Mark Tufo - Zombie Fallout

“Talbot, get your ass over here!” Jed was yelling from the locked door, fumbling frantically with the keys trying to find the right one.

Flashbacks of every horror movie I had ever seen ran through my mind. You know the part where the person that is about to die fumbles with his or her keys, giving the monster in the flick the needed time to catch up with and dispatch the lowest paid actor in the movie. As I neared the door I could see the tremors in Jed’s hands, and this wasn’t the advancing age palsy either; this was the full-blown San Andreas type.

“Jed, take a deep breath, breathe for a sec,” I said to him, trying to instill a calm in him that I wasn’t even feeling, and I wasn’t even sure what was going on. Jed looked up at me, and my heart sank. His face couldn’t even be considered ashen, transparent was a better descriptive, I could see every blue vein perfectly etched in his features.

“Jed, what’s going on?” I asked in alarm.

“The end Talbot, the end,” he answered sadly.

I had never seen him so resigned. I wasn’t so sure now that I wanted him to open that door, maybe I could just ride it out right here. That was an option I didn’t have the luxury of exploring. The lock rattled open, and Jed jerked the door open.

“Get home Talbot,” Jed said without much inflection. Jed might not be a zombie, but he was dying inside.

“What about the trial?” I had to ask. I didn’t want attempted escape added to my offenses.

“I don’t think there’ll be enough people left in a couple of hours to worry about that,” Jed said, his shoulders slumping even further.

“Oh shit, Jed, it’s that bad?” I asked as I felt my heart drop.

“The wall has been breached in at least a dozen places. If you don’t get out of here and home now you’ll spend your last time on earth with him,” Jed said as he pointed to the far corner of the rec room slash converted cell where a drugged Durgan was recovering from the ad hoc surgery done on his shattered knee.

Sometime while I had been sleeping, Durgan had been wheeled in on a gurney. It was clear that he was not getting anywhere soon under his own volition. It was also clear, to me at least, that I couldn’t leave him. Yes, he was a murdering scumbag who had personally threatened to kill me and would have carried out his plan if given the opportunity, but even then I couldn’t just leave him. I looked longingly over Jed’s shoulder and the way out and back towards Durgan and the Christian-like thing to do. Who was I kidding, I wasn’t even a practicing worshipper. I was more like a pretend worshipper. I couldn’t even do what the vast majority of other pretenders did and go to church on Christmas Eve. Despite all that, I still went back to get Durgan. He jerked awake as I disengaged the foot brake on his gurney. His murderous black eyes quickly lost their postoperative haze and locked onto mine.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he mumbled. Even half asleep he was an asshole.

“Getting you out of here, the zombies have gotten into the complex,” I hastily explained.

A small smile curved across his lips. He was pulling out of his stupor by leaps and bounds. I was halfway across the room pushing the gurney when Durgan spoke.

“You know I’ll kill you the first chance I get right?”

“We’ve already been through this, why don’t you give it a rest.”

That seemed to piss him off to no end. Durgan’s body had been reduced to a shell of its previous self, but this was something that his mind had not yet grasped. He was a bully in the truest nature of the word and was ALWAYS used to getting what he wanted, how he wanted it, when he wanted it. Physical intimidation wasn’t just a means to an end for him, it was a lifestyle, so what issued forth next was pretty much par for the course for him.

“And then when I’m done with you, I’ll kill every one you’re close too,” he said as he croaked out a laugh, his throat unnaturally dry from the anesthesia.

I didn’t even respond, I took my hands off the gurney, walked past Durgan and out the door.

“Wait, where you going?” Durgan yelled. “I was kidding, you can’t leave me here. Wait!” he screamed in fear for maybe the first time in his life.

“You’re an idiot,” Jed said to Durgan as he pulled the door shut and locked it.

“Old man, you can’t leave me here.”

“Son, if I were so inclined to help you, which I’m not, I don’t have the strength to push what’s left of you out of here. Your best chance of survival just walked through this door. And to be honest, I’m glad you opened that big mouth of yours because if you hadn’t, and Talbot had tried to save your worthless life, he might’ve lost his in the effort. There would have been no justice in that.” Jed walked away, not feeling bad in the least as Durgan’s insults faded away into blubbering incoherence.

“Fuck me,” was all I could think to say as I walked out of the clubhouse.

Zombies were everywhere. Some of the townhomes were on fire. I would later learn it was from the zombies that had been firebombed. The few residents of Little Turtle that weren’t hunkered up in their homes were running for their lives, most without much success. Ravenous zombies were making short work of their unlucky catches. More than one victim would be busy looking over his or her shoulder at their pursuer only to run headlong into the loving arms of another zombie. I stared in fascinated horror as I watched what was once a guard (I could only tell by the uniform) literally have his face peeled off. The zombie had grabbed a piece of the guard’s chin in its teeth and pulled straight up. By some sheer witless luck his entire face had come off as neatly as a banana peel. The muscles underneath contorted into a scream but were cut short as another zombie ripped out his Adam’s apple. The ragged hole in the man’s neck leeched off what would have been an earsplitting shriek. Blood flowed freely from the faceless man’s eyes. My mind was in denial. It looked more like special effects in a low budget movie. I could not recognize what was happening as truth. This was an impossibility. People don’t get their faces ripped off. This wasn’t Silence of the Lambs. The guard’s eyes locked on mine, which brought me back to the here and now. I would later convince myself that in that state, the man was not capable of higher cerebral thought; he had to be in shock. But in that moment I was sure that he knew who he was, what was happening and what was about to transpire. The moment was broken when another zombie stepped between our line of sight and honed in on its after dinner parfait, me.

‘Run!’ my mind screamed. I obliged. I had to pull out all of my high school football running back moves. At 43 years old I was lucky not to pull anything else. For every zombie I dodged, two took its place. I figured at this geometric rate I would have to get by 64,000 of them by the time I got to my front door. This was not going to be easy. To my right the remnants of the wall were being pushed over as the main body of zombies fought to get their fair share of fresh meat. None of them wanted to be late for the party. I was twenty-five or so yards from the front of my house when I realized I would never have enough time to knock and convince who was ever on the other side to open the door before I was swarmed over. And my moments of having enough maneuverability were rapidly diminishing.

“Mom!” I heard a familiar voice yelling. “Dad’s coming!” Justin had been watching the front of the house and Travis had been watching the back just in case something like this happened.

Within seconds gunfire erupted from the upstairs windows as Justin, Travis and Brendon opened fire, widening a hole for me that I could have driven a truck through. I would have liked to have sauntered up to the front door like I was John Wayne, but I was scared shitless. Tracy had opened the front door and the security door and was yelling at me to hurry up.