Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (34 page)

It
was hours later when Mary finally called Josh downstairs to eat,
and I thought it would be a little weird if I stayed upstairs and
played with his Lego’s by myself. As it was, it had been a brief,
enjoyable respite from the horrors of the last few months. We
created all sorts of alternate worlds with the plastic building
blocks. Every last one of them did not contain a zombie, not a
one.

The table was set with a meal consisting of
an MRE and was as presentable as possible, considering the nature
of the product being used. I pulled out a chair to sit with the
rest of the dinner attendees when Mary spoke.

“That chair isn’t for you,” she said
disdainfully.

“Okay,” I said furrowing my eyebrows. “Who is
it for then?”

“BT,” she said as she tore a cheese packet
with her teeth.

“You know he’s still asleep, right? I just
passed him on the way in here and he’s snoring so loud, it sounds
like he’s clearing a forest.”

“The fact remains that it is his seat,” she
repeated.

“Okay.” My eyebrows still furrowed. I was
missing something, but I had not a clue as to what.

Mrs. Deneaux was at the head of the table and
was looking directly at me. She was smiling as she forked in a
large portion of military surplus ham steak.

“Can I eat?” I asked Mary.

“You’ve worn out your welcome,” she said,
looking at me with a piercing stare.

“Mom?!” Josh rang out. “What’s wrong with
you?”

“Hush, honey. Eat your dinner.”

Josh stood up and began to walk away from the
table. “I’ll eat when he does.”

“You’ll sit down and do what I say, young
man!” she yelled. “What have you said to him?” She turned venomous
on me.

“We were building spaceships with Lego’s,” I
said, backing up. “The only thing I said to him was how cool his
ship had come out, and once or twice I asked him for a certain
piece. What the hell is going on? I don’t know you well enough to
illicit this response. I mean, sure if you spent the time to really
get to know me, I’d be able to do this to you on a fairly routine
basis.” I was shooting for humor, but ended up with a
self-inflicted wound. She stared back flatly at me.

“We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I told her.

“We are?” Gary asked, I noticed he had not
stopped eating his meal. I wanted to thank him for his
solidarity.

“You can’t!” Josh cried.

“What about BT? Is he ready to go?” Gary
asked around a mouthful of something that resembled meat. “And
Paul? We still need to find him.”

It was quicker than a cobra strike and could
have been as lethal, the look that Deneaux shot at Gary.

My brain was tossing all this info together
in the washing machine of my mind, but no matter how much spin I
put on it, it still kept coming out dirty and stained. Deneaux had
planted bad seeds about me in Mary’s head. Deneaux wanted us kicked
out of here, but why? My mind began to spin faster, not just out of
here, meaning this house, but out of here, meaning this city. She
was covering something up and all that it could be was Paul. Brian
was a dead zombie. How he became a zombie could be debated and how
he was shot was up for question also, but the fact remained he had
been a zombie and Deneaux had every right to dispatch of him.
Clinical word
I told my brain as I thought of my former ally
in survival.

“Two days,” I told Mary, but her head was
shaking in the negative. “I need two days. Tomorrow we will go out
all day, looking for my friend.” Deneaux’s fork hesitated for a
split second as it traveled to her pursed, shriveled lips.

She put her full fork down on her Chinette
plate.

“Really, Michael, you just told her that we
would be leaving tomorrow. I do not think it is fair to her that
you should put her and her son in this much danger.”

“Thank you, Vivian,” Mary said, reaching out
and clasping Deneaux’s claw, I mean, hand.

I looked at Deneaux with my
“I know what
you’re trying to do”
gaze. She merely smiled.

“Fine, tomorrow it is,” I told Mary.
Deneaux’s smile grew further, I was afraid her paper thin skin was
going to tear as it stretched beyond its limits. “We’ll move to
your neighbor’s house.” Deneaux’s smile evaporated.

Mary shot from her seat. “You can’t!”

“Sure I can. Who do you think you are to tell
me where I can set up my base of operations?”

“That’s too close!” she yelled again.

“I’ve got one friend who is missing and
another that hasn’t awakened in hours. And you’ve seen the size of
him. How far do you think I can carry him? I’m not going very far
until I get both issues resolved,” I said to Mary as much as I did
Deneaux.

Mary plopped down in her seat, cupping her
head in her hands. “Two days and you promise you’ll go?”

“I’ll leave this house and your general
vicinity, yes,” I told her.

“That’ll have to do,” she answered
solemnly.

“Yes,” Josh said, pumping his fist.

“Can I eat now?”

“Not at the table,” she said without removing
her head from her hands.

That was fine with me. If I wasn’t with my
immediate family, I preferred to eat alone. I didn’t generally like
people enough to break bread with them and make idle chit chat
about things I didn’t give a crap about; and don’t get me started
if I came across signs of uncleanliness on their utensils or
dishes. It was best to not go down a road lined with potholes, when
holding such a fragile, glass-wrapped psyche like my own.

I grabbed BT’s MRE off the table before she
could object and headed into the living room. Josh was immediately
on my heels. Mary had not stopped him, probably hadn’t pulled her
head up yet to take note. BT slumbered on as I tore open the near
nuclear-proof plastic wrapping.

I don’t know how many of you have ever had
dealings with MREs, but if you’ve survived this long, then you, my
friend, are a survivalist and EVERY survivalist has at one time or
another had an MRE, whether from the military or an Army/Navy
surplus store. (You know those places that were located in the
worst parts of every town and the guy behind the counter looks
suspiciously at every customer like they could be the feds come to
get his secret cache of hand grenades and rocket launchers in the
back room.)

If, on the off chance that you have somehow
made it this far without one, I will relate a short story. When I
was in Marine Corps boot camp, eating was one of the only events
that any recruit could sort of look forward to. I say “sort of”
because we generally were not allowed to finish any meal. I can,
without even thinking about it, honestly tell you that I threw more
food away during my three and a half months of boot camp than I
actually ate.

When we went to the dining halls, there was a
chance I would get to shovel as much food into my mouth before the
DIs would start barking at us to get back outside and in military
formation. The times we spent out in the field without access to a
dining hall, however, were times of depravation and starvation. The
DIs would put a box of MREs out in a field, usually somewhere in
the neighborhood of one hundred or so yards away, and then tell us
that we had five minutes to eat. So, we would race out to the box
and tear into it, which in itself takes a little to get through.
Removing the metal banding straps without tools was always a good
time to see who would bleed first, then as the piñata of meals fell
to the ground, it was a scramble to grab a meal. There was not the
luxury of choosing one particular meal over another. Did I tell you
this one little tidbit? There are twelve meals in an MRE case and
we had two boxes. There were thirty Marine recruits in my platoon,
easy enough math. You think people fighting for a stupid, sold-out,
hot toy during Christmas is fierce? Tell a starving Marine you just
took the last meal.

Looking back on it, the ones that didn’t get
the meal were probably better off. I can’t tell you how many
fingernails I tore, trying to tear through the five mm gauge,
sealed-by-a-glue-fanatic bags. Ripping with teeth was perhaps
marginally better, chipped tooth, bleeding fingers, to-MAY-toe,
to-MAH-toe, just give me my fucking food! Alright, so let’s see
where we are. Sprint to box, five guys trying desperately to crack
boxes open, ensuing fight for insufficient meals as they spill to
the dirt, check so far. So now you have battled and won a meal and
are hiding your kill from your fellow predators. You have
successfully torn through the hard exterior carcass to get at the
“meat and potatoes” so to speak. It doesn’t matter much whether it
is wombat or porcupine meat, you’re going to eat it.

By this point, three of the five allotted
minutes have been used up, and now for the topper. Apparently,
Marine DIs do not make much money because they cannot afford
watches that keep particularly good time. I would finally be at a
point where I could rip open the food’s foil container and squeeze
food down my gullet (forget the plastic utensils, forget chewing,
this was all about sustenance) when the DIs would start screaming
at us to assemble. Now some of you may not have ever joined the
services. That is fine; we all walk our own path in life, some of
you may have chosen the Army, or were maybe a little smarter and
went to the Navy or quite possibly, you were a genius and joined
the Air Force. But I was in the Marines. When your DI screamed at
you to be somewhere you did it, no questions asked.

The gut-crippling clutches of hunger were far
outweighed by the prospect of suffering the wrath of a DI who felt
you had wronged him. Some of you sneakier souls are thinking, don’t
those camis have dozens of pockets? Yes, they do. Then why not
shove your uneaten food in those and eat them later? Any former
Marines want to answer this one? Because, my dear reader, DIs know
about pockets and they know about what lengths a desperate starving
recruit will go to. You would be treated less harshly in the real
world if you had just killed a cop and his partner caught you first
and was alone with you for a half hour before his back-up got
there.

Some of you may scoff at that analogy, I had
to stand at the position of attention while the recruit next to me
suffered the wrath of two DIs for trying to heist a jelly packet
that he had shoved down his trousers. By the time they were done
with him, well let’s just say that the jelly packet would have been
the only thing he would have been able to eat.

***

I ended up with a beef stew MRE packet. Think
Dinty Moore, but gross. The fat congealed at the top of the packet
was the thickest part of the whole meal, including the mystery
meat. I ate everything, I was famished. I looked over to BT, who
was still sleeping. It left me wondering if getting Tomas into the
mix was a good call or not. I had no viable alternative, but still
it nagged at me; knowledge is power and now Tomas had some. Life
was already precarious. Why I felt the need to keep digging holes
around the lip of the precipice was beyond me.

I could hear Deneaux in the next room trying
to comfort Mary. It was like listening to a snake tell its prey
that everything would be alright. Sure, for the snake it would be.
I was staring so hard at BT, I wasn’t even looking at him anymore,
if that makes any sense. I never noticed when his eyes opened.

“You scare me sometimes,” BT said, his vocal
chords sounding coarse and dry.

I quickly pulled my thousand-yard stare back
in. “Yeah, well you do that to me all the time.”

“So we’re here a few more days?” he asked as
he pulled himself up to a sitting position.

“What’d you hear?” I asked him.

“Enough to know that you must have stomped
all over Deneaux’s prized azaleas. She does not like you.”

“It’s more than that, I agree she’s not a
fan, but there’s something more. Do you have enough strength to
head upstairs?” BT nodded. “I figure the old bat has ears like
one.”

Josh laughed.

“Josh is everything all right in there?” Mary
called.

“You really shouldn’t let him get too much
influence from Michael. He sets bad examples,” Deneaux chirped into
Mary’s ear.

“Tell me again why you decided to come with
us?” I asked, before she could respond, I continued on. “Or better
yet, why did I allow you to come with us?”

I could hear her over-exaggerated heavy sigh
from where I was.

“Mom, I’m fine, we’re going to play with my
Lego’s again,” Josh said, winking to me.

“Be careful,” Mary said.

“From the Lego’s?” Josh asked, completely
confused.

“You know what I mean,” she answered.

Josh shrugged his shoulders and mouthed, “No,
I don’t” to me.

“I do,” I soundlessly worded to him and then
waved him to go upstairs.

BT followed, the big man was moving slowly
and had to take a break halfway up the stairs.

“You alright?” I asked him from the top of
the stairs.

“I didn’t know you cared,” he said a little
more heatedly than perhaps he meant to, as he apologized when he
got up to me. “I’m sorry, man, I feel like I’ve got the flu,
without all the phlegm.”

“Gross,” Josh said. “Come on,” he said,
pushing the door to his room open.

BT almost crashed into a rendition of a B-1
bomber as he headed straight for the bed to plop down on it. Josh’s
bed creaked and groaned from a pressure it had not been designed to
bear. Josh and I stared for a few seconds waiting for the resultant
collapse.

BT, getting wind of what we were doing,
spoke. “It’ll hold,” he growled, and as if intimidated by his
words, the bed did as it was told.

“Can I stay?” Josh asked. “I know you guys
came up here to talk and get away from the women, but I’m a man
too, so I should be here.”

“It’s your house, my man,” BT said. “I don’t
see why not.”