He nodded ever so slightly. I wasn’t overly thrilled with his response.
“Paul, YOU are the last line of defense here,” I told him. Paul weakly motioned towards Justin’s door. “Dude, I’m not sure he has enough strength to get out of bed if he needs to piss. If push comes to shove though, he will get up and do what he can when the time comes.” What I left unsaid was that I didn’t have that same faith in Paul. I think he got the underlying current of my meaning.
He looked hurt when he spoke. “You know I’d do anything for you, Mike, and the kids… and Tracy,” he added hastily.
I eased up. “That’s all I needed to know Paul. We’ll be back.”
Travis and Brendon were waiting impatiently by the door, rifles and ammunition cans by their sides. Tommy was on the couch doing a crossword puzzle. Not a lick of concern creased his features.
“Hey Mr. T,” Tommy said from his seated position, looking up at me with a big smile across his face.
God I loved that kid, he knew what was going on and was in a great mood despite it. It was infectious. I smiled back. “Yeah, what’s up Tommy?”
“What’s a four-letter word for ‘seven days?’”
At first I didn’t grasp the question and then I noticed the puzzle book in his lap. My dim-watted bulb finally flickered on. “Week, Tommy, it’s a week,” I answered, happy to be able to help him.
His expression changed dramatically; he became extremely solemn when he replied. I would have almost thought he was a different person as he intoned, “Exactly.”
I know my face ashened. I could feel the blood running out of it. Tommy had just told us how long we had. I opened the door and headed out before anyone could see my betraying visage. We had enough to be worried about. I was hoping that nobody else hearing Tommy’s words had come to the same realization. If they did, nobody said anything. Brendon, Travis and I went to find the best vantage point to begin our beleaguered defense.
Before we climbed the guard tower, I got them into a small group huddle. “Listen to me boys.” It was difficult to be heard over the cacophony of battle. I shouted again. “Boys! We do not separate. Do you understand?” I looked at each one in turn to get my confirmation nod. “If you need to take a piss or get something to eat or just take a rest, you go home and you go with each other, do you understand?” Again I looked for and received the confirmation nod. My words were having the desired effect. I wasn’t sure that they were getting the seriousness of the situation we were about to become engaged in. Fear rimmed their eyes as much as their male bravado tried to suppress it. Scared was good though. Scared kept people, soldiers, alive. It was fucken heroics that got good people killed. I made it abundantly clear I didn’t want any heroes.
“Once these walls are breached,” I started.
Brendon’s eyes snapped to mine. “Breached?” he asked incredulously.
“Dad?” Travis asked.
My heart dropped, his fear was palpable.
They both looked like they wanted to bolt for home right now. Trust me, I wanted to join them.
“Holy shit, Mike,” Brendon said he looked back towards the house. I knew what he was thinking. He wanted to get Nicole and get the hell out of Dodge while the getting was good.
I grabbed his arm to focus his attention back on me. “Brendon, you’ve seen what’s on the other side of that wall, right?” He nodded. “How far do you think you’d get?” He still wasn’t convinced. “There’s nowhere to go, yet.” He looked back at me, all of his hope fixated on that one small word, ‘yet.’
“Now listen,” I said to them both. “I have a plan for when...” And I stressed ‘when.’ “… this wall is breached, but it depends on all of us making it back to the house. Once the zombies are in the compound it’s going to be everyone for themselves. As hard as it might be, I don’t give a shit what else is happening, when I tell you to get your asses back to the house, you’ll do just that. Don’t stop for anything or anybody. You two are my responsibility. If one of you decides to take matters into his own hands, I will have to go and find you. Now if something happens to one of you and to me, all of my plans go down the shitter.” This is when I drove my point home. “Now if I’m gone, you’ve sealed Mom’s, Nicole’s Justin’s and Tommy’s fate, not to mention Henry. When I say home, we ALL go!”
For the moment the boys crowded so close to me we looked like some humanoid form of octopi. That was just fine with me. We climbed up the nearest tower. It was forty yards from the house. Even at a slow trot we should be able to make it home in under ten seconds. That was little solace as I turned my gaze away from my home and into the crevice of psychosis.
“Glad you could make it,” Alex said as he clapped my shoulder.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I replied.
Alex looked at me, trying to decide if I were serious or not. I let him keep wondering as I shouldered my rifle.
Four hours later, my shoulder throbbed, my back ached, my trigger finger was having muscles spasms and still they plodded on. This wasn’t a battle in the traditional sense. We shot firearms, they caught lead. There was no battle cry, no call to arms, no rallying, no retreating, no strategy. Just onward, relentless, implacable, obdurate, pitiless forward momentum. Those that fell weren’t heroically pulled up and treated in the rear echelons. They didn’t cry out in vain. They didn’t scream for their mothers or a nonpartisan god, Buddha or Hare fucken Krishna. They fell like cordwood, hundreds upon hundreds of men, women and children. I couldn’t convince myself, no matter how much I tried, to shoot a child. I knew instinctually that they weren’t human and if given the chance they would eat me alive, but I could not bring myself to shoot anything under four feet tall. I made sure to always keep my aiming point higher than that. My nightmares were going to have nightmares already. I was not going to compound it any further.
So far the merciless gunfire had kept the zombies from reaching the walls, but that was going to change real soon. It had been a stalemate so far, our lead for their bodies. It had been light out, we had been well rested and still stocked with plenty of ammunition. All the pros in our corner were as rapidly retreating as the sun over the Rockies. Every able-bodied person with a gun had been manning these walls and we had done little more than delay the inevitable. With darkness came fatigue and hunger and hell, probably even shock and trauma. As people peeled away from their posts the zombies gained precious inches.
I had finally been able to stretch out my trigger finger although I was now suspecting it might always include a perceptible hook. Travis was leaning against the far side of the railing his head drooping ever so slightly and his eyes following suit. Brendon wasn’t faring much better. When I had first been exposed to combat in Afghanistan I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a week. The rampaging fear and adrenaline rush commingled into one hell of a toxic stimulant, but it came at an extreme price to your system. The crash was a near catatonic state. I could sleep for almost forty-eight hours straight after a firefight. I knew what was coming. The boys would have to learn the hard way.
“Brendon, take Travis and head back to the house,” I told him. He may have wanted to argue but he was already riding down the other side of the adrenalin slope. He clapped Travis on the shoulder and motioned towards the house. Travis looked back at me and I nodded my approval. “I’ll be there soon,” I assured him.
The fifteen or so people that had started the day on this platform were now whittled down to three. Myself, Alex and a third guy I didn’t remember ever seeing before.
“Some day, huh?” Alex said as he slid down to sit next to me.
“I’ve had better,” I answered in a serious tone.
Again Alex just looked at me trying to ascertain my true meaning.
“I’m sorry,” I laughed. “It’s my New England sarcasm coming out in full force.” Folks that don’t come from that region have a difficult time truly understanding what is being said to them. Many will find it an abrasive form of communication. It is, without a doubt, an acquired mode of information dissemination.
Alex appreciated my honesty. “So how do you think it went?” he asked.
“About how I expected,” I told him. He kept looking for more so I elaborated. It was much easier talking now that most of the gunfire had fell off to some sporadic shots. “You can do the math as well as I can, Alex. This is a lesson in futility. We’ll be out of ammo in a few days, a week at most. Then, I don’t know, the food might hold out for a month and then what, we can’t go anywhere.”
“What about the truck? Couldn’t we fill it with as many people as possible and just run the smelly bastards over?” Alex asked with a glimmer of hope.
“You gonna pick who stays and who goes?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
“We could do a lottery or something.”
“Yeah that’ll go over well, you better hope all the ammo is gone before you make that little proposition. Besides it won’t work.”
Alex looked to me to question the validity of my statement.
