Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

“These cats are freaking me out.”

“Get in the house. I swear I hear running feet,” Gary said with a wide-eyed expression, doing a quick three sixty of their area.

Mike knocked quickly on the door. “Hi, we’re friendly and we’d like to come in. Please don’t shoot us.”

“That wasn’t very convincing.”

“I’m all ears if you have something better.” They heard no sound, but a fourth cat was now peering out the side light at them. Mike tried the door handle. “It’s unlocked.”

“Get in, we’ll try our luck in there,” Gary said, as he pretty much pushed Mike in. Six cats with tails flicking back and forth were looking up at them cautiously. Gary shut the door behind Mike, nearly stepping on a cat in his haste to peek outside the side light.

“Zombies! I knew I heard them coming. What is that smell?” Gary asked, finally turning around and taking in the view of forty or fifty cats that had now assembled in the room.

“Wow, this sucks,” Mike said. The cats weren’t advancing, but they also weren’t retreating. The ammonia smell of abundant cat urine was prevalent as were the feces that littered everything, but there was also something sinister, some underlying smell that he knew, but was unwilling to identify. Mike would have written down now that it was death, plain and simple, but at that time, his mind struggled to keep away from that realization. Add to the fact that Gary’s gagging wasn’t helping the situation at all.

Some cats were mostly fixated on Mike, but in Gary’s moment of weakness, he saw some of the pests moving in closer. They halted their advance as zombies began to slam into the framework of the house. Gary’s head shot up. “Is that blood?” he asked, pointing to the floor a few feet past some of the cats.

The garish, orange-flecked linoleum which Mike imagined led to the kitchen was dotted in reddish brown splotches.

“It looks like it. Is anyone home?” Mike called, hoping to reestablish some normalcy to the situation. The cats seemed to get a little hesitant at the sound of his voice, but they didn’t take off and retreat to a safe place. “Come on, man! We’re on the second rung of the food chain, Talbot,” Mike said, trying to steel himself for what needed to be done. “Third, if you include sharks.”

“Has Tracy been nominated for Sainthood yet?” Gary asked.

“Just watch my back.”

“From the zombies or the cats?” he asked.

“The cats, definitely the cats.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

They moved a foot forward, the cats yielded half that, seeming to grow bolder as they stepped deeper into the house.

“They’ve got in behind us, Mike. What the hell is going on?”

“I’d say that they’re pretty hungry.”

Mike’s trepidation increased as he got closer to the kitchen opening. The cats seemed very reluctant to yield the ground to their front. They were almost protective, like they had a prize they were unwillingly to share. A cat actually bit his boot as he crossed in, Mike gently kicked it away, not quite willing to add animal cruelty to his list of transgressions. He had never been a huge cat fan, but he’d never had reason to hate them until he walked into that kitchen.

“Oh God,” Mike said softly. Gary retched behind him.

A shredded human, bones glistening wetly with the remnants of bodily fluids and cat saliva stared back at them with an eyeless gaze. Its jaw bone was missing as was a portion of its lower leg. All that remained was a shock of hair on top and strips of blue denim. It was the white gold wedding band, lying a few feet from the body that brought Mike to the full realization of who lay before him.

Mike whirled, quicker than any of the cats could respond and lashed out with his heavy boot. The crack of ribs as he launched a cat into the far wall was only superseded by his satisfaction as he came down heavily on the spine of another. It wriggled its head uselessly from side to side, its legs now a useless jumble of spare parts.

The cats were mewling and scurrying about, some running, some defending.

“What is going on, Mike?” Gary asked. He was as scared as Mike had ever seen him.

“That’s Paul on the floor there and these fucking things did it!” Mike screamed as he lashed out at anything that was foolish enough to get within striking range. Within five minutes, he had killed or wounded at least a dozen of them. The rest had seen the folly of trying to tackle two full grown, healthy, armed and defensive men. Mike had received more than a few razor-sharp claw slashes, but that had only added fuel to the fire that the cats had ignited.

He didn’t know if Gary had gone on the offensive at all, but he had protected his back as some of the cats tried to launch themselves at him from varying pieces of furniture. Mewls of pain and rage echoed from around the house. They’d be back, most likely waiting for the cover of darkness.

“Cowards!” Mike screamed. He was shaking with his emotions, that fluctuated wildly from pain to rage to mourning. Gary grabbed him in a big hug.

“It’ll be alright, brother,” he kept saying over and over.

But it wouldn’t be, now or ever. This was one more hard stop marker in life that Mike would never be able to step back over. There would be life with his best friend of almost thirty years and then there would be a much dimmer life with him after. Mike sobbed into his brother’s shoulder to the point where his head ached and a good dry cleaner would never be able to get the snot out of his jacket.

“We need to bury him,” Mike finally managed to get out.

“I feel the same way, but I don’t really want to stay here long enough for the zombies to leave so that we can do that. Maybe we can head out the backyard and come back.”

Gary’s idea was valid in almost every way, but Mike could not leave his friend here with the cats to pick through whatever remained of him.

“The backyard it is, but we’re burning this fucker down,” Mike said with rage-fueled words.

Mike scoured the house, looking for some sort of accelerant to make sure this house would burn hot enough to rival the depths of hell. The best he could do was a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol. The cats did not come out, but there was not a room in that house that they were not observed by multiple eyes. The only thing that was stopping them and barely, was the size discrepancy.

“Mike, you should come here,” Gary said from the other side of the house, back from the kitchen Mike was doing his best to avoid.

Mike braced myself and did his best to remember his friend as he had been in life, not the carcass that lay on the floor. Mike almost sobbed when he went in. Gary at some point had draped a blanket over Paul. There would never be any way Mike could thank him properly for that.

“What’s up, brother?”

He handed Mike Paul’s wedding band. “I think you should be the one to give this back to Erin.”

Mike would rather hammer nails through his toes than have to give her back her dead husband’s ring. She would never forgive him. He lost two friends today. Mike nodded as he took the ring from Gary’s palm.

“The stove is gas,” he said.

Mike was still staring at the ring now in his hand, Gary’s words merely a jumble of mish-mashed sounds.

“Did you hear me?”

Mike nodded only because he heard the uplifting sound of a question and it seemed appropriate. But he hadn’t, not in any cognitive way. Mike was shutting down, the accumulated stress of the entire ordeal was beginning to break him. He had always thought those people that claimed they had an emotional breakdown were weak-minded. That was until he began to suffer through his own, and then he pitied each one of them, because if they had been pushed that far to the brink, something had gone horribly wrong in their lives.