The End Has Come and Gone by Mark Tufo
She smiled again, “Thank you for that,” as she buried her face again in Henry’s neck. “You know, this just might be the best dog ever,” she said as she squeezed him tight. Henry turned and licked her forearm.
“You’re probably right,” I told her as I stroked Henry’s huge head. We all turned as the large diesel engine of the ladder truck roared to life. The front of the truck poked its head from the fire station, splatters of a much darker red staining the majority of the vehicle. My mind was working furiously to find an alternate reason to explain away the blotches and was failing miserably.
Brian was driving the truck and Jack was sitting up on the ladder apparatus smiling like a kid who had just received his favorite toy for Christmas. “All aboard!” he shouted.
With a grim determination I walked back into the station. I just couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the dog pinned up against the wall. I had no sooner walked in when Meredith came sliding down the brass fire pole. I was happy that she could at least find a moment’s relief and enjoy the short thrill ride down, but the look on her face did not speak of any joy.
“Nest…” she barely eked out. I didn’t actually hear the words spoken, the blare of the ladder truck’s horn almost deafened my already battered ears.
“NEST!” she screamed just as the echoed reverberations of the blast were finished.
Zombies began to fall through the hole just as Meredith vacated the area, more followed down the stairs at the far corner.
Travis’ sixth sense was in high gear that day. He came around the corner, the Mossberg in his arms jumping as twelve gauge deer slugs ripped through the barrel. Zombies were launched off their feet; most would never regain a vertical position. Justin was next, quick to drop the cigarette he was smoking and chamber a round in his rifle. The three of us stood abreast, the rapid rate of fire tearing through our enemy but still we were losing ground.
Jack turned from his lofty perch, the smile literally running from his face. “Too many!” he screamed. “Coming around the other side!”
Perla had moved Henry aside and was running towards us. I could hear the blasts of her rifle and was none too pleased. I never did much like having someone shoot past me from the rear. Way too many chances for an errant shot. And Lord knows I’d pissed off enough people in my life that ‘friendly fire’ was always a personal concern of mine. I turned to look and possibly shout a few choice expletives at her, but she wouldn’t have seen me. She was shooting over to our left. I followed her line of sight. Zombies were coming at us at full tilt.
“Back!” I shouted, putting my forearm on Justin’s chest.
Brian was honking the horn on the truck and waving frenetically at us to get on. Cindy had climbed up by Jack and they were both concentrating their fire at the targets Perla was shooting at. My firing line was still oblivious to the danger on our side. Travis was jamming rounds into the Mossberg’s port with a speed I could barely register. I tapped him on the shoulder just as he shouldered his weapon. His eyes grew twice as wide as he looked over my shoulder at the approaching nightmare. His rifle swung over as he began to acquire new targets.
I shook my head in the negative, “Let’s go!” Meredith dropped the magazine she was loading into her rifle as I almost lifted her and Justin off their feet to get them in motion. Perla swung over to cover our retreat. I was now infinitely grateful that she was shooting over our heads. Funny how that change happened, I guess it’s just a matter of perspective. The zombies were close. I was waiting for the drag of a nail down my shirt, or a bite in my back, the green slimed teeth sinking deep into my flesh, or the black encrusted broken jagged nails scraping through the fragile layers of my skin. Always knew I should have used more moisturizer as I was growing older. It would have given my skin more elasticity and less chance of splitting when a zombie tried to scrape the life out of me. Yup, random thought as I fled for my life. At least it didn’t involve sex, maybe I was finally maturing. And then I began to think of the other uses that lotion could be used for and realized that maybe I was not as far along as I had originally thought.
I had a moment of panic as I looked at Henry in the front seat staring back at me. If he had inadvertently locked the door, which he was prone to do, I was a dead man. I couldn’t even count the number of times I had let him in on the passenger side only to have him come and greet me on the driver’s side and push the lock button down. Then he would just sit there with his huge panting grin wondering why I wasn’t joining him inside. I wouldn’t swear on it but I think he did it on purpose. I had taken him on dozens of car rides and never once had there been a problem. The day I had to take him to the vet for some shots he locked me out of the car. Two hours and a missed vet appointment later, the lock smith came and opened the car door.
“Hey buddy, you really should make a spare,” he told me as I wrote him a check for a hundred and ten dollars.
I told him to blow me, he laughed.
Five days and four uneventful car rides later, I was able to secure another appointment at the vets. This time I made sure that as soon as I put Henry in the car I ran around to the other side to get in. I slipped a little in the gravel by the front end and by the time I recovered and was able to get a hand on the door handle, I heard the telltale ‘click’ of the lock being engaged. There was no denying it this time. Henry was full on smiling at me. It was no damn pant. I was cursing loudly as I headed into the house.
“Talbot, did that dog get the best of you again?” Tracy asked, smiling almost as widely as Henry.
I was beyond pissed as I made sure to pick a different locksmith lest I get the same smart ass as before. I paid the extra twenty to have him make a key on the spot. This guy was an hour and a half quicker than his competition and so I was still able to make it to the vet. Henry was not a happy camper and let me know by leaving an extra heavy puddle of drool on my seat. The twenty minutes it took to drive home was excruciating as the thick saliva soaked through my jeans and onto my left butt cheek.
There was no way he could have known, right? In the hundreds of car rides we had taken together he had locked me out four times. Two were for the vet, once when I wanted to get his picture taken with Santa. The last time had been the summer before. It had been an unbelievably hot day, for some reason I thought it might be cooler at the dog park. Henry had been hesitant to leave our air conditioned home. I had to pick him up off his doggie hammock and physically put him in the car. I had no sooner placed him in the passenger seat when he stood up. He crossed the bridge between the two seats, lifted his left front leg and pushed the lock down with his paw. I watched in amazement. He wasn’t running around crazy and just happened to hit the lock, it had been a deliberate action. He had told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to go. I reached up under the frame of my jeep, grabbed the key I had hidden with the magnetic box, opened the door and let Henry find his way back to his hammock where he stayed the majority of the day. He occasionally got up to drink and eat, but for the most part he and the hammock were a fused entity.
I now had to hope, with my life on the line, that Henry’s actions had ALWAYS been that of a fully cognizant being and not those of an over exuberant puppy/dog. Henry jumped into the back seat just as I got to the door. Travis and Justin who were quicker than me had already gained entry. I pretended for pride’s sake that I was covering Meredith’s retreat, which technically I was, but she was also quicker than I. This was a blow to my ego. I could smell the gunpowder of the expended rounds as they came dangerously close to my back. The zombies were within striking distance. If they could breathe, I would have felt their exhalations on my neck.
Meredith, Justin and Travis had made it in. Henry had not locked us out after all, but that still did not quiet my hammering heart as my hand wrapped around the cool metal of the handle. If I lifted up and it did not disengage the locking mechanism, there would not be enough time for anyone inside to help me out. I know Henry didn’t lock me out now I had to hope that good ol
“Zombie’s got you Dad!” Justin shouted, pointing.
I wanted to shout ‘Really?’ but there is a time and a place for sarcasm and I certainly didn’t have the time for it. I had a variety of none too pleasant sensations all happen quicker than the blink of an eye. The first being the razor sharp burn of pain as a bullet scraped against the side of my head, the second was the separating of a fair portion of hair and skin from my scalp as the zombie behind me suffered a fatal head shot; his hand spasmed closed even tighter, and as he fell he took a part of me with him. The third was my shoulder getting slammed by the car door as BT used our other ride as a battering ram. Zombies shot out at odd angles as the ton and a half projectile slammed into them. I could see Tracy holding on for dear life in the passenger seat. Gary was in the back seat and he spared me a side-long glance as they passed by. BT had bought me a few precious seconds and I would not squander them. My head initially dragged even further backward from the clutch of the zombie and then shot upright as my scalp finally let go of its prize. I didn’t even bring up my right hand to see how deep the wound was from the bullet. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to do anything about it right now and I was too scared to check anyway.
“Oh my God!” Meredith screamed, “You’re bleeding from your head!”
“You’ve been hanging out with Justin too long,” I told her as I shoved the car in gear and screeched the tires out of the parking lot. BT and the fire truck were not far behind. Neither were the zombies for that matter.
Blood was accumulating in my lap at an alarming rate. “How bad is it?” I asked Meredith. If I was to solely base her answer on the expression she was wearing, it was safe to assume my brains were exposed and were leaking down the side of my face.
Justin pulled himself up from the back seat and gingerly probed his fingers around the wound.
“What are you doing? It feels like you’ve got arsenic on your fingers,” I fairly yelped at him.
“Well, to quote Monty Python, Dad, ‘it’s only a flesh wound.’” Justin said still messing around with a flap of skin attached to an exposed nerve bundle secured tightly at the base of my spine.
“Yeah, but if I remember right, the ‘flesh wound’ in that movie equated to a missing arm,” I told him.
“I’m not sure it will even leave a scar,” Travis threw his two cents into the mix.
“You guys aren’t just saying this like they do in the movies are you? ‘Oh Murphy, it’ll be alright,’ meanwhile the guy’s guts are blown all over the beach.”
“Wow, Mom did say you were a little dramatic,” Travis laughed, “but I didn’t really believe her, at least until now.”
“You get shot in the head, smart ass, and then tell me who is being dramatic,” I said as I finally mustered the courage to put a finger up by the grazing. The wound was shallow and about the width of the tip of my pinkie finger. I had once again cheated death. This hadn’t been my closest call but it was in the top five. The black robed one would have to wait yet a while more. Could Death alter destiny to serve his needs? Or was he (it) merely one more cog in the vast machinations of fate? No more able to alter his course than a blade of grass in a swift running stream. Were any of our ends foretold, the time and date written on head stones, or were they fluid? Did Death wait for an ‘expected’ demise or was his arrival contingent on our passing?
I preferred to think that he was snapping his fingers in the familiar ‘Damn, he got away’ gesture rather than sitting back with a slated schedule and saying, ‘Not yet, but SOON.’ Giving Death the finger seemed WAY cooler.
After a couple of miles when I was fairly certain we had lost our dinner guests, I pulled over to the side of the road. The wound may have been shallow, but it would not stop bleeding and I might be entirely too thickheaded to know when to die but I’d passed out before and I did not want to suffer that indignity again. Perla jumped down from the fire truck with a white first aid kit.
“I’m so sorry Mike,” she said as she came towards me.
I staggered out of the car, some was from blood loss, some for dramatic effect. Hey, it’s not every day you get shot in the head, might as well milk it for something.
“Mike?” Tracy asked approaching hesitantly. Concern, care, and worry were all wrapped up in the one word question.
“I’m fine,” I said leaning against the car heavily.
“It barely touched him,” Travis said as he got out of the car to check the approach from our rear.
“Yeah, it’s bleeding much worse than it actually is,” Justin added as he reloaded a magazine.
Perla placed a hydrogen peroxide soaked cloth to my head pinkish foam oozed from my wound. The resulting sizzle sounded much like the Pop Rocks candy I had enjoyed in my youth. Who am I kidding, I had eaten a bag of the sugary goodness not a week before the zombies had come. I found them in a dollar store and bought the whole box. I had hidden them out in the garage, not willing to share nor divulge my secret stash.
I was trying to pull my head away from Perla’s ministrations; she wasn’t having any of it. She quickly placed some disinfectant on the wound and then wrapped my head in gauze. My head began to throb like I had spent the last three nights partying, but without the resulting fond memories of crazy actions performed.
“Good thing you jarheads have thick skulls,” Brian said as he came over. “Left my damn rifle at the fire station.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I told him. “I wouldn’t think as an army dog you’d know how to shoot it anyway.”
Brian looked at me sternly. I thought I might have crossed an imaginary boundary with him before he smiled. “You alright?” he asked seriously.
“Yeah, just feels like someone is tapping on my skull with a ball peen hammer.”
“We still on then?” Jack asked from the ladder, watching the conversation from above.
“Your head is still bleeding, Uncle,” Meredith said as the cloth around my head began to soak red throughout.
Gary came over to give me a quick once over. When he was confident I wasn’t going to expire, he popped the hood. Chunks of gore ran towards the windshield as he raised it up. Tracy’s car looked like it was in imminently more danger of going to the great beyond. The front end was caved in and the smell of caustic anti-freeze filled the air.
“Radiator is shot and the fan has cut through some electrical lines,” Gary said mournfully as he stood back up, popping his back as he did so.
“Well, let’s transfer the stuff out of there, we have plenty of room with the fire truck now,” Tracy told him.
Fifteen minutes later we were back at the original overpass that overlooked the furniture store.
“This really looked better on paper,” Jack said as we surveyed the throng of zombies.
“No it didn’t,” I told him frankly.
“Yeah you’re probably right,” he answered back.
“But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try. Isn’t that right Mike?” BT asked. I nodded in reply. “See, do I know my crazy friend or what?” he said triumphantly.
“I think Eliza is here, I can feel her almost like an echo,” I said almost imperceptibly.
“You can feel her?” Justin asked.
What was awesome was Justin couldn’t. Did Easter’s incantations really work?
“Eliza is here?” Tracy asked with alarm. “Then we should be anywhere but here!” she emphasized.
“If Eliza is here, so is Tommy, Mom,” Travis said, linking all the pieces of the puzzle together.
“This sucks,” I said. “This is just about a text book trap,”
“Brian?” Cindy asked.
I know what that implied; life right now was already difficult enough to hold onto wit
“Guys, you owe us nothing,” I told the group.
“What would you do, Mike? Honestly, if you were us what would you do in this situation?” Brian asked me.
“I’d leave,” I told him.
“Bullshit,” BT said. “You’d be the first in,”
“That’s what I thought,” Brian said, “Then we stay,”
“Ass,” I turned to address BT.
“Anytime,” he smiled.
“We should get moving then,” Gary said. “Zombies are zombies, but zombies in the dark are a lot scarier.”
“Agreed,” I agreed.
The beeping from the fire truck as Brian backed it into the Wendy’s parking lot was nerve racking. The zombies didn’t even seem to pay it any attention. Brian backed the truck up as far as he could go; the rear tires were resting on the retaining wall. I was no expert on fire trucks and ladders, but I didn’t see any way that the ladder was going to extend to that furniture store roof.
“Good to see you Mike!” Paul shouted from the far roof, his voice traveling considerably well over the thousands of quiet zombies below, and without any roadway traffic there was really only the sound of birds and insects to contend with.
“You too Paul, although I really wish we could have met in a bar with a pitcher of beer instead,” I told him.
Even from this distance I could see him nod. Alex waved enthusiastically. I returned the gesture with an arm that felt more filled with Jell-o than muscle. Have I yet discussed my fear of heights?
“That going to reach?” Paul asked the question that was on everyone’s mind.