Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

“Don’t kill them all, BT, or the speeders will be looking for another food source, and I know I can beat you in a footrace,” I told him.

“That’s alright. I know I’m faster than your brother,” he said, smiling.

“That’s not cool, not cool at all,” Gary said. “Can we maybe go now?” he asked as the screams intensified.

We ran parallel to the road, making sure to stay deep in our culvert. Now that I had found Eliza’s string and knew exactly where it was, pulling it open was fairly easy. I was like a kid that had just discovered an unlocked candy store. Sounds incredible at first until you’re elbow-deep in salt water taffy and three pounds of licorice are already inside your stomach, oh! and don’t forget about the dozen or so sugar sticks you’ve already eaten. I was sort of drunk with the power of it, not yet realizing how much more danger I was putting us in. Apparently, Eliza wasn’t fond of the slower-ambling shufflers we’d all come to know and love. She was much more interested in the devastation that could be wrought from their faster, more mobile brethren.

Zombies were dropping out of trucks like blood from a pierced hemophiliac. (Think about that for a second.) Problem was, there were way more zombies than food. Some zombies had been shot or simply ran out of room on the roadway or were simply pushed out of the way began to find themselves in our culvert. Some were far beyond making a go at us, others were not.

“Company,” Gary said, looking over his shoulder. He had run up into my back and almost through it.

“You’d better pick up the pace,” I told BT, turning back to see what Gary was looking at.

“You sure I’m the slowest?” Gary asked, jockeying for position on my side.

“Gary, I’d trip you if you weren’t,” I told him.

He stopped to look at my expression. I’m not sure if he was happy with the answer he divined. He began to push ahead of BT.

“What the hell?” BT said loudly.

I started firing. I was well beyond the point of caring if we were discovered or not. Besides, Eliza’s men were doing all they could to merely survive right now. They were in full scale battle mode, whereas we were just a minor skirmish in comparison.

BT took an immediate left, heading straight for the tree line. The zombies had heard the cacophony and started to come into our ditch, further up, effectively cutting off our escape that way. A quick glance to the left had me wondering which avenue would be better, thorns the size of small rhino horns that glistened wetly, each looking big enough to bleed all of us dry or the zombies. Good thing BT was cutting the path first!

I was vaguely aware some of the trucks were starting up and pulling away. Some of Eliza’s henchmen would survive the day, but most, I felt, had met the end they so well deserved.

I almost fell over BT as he slid down like a baseball player going for a triple on a ball that was, at best, a double. Gary was way ahead of the curve on me on this one. He was on his hands and knees, crawling underneath the worst of the brambles. A zombie stepped on Gary’s ankle in an attempt to get at him, and if not for getting hung up in the stickers, it would have succeeded. The zombie kept trying to power its way through and was only rewarded with more piercings. I got down and began to scramble for all I was worth. The top of my hoodie got snagged on a branch and I was hung up like dirty laundry. A zombie grabbed onto the bottom part of my leg and was coming in for a bite when I screamed for him to STOP!

I turned to look at it and see if I had any effect on him. The intensity of my yell forced blood to pour from its nose. Its eyes glazed over for a fraction of a second and then it just stopped. It didn’t move. I would have liked to maybe kick it in the head four or five hundred times, but I wanted to get out of there quickly. More zombies were coming and I wasn’t sure if I could do the same to them. I snapped off the branch I was affixed to and went deeper into the tangle.

BT had pretty much uprooted the fauna as he went through. You could have driven a Geo Metro through the hole he left. The only problem with his passage was that it left an avenue for the zombies to follow. Once we all made it through the ten or so feet of thorns and into the woods proper, I stopped to get an idea of our pursuit. Zombies were haplessly stuck in the path that Gary and I had forged, but zombies were already halfway through BT’s gap.

“Should have been a little more careful about that,” BT said.

“You think?” I asked him.

Gary killed the first two zombies coming through, sealing the hole for the moment.

Zombies began to fan out. Some would be stuck hopefully forever; others were beginning to find inroads toward us.

“We’ve got to get going,” I said, pretty much needlessly.

“I thought Justin was the one with the flair for the obvious?” BT asked.

“He had to get it from somewhere,” Gary added.

I was going to tell them these rifles would be useless in the dense copse of trees, but refer back to the “obvious” banter. Zombies were already in the woods behind us, and were approaching as rapidly as the vegetation would allow.

“BT, go!” I said, smacking him on the shoulder. “Gary you get behind him. “I’ll try to make them stop.”

The gunfire from the roadway had become sporadic and then had abruptly ended. The food was doing what food was supposed to do, either getting eaten or fleeing. As the menu became slim pickings up top, more and more began to find their way down the embankment and joined in the pursuit of us.

I thought I might have possibly heard a woman scream. Eliza in frustration was my hope, but we were being hunted vigorously and we did not have time to gloat.

“Zombies in front,” BT said breathlessly. His trailblazing was beginning to take its toll. He turned left into somehow thicker foliage.

“This is horseshit,” I said as a third branch smacked off the side of my face. We would be leaving a blood trail Henry could follow. (I’m implying that bulldogs do not make good bloodhounds.)

Gary stopped for a second to take two well aimed shots at zombies that made an angle of approach which would have put them dangerously close to snagging BT.

BT pressed harder; he looked to be hung up. He quickly shucked off his jacket and kept pressing. He popped through a particularly dense bramble to emerge on the other side. But zombies had somehow beaten him to the punch. We were nearly encircled and barely had enough room to pivot around and find open firing lanes.

“Stop BT!” I yelled. “We make our stand here.”

“Not quite the Alamo,” he said with resignation, placing more rounds in his rifle.

“Any chance you can make them go away?” Gary asked, shoving rounds into his magazine.

“Yeah, one at a time and as soon as I move to the next one, the previous one will come back,” I told him.

“Not very effective,” he told me honestly and without malice; he was merely stating his feelings.

“Mike, now would be a most awesome time for one of your last ditch efforts,” BT said between expended rounds.

The noose was tightening quickly around our necks. The sun was nearly at high noon, the preacher had said his final words, the hangman’s hand was on the trip lever and the townsfolk were staring wide-eyed, fearful to blink, lest they miss something.

A zombie flew in from our right, a tree root making it fall at the last moment. It latched on with its teeth to BT’s pants, below his knee. The zombie’s hands scrambled to seek purchase. BT quickly turned the butt of the gun and slammed it into the side of the zombie’s face. The impact dislodged the majority of its teeth from its head. It’s nasal cavity had completely been pushed in from BT’s second head strike. It fell to the ground in a heap of crushed bone and leaking brain.