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Authors: Kelly M. Hudson

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The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (7 page)

BOOK: The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead
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It took a while, but she finally
got his shoe free.  When she did, she punted the head into the corner of the
office and smiled grimly at Jeff.

“Let’s get out of here,” she
said.  He nodded, still out of it.  She offered her hand and he took it and she
led him from the room, taking the hammer and shotgun with her.  When they were
out, she shut the door and guided Jeff to one of the tables in the small dining
area.  She sat him down and returned to the door, moving a few crates of boxed
food stuffs to block the entrance.  When she finished, she sat down on the
boxes and sighed.

Jeff was staring at her, still in
shock.

She walked to him and stroked his
hair softly.  Jeff did not respond.  He didn’t have a thought in his head; it
was like his mind had simply shut down. 

After sitting like that for a
while, Jenny went on a search, found a couple of blankets and a pillow, brought
them back, and made a small nest under the table where they were sitting.  She
got Jeff down to the ground and lay next to him, putting his head on her
shoulder.  Jeff did everything she wanted but was otherwise unresponsive.

An hour later, serenaded by the
constant scratching and moaning of the living dead, they both fell into a deep,
haunted sleep.

 

6

 

Jeff woke first, several hours
later, his catatonia over, replaced now by an unrelenting grief.  He’d killed
two men.  Shot them dead in cold blood. 

His sobbing woke Jenny, who
wrapped an arm around him and hugged him.

Some time later, they both fell
asleep again.

 

“I killed him,” Jeff said.  He was
still propped up in her arms, morning light streaming through the cracks in the
doors. 

“You had to.  They were going to
get us.” 

“No,” he said.  “Not them.  I
mean, I did kill them, but I killed someone else, too.  A long time ago.”
Jenny went silent for a moment. 

“This isn’t the part where you
reveal you were a psycho all along, is it?” she said, grinning.  “I’ve had a
couple of crazy boyfriends.  I don’t know if I can take another.”
He smiled, despite himself.

“No.  I’m afraid you’re stuck with
me, dear,” he said.

His smile faded as he wrestled
with what he was going to say.  After a few minutes of awkward silence, he
blurted it out. 

“My Dad,” he said.  “I shot my Dad
when I was a kid.”

“Oh,” she said. 

“He used to take me hunting,” Jeff
said.  “When I was little, up until I was ten years old.  He taught me how to
shoot a gun.  All kinds of guns:  rifles, shotguns, pistols.  My father was a
real outdoorsman.  He showed me how to start a fire rubbing two sticks
together.  Lots of kids my age were in the Cub Scouts or the Boy Scouts.  I
didn’t need anything like that.  My dad was a walking, talking, living and
breathing How-To-Survive-In-The-Wilderness Guide.”

“He sounds like a good father,”
she said.

 “He was, right up until I shot
him dead,” Jeff said.

Jeff was silent, waiting for Jenny
to say something.  When she didn't, he continued. 

“It was a hunting accident.  We
were out looking for deer and I had a rifle and he went up ahead of me and I
lost track of him and got a little turned around because the brush was so thick
where we were, and then a deer bolted out in front of me and you should have
seen it.  It was one of the most beautiful bucks I’d ever seen.  I remember the
thought flashing through my head that if I bagged this deer, Dad would be so
proud.  So I raised my gun and fired, on instinct.  Only the deer was so fast,
I missed.”
“Your dad was on the other side of it,” she said, finishing his thought.

Tears rolled down Jeff’s cheeks. 

“My mom, she never forgave me. 
She started drinking at the funeral and never stopped.  She used to beat me and
scream at me and blame me for ruining her life,” he said. 

“I’m so sorry,” Jenny said.

“I was smart enough to know it was
an accident.  But I still killed him.  I swore I’d never pick up a gun again. 
And I never did, not until today.  And what’s the first thing I do?  I kill two
men,” he shook his head.  “I'm nothing but a murderer.”

Jenny pushed him up off her
shoulder and bolted to her feet.  She stared down at him, that cold look he’d
seen before in her eyes came back, beaming out icy rays of death. 

“Get over it,” she said.  He stared
up at her, confused.

“Get over it,” she said again.  “I
don’t know if you noticed, but the whole fucking world had fallen down around
us.  There’s dead people walking and everyone that’s left other than us seems
to be crazy.  We don’t have any more time for feeling sorry for ourselves.  We
can’t afford to.  We’re probably going to have to kill a lot more people before
it’s all over. So get the fuck over it and act like a man.”
She turned and walked over to the office and pulled down the boxes.  Jeff watched
her, stunned.  Then he got angry. 

“What the fuck is your problem?”
he snarled. 

“I don’t have a problem.  I have a
pussy.  You seem to be one,” she said.

Jeff hopped to his feet, all rage
and fury now, his arms spinning wildly around him as he gesticulated his anger.

“You’re one to talk.  All that
yapping you were doing when I threw you boyfriend out the window.  Maybe I
shouldn’t have listened and just given you a lecture, instead,” he said. 

Jenny spun and stomped over to
him. 

“Maybe you should have,” she
said.  “Maybe you should have told me to wake the fuck up.  But you did, in
your own way.  When you threw Bill off the balcony I had to face the facts. 
Bill wasn’t coming back.  Our old world wasn’t coming back.  All there was left
was zombies and us.  That’s it.  Me and you and a bunch of walking corpses. 
That’s all there was and that’s all there is.”

They were face to face, their
noses almost touching.  Her eyes were squinting and her mouth was pulled back
into a fierce scowl; his eyes were wide and his eyebrow arched, his lips
pressed together so tight they were white. 

“Fuck you,” he said.

“No.  Fuck you,” she said.

Their lips met.  They kissed. 
They smashed their bodies so hard together Jeff thought their bones would turn
to powder and their skin would meld.  He turned her around, grabbed her pants,
jerked them down to her ankles, her lace panties going with them, and bent her
over one of the tables behind him.  He shoved her down and held her there,
using his free hand to get his pants down, and rose up against her naked
buttocks.  He grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanked her back towards him so her
back was bowed, and he took her.  Hard.  She grunted and pushed back against
him, matching his thrusts, both of them screaming in a primal language.  She
pulled away, slapped his face and jumped up on him, forcing him to the ground
as she rode him, in charge now, raking her nails across his chest as she took
him and he took her.

When they came, it was together,
and it was so hard they both later said that they heard the glass in the
windows shatter. 

And then it was over, and they
slumped against each other, sweating and bleeding and panting.

And smiling.

 

It was some time later when they
recovered, neither saying a word about what had happened between them.  They’d
slept some, exhausted, but now it was time to get to work.

Wordlessly, they fortified the
broken window in the office, finding some nails and spare boards to seal it
up.  They boarded up the door, too, just in case.  After that, the two of them
went to the front doors of the building.  The doors were made of steel and
sturdy, with locks in both handles, latches at the top and bottom going into
the floor and ceiling to anchor them, and two deadbolts above the handles, crossing
the doors.  They nailed a board in each corner, just to add some reassurance. 
Outside the entrance, they heard the dead, their fingers scrabbling across the
surface, moaning and pressing against the doors.   

They went into the storage area
next and found, after discussing their earlier bout of sex, that indeed, the
windows in the back had exploded outward.  Glass littered the floor, gleaming
in the overhead fluorescent lights.  They looked around the room but found
nothing. 

Smoke drifted in through the
broken windows, one on the north side, the other on the south.  Most of the
smoke came from the south side.  Jeff went to look and Jenny joined him.  They
could see, slightly to their right and partially hidden by the Food Bank
building itself, their old apartment building burning down.  They watched for a
while as the flames licked and spat and sizzled and sparked, and then the fire
died down, having nowhere else to go, since the complex was surrounded by
concrete on either side. 

From the east, more smoke blew
towards them, thick and heavy. 

“Boost me up,” Jenny said.  She
used the hammer to smash out the remaining glass and clear the sill.

Jeff lifted her and she wiggled
halfway out the window.  Outside, against the wall, about level with his chest,
the scratching started.  He grabbed Jenny’s leg in a panic.

“It’s okay,” she said.  “The
ground slopes here.  I’m like three feet above them.”
He held her legs tight, anyway, ready to yank her back at a moment’s notice.

“What can you see?” he said.

Jenny squirmed back into the
room.  He gripped her hips and helped her down.

“Oakland is definitely burning,”
she said. 

“Oh.”
“It's closer than it was.  I don't know how much longer we have before it
reaches the island,” she said.
They walked to the back storage room and the rear exit.  Jeff looked out the
windows and could see the thick smoke out there.  He shrugged, unsure what they
should do. 

Seconds later, the dead were
outside the doors, scratching around where their feet were.  They were never
going to go away.

 

Later, he opened a can of beef
stew and they each ate a bowl, toasting some bread they found in a freezer. 
They chewed in silence, the only sound the moaning and scraping of the dead,
always there, just outside the walls.

 

Before they slept, they held each
other, their bellies full and their bodies tired.

“We need to think of a way out of
here,” he said.
Jenny fished in her pocket and pulled out a pair of keys.  She shook them so
they jangled.

“I got these in the office,” she
said.  “They go to that van out there.”

Jeff smiled. 

“You know how lucky you are to
know me?” she grinned.

“The luckiest bastard in the
world,” he said.  He leaned over and kissed her and pulled her close.

They were asleep in seconds.

 

In the middle of the night, Jeff
woke with a start.  He sat up and looked around, a sleek sheen of sweat coating
his body.  They’d left lights on in each corner of the big dining area so he
could see fairly well, but there were still pools of darkness here and there
that could hold any sort of danger.  They'd fallen asleep under one of the
tables, the shotgun at his side, the pistol at hers.

Only now, both guns were gone. 
And so was the hammer.

He slid from under the table and
stared off to his left and his right.  Nothing moved, nothing made a sound, but
the dead, still at the doors and windows, still searching for a way in.

Jeff listened.  Other than the
whispers of the living dead moving around, there was nothing.  Until the man
spoke.

“You killed Clint and Howie,” he
said. 

Jeff flinched, waking Jenny.  She
moaned and rolled over.  He shook her and she came awake and sat up next to
him.

Across from them, in a pool of
darkness, a match struck, a cigarette lit and for a moment, a small, old face
flared to life.  Then it was gone.

“Who is that?” Jeff said.

“They were my friends,” the man
said.  Jeff watched, following the burning red tip of the cigarette as it
worked from mouth to down by his side.

“What do you want?” Jeff said.  He
squinted into the dark pool but could see nothing.  Only the red dot, burning
and moving, up and down.

“I should kill you both,” he
said.  “I have your guns.  I have your pistol, pointed right at you.  I should
kill the two of you.”
“Please,” Jenny said.  “Just let us go.”
Puff.  Red dot brighter.  Exhale.  Red dot lower.  It moved up and down, up
and down. 

“We had it good in here.  Those
dead things, they stayed away.  We had food and company and a radio.  But you
fuckers, you came in and shot them dead and then came looking for me,” he said.

“Listen, they attacked us,” Jeff
said.  “We were just defending ourselves.”

“Then why’d you come looking for
me?” the man said, his voice harsh and rusty, whether from the cigarette or
age, Jeff couldn’t tell.

“We were checking to see if any
zombies were here,” Jenny said.  “That’s all.”
“Why would there be zombies in here with my two friends?  That don’t make
sense, bitch,” the man said.

“Hey, watch it,” Jeff said.

“Or what?  You going to shoot me
and then cry about it?” the man said.  He laughed, the chuckle sounding like
someone broke a brittle and dry stick over their knee.  “That’s right.  I heard
you.  What a baby.  Oh, poor dear.  You killed your daddy.”  The man took a
deep drag and then ground out the cigarette.  “Oh, and I heard and saw it all,
too.  I watched you two fuck.  Yes I did.”
“You’re sick,” Jenny said.

“I jacked off.  You didn’t even
hear me.  But I watched and jacked off.  I don’t normally go for slant-eyed
cunts, but seeing as there isn’t any other women around, I figure I could go
for you,” the man said.

Jeff held his hands up.  “There’s
no cause for that,” he said.  “We didn’t mean to kill your friends and we’re
sorry we holed-up in your place.  But do you hear that?  The scratching? 
They’re out there.  We had no choice.”

Silence.  Jeff stared hard at the
darkness but nothing moved.  He wished the guy would smoke again.  At least
that would give him a reference point to focus on.  As it was, since the man
was so silent, it was almost like he was a ghost.

“What’s your name?” Jenny said.

Silence.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” she
said.  “What’s your name?”
There was another blanket of quiet, then he spoke.

“Dan,” he said.

“Dan.  I’m Jenny, and this is
Jeff.”

“I know your fucking names.”
“Well, we’re sorry for everything, but we don’t mean you any harm,” Jenny
said.  “And we need you right now.  We need to stick together.  All those
zombies are out there and we don’t stand a chance if we fight with each other.”

“But you killed Clint and Howie,”
Dan said.

“It was an accident,” Jenny said. 

Jeff watched her.  She was
amazing, so calm, so self-assured.  She wasn’t the least bit phased by what Dan
had been saying.  The man had talked about watching them have sex, for God’s
sake, and she didn’t bat an eye.

“Maybe,” Dan said.  “Maybe.  If
you give me a blowjob, I’ll think about it.”
Rage flared in Jeff.  He stood up suddenly and pointed at the dark blob.

BOOK: The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead
13.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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