Mark Tufo - 'Til Death Do Us Part

Tommy started to hack by my side along with the ever dangerous thrusts of Tracy. There was a good chance I was going to come out of this battle a eunuch.

Justin was reaching down to me while Travis kept ripping boards up with a crowbar. He got about three up when the barrel of his rifle came through.

Fuck yeah! I thought as he started blasting zombies to our front.

With a renewed vigor, I heard BT’s war cry, zombies fell as his adrenaline surged. I drained the remainder of my magazine, giving us a little breathing room, although breathing was not on the top of favorite list right now, not with the smell that accompanied it anyway. Tommy focused his energy back to our side, as I replaced my magazine and began to fire.

“I’ll have another one ready soon dad.” Justin said as he was shoving 5.56 rounds into a fresh magazine.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we didn’t have another minute. If we didn’t get into the house soon, we were done for.

We were again moving but slowly, the zombies were paying in buckets of blood for the precious inches we were gaining. I was on my twelfth round when massive rifle fire came from our front.

I couldn’t see what was going on, but it was fast enough that I thought it was automatic gunfire. If Ron was holding out, I was going to be pissed, that was provided we made it.

“BT?” I screamed over the din.

“Gatling gun I think!” he yelled.

“Are you shitting me?” I asked softly. Now it was worth living just to see what the hell he was talking about.

The zombies were human once and they could not sustain the damage we were inflicting, Travis turned his attention to our backs as we passed his position above.

“You’re uncle is going to be pissed when he sees this damage,” I said as I went underneath him.

“I’ll deal with that later.” He smiled with a strain.

The Gatling gunfire stopped ahead as I imagined Ron was heading back into the basement. BT moved to the side as Azile and Tracy entered through the oversized window. Gary was holding the bars up.

“Go, man.” I tapped BT.

“Go, Tommy!” I yelled.

I fired off the remainder of my rounds and ducked in. Gary let the bars clang down and locked them in place with first a pin and then a lock that I figure was first developed to hold an elephant in place.

Gary hugged me.

“Good to see you, man! Where’s the Gatling gun?” I asked.

Ron was heading into the recesses of the basement.

“Whatcha got there, brother?” I called out.

“Nothing for you!” he said back.

I caught up to him, it was a thing of beauty—eight gun barrels shone brightly.

“It’s a .22 caliber Gatling gun reproduction,” he said defensively.

“You should have told me,” I said, trying to place my hand on it.

“Mike, it cost me ten grand there’s no fucking way I was going to tell you about it.”

I was sort of hurt, but I wouldn’t have told me about it either. “Is this what was in your trap door in your closet?” I asked, putting it all together. This was why he was so adamant about not letting me see it. I had wrongly figured it was porn, although this thing had me drooling as if it were.

Then Ron’s next words doubled me over. “Dad didn’t make it, Mike.”

I staggered a step or two back, Tracy was there for support. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried like a five-year-old. I cried for the loss of my dad, my mom, my brother, my niece, Jed, Jen, Alex, Paul, Erin, Brian and at least a dozen other good souls we had lost along the way.

I stayed for a long time in that darkened basement, when Ron had told me how our father had died. I wanted to be as close to his final earthly spot as was possible. The battle raged on above me, but now it was more of a fish in the barrel scenario. We had position, ammo and security, I wasn’t needed upstairs.

It would be another three days before the horde dwindled down to an unlucky few. I had joined in the fray if only to vent my misguided revenge. I wished desperately that they gave a shit for what they did. I had switched out my MP-4 for a Mosin-Nagant Russian WWII sniper rifle, a bit of overkill when the 7.62 by 4.42 round struck home. I watched each individual I hit as the back of its head blew out in a spray of white, crushed bone and diseased gray matter.

I drilled five hundred and twenty-six zombies into the ground that day, but whose counting. My fingers ached from jamming that many rounds through the old gun, my anger increased at each one, that they didn’t care, that they didn’t give a shit when the zombie next to them fell, that their sisters, brothers, fathers and friends were dying all around them. That was what stopped any war—when the killing just became too much, when neither side could stomach the mounting atrocities. The zombies would not stop, they would never stop, not until each and everyone one of them was dead.

AFTERWORD

Three days after the death of Eliza, the war at Camp Talbot was over. I could not do much more than shiver as I sat in a rocker, on the part of Ron’s deck that was not on the blood steeped lawn. I watched, as he pushed piles of dead zombies into giant pyres with his tractor. The boys were keeping vigilance over him. Gary rode on the tractor as an added layer of protection.

“Will this ever get better?” I asked, my teeth chattering even in the seventy-degree heat of the day and two blankets wrapped around my legs.

“Not anytime soon, Mr. T,” Tommy said as he sat beside me suffering through the same symptoms. “With Eliza, gone we’ve lost a piece of us.”

I felt like a hard core heroin junkie who had gone cold turkey, my bones dripped in pain, if that makes any sense. I’d already taken a loss I did not figure I could absorb when I had lost my soul, but with the absence of whatever Eliza had filled the void in with, I was adrift in a sea of black. My innards ached as they seemed to move around in the shell that once housed me.

“It would be better to die,” I told him with vacant eyes, “than to live like this.”

He may have nodded in reply or it could have been my shivering that gave the illusion of movement on his part.

***

“Can you do anything?” Tracy asked Azile as she looked through the window and out at her husband who was so obviously suffering.

Azile shook her head, she also was trapped in her own misery.

***

“There’s more,” Tommy said.

I stood, hoping that my bones were not as hollow as I felt. “Do tell. I could use a bit of shitty news right about now.”

“The order I put to halt the progress of BT’s zombieism will unravel now that I no longer have as much power.”

My legs weren’t hollow, but they were having great difficulty supporting my weight at the moment. “How long?” I asked him.

With considerable effort, Tommy shrugged his shoulders.

“You once told me that you saw your sister get bitten, then she ultimately killed her sire. How did she survive? Did she walk all these years like this? Is that even possible? I feel hollow, Tommy. I can sense the pain I should be feeling, but I’m numb to it. With every beat of my heart I flip from my heart breaking at the death of my father to an absolute fathomless void, where nothing not even emotions can stem from. I know I should be concerned for my friend’s health, sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. I know I should be loving my family, and yet there are times when I can’t even remember what the emotion entails. I felt more concern for a dead squirrel in the roadway when I was human than I do now.”

***

Tracy shivered as she overheard words she wasn’t supposed to.

***

“Eliza killed her sire. She was not diminished from his death, but rather enhanced by it. That was why she never let any of her charges live for very long, lest they try to take her power from her. The emptiness will go away, you’ll fill it in with something, Mr. T. My sister filled hers in with hate and cruelty for everyone and everything. But that’s not who you are, you have it, we, ” he stressed, “have it in us to fill it with something better.”