Trailer Park Zombies Read online

  My hand went out almost of its own volition and touched her forehead. I cupped it and rested my palm there, feeling her cold body and taking a moment of silence just for her. It was the least I could do for the woman who’d brought me into this world. The sorrow poured out of me through my hand into her and I could feel my heart breaking. Not for her, you understand. I don’t expect you to think I suddenly changed my mind about how I felt for her. But for the whole situation. For the whole of Rosie Acres. For all the death and destruction that lay squarely at my feet.

  I closed my eyes and whispered to my mom, “I’m sorry you’re dead, mother. You deserve to have lived a good life.”

  A rush of air passed through me and my skin contracted into goose bumps and every hair on my body stood on end. My nipples became hard as rocks. I felt a tear fall from my cheeks and splash onto her.

  “I’m sorry, mom,” I said again. Then I turned to go.

  I quickly left the trailer and went back outside. I so wanted this whole mess to be over.

  The zombies were waiting for me.

  24.

  Mason Smith stood out there with his zombie army. It looked like all the zombies that were left were in the road before me. Their utter silence was eerie. There were at least a hundred zombies arrayed out there. None of them were moving or shuffling or twitching or making a single sound. All eyes were on myself and Mason, who stood a few feet in front of them. Only about half of them actually had eyes but I could still feel their gazes tearing at me. None of them shuffled or shambled forward for me. None held beseeching arms in my direction, hungering for my flesh and blood. None wanted to feed on me. It was weird.

  I saw many, many familiar faces. Neighbors and friends and enemies. Most were horribly disfigured and missing chunks of flesh from their faces or necks or elsewhere on their bodies. A good number were actually naked and I shudder to think of the pieces they were missing. Gaping holes stood where flopping penises should have been and empty sacks of flesh hung below where even more sensitive parts should have. My stomach gave a great lurch and if I weren’t completely terrified I might have thrown up everything within me and passed out right then and there. I could feel every hurt and bite out there before me. Ever watch a guy wince when he sees someone else get kicked in the balls? Imagine what that guy would feel seeing another guy missing his equipment entirely.

  Not pretty.

  I looked through the crowd for Barrett, but I didn’t see him in there. Granted, he’d been so torn up that it was difficult to recognize him, anyway, and now I was staring at a crowd – a horde – of wet, glistening madness and open wounds. It kind of distracted the eye. But Mason… yet Mason… stood there before me with almost no wounds at all.

  His head still cocked at that weird angle that made you immediately realize his neck was broken. His clothes and hands were covered in dried blood and his mouth was completely disgusting. There were bits of flayed skin hanging from his teeth and black blood coated everything. His mouth was opened at me in a semblance of a grin and I wanted to go over there and floss that crap out of his mouth. What did he want with me? Was this his final bit of revenge for killing him? His final little ha-ha moment to show me what horrors my acts had wrought? Screw him. Shit all over that.

  I could feel anger and rage finally begin to overcome the fear and silence that was hanging over us.

  “What do you want?” I spoke the words that broke the spell the dead had cast over me.

  The zombies did not answer me, of course, but at this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mason could speak. His head cocked even more, if that were possible, and he took a shambling step toward me. I let him come. Maybe we could talk and I could put him to rest and this would all be over. Maybe if I killed him they would all fall to the ground. I desperately hoped so. It worked in Silver Bullet and The Lost Boys. How could Corey Haim be wrong?

  In case you missed it, the Haimster was in both. The first was about werewolves and the second was vampires. Zombies weren’t so different, right?

  It didn’t even occur to me to raise the shotgun until it was too late. Mason was acting so normal, so human that I didn’t even think that talking was not on his mind. But when he got within a couple steps of me his arms finally rose up toward me in that normal zombie fashion and reached for me. I cried out and panicked for a second, feeling my arm throb from the motion and dropping the shotgun in my effort to keep his hands from reaching me.

  It fell with a clatter and I gripped his hands in my own. We did a weird zombie dance, but he just kept closing the distance between us. He hadn’t been dead long enough for his muscles to waste and rot away. They were still there and as strong as iron. No longer caring if he hurt himself by over-exertion he just keep pushing forward more and more trying to get me.

  Our eyes were inches apart and I could smell his fetid breath. The rotted flesh hanging in his mouth made what little air wheezed out rancid and the whole thing wafted into my face with every push that he made. He wasn’t breathing, but something about the motions he was making pushed air through his lungs and made me want to gag.

  The only sound during our silent struggle was the breath wheezing out of my throat. My arm was burning from the gunshot and my leg was beginning to burn from the nutshot Mason had given me Friday night. I didn’t think I had that much left in me with which to fight. My will was ebbing with my strength and I was even beginning to think that maybe being a zombie wouldn’t be all that bad. I could be with my friends and we could go around chomping on people. No more school. No more parents. No more anything. Just the hunger and the inexorable need to feed.

  Wait a minute. Shit all over that.

  I looked around me for anything I could use before my strength gave out. We were standing a few feet in front of my trailer and there was nothing handy. There were the chairs a few feet off to the side that Fannie Mae, Barrett and I had used what seemed like 20 years ago, but they were little crappy metal chairs that wouldn’t help, not to mention they were too far away. The shotgun lay at my feet, but it might as well have been a million miles away for what good it would do me right now.

  I grunted with the effort and used my hands as leverage and pushed against Mason, trying to get him off balance. He moved back an inch, but nothing else happened. He held my hands tightly in a vice grip. My hurt arm began to shake with the exertion of holding him back and I could feel sweat rolling down my face. I only had a few more seconds before all my strength would be gone and he would be on top of me.

  Wait. On top of me?

  I chanced taking a step back with my left foot and pulling him back in my direction. His teeth snapped at me and I barely whipped my head back in time. Still going through the motion of pulling him back toward me I quickly reversed direction and moved my left foot forward and rested it behind his, following it with my shoulder. It hit him right in the chest and the final shove I gave him pushed him back into my foot. His balance was less than a newborn puppies and he went over backwards without a sound, his hands still gripped tightly on mine.

  “Oh, shit!” I cried out and followed him down to the ground, landing on top of him with a whoompf. If he’d still been breathing – or alive – that would have knocked the wind out of him. As it was it still almost took all mine away. He didn’t try to regain his footing or try to push me over to gain leverage or anything a normal person would have done. He just reached with his face to try to bite my nose off. Fortunately the hard, crooked angle of his broken neck got in the way and wouldn’t bend quite the way he needed it to. So he let my hands go and reached for my head to bring it that final inch closer.

  That’s what I was waiting for.

  I braced my hands on his chest and pushed off, rolling sideways. I landed on my back with a grunt, sliding a few inches on the gravel. My eyes closed instinctively to keep anything from flying in them. The gravel scratched and rubbed against the back of my neck, bringing a gasp of pain from my lips. Dammit, was every inch of my body going to be scarred fro
m this?

  Mason’s hand crawled across the gravel and the tips of his fingers grabbed at my shirt. Rest time was over. I did another quick roll onto my stomach and pushed off with my hands, pulling my foot so that I could propel myself to my feet. I’m not quite sure how I managed the acrobatic feat, but I did it and somehow I was standing. Mason was still reaching for where my shirt was moment ago. I spared a quick glance for his zombie army but they were all standing there like dumb automatons.

  I said a quick prayer and closed the distance between me and Mason, reaching down to grab my shotgun. I lined it up on his head and it was like time slowed down again. He slowly turned his head to face me and his ever-reaching hands were held out toward as if in supplication. I knew that all he wanted was me. I was only food to him. I screamed at him and aimed the sights on his head, feeling a savage relief when I pulled the trigger and felt the shotgun press sharply back into my shoulder.

  His head blew apart into a million chunks and his reaching hands finally fell to the ground and lay still.

  I brandished the shotgun over my head and screamed a savage, warrior scream that left my throat raw and looked out at the zombie horde, expecting to see them all falling to the ground. They weren’t.

  They were all shaking and vibrating, as if released from some great constraint. This lasted for several seconds before they all lifted their heads to face me and began their stumbling and dragging toward me. All I’d done was release them to come kill me. Mason had apparently been controlling them after all.

  That was when I heard the step behind me. I screamed and turned around, bringing the shotgun to my shoulder.

  My mother stood there, taking the steps down from the broken trailer door. I felt all the blood rush out of my face as I watched her closing the distance on me. What the hell was this? She’d been dead. Ice cold and frozen into position by rigor mortis. Dead for two days. Unequivocally, unarguably, dead. Yet here she was trying to eat my brains out. What was going on? What was the cosmic joke here? Had killing Mason opened the floodgates and all the dead were now coming to life?

  But, wait. I’d touched mom. In the trailer. Touched her and let my tears fall on her and had felt something pass from me to her. Had I somehow raised her? Was that what was going on? I’d killed Mason and he’d come back. Now I’d touched my mom and wished she weren’t dead and now she was coming back.

  Thoughts raced through my mind at a thousand miles a second. Everything that had happened over the last two days floated through my brain and I realized that everything that had happened – every zombie that had come back – was all linked with my killing of Mason. The floodgates opened and I reached out to my mom with my mind and felt her there. I felt the connection to her like a single strand on a spider web. I can’t explain it any better than that but once I knew it was there that connection blazed forth in me like a light out of Heaven. I could see my mom in front of me and hear her naked feet shuffling on the gravel, but some other sense inside of me – maybe a sixth one – could feel her in front of me.

  I put pressure on that strand and somehow held it there in the front of my mind. A headache immediately bloomed in my head and it was like my brain was pulsating and trying to break its way out. I winced with every heartbeat and pulse of blood through me that threatened to tear me open. I put my hand up to my temple and applied pressure there, trying to stop the pain, but it did no good. While holding that thread of silk, that piece of the web, in the forefront of my psyche, I told mom to stop. The pain overwhelmed me and brought me to my knees and I could barely mutter the words and find the breath to tell her, but I did.

  “Mom, stop.”

  She did. Freezing to a stop immediately. I could still see the hungry look on her face. The hands still reached for my throat and my heart, wanting to snuff the life out of me.

  It was the simplest thing in the world to reach out in my mind and pluck that string. The overwhelming agony it brought to my head was another thing. I felt something trickling out of my nose and brought my hand up to it. My nose was gushing blood like a geyser, flowing out with every beat of my heart.

  Mom fell to the ground and in my mind the strand that held me to her darkened and disappeared into the recesses of my heart. I looked at her and could tell she was well and truly dead. Again.

  In agony, holding my head with both of my hands, I turned to the waiting crowd of zombies. They’d closed most of the gap between us. The ones in front were mere feet from me. I pulled up that other sight within me and somehow saw all the strands of the web and felt every zombie that still resided in the Acres. Most were in front of me but there were others still on the prowl in the park. Though it was agony to do so I managed to pull in all the strands and hold them in my thoughts, my head feeling like it was about to burst open like an egg thrown from the window of a high-rise.

  I cried out to them. “Stop! Stop!” Somehow exercised my will on the threads. They all came shakily to a stop before me. I could feel my tenuous grasp on the threads that were their un-lives begin to slip. It was too much and there were too many of them. The feet began to creep forward, millimeters at a time. They’d never stop. I felt darkness encroaching on me and black spots appeared before my eyes. I fell forward toward the gravel, barely getting my hands down in time. The threads flickered in my mind.

  “Enough!” I cried out, feeling power blaze through my words. “STOP!”

  The zombies stopped, some crashing to the earth because they’d stopped in mid-step and one foot had been in the air. I felt blood seeping down the corners of my eyes, covering my hands where they lay on the ground. I couldn’t see anything now, the black spots covering my vision and only hearing the roar of silence in my ears. I gathered all the threads in my mind again, pulling them all together with the last vestige of my will. Then I severed them all. All but one.

  Blood spurted out of my ears and I fell forward to the ground, bashing my forehead on the gravel. A welcome darkness rushed in.

  25.

  Light came back to me slowly. I had no idea how long I was out, but at least the pain in my head had fallen to a manageable level. It only felt like a really bad migraine now. I rolled to my back and brought my hands to my head, feeling for the damage. I had a huge scrape on my forehead that brought a sliver of pain when I touched it. My eyes, mouth, nose and ears all had dried blood on them but they’d stopped bleeding.

  I slowly brought myself to my knees and crawled along the gravel to one of mom’s lawn chairs. All the pain on my body felt very distant to me now. And every small in comparison to the pain in my head. I felt like I was covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises. I needed about a year to rest. I finally reached the chair and dragged myself into it. The effort brought gasps of pain to my lips and another burst of agony from the area of my head.

  I still had a tenuous hold on that lone thread that I’d not severed. Apparently passing out hadn’t been enough for me to let go of it. Lord knows what would have happened if I’d passed out while still holding onto the threads of the whole horde. I shuddered at the thought.

  I tweaked the thread, each motion bringing another stir of pain to my head. I could feel the blood begin to flow out of my nose again but I ignored it. I commanded the thread to come before me and it finally did, digging itself out from underneath the pile of dead zombies arrayed out before me. First I saw a hand come out and then another and finally the zombie rose to its feet.

  It was Barrett.

  I waved him forward, feeling my gut heave as I tugged harder on the thread. He stepped toward me like a marionette on strings, which I guess he kind of was. I made him sit on the chair in front of me, absentmindedly wiping the blood from my nose.

  He stared at me impassively, the hunger still in his eyes. My will had imposed itself on his body 100% but I couldn’t override his basic instincts. His dead eyes still flashed on his hunger and I could feel it reverberating through the thread that I held in my mind. I knew that if I let go my control that he’d lunge forward and a
ttack me, trying to eat my flesh, so I had to use every bit of concentration to hold him back.

  “Barrett,” I said, “I’m sorry. So sorry. I don’t know what’s going on or how I can do these things.” I shook my hands in the air. “But I’m sorry. It’s my fault that you and Fannie Mae are dead. If there’s a piece of you left in there I know I can’t ask for your forgiveness but please know that I’m sorry and that I will end your suffering.”

  I reached forward and grabbed his hand. I would have hugged him if I had the strength to get up, but it wasn’t in me. I held the thread for as long as I could but eventually I just let it go. His body slumped before me.

  This was the end of the line.

  26.

  Okay, not really. Not a hundred percent at the end of the line. I guess there’s a little bit more to tell.

  I could feel the call of the shotgun and wanted desperately to end my suffering and join my friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt too much like the easy way out and I didn’t feel like I deserved the easy way. I could see the carnage in front of me, the hundreds of people dead because of me, and know that my death wouldn’t be enough for them. It would only ease my guilt and my suffering and they deserved more than that.