Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (40 page)

“I wish, maybe we should just get some
wheels.”

“The noise will attract them.”

“I know, but we’ll be able to cover more
ground, and maybe Paul will hear us.”

“I thought you said...”

“I know what I said, I’m trying not to
believe what my Spidey-sense is telling me.”

“Spidey-sense sucks.”

“I agree.”

“Whoa! What do we have here?” Gary said, his
attention focused ahead of us.

A lone zombie was standing on a small stoop.
It did not, at first, pay them any attention as its gaze was
fixated on something small in the side light window to its
left.

“That a cat?” Gary asked softly as they got
closer. The zombie still not privy to their existence.

“Looks like a small dog. Nope, that’s a cat.
I can tell by that funky tail-twitching thing they do.”

“Someone must be in there,” Gary said as we
stopped about twenty-five feet from the house. “No way that cat
could have survived so long without some help; and it looks pretty
fat.”

Another cat came up next to the large gray
cat; they both seemed to be staring at the men. But this wasn’t
with imploring, “help us” eyes; this was more like something
predatory. “Do they look like they want to eat us?” Mike asked
Gary. Their zombie friend finally turned around. Mike would swear
its eyes got big as it noticed them.

“I don’t know about them, but he sure looks
hungry.”

“You want the honors?” Mike asked Gary, as
the zombie headed towards their location.

“I’ll shoot it, but you have to go into the
cat house first.” Gary blew a hole through the back of the zombie’s
head before Mike could even utter his response. It wasn’t like they
had a choice anyway. Zombies would come running. They, however,
would not stay out long if they could not find anything worth their
while.

The zombie was still twitching as Mike made
his way up to the porch. A third cat joined the other two who
disturbingly had not moved even after Gary took his shot.

“These cats are freaking me out.”

“Get in the house. I swear I hear running
feet,” Gary said with a wide-eyed expression, doing a quick three
sixty of their area.

Mike knocked quickly on the door. “Hi, we’re
friendly and we’d like to come in. Please don’t shoot us.”

“That wasn’t very convincing.”

“I’m all ears if you have something better.”
They heard no sound, but a fourth cat was now peering out the side
light at them. Mike tried the door handle. “It’s unlocked.”

“Get in, we’ll try our luck in there,” Gary
said, as he pretty much pushed Mike in. Six cats with tails
flicking back and forth were looking up at them cautiously. Gary
shut the door behind Mike, nearly stepping on a cat in his haste to
peek outside the side light.

“Zombies! I knew I heard them coming. What is
that smell?” Gary asked, finally turning around and taking in the
view of forty or fifty cats that had now assembled in the room.

“Wow, this sucks,” Mike said. The cats
weren’t advancing, but they also weren’t retreating. The ammonia
smell of abundant cat urine was prevalent as were the feces that
littered everything, but there was also something sinister, some
underlying smell that he knew, but was unwilling to identify. Mike
would have written down now that it was death, plain and simple,
but at that time, his mind struggled to keep away from that
realization. Add to the fact that Gary’s gagging wasn’t helping the
situation at all.

Some cats were mostly fixated on Mike, but in
Gary’s moment of weakness, he saw some of the pests moving in
closer. They halted their advance as zombies began to slam into the
framework of the house. Gary’s head shot up. “Is that blood?” he
asked, pointing to the floor a few feet past some of the cats.

The garish, orange-flecked linoleum which
Mike imagined led to the kitchen was dotted in reddish brown
splotches.

“It looks like it. Is anyone home?” Mike
called, hoping to reestablish some normalcy to the situation. The
cats seemed to get a little hesitant at the sound of his voice, but
they didn’t take off and retreat to a safe place. “Come on, man!
We’re on the second rung of the food chain, Talbot,” Mike said,
trying to steel himself for what needed to be done. “Third, if you
include sharks.”

“Has Tracy been nominated for Sainthood yet?”
Gary asked.

“Just watch my back.”

“From the zombies or the cats?” he asked.

“The cats, definitely the cats.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

They moved a foot forward, the cats yielded
half that, seeming to grow bolder as they stepped deeper into the
house.

“They’ve got in behind us, Mike. What the
hell is going on?”

“I’d say that they’re pretty hungry.”

Mike’s trepidation increased as he got closer
to the kitchen opening. The cats seemed very reluctant to yield the
ground to their front. They were almost protective, like they had a
prize they were unwillingly to share. A cat actually bit his boot
as he crossed in, Mike gently kicked it away, not quite willing to
add animal cruelty to his list of transgressions. He had never been
a huge cat fan, but he’d never had reason to hate them until he
walked into that kitchen.

“Oh God,” Mike said softly. Gary retched
behind him.

A shredded human, bones glistening wetly with
the remnants of bodily fluids and cat saliva stared back at them
with an eyeless gaze. Its jaw bone was missing as was a portion of
its lower leg. All that remained was a shock of hair on top and
strips of blue denim. It was the white gold wedding band, lying a
few feet from the body that brought Mike to the full realization of
who lay before him.

Mike whirled, quicker than any of the cats
could respond and lashed out with his heavy boot. The crack of ribs
as he launched a cat into the far wall was only superseded by his
satisfaction as he came down heavily on the spine of another. It
wriggled its head uselessly from side to side, its legs now a
useless jumble of spare parts.

The cats were mewling and scurrying about,
some running, some defending.

“What is going on, Mike?” Gary asked. He was
as scared as Mike had ever seen him.

“That’s Paul on the floor there and these
fucking things did it!” Mike screamed as he lashed out at anything
that was foolish enough to get within striking range. Within five
minutes, he had killed or wounded at least a dozen of them. The
rest had seen the folly of trying to tackle two full grown,
healthy, armed and defensive men. Mike had received more than a few
razor-sharp claw slashes, but that had only added fuel to the fire
that the cats had ignited.

He didn’t know if Gary had gone on the
offensive at all, but he had protected his back as some of the cats
tried to launch themselves at him from varying pieces of furniture.
Mewls of pain and rage echoed from around the house. They’d be
back, most likely waiting for the cover of darkness.

“Cowards!” Mike screamed. He was shaking with
his emotions, that fluctuated wildly from pain to rage to mourning.
Gary grabbed him in a big hug.

“It’ll be alright, brother,” he kept saying
over and over.

But it wouldn’t be, now or ever. This was one
more hard stop marker in life that Mike would never be able to step
back over. There would be life with his best friend of almost
thirty years and then there would be a much dimmer life with him
after. Mike sobbed into his brother’s shoulder to the point where
his head ached and a good dry cleaner would never be able to get
the snot out of his jacket.

“We need to bury him,” Mike finally managed
to get out.

“I feel the same way, but I don’t really want
to stay here long enough for the zombies to leave so that we can do
that. Maybe we can head out the backyard and come back.”

Gary’s idea was valid in almost every way,
but Mike could not leave his friend here with the cats to pick
through whatever remained of him.

“The backyard it is, but we’re burning this
fucker down,” Mike said with rage-fueled words.

Mike scoured the house, looking for some sort
of accelerant to make sure this house would burn hot enough to
rival the depths of hell. The best he could do was a small bottle
of isopropyl alcohol. The cats did not come out, but there was not
a room in that house that they were not observed by multiple eyes.
The only thing that was stopping them and barely, was the size
discrepancy.

“Mike, you should come here,” Gary said from
the other side of the house, back from the kitchen Mike was doing
his best to avoid.

Mike braced myself and did his best to
remember his friend as he had been in life, not the carcass that
lay on the floor. Mike almost sobbed when he went in. Gary at some
point had draped a blanket over Paul. There would never be any way
Mike could thank him properly for that.

“What’s up, brother?”

He handed Mike Paul’s wedding band. “I think
you should be the one to give this back to Erin.”

Mike would rather hammer nails through his
toes than have to give her back her dead husband’s ring. She would
never forgive him. He lost two friends today. Mike nodded as he
took the ring from Gary’s palm.

“The stove is gas,” he said.

Mike was still staring at the ring now in his
hand, Gary’s words merely a jumble of mish-mashed sounds.

“Did you hear me?”

Mike nodded only because he heard the
uplifting sound of a question and it seemed appropriate. But he
hadn’t, not in any cognitive way. Mike was shutting down, the
accumulated stress of the entire ordeal was beginning to break him.
He had always thought those people that claimed they had an
emotional breakdown were weak-minded. That was until he began to
suffer through his own, and then he pitied each one of them,
because if they had been pushed that far to the brink, something
had gone horribly wrong in their lives.

“Mike!” Gary said on the verge of a yell.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Mike said like a little
kid lost in the woods.

“Where the hell else would you be?” Gary
asked.

“Sorry, bro, this is just…”

“I know, Mike, I know. We’ve all lost ones we
love, but there isn’t time, not yet. You’ll have to grieve later.
Can you do that for me?”

Mike stared at him through watery eyes. “When
did you become the leader type?”

“You like that?” he asked.

“Not bad and thank you,” Mike said. He wasn’t
better, not by a long shot and maybe not ever, but he was
functioning. Mike was still at the abyss; except now it was to his
back. He was not sure if this new precarious position was the best
place to be, but it gave him a chance to make this fucked-up world
pay, starting with the damn cats.

“The stove is gas,” Gary repeated. “And I
found matches.”

The cats were back at the kitchen entrance.
Hunger is a powerful motivator, even more so than the need to
breed. And how many species killed each other for the right to do
that?

“Do you think they know something is up?”
Gary asked as he pulled the stove out to get access to the gas
line.

“I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve read that cats
have an open gateway to the spirit world and I bet their ancestors
are telling them that these shit birds are about to join them in
the afterlife. I would imagine that news isn’t sitting too well
with them.”

A large gray tom strode into the kitchen,
emboldening the rest of his clowder. Dozens of cats were behind him
and back out of eyesight, in the living room.

“How’s that going?” Mike asked Gary, never
taking his gaze from the large gray, and the accumulating throng.
He knew if he broke contact with him or them, they would attack.
Mike knew they had size on the cats, but the combined weight of the
small predators most likely outweighed them both.

“Got it!” Gary said with a grunt as he stood
up with one end of the disconnected piping. The noxious gas fumes
combined with the ammonia smell almost put Mike on his ass.
Something about the hissing of the escaping gas or the smell
triggered the cats into action. Mike noted that the gray had not
moved as his minions streamed past.

“Gary, get out of there! We’ve got to go.”
Mike hoped his voice wasn’t approaching falsetto, but he was
scared. Gary never did call him on it, so either he had kept it
together better than he thought or Gary was too scared to realize
Mike’s man-code slip-up.

Gary scrambled over the top of the stove and
moved to the backdoor before the cats could attempt to cut off
their retreat.

“How many are there?” Gary said, fumbling
with wooden matches.

“Enough,” Mike told him, and he believed
it.

The gray began to shimmer in Mike’s line of
sight as the room filled with dangerous amounts of liquid propane.
His tail stilled, and like a military message, the cats as one
unit, struck.

Gary had pulled the back door open and Mike
was using his rifle as an ineffectual baseball bat. At least three
cats had found purchase on Mike’s shins and dug in for the long
haul. Their curved claws tore through his skin and the muscle that
lay underneath. The pain was excruciating, Mike’s first instinct
was to reach down and squish their necks, but he knew as soon as he
bent down, they would attack his neck and face and then it would be
game over. Mike gritted his teeth and kept swinging to dissuade
anymore cats from weighing him down. Occasionally, he made contact,
even Bucky Fucking Dent gets lucky sometimes (If you have an old
sports book in your safe house look it up; if you’re a Red Sox or
Yankees fan, you already know).

Mike heard the match as it struck against the
box. He’d seen enough Hollywood movies to know a giant explosion
was about to ensue. He could smell the sulfur as the match lit and
then out of the corner of his eye, he caught a giant flare as Gary
lit the rest of the matches in the small cardboard box.