something like that. We’d both seen what happened when people came back.

  Barry was five when his little sister was born. She was the spitting image of her mother. In other words, she was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen. We named her Tammy. Our little soldiers reminded us daily of those who’d fallen but since we found we could never forget we thought it was best. They weren’t just reminders; they were tributes to our friends.

  If we’d have had a third we were going to name him Duke, but Fannie Mae had complications from the birth of our Tammy and the doctor said we shouldn’t have anymore. He thought that she couldn’t survive another pregnancy. It was an easy decision for me to go get a vasectomy. A quick snip and a tug and 20 minutes later I was driven home, nursing my balls. Fannie Mae took care of me like I was a king for the next few days. It was amazing and just made me realize all over again how much I loved her.

  Hell, I woke up every day and fell in love with her all over again. She was always that 14 year old girl with the braids to me. My little Fannie Mae.

  Barry had his first kid when he was 25. He had fallen in love with his high school sweetheart, too, and I could see that theirs was a deep, abiding love was as well. He named his boy after me – after my new government name – but the boy quickly earned the nickname Duke from me and his grandmother. She called him Dukey. Barry had no idea where the nickname had come from and Fannie Mae and I could only give him our quick, secret smile.

  We never told the kids about Litchville, Kentucky, and the horrors that had happened there.

  All in all we had six grandkids. When I was old and gray it was the best thing in the world to have them all climbing all over me and screaming for grandpa to read them a story or play games with them. I was their favorite and we all knew it. Grandma didn’t mind. She knew how much the little ones meant to me. They were my whole world.

  After her, of course.

  I was 96 and on my deathbed. Not really dying of anything specific. Just old age. My Fannie Mae lay on the bed next to me, holding my head and stroking my hair. She whispered words in my ear that half the time I didn’t understand. I’d look up at her and smile my goofy grin at her, thinking about the 80 or so years that we’d spent together. The events of that weekend and my 16 birthday blurred together and finally some of those memories were allowed to rest.

  My grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren stood around us, arrayed silently as I lay dying on the bed. Fannie Mae swore that she’d follow me within hours but I told her not to be silly. She still had at least 14 good years left in her. I know I murmured some of our secrets in front of the little ones but they didn’t understand, didn’t know what we were talking about. We’d kept the secret all those many, many years.

  As I lay there dying I thought about Barrett and Tamara and Mason Smith. And Washington, who’d gone so wrong there at the end. He’d… he’d…

  No. None of that had ever happened. We’d been saved and rescued and F
annie Mae and I had had our lives together forever and ever. Forever, dammit.

  If only.

  21.

  Washington pointed his gun at Fannie Mae as the zombies closed in around us. His eyes were dark with his insanity. There was nothing of the man left. I glanced at Kevin where he held the barrel of my shotgun. He looked like a rabid dog: spit sliding out of his mouth and dripping on the ground. Shaggy was over there looking like he wanted to tell us all to go to hell and run off on his own. I didn’t blame him, that’s what I wanted to do, too.

  I did the only thing I could think of; I pulled the trigger of the shotgun where it was pointed at the sky. The roar and flash of light it made as it fired filled the night sky. Kevin jumped back from the noise and heat and brought his hands to his ears. I swung the shotgun up and hit him on the head with the stock of the gun, breaking his fingers. He dropped like a sack of potatoes, moaning and holding his head. Everything moved in slow motion as I swung the shotgun back in Wash’s direction. I pumped the shotgun, ejecting the empty shell and following the arc of it with my eye.