Jen’s cacophonous voice assaulted all of our ears as soon as we entered the cab. She was somewhere between sobbing and screaming her desire to vacate the premises as soon as possible.
“Oh for the love of God girl, shut up!” Carl said evenly. His words had the desired effect, she shut up almost immediately, although she switched to an almost as bothersome half hiccup, half hushed sob. I think the screaming was better. This was the sound of the defeated.
The truck started on the very first turnover attempt. I was figuring that was good news. At least it wasn’t going to be like those low budget horror slasher flicks, where the heroine either can’t start her car or trips over a nonexistent tree root. Thank God for small favors.
The truck roared to life but we weren’t moving. “Please don’t tell me the transmission isn’t working?” I gave voice to my concern.
Carl and Ben both turned to me in unison as if on some unseen telepathic command.
“What?” I asked, fear began to mount, a few more seconds of this and I might end up on the floor mat with Jen.
I don’t to this day know how they did it but Ben and Carl, as if it was choreographed, simultaneously looked out the windshield at the same time. I followed the path of their gaze.
Realization dawned. “The gate? You want me to open the gate? Go through the damn thing,” I half yelled. Jen bawled a little louder.
Ben spoke up verbally this time instead of any more unnatural synchronized motions. “I don’t want to take the chance of puncturing the radiator or a tire or having the damn fence hang up underneath. ‘Sides, they’re all across the street.”
I looked at Carl for some sympathy, but didn’t find any.
“That’s what you get for being younger,” he quipped.
“Son of a bitch,” I said as I opened the door and jumped down. Jen immediately reached up and locked the door.
I heard Carl mumble something to her as he undid the latch. The zombies weren’t moving forward but every set of eyes turned to me as I walked towards the gate. I was deeply unnerved. I once had illusions of being a rock star but if this was what it felt like to have all eyes on you, then fame could find a different resting spot. There was jostling in the back as some of the zombies in the rear were trying to gain a better vantage point to see what was on the menu. Not one of them stepped into the street. It was if they were made of wood and the street flowed with lava. I could have most likely recited the Gettysburg address, done a little dance, possibly a crossword puzzle or two and even relieved my aching bladder before the fastest of the zombies could cover the distance to the gate. I swung open the gate and spun back toward the truck. I walked quickly, proud that I hadn’t broken out into a panicked run but it was close. I hopped back up into the cab, thankful the door wasn’t locked, and still nothing stirred, not even a mouse.
As the truck swung on to Buckley Avenue, the zombies’ heads turned in harmony. As we passed, they began to step out onto the street. For the first quarter mile of our trip, zombies began piling out of every imaginable nook and cranny. There had to have been thousands of them as they ganged up behind us. It looked like the beginning of the world’s slowest marathon.
Ben laughed as he said. “The dead sons of bitches aren’t going to catch us!”
“Yeah at least for another seven miles,” came my pensive reply.
Ben’s smile dropped off his face; even the stoic Carl looked like he had eaten something that didn’t sit well. Jen, however, was clueless.
“What….what’s in seven miles?” came her quavering question.
“Home,” I answered, as I looked in the side mirrors.
“Oh God,” Jen groaned.
Except for the occasional gear grind the remainder of the journey home was unremarkable. Each of us in his or her own way was contemplating the reality which had just been driven home, no pun intended.
“Ben, stop,” I said. No response. “Ben, stop this truck!” I yelled a little louder. How Ben was even concentrating on driving, I don’t know, he was so far down deep in thought. Carl nudged him.
“What?” Ben asked, sounding a little irritable.
“Talbot wants you to stop the truck,” Carl said, for which I was grateful. I might have yelled it a little louder than was considered polite if I had to ask for a third time.
Ben shrugged. “Fine,” he muttered. “But I ain’t turnin’ her off.”
“Fine, fine,” I said over the rumble of the engine. “What if we don’t go back?”
Ben and Carl looked at me both with expressions of confusion on their face. I didn’t bother to check Jen. I knew she still had her face buried in her hands.
“We saw those zombies,” I went on to explain. “They’re following us to see where we’re going. If we don’t go home they can’t get to our loved ones.”
Jen sobbed in response.
“Now hold on Talbot, I only saw a bunch of zombies milling about in a street. You can’t for sure say they were following us,” Ben said in reply.
Carl forged on. “And even if they were following us, and I said ‘if,’ what makes you think they can track us to our home. They’re stupid brain-dead flesh eaters!” he yelled. It was the most expression I’d seen out of him all day. He might be trying his best to not look riled, but this development was getting under his feathers.
“You saw Hector and the pliers, they’re not completely brain-dead,” I said evenly.
Carl’s face smoldered. Ben was looking from Carl to me in an attempt to garner some much needed information.
“Who’s Hector and what does a pair of pliers got to do with anything?” Ben asked.
Carl began anew, but not in response to Ben. “That still doesn’t make them Einstein wannabes, or Davy Crockett trail tracker wannabes for that matter.” Carl was going to take some serious persuading.
“Listen Carl,” I directed my dialogue towards him. Where Carl led, Ben would follow. “There’s something different about these zombies.”
Carl arched his eyebrow. “Different how? And what exactly does a zombie act like?”
I spent the next fifteen minutes relating everything I knew about zombies, learned from movies, books and comics. Sure, it was an imperfect argument, how could I possibly make an informed judgment about our fact-based reality when I was using fiction-based perceptions. The only hard facts I could give them were my observations of that woman zombie, the one that had killed Spindler. None of them had been there, my explanations fell on deaf ears.
Carl was of the mind to give me the benefit of the doubt, but I hadn’t given him anything solid enough to leave what was left of his family and friends behind. Without Carl my words fell on the deaf ears of Ben. Jen was no one’s ally.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” Carl said. “The zombies, them I believe in. Hector was just an aberration, some legacy memory. The girl? I think she was a specter of an imagination in overdrive.”
