I was sort of hurt, but I wouldn’t have told me about it either. “Is this what was in your trap door in your closet?” I asked, putting it all together. This was why he was so adamant about not letting me see it. I had wrongly figured it was porn, although this thing had me drooling as if it were.
Then Ron’s next words doubled me over. “Dad didn’t make it, Mike.”
I staggered a step or two back, Tracy was there for support. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried like a five- year-old. I cried for the loss of my dad, my mom, my brother, my niece, Jed, Jen, Alex, Paul, Erin, Brian and at least a dozen other good souls we had lost along the way.
I stayed for a long time in that darkened basement, when Ron had told me how our father had died. I wanted to be as close to his final earthly spot as was possible. The battle raged on above me, but now it was more of a fish in the barrel scenario. We had position, ammo and security, I wasn’t needed upstairs.
It would be another three days before the horde dwindled down to an unlucky few. I had joined in the fray if only to vent my misguided revenge. I wished desperately that they gave a shit for what they did. I had switched out my MP-4 for a Mosin-Nagant Russian WWII sniper rifle, a bit of overkill when the 7.62 by 4.42 round struck home. I watched each individual I hit as the back of its head blew out in a spray of white, crushed bone and diseased gray matter.
I drilled five hundred and twenty-six zombies into the ground that day, but whose counting. My fingers ached from jamming that many rounds through the old gun, my anger increased at each one, that they didn’t care, that they didn’t give a shit when the zombie next to them fell, that their sisters, brothers, fathers and friends were dying all around them. That was what stopped any war—when the killing just became too much, when neither side could stomach the mounting atrocities. The zombies would not stop, they would never stop, not until each and everyone one of them was dead.
AFTERWORD
Three days after the death of Eliza, the war at Camp Talbot was over. I could not do much more than shiver as I sat in a rocker, on the part of Ron’s deck that was not on the blood steeped lawn. I watched, as he pushed piles of dead zombies into giant pyres with his tractor. The boys were keeping vigilance over him. Gary rode on the tractor as an added layer of protection.
“Will this ever get better?” I asked, my teeth chattering even in the seventy-degree heat of the day and two blankets wrapped around my legs.
“Not anytime soon, Mr. T,” Tommy said as he sat beside me suffering through the same symptoms. “With Eliza, gone we’ve lost a piece of us.”
I felt like a hard core heroin junkie who had gone cold turkey, my bones dripped in pain, if that makes any sense. I’d already taken a loss I did not figure I could absorb when I had lost my soul, but with the absence of whatever Eliza had filled the void in with, I was adrift in a sea of black. My innards ached as they seemed to move around in the shell that once housed me.
“It would be better to die,” I told him with vacant eyes, “than to live like this.”
He may have nodded in reply or it could have been my shivering that gave the illusion of movement on his part.
***
“Can you do anything?” Tracy asked Azile as she looked through the window and out at her husband who was so obviously suffering.
Azile shook her head, she also was trapped in her own misery.
***
“There’s more,” Tommy said.
I stood, hoping that my bones were not as hollow as I felt. “Do tell. I could use a bit of shitty news right about now.”
“The order I put to halt the progress of BT’s zombieism will unravel now that I no longer have as much power.”
My legs weren’t hollow, but they were having great difficulty supporting my weight at the moment. “How long?” I asked him.
With considerable effort, Tommy shrugged his shoulders.
“You once told me that you saw your sister get bitten, then she ultimately killed her sire. How did she survive? Did she walk all these years like this? Is that even possible? I feel hollow, Tommy. I can sense the pain I should be feeling, but I’m numb to it. With every beat of my heart I flip from my heart breaking at the death of my father to an absolute fathomless void, where nothing not even emotions can stem from. I know I should be concerned for my friend’s health, sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. I know I should be loving my family, and yet there are times when I can’t even remember what the emotion entails. I felt more concern for a dead squirrel in the roadway when I was human than I do now.”
***
Tracy shivered as she overheard words she wasn’t supposed to.
***
“Eliza killed her sire. She was not diminished from his death, but rather enhanced by it. That was why she never let any of her charges live for very long, lest they try to take her power from her. The emptiness will go away, you’ll fill it in with something, Mr. T. My sister filled hers in with hate and cruelty for everyone and everything. But that’s not who you are, you have it,
“You’re still a vampire right?” I asked him.
“I am.” He let his head drop.
“Why now the change back to this ‘Tommy’ persona? How can I ever trust or believe you, if I ever even care again?”
“I took on a large part of my sister when she turned me. With her influence gone, I’m more the boy you remember.”
“I wish I could believe that…I do…for my family.”
I watched as zombies burned by the hundreds. With some effort, I was able to walk down towards one of the pyres. I should have been close enough for my skin to be melting, and still I quaked in the unoccupied recesses of my mind.
“You alright, Mike?” Ron asked a good fifteen feet behind me. I turned to see his hands shielding his face from the intense heat.
I waved him away, not because I was concerned for his safety, but rather, I wanted to be alone. I wondered if I would feel anything if I walked just a few more feet into the intense blaze.
Tommy stepped up beside me. “The shaman did it.”
I didn’t say anything. I realized that at one time I would have had an answer for him, something revolving around, ‘Sure now all we need is some peyote, a shaman and sweat lodge and we’ll be all set.’
“We have a witch,” Tommy said, filling in the gaps in the conversation.
I turned and we walked back towards the house. Travis was watching me as I entered.
I went to BT’s room. “Good news, buddy.”
“They discovered a cure for sarcasm?” he answered.
“Better…road trip,” I told him.
