first.
He nodded toward the window. “Why don’t we just throw her outside and let the zombies take care of her? Then it’s off of us and we can just say the zombies got her.”
I nodded to mom’s shroud. “What would happen if the virus or whatever revived her? Even with her being dead so long? I’m happy that she’s dead and about the last thing I want is for her to come back. The only way I’d want that to happen is so that she could eat dad. I really don’t want to have to re-kill my mom, Barrett. I might have hated the bitch, but I don’t want her blood on my hands.”
He stared at me silently, then nodded.
I muttered to myself, “I have everyone else’s blood on my hands. I don’t really want hers, too.”
We carried her slowly through the hallway and then cursed each other when we hit the table. This was something we should have thought of before we put the table in. Neither one of us felt like wrestling with the table again so I finally left mom in Barrett’s arms as I threaded myself back through the chair legs, humming silently. When I was all the way through I reached back for her and Barrett and I somehow manhandled her through the bottleneck. It was short order from that point on to get mom into her bedroom.
We made it back into the kitchen and both vigorously washed our hands. I swore I could still smell her stink on my hands but after a couple washes decided it was only in my head. I went back to Fannie Mae and looked out the window over her shoulder. She leaned back into me, shivering, and I sighed and wrapped my arms around her. She wiggled in my embrace, making herself comfortable. In the process she made me a little uncomfortable, but I tried to ignore it and will it away. (What can I say? I was a 16 year old boy with raging hormones: and I was a virgin to boot!)
Barrett came into the room and prudently decided not to comment on our arrangement after a dark look from me. It was amazing what pettiness we could get away with in the midst of all this madness.
I looked out the window again. The road was deserted. No zombies. No people. No bodies. Well, there were scraps of bodies, but they don’t count. Especially since they were, thankfully, not moving. “Anything else happening, Fannie Mae?”
She shook her head. “No. Donny got Mrs. Smith right after you guys went back to take care of the backdoor. She was trying to hide behind a car. He just went straight for her and tore her apart. About halfway through munching on her he just stopped and stood up and started to wander off and she got up and followed him. The rest of them wandered off, too, like they’d lost all interest in the people.”
“Which way did they go?” I asked.
“This way,” she replied. “They headed toward this trailer and went around the back.”
“Barrett?”
He didn’t even have to ask what I was asking of him. He just nodded. “I’m on it.” He went to the back side of the trailer and peeked one of the windows we had over there. “I can’t see anything, cahuna. It’s a weird angle to see anything right behind us, but I don’t see anything back to the tree line.”
I pointed to the other window, the last one before the hallway. “What about that one?”
He went to that window and pulled the curtain back, peaking out. “I think I can see –.”
A hand slammed against the window. Bloody and covered with all kinds of filth it rattled against the window panes. The fingers squeezed and closed trying to get through to Barrett but the window held. The hand slid down the glass, making a squeaking sound. Later in life I could never clean my car windows and not see the zombie’s hand against the glass. It came out from underneath the window again and slammed back into the glass. Moments later it was joined by another hand. This one obviously belonged to either a shorter zombie, a zombie with a shorter arm, or a zombie with no legs, as it could only reach the edge of the glass, but you could see the fingertips tapping playfully on the glass.
Fannie Mae shuddered even more in my grasp. She turned to me and buried her face in my shirt. “How much longer do we have to put up with this, Dukey? I don’t know how much more I can stand.”
“I don’t know, Fannie Mae. I don’t know. Maybe the cavalry will come charging in soon and help us.”
“You don’t really think that, though, do you?” She whispered that into my chest.
I didn’t bother to answer her, but we all knew what the answer to that question was.
We sat there in silence for God knows how long and eventually the hands stopped scratching at the windows and the zombies stopped trying to get in. We hoped. Occasionally I thought I could hear a whispering echoing through the trailer and a small scraping on the outside, but I’m sure that was all in my imagination.
Yeah, right.
13.
This time I knew from the beginning that it was a dream – I think. It started with the same imagery we’d just seen: Donny, the foot-zombie, and the quick zombie horde forming outside the window. The big difference was that no one ran. They all just stood there when the zombies attacked so the zombies just went from person to person and a quick chomp later and we had a new zombie. It only took minutes to transform the 50 or so people watching into zombies.
Then as one they turned to face our trailer.
They silently came forward in zombie formation to line up outside my trailer. Wordlessly and without so much as the whisper of leaves to mar their presence. Once they were all in formation the foot-zombie stepped forward away from the rest of them to close the distance to my trailer. He passed out of view when he went up on the porch and we heard his soft treading on the stairs. Then a soft
The bastard was knocking. It was civilized, even.
When we didn’t answer he did the same three tap on the door again. This went on for several minutes with him knocking every ten seconds or so until I finally went to open the door. Fannie Mae and Barrett tried to stop me, but I just shrugged them off. Didn’t they realize that I had to answer the door?
I opened the door and foot-zombie and I stared at each other across the three-inch gap of the threshold.
