“Alright, I’m ready.”
The lighter flashed, the flame so bright comparatively that I had to squint. Tommy held the lighter high over his head and advanced. When he got close, he brought it down to my arm. The area around my wrist had already swollen to nearly double its size and was the angry purple of a Barney gone rogue. (Old kid’s show if you ever had the good fortune to not see it.) It had snapped so far that my fingers were actually touching my forearm. It would have been a sickening site to behold on an NFL star as I watched from the comfort of my couch. On myself it was horrifying.
“Ouch,” Tommy said.
“You don’t say?” I wanted to look away. My eyes and my stomach were both in agreement on this. My brain though was still trying to wrap itself around what had happened and would not yet yield its thoughts on the whole thing just yet.
“Damn.” The flame went out. “Burnt myself,” he said as he sucked his fingers. “Can you hold the lighter while I work on your wrist?” He didn’t bother to hear my response when he thrust the hot metal top into the palm of my hand. It sounded like boiling-over water did when it fell onto super-heated stove coils. “Sorry,” he said immediately, and good thing too—otherwise I was going to try and press the thing against his cheek.
I waited a few seconds until it cooled sufficiently and flicked the lighter on.
“Ready?” he asked again not waiting for me to respond.
His hands were already on the move before the flame had come on. I cried out as his left hand grabbed my forearm and his right hand wrapped around my fingers. I dropped the lighter as he first pulled my hand further away from my arm and then guided it back in with his left. His squeezing was gentle as he felt the bones to see if they lined up, but right now it felt like each pinprick of pressure was delivered with a ball-peen hammer. Tommy steadied me as I rocked a bit on my heels.
I gurgled some sort of swear words together. Came out something sort of like “Mucking futher wick sticker.”
“Maybe we should have done this with you sitting down. Feel better?”
To respond would have meant opening my mouth again, and I was already willing down the minimal contents within me. If by “feel better” he meant I wanted to cave his fucking skull in with a cannon ball, then yeah, I felt worlds better.
We stayed that way for a bit, my wrist braced in his hand. I didn’t dare move, because I knew he wasn’t going to.
“Mr. T, you need to hold your hand in place so I can find the lighter.”
“Fuck the lighter,” I said through gritted teeth. Again we stayed this way a few more minutes.
“How about now?”
“The lighter can kiss my ass.”
“Well, we’re making strides toward improvement.”
“Get it, I’ll be fine.” I wasn’t sure how long my legs were going to support me. Tommy guided my hand into place.
“Hold it tight.”
“I feel like I’ve just Super Glued something together, and if I don’t hold it into place long enough it will just fall off.”
Tommy was on the ground feeling around for the lighter. “That’s exactly what will happen if you let go too soon.”
Chunks of bile-encrusted somethings rose up into my throat. I was fairly certain I could not go through the placement of my wrist again. I stood steadfast.
“Got it,” Tommy said triumphantly. “Okay, Mr. T, I know you’re not going to like this part one bit, but you need to do it.”
“Worse than having a bone set without a pain killer?”
“To you? Yes.”
I was at a loss. “What, Tommy?”
“We need to have your wrist heal even faster.”
“Okay, you got some super healing juice I can drink? I mean, I really don’t know…no…no fucking way,” I told him when I realized just how close to the truth I’d inadvertently come.
“Mr. T, I’d splint your arm in a heartbeat if there were another way. First, we don’t have any medical supplies, and second, you’re going to need to be a hundred percent to have a chance of getting out of here. It won’t take more than a few seconds. We could already be done.”
“Do you even have a clue how repulsive I find this to be?”
“There is no other way.”
I would have argued more, probably until my wrist could have healed naturally, if not for the sound of something else coming down the chute. It was a zombie. There was nothing else it could have been. We both turned to look as this one landed very much like I’d been afraid I would, headfirst. Its skull cracked open, spilling its contents all over the floor.
“Clean-up, aisle eight,” the words tumbled out of my mouth eons before my brain thought to retract them. Which in itself is pretty funny. I mean, really, it’s your brain that comes up with the process of speech, so why does it take so long for the appropriate filters to be put in place before thought becomes vocalized? Yet another design flaw in humans.
Tommy pressed his forearm into my face. I got a heavy whiff of gas, sweat and liverwurst Pop-tarts. I would have turned away if the chute wasn’t once again populated with a zombie; and, from the sound of it, more than one. I punctured his skin and drank a small sip at first…and then the nature of the beast took control as I pulled deeply like I was sharing an alcoholic drink for two with three friends and wanted to make sure I got my money’s worth. Tommy pulled his arm away from me. Pain blistered in my stomach from the loss, and then an intense heat radiated out from my middle, spreading like wildfire through every part of me, including my extremities.
Tommy once again turned; we could just make out a zombie slowly getting to its feet. It landed headfirst as well, but had the safety of landing on the failed test dummy. The muzzle flashes lit up the room like the world’s loudest strobe light.
“You ready to move?” Tommy asked as a third and a fourth zombie hit the floor. The cracking of bones, teeth, and jaws reverberated off the walls. It seemed that only the first one down was going to die by contact in its attempt to follow us.
“My clothes.” I didn’t want to die naked, screw that noble savage shit.
“Good idea.” Tommy ran to my pile of clothes grabbed my magazines and then lit my clothes on fire, tossing the burning material into the zombies.
“Not really what I meant,” I said as Tommy turned me to the incinerator access door.
At least a couple of zombies were now ablaze, and we had the added benefit of having a zombie candle to light our way. I was just thrilled the doorway was open, surprised Deneaux hadn’t locked the access door behind her. I could only assume it also used the magnetic type locks, otherwise, she would have been stuck in here as well. The incinerator may have been a nightmare, but at the moment, it was lit up like Times Square during New Year’s. Heading out to the greater room that housed it and the hallway was terrifying. We were going from the horrors we could see to the terrors we could not.
Tommy would flick his lighter occasionally, but we were running—the flame never held. All we would see was the momentary flash of the flint. Try to assemble an accurate picture of your surroundings with a quarter second of light over an ever-changing landscape. Zombies were chasing us. How did I know? Well, Bobby Blaze was one of them. He didn’t seem to care in the least that he had become the human torch. His clothes were completely burned away, his hair burning a brilliant orange. I thought that he must’ve had some sort of hair product in it before he’d become a zee. He had been burning with so much intensity that his skin had caught fire. Large swaths of charred flesh were hanging from his thighs and chest. It was his manhood that sickened me the most, the tip of it burning and, as the flesh melted, flaming pieces fell away to the floor as he ran. I couldn’t help thinking it looked like the worst burning case of gonorrhea in recorded history. I was pretty sure a shot of penicillin wasn’t going to do him any good.
I noticed our light source was starting to fade. Bobby Blaze must have been boiling his brain or perhaps he’d burned through the muscles on his legs. Either wa
y, it was getting dark again.
“You know where you’re going?” I asked Tommy as we ran.
He seemed so sure of his turns. I should have known better—this was just purely escape mode. We needed to get away from the zombies first and find a way out second. Even over my labored breathing I could hear the heavy footfalls of pursuit. More than once I had turned and fired, the muzzle flashes illuminating the nightmare behind us. My wrist was feeling better, but it was far from healed. I was shooting with one arm—and not my natural arm either—while I was half turned around and on the move. To say they were less than successful would be a vast understatement, unless of course some of the rounds that hit the walls miraculously ricocheted off and into a brain or two of the ones that followed. If that were the case, then I was a friggin’ crack shot.
“You smell that?” Tommy asked.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Smells like hot dogs.”
I almost vomited thinking about Bobby Blaze’s Burning Bobbitt. I pleaded with a deaf god for that to not be what he was referring to. The visual, along with the olfactory input, would just be too much.
“Beans, too.”
That was it. I dry heaved. Now I had to add Bobby Blaze’s Blueberries to the equation. I nearly tripped over my own feet with my head hanging so low. I figured I’d lost some precious lead time, so I turned and fired again. This time it would have been impossible to miss. The zombies were within five feet; I could clearly make out the twisted snarls of their mouths as they hunted us, their arms outstretched, long streamers of drool hanging from their death dealing teeth. Their eyes would narrow when they would catch a glimpse of us.
“Gotta run faster,” I grunted to Tommy, turning back to the front.
It was then that I caught a sliver of light from an opening door. I knew two things right then. One was we were not alone; and the other was Tommy was quickly pulling away from me.
“Mr. T, come on!” he shouted.
He was beginning to act a lot like my son, Justin, in the Captain Obvious respect. Really, what were my choices? Not hurry up and be eaten? I’d rather go shoe shopping with the missus. I nearly fell when I stepped on one of my shoelaces, talk about instant karma. I ended up coming in hot, stumbling headfirst past Tommy and in. I winced as I used my arms to keep myself from crashing into some steel shelving. Tommy slammed the door shut and threw a decent sized slide bolt to lock the door. I thought that strange, but who was I to complain if it kept the zombies out.
“Hi, Mr. Talbot.”
“Porkchop?” I turned to see the boy as he moved to sit in front of a small propane camp grill.
On one side he had boiling water with hot dogs and on the other was a pot full of beans. The room was lit up by three flashlights, strategically placed to keep as much of the shadow back as possible.
“Are you alright?” I asked. Seemed funny to ask that of a kid who was sitting down to a meal, and I was the one covered in gore and gas, nursing an injury and nearly nude.
“Doc is dead,” he said, having a hard time looking me in the eye.
“Whatever happened, Porkchop, it wasn’t your fault.” I moved closer to him, as did Tommy.
Porkchop shied away from Tommy. I can’t say I blame him. He was well aware of what the other boy had done, and he’d been listening to the ravings of his adoptive father for a long while now. Tommy immediately moved away to give him space.
“He saved me,” Porkchop sniffed. “I was in the cafeteria. I have a job as assistant to the assistant potato peeler. It’s great. I only have to peel when I feel like it, and I usually get some cake before they put it out for the meals, so I always get the corners where there is more frosting. So, on the nights I know they’re going to have chocolate cake, I peel potatoes.”
“Seems like a fair trade to me,” I told him. He nodded.
“It was Red Velvet night today…or was it yesterday?” He looked over to me.
I was about to respond and he continued on, in the end I suppose the time of day was unimportant in the recanting of the story.
“I love cream cheese frosting, Mr. Talbot, maybe more than fried chicken. So I decided I’d peel some extra potatoes, only they weren’t having potatoes, it was carrots. Those are even easier to peel.”
I had to disagree on a personal level. More than once I’d nicked my fingers with those barbaric peeling devices. Nothing like bloody carrots and cucumbers to go with your meal. Adds iron so I’m told. Screw knives…between cheese graters and peelers I’d spilled way more blood than any kitchen disaster that started with a blade.
“I was on my thirty-third carrot when I heard screams coming from the far side of the cafeteria.”
I looked at Porkchop strangely. I hadn’t known he was OCD like me. Counting peeled carrots was exactly the type of thing I would have done. Poor kid, depending on if we got out of here or not, he was in for a life relegated to counting just about everything from steps to tooth brush strokes.
“It was Mr. Springer.”
“As in Jerry?” I had to interrupt him.
“Who?” Porkchop asked.
I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“Mr. Springer the janitor. He was always nice to me. Sometimes my job was to help him gather trash bags. But usually he just let me ride around on the cart. This is one of his secret locations.”
That explained the old-fashioned slide bolt on the door. “What’s so secret?” I asked, looking around the room for a stash of booze or a cot.
It was more like a mini-fire department, which made sense. Wasn’t like if this place had caught on fire they could call the local fire station. Against the far wall were heavy jackets and pants. Immediately below them were heavy rubber boots, to the side, hanging on hooks, were helmets with fire-shield glass in front. I’d like to admit that bells were going off in my head right about now, but all I could think about was how heavy and uncomfortable all that crap looked like it would be to wear. A small unused card table with some chairs resided in the corner.
“You thinking what I’m thinking, Mr. T?” Tommy asked.
“I doubt it.” I’d moved on to wondering if the jacket would chaff the hell out of my nipples if I donned it without a shirt.
“Mr. Springer liked to come down here and read.” Porkchop had gone back to answering my question.
“Why is that a secret…oh,” I said when Porkchop got up and walked over to a small row of lockers. Opening one up, I saw it was full of books with men wearing kilts for covers. He was a closet romance novel reader. I had to smile a little at that.
“He was also a volunteer firefighter.”
That made more sense. That was why he would have had keycard access to this place and even more of why he would want to hide his addiction. Tough to be a manly fireman with a Romancing the Highlander novel in your back pocket.
There was a heavy banging on the door we’d entered. It appeared that the zombies were also romance-reading fans. It was a hope of mine anyway.
“Mr. T, we should really be finding a way to get out of here.”
I held up a finger and silently shushed him. This was a small room; there was a bench in the middle—I would imagine to help in donning fire apparel…or reading in this case. The lockers and the hose were mounted on the far wall, along with an axe. There were no holes in the floor, walls, or ceiling as far as I could see that would allow for some miraculous escape. At this point, I’d love to tell you that all of this was coming together in my head.
It wasn’t.
I was blank slating. I think maybe it had something to do with being nearly naked and the damn burning itch in my wrist as it healed at an impossible rate. Right now, as far as I was concerned, we were trapped, might as well hear Porkchop’s story out. He would recite it whether we were listening or not, and this would give me plenty of time to claw at my crawling irritation.
“I stood up from my duties to look through the opening that went from the cook area to the serving area. From there, you can
see out into the cafeteria. Mr. Springer was swinging the end of his mop back and forth in the face of a zombie. Then he stuck the handle into the zombie’s mouth and drove him backwards into the wall. Left a huge blood splatter. It was pretty gross.”
I had a newfound respect for the sometimes fireman and secretive romance-reading janitor.
“It was when more zombies came in that he started to lose the fight. He killed two more, and would have had another if one hadn’t bit his shoulder from behind.”
“He killed three zombies with a mop?” I asked.
Porkchop nodded.
“Damn, I wish he were here now. I’d help him carry his books.” And I meant it.
“I couldn’t move, Mr. Talbot. People were screaming and running all over the place, but I couldn’t move. I kept watching as more and more zombies just tore him apart. He was still fighting with five of them on him. He saw me once, it was across the cafeteria, but I heard him tell me to run. I couldn’t, though, he needed saving and I did nothing.”
“Porkchop, there’s nothing you could have done. If you had gone out there with your potato peeler you would have been dead, too.” I tried to calm him down. He was crying now, fat tears falling to the floor as I helped him back to the bench.
“Dad, I mean Doc Baker, came in from the other side. He was looking around like crazy for me. I couldn’t even call out for him. I was like peas.”
“Huh?”
“Frozen.”
“Gotcha.”
“So he finally spots me, and he’s waving for me to come and follow him, but I can’t.”
“Because you’re peas,” I say as I put my arm around his shoulder.
“Because I’m peas,” he echoes. “So he comes to me.”
He was crying now, a full-throated keening coming from him. This sound seems to be a siren song for the zombies as they redouble their effort on the door. The bolt looks solid enough, but I’m not sure how long it can hold.
“He…he grabs my hand and we…we start running the way he came in. It was too late though.” He had to stop his narration while he exhausted his supply of tears. “If I had gone when he waved to me, we might have made it.”