need a weapon?” he asked himself. “I’m going to my parents’, not Detroit .” Each step got heavier and heavier as he crossed the yard. “Come on Mom, just walk by the window, just once,” he pleaded. More sirens joined the fray and for the life of him he could not figure out why his parents weren’t checking out what the fuss was about. ‘They must really have Breakfast at Tiffany’s cranked,’ he thought, looking for humor and finding none. The sirens which had violently been pushing the silence away cut off as if on a timer as his foot hit the first step on the back porch. The vacuum of sound was immediately filled in by the frantic barking of Chip and Dale, his mom’s dogs.
“Chip and Dale never bark,” Peter said aloud. “Mom dotes on them too much for that.” He never noticed as the phone slid from his grip and cracked on the cement. His eyes were fixed on the door handle. For reasons he could not explain, he was more afraid now than that time he had stopped a barge three miles off the shore of Florida that carried two nuclear warheads. This was far worse, this was quite literally happening on his own doorstep. Retreating into the alternate reality of HALO right now seemed like the wisest course of action. And he was close to that decision, he wanted to put this made-up nightmare behind him and go try out the new game armor he had purchased.
He had actually started to softly close the screen door and turn to walk away when Chip’s or possibly Dale’s barking changed into a high pitched howl. “Never heard that before,” He said, frozen in indecision, half in and half out of the entrance. He gripped the door handle and pulled back quickly. “Whoa, that’s freezing!” he said, blowing air into his palm. Even the dog’s change in tone was not enough to force him into action. It was the three shambling strangers that had just entered into the circle of light at the base of his driveway that sealed the deal. “You guys don’t look so good,” he said as he twisted the knob and prayed to the patron Saint of All Who Opens Things that the door was not locked.
He was in and had quickly shut the door before the smell assailed him. His first thought was that he was wearing the same shirt he had worn for yesterday’s luncheon special and had possibly taken home far more than his fair share of cloying liver and onions’ odor. Although that would have been heavenly compared to the aerial blast of assification that filled the room. Chip, the lighter colored of the two dogs came running down the hallway, tail tucked between his legs. He stopped right in front of Peter and began to piss all over the floor, something he could not remember the dog doing even when he was a puppy.
“What’s the matter boy?” Peter asked, lowering himself down to the dog’s level. Chip was shaking violently and he pulled back when Peter tried to comfort him. Peter stood back up; Chip ran and hid behind the couch. “Mom? Dad?” Peter said so softly they might not have heard him if they were in the same room. Peter wanted to check the basement first because it was on the opposite side of the house from where Chip had run out from. “Not very logical,” he chided himself. “Or courageous. Come on, what would Death by Murder667 do? Well, first off he’d have an M392 and about 25 hand grenades, so that’s not going to work so much considering I don’t even own a squirt gun. But Dad does. Yeah, and it’s down the exact hallway you’d rather not go down. And who the hell are you talking to?” Peter started slowly down the hallway and turned back to where the small dog had hidden. “Any chance of some back up?” Not so much as a whimper. “Solo mission then,” he said, steeling himself to go down a path he’d traveled at least ten thousand times in virtual reality. The atmosphere, the stink, the feelings of dread all intensified. Each step became a chore, a vastly distasteful chore.
He could hear something tapping in his parents’ bedroom. It was a discordant sound that more than anything had Peter on edge. The door was half open but no light spilled out, and the ambient light from the hallway did little to pierce the darkness beyond.
“This sucks,” Peter said hardly a register above silent. The tapping grew louder and more frantic and then suddenly stopped. The tapping which he had found ominous was light years better than the ensuing quiet. Something stirred in the darkness. Peter involuntarily checked his chest for his trademark hand grenade bandoliers. “Yeah, that’s how most people solve their problems, throw a hand grenade in their parent’s bedroom.” A face materialized out of the gloom, it was familiar yet unrecognizable. His mother looked through Peter with opaque eyes. Blood lined her mouth, entrails emblazoned her night shirt, a jagged strip of flesh was torn from her forehead where dirty white bone shone in the light. If his mother had not slipped on the remains of Dale, Peter would have died that night, frozen in fright. His last thought as he fled from the house was that the tapping noise had been Dale’s toenails hitting the wall in his death throes.
Peter spent the next two days barricaded in his apartment, only occasionally stealing glimpses of the chaotic outside world. Hundreds of zombies had passed by his house, this he could tell by the smell alone. The windows were shut and duct tape sealed every crevice, and still the stench bled through. Gun fire gave him grim hope that not all was lost, but by the end of the second day the frequency of shots was becoming less and less and the smell was getting worse. He was able to do the math in his head on that one. Sleep was infrequent and always ended abruptly when the ruptured skull face of his mother crept in on him.
Seventeen diet 7 Ups, half a bottle of ketchup and something that might have been a corned beef sandwich lined the barren shelves of Pete’s fridge. “Always ate dinner with Mom and Dad,” he choked out. Pete understood the irony of starving to death in his apartment or becoming dinner for the abominations that walked outside. ‘It’s an eat or be eaten world,’ he thought sourly and with no humor.
Three days later and even with strict rationing he was down to one 7 Up. The previous night he had stripped most of the bluish-green mold from the mystery meat sandwich. His stomach had cramped something fierce but it was worth it. The 7 Up and ketchup soup just wasn’t cutting it anymore. He didn’t dare drink any of the tap water until he was sure that wasn’t the agent that had caused this epidemic or whatever it was. Hunger and depression was making him lethargic, and leaving the couch was becoming increasingly difficult.
He was like the frog put in a slowly boiling pot of water; he would never leave this apartment. Starving to death was a slow painful process and was worlds better than the alternative. If not for the smell of smoke that was exactly what would have happened. Fire was the mitigating factor. Pete could think of no worse way to die except for maybe having rats eat his eyeballs while he was strapped to a table, but that was a completely different nightmare. Pete did not want to burn, charred blistering skin peeling back from his hands and face as lava hot smoke burned through his chest, exploding his lungs and torching his throat. The fluid in his eyes would sizzle and explode, his mouth forever pulled back in a smile of death like the victims of Pompeii .
He peeked out the window, the first time in a while he had cared enough to bother. Two streets away, in the general direction of where Susan Payne had lived (the first girl he had ever kissed), the sky was completely enshrouded in thick black smoke. Fine filaments of the sooty substance w ere bleeding through under his door and even around the uneven edges of the duct tape. He momentarily considered throwing up another layer of tape and sticking a towel under the door, but to what end? All that would accomplish would be allowing the fire time to catch up and roast him alive instead of suffocating him to death. Neither way was a savory means to his end.
The fire storm had one benefit, the things that were human once wanted as little to do with the fire as any other living creature. Squirrels, cats, dogs, and what he would come to know as zombies all made hasty retreats in the opposite direction from the impending doom.
“Now or never Pete,” he told himself, taking one last glance over at his parents’ home. He absently wiped a tear away from his eye. The fire had jumped to the street parallel to his own. He could see the flames as they licked the edges of the homes. God had turned his back on man, hell had been unleashed on earth, the proof was now devouring the Almstead house. The fire was a vengeance, a scouring of all that was wrong with the world.
Pete walked slowly through his apartment taking mental images of a home he would never return to, then left with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing. He ran to the driveway to get the white van his father used for his in-town delivery service. He went directly to the back of the van, feeling around the juncture where the bumper met the frame until he found what he was looking for, the spare key. His mother had made Pete’s dad get the magnetic contraption after his dad had called the locksmith for the third time in three months because he had once again locked the keys in the van. Funnier still was that in the twelve months since he had the spare key attached to the bottom of the van, he had never again locked his keys in the car.
Pete adjusted the captain’s chair and turned the ignition over. His heart skipped a beat when he peered into the kitchen window and saw his mother staring back at him. He threw the van into reverse heedless of whatever might be behind him. He nearly took out the privacy fence that encased his parents’ yard. He never took his eyes off that window as he stopped and then placed the car into drive; his mother’s gaze never wavered as her milky white eyes followed his treacherous departure.
CHAPTER THREE – BT
