Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (17 page)

“Well, if you were to open that door you’re
heading for and look across the street, past the small copse of
woods, you would basically run into her last known whereabouts,” I
told her.

I could tell that opening the door had
suddenly lost some of its luster. Zombies were a nightmare, which
many people had not been able to wrap their minds around and had
paid the ultimate price for that disconnect. Vampires, well
basically the same path, but you had to go a lot deeper into the
woods, so to speak.

“Did Mike tell you he was a half-vamp?” Gary
said, still fingering the bandages.

“What?” Mary said, almost falling over
herself to get away from me.

“You’re not helping, Gary. How hard did that
bullet hit?”

“Way cool!” Josh said, coming to get a better
look at the circus attraction.

“Stay away from him!” Mary shouted, but I
didn’t know if she was talking to him or me.

“Do you drink blood?” Josh asked excitedly.
He may have heeded his mother’s words and stopped his advance, but
his curiosity was unbridled.

“No, but I’ve got this thing for Pop-Tarts
now,” I told him honestly.

“He has a psychic link to Eliza,” Gary added
absently.

I thought Mary was going to faint. “Gary,
feel free to shut the hell up whenever you want,” I told him.

“What? She has a right to know.”

“Does your friend out there turn into like
Big Foot or something?” Josh asked. “I mean because I saw him
running down the street and he was HUGE!” Josh said, spreading his
hands as far apart as he could.

“No, but that would be cool,” I told
Josh.

“Yeah, it really would be,” he agreed,
nodding as he answered.

“Does she know you’re here?” Mary asked
cautiously. She kept eyeing the door anxiously as if she expected
her to bust through at any moment.

“No,” I answered.

“How can you be so sure?” Mary asked.

“Things would be way worse,” Gary said. “I
really only have a scratch?” he asked her.

“Oh, honey,” Mary said reverting back to her
caregiver status. “But it really is a nasty looking scratch.”

I don’t know if she was a trooper and had
assimilated the information and was dealing with it or she just
chose to push it down deeper into her psyche. Not my call, but
whatever gets you through the day can’t be all bad.

“Can we still go on with the plan?” I asked
Mary. She seemed to have lost herself in Gary’s wound. “I’ll take
that as a yes,” I said to Josh.

“I would,” he agreed with me.

“You think it’s better to drag this behind
rather than tie it to the top?” I asked Josh for maybe the third
time.

“Even for an adult, you don’t listen well,”
he admonished me. “I’ll tell you once again, this car has no top or
bottom to tie anything onto. If it were to flip, it would get stuck
on the clothes, like a turtle.”

“That makes sense,” I told him.

“That’s what you said the first two times I
told you,” he said.

“Hey, cut me some slack, kid, I’m the one
running with the zombies. I’m a little nervous.”

“I guess I would be too,” he answered,
thinking about it.

“Gary, I know you’re head is probably still
aching, and you might be woozy and everything, but do you think you
could lay down some covering fire if I were to say, trip over
something?”

Gary was fighting back a comment. I could see
the machinations behind his eyes working frantically, but
apparently higher reasoning or a higher purpose took over. “I don’t
think this is a good idea, Mike, but I’ll always have your back,”
he said, getting up, even with Mary’s disapproving stare.

I nodded my thanks to him. I stuffed Gary’s
bandages and bloody shirt into a laundry bag, secured the top and
then tied a nylon rope from the neck of the bag to a strut on
Josh’s car.

I opened a window and immediately regretted
my decision. The smell that assailed us was hideous, the sour
stench of death. Josh hurled his peanut butter and oatmeal
sandwich. It looked pretty much the same coming up as it had going
down. I would not be adding that to my list of foods to try.

“You going to be alright?” I asked him as I
lowered the car by the laundry bag rope to the ground.

I could hear Gary gagging in the background;
Josh started back up. “Great,” I muttered, “dueling gaggers.” My
support system was not looking up to task.

Mary saved the day. “You two are going to
ruin my carpet!” she yelled, getting up to clean Josh’s internal
spillings.

A zombie startled the crap out of me as he
smacked into the bars. It had come dangerously close to stepping on
the car. More zombies were coming to investigate the din and they
weren’t generally too concerned with foot placement.

“Josh, you have to get that car out of here,
or they’re gonna bust it,” I said. That seemed to get him. The
smell was one thing, but losing one of his remote-controlled cars
was another.

The zombie was eyeing us hungrily (pun
intended). It was tough to say if intelligence burned behind its
opaque eyes, but this was no clodhopping brain chaser either. Josh
gulped loudly as he looked straight at the zombie.

“Umm, I have to get closer to the window so I
can see the car,” Josh told me as he turned his large remote
on.

“Cover your ears,” I told him.

Mary was coming back from the kitchen with
her cleaning supplies. “Don’t you dare!” she screamed just as the
report from my rifle rang out.

“COOL!” Josh yelled, taking his hands away
from around his ears.

The zombie had fallen mostly straight back,
but its left arm was resting on top of the car.

“No shooting in the house!” Mary yelled.

“I’ll keep that in mind, the next time,” I
told her honestly. Zombies were within a couple of feet of the
window. “Josh, now or never, buddy.”

I’ll give him credit. He mustered up all his
courage and stepped up to the window. And then nothing, I saw him
moving buttons back and forth and side to side and we could hear
the car trying to do something, but the zombie had it pinned.

“I think I can get it free,” Josh said
excitedly, up until the point a zombie woman cracked it in half.
Josh looked more crushed than the car that was now getting ground
into the dirt.

I quickly undid the knot on the small laundry
bag and shut the window, drawing the shades and pulling the
curtains shut.

“Well, that didn’t work,” I said, going into
the kitchen, I sat down heavily in a chair.

“Josh, honey, are you alright?” Mary said,
putting her cleaning supplies down to grab her son in a bear
hug.

Josh wept a little, but he tried his best to
hide it from us all.

“It was a gift from his father,” Mary said
over his head to me.

I can’t even begin to convey how big of an
ass I felt at this point. If you’ve read all of my journals, you
know I have a penchant for saying or doing the wrong thing at the
ultimate wrong time, but this one? This one took the cake.

“What…what am I going to do if…if Da…Dad
comes home with the parts for it now?” Josh sobbed into his
mother’s arms.

“Josh, he’d understand. You were trying to do
something good for someone else; you guys would rebuild it, that’s
all, honey,” Mary said. She seemed to have correctly punched all
the right buttons. Josh pulled back from her arms, wiping his tears
away.

“I’ve got another car, Mr. Talbot, if you
want to try again, that is,” he said to me.

“I would, Josh. My friend is out there and
I’d like to find him.”

“I understand because if I knew where my dad
was, I’d try to find him too,” Josh said, wiping his nose and
extricating himself from Mary’s arms. “I’ll be right back,” he
said, heading back upstairs.

Mary let out a half sob, half gasp. “I’m
watching him grow up right before my eyes. Sometimes, he’ll always
be my sweet six-year-old, and then sometimes like now, I can see
the man that he is becoming.”

Gary finished cleaning up the carpet as Josh
rummaged around in his room.

Josh came down the stairs with what looked
like the monster truck version of a radio-controlled vehicle.

“Oh, honey are you sure?” Mary asked, placing
her hand to her chest. “That was a Christmas present.”

“Mom, Hugo is the best chance Mr. Talbot has
of getting to his friend.”

I gathered that Hugo was the name of the
truck. “Josh, I don’t know how this is going to turn out.”

“He never does,” Gary added for good measure,
coming back from the kitchen.

“I thought the peanut gallery was closed?” I
said hotly.

“Boys,” Mary said, playing referee.

“It’s alright, Mr. Talbot. Maybe if you find
your friend, then you could go and maybe find my dad.”

I looked over at Mary. I would be lying if I
said anything but the truth of where I thought his father was.

“I know that look,” Josh said. “You don’t
think my dad is alive. But he has to be! He wouldn’t have just left
us, not now.”

“Josh, I will promise you this, if I can get
to my friend and get back, I will go check out where you think your
dad went.”

“Electronix Emporium,” Josh said quickly, now
beaming. “No fooling? You’ll go check?”

“He’s a lot of things and many of them not
good, Josh, but a liar isn’t one of them,” Gary said.

“Gotta love a good, back-handed compliment,”
I told my brother.

He nodded his head in appreciation.

We moved to a different window on the same
side of the house, one where we hoped there would be less zombies.
We were right, but then we encountered our next situation - Hugo
would not fit through the bars.

“It’s almost like it wasn’t meant to happen,”
Gary said. “Like a sign, a bunch of signs.”

“Since when did you become a fortune teller?”
I asked him sarcastically.

“Since my fortune got tied up in yours,” he
answered quickly.

“As good a time as any, I suppose,” I told
him.

“It’s only going to fit out the door,” Josh
said, slamming the window down before we attracted any more
visitors.

“I’d rather not open any doors,” Mary
said.

“How were you planning on letting me out?” I
asked.

“Hadn’t thought that far,” Mary said, as
realization dawned on her that she really hadn’t gotten that
far.

“See what happens when you’re around him for
too long?” Gary asked sympathetically.

“Is that like his vampire psychic powers
warping our mortal minds?” Josh asked expectantly.

“No, he’s always had this effect on people,”
Gary said dryly.

Josh looked a little bummed that it wasn’t a
supernatural cause that made those around me go crazy.

“Back door for the car, front door for me?” I
asked the household.

“No,” Mary said without hesitation. “I will
not have both of my doors opened simultaneously. You don’t even
know if this will work. We put the car out, Josh sends it on its
way and we see if they follow.”

I didn’t like the plan. At absolute best, the
car had a hundred-yard range with Josh’s controller and then it
would just stop. I needed a bunch of zombies to go and check this
thing out and in a relatively small amount of time before the car
hit its max threshold for signal-catching. I should have given the
kid way more credit. He had a trick or two up his sleeve to give me
the time I needed.

“How we looking?” I asked Gary and Josh, who
were peeking out a window adjacent to the door.

“There’s a few milling around, but if you
don’t stop to wash your hands or anything, you should be fine,”
Gary said.

“You’re on fire tonight,” I told him.

He grinned back.

“You ready, Josh?” I asked.

He spun the wheels on the truck I was holding
in response. The torque and the shock almost made me drop the
thing. This time, I had secured the small bag of bait on the top of
the car, careful to make sure that nothing hung down that could get
hooked up in the wheels.

“This sucks,” I said right before pulling the
door open. Zombie heads swiveled to the noise, food recognition
dawning on their eyes as they began to forge ahead. I started to
fumble with the security door, which was, I guess, out of my skill
set because I couldn’t get the damn thing open. Mary rushed to my
aid, undoing the lock and pushing the door open. I looked at her in
gratitude.

“Put the damn car down!” she shouted at me,
never taking her eyes off the advancing horde.

Josh already had the wheels turning as I
placed it on the ground. The car shot from my hand as it made
contact with the hard surface. A zombie slammed the door into my
hand. I was sure I felt a couple of bones shatter as Mary wrenched
me on my back, pulling me in. She quickly locked the screen door,
and I scrambled out of the way as she hurriedly shut the front
door.

My hand was already turning that bluish shade
of pain and internal bleeding.

“You righty or lefty?” Mary asked, holding my
hand.

“Righty,” I told her, “but I shoot
leftie.”

Her face sank a little as she held my rapidly
swelling left hand.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I have wonderful
recuperative powers.”

She looked at me funny; I did not feel the
need to elaborate.

“Mike, your hand is broken,” she said,
pushing her finger into the bluest part as if to prove her
point.

“Yup,” I winced.

“Hey, they’re following it!” Josh stated
exuberantly.

I figured I only had seconds before the car
had traveled its furthest radio-receiving distance and then they’d
turn their attention back to me.

“Wish me luck,” I said as I once again opened
the front door. Hand Slammer was gone this time and I had, at
least, learned something from Mary as I got the security door
opened much more easily. I looked immediately to my right,
expecting to see Hugo rapidly approaching maximum distance. All I
saw were zombies who were heading towards the side of the house. I
ducked my head back in, Josh and Gary had shifted to another
window. The kid was brilliant. Instead of just taking the car and
heading for maximum distance, he was dodging and weaving it through
the zombies, thereby giving me way more time to get the hell out of
here.