Trailer Park Zombies Page 6

  Well, I kind of felt like that.

  I turned in a quick 360 degree circle to make sure there were no monsters creeping out of the darkness and then did it again just to make sure. I was trying to catch them by surprise but, of course, there was nothing there. There never is when you’re looking for it. Not that I was expecting monsters. Monsters weren’t real. It was just that kind of night.

  Fannie Mae stood a step behind me with a couple fingers gripping my belt loop. I could feel her tugging on me and it was more a reassurance than anything else. Everything would be okay as long as she was there. She was the innocent girl who always survived the monster movies. Plus I knew that if something did come screeching out of the darkness at me that she’d yank me back out of its reach. Again with the hopefully.

  There was nothing in the living room to indicate any trouble. A few muddy tracks on the floor but those could have happened at any time. There was no reason to suspect that someone had jimmied the door open and shuffled straight across the floor to the hallway leading to the bedrooms, leaving muddy tracks everywhere. No reason at all.

  As we started walking down the completely dark hallway (no windows there) I began to feel an itching in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. I whirled around, throwing Fannie Mae off balance, and shone the flashlight at the hallway behind us. Nothing there. The itching continued and I whirled back in the direction of the bedrooms.

  Mason Smith stood before us.

  Fannie Mae let out a little scream. It seemed little over the roaring of sound within my ears at least. For a second I thought I might pass out, but I knew if I did that it would be all over. I didn’t allow myself to do it, but it was close.

  His head was cocked at a weird angle, the same one it was in the last time I’d seen it when he’d been leaning against the monument in the cemetery. Back when he was dead. His mouth was open in a wide smile, the muscles pulling tight against his cheeks. His teeth were black and stained with blood. He reached out to me with his hands, straining across the gap of six feet or so to reach me. But he didn’t move forward at all. His mouth opened and closed as if he were trying to talk. Or, as I realized suddenly with horror, like he was trying to eat us.

  He still had on the jeans and shirt he was wearing before, but they were completely coated in mud and dirt and blood, as if he’d dragged himself on the ground for a while before remembering how to walk. His hands were coated with gore and his nails looked broken and jagged. Several were pulled back completely, resting at a 90 degree angle against his fingertip. I was guessing he’d somehow used those to force the door open.

  He took a shuffling step toward us, sliding his foot on the floor, making a scraping sound that just set my teeth on edge and made my tongue burn. Then he stopped and sniffed. His eyes opened wider and a low moan came from his throat. And yes, it sounded just like the moans zombies always make in movies.

  Then he turned around and shuffled back into the bedroom he’d just come from. A few seconds later I heard the tinkle of breaking glass and a sound that could only be interpreted as a zombie pulling itself through a window. Hard to describe but you know it when you hear it.

  I’m guessing it’s just one of those things.

  Goosebumps the size of walnuts trailed down my flesh. A line of them started on the back of my neck and traveled down the length of my body. I started shaking, shivering. My teeth chattered so hard that I thought a few would snap in two. Every hair on my body stood on end. I was scared spitless, that is no lie.

  Fannie Mae gripped my hand so hard that I thought it would break. I could feel her shivering next to me.

  Neither of us spoke.

  I forced my legs to unfreeze and did my best to run gimpily down the hallway to the bedroom we’d seen him go into. It was the master. There was only one window in there and it faced the back of the trailer. The curtains billowed silently in the wind. I could see jagged strips of glass still set in the frame. They were covered in globs of blood.

  I shone the flashlight around the room and rested it on what was on the bed. What was left of Tamara’s parents. The goosebumps left my flesh in a flash of heat and my body broke out in a quick sheen of sweat. I felt like I was going to throw up. The sound of Fannie Mae retching behind me didn’t help.

  Tamara’s parents were strewn around on the bed like sacks of meat. Blood splatter covered the walls and the bed was soaked through with what looked like gallons of it. Great hunks of meat were missing from their bodies. Her father was missing most of his stomach and gray loops of intestines spilled out of the hole looking like roles of sausage links. Hunks of them were randomly missing, too.

  Her mother was half on the bed, her top half on the floor. Her arms were splayed out above her head and were somehow still providing support. Her hair was arrayed around her on the floor as if she’d been primped especially for this position. She was nude. I registered that as a side fact as I tried to take in the tableau before me. Tamara had gotten her good looks from her mother, there was no doubt.

  But those good looks were not in evidence before me.

  Her left breast was just gone. Torn from her body like so much meat. Deep gouges as of teeth scraping the flesh were on practically every inch of her body. Half her neck was gone. Ripped and thrown to the side. Her spine glistened wetly through the wound. Hopefully that was the first hit and she hadn’t felt every other indignity done to her body.

  I stood frozen, just taking it all in. I couldn’t stop looking. Every horror imprinted itself on my brain.

  Fannie Mae pulled roughly on my arm. “Let’s go, Dukey. Please. Let’s get out of here.”

  I let her drag me behind her as we exited the bedroom. My eyes were still drawn to that bed and the massacre of Tamara’s parents. Had they made no sound? I knew the neighbors weren’t that close by but surely someone would have heard the screams coming from this charnel house of death.

  Tamara.

  Fannie Mae was trying to drag me down the hallway, bypassing the next bedroom completely, heading straight for the front door. I reached out with my hand and gripped the doorframe of the other bedroom tightly, jerking us both to a shuddering stop.

  She didn’t notice that we were no longer moving.

  I felt like a wishbone, being tugged between her and my own hand on the doorway. I finally reached deep within me and found my voice.

  “Fannie Mae. Stop.” She didn’t listen to me. Just tugged relentlessly. I returned her grip, tightening my hand on her own, and pulled gently backwards. Raised my voice a touch and said, “Fannie Mae!”

  She looked back at me. Tears glistened down her cheeks. She was sobbing silently. It was only then that I realized that my cheeks were wet as well. I’d been crying this whole time.

  “Let’s go, Duke. We need to get out of here.”

  I shook my head. “We have to see about Tamara. This has to be her bedroom.”

  She shook her head back at me vehemently. “No, Duke. If she was okay she’d be gone or out here already. We don’t want to see what’s in there.”

  I jerked my hand out of hers and she opened her mouth in pain. “I need to see. Whatever’s happened here is all my fault. If I hadn’t hurt Mason, hadn’t killed him, then we’d be okay. Everything would be normal. I have to see.”

  She didn’t say anything as I went through that darkened doorway.

  Tamara could have been sleeping. She looked so peaceful. It was only if you looked closer that you could see a huge hunk of flesh was missing from the leg that was casually tossed out from under the covers. A bite had been taken from her thigh like she was a piece of chicken dinner. Her lips had been savagely ripped off, leaving her face bloody and caked in filth. As if someone had kissed her and then bit down and taken everything off with one savage rip. One arm dangled from the bed, fingertips grazing the floor.

  I collapsed to my knees, feeling a rush of emptiness fill my brain. Circuits and synapses were misfiring and shutting down. My eyes were dilating and it was like
I was seeing everything from a million miles away. I could feel my breath coming in huge gasps of air. It was all like it was happening to someone else.

  Then a huge slap across the back of my head brought me back to myself. The pain brought a grunt from me and I could feel my face burning with the ache of it. I looked at Fannie Mae. She was nursing her hand.

  “Had enough?”

  I nodded, not able to say the words. She held her hurt hand to me and whispered softly, “Please, Dukey, let’s go.”

  I nodded again and wobbled to my feet, not even registering the pain in my thigh. Fannie Mae took my hand and led us from the trailer. I unthinkingly closed and latched the front door behind me. We stumbled slowly through the Acres back to my home, using the flashlight to search every nook, cranny and shadow for Mason. He was nowhere to be found, thankfully.

  Neither of us noticed the drumbeat in Tamara’s room as her fingers began twitching and rapping a staccato rhythm on the floor.

  7.

  It felt like we ran across the Acres for an eternity or two. Every shadow looked like Mason reaching out to grab us. Every sound or brittle crunch of the gravel sounded like the shambling footstep of the dead. What’s the shambling footstep of the dead sound like, you ask?

  Scary as all hell.

  I wanted to beat on the door like hell had broken loose to get Barrett to let us in but my guess was that if he heard someone beating on the door like that that he’d go hide under the bed or something. There was a deep itch between my shoulder blades and I could just feel the darkness looking at me.

  So I calmly knocked on the door and whispered to Barrett to let us in. The back of my trailer was on the edge of the park and beyond the border lay a few acres or so of deep woods filled with wild Roses (“Rosie Acres,” get it?). They were spooky at the best of times and this wasn’t really the best of times.

  He opened the door an inch or so to make sure we were alone and then I yanked the door the rest of the way open and ran into the trailer, pushing him out of the way and dragging Fannie Mae behind me. The look on his face was grim in the flickering light of the candles strewn throughout the front room. Apparently he’d been digging in the kitchen. Too bad he hadn’t gone back into the bedroom for the lantern we kept back there.

  He began to speak but I waved him off, turning around and locking the door. I threw the dead bolt and still didn’t feel safe. If mom wasn’t still passed out on the couch I would have dragged it over to barricade the door. I was still considering it with a critical eye when Barrett finally put his hand on my shoulder and whipped me around.

  “What happened? What’s going on?”

  Fannie Mae collapsed to the floor, leaning her back against the couch. She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms tightly around them, burying her face in them. Her shoulders shook with sobs. I ignored Barrett and went into the kitchen, slamming drawers open and closed as I looked for anything that could be used as a weapon.

  Barrett followed me, asking repeatedly what had happened. I finally stopped with my hand in the silverware drawer, cupping a butcher knife in my palm.

  “They’re all dead,” I said. “Tamara and her family. All dead.”

  “What?” Barrett asked, confused. “How can they be dead?”

  Fannie Mae’s voice carried to us from the front room. She spoke in a quiet voice but every word was crystal clear. “Butchered. Eaten. They were torn apart, Barrett.”

  He looked at me, “Torn apart?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. By Mason Smith.”

  The confusion on his face was almost comical. If it wasn’t for the whole, “Tamara’s family is dead” part I’m sure he’d have been laughing in the aisles.

  “Mason Smith? Mason fucking Smith? Are you guys putting me on? He’s dead. Are you saying he’s alive?”

  I shook my head sadly. “Unfortunately, I’m not saying that at all. We saw him there, Barrett. Just standing in the doorway to her parent’s room. He was very definitely, very definitively, dead. With a capital D. But still, he was standing there. And then he turned away and jumped through a window. It’s like he was playing with us.”

  Barrett looked like he was about to collapse. He gripped the counter like his knees were weak. Undoubtedly they were. He looked at the couch behind us, glancing at Fannie Mae and then flicking his eyes to where my mom lay in the shadows.

  “Are you saying he’s dead, but not dead? What? Do you expect me to believe that he’s what – a zombie?” His voice was rising toward the end, like he was about to crack.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m saying that,” I said. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead on it. To actually put a label on it, but yeah, I guess I’m saying he’s a zombie. It’s about the only word that really applies. He’d eaten whole hunks of their bodies, Barrett. You should have seen -,” I shook my head. “No, be glad you didn’t see it. Tamara and her parents are all dead.”

  “Are they really dead?”

  “What?” I pulled my hand from the drawer, gripping the butcher knife tightly.

  “Are they dead? Or undead like him? Zombies?” He gripped his hair tightly, yanking on it. When he was done his hair stood up in wild clumps. “Zombies in the trailer park? God, am I in a horror movie?”

  I put my hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently, the knife still in my hands. “Why would they be anything but dead, Barrett? Barrett!” I almost slapped him full on the face, but his eyes finally focused on mine.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? Paid any attention to them, at least?” He searched my eyes and I could see the wild, crazed look in his. “Why do you think the world always gets overrun in zombie movies? A zombie’s bite is infectious. One touch from them and you’re damned. Even if you survive the initial bite and get away it’s already done. The virus, or whatever animates them, starts working in you and some amount of time later you’ll be dead, but not dead, and hungering for flesh.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it works.”

  “They were most definitely dead,” I said. But were they? God, I hoped so.

  He sighed. “We have another problem.”

  “Great, what’s that?” I rubbed my forehead. I could feel a headache coming on. I was majorly dehydrated.

  “Um,” he said. His eyes flicked over to the dark recesses of the couch, where my mom was still passed out. She was blithely unconscious during all this, thank God. “It’s your mom,” he finally blurted out.

  “What about her?” I started pouring myself a glass of water. I really needed a drink.

  “Well, um, I wanted to see if she had any booze left in her bottle. I couldn’t find her cache and I’d left mine outside. And I wasn’t going back out there.” He stopped.

  I sighed and drank half my water at one gulp. God did that taste good. “Just spit it out, Barrett. We’re kind of in the middle of a crisis over here.”

  “She’s dead.”

  I dropped the glass in the sink. Thankfully it was a plastic glass or I’m sure it would have shattered all over the place and cut my eye or something. It was just one of those nights. “What?”

  “She was stiff when I went to grab the bottle. I felt for a pulse and there was nothing. She’s dead, Duke. I’m so sorry. She must’ve had a heart attack or something after she passed out. The booze finally got to her.”

  I barely heard him as I dropped the knife and raced over to the couch. I grabbed the flashlight as I went by the edge of the couch and flashed it on her. I dropped to my knees, not even feeling the pain throbbing from my leg. I gripped her hands, noting the coldness of her clammy flesh. I felt for a pulse on her wrist but couldn’t find one. There wasn’t one on her neck either. She’d been dead for hours. I shone the light on her eyes but they were closed. Barrett was right; she must have died in her sleep.

  I felt a wave of something through my body. Fannie Mae’s hand dropped on my shoulder and it was then that I began to laugh. The wave that had threatened to turn to grief broke and all I felt was relief. She was dead. My mom was
dead.

  Fannie Mae put her arm around me and didn’t say anything. I think that she more than anyone else could understand what I was feeling. Barrett had heard the stories throughout the years but there was no way he could comprehend the amount of hate I’d had for that woman. Maybe her death didn’t deserve a laugh and a huge feeling of relief, but that was the legacy she’d left for herself.

  I looked up at Barrett. He was still in the kitchen where I’d left him. No doubt he didn’t want to get any closer to her body than he absolutely had to.

  “Let me have your phone,” I told him.