Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

With some effort, I was able to pull the zombie’s attention away from BT to myself, but it kept looking over at BT, hoping he wasn’t going to leave.

“People don’t get it. I’m always telling them the dark meat is sweeter,” BT said.

“There is no way you just said that in this situation,” I said, trying to keep all my attention focused on the zombie.

“Why’d you kill all the other zombies?” Josh asked.

“Because I wouldn’t have gotten them all to listen,” I answered him. I could feel the temperature of my body begin to rise as I worked in overdrive to try out an experiment I wasn’t even certain would work.

“If you’re all focused on this one,” BT asked, “am I going to be alright?”

“You’ll be fine, I have enough concentration to work on this zombie and keep your virus at bay, but if people keep asking me questions, my strength is going to get a little diluted.”

“Mike! Come on, brother! What are you doing?” Gary asked.

“Zip it, man!” BT said, taking one hand off the rifle and pointing a huge finger in Gary’s direction.

I think it was the first time I had ever seen BT raise his voice to Gary, but I guess when you have the threat of becoming a zombie hanging over your head, all bets are off.

The zombie jerkily moved closer to me. It was like trying to force magnets of the same polarization together. The zombie really did not want anything to do with me. I kept reeling him in closer. My eyes were watering from the stink of it. Its gray, vein-lined face was less than six inches from mine. It finally stopped trying to find BT and its eyes locked onto mine. Its mouth opened up. It ran its gore-encrusted tongue over the shards of its remaining teeth. This one looked like it had eaten a bag of marbles; blood welled up from where its tongue made contact.

I cocked my head to the side, giving it a large area of my neck to peruse.

“What the hell?” Mary moaned, “I would have never let you in if I had known you were clinically insane. Make him stop!” Mary said to Gary.

“BT told me to zip it,” Gary mumbled.

The zombie eyed my neck greedily, and its mouth opened even wider. I didn’t think that was possible. It leaned in closer. A thick liquid dropped from its mouth and onto my neck. I was going to go with it being drool, not that that was much better, but it was worlds better than the other myriad fluids it could have been.

The zombie slowly eased its way in, the blood throbbing through my neck was too much. I might not be its favorite thing on the menu, but I was hot and it was hungry. I was holding the zombie a quarter inch from my neck. The strain in my mind and my body was beginning to wear me down. I could feel the heat of decay from its mouth on my neck. If I moved a fraction of an inch, it would bite, and then it licked my neck. Half vamp, former Marine, father of three, none of that mattered; my stomach threatened to completely turn itself inside out. I pulled away.

“Kill it,” I moaned to BT.

BT waited until all the noise from his shot went quiet. “What were you trying to prove?” he asked.

“That I can control them. That what is inside of you has stopped its advance, that’s what I am trying to prove.”

“That proves nothing,” Mary said defiantly. “I’m not letting either of you in here with my son and me.”

My head dragged even lower. I had expended a lot of energy with the useless test and I had a slow steady trickle being sent to BT. I could hear rustling inside the house.

“What are you doing, Gary?” Josh asked.

“If they can’t come in, little man, then I have to go out,” Gary told him.

“Wait,” Mary said. “Are you sure? You could spend some time here, with us,” she added, a little pleadingly.

“You guys have been great hosts, but that’s my brother and his friend,” Gary said.

BT and I looked at each other as Gary said “his friend.”

“I guess he didn’t like your ‘zip it’ comment,” I laughed.

BT shrugged.

“But they’re dangerous,” Mary yammered.

Gary stole a quick glance out the window, looking at us to maybe see if we had sprouted wings or maybe horns. “They don’t look any more dangerous than they usually do,” he said, pulling away from the window.

Mary looked out the window, I think to her, we had sprouted those things. “How can you say that? One is part vampire and the other is part zombie! What could possibly be more dangerous?”

“Mike’s plans,” Gary shot out without missing a beat.

“I heard that,” I told him.

“Sorry, it was the first thing out of my mouth, I didn’t even need to think about it.”

“Mom, we can’t leave them out there.”

“We most certainly can,” she answered him.

“She’s right, Josh. You guys don’t really know us and you certainly don’t owe us anything. Could you please just send out a few first aid supplies with Gary so I can field dress my friend’s wound?” I asked Mary.

“I’ll do it,” Mary agreed.

I didn’t know at the time she was talking about cleaning the wound herself, not just sending the stuff out.

We walked over to the front door, I expected to be greeted by Gary. Mary was looking around the front screen security door; and when she was satisfied there were no other boogey men besides BT and me present, she motioned for us to come in.

“You sure?” I asked her.

“No, so get in before I change my mind.”

BT brushed past me. Mary almost got her neck stuck craning it high enough to look at BT’s face this close.

BT sat calmly as Mary scrubbed, cleaned and disinfected his bite and a dozen or so other various scrapes and bruises.

“You don’t take very good care of yourself,” Mary chided him.

BT was in the middle of eating a Beef Stroganoff MRE packet. He didn’t really know what to say to her comment, so he just kept eating, but he did send me a knowing glance like “What the hell is she talking about? Doesn’t she know there’s a zombie apocalypse going on right now?” Or it might have just been indigestion. I’m not sure. I wasn’t paying him so much attention as I was one of the things inside of him.

“Man, it’s creeping me out the way you’re looking at me, and I’m trying to eat too,” BT said.

“Sorry man, I’m just…”

“I don’t want to know,” he said, cutting me off as he dug deeper into his foil food packet.

I could link with what I’d come to know as the Hugh-Mann’s, according to my great grandfather’s research. I read most of his findings while someone else had been driving. Contrary to popular belief, I can read; it’s writing that most seem to think I have a problem with. I could sense them and they were dormant for the moment, kind of like the stasis we had seen from other zombies, but if BT was to stray more than thirty feet or more, I lost concentration. Then any influence I had would be gone and the process would continue. Right now, I could keep him from becoming a zombie, but if he were to turn, there would be nothing I could do. That would be the point of no return.

Mary had seemed particularly nervous when she first started working on BT, but the more she got into the routine of her profession, the more she loosened up. And there was just something about the big man. If you were not on the opposing side, he made you feel safe.

“Is Mike still looking at me?” BT asked as he dived into a tuna casserole packet.

Mary looked up from a cut on his leg she was actually stitching up. “Yes,” she answered turning back towards her work.

“This food would be much more pleasurable if you weren’t looking at me, man,” BT said, never looking up. “And you too, little man.”

Josh was sitting at the table and looking at BT, slack-jawed. “Are you a wrestler?” Josh asked.