I stared hard at him for a second straining to bring my thoughts back in focus, and then I let out a small whoosh through my teeth.
“Tommy that’s all right,” I said happily. “Cell phones are not working, they probably just didn’t get your message.”
I felt hopeful. I couldn’t stand the thought of this big happy-go-lucky kid being depressed. That would be like the sun wearing a veil. Tommy stared at me like I was going nuts.
“I don’t have a cell phone, Mr. T. I kept losing them so Mom said to save my money.”
I had a dozen questions I wanted to ask him but Tommy fixed all of his attention on his Butterfinger, as if to say in a passive aggressive manner that he was done discussing the matter. When I saw the sunshine come back into his eyes, I let it go. I walked into the kitchen, shaking my head a bit trying to get a grasp on the conversation Tommy and I had just had. I chalked up our miscommunication on intellectual lack. Mine, not his. I figured while I was heading this way I might as well get a kiss from Tracy.
“Get out of here,” she begged. “I could smell you coming! You’re going to make the food spoil.” And then she flicked a noodle at me.
“Yeah it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I said dejectedly as I turned around to head upstairs and take a shower.
I took a shower hot enough to melt skin, well maybe only on a wax figurine, but it was still plenty hot. I toweled off and changed into some clothes that weren’t going to need to be destroyed. I caught the aroma of dinner cooking and it smelled heavenly, but the pull of my bed was stronger. You know how people say that they were asleep before they hit the pillow? I never believed a word of it, at least until tonight when it happened to me. Right behind sleep came the nightmares. I dreamed of my daughter (not Nicole, of course it was the woman in the field). She was wearing the tattered blue dress from the little girl at Wal-Mart. She was running to greet me. I had been away but couldn’t remember where I’d been. As she approached her mouth began to grow disproportionately to her size, and lined in the gigantic maw were razor sharp teeth. She kept getting closer. I wanted to scream but it was frozen in my throat. Spindler walked up beside me and asked, ‘Do you want me to cut her head off?’ I was shocked. He was holding a sword. I was nodding yes but mouthing ‘No…she’s my daughter.’
‘Wimp,’ he said as he walked away, twirling the blade in the air. I couldn’t peel my eyes away as I watched the blade twist faster and faster catching and reflecting the sunlight. (Weren’t we just inside?) The blade had ascended as far as it was going to go and began its long graceful descent. I shouted to Spindler, ‘Get out of the way!’
I distracted him long enough for the blade to do its work. I watched his head roll on the floor, trying to ascertain how so sharp of an instrument could leave such a jagged edge. I looked up at my daughter, who was not my daughter. She was right in front of me. Her breath was noxious as she stood eye to eye with me, although I knew she was at least a half-foot shorter than I was. Her arms reached out to grab my hands. I was frozen. I accepted her cold embrace.
‘Do you want to play?’
Nothing was frozen this time, I awoke screaming, but my distress was covered up by the sound of small arms fire.
Justin was halfway up the stairs when I got to the bedroom doorway.
“You get your brother and keep watch on the house,” I said to Justin. “And tell Brendon to get his boots on, me and him are going out to see what’s going on.” Justin was about to say something and I had a gist of what it was going to be. “No,” I shook my head. “You and Travis have had enough excitement for the day and I need to know your mom, sister and Tommy are safe.”
That soothed him but it didn’t appease him. Rifle fire was still chattering away, something was even more amiss than you would normally derive from gunfire at night. Nobody had sounded the alarm. Jed was going to have someone’s ass for this lack of discipline. Then I heard a sound that was almost as nightmarish as the nightmare I had just woken from. It was undeniably the sound of a machine gun, something that none of us besides me had access to in this complex, and I was holding mine.
“Shit!” I yelled. “Everyone but Brendon upstairs. It’s a raid! If anyone comes in this house without announcing themselves, you shoot first! You got that, boys? I’ll lock up on the way out. No one is getting in without making a lot of noise.”
Quasi-intelligent zombies were one issue to deal with, determined humans with weapons were another. The ‘brrrrpppp’ of the machineguns went off again. I could hear screaming and the sounds of confusion coming from the direction of the clubhouse. Well, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to tell where to look for stuff to raid, with that giant semi sitting out there. And then it hit me, I knew without a shadow of a doubt Durgan and his merry band of insane idiots were behind this. The machine gun I was hearing must be that menacing looking Gatling gun Durgan had been toting. Obviously it wasn’t for show as I had hoped.
Brendon and I were halfway to the clubhouse when we came across our first victim. I didn’t know him well but he was at all the meetings, usually in the back, I think his name was Bob or Hank, Ted maybe. Oh, who gives a crap, his neck looked like it was cut with a machete. Whoever had done this was incredibly strong and had been trying to sneak in silently. ‘Damn Durgan, I’m going to blow his head off,’ I thought viciously.
As we crept in closer we could hear the moans of the wounded, some crying out for their moms. I knew from my previous combat tours that those would be the ones that wouldn’t make it through the night.
Durgan’s Gatling gun lit up the sky like a Christmas tree on ‘roids, it was impossible not to find him. He was about forty feet away from me and looking in the other direction, so when I stepped out from behind my tree I didn’t expect him to wheel on me with such precision. I watched in hyper-slow-motion as the barrels began their circular route. Bullets began to blaze, first into the grass next to the tree I had been hiding behind, and then into the tree Brendon was cuddling like it was his long lost lover. I heard the discernible sound of the tree snapping; it was coming down but for the life of me I couldn’t remember how big it was and if it would crush me should it hit me. The only thing that saved me was my Marine Corps training; the moment I stepped from behind that tree I had started firing.
My bullets found their mark a moment before Durgan’s had. It wasn’t a head shot but it was just as effective. I had sheared his right leg off right above the knee. Blood gushed from the wound as he went down hard.
‘The bigger they are the harder they fall.’ Is there any chance I could get a CAT scan in this post apocalyptic world, FOCUS!’ My introspection and celebration were short-lived as I felt the buzz of hot lead incredibly close to my head. Brendon began to pop off rounds with his .380 but with an effective range of about twenty-five feet, odds were we were in more trouble than our opposition. My clip was empty and I wasn’t even sure of much more than our assailant’s general direction. I pulled Brendon down behind the small fallen pine tree. The branches wouldn’t do much to stop a bullet but it kept our positions concealed.
“Brendon, I only brought one magazine and it’s gone,” I told him. The look on his face was a Kodak moment.
Dejectedly he turned to me and said. “Yeah I popped off about five or six rounds, I’ve only got about four rounds left myself.”
We could hear more screaming. Most of it was coming from the clubhouse, but the majority of it was coming from Durgan himself. The language he was using was making me blush. I wanted to take Brendon and back away so we could first off get out of harm’s way and secondly to go get more ammo and preferably a better gun for him. I looked up just high enough to see over the trunk and was welcomed by an angry assault of hornets, well, more like MK-46 7.62 rounds but you get the general idea. One of Durgan’s flunkies had us pinned.
I tried not to let my apprehension show in my voice. “Umm, I think moving out of here isn’t going to be an option,” I told Brendon.
“I kinda figured,” he replied cynically.
We were pinned, low on ammo and the damn cavalry was nowhere in sight.
“Where the hell is Jed?” I asked of no one in particular.
“Oh, no!” Brendon said, as I watched his face fall.
“What? What’s the matter?” I asked. Unless the zombies were taking this opportune time to attack, I couldn’t understand what had him in such a funk. I then followed his line of sight.
“OH NO, you have got to be kidding me!” I yelled. I think I said something that more resembled Durgan’s vernacular than my own, but it got lost in the translation.
Coming towards us was Tommy. He was advancing as stealthily as a 250-pound hulking kid can. Needless to say he sounded like a bull in a china shop during an earthquake with cowbells strapped to its back, am I making myself clear enough?
“Is that a…a bow and arrow?” I asked incredulously. I knew what it was, it just wasn’t registering. We had been vacationing in Estes Park, oh man, had to have been ten years ago, back when Justin was the ripe old age of nine. We had gone into a sporting goods store and Justin had fallen in love with a kid’s bow and arrow set. It was the type with the practice arrow tips. It was a safe ‘toy’ unless of course you played William Tell. When we got back to the cabin and Tracy saw what I had bought him she ripped me a new one. It sucked that I had to wipe two holes for a couple of weeks, but Justin was stoked. Was that too graphic? Sorry.
Anyway back to my backfill story, like any kid he played with it for a good two weeks before he became sick of it. I think there were two arrows left that weren’t either broken or lost. I had put it up in the garage almost a decade ago and hadn’t thought about it since. How Tommy found it and why he was coming to ‘help’ us was a different story.
I so desperately wanted to yell out to him to stop and go home, but I didn’t want to bring undue attention to him either. But how the hell they didn’t see him coming was beyond my comprehension. I was already mourning his passing in my head; I was going to miss the kid. He was like a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark and desolate world. He got to within ten feet of our location. I was frantically gesturing for him to come and hide with us. I even rose a little to get him when the angry hornets came back. He just looked over at us and was smiling, Butterfinger mess spread all over his face. He then pulled the drawstring back so far on that little bow I thought it was going to snap in half. He let go, the arrow flew. I knew without a doubt in my mind that arrow was going to hit home. It was divine intervention, pure and simple. I heard the telltale thud of impact. Whoever that arrow had hit hadn’t even had time to cry out in surprise.
“Hey Mr. T!” Tommy yelled, waving happily. “Do you think they have any Twinkies in there?” He gestured toward the clubhouse.
I stood up slowly, still half-crouching and waiting for someone else to pepper my location. When no one did I turned back to Tommy. I didn’t know whether to kick his ass or kiss it. I know he wouldn’t have understood either gesture. So I just held out my arms wide. He rushed forward for the offered hug and nearly toppled me over which would have completed the mission the raiders had attempted. I so wanted to yell at him, but that huge grin and the fact that he had saved our lives, well that factored into my decision not to.
“Yeah, there’s Twinkies. Come on.” I put my arm around him and led him past the worst of the carnage so we could rummage through the food.
Little Turtle residents were now scrambling in the aftermath to help the wounded or offer solace to the dying. I wasn’t a medic or a priest, so I stayed with Tommy while the whirlwind of activity swirled around me.
