Mark Tufo - Zombie Fallout

That was news to me. “You called?”

“Yeah I didn’t think I got through, I must have tried a couple of hundred times. I was on my last bar of battery when it finally rang on your side.”

“When?!” I asked incredulously.

“Damn, must have been yesterday morning,” he answered.

“When I went to the armory,” I finished more to myself than him.

“When…when I saw the boys across the street I thought the cavalry had shown up. When I realized you weren’t with them I wanted them to leave, I really did. But I also wanted to live. I wanted to be able to protect Erin. You know how that is, right? Trying to protect a loved one I mean,” he said as he looked up at me from his beer.

I nodded in agreement. I know that feeling all too well, and I also knew how it felt to feel as if you had failed. I couldn’t blame my friend for wanting to get help. I was pissed my kids thought it would be a good idea to go and get him though. He stood up and swayed back a bit. He was looking for a hug, which I was all too willing to give. I told him I loved him and that he should go sleep it off, not so much because he was drunk but because I wanted him to stop drinking my damn beers. Paul felt absolved as he stumbled to the couch. A small smile spread across his lips as he pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell into a relaxed sleep uninterrupted by the interminable pounding of dead flesh against his abode.

I finished my beer and another three as I pondered what would happen when the zombies did break through our defenses. That they would break through was never in doubt as far as I was concerned. How I was going to be prepared for it was another matter. I had no desire to be trapped in my unfinished attic waiting to starve or freeze to death while a bunch of pus-mongers roamed freely through my house. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to immediately implement but the loud boisterous snoring of Henry reminded me that perhaps now wasn’t the time to be doing home alterations. There was one thing I could do though as I went back upstairs and grabbed my jacket, flashlight, crowbar and rifle. It was kind of nice falling asleep fully dressed, it made getting ready a lot quicker proposition. The cold nearly snapped me out of my mild inebriation. What it actually did though was a much more pleasant sensation of awakening me fully while letting me keep my burgeoning buzz. Maybe there was an angle I could exploit here if the world ever returned to normal. “Drink Arctic Blast Beer, Be Fully Awake When You Say Something Inappropriate!” I could have a guy give a wide-eyed thumbs up as he grins to the camera after having received a slap from an attractive young lady. “Arctic Blast – When You Need To Know When You’ve Said Something Stupid! Remember Every Offending Remark! Every Hilarious Antic! Every I Love You Man!”

So. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!

CHAPTER 17

Journal Entry - 15

I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys, I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here. After some serious prying I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.

If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.

I went back into the house, grabbed another beer and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.

Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any but I still hadn’t finished it and with the thing now being body temperature warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!

Paul was in the kitchen getting a glass of water as I walked in and dumped the remains of my beer into the sink.

“I see nothing’s changed since college,” Paul said with a small laugh.

I wasn’t awake enough to catch the barb.

Paul moved on. “So what’s the plan for today?” he asked.

“Ass,” I said to him. I had finally caught his meaning.

Now it was his turn to be lost. “Don’t get me wrong buddy, I’m always up for a good time, but I’m not sure this is the right time,” he answered.

At first I didn’t garner his meaning. It was going to be a long day if we were always one sentence apart in our communications. I stopped for a second and thought about restarting the whole conversation. It just didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do. I started on a whole new subject instead.

“Well, Alex is going to be using about every able bodied person he can find to begin setting up defenses.”

Paul looked perplexed, so I explained everything that had happened the previous day with the assembly of zombies.

Paul didn’t look overly concerned but he was a master of disguising his true feelings. That’s why I never played poker with him. I had every intention of bringing Paul, the boys and myself to go help Alex, but first I was going to need a few hours to take care of some things at the house. My wife blanched at a few of my suggestions and made me alter a few of the more, well ‘altering’ ideas. First things first, I had Travis go scrounge me up a couple of ladders. I would have sent Justin too, except that he was still extremely weak from his ordeal. I needed a couple of ladders, lightweight and strong. Two of the longest that he could find should suit my purposes just fine. I grabbed some food supplies and extra water and placed them in my Jeep. I then got Brendon to follow me in his truck outside the complex. When we came back ten minutes later on foot, the guard looked like he wanted to ask us what we were doing, but he just shook his head and let us in. The next thing I did couldn’t have been a bigger waste of a half hour of my life unless I had watched What Not To Wear on HGTV. I reinforced the gate in my backyard to the point where a charging rhino couldn’t have busted through. I didn’t nearly get the return on investment that I had hoped for. I’d like to think that I noticed a hole in my defenses but at this point I was much too busy patting myself on the back.