APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (14 page)

             
So when the outbreak happened and the dead had infected his father, Tony didn’t kill him, instead he had left the old man wandering around the local junk yard. Tony believed that was where he would have liked to spend his afterlife anyway. He loaded up his clothes, food and water into the Hearse, which had been serviced the weekend before and drove to a rural farm outside of Pittsburgh where his film director, idol occasionally resided.

Tony found his idol shuffling around shirtless and filthy, with a distinct limp through the fields surrounding his home, his long gray hair blowing in the wind. Gone were his trademark black-rimmed glasses, as well as his pulse. Tony found that the basement of the director’s house was a virtual fall-out shelter, stocked with food, water, weapons and ammunition. Death-Wagon nodded approvingly.  He had known that if there had been anyone prepared for such an apocalypse then it would be none other than George Romero.

                                                           
Chapter 11- Dan of the Dead

Zanesville, Ohio

              Daniel Tyson sped back into Zanesville, still shaking and found that his hometown was a war zone. Even though Zanesville, Ohio had a higher crime rate per capita than most metropolitan areas, Daniel was still shocked at the carnage that had spilled onto the pot-holed streets and thoroughfares. Sirens blared from everywhere, buildings were burning and cars were overturned or smashed together during the panicked mass exodus. It looked like a larger scale of the parking lot at the funeral home. Then he saw the first zombie. A Salvation Army Santa with blood caked in his fake nylon beard; part of the fake mustache was stuffed into the zombie’s right nostril, but Santa didn’t seem to mind. Daniel noticed that Santa still carried one of those annoying bells in one hand and in the other was the arm it had ripped from the shoulder of a small child. He slammed his foot back down on the gas pedal and drove out of town. He knew he shouldn’t risk going to his house, he had too many neighbors and nothing in the way of weapons. He had always been something of a pacifist, that is, up until this morning. As he drove back out of town he wracked his brain for someone he knew that lived in a more rural setting.

The Pirate,
he thought.
Yeah, that crazy bastard would know what to do.

             
The pirate was actually Arlington Neff. He was a former Army Ranger that had an actual hook for a left hand after a freak accident that cut his military career short. To further the nick-name he had never refused a shot of 151 Rum. Arlington wasn’t aware that people called him the Pirate; it was one of those unflattering nicknames that were uttered in hushed tones and usually followed by laughter.  Daniel was also fairly sure that Arlington was often called Yarlington, or simply Yar, in reference to his pirate nickname. After his discharge he began a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol that had left him, if not burned out, then at the very least, crispy around the edges. Once upon a time he had been straight-backed and squared away although he had always had a terrible time with articulating his thoughts to words. Now you had to visit him early in the morning to get any sense out of the man. When Arlington was drunk he talked more than he did when he was sober, but his thoughts were manic and paranoid at best. He was a conspiracy nut. He believed that the government was hiding everything. Aliens landed at Camp David and planned the New World Order with the President and other world dignitaries, in the JFK case Bigfoot had been the second shooter on the grassy knoll, Elvis was in the witness protection program and working with the FBI and possibly that Soylent Green was made of people.

             
Arlington used to have a lot of friends, but his compulsions, conspiracy theories and alcoholism had driven everyone away. Arlington was ignorant as to why no one wanted to hang out with him anymore, but he figured that it probably had something to do with the government.

             
The former Ranger lived down an old haul road in a run-down trailer with a large, yet dilapidated deck on the front. His front yard gleamed in the sun, completely covered by broken brown glass bottles. Daniel saw Arlington’s old Ford pickup rusting in a hulk of mud tires. One of the huge mudders sat atop a dead dog. Daniel recognized the mutt as Arlington’s own shepherd/ lab mix. It appeared that Arlington was completely unaware that he had run over his best friend.

             
The body lying on the front porch in a heap did not escape Daniel notice. He cautiously put the car in park and closed the door behind him as soundlessly as he could. He carefully walked through the yard, although he still crunched on broken glass with each step. The body never stirred as he crunched forward, but as he drew near the first step of the front porch he saw the dual barrels of a 12 gauge shotgun snake its way out of the boarded up front window, which suddenly made the dead guy lying in a pool of shredded gore in front of him a lot less worrisome.

“You one of
them
?” croaked a slurred voice. The sound reminded Daniel of Otis from the Andy Griffith Show.

With his hands rising slowly in front of him Daniel spoke in a subdued tone, “Whoa,

whoa, easy, Arlington. It’s me, Dan. Dan Tyson.”

             
“I s’pose you came here to eat my brains, didn’t ya?” asked the voice behind the shotgun in a slurred and groggy tone.

             
Daniel had never been good at concealing his emotions and he couldn’t help the expression that crossed his face of bewilderment, but he managed to compose himself. “You don’t have any brains
to
eat, you moron,” said Daniel. Many in his circle of friends believed that these outbursts were possibly a mild form of Turrets Syndrome, or lack of inner monologue; whatever the case, Daniel was renowned for having absolutely no tact.

             
There was silence for a moment before he saw the shotgun’s double barrels retract back into the boards followed by a few more seconds of silence then he heard the multiple locks click and the door swung open. The Pirate looked more scurvy than ever, with wiry muscled arms and a pale skin tone that pronounced he had not seen the sun in a long, long time. His beard had about six day’s growth; he wore a black bandana tight around his skull, pinning his ears to the sides of his head. Arlington was fashionably adorned in a thread bare, faded blue denim shirt with the sleeves cut out that exposed two sleeves of the worst tattoos Daniel had ever seen.
The dude is going to get hypothermia or hepatitis, one of the two,
Daniel thought absently. He hoped that Arlington hadn’t paid for any of those travesties. Daniel was aware of the reason Arlington always wore tank tops and sleeveless shirts, and that reason was his hook. Arlington had complained about getting the hook caught and ripping out the material of every long-sleeved shirt he owned.

             
The Pirate smiled showing off a mouthful of slightly yellow teeth. “Danny! How’ve you been, brotha?” he asked, holding the door for him to enter. Daniel noticed that Arlington scanned not only the tree line behind him, but also the sky and he had to resist the urge to look up at the sky as well, even though he was sure that Arlington was searching for black unmarked helicopters silently hovering over the trees. 

Daniel went inside with trepidation, almost wishing he hadn’t as he stepped past the blue clad corpse. He studied the body as he entered the trailer. “Is that your mailman?” he asked the gaunt figure swaying before him.

Arlington shrugged and said, “Used to be.”

             
Arlington shut the door behind him and fumbled to re-lock all the deadbolts. Dan’s slightly inebriated host motioned to a red milk crate with his hook, “Sit down, sit down, you want a beer?” asked the pirate as he staggered to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

“Yeah, that’d be good.” replied Daniel as he scanned the small trailer.

              Daniel studied his estranged friend for a moment and in that fleeting fraction of a second he saw what Neff could have been.

             
The living room walls of the mobile manor were covered in faded centerfolds from various Playboy magazines; evidently Arlington had a thing for giant, fake boobs, but Dan couldn’t fault the man there, what guy didn’t like giant, fake boobs? The couch was covered in newspapers, and beside it were stacks of other newspapers that were somewhat yellowed, from age or nicotine, Daniel was not sure. He looked into the kitchen and saw a computer screen glowing on the dining table. The table beside the dated PC was strewn with stacks of loose leaf sheets of papers. Daniel could see that they were covered in yellow highlights and red grease pencil had circled underlined and scrawled notes in the margins. Arlington returned, handed him the beer with his good hand that was adorned with a Ranger para-cord bracelet and took a seat on another milk crate and cracked open his own beer. He drained half of it with greedy gulps as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, then with an audible sigh “So… zombies…” he said, then drained the rest of his beer. He looked at the empty bottle in an oddly accusatory manner, like he wondered who the bastard was that had just drank  his beer and had placed it again in his hand empty  then stood back up and wove his way through the piles of debris back to the fridge. “Need one?”

             
“No, I’m good,” answered Daniel shaking his head.

             
“Need me to put a nipple on that for ya?”

             
“Fuck off Arlington,” said Daniel and Arlington laughed.  Daniel paused for a minute before he began. He figured he would regret his next question, but he had come this far.  From the corner of his eye he thought he saw something furry skitter along the wall and shivered.               “So…what’s your take on these…
zombies
,” Dan asked, feeling stupid even saying the word.

             
Arlington shrugged, took a long pull on his Blue Ribbon and decided to light a cigarette before he leveled his yellowed eyes at Daniel. “Don’t know for sure. Probably the military; we have always had some weird shit.” The last three words he belched in a long, low resonant blat.

Daniel shook his head and wondered how long
Arlington had been drinking.

“All I know is that you’d better get strapped, brotha. I got an extra Glock in the back if you need one,” he offered.

              “I have no desire to start shooting people,” stated Daniel. He felt his gorge rise as he thought about the little girl he had used like a baseball bat just hours before. He didn’t want to revert to that again.

             
Arlington was either studying him or trying to focus his dilated eyes. “Me neither, but I’ll sure as shit shoot zombies.”

Daniel changed the subject. “Is there anywhere we could go for safety?” he asked hopefully.

              “
Go?
I ain’t
goin
’ nowhere, son. This place is all I got; besides it’s secluded and shouldn’t draw too many unwanted visitors.”

             
“What about the mailman rotting on your porch?”

             
“Hell, he ain’t goin’ anywhere either,” Arlington said with a grin, “you can ask him, but he’d make a right smelly, not to mention, uninformative navigator.”

             
“So you won’t go with me?” asked Daniel, his heart sinking.

             
“No can do Amigo, but I suppose I do know somewhere that might be safe. You probably won’t be able to get in ‘cause it’s for politicians and the like in case of an NBC strike.” He finished his beer, dropped it to the floor where it clinked against its fallen comrades before rolling to a stop beside a De-con mouse poison box. Arlington stood up and walked back to the fridge. He retrieved his beverage, stopped by the window and peeked through the crack in the boards when he heard crunching outside.

“Dammit!” he growled and grabbed his shotgun.

Daniel started and asked, “Another one?”

             
“Yeah… doggone it… its Mrs. Carter from the next holler over. He poked the barrel out through the crack, his left hook a vise on the front stock, while his right hand triggered the cannon and blasted her in the face. Her head disintegrated in an explosion of red mist and fleshy chunks, then her body slammed forward at the waist like a metal head in a mosh pit. It looked fake, surrealistic to Daniel as he peered through the peephole in the fortified front door. It looked nothing like the movies he had seen where the body flew backward. But there was nothing fake about her grated tongue flopping around where the top of her face used to be. Her body didn’t have any spasms it just laid there in the glittering shards of broken glass. There wasn’t even that much blood. Some blood, he noticed, and reasoned that her circulatory system hadn’t exactly been pumping for a while. Arlington broke down the double barrel, kicking out the spent shells and shoved a pair of fresh slugs in their place. “She used to bring me down the best peach pie I’ve ever ate,” he muttered, shaking his head in disgust and gesticulated wildly as he spoke. Cords in his neck stood out like ropes as he talked, giving him an appearance of anger or madness. Daniel thought it was more anger though, but it was an anger that pointed inward only to be projected outward. Daniel was certain that Arlington Neff was a pressure cooker of self-loathing. Then as suddenly as his madness emerged it was gone and he spoke in an almost whimsical tone. “Any who… the Greenbrier, it’s in West Virginia; outside of Covington.” He staggered to the kitchen and shuffled through the papers. He picked one up and took a minute to focus his dilated eyes then flicked it with his middle finger. “Yep, Covington; here’s the details of the place…it was shut down years ago, but they kept the place up for tours and such. As long as the political fat cats haven’t occupied it, you might have a shot. I wouldn’t go alone though. I would try to find some of your friends; strap up and grab some food and water before you do anything like that,” he gulped down some beer, “but I can’t go.”