It was clear. For now. They hustled back to the
children. Karen pulled her purse strap over her head and picked up the box of
ammo from the closet. She crammed it into the already full purse and forced the
zipper closed.
Troy loaded the last round into his shotgun and
racked it. Karen dug in the closet and found a red leather dog bag that she
used to carry Botchy around in before she had Valerie. She scooped up the
sleeping old deaf dog and pushed Botchy into the opening, pulled the flap
closed, the Velcro locked the little pouch inside. Karen slid her arm through
the strap and tossed it up onto her shoulder.
“I packed all this food,” she said as she pointed
down at the backpack she filled earlier.
“I can’t carry it and Valerie. Mama’s got food. We
need to get out of here,” Troy said as he wiped off his drenched forehead.
Karen plucked the crying toddler from the bed and
propped her up on her hip.
“Alright buddy, you have to hold onto Uncle Troy’s
back!” He faced away from Valerie as she stood on the bed and he backed up into
her. She leaped up on to his shoulders. “Dig your shoes into my belt and use it
like a step.” He gave directions as he headed for the front door. She got her
little arms around his neck and her shoes on his belt. Valerie was as secure as
she could be. Troy was ready to charge out the front door.
“Wait!” Karen changed direction and entered the
kitchen. She sat Robin on the counter and dug through the junk drawer until she
found a pen and a notepad. She scribbled down the words “Went to Mom’s”
“Okay, let’s go!”
A group of dead people knocked politely at the
front door. They wished to come in and make themselves at home. Troy took a look
through the peephole and five crusty infected fuckers stared blankly at the
door. They bumped shoulder to shoulder and jammed up the exit.
When they got closer to the door they stumbled over
the dead bodies on the ground. Troy would have to empty his gun just to step
one foot out the door. Karen rejoined him at the door and nodded for him to
open it.
“It’s blocked.”
“Out the back!” Karen pivoted on a dime and headed
for the sliding glass door. “Girls, don’t look!” She pulled Robin in tight so
her face was tucked against her neck. Troy hunched over to give Valerie a
better place to lie on his back. The two of them danced over the disgusting
bodies that littered the playroom floor.
Valerie couldn’t help herself. She looked at the
devastation and gore splayed out on her precious toys. She let out an
ear-piercing scream and buried her face into her Uncle’s back.
Karen stepped out onto the small back porch, and
over the dog fence and into the soft grass of the backyard. She was greeted by
a pack of infected. At the front of the group was a sad looking old granny. Her
black eyes were sunk deep into her skull and her neck was covered in dark
purple bruises. A chunk of meat hung out the side of her brown polyester pants.
It looked like she was bitten on the calf. She wore a gray sweatshirt that read
“World’s Best Grandma”. Troy blasted a shot at the group. The pellets shredded
the grandma. Her out stretched hands were destroyed, leaving only stumps. The
words on her shirt were blacked out with blood. The force of the shot knocked
her to the ground and her limp body tripped up the others.
Karen ran to the far side of the apartment
building. She raced across a patch of grass that separated her building from
the next building over. The coast was clear on this side of the unit. As she
rounded the corner she spied Troy’s red truck. He had left his driver side door
open.
Thank god.
She picked up speed as she headed for the open
door. The sun felt so warm on her skin. There was a nice breeze in the air. It
was a perfect spring day in the northwest, except for the smell. Every one of
the infected in the parking lot must have evacuated their bowels. The stink of
nasty shit hung heavy in the air.
Karen’s bicep burned and her lungs were on fire. She
wanted to switch Robin to the other arm, but that would mean she would have to
shoot with her non-dominant hand. It was better to be in pain than miss a shot.
Old infected creatures milled about in the parking
lot separating them from the truck.
“Fuck!” she cursed.
“Bad word.” Robin let her Mama know she was
disappointed in her. Troy was half a second behind his sister. He racked
another shell. The weight of the two full bandoliers plus the forty-five pound
kid on his back made this dash a nightmare. The two decades of smoking wasn’t
doing him any favors either. The last thing he needed right now was for the
lace on his boot to become untied. The plastic tips of the laces danced on the
concrete as he moved onto the sidewalk. Two steps later Troy got hung up on the
shoelaces. His yell alerted Karen to the problem.
She turned in time to see him crash to the ground.
The shotgun went off and the pellets just missed Karen’s knees. The misfire
crossed over the entire lot and punched out the back window of a sedan. The gun
fell out of his hands and slid across the ground. Valerie panicked and squeezed
tighter around his neck. Her forearms choked him and made Troy cough violently.
He forced the words out through the coughs, “Let
up!” he tapped her arm.
Karen ran back and hovered over the two of them. Her
gun was trained on the forehead of the next closest infected man.
“Get up Troy!” Karen’s voice was strained. Pain
radiated all over the man’s body. He pushed himself up to his knees and reached
back with his hand to raise Valerie up higher onto his back.
“You okay girl? Goddamn that hurt!”
“I’m okay!” she said as she kept her face buried
deep between his shoulder blades.
The infected encircled them. Troy’s shotgun had
slid ten-feet from where he landed on his belly. Two infected old folks crossed
over the steel barrel and wood stock of Troy’s gun. The monsters looked like an
old couple visiting Hawaii. Flower shirts and shorts. The only thing missing was
a set of colorful leis around their necks.
“What are we going to do?!” Karen panicked. They were
completely cut off from Troy’s weapon. The thirteen-ish rounds in Karen’s gun
were no match for the twenty plus ghouls that surrounded them. Karen wished she
were back in the closet.
Robin tried to crawl farther up onto Karen’s shoulder. As
if being on top of her Mama would save her. Karen fought to keep the girl on
her hip and her gun aimed at the closest infected man. Troy pulled at Valerie’s
arm to get her to stop choking him.
“Troy?” The dire situation has crippled her ability to
string a sentence together.
“I…don’t…” Troy got to one knee. There was no clear path
to make their escape and without his shotgun they were all dead. The grandma
with the missing hands had regrouped with her gang of creeps and had closed off
the way they had come. There was no retreat and they couldn’t move forward.
Maybe if Karen had a lucky clover shoved deep up her ass she might hit a bullseye
with every shot and clear a path to the truck, but she forgot to shove it up
there this morning.
The closest infected was now only five feet away, close
enough for Karen to smell the man’s coffee breath. She was about to pop off a
round and take stinky breath down when a scream screeched out above them.
The high-pitched yell blasted across the parking lot.
Karen and Troy turned quickly to see from where it was originating. It came from
Cliff and Tina’s second floor window; Eve was carrying on like a banshee. Once her
voice gave out she punched a hole in the screen and tossed down a toy. It was a
plush mechanical teddy bear that sung and danced to the song “Wild Thing”. It
kept dancing and singing when it hit the flowerbed at the front of the apartment.
Over the singing bear Eve kept screaming and slapping her hand at the siding
outside the window.
Karen and Troy looked back over the approaching infected.
The monsters were easily distracted and the nine-year-old now had a captive
audience. The dead shuffled past Karen and Troy and they made for the noise.
The brother and sister stood still and kept their mouths
shut. It did not take long for some space to clear up around them. A few more
voices joined Eve’s.
Tina and Cliff yelled out and loudly clapped their hands,
“HEY! ASSHOLES! UP HERE!”
“Bad word.” Robin shook her head against Karen’s neck. A
gap was made for Troy’s shotgun. They sprinted for it. The gun had a few new
scratches down its side, crisscrossing the dark blue metal finish of the
barrel. Troy swallowed a grunt as he squatted to pick up the Remington.
The infected clustered under the second floor window,
their torn blood covered wrinkled arms reached up and futilely clawed at the
building’s siding. One of them had stepped on the teddy bear and the digital
sounding old rock song started over again. It made the whole scene look like a
pathetic rock concert with the worst audience ever.
Troy retrieved his weapon and they bolted for the open
truck door. One of the infected, suffering from a busted up leg, was limping
behind and staggered by the front of Troy’s ride. It was late for the concert.
Even with one of its eyes dangling by a thread of tissue it spotted the fast
moving Karen and charged at her. It was on a collision course with the fleeing
humans. Karen didn’t break her stride as she aimed her pistol at the infected.
BOOM!
She nailed a direct hit at fifteen paces. Maybe she did
put that lucky clover up her ass this morning. The gunshot pulled the attention
of the infected back onto them. No matter how loud Tina and Cliff shouted down
at the monsters, the moving target was much more appealing.
Karen’s body slammed into the truck door and she pushed
Robin up onto the bench seat.
Troy stood guard by the open door. He pumped a few rounds
into the closest infected. Once Karen was fully into the truck cab Troy took a
step back and Karen pulled Valerie off of him.
The infected were so close together Troy was able to take
down a group with each of his shots. Karen got the girls set up next to her and
clicked both girls into the center seatbelt.
“Let’s move,” Karen pulled the belt tight across their
laps. Troy backed up into his vehicle and slid his shotgun across the floorboard.
He slammed the door shut and cranked up the window. A sloppy set of fingers
crashed into the glass. Black sludge squeezed out of the bite marks on its
hands. They lay down a thick coat of gunk on the window making it look tinted. Troy
breathed out a rough lung full of air. He wasted no time getting out his keys
and jammed them into the ignition. Troy cranked over the engine and they took
off.
“Uncle Troy’s truck?” Robin looked up at her Mama and
pointed at the dash. Her little brown eyes red with tears, but she still had to
tell her Mama the newest update.
“Yeah baby, it’s Uncle Troy’s truck,” Karen said as she
dropped a kiss down on to both kids’ heads. She did an internal prayer and was
thankful for the extra couple of minutes she now had on this Earth with her
children.
Blessings and curses. Peaks and Valleys. Each move they
made felt like both. They were still alive, but she was leaving her home. The
place Jim was fighting to get back to. She squashed the thought that Jim could
be here any second. It was a waste of a thought. It didn’t help her to dwell on
possibilities. She could only focus on what was happening right now. No matter
how much she hated the reality, there was no way they could have stayed in the
apartment and kept the girls safe. Jim would have told her she needed to go.
Her mother’s house was the right move. As he got the truck turned around in the
lot he knocked over half a dozen infected, but never got one of them under the
wheel to squash them dead. Karen waved up at the Morgan family. She gave
them a nod of gratitude for the help.
The Morgan’s waved back at her.
“Where the hell are they going?” Tina asked her husband.
Cliff shook his head and gave his daughter a loving pat
on her back. It was his way of telling her how proud he was of her quick
thinking to help save the neighbors.
Troy left a set of rubber stripes on the asphalt as he
peeled out of the parking lot. A white cloud of smoke followed the speeding
truck. Maybe it was all of the adrenaline spikes Karen had been receiving for
the last few hours, but the ride with her brother felt surreal. It felt more
like a snippet from a bad dream. The one detail of the nightmare you can
remember when you wake up in the morning. Seeing her brother behind the wheel
reminded her of something from her childhood.
As the sister and brother grew up in their home, the
battle lines were clearly drawn. It was always them versus the parents. Team
kid versus team adult. The family had to move every couple of years for their
father’s work. A large chunk of their early teens was spent in a big house
outside of Spokane, Washington. They had a lot of firsts in that house. Troy
lost his virginity in the decked out party basement the Halloween after he
turned sixteen. Karen kissed her first boyfriend at the age of twelve in her
bedroom. It was also the house they lived in when they learned that their
parents were going to get a divorce. When Karen was eighteen she got an email
from an old neighbor friend from Spokane that told her the house was about to
be demolished.
She and the then twenty-one-year old Troy packed up some
camping gear and a twelve pack of beer and took a road trip from Vancouver to
Spokane to see the old house one last time. They got there about eleven o’clock
at night, broke in, and drank themselves to sleep in the living room. That
morning they woke to the sounds of bulldozers. They had just enough time to grab
the car keys and escape out the window they busted open to get inside. The
construction crew chased them a hundred yards before the workers gave up and
went back to bulldozing.
The siblings watched from a small hill on the property as
the house was knocked over with their camping gear still inside. They held
hands and cried openly as they watched a part of their childhood get crushed
and sorted into different piles.
Lumber, metal pipes, carpet and roofing all piled up on
the dirt that was once their home. They waited until the work team called it a
day before they could get back to their car. They were certain they would get
arrested for breaking and entering if they came back to get their ride too
soon.
It was a long, quiet trip back to Vancouver. They both
suffered from hangovers, but even with a splitting headache it was the best,
and last trip, they ever took together. The memory splashed across Karen’s mind
as she watched her brother hammer through the gears. It seemed impossible to
her that it had been over a decade since the last time she went anywhere with
Troy.
There wasn’t time to daydream, she had to focus and think
about her next move. Karen pulled out her box of ammo and the spent magazine. Her
fingers were already sore from the last time she loaded the damn thing. She
worked through the pain and refilled both of her magazines.
Only ten rounds remained in the box when she was done
reloading her gun. She popped the magazine back in, racked the slide and put it
back in her holster. Since she was in the mood to reload she picked up Troy’s
gun from the floorboard, flipped it over and stuck out her hand towards her
brother, “Shells.”
“You know how to reload it?” Troy pulled a shell from his
bandolier and handed it to her.
“I’ll figure it out,” she said as she took the shell and
forced it into the bottom of the shotgun. It took her a minute to get the son
of a bitch in there. After she worked out the mechanics of it she fought five
more shells into the gun and racked it.
Out of the corner of her eyes she caught glimpses of
horrific acts of violence. Troy swerved all over the road to avoid vehicles and
humans.
Living and dead.
Botchy was scratching at the door of her bag. It had been
awhile since she had ridden in it. Karen pulled open the Velcro door and her
fuzzy head popped out immediately. The little doggy was all tongue and loving
the salty buffet of tears on Karen’s face. Even with the living nightmare going
on all around her the wet kisses of her sweet dog gave Karen a smile.
“Botchy?” Robin put out her hand so she could get some
kisses too. Karen moved Botchy from one child to the next letting the dogs
little wet tongue bring joy to both children.
“Where are we going, Mama?” Valerie asked as she rested
her head down on her Uncle’s shoulder.
“Ganny’s.”
“There aren’t any bad people there?”
Karen searched for an answer that would not scare the
child. “There won’t be as many and Mama and Uncle Troy will protect you okay?”
“And Robin?” Valerie needed total clarification.
“And Robin and Ganny and Botchy. You don’t have to worry.
You’re safe.” Karen ran her hand down the back of Valerie’s head. Troy raised
his eyebrow at his sister and Karen shrugged her shoulders back at him. The
statement felt no different than the promise of Santa’s arrival on Christmas. Troy
cut across the parking lot of a gas station.
“Oh, God!” Troy groaned.