Jason Jones: Trailer Park Zombies

I took a step toward her, but that was when Mason grabbed my ankle and yanked me back with all of his football quarterback might. I tumbled to the ground with a whumpf , landing with my face in Tamara’s stomach. She screamed again and shoved me off her, trying to scuttle away from me. I whimpered and rolled to my back, trying to catch my breath.

Mason loomed over me, buckling his belt and zipping his pants. An evil grin was on his face, accompanying the scratch marks that trailed down one of his cheeks. At least Tamara had gotten her licks in. “You’re gonna pay, Johnson. Oh, are you going to pay.”

I tried to gain my breath, gain my legs, something, but before I could Mason lashed out with a kick of his own and got me square in the upper thigh. I screamed as a lightning bolt of pain welled up inside of me. For a second all I saw was white. If he’d gotten me in the nuts it would have been all over. My dreams of getting a vasectomy at 21 and living a carefree life of random sex would have been all over. Just give me an invitation to the falsetto section of the choir and I’d sing my heart out for the rest of my life.

Thankfully, he’d missed.

Where are friends when you need them?

I glanced behind me as I struggled to get a handle on the pain and tried to get my hands under me. I could feel nothing except for the throbbing in my thigh. It felt like my leg was broken, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t. Barrett and Fannie Mae were both behind me trying to pull Tamara away from the fight. She was letting Fannie Mae touch her but wouldn’t have anything to do with Barrett. He and I locked eyes for a moment and all I saw in them was shame. In that moment I knew there’d be no help for me coming from him. He was a coward.

I looked back at Mason, who apparently thought I was incapacitated. He was looking at Fannie Mae with a gleam in his eyes and rubbing his crotch. Maybe this was a normal Friday night for him, but I’m pretty sure if it was I’d have heard about it at school. I don’t know what had gotten into him, but I was going to take it out.

Ignoring the blazing pain, feeling the anger blossom like a solid thing in my head, I managed to get to my knees. I swayed like a prize fighter going down for the last count, but some reserve of strength managed to well up within me and I finally managed to get to my feet. Mason looked at me.

“Something wrong there, Johnson? You might want to stay there on the ground or I’m going to have to put you out again. I think I’m going to have a taste of your little friend over there. She’s probably even tighter than old Tammy. Who’d have thunk that that little slut was a virgin, huh? With the way she flashes it all over town?”

I roared as I launched myself at him. Well, it sounded like a roar inside my head anyway. It caught him completely by surprise as I tackled him like a sack of potatoes. He flew backward with me still attached to his hips, my arms wrapped around him to keep him off balance. We came to a sudden stop as he hit the granite monument behind him with a sickening crunch.

My face landed in his lap as we hit the ground again, whipping my head back with a grunt and catching my tongue with my teeth, quickly filling my mouth with blood.

Barrett pulled me to my feet. “Are you all right, man?”

I spit the blood out of my mouth in the general direction of Mason Smith. Doing it again and again, trying to get the taste out of my mouth. I shook my head to clear it, then put my hand up to my face. “Ow,” I said.

I tried to put my weight on my leg but it buckled beneath me. Fortunately Barrett still had a firm grip on me.

“Someone needs to take the car into town to get the cops,” I said.

Barrett looked at me blankly. “Why?”

Maybe my head wasn’t very clear. “What do you mean, why?” I said around the blood. “He just raped Tamara and we just kicked the shit out of each other. We need to explain it all to the cops so he can go to jail.”

Barrett didn’t say a word. He just pointed at Mason. Looked at me. Pointed again. “If we call the cops you’re the one going to jail, Duke.”

“What?” What? I turned to follow his finger, keeping my weight firmly off my leg. “Oh, shit,” I said weakly.

“Yeah,” Barrett said.

Mason lay against the monument, his eyes open and glassy, staring into nothing. His neck lay at a crooked angle and I could see smears of blood decorating the stone behind him.

I gripped Barrett tightly. “That’s it. I’m done. So much for dreams. No more escape from the trailer park, from this state, from this life. I’m going to jail forever, man.”

I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. Everything was gone.

A new voice spoke up behind me, “It doesn’t have to be that way, Duke.”

“Huh?” I asked, not turning around. “How’s that? I just killed a man.”

Tamara appeared in my line of sight, wrapped loosely in Fannie Mae’s coat, leaning heavily on Fannie Mae. Much as I was leaning on Barrett. The tears on her face had dried up, although it looked like they’d started on Fannie Mae’s.

Tamara said, “We don’t call the cops. I was never here. You were never here. You don’t go to jail. Easy.”

My jaw dropped. “But he raped you, Tamara. People have to know that he was with you tonight. There’s no way around that. They’ll come for you and you’ll tell them what happened. It’ll be better if I tell them now.”

“No, Duke,” she said, coming to a stop before me. “No one knows that he was with me. We didn’t leave the game together. Plus, I’m his girlfriend. Why would he rape me? I’m the slut of the Acres, remember?”

“Tamara, you’re not,” I said.

“Shush,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. It is what it is. I’ll go back to the trailer, take a shower, trim my nails, scrub every inch of my body down. They can say what they want, but I’ll never tell them what happened.”

I looked at Barrett and Fannie Mae. “Talk some sense into her. This isn’t right.”

Barrett opened his mouth, but it was Fannie Mae who spoke first. “She’s right, Dukey. This is the only way. You’re the only one of us who has the chance to get out of here. I couldn’t stand the thought of you rotting in jail. He was a monster,” she nodded down at Mason, “and you don’t deserve to go to jail in his place.”

Barrett just nodded when I looked at him. He couldn’t meet my eyes.

“Fine,” I said wearily. “What do we do about him?”

Tamara looked down at Mason’s body. “Screw him,” she said. “Let the animals have him. Let him rot. Someone will find him.” She nodded at the sky. “The rain will come down eventually. That will wash the body clean for us.”

“All right,” I said simply. “Let’s go home.”

Happy birthday to me.

3.

Who knows what magic breathes in the empty spaces, in the dark of night? On a cursed body rapidly cooling on the grounds of a now unconsecrated burial ground? Who knows what secrets lurk in the heart of the world and the places that man cannot see?

How the hell should I know?

All I know is that as midnight arose and the four of us stumbled away to try to heal our wounds and forget the horror behind us another nightmare somehow managed to find purchase in the world. It slunk somehow through the night and we did not sense it as it passed us. It crept into the fading shell of the quarterback on the ground. Maybe it was a demon or a disease or some creeping nothingness from beyond the realms of knowledge. But from somewhere it came and it found purchase there in that shell.

And a dead finger twitched.

Barrett dropped Tamara off first. The rumble of the engine seemed muted somehow, as if even the car understood the tragedy and the need to be silent. She and Fannie Mae both got out of the car, Tamara hugging the coat around her nearly naked body and Fannie Mae’s arm strung tightly across her shoulders. Barrett asked Fannie Mae if she wanted him to wait and she just shook her head silently. I glanced at them in the rearview mirror as Barrett turned around to take me home and I could see them both standing at the bottom of the stoop staring at us. The things I wish I would have said.