Zombie Fallout 9 (35 page)

I nodded. “Sometimes it sucks having a moral compass.” I said the words just as I opened the door. I'd barely had enough time to pull the trigger, as one of the zombies pressed the hollow of her collar against my barrel. I'd just about split her slender neck in two, cutting her spine. Her head fell to the side. I moved the muzzle, placing it against her skull, and finished the job. Unlike the zombie we had in the bed, this one's stomach did not move. Whatever had been in there was long gone, and I could only hope to a better place. I saw the double doors still slightly swinging as the third made her escape. I hoped she wasn't going for reinforcements. I was not a fan of our current locale.

“Okay, it's clear. Get what you need.” I stayed by his side while he searched. When he found a sterile, plastic-wrapped pack, he ran back to the room, oblivious that his bodyguard was struggling to keep up.

“Now what?” he asked after he tore the pack open. He was holding a scalpel.

I locked the door again and placed my rifle on the dresser that held a small television.

“Now we, and by we, I mean you, cut into her belly. Softly; this isn't a block of cheese. You go too deep, and you'll injure whatever that thing in there is.” I pulled her dirty shirt up; thick, black-blue veins crisscrossed her gray abdomen.

Justin wasn't even touching the zombie as he ran the blade down.

“Umm, you need to make contact.”

“I'm practicing.” His hand was shaking.

“You want me to do this?”

He gulped and looked at me. “No, I need to do this.”

I was going to ask why he needed to do it and what would it set right if he did. In the end, I didn't.

Her skin was stretched tight like a rubber band at its breaking point. When he finally let the blade slice into her, the skin pulled back and rolled up.

“You're going to have to go through her abdominal wall.”

“You're making me nervous.”

“
I'm
making you nervous? You think it has anything to do with what you're doing?”

He didn't answer as he once again ran the blade down the now exposed muscle. That also peeled away like a layer of an onion. Although when one cuts an onion, you generally only want to cry. There were way more bodily functions I wanted to do at this exact moment. There wasn't as much blood as I thought there might be. Probably because most of it was on the floor. A baby hand pushed up against a nearly translucent membrane, the last obstacle between him and us.

“Careful,” I said as Justin once again moved in.

“I got this, Dad.”

“Yeah, I seem to remember you saying the same thing when you went to get your driver's license; took you three times.”

“Are you really bringing that up right now?” He looked over to me, fat droplets of sweat clinging to his forehead.

“Just trying to help you relax.”

“So you say.” He moved slowly but deliberately, cutting through that membrane. A small hand shot through the opening.

I pushed my son back.

“Babies don't have teeth, Dad.”

“How do you know what this thing has? We don't even know what it is. And just for the record, one in two thousand babies are indeed born with teeth.”

“Mom was right.”

“About what?”

“You are stuffed with a bunch of useless trivial information.”

“Useless? That trivia might have just saved your life.” I still had my hand on his chest.

“Can I get him?”

“Be careful.” I don't know what I was expecting. Some campy B-roll movie and the baby goes all psycho and adheres itself to Justin's neck just as the camera fades to black. That seemed the most likely, at least in my head. The reality was much fucking scarier. The throaty scream of a penis-less baby echoed throughout the room. Yeah, it took me a second to realize the penis-less boy was actually a girl.

“She's beautiful.” Justin had a full stream of tears coming down his face. I took the scalpel from his hand and severed the umbilical connection to the zombie. I wrapped the mother up in the blankets and carefully placed her on the floor against the wall behind me. Justin, in the meanwhile, placed the baby down on the bed and cleaned her off.

“What do we do now?” I looked down at the baby, who to my untrained eye, looked as healthy as can be. The baby was blinking slowly. She was looking pretty intently at Justin, her mouth open in what looked like the beginnings of a smile. I was extremely happy to note she was of the other one thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine, not one tooth showed. Can't be too careful.

“We get her home and show her off,” he said triumphantly.

“Just so we're on the same page, I'm freaking out right now.”

“I know, Dad, I know. I just didn't want to state the obvious.”

“That's a first.”

In addition to the diaper bag, I also filled up one with formula. It was going to be difficult aiming correctly, loaded down the way I was, but they were necessary supplies. The day had taken a turn I could have never expected, and we weren't done. The third zombie had a change of heart in regard to escaping, or maybe she was looking for a better place from which to launch an attack, or maybe she was just fucking horrible at hide and seek. She was standing in the hallway like she just plain forgot what she was doing. I mean, how many times have we all done that? Go into a room maybe looking for our keys or something as inane and then get in the room and completely space it out. Sure, she forgot she wanted to eat somebody, but pretty much the same thing. She quickly remembered when she spotted me; I shot a hole clean through her. I immediately went and placed my hand on her belly. We already had one miracle for the day. Would it be asking too much for another? The flesh was still and, more importantly, cold. I shook my head to Justin.

The baby was bundled up in his arms as he approached. I stood and went over to the windows just to see if anything had heard the shots and was even now coming to investigate. It was a yes and no sort of answer on that. There was indeed a group of six zombies in the parking lot, they had been running at full tilt but all stopped at the same time and began to look around. My guess was that they'd been hunting someone, and the person had had the good fortune to get away, at least for the moment. One of the six zombies stepped out of the small, loosely formed circle. He stood straight up and rigid as if at the position of attention for a military formation.

“What the…?” Never got to the expletive, as a
ding
like a tiny bell had been rung inside my head; this was immediately followed by a quick flash of a zombie. Fear knocked through me, and then whatever had invaded my personal space was gone. A couple of things happened at the same time. The first, the one I thought delivered the pinging turned and looked up to the window I was perfectly silhouetted in; the second, from across the parking lot, a man stood up from his hiding spot behind a small van. The other zombies were in quick pursuit when he took off running.

Justin had a dazed look on his face, and the baby was in the midst of a full-throated cry. It was safe to assume they'd all just experienced what I had.

“We've got to get the fuck out of here.” I grabbed Justin's arm. He didn't need much goading. We'd found a much cleaner stairwell down, and we were in the truck in under two minutes. Even with the windows up, I could hear the man scream as the zombies tore into him. Justin got the baby to calm down just as we were pulling up to Ron's. Neither of us had spoken at all about what we'd felt. I was too busy trying to figure out what it meant and how it affected us. The zombies, thankfully and unexpectedly, yielded us the roadway.

Tracy was the first to approach as we came in. She must have been in dire need of some changing material for Wesley, or she was going to give me hell for separating from BT. Whatever she was going to say changed, suddenly, when she saw me carrying two heavy bags and Justin one small parcel.

“That's just like you, Mike,” she said. “I send you for diapers, you bring home a baby.” She gave me a quick kiss, kissed Justin on the forehead, and escorted both of them into the house. Stephanie grabbed the bags, easily hefting them. Sometimes I forgot just how stout of a woman she was.

“You okay, man?” BT asked astutely.

“Well, I just watched my son perform a medical procedure on a zombie to save a baby.”

“You need to tell me that story.”

“Oh, I will brother, but we've got some more pressing problems we need to deal with.” I called a meeting of the entire house occupants to let them know what I'd witnessed.

“
L
ike dolphins
,” Trip had explained to the clearly confused table when I was done presenting my new information about the zombies' ability to reach out for victims.

“Is there any defense against this?” It was Stephanie who asked.

“I've known all along!” Trip said almost gleefully. He'd pulled off one of his sandals and had his foot up by his nose. He took a big sniff and winced.

“He's talking those fool tinfoil hats isn't he?” BT asked in disgust.

“Those fool tinfoil hats saved your life,” I reminded him.

“Thanks, asshole,” was his reply.

“I think I can work on something that will be a little less conspicuous,” Mad Jack stepped in.

“Maybe something without batteries,” I said.

“Yeah, we don't want anything burning through our skulls.” BT and I fist bumped under the table.

“Is it a priority yet? I mean the zombies know we're still here.” Dennis had just come in from a shift on guard duty.

We all could only nod in agreement.

“I think if and when MJ comes up with something—”

“Or we use tinfoil!” Trip interrupted me by standing and blurting out with his finger in the air.

“Or we use tinfoil,” I added. “We might want to start thinking about an exit strategy.”

This was met with a chorus of disapproval, as I figured it would be. We were relatively safe here, we had supplies that a small third world country would be happy to have, and this was home. “Listen, I get it, that's just a suggestion. The zombies aren't going to go anywhere, at some point one of us has to leave. If any of you have noticed, every morning when we get up, there're more zombies.” I could tell by some of the stares that most were not aware of this new development. “They're amassing. I think they're waiting to get to a number that we can't repel, that we have no chance in hell of repelling. They get a couple of hundred of those new bulkers and they'll take this house down.”

There were murmurs, but no one doubted that.

“I, for one, am not leaving.” It was Ron. I had the distinct feeling that if I said the sky was blue, he would have disagreed. This was exactly what we didn't need, divisiveness. Some would stay just because it was the easier decision, not because it was necessarily the right one.

“This isn't a game, Ron. We need to make intelligent decisions for the safety of everyone.”

There was no heat in his voice. “Staying
is
the most intelligent choice, Mike.”

Even if I swayed everyone and they agreed to leave, I would not go. Not without Ron, and he was not going anywhere. I toyed with the idea of kidnapping him. The thought passed soon enough. For good or bad, right or wrong, good or evil, this home would be the one written in the annals of the Talbot legacy where we made our final, desperate, doomed final stand or a miraculous come-from-behind victory.

I may have shown my utter disgust for the way the conversation went. I didn't give a shit as I let my chair fall back behind me when I got up and left.

The next morning, BT found me. I wasn't doing much of anything. He smacked me on my chest.

“Come on, MJ needs some help.”

“I'm not test piloting his newfangled head scramblers. He'll probably make us all like Trip.”

“No, it's for the transformers.”

“Please tell me he didn't make some new high-powered ice cream maker.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Wait … actually, that's not that bad an idea, not that soft-serve crap though; always thought of that as melty ice cream. First time I had it I was four; started crying because I thought it was going to get all over my hands.”

“So you've had problems with your hands being dirty for a very long time?”

“Wow, I guess I did. You think maybe the ice cream was the root of my problem?”

“I think it goes much deeper than that, Talbot. Just come on, this has nothing to do with ice cream.”

I followed BT outside. I was looking at a stack of four-inch-by-four-inch pressure treated posts.

“Why am I looking at these?”

“We need to dig some holes.”

“Fence post holes? I hate digging fence post holes.”

“Trust me, this is for a good reason.”

“MJ tell you that?”