Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (22 page)

The house was pitched in darkness; Paul
expected no less. He did a quick scan of the entry room and then
immediately opened up the drawn shades to let in some much needed
diffused curtain light. Dried blood coated the far wall and even
abundantly dotted the ceiling. Bits of matter, the origin of which
he cared not to dwell upon, littered the small throw rug and wood
floor.

Paul looked out the door. His traveling
companion was still making her way towards him, but was still an
extremely safe distance off. Paul still felt a powerful urge to
shut the door though and try his best to put her out of his mind.
But he feared that a much more mobile threat might still be lurking
in the household and he wanted to be able to get out as soon as
possible. Against his better judgment, he left the front door
open.

“You make sure to ring the bell before you
come in!” he shouted at the zombie.

She did not either confirm or deny her
intention.

Paul kept his rifle out in front of him as he
went from room to room. At this point, it was no more than an early
detection system as the barrel would strike something first, but as
a weapon, it was almost useless. He wouldn’t even be able to get a
good full extension on his swing in these tight quarters. The house
was a disaster, but from the looks of it, not by looters. A battle
had been waged here, but the chunks of fingers and bits of bone
scattered around led him to rightly believe that the zombies had
come out victorious in this round. Animals had done a fair amount
of damage also, getting to anything in a carton or box, Paul
laughed a little as he stepped on a small pile of Sugar Smacks.

“I guess even raccoons have enough sense to
stay away from that stuff,” he said to the empty room. As he got
past the kitchen and further into the house, the smell of disuse
became prevalent. It wasn’t the overwhelming stink of the dead or
the undead, just stagnant water, mold, mildew and old food. He
never thought he would be thankful for those odors. Blood was the
dominant color as he entered into the aptly named dining room.

“This must have been the last stand,” he said
reverently. A small candelabra was on the ground, with matted
bloody hair stuck to the bottom. “About as good a weapon as my
own,” he said as he made sure to step around it. The copious amount
of blood on the floor was strewn with footprints and animal tracks.
Some were hand-like, paw prints of raccoons, but the more
disturbing were the various sized prints of dogs. Paul had a
healthy fear of dogs since he had been bitten as a youth. But they
all looked old, human, zombie and animal alike. The blood had dried
long ago and it appeared that nothing currently shared the house
with him.

He did one more run-through of the entire
first floor of the ranch. Thankful that the small home did not have
a second floor. He locked the basement door on the first pass by.
He blamed his sprained ankle and the pain it would cause to go
downstairs on his decision to lock the door, but mostly he was just
afraid of going down there. The basement from his vantage point on
the top of the stairs, did not appear to have any ambient lighting
coming in and he couldn’t see the point in stumbling around in the
dark looking for anything, especially when he didn’t know what was
down there, if anything worthwhile.

Paul went into the bathroom. The medicine
cabinet was opened, but surprisingly it looked like everything was
still there. He pulled down a bottle of aspirin and immediately
gulped down three of them, sticking the rest of the bottle in his
pocket. Stomach pills, flu medicine, cough syrup, hemorrhoid cream,
most of it was standard fare and everything but the cream ended up
in his pockets.

“Come on, everyone has unused meds
somewhere,” he said. Paul shut the mirror on the cabinet,
completely confident that he would suffer the same fate as every
horror movie ever produced in the last fifty years. Something would
be behind him as the mirror shut. His heart almost stopped when he
realized the cliché he was performing. “Not enough scary shit going
on, I’ve got to see if I can drum up a few more quarts of
adrenaline.” Nothing was there, but his fear wasn’t quite abated,
he knew that you could not see the reflections of vampires. He
turned as quickly as his injured ankle would allow, it was not fast
enough. Whatever had been behind him was now gone, even if it was
all only in his imagination.

“No more mirrors,” he said, chiding himself.
“Kitchen cabinet or nightstand?” Paul headed for the master bedroom
in the small two-bedroom house. The first thing that struck him was
how neat the room was, even the bed was made. “Who makes their bed
in a zombie invasion?” Paul wished Mike were here to share this
moment. They’d definitely get a good laugh over it.

Paul shuffled over to the nightstand. A
molded-over mug of coffee stood alongside a lamp as the only
inhabitants on the top of the small nightstand. Paul pulled out a
book called
Indian Hill
by Mark Tufo that looked to be about
half read, judging by the bookmark. “Doesn’t look like they’ll ever
finish that,” he said as he tossed the book onto the bed.

“Bingo!” Paul said excitedly as he grabbed
four prescription bottles. The first was full of thumb tacks. “Okay
that’s not going to work,” he said, tossing it beside the discarded
book. The second was Xanax. He knew it was for anti-anxiety and
didn’t know how it was going to help in this present situation, but
he stuck it in his pocket.
The whole world is one giant anxiety
now
, he thought. The third contained painkillers. He opened up
the bottle and shook them out in his hand. “Eight, that should be
enough,” he said as he popped two in his mouth.

“Perfect!” he yelled sarcastically as he
shook the lone pill around in the bottle labeled Amoxicillin. It
was the right drug but the wrong quantity. “I do not want to do
this shit all day,” he complained. He quickly went into the
kitchen. Besides a lot of canned goods, there was nothing there
that would do him any good in his present situation. He grabbed a
small screwdriver he had seen in one of the drawers and sat down at
the table to see if he could get the jam in his rifle out. “Might
have been a good idea to do this first,” he said. He then moved his
chair when he realized he had his back to the front door. Paul had
just finished prying out the jammed cartridge when the first
effects of the painkillers began to take effect. “Now that’s what
I’m talking about,” he said as he stood, testing out his new
not-caringness on his injured ankle, for that’s all that
painkillers truly do, they numb the mind, not the injury.

Paul debated heading back to Brian with the
one antibiotic or setting out again to look for more. Would one
pill do anything? Or would it be akin to pissing on a forest fire?
He decided to keep looking. It would take him too long to hobble
back and then out again, and that’s if he didn’t need to take a nap
somewhere in the meantime. Paul was deep into the effects of his
prescription meds as he stepped out of the house. His first
footfall out of the house landed squarely in Stumpy’s mouth. Paul
toppled over as the zombie bit down hard on the toe of his boot.
Paul was halfway to meeting the pavement before his lagging mind
was able to catch up to the situation. He was thankful that it was
not his injured ankle in the zombie’s mouth, but that was about it
for the pros as his face raced to meet her injured leg.

His mouth opened in the exclamatory O shape
as he got a face full of zombie calf. He knew without a doubt you
got the zombie virus from being bitten, but what are the
repercussions from the other way around? he thought as he tasted
her vileness upon his lips. Paul twisted around and over, as did
Stumpy. She had a good hold of his boot top and was not going to
yield her prize. “Fucking bitch!” Paul yelled as he brought his
right foot down on the top of her head. He immediately regretted
his decision, three more pain pills would not have been able to
mask the intense pain his ankle brought from the jolting contact
with her skull.

Pain was his all-consuming thought as he
swayed from side to side on the ground. Stumpy stayed with him,
move for move. As the pain level came to a manageable point, he
tried to crawl away, but the zombie was having no part of it. Her
mouth had not left his boot as she tried to gnash her way through
the heavy material, but her arms had come up and she wrapped her
hands around the bottom of his leg.
Death by crawler
, Paul
thought,
Mike’s going to love this
.

The rifle!
The idea ripped into his
thoughts.
But I can’t even swing it, like this.
Paul whined
in response to himself. Even Paul’s psyche was let down by his
inability to reason together a workable escape plan. “Oh yeah, I
fixed the jam!” Paul said with elation. Paul’s subconscious did a
small, sarcastic jig in celebration. It would be tough to miss from
this distance even for Paul, but whether from lack of judgment or
impeded painkiller judgment, Paul did not take into account what
was on the other side of Stumpy’s head, namely his boot. The relief
of having Stumps fall to the side was immediately replaced by the
pain in his foot where he had just lodged his bullet.

“Are you fucking kidding me!” he spat. Paul
rolled violently from side to side, not caring that half his
movement brought him into contact with the newly departed Stumps.
“So much for Saturday night dancing!” he shouted at the top of his
lungs. The endorphins released from the volume helped to diminish
the pain, but not nearly enough. Paul finally looked down at his
foot. Blood was pumping out from the bullet hole in the top of his
boot at an alarming rate.
I always thought if I died from a
self-inflicted gunshot wound, it would be something a little
further north
, he thought as he crawled back over to the front
door so that he could sit on the stoop and access how much damage
he really had incurred.

As he pulled himself up, he reached into his
pocket and immediately downed another two painkillers. He debated
waiting for them to take effect before doing what needed to be
done, but thought better of it because he could possibly bleed out
before that happened. Paul undid the laces, feeling strangely
detached as he did so. The boot came off without a hitch; it was
the sock that was proving difficult. Not that it was stuck to
anything, but rather he just didn’t want to see what lay hidden
beneath it.

“Ours is not to question why, but rather to
do or to die. Why the hell am I quoting Tennyson?” Paul asked
himself as he looked down on his blood-soaked sock. His next
question to himself paralyzed him with fear.
I just shot myself
with a bullet that went through a zombie.
Paul ripped the sock
off, the webbing between his second and third toe had a nice round
hole blown right through it.
No bones, that’s good.
Paul
couldn’t figure out how he was going to get up and on which leg he
could stand. He opted to crawl on his hands and knees to the
fridge. The only thing reasonably viable in there were the cans of
diet Sprite. “Can’t hurt any more than it does now,” he said,
grabbing four of the cans. He moved over to the kitchen chair and
opened the cans, dumping the entire contents on his injured foot,
hoping that it would somehow disinfect the wound.

“Does aspartame have any antiseptic
qualities?” Paul asked his wound. It wept some foamy pinkish fluid
onto the floor in response. “Doesn’t look like a wound that would
be my undoing.”

Paul was stuck in indecision. He was
effectively hobbled with a right sprained ankle and a left foot
with a bullet wound in it. A rifle with exactly two rounds, no
antibiotics and enough pain pills that he might not even feel a
bullet to the brain if he went down that road.

“Whoa where’d that come from?” he asked the
air. “Fuck! I’d probably miss.” And then he started laughing; he
almost choked, he was laughing so hard. “Okay what are my options?
I can try to get back to Deneaux and let her know what happened.”
He dwelled on that for a second. “No good, she’d shoot me as soon
as I said I was infected. I could try to find Mike. He’d at least
wait until I changed over before he shot me. No, I’m not doing that
either. Plan C.” Paul gimped over to the front door, shut it
securely, locked it tight and sat back at the kitchen table. “Hell,
if I’m going to turn into a zombie, I’m doing it with some style.”
He took one more pain killer, rationing the rest off for later that
night.

Chapter
Eleven - Ron’s

Travis had pulled up a recliner and fallen
asleep by Ron’s shortwave radio. Tracy put down her cup of coffee
to drape a small blanket around her son.

“You should get some sleep too,” Ron said,
coming into the room.