Chapter 11
Spense had to ease off the gas as he entered the doctor’s driveway. He slowed down as we edged into the drive, the station wagon rocking back and forth as we drove through deep furrows in the gravel. Tire tracks?
Someone must have wanted to get away in a real hurry.
I was in the back seat, holding Marilyn’s head in my lap. I brushed the hair off her face. “We’re almost there, Marilyn.” The convulsions hadn’t returned. Part of me was thankful. I had been praying, a continuously whispered “please let her be okay” sent out to the universe, that they wouldn’t return. But then another part of me, the one terrified by her unnatural stillness, just wanted her to move. At least then I wouldn’t be checking her pulse, her breathing to make sure that she was still alive.
She looked paler than ever. Her breath came in short pants. I kept touching her hair, grateful for each tiny puff of air that I could feel against the back of my hand. Because she didn’t have a pulse. At least, not one that I could find. And those breaths were the only thing keeping me together.
Impatient to reach the doctor, I looked out the window. Whoa. I sucked in a breath.
The gravel wasn’t the only thing damaged. The front lawn was littered with overturned planters, the landscaping shredded by cars running over it and through it. In the path of Spense’s headlights, I could see the shimmer of broken glass and tinted plastic, the kind you see dusting the asphalt after a car crash. There were dark lumps all over the lawn. Discarded robes? It even looked like a few ladies’ purses had been tossed aside and then left in the hurry to leave.
“It looks like the day after a frat party,” I said to Spense as he maneuvered around an obstacle. The wagon bucked again as he drove over something not worth the effort to steer around. I held fast to Marilyn, not wanting the jostling to disturb her.
She didn’t seem to notice.
“That, or the set of Zombie Buster 2000.” Spense slowed to a stop as we finally reached the front of the house. “Director’s Cut.”
He cut off the engine and got out, heading to the back to get our “guns.” I shimmied out from under Marilyn and then pulled her across the back seat, to a place where I could pick her up. I stumbled, trying to balance her limp weight in my arms.
“You want this?” Spense thumped me on the shoulder. I tried to juggle Marilyn, keeping her in my arms while I attempted to free up a hand. Spense slapped it into my open palm.
Not a gun. My wife’s Taser. The one we always teased her for keeping in the glove box of her car. Not exactly heavy firepower. Spense took a practice swing with his baseball bat. The one he kept under his bed. The one we’d had to go back to Spense’s house to get when he finally admitted that he had no clue where to get guns either. “But you’ve got to sound like you know,” he’d explained. Yeah, I didn’t get it either.
I’d insisted that we go to the doctor’s, even without guns. I wasn’t going to waste anymore time.
I jumped to reposition Marilyn, whose head was lolling off to the side, as limp as a wrung chicken’s neck. I managed to get a better hold on her while still aiming the Taser in front of us. But there was no efficient way to carry both her and the weapon. Her head dangled over my bicep. And I just let it. Speed was now my best option.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said to Spense as the two of us walked into the doctor’s abandoned house.
We recrossed our old path, going through the entryway toward the main room with its bank of glass walls. The place was trashed, just like the front yard with furniture overturned and paintings hanging at skewed angles or lying smashed on the floor. There were smudged handprints all over the windows like the guests had tried to get out that way. At the far end of the room, someone had thrown a chair through the glass and made his own exit. A slight breeze came from that opening, a warm evening wind that snaked through the room and tunneled toward the front entrance. We hadn’t bothered shutting the door behind us just in case we needed to make a quick exit.
The whole scene was uncanny, so different from how it had been with all the guests just a few hours earlier. There was no mood music, no burble of conversation, just the crunch of catered munchies underfoot. And something else. A muffled noise. Moaning?
“Sounds like the thing in the basement.” Spense held his bat in front of him like a sword and headed toward the kitchen. We sneaked down the hallway and entered the kitchen, our feet sticking to the floor as we stepped through piles of exploded crab puffs. I nearly slipped in a puddle of dipping sauce. The door to the basement, the place where we had hidden, was wide open.
“Oops.” Spense shut the door. He jerked his hand back from the door handle when finished, his bodying shaking in an exaggerated shiver.
“There. Did you hear that?” A noise. But not from the basement.
“Yeah. Sounds like it’s coming from the back of the house.”
We reversed direction, heading back towards the main room when I noticed that Marilyn was starting to perk up.
“Marilyn?” She was holding her head up. Well, not totally. She would lift her head to the level of my bicep and then it would fall back, as if she were unable to support the weight. She did this a couple times, like someone trying to sleep on an airplane but in reverse, her head slowly rising and then plummeting back in the other direction.
“Is she responding to the noise?”
“I don’t know.” I waited and the next time she raised her head I shoved my upper arm underneath it. Now supported, her face rested against the inside of my bicep.
It hurt, trying to hold Marilyn and the Taser. And now my shoulder was straining at this awkward angle. The muscles in my arm trembled.
But then she moaned, in a happy way. And relief washed through me. I sent a mental “thank you” out to the universe as she nuzzled her face against my t-shirt, accidently bunching the material until her lips were pressed against my skin.
“Uh, Marilyn?” She brushed her mouth back and forth across my skin, moaning, and then she started to bite. Nothing painful. More like a lazy gumming.
“What’s she doing?” Spense tilted his head, trying to get a better look.
I twisted away so he couldn’t see, using Marilyn’s body to shield what her mouth was doing. Some things are just private. “Don’t worry about it.”
Spense shrugged but kept craning his neck to see. I walked past him, not bothering to make room in the small hallway. Marilyn’s shins hit him right in the gut.
“Oof. What was that for?”
“NoTHING.” I jumped, because Marilyn’s teeth bit into my bicep. “Let’s just find the doctor.”
And that was when we heard the scream.
Spense and I looked at each other, Marilyn’s weird behavior forgotten as he made a line for the back of the house. I followed, huffing with the effort.
Once in the back yard, the screams continued. They seemed to be coming from some kind of large tree. I’m not much of a horticulturist. So I had no idea what kind of a tree it was. It wasn’t a palm tree. That much I can tell you.
I couldn’t see the doctor but there were figures surrounding the trunk. They were clawing at the bark, reaching into the leaves.
“Get off! Get off! Get off!” Dr. Chatsworth repeated over and over. Occasionally a loafered foot would emerge from the foliage and kick at one of the figures clustered around the base, making it stumble back before it would shamble forward to the base of the tree.
As the figures around the tree bumped and shuffled about, there was a break and I saw a body splayed on the ground. It was face down, and I had a feeling that even if it wasn’t I wouldn’t be able to make out much. The only thing recognizable about the body was the black polo shirt that the service folks had been wearing earlier. And the cell phone clutched in one partially gnawed hand. It was still chiming out incoming texts.
I’ve never really bought that line about how movies desensitize you to violence, but, man, my brain just couldn’t process that this was real. We s
tood there for a couple minutes, grossly fascinated, unable to look away
“Dude…Rick,” breathed Spense. “Do you know what this reminds me of?”
“Yeah, man,” I replied. “Zombie Buster 2000, Director’s Cut.”
“Those things are totally shambling.”
“Totally.”