Trailer Park Zombies

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 from 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.