Jason Jones - Trailer Park Zombies

“Let me have your phone,” I told him.

He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, gripping it tightly. “Why, Duke?”

That surprised yet another laugh from me. “You really have to ask? Should we count the number of things we need to talk to the cops about? Um, one, we have my dead mother here. Two, we’ve got a slaughtered family down the way. Three, we’ve got a murderous zombie on the loose. Don’t you think any one of those things merits an intervention by the police?”

“And what are you going to tell them? That you accidentally killed the guy who raped the girl you’re in love with and then he came back from the dead and trashed our car and then he murdered that girl and ate her family? Oh, and by the way, your mom just happens to be dead, too? The situation hasn’t changed, Duke. We still can’t call the cops.”

I looked at him wearily, “Then what do you suggest, Barrett?

Fannie Mae spoke up, “Why don’t we get in the car and take off? I know it’s covered in blood but we could still get out of here. Wait for everything to sort itself out.”

Barrett got a sheepish look on his face. “We, uh, can’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“After I found your mom I decided I couldn’t deal and blood or no blood I was getting out of here. Sorry, Duke, I just couldn’t stay in here by myself. I thought it best if I just left.”

“Best for you ,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. But the car wouldn’t start. It doesn’t look like,” he paused, “ Mason got into the engine compartment but it still wouldn’t start. I fiddled with it for a couple minutes but I got the willies and came back inside.” He hung his head, “I’m sorry for trying to abandon you guys, but I just couldn’t….” He trailed off.

“Whatever, Barrett,” I said. I got up from the floor and peeked out the front window. “What time is it?”

“Almost five,” said Fannie Mae from the floor. She was struggling to rise up, too. None of us wanted to be too close to the corpse of my mother.

“The sun comes up at what, six?” I looked at the sky, looking for any kind of light in the east. A huge part of me welled up at the thought of seeing the sun. This night seemed to have lasted forever. The sky was still as dark as ever.

“Something like that,” Fannie Mae said. “This time of year? Maybe 6:30. Ish.”

I nodded. “If we’re going to try to wait it out here then we need to do something about the car. A busted up car covered in blood might be a pretty big hint to my neighbors that something’s going on.”

Barrett came up behind me, looking out the window, too. “What about your mom? And Tamara and her family? And Mason Smith out there?”

I looked at my mom. “We’ll leave her there. Get up in the morning and pretend we just found her. Or hope my dad comes home at some point and finds her. We’ll all be shocked and dismayed at what we find.”

Fannie Mae spoke up, “What if she, you know, comes back?”

Barrett shook his head. “If this was a movie she would have already. Plus she wasn’t killed by Mason so hopefully that means we’re okay.”

I was still staring out the window. “Then what brought Mason back?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what, Duke. No clue whatsoever.”

“And you’re sure that Tamara and her parents will come back? 100%?”

He snorted. “No. How can I be sure of something like that? It’s like we’re in the middle of a horror movie right now. This kind of stuff doesn’t happen in real life. I don’t know what brought him back. He may not even be a zombie. He may or may not be infectious. But I wouldn’t count on it being any other way. In the movies I’ve seen people usually come back within seconds of being killed by the zombie. How long were you in there after he’d killed them?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But he was still in there so I can’t imagine it was too long. I think we interrupted his feeding.”

“Say it was 10 minutes then. Or, hell, five. In the movies they would have come back by then. That’s why zombie movies are so apocalyptic. One bite and you’re infected and they’ve increased their numbers by one. Within hours you have an army. I’m not that good at numbers but just imagine if each zombie only bit one person an hour. The whole city would be wiped out within a day.”

I smiled, “Granted, we have a small city.” It was a grim smile.

“Yep.”

Fannie Mae broke in. “So we may or may not be facing a zombie horde. Tamara and her parents may or may not be coming back – from the dead. We may or may not be fighting for our lives in a few hours. Oh, and we need to go out in the middle of the night to do something about our car that the dead guy attacked so that the neighbors don’t think we have anything to do with it.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“Groovy,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

Barrett looked at us with a tinge of wonder and a goofy grin on his face. “You guys are nuts.”

We both ignored him. I still wasn’t looking at Fannie Mae as I scoured the night outside for any movement. My one hope was that whatever was going on with Mason was unique to him and wasn’t communicable to others. Or, hell, maybe he wasn’t dead after all and we’d just driven him nuts. Yeah, I’m sure that was it.

The last thing any of us wanted was to back out into the darkness and deal with the car but we had a small window of time in which to do it. Even though it was Saturday and we were in a trailer park there would still be those random old birds that would get up at the crack of dawn and go for their walks or get up and about. I reminded them of that little fact and Fannie Mae was quick to point out that one of the intervening neighbors of ours – not the Marster’s – was well known for getting up super early. He’d woken up her mom many times on his early morning ramblings.

That still left the question of what exactly we were going to do with the car.

Barrett said, “I think my dad has a car cover in the trunk. We could go get that out of there and just cover the car up.”

I looked at him with a critical eye. “You don’t think anyone would think it was weird that I’d have a car parked in front of my trailer with a car cover on it? I’m sure that first thing in the morning Donny over there,” I pointed across the way, “wouldn’t take but two seconds to peek under it. Him or one of his hoodlum friends.”

“Got a better idea?”

Fannie Mae broke in, “Even though the car can’t start, you can still push it, can’t you?”

Barrett nodded, “Yeah. You just have to put it into neutral.”

She had a little grin on her face. I asked her, “What’s on your mind, Fannie Mae?”

She pointed at the rear of the trailer. “We could push it into the woods. There’s enough of a gap between the trees back there to get the car in. Then we could put Barrett’s cover on it and cover it with a little bit of brush.”

I thought about it for a second and then nodded. “That’s not too bad. Probably the best plan we have. We shouldn’t need to go back much more than 20 or so feet to make it not visible. The trailers here on the back cover it well enough and no one really goes back there. It’d probably be good for a couple days at least.”

Barrett pointed out the flaw in the plan. Of course. “That’s a pretty hefty haul there, cahuna. We’d have to back it up from the parking spot, steer it through the gap between the trailers, and then steer it over dirt and grass and get it back in there. I hate to break it to you, but neither of us is in that great of a shape.”

“We’d better get started then,” I said.

As we left the trailer I heard him mutter under his breath, “Not to mention the horde of zombies.”