Another zombie joined us, or a particularly heady wind hit, or a damn butterfly landed on a palm frond somewhere on an island in the Pacific, didn’t matter, the rear of the ladder came off the ladder truck. What had previously seemed like a good idea now truly sucked as I death gripped the rung I was on as we swung with velocity towards the wall. Memories flooded through my senses, I guess the mind feels the necessity to show events that are not life threatening when one is faced with a most certain demise. For the briefest of moments I was once again a fifteen-year-old enjoying a burgeoning beer buzz with my two best friends on the planet, Paul and Dennis, as we discovered a place called Indian Hills. My parents had left me alone for the weekend and I did what any respectable teenager would do if they wanted to hold on to their cool card, I had a raging party. The next morning as my two buddies and I cleaned up, we decided to hightail it from the premises before my mother came home. During the best of times she could give Deneaux a run for her money. With the hangover I was suffering from, I did not want to add her to the mix.
Paul, Dennis and I had grabbed a few beers and were reinvigorating the buzz we had so much enjoyed the previous evening. Our goal was an area that we had seen from a perch atop our local grocery store. We would come to find out that the area was known as Indian Hills. It was an Indian burial ground (no, really!). The place had become a sort of oasis for us as we had grown over the next three years. That it was mystical was beyond reproach. We had more than our fair share of adventures on that land, but that’s a story for another journal.
The fingers of my right hand smashed against the wall as I had readjusted my grip from rung to rail. I’m not ashamed to admit I screamed. I’m pretty sure it was a good throaty man scream but I can’t be sure, it might have been as intimidating as an eleven-year-old girl’s. My immediate thought was better the right, I shoot lefty. And then all thought was washed away by the mind-blistering pain that ripped through my neurons. The pain peeled back quicker than I expected. I would learn later that the left side of the ladder had struck first, absorbing the majority of the strike. I would most likely lose all four fingernails on my right hand but that was a small price to pay for my life. I might have had some small micro-fractures in the tips of my fingers as well, but I’d left my Blue Cross Blue Shield card back in Colorado , and I figured that I was out of network anyway.
The haze in my mind burned off the moment I felt that hand wrap around my foot. So there we were, me and my new buddy, suspended thirty feet above the ground by a small rope attached to a ladder I wouldn’t tie anything bigger than a Chihuahua to. The ladder swayed back and forth against the wall, I’m sure doing its best to cut through the nylon holding us in place just like in every movie I’d ever seen. Sure, I had a safety rope on, but it looked like it had seen better days.
My new buddy was really trying to climb up the ladder. His hand was wrapped like a vise and I could feel his full weight as he either was trying to pull me down or pull himself up to greet me properly. But he would bite me long before we could exchange banalities.
“Cut the rope!” I shouted. ‘Did I just say that?’ “For the ladder!!” I clarified quickly.
“We figured that much,” BT said, looking over the rim of the wall.
“Just making sure, hurry, my buddy here is pretty hungry and he thinks I’m on the menu.”
“What do you mean nobody has a knife?” I could hear Tracy ask irately.
I tried to shake my new buddy’s hands free, but he was having none of it. His right hand gripped my calf. As soon as he pulled up and got his mouth into position, I was about to become his lunch. My arms strained as I supported the both of us.
“Not that one!” BT shouted.
‘Are you kidding me?’ I thought as I hung on, still grimly trying to shake my ‘friend’ loose.
“Let go of the ladder!” BT said, “Don’t worry, bud, the rope will hold.”
“The both of us?” I asked him.
“Probably,” the one called Mad Jack said.
I pulled my hands back just as the ladder zipped by. The rope tied around my waist bit deep into my flesh as it absorbed all of our weight. I felt like I was being severed, and the added pressure as the group on top of the roof began to hoist me up only contributed to the strain. My biting buddy was still firmly entrenched like a fat deer tick, but without his feet planted on the ladder he was merely hanging on for his dearly departed life. I wasn’t in any immediate danger of being bitten but rather torn in two like a convicted felon, drawn and quartered or, in this case, halved. To-MAY-toe, to-MAH-to, what’s the difference?
“The rope is breaking!” April shouted.
“Shut up, fool!” Mrs. Deneaux snapped. I would like to think that perhaps it was to save me from the bad news of my upcoming demise, but more than likely it was to hide the surprise so she could relish the look of shock on my face as I plummeted earthward, the old bitch. There was a lurch in my stomach as I free fell a few feet. I quickly looked up.
BT was leaning as far over the wall as he could, fat droplets of sweat cascading down upon my face. Normally this would have grossed me out to no end, but since he was single-handedly pulling the rope up hand over fist, I would forgive him this transgression. The veins in his neck stood out thicker than the rope I was tied to. His teeth clenched together in a pressure I think could snap through a steel cable, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration and pain.
I wouldn’t find out until I was safely on the roof, but the rope had snapped. BT had dived after it and just barely gripped the edge of the trailing rope. He and he alone had my lifeline in his hands. He hadn’t even had enough cord to wrap it around his hands, he was just pulling two full grown men up the side of the building. Well, to be fair, the zombie looked a little on the underfed side and had decayed a substantial amount, but still!
As more of the rope became available, Paul and Alex gripped some and the pain in BT’s features eased. But he never let go, even as the blood ran from his hands in droplets to rival those from his sweat.
I had never before been so willing to be embraced fully within a man hug. BT grabbed me under my armpits and basically manhandled me up. Travis got his rifle into position and blew my buddy’s head in two. I looked over my shoulder as the zombie fell towards the ground. His friends greeted him gaily at first, hoping for a meal from the heavens. He was quickly trampled underfoot once as they realized he was tainted. Of all the things zombies were, it was a damn shame they weren’t cannibals.
BT picked me up and placed me firmly on the roof. It took me a little longer to regain my wits.
“You can let go now, people are starting to stare,” BT whispered in my ear.
I pulled back slowly. “Thanks, man.” Those two words meant much, much more but the true sentiment was conveyed in my tone.
“You’re welcome and we’re even now,” BT said with a smile.
I watched as he walked away looking for something to wrap his hands up in. Tracy came over to me and pointed out the blood that covered my armpits; his hands must have been flayed. He might think we’re even, but the save-o-meter clearly pointed in his favor. Would it be against the rules if I staged a fake disaster and ‘saved’ him from a perilous fate? Just to swing the meter back in my favor, something minor, maybe a skateboard on the stairs or I could kill a malaria carrying mosquito before it bit him, something small. Just a scale tipper, that’s all I’m looking for. Well, no real worries with the state of the world as it is, I’m sure an opportunity would present itself soon enough. But what if he saves my ass again? Then I’ll be down by two. That could be a pretty big deficit to come back from. Maybe if I just up and chucked Deneaux off the side of the building, he would consider that a leveling of our score.
“You alright Talbot?” Tracy asked. She looked more nervous than I’d seen her in a long time.
I nodded slightly. The shock of the event still hadn’t completely registered. I was betting there would be nights to come where I would dream BT hadn’t made it to that rope and I had plunged backwards into a sea of sharp teethed zombies. Maybe even staying asleep long enough to feel them rend the flesh from my bones, elastic skin snapping as it was pulled free from my body. Veins and arteries popping as the sealed blood within arced out in red rainbows of death. Rein it in Talbot! I know my imagination can be like a three-year-old on Red Bull and still I feed it.
“How’s your hand, buddy?” Paul said as he gripped it for a handshake.
“Hurts like hell,” I said, ripping it from his grip.
“Dude, I am so sorry. I thought it was the other one,” Paul said, moving in for a hug.
Erin smacked him on the shoulder. “We really are so glad to see you and your family Mike,” Erin said, moving Paul aside so that she could get her own hug in. “Do you have a way to get us out of here?” she asked hopefully.
I looked back over the wall at a fire truck that was barely visible due to the swarm of zombies on it. Worse
