Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

“Yeah, mom,” he told me.

“We’re waiting!” Chaz yelled impatiently.

“You can wait another minute,” I said under my breath. Or maybe not , I thought as I looked behind me at Adam. He was about as pale as I once figured vampires were; I now knew that wasn’t the case, but just last year that was what I thought. Adam’s breathing was shallow and anything less than a world class hospital wasn’t going to do him much good.

“BT says everything is good to go,” Angel yelled down the stairs. “He also said you were an asshole.”

“Angel!” her brother Ryan shouted.

“Well that’s what he said,” she defended herself. It kept going, but the door upstairs closed and the rest was lost to me.

I grabbed my rifle and took a long look at Adam. I wasn’t completely sure, but his dilated pupils gave me the impression he was no longer focusing on anything on this plane of existence. In fact, they were so wide, they looked like the last thing he had witnessed had scared the shit out of him. I wondered if that would be the last expression I would have when the Dark One came to claim me. Wait…could he claim me? I had no soul to lose? If I made it through the rest of the day I was going to grab some beers and think on that for a little while.

I made sure I was ready to fire and opened the door. Five men peered intently back at me, it was easy to determine who Chaz was by the worried expression on his face.

“All of you turn around,” I told them.

“See! I fucking told you he was going to kill us!”

“I’m going to check for weapons, I’ve been burned by the honor system before,” I told them.

BT was again in the basement. “Can you cover me?” I asked him.

“You want me to do anything else? Maybe get you a glass of water, shine your shoes, do a little tap dance?”

I looked over at him questioningly.

“Sorry, little amped up. Go ahead, I’ll cover you.”

“Gee thanks,” I told him as I put my rifle up against the house. I checked Chaz first; except for a fingernail clipper he was clean as a whistle. The second man had an ankle pistol and a Bowie knife, the third had two grenades shoved in his front pants pockets, I was wondering if he thought I might think these were his balls and just leave them alone. The fourth was also clean, the fifth had a sawed off shotgun shoved down his pants.

“You’re kidding right?” I asked. He shrugged. “Take it out nice and slow, please.”

I jumped when his gun went off. Dumb ass had wrapped his hand around the trigger, when he pulled up he fired, neatly obliterating the front part of his right front from his body. He toppled face first not even attempting to break his own fall. I could hear Gary’s retching from above us.

“Whatever you do, Gary, don’t raise your head over the railing to puke!” I warned him. Brown bile began to leak through the floorboards above and slightly behind us.

“So fruggin gross,” Gary said around a mouthful of semi-digested lunch; and it was. The man’s boot had ripped in two at the top, tendons and muscles had curled up and over the exposed skin, blood drained out so quickly it was easy to see the delicate smashed white bones underneath it all.

“Don’t worry, man, you can hold on to the gun,” I told the fallen man.

He was grunting in misery. It was better than shrieks…but not by much.

“Can I get my brother now?” Chaz asked.

“One more thing,” I said as I put the barrel of the second man’s ankle pistol to his head. I ripped his chain off as I did all the rest excluding the now Shoeless Joe Jackson. “Get him,” I said, stepping to the side. “Just you, though,” I said when two of the others turned.

Chaz ran in to the house, his cry of agony came immediately. “He’s dead!”

“He is?…now get him out of the house. And the other two, hell get them all out of here, including Stubby.”

“What do you want us to do with them?” Steel Balls asked.

“Drag them over to the pit, I don’t care.”

“But...but you took our vials.”

“I left Adam’s and Stubby’s on. You guys can fight for them, grab a body and get off my land.”

“Mike?” BT asked.

“No room here for mercy, buddy.”

“Mike?”

“BT, if we had a jail…maybe. Try to hold on to the reason why they were here.”

“You’re killing us,” Steel Balls, said as he hefted the man Chaz had shot.

“I’m doing no more or no less than you would have done to us,” I told him.

The other man went over and helped Stubby get up. Chaz was still in the basement rocking his brother back and forth in his lap.

The other men including one of their dead were heading across the yard. They were looking at the zombies that were eyeing them back. I wondered how large the sphere of influence for the vial would be. If they got into a tight enough huddle, it should protect the three of them.

I went into the house and dragged the other three dead men out of the house as BT covered me. Their blood had mostly stopped leaking, but I still left a trail a blind man could follow.

The man that had been shot through the head was the worst, dropping bits of brain matter of the floor. I tried to imagine it as something different, but I was staring straight at his head as I pulled him from his arms.

Two of the men were coming back to gather their dead, Stubby was sitting alone, the dead man was now burning in the kerosene at the bottom of the trench, black smoke was wafting up from his burning clothes and hair. The zombie congregation packed a little tighter where Stubby was sitting, either he looked delicious or they really liked smoked meat. A few were jostled into the trench below.

“Let’s go,” I told Chaz when I got the last man out.

His eyes were red-rimmed. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

“Yeah, and all those people you were going to kill upstairs, they’re all I’ve got left. Get out.”

He did without any further words, hefting his brother up over his shoulder. He brushed by as he left. Within a few more minutes all of the dead raiders were now permanent fixtures with the ground. The men were looking at the gap and the zombies, trying to figure out how they were going to get back across. BT and I watched as one of them actually turned and began to come back. I raised my rifle up and he turned back to the zombies.

Steel Balls and the man who had turned around began to talk rapidly, their voices rising to a peak. It looked like Steel Balls won. I could see Stubby begging, his hands were up in the air, he was shaking his head back and forth and trying to scoot back as fast as he could. Steel kicked Stubby in his bad foot. Stubby stopped moving immediately as his scream of pain pierced the silence. He paid no attention as Steel Balls moved and grabbed the chain off his neck.

“Help me, please!” Stubby begged.

I went back inside; BT stayed out a moment longer before joining me. I grabbed a bucket and some water out of the utility closet and had already started cleaning up stains that would never vanish.

“What happened out there, man?” BT asked me.

I looked up from my scrubbing. “What would you have done differently?”

“At least I would have left them the vials,” BT said, rubbing his face with his hands like he was trying to scour away the grime of the event.

“I’m going to walk you through my thoughts.”

“Go on,” he said, pulling up a folding chair that I did not think was up to the task of holding him suspended in space.

“They weren’t here to borrow sugar, BT.”

“I get that, Mike, I do, but that’s cold-blooded.”

“I’m not done.” BT motioned for me to continue. “I let them leave intact, they go right back to Eliza, regroup and try again. She’s not just going to pat them on the shoulders and say, ‘Nice try fellas’. Maybe we stop them again, maybe we don’t. I’m not willing to gamble the lives of those people upstairs at all, no matter how good the odds may seem in our favor. Money is gambled, not lives. Now, as an added bonus, we have seven more vials of Eliza’s brew that we can give to people upstairs. Because when our perimeter is overrun…which it will be…”