Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (35 page)

I was more inclined to send him packing for a
few minutes, but I don’t think he was going to do any heart to
heart talking with Deneaux anytime soon.

“What’s going on, Mike?” BT asked. “I caught
some of her conversation with Mary, but I kept drifting in and out.
All I could really tell is that she wants to get out of here as
quick as possible.”

“It’s nothing concrete, BT, but she’s trying
to cover her tracks.” I related the story of finding Brian and how
he was facing away AFTER she had called him, and how she now was in
possession of Paul’s rifle. I also mentioned how she had said she
was alone, but the house she was staying in provided clues to the
contrary. “It’s nothing but a suspicion, but she did something
she’s trying to cover up and she wants us to leave the scene of the
crime before we turn up any evidence.”

“Brian’s dead,” BT said wiping his hand down
his face. “Man, I almost don’t want to go back to your brother’s
and see what this does to Cindy.”

“I cannot leave here until I know about Paul.
There’s no way I could look Erin in the face and tell her that I
have absolutely no clue what happened to her husband and my best
friend.”

“So Brian was a zombie? Why lie about
anything to do with that then?” BT asked confused. “Could the
bullet have spun him around or anything?”

I looked over to Josh before I replied. “Exit
wound was on his face.”

“Gross,” Josh said, I agreed implicitly.

“She’s acting so shifty, even more so than
usual. I don’t have a good feeling about Paul.” I hitched a little,
I’m still mostly human I thought, I’m still entitled to have
feelings. “I’ve known him for thirty years. I owe it to him at the
very least to find out what happened.”

“You’ve got to prepare yourself for the real
possibility that he is no longer with us,” BT said tenderly.

“I know that man, I do. With a rifle, Paul
wasn’t a huge threat; well without…” I didn’t, I couldn’t finish
the damn sentence.

“I’d like to head out with you in the
morning,” BT said. “Help look for him.”

“Me too,” Josh threw in before I could even
tell BT no.

“No, on both counts.”

“You gonna stop me?” BT said, trying to rise
up off the bed and use his height advantage as a mitigating
factor.

“BT, Josh could stop you right now.”

Josh looked over at me like maybe I shouldn’t
be throwing him under the bus quite like that.

“Dammit, Mike! I’m as weak as you right now,”
BT said, cursing. “I can barely move.”

I didn’t rise to his bait, I did think about
putting him in a headlock though, just because I thought I could
probably take him. But merely to gaze upon the man is to feel
intimidation. “You sure you never played in the NFL?”

“Why? Because I’m big and I’m black?” BT said
with some force.

I thought about it. “Well, yeah.”

He laughed. “Played some college ball, had
some pro scouts interested. It never went any further.”

And he dropped it, I don’t know if there was
no more to add or he didn’t want to talk about it.

“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” Josh
asked.

“No way, kiddo,” I told him. “Your mom, if
given the chance, would throw me out into the street in front of a
convoy.”

“A what?” Josh asked.

“A bunch of trucks,” BT clarified. “And he’s
right. It’s too dangerous out there for you.”

“I’m almost twelve,” Josh said, making it
sound as authoritative as possible.

“Yeah, and I’m sure you’re going to want to
make thirteen,” I told him. And then reality with its ugly iron
fist hit me with an uppercut. What really is the rest of his life
going to encompass? Eventually, they are going to run out of food
and they will have to leave their relatively safe haven and neither
seemed to have the skills to scavenge in a hostile world.
Basically, they were living on borrowed time.

That didn’t mean I was taking him with me on
a learning expedition, but I still felt for the kid and his mother.
Her ex-husband, his father, was gone (
much like Paul
, crept
in. I squashed it heavily, but the thought kept peeking from around
the edges) and he wasn’t coming back. How many “families” were
there still out there like this? Isolated, each its own island of
remoteness. There could still be a salvageable community in this
city, but they would never be able to become cohesive. There was no
communication, no ability to seek others out. The populace would be
too fearful to create bonds anyway. There might be a few brave
souls like Mary that would open a door to a stranger, but she was
in the minority. We were just as lucky she hadn’t shot us
instead.

Between zombies and criminally opportunistic
humans, the world was merely a shell. The day of humans as the
dominant species on the planet was coming to close and it was just
as violently dangerous and deadly as the great comet strike that
took out the dinosaurs two hundred million years ago. There would
be a few viable communities still intact, places like Little Turtle
or Easter Evans School, but as the zombies’ resources became fewer
and fewer, they would seek these last food zones out relentlessly.
Nothing would be able to withstand that type of onslaught.

Ultimately, the zombies and Eliza would have
won, but what was the prize? She would rule a planet of mindless
eating machines. I can’t imagine she had thought this out
completely. She gets off on the power she holds over people and the
fear she instills in their hearts. Zombies didn’t care, at all,
they eat. And make no mistake, we would be just like every other
extinct species on the planet, gone and for good. Seen any
Tasmanian wolves lately? Maybe a dodo bird or two? There is no
species regeneration. And Eliza and Tomas would hardly qualify as
Adam and Eve.

Would she live long enough to see another
sentient being rise from the ashes of our deaths? Would dolphins
come ashore and finally take their rightful place as care-takers of
the land? Would zombies give anything a chance to get a foothold?
They ate everything. They were worse than locusts. They stripped
the land clean of every type of animal. Looks like it was going to
be the age of plants. I hope Eliza likes roses.

I had spent the last few seconds mulling over
my dark thoughts when Josh interrupted me. Maybe the kid had an
idea what he was in for. “I will be thirteen. I miss my dad, but I
know he’s not coming back. I don’t tell my mom that because she
needs to believe that I think he is. I need to see what it is like
out there. We won’t be able to stay here forever, no matter what my
mom says. Sometimes I think that she just doesn’t want to think
about it. I think about it every day. We’ve got maybe six months of
food and three months of bottled water, so what time are we
leaving?”

“You’re a realist, Josh, and I can appreciate
that,” I told him, and that was the honest truth. “But you’re not
my kid and the danger out there, it’s real. This isn’t a training
exercise. I would no sooner put you in any needless danger than I
would any of my own.”

Mary had at some point come up the stairs and
had been at Josh’s doorway while I spoke to him. She grudgingly
nodded at me for what I said to him, but she still didn’t want him
to be with me. The kid might have been thinking about going out at
some point while he was with his mother, but he had never before
voiced it. So again, something else was my fault by default.

“Come on, Josh. It’s time for bed,” Mary
said, grabbing her son by the shoulders, steering him towards his
bed.

It didn’t seem that late to me, but that
wasn’t what this was about anyway. I took one longing look at the
Lego’s I wanted to play with and headed downstairs, making sure
that BT led the way. If he fell down the stairs behind me, I’d be
crushed.

Mary came down a few minutes later. “I’d
appreciate if you didn’t put any wild thoughts in my son’s head,”
she said hotly.

“Those ‘wild thoughts’,” I told her with air
quotes and everything, “came from the mouth of your son without any
prompting from me.”

“He doesn’t understand what is going on!” she
yelled and then brought her voice down to that inside yelling tone,
cognizant of the fact that she had just put her offspring to
bed.

“I think you underestimate him. He
understands, probably even more so than you. He knows that his
father isn’t coming back, he understands that you have a finite
supply of food and water and more importantly, he understands that
as the man of the family, he is wholly unprepared to defend the
both of you. I’m not arguing in the least to take him with me,
Mary. I’m just telling you what is going through the boy’s head.
He’s growing up fast because he has to. Just because last year he
might have been playing with Pokemon cards and plastic dinosaurs
doesn’t mean he can’t comprehend the danger around him now.”

Mary sat down hard, I thought for sure she
was going to miss the couch completely, again. As it was, she had
to put her hand on the armrest to keep her ass from going to the
ground. After she had situated herself properly, she brought her
wet hand to her face. “What the hell is this?” she said, showing
her hand to me.

What the fuck?
I thought. It’s not
like I took a piss on her couch while she wasn’t looking.

BT raised his hand like he was in the second
grade. “I tend to drool a little, when I sleep sometimes,” he
finished, adding the qualifier.

“Gross,” Mary said, heading for the kitchen
to wash her hand off.

“Thanks man,” I said to BT. “That took the
heat off for a minute.”

“She’ll be back,” he said as we heard the
water running in the next room.

“Wow, she’s pissed,” Gary said, coming into
the room with us. He was talking, but looking at the wrapper to the
granola bar he was eating. “These are fantastic, I’ve never heard
of them,” Gary said around a mouthful of nuts. (I’m not sure
exactly about the contents he was chewing on, I just wanted to
write that). “I’d sleep with one eye open, nope maybe both eyes,
one for Deneaux and one for Mary. It really is kind of funny how
you bring out the worst in the females around you.”

“Ah, brother, the one constant I have in
life, no matter how far I fall, someone in my family will be there
to kick me where I lay.”

He smiled.

“Touching,” Deneaux said sarcastically. “What
time are we leaving in the morning.”

“We?” I asked her.

“I want to find him as much as you do,” she
said falsely.

“You don’t lie as well as you think you do,”
I told her. “And you’re staying here.”

Her facial expression nearly matched Mary’s
from a few moments previous. Deneaux left, heading to the opposite
side of the house where there was a sitting room and a large chair.
I could only hope that she would get sucked into the oversized
cushions and teleported to an alternate reality, one where old
crones were stoned for being witches. I think Salem may have had it
right.

“Why would you let her know you’re
suspicious? I’d rather tell a pit viper I was highly allergic to
its venom and I didn’t have an antidote,” BT said.

“No way,” Gary said. “I’m calling your
bluff.”

“Let it go, BT,” I said as BT turned to Gary.
“He knows not what he says. And I want her to know because if she
had anything to do with Paul getting hurt, I’ll kill her and she
knows it. She’ll get desperate and even the devil can make
mistakes.”

“So you’re going to leave her behind with me?
Thanks, I don’t remember when
I
ended up on your shit
list.”

“Luck of the draw.”

“Wonderful.”

“Maybe you can try to keep her away from
Mary. The more Deneaux talks, the more poison she spills into
Mary’s Kool-Aid,” I said.

“What does that even mean, Mike?” Gary turned
to me.

“You know. Kool-Aid,” I said, not clarifying
a thing.

“I have no idea what he means, do you, BT?”
Gary asked.

BT shrugged. “I understand about half of what
he says and of that only twenty-five percent makes sense.”

“You guys should take it on the road. I’m
saying that Mary’s Kool-Aid is her business and that Deneaux is
spreading lies about us, well, me specifically.”

“I know what you’re saying. I was making sure
that you did too,” Gary said.

“Should we take shifts?” BT asked, eyeing his
couch hungrily.

“I’ll take first watch,” I told them, my gut
was telling me something was not quite right with the night. Odds
were it was the road kill meat MRE, but it had been a while since
I’d felt lucky and I’d rather be awake and alert for whatever came
down the road.

Nothing happened while I stared out that
window, yet the unease in me did not abate, but rather grew. I kept
waiting for something, I occasionally even checked on the softly
snoring Deneaux to see if she was trying to sneak up behind me and
plant a knife in my neck. I could swear on more than one occasion,
I felt the icy, cold tip break skin. Only once, did she scare the
hell out of me when, on one of my many circuits around the house,
her black eyes were staring at me through the gloomy night. She
must have had a lot of enemies in her day; she was sleeping with
her eyes open. This I knew because her snoring had not stopped. She
looked like a cold, calculating reptile like that and I more than
half expected her to strike from that chair. I’d take Durgan any
day. He wasn’t smart enough in life to do anything but come
straight at you. Deneaux seemed to have mastered the fine art of
subterfuge. There wasn’t an angle she probably hadn’t exploited at
one time or another, and I was wholly convinced, up to and
including murder.

I returned to my chair, I had the jitters. My
legs were bouncing up and down, restless leg syndrome, my ass, this
was a full on epidemic. I won’t swear on a stack of Bibles that it
was three am (mostly because I was afraid the Bibles would burst
into flame), but it seemed that the witching hour had come to
fruition and then the dread of death washed over me and was
gone.