Jason Jones - Trailer Park Zombies

Wash shook his head at me. “No, I think you’re going to help us.” He suddenly pointed his gun at Fannie Mae. “If you don’t I’ll kill her right now. Or shoot her in the leg and leave her here for the zombies. I’m sure they’d love the tasty little snack.”

I stepped forward, lifting my shotgun. Kevin put his hand on the barrel. I ignored it as I eyed Wash. “I don’t think so, Wash. You’d have to kill me first.”

He laughed. “And why wouldn’t I do that? This is the end of the world, Duke. Killing one more person can’t make that much of a difference. I’d just be saving us from another potential zombie.”

I looked Kevin in the eye, then Wash, and finally Shaggy. All I could see in Kevin and Wash’s face was insanity. They truly were no longer home. They’d decided for some reason that they now had to die and nothing was going to stop them from it. This was insane. Not 30 minutes ago they’d been all about survival and getting out of here and now all they wanted was to die. What the hell was wrong with people?

Shaggy was the only one who didn’t have the insane look in his eyes. He looked uncertain. He actually backed away a couple steps from the rest of us. I think I was the only one who noticed. This was going to go very, very badly.

20.

When the dust settled and the sun rose, everything was fine with the world. Help came in the form of about a million Army guys and they took out all the zombies. They figured out that it was some weird kind of virus that had mutated in the graveyard and somehow animated dead flesh. They couldn’t really explain why the reanimated people hungered for flesh but decided it was ultimately unimportant. The virus was contained so that’s all they really cared about. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my head that maybe they kept a couple of the zombies alive in a lab somewhere to “study” them and the virus, but Fannie Mae kept telling me not to worry about it, that it wasn’t our problem.

She also told me that the virus would have caught anyone in the graveyard, so ultimately none of it was my fault. I still woke with nightmares occasionally and when I did she would hold me and stroke my hair and tell me it was all right, that it wasn’t my fault. She would soothe me back to sleep and if I woke up again that night she’d still be holding me and rocking me and I could sleep well knowing that she was still there.

More people survived the zombie outbreak than we would have thought in the dead of that night. At least a hundred people were huddled in their trailers, hiding under beds and the back of closets. We had Walter and the others to thank for our survival. They’d managed to get to town on their motorcycles and somehow got the police to believe them. Don’t even ask me how they managed that. The police somehow convinced the Army to come out and take over the town. They killed a couple hundred zombies, although they didn’t classify them as that, of course. To the Army they were classified as the “infected” and they would never say anything different. The town was cordoned off and quarantined and it took them weeks to ensure that they’d completely cleared it of the “infected”. They interviewed me and Fannie Mae and the rest of the survivors relentlessly and were finally convinced of our stories, drilling into us the imperative of never letting anyone know what had happened.

Fannie Mae and I were relocated by the government to a suburb of Denver, Colorado. We were given new names and new identities but when we were alone we would talk about what happened and I would still call her by her real name. I knew how important her name was to her. We refused to be separated by the government so they put us up in the same town, in the same school district. We had different foster parents (that would have been too weird otherwise), but we still talked together and ate together and hung out together.

Our love grew exponentially as we got older. It became a deep, abiding love. I could never explain it to anyone, let alone myself. Part of it was just the many things we’d gone through with each other and part of it was just the fact that she was an amazing, awesome woman and she accepted me completely.

The two year age difference between us made it a little weird for a year or so, until she reached 16. Some of the teachers tried to keep us apart, but our foster parents never tried. They could see how we felt for each other and could tell that it wasn’t a childish love. They never knew the things we’d gone through or the horrors we’d seen, but they could tell that something drew us together. And knew even better that nothing could tear us apart.

I graduated high school with honors. The government fixed my transcripts so that my first couple years of high school didn’t matter anymore, but I managed to do the last couple all on my own. It’s amazing how much it helps to have a nice, stabilized environment at home with supporting parents. I got accepted to a bunch of really nice schools but they were all too far away and I couldn’t leave Fannie Mae. She told me not to worry about her, but I just couldn’t leave her like that. So I went to DU – University of Denver – and eventually graduated with a degree in IT.

Fannie Mae blossomed well under the attention of her foster parents. They bought her nice clothes and pampered her and treated her like the little girl they’d never had. She ate it up but never got spoiled and never took them for granted. She flourished and did even better than me in school. She went to DU, too, and graduated with a degree in social work. All she wanted to do was help people so she got a job helping developmentally disabled people. I was so proud of her.

We got married when I was 25 and she was 23. Everyone wanted us to wait until we both graduated, so we did. We got married less than a week after she got her degree. It was a huge wedding, with all of our foster families and the many friends we’d made over the years. There were over 300 people at the wedding. We burned a candle at the ceremony for all of our friends who’d gone before us. I knew that no one there knew what we were talking about, but we said our little piece and a prayer for the fallen and both had tears streaming down our cheeks when we did it.

I think our foster parents were the only ones who’d had an inkling of the truth. They knew that the government was the ones who’d dropped us on their doorsteps. They’d never asked us for details, but they’d all heard the screams and the moans of our night terrors. I think I’d had nightmares for the first year or so that I lived with them. It haunted me more than Fannie Mae. Barrett weighed heavily on my mind. He was always there for me and there were times I could swear I could see him out of the corner of my eye.

Fannie Mae’s foster mom died when I was 30 and she was 28. It was shortly after the birth of our first child, Barry. She’d held out for as long as she could. She had stomach cancer and it was particularly vicious. The doctors gave her only a few months to live right when Fannie Mae announced her pregnancy. She vowed to see her first grandchild and she did, dying the day after Barry was born. Fannie Mae took it hard. The birth had been long and painful and she was still recuperating in the hospital when her mom died. She turned to me with tears in her eyes and whispered that she wished her mom could come back. I shook my head vehemently at her and told her to never wish for something like that. We’d both seen what happened when people came back.

Barry was five when his little sister was born. She was the spitting image of her mother. In other words, she was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen. We named her Tammy. Our little soldiers reminded us daily of those who’d fallen but since we found we could never forget we thought it was best. They weren’t just reminders; they were tributes to our friends.