until there’s nothing left.” Well I guess I had finished what I had started. I had completely wiped out any satisfaction we may have gained in our ‘victory’. What a fucken killjoy I turned out to be.
“How to mellow a high Talbot.” BT threw out there.
Not a sound was made, not even a stirring zombie. Nobody was sure in which direction I was going to go in from BT’s barb. “Oh you fuck.” And then I started laughing. Joined in by the rest. It seemed impossible that we would laugh amidst all the destruction below us but stress finds its own necessary release.
Straggler’s, to prove my earlier point, kept coming in only to be met with unmitigated leaden justice. A more pressing concern lodged into my head as I watched the newest interloper go down in a cacophony of bullets, actually a couple of concerns. Our mini-vans were completely encased in the shards of zombie remains. This wasn’t Alex’s truck, we would never be able to just drive over them or push them out of the way. The Terrible Teal machine would spin in place like a washing machine. Clearing out an exit for the cars wouldn’t take an abnormally long amount of time. Touching and dragging the bodies out of the way was not a palatable mission. Anything less than a Level 5 biohazard suit seemed to me to make the whole endeavor a nearly impossible assignment.
Secondly, and just as important, while we could clear a path and be on the road in the next half hour once our ammo and food were back in the cars, what kind of ungrateful bastard guests would we be if we had just made the world’s worst mess and then abruptly left. The zombies had come for the Talbot party, table of eight. To leave this horrendous display of death for Denmark was incomprehensible to me. Moving this many pieces of bodies to a safe enough distance whilst also keeping a vigilant eye out for others of their kind was going to take hours.
I vomited four times that morning. The first was as my first misplaced step off the ladder landed squarely on an eyeball. The resounding pop and ooze of viscous liquid from beneath my boot propelled anything worth digesting out of my mouth and onto the rungs of the ladder.
“Oh fucking Talbot!” BT lamented, as he was higher up the ladder and following me down.
“Sorry about that.” I wiped my mouth, my agitated stomach letting me know just how much it was displeased with this course of events.
In such a confined area with that many bodies it was absolutely impossible to not keep stepping on THINGS. Yeah, hold onto that thought. They are NOT fingers and forearms and skull plates. They are THINGS. Oh, who am I kidding! This looked like the world’s largest blender had been filled with humans and someone had held down the blend button for about a half second. So not nearly enough time to puree the contents but merely chop down the bigger pieces. You thought liver smelled bad when your mom cooked it? Try stepping on one fresh out of a corpse. Vomit number two did nothing to mask the putrification around me. BT wasn’t fairing much better than I was. If not for Jen’s lead and our need to competitively ‘keep up’ with her, it might have been a job that didn’t get done. No matter the guilt I felt for leaving Denmark in such a lurch. She set about the burden with a grim willpower.
Denmark and Travis stood watch over us as we dragged the human odds and ends out of the parking lot. If this were a real job that demanded compensation, I don’t think there would be a sum worthy. But survival has its own price, one that we couldn’t pay enough to satisfy. Occasionally a shot would ring out, hampering any more visitors from coming in for an afternoon meal. As we stacked the bodies behind the Dairy Queen like cordwood, we took the time to watch each other’s backs. We were not under the watchful eye of our lookouts from that vantage point. The distance, I hoped, would keep the majority of stench from wafting into the motel but more importantly was the old adage of out of sight out of mind. Although anything less than Noah’s Ark type floodwaters was not going to wash away gallons upon gallons of blood that had overrun everything.
My third mouth breaching came as I grabbed onto some kid’s jacket. He was wedged under the body of a female that suspiciously bore a family resemblance. The family that eats together, stays together you know. Whether in life, in walking death or in absolute death, there was something about killing a family that tore something free from within me. I wanted to be out of this split femur soup. I reached under and grabbed the thing from underneath the armpits. I pulled with more exertion than the task demanded. I was rewarded with a wet tearing sound as the boy’s top half came loose from the disengorged innards that spilled like night crawlers from a broken bait box. I fell over still holding tight to the top half of the boys remains. Luckily, my fall was broken by the ample carcass of Frita, the Ihop waitress. Her nameplate quickly lost under my voluminous cascade of bile. I stood up quickly, a dizzying spell nearly bringing me to my knees again. Flesh, saturated with bodily fluids, slapped against my blood soaked jeans. I dropped the boy to the ground. When I felt the worst of the attack had passed I reached down and grabbed the boy’s hand, not in a gesture of good will, it was what allowed me the greatest grip. I did not turn around as I dragged the boy to his final resting spot.
Jen had somewhere acquired a snow shovel and had cleaned up what had spilled out of the boy, my burden had been getting lighter as I walked but I would not turn to detect the reason why. One more violent stomach outburst like the previous one and I would have left my spleen on that parking lot pavement. For the next hour I went through my duties like an automaton, bend, lift, drag, bend, lift, drag. I had become more like our enemy than I would have ever thought possible. BT for all his bravado was two pukes ahead of me, fine by me he was welcome to that trophy. And winner of the 2010 Lord Upchucks Cup goes to Big Tiny! Huge applause! I grinned. Nuggets of some distant forgotten meal bracketed my goatee. Pain wrenched my gut. My knee was on the verge of collapse and my smile resembled something closer to a scowl. But still I soldiered on. Tracy, Nicole and Brendon had spent the better part of the morning getting our belongings back into the minivans. They had just about finished, when me, and the death detail were down to single figure leftovers to remove, when Denmark’s warning came.
“Michael you best come up here and take a look.”
I hobbled over to the ladder, the blood of a hundred bodies was solidifying on every article of clothing I was wearing. Between my knee and the inflexibility of the frozen blood my navigation of the ladder was haphazard at best. ‘If this is the way I die I am going to be seriously pissed off.’
'You say something?” Denmark asked as he reached out to help me up and over and then abruptly thought better of his gesture. He warred within himself, the disgust of possibly touching anything that was attached to me or the common courtesy of helping me up the ladder. Courtesy won out as he reached his hand out again.
“I’ve got it, don’t worry Denmark.” I wanted to laugh as I watched the relief on his countenance.
“Dad, hurry!” Travis yelled.
Denmark went to clap me on the shoulder in an act of shared camaraderie and then pulled back as not even that innocuous part of me was free from debris. Within a few moments of caked blood cracking movement I was standing next to my son. I saw…nothing. Nicole and Tracy had packed the rest of the food into the back of the minivan. Brendon was finishing strapping something to the top of his minivan. BT and Jen were sharing a smoke that looked so good, the savory tobacco smoke wisping up into the cold winter air. Even from this distance I could tell BT’s hands were shaking. Jen had to try and time her placement as she went to hand him the cigarette.
“What?” I asked perplexed.
Travis’ pointing finger led my vision higher up the horizon. I saw a black smudge, a stain upon the skyline. I saw a plague upon my family. Hundreds, no thousands, tens of thousands of zombies blotted out the distant boundaries of my vision as they marched forward toward us.
“My God.” Denmark noted.
“Time to go Mr. T.” Tommy said as he reached to grab my hand.
I pulled away before he could make contact. “Oh Tommy I don’t think I could stand it if I passed on what I’ve been touching.” He understood, even if he wasn’t a tenth as concerned about it as I was.
“We leaving now?” He begged.
The scene, while not nearly as heroic and without the accompanying foreboding music, reminded me of the Lord of the Rings when the orcs and cave trolls descended on Helm’s Deep. I was transfixed. Stay and fight or just run. I looked to Denmark’s fear lined face and the consternation of his wife Maggie as she looked on and even to a lesser extent the misery that was etched on Greta’s face. My mind was made up. These people had opened their home and their hearts to us. What right did I have to bring this grisly end upon them.
“We’re leaving Tommy.” I said. Tommy was relieved.
“Michael.” Denmark peeled his eyes away from the abysmal vista. “I thought you were more of an admiral man than that.”
“What? Did you mean admirable?” I asked. I didn’t have the foggiest clue about what he was talking about.
“You are just going to leave me and Maggie and Greta like this?” He asked
“Oh.” I started. “Denmark it’s not like that at all.” His arched eyebrow let me know exactly what he thought of that response. “First off you’re welcome to join us, although I don’t see the benefits for you to that decision.
