Jason Jones - Trailer Park Zombies

The world began to rush back in at me. The pain in my arm and the moans of Kevin on the ground, trying to get to his feet himself, but failing because he kept trying to use his broken hand. Fannie Mae’s hands yanked again at my armpits, bringing cries of my pain from my lips as she pulled the hurt muscle in my arm. Sound finally came back and I could hear her screaming at me to get up. I realized she’d been screaming the whole time.

I finally gained my feet, wobbly and at risk of falling for a moment.

“Come on. Come on. Come on.” Fannie Mae screamed from behind me. Neither one of us wanted to face Barrett.

I whispered an apology to Barrett as Fannie Mae and I turned to make our escape. He’d have wanted us to shoot him and take him out of this Hell but at the moment I just didn’t have it in me. We made it maybe three steps before Mason Smith stepped out of nowhere at us. His head was still cocked at that weird angle from his broken neck. Other than that he looked in perfect condition, if you ignored his pale skin and deep, sunken eyes. His face and hands were covered in blood and gore and it looked like he was wearing a red mask on the lower half of his face.

Neither one of us had time to react before he stepped forward and grabbed Fannie Mae’s arm. I cried out in warning as he almost delicately bit into her forearm. She screamed in pain and fear as the blood started spurting down. I swear Mason grinned at us. He let go of her arm and slid back into the darkness, disappearing from sight. I swore and looked back behind us. The other zombies had swarmed out and were now chowing down on Kevin and Wash. Barrett stood there shuffling ever so slowly forward, staring at me and Fannie Mae.

A few of the zombies were inching in our direction but that was when I took charge and started pulling Fannie Mae away from the horde. She was screaming inconsolably and staring at her arm in horror. I tried not to look at or think of it as we ran away. Stumbled away might be the right phrase. My arm throbbed in pain and my brain throbbed in terror, the pain in my leg was but a distant memory. All I could see was that bite on her arm.

The zombies could have probably overtaken us at any moment but for some reason they didn’t. We could hear the screams of the others behind us as we ran away. It only took us a few minutes to reach Fannie Mae’s trailer. She dug her keys out of her pocket with a wince and opened the door, shoving me inside.

I don’t know which of us was in more pain, but we managed to barricade the doors and windows as best we could and then I finally collapsed on the couch. Fannie Mae disappeared into the bathroom and I heard her rattling around for a minute before she came back out. She had a pill bottle in one hand and a first aid kit in the other. She put those down next to me and then went into the kitchen and got us some water.

She came down and sat in front of me on the floor, running a shaky hand through her hair. Her face was waxen and pale, her eyes sunken deep into her forehead. The bite on her arm was even whiter than her face, the jagged edges bleeding slowly as we sat there. She caught me looking at it.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“What?” I said wearily. I was so, so tired.

“The bite,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s throbbing a little but there’s surprisingly little pain.”

I nodded silently at her. I could feel the horror scrabbling at the corners of my mind, trying to gain a foothold. It felt like it was going to be here very shortly.

“Take off your shirt.”

“Huh?” I said numbly. Was this what shock felt like? I could feel myself growing cold. I didn’t have her luxury; my arm was hurting like crazy. It was the worst pain I’d ever had in my life. Except for the pain in my heart I was feeling right now.

“I have to look at your gunshot,” she said, opening the first aid kit. “We have to clean the wound.”

I stared at her stupidly as she opened the top of the pill bottle and dry-swallowed a half dozen pills. “What are those?” I asked.

“They’re antibiotics. I think.” Her mouth quavered. She was trying her best to hold it back for me, but I could tell that she wouldn’t make it too much longer. “It’s all I can think of. Maybe it will stave off the infection. I hope.”

“It will,” I said, trying to put an inflection of hope in my dead voice. “It has to.”

She smiled wanly at me and said softly, “Take off your shirt.”

I gave her a confused look and she laughed at me, “I need to check your arm, silly.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly.

I did my best to get out of the shirt but she ended up having to help me in the end. The wound on my arm was burning and every movement seemed to stretch the skin in all kinds of fun and interesting ways. I was sweating by the time we had it all the way off. She winced when she saw the open wound and I couldn’t help but look at it myself. It looked ugly. The bullet had passed right through, but on the way it had sheared off a section of skin with it. If I managed to survive I’d have a real wicked scar.

Blood seeped slowly out of the hole and I could see light passing through my arm. I tried to hold it up by my face to get a closer look but that just made me hiss in pain and drop it back down. Beads of sweat popped up on my face. Fannie Mae pulled some things out of the first aid kit and set them neatly in a row next to her. Her face scrunched in concentration and her tongue popped out between her lips. If the situation wasn’t so abysmally awful I would have kissed her. She looked so cute.

She held up a roll of gauze and unscrewed the cap on a brown bottle. It looked like peroxide. She put the gauze over the hole and upended the bottle over it, soaking it into the gauze. When she was done she held the bottle out to me. “This is peroxide. This is gonna hurt, Dukey.”

I nodded at her. “Just get it over with.”

She grabbed my hand firmly with her free one and then placed the wet gauze on my arm. My mouth opened wide and I could feel the tendons in my neck stretching taut as I tried to hold in my scream. No need to let the zombies know where we were. I could feel the skin on my body go through various degrees of hot and cold and honestly came about an inch shy of taking a crap in my pants. The pain was that intense. After some interminable time that felt like a million years but was probably no more than 30 seconds the pain finally began to ebb. I breathed in deeply, trying to will the pain away from me and telling myself that I could feel nothing.

That must have been what Fannie Mae was waiting for because she finally took the gauze away from my arm. The wetness of it had mixed with my blood and it looked pink in the dim light. I tried to smile at her. “Thanks, Fannie Mae.”

She shook her head at me. “Don’t thank me yet. I still have to do the other side.”

I felt my stomach do flip-flops and my mouth dried up. “Okay, then.”

She sighed and repeated the whole process with a new piece of gauze. If anything this time it hurt worse. It was like I could feel every drop of the peroxide interacting with my nerves and each pop and sizzle they made sent a current of pain into my brain. I might have let out a couple little drops of pee. Just a couple, mind you.

She finally peeled the gauze away, but the pain never really subsided. It felt like I was going to be sick. I could feel the bile rising in my throat but I managed to keep it down. Barely. But I could taste every scrap of food I’d had in the last couple days and when I burped the taste of it all came back. It didn’t taste very good.

Fannie Mae squeezed a tube of antiseptic all over the holes and then finally wrapped my arm in gauze and taped it over. When we were done she handed my shirt back to me silently.