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.
