Mark Tufo - Whistlers

“Post-partum depression.”

“I don’t even know why I asked.”

“There you are.”

I’d been walking for miles when I came across a bridge that crosses over the top of the highway. Sitting in the shade and eating a meal sounded like a splendid idea. I just had to make sure nothing was hiding behind the huge cement stanchions. After a quick perimeter check, which didn’t even yield graffiti, I got behind one of the columns and opened up a meal. I ate a reasonable facsimile of tuna casserole and some sort of sponge cake that would have been more aptly named ‘brick loaf’ instead. I took a big swig from a canteen I’d pilfered and peered around the edge. Lucy was coming. She was a good five hundred yards away. She would walk a little bit and then stop to look at the bridge. She could sense the inherent danger lurking in the shadows. I just hoped the pull of her stomach would bring her in closer.

She was moving agonizingly slow, her hesitation was causing me precious minutes I didn’t have. I moved slowly, getting into the prone position, resting my rifle on the ground, and clearing some grass right in front of me. She was somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred yards now. I’d feel a whole lot better if she got within a hundred. I couldn’t afford to spend too much time playing this game, and Lucy needed to die. Even though I had goggles, she would still have the advantage over me at night, and that just wasn’t going to do. Plus, I’d yet to prove it, but I was fairly convinced zombies had some sort of telepathic means of communication, and I did not want her friends Ethel, Fred and maybe Desi Jr. showing up.

“Come on, Lucy. I’ve got a pie with your name on it.”

The closer she got, the slower she went.

Does she hear me? Smell me maybe?

Lucy started looking around for a place to hide, I think.

“Screw this.”

I pulled the trigger just as she collapsed to the ground. I saw a puff of her hair blow away from the top of her head.

“Did I get you?” I asked, looking over my sights. She seemed to have been falling before I’d even got the shot off. She was still moving and staying low to the ground as she started crawling towards the grass.

“Are you kidding me with this shit?”

I got up quickly and started running with my rifle.

The plain is mostly flat but breaks into a series of small, rolling hills at times. The highway traverses in a nearly straight line but follows the undulations of the land, rising to crests and descending into small valleys. Trip and I are currently walking through one of those series of hills, which limits our visibility until we come to one of the hilltops.

“Did you hear that?” I ask, halting near the bottom of a dip in the road. “That sounded like a gunshot.”

“How could I? You were talking,” Trip responds.

“It was close. Maybe if you weren’t lip-smacking your food down, you would have heard it.”

“That could be Ponch.” Trip takes off at a run.

I reach out and grab him by the shoulder as he passes by, my fingers closing around a section of his clothing. He is brought up short, causing his packet of food to upend. He frowns as he looks from the spilled food to my hand still gripping him.

“Look, all we know is that it’s someone that’s armed. It may or may not be Mi…Ponch. I agree we should move quickly, but we also need to be cautious. Remember those military vehicles we left? I don’t think we want to run pell-mell into them.”

Trip continues to stare at the food and my hand holding him.

“If I let you go, you aren’t going to just start racing up the hill, right?” I ask.

He says nothing in reply, which I decide to take as a yes. Releasing him, I half, well more than half, expect him to completely ignore what I said and start running again. I just never know with this guy. He doesn’t and smoothes out his jacket where I grabbed him.

Like that’s going to help , I think, starting up the hill.

I move off the edge of the road and closer to the fields should we suddenly find the need to hide. Starting cautiously up the hill, with my carbine readied, I glance quickly behind to see Trip following. Near the crest, I hear a second gunshot which seems to come from just over the rise. I crouch lower, crawling the last few feet so that I don’t silhouette myself against the skyline. The landscape slowly unfolds before me until I reach a point just before the top.

Ahead, the road dips slightly and almost immediately runs under a bridge; the crossing highway seems to be the road Trip and I were on before trekking to the other roadblock. Bringing my M-4 up, I peer through my optics down to the structure. Below, not very far away, an armed man is standing over a body. I can see him clearly, but it’s the pink shoes and poncho that first gives him away.

Lucy had stopped crawling as I came near her. She looked up and snarled. I felt a momentary wrench of pain for the humanity she’d lost, but she was the enemy, plain and simple. If I let her live, she would never stop her pursuit. I don’t know if zombies feel pain, so I made it as quick and pain-free as possible. The bullet struck in her temple and blood jetted out in a driving stream. Her head dropped to the ground.

“I’m sorry, Lucy.”

And I meant it. A flash of light caught my peripheral vision. I turned and realized I was caught in someone’s scope. I was about to raise my hands in the universal symbol of ‘I surrender’, or the alternative of ‘I need to buy some more time to figure out how I’m going to get out of this mess before you shoot me.’

“Hey, Ponch!” Trip shouted.

“Trip? Jack? Is that you guys?” I called out.

I don’t even have the words to describe the relief that flooded into me when I saw two figures rise from the hill nearby and begin walking toward me. I’d been operating on pure survival mode, desperately trying not to let just how fucked I was creep into my psyche. I may have cried if it had just been Trip, but since Jack was there, I had to appear as manly as possible.

As they arrived, I noticed Jack look over at Trip. “It’s good to see you made it through the night. Was she giving you trouble?” he asked, looking down at my fresh kill.

“More like keeping me company. It’s good to see you guys.”

“Likewise,” Jack said. “I wasn’t sure you’d made it until we came across the military blockade, and even then, I wasn’t entirely sure it was you.”

“Did you see…?”

“The anomalies? Yeah,” Jack said tersely. “I’ve been thinking on that. That is, when Trip gives me more than a minute to reflect.”

“I guess anomaly is one word. Jack, there was a fucking leg sticking out of the ground, and I don’t mean like it was planted there, but like it was part of the roadway.”

“There’s another roadblock on a nearby highway where there was a boot sticking out of a tire,” he said.

I spent the next couple of minutes telling him my thoughts on the zombies and the night runners, and he in turn let me know what he thought about the burning city and the anomalies. I was having a difficult time at best calling that errant leg an irregularity.

“Do you want to hug me?” Trip asked.

It’s sort of funny, because I did…so I did. I maybe would have stayed that way a little longer, but Trip started discussing his latest bowel movement. Jack walked away. Now, normally, I would have found a way to get out of this discussion, but I was still basking in the glow of having them back and I’d soak it up a little longer even if it meant I had to listen to his very colorful description. The hug, however, was over.